Harpy Editor Hazen E. Griffin gives us his recommendations for novels, short stories and plays which will have you thinking as a fresher should … or shouldn’t.
Learning to Cross the Road Without Looking by Tenzing Scott Brown
Set mostly in a Life Drawing classroom at the National College of Art and Design (now part of UCD!) in Dublin, Learning to Cross the Road Without Looking is a play written by situationist prankster and musician Bill Drummond under the pen name Tenzing Scott Brown, based on a series of emails he received from students of an actual Life Drawing class at NCAD.
The play explores themes of uncertainty and concern for the future. While this theme has absolutely NO bearing at all on the lives of most students, and would probably be better presented to an audience of middle-aged accountants, Learning is absolutely still worth reading, even if you’re not into theatre.
The students are given a task: go outside and absorb the sounds of the world around you, then make a score reflecting those noises and perform it for the rest of the class. Some of the scores presented in the play are surprisingly profound; for example, one encourages you to get on a random bus and ride it until its terminus, noting the people who come and go and what the bus driver says to you, if anything, when you get off. How do we handle the stress of everyday life by making leisure truly interesting? Learning to Cross the Road Without Looking answers this question.
Junky by William S. Burroughs
Kenneth Hudson once wrote that “Nobody is credible or complete without [a problem].” Burroughs exemplifies this adage with a story of middle-class struggle and self-exploration that explores the author’s descent from mundane suburban life into the darkest depths of drug addiction – all of it is worth reading, but that’s not why it’s on this list. No, where Junky truly excels is in its ability to describe people. If the passage of time has any common themes at all, one is most certainly that you will meet new people. I first read Junky as a First Year, and it made life so much more interesting and vibrant to have the language to describe someone from my tutorials as having “cold fish eyes full of hate” instead of just saying that they were looking at me weirdly.
The Beast with Three Backs by Hunter S. Thompson
Read this short story as soon as possible. The Beast with Three Backs, originally published as part of the book Generation of Swine, sees Thompson travel to the proud Canadian city of Montreal to give a lecture at Concordia University. At the airport, a contingent of two students have been sent to welcome him, and they decide that the best way to do this would be to give him a taste of Canadian nightlife… This leaves a strong impression on Dr. Thompson, and by the end of his trip he concludes that Canada is an utterly doomed country filled with “truffle-eating wine-sucking anarchists” (sorry Canadians).
I believe that every student has the desire and capacity to inflict this sort of socially traumatic experience on a professor ingrained within the very essence of their being. If you, the reader, think you don’t, then you just haven’t acknowledged it yet. No matter how great UCD is, there will always be an innate desire for the chaotic catharsis that Thompson taps into with this piece.
Disco Elysium by Robert Kurvitz (and others)
If, after seeing Inside Out, you tapped into one of your more extreme emotions – dangerous ones like vehement hatred or manic obsession – you should read through Estonian author Robert Kurvitz’s visual 2019 novel Disco Elysium. Year after year, you shed an old part of yourself and replace it with something similar, but altogether new. Disco Elysium explores these profound personal developments and transitional changes through the vehicle of a police officer suffering from total memory loss, forced to investigate a major crime while grappling with the herculean task of reinventing who he is. Most dialogue is internal to the protagonist, presented as himself having a discussion with the different parts of his brain (it’s basically Inside Out for adults). It’s easy to reflect on DE’s internal struggles in a way that applies to your own life, raising questions about work-life balance and making you interrogate your own belief systems in light of what you learn in University.