Two Knights – Shut Up (2014)

When I was at university we had this crazy maths lecturer: late 30s, bespectacled, strong German accent, surname that sounded to us like a euphemism for having a shit. Every Tuesday I would drag myself out of the beer-filled hole I slept in for his 10am lecture, where he would show us some vitally important bit of differential geometry. I could tell it was vitally important because he used to froth at the mouth and run around the front of the lecture theatre with excitement.

Then he would have to prove what he just stated to a room of hungover teenagers, some of whom (me) were already busy playing pocket ludo. It was clear he didn’t give a shit about this part: he would start off the proof with a couple of lines of algebra, and just when I’d figured out I should probably be copying it down, he’d say VERY LOUDLY: “and DOT DOT DOT” and dismissively smash three full stops into the blackboard. Which was kind of like saying he’d already done the hard stuff for us, from then on the proof was so simple that he wasn’t going to sully himself by explaining the obvious.

Or like saying “if you know anything about differential geometry, you’ll know exactly why this makes sense; and if you don’t know enough about differential geometry, fuck you because it still makes sense – only in a way you are not cool enough to understand”.

Now imagine that I’m not talking about some guy who gave me a bad mark in my differential geometry exam, but that I’m talking about some band I heard, and imagine that differential geometry is exactly like that band’s music, only this time the weird maths guy doesn’t understand it, and that it’s all somehow wonderfully ironic.