Assorted Backstory II (Why Pish Tosh?)

Why Pish Tosh?

In college I took a monthlong class with an artist. It was a zine class. The artist was herself the proprietor of two zines with cult followings. So in it, we all made our own zines.

Mine, though I didn’t know it, was a proto-academic-zine. I was applying to grad schools then. I’d had to take the GRE. I’d had to pay extra to have the scores disseminated in a timely way to the schools to which I was applying, a fee about which I was pissed. I was also writing up the final version of my thesis, culmination of my writing career to date. I had lots of essays in it. (It was a creative thesis, which was at that time a genre I had invented, though others in that program have done it since.) In the zine, then, I wrote mini-versions of those essays: little rants about culture’s fetishization of the teenage body, about the ETS, about birth control in college, about how writers write about writing. It was a nice zine. Each came with a foil-wrapped condom, the bonus gift. I also made up tiny books: staple-bound copies of a story I’d written, and which I illustrated with shrunken copies of several Aubrey Beardsley prints. The cover was also meticulously detailed with the normal errata of a book cover: about the author, reviews from other writers (in this case, snips from the workshop comments of my student colleagues). Each zine also came with a copy of this book inserted in a little envelope I’d made out of a page ripped from a stolen copy of The Riverside Chaucer. *

I was stuck for a name for the zine. Hardest part. And so I called it Pish/Tosh: the cover read “Pish” on the front and “Tosh” on the back.

Pish Tosh is an expression. One I never hear. It means roughly the same as “Piffle.” Which is, I think, a polite form of the sentiment, “Bullshit.”

Implicitly sarcastic, efficiently argumentative. It seemed to work. But mostly I grooved on the sound.

So this blog is named for that, my one-issue, teeny-distribution college era zine.

And for the sound. Which I still like.

*
But there’s another issue with the title, and it’s this: there’s no convenient handle by which to designate the holder of an MFA. The degree doesn’t come with a title. So there’s no “Doctor Blurt” for me. And “Blurt, M.F.A.” seems… lame.+ “Professor Blurt” is no longer accurate. Plus I’ve got a leg outside the world those titles designate. How ‘bout “Miz’ Blurt”? Nah.

So, Pish Tosh it is. May not sound like it, but this is an academic blog. More or less.



*Imagine my horror, years later, when for the PhD I had to take a Chaucer class, and discovered that The Riverside Chaucer (required text) cost $80!

+One of my favorite acad. blogs is Bitch. PhD. A great title, of which mine is then just a stupid echo.