The first one I read, backstage at the theater waiting for my next entrance, was this collection of ghost stories by Robertson Davies. He originally told them at Christmas parties at Massey College in the University of Toronto. They are light-hearted, mocking the college and university life as well as ghost stories themselves, with their fancy gothic language and their earnest spirits. It felt a bit strange to read them, as if I was crashing a private event, but I do like the idea that ghost stories should be a required item at parties.
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| "The wit of a graduate student is like champagne--Canadian champagne." |
My favorite story was called "The Ghost Who Vanished by Degrees," which concerned a ghost who, having committed suicide after failing to achieve his PhD spends his afterlife studying and writing theses and then forces Mr. Davies to examine him for degrees in every possible subject. I was a little embarrassed to read that one of the ghosts theses was pretty much the same as my sophomore essay, and Davies description of this examination reminded me a lot of my experience defending this essay:
Next came Classics. His thesis was on The Concept of Pure Existence in Plotinus. You don't want to hear about it, but I must pause long enough to say that I scored rather heavily by my application of the second principle of conducting an oral, which is to pretend ignorance, and ask for explanations of very simple points. Of course your ignorance is real, but the examinee thinks you are being subtle, and that he is making an ass of himself, and this rattles him.
Another good story was "The Cat That Went to Trinity," a Frankenstein parody about a biophysics student who creates a cat 12 times the size of a normal cat. The cat takes an immediate liking to Davies, and licks his hand. "Imagine, if you can, the tongue of a cat which is twelve cats rolled into one. It was weeks before the skin-graft necessary by this single caress was completed."
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