Betty Cavicchia: Okay, so just to clarify, we are currently at the Senior Art Exhibition. Yes?
Marcus Studinski: Hi.
BC: Thank you, that’s very nice of you. But we’re at the Senior Art Exhibition because we went to Costa’s office and waited outside for a few minutes, and then he came by and dropped his stuff off and then was like, “Okay, let’s go.”
MS: Put on his fleece and started walking.
BC: Yeah, and I was like, “Go where?” and he’s like “the Senior Art Exhibition.”
MS: Those dressy black shoes were made for walking.
BC: So despite every fiber of my body saying I do not go to a secondary location with this man…
MS: You followed consensually. I was ordered online.
BC: Oh, yeah. Yeah, my backstory is that I bought Marcus on the deep web as a manservant.
MS: I was purchased as a manservant recently online. My services were contracted.
BC: It’s true.
MS: Kind of diseased for a private company.
BC: Right.
BC: So to start out, just pretty simply, if you could introduce yourself and describe what you do here at Beloit College, in any words you’d like.
(Kosta looks at Marcus)
BC: No, you—I’m not interviewing Marcus!
Kosta: I know, but he’s got that funny face. It’s almost like a cartoon character coming to life. Sometimes.
MS: It kind of is. Sometimes. What do you do?
K: What do I do? Okay, so—
MS: Allegedly.
K: I amuse myself. (laughter)
BC: (laughter)…What do they pay you for here? And what’s your name?
K: Oh, well, my name is… How do you pronounce my name?
MS: Koh-sta.
BC: Koh-sta.
K: Koh-sta. Okay, so it’s getting a little closer. Yeah, so everyone pronounces my name differently. So some people say Kah-sta, some people say Koh-sta, some people say Kaw-sta. In Greece, which I haven’t been in 50 years, it’s pronounced “Gusta”.
BC: Really?
MS: “Gusta”.
K: Yeah. Because the “K” has turned to kind of a “G” sound.
MS: So it’s like Augusta, Maine, without the “A”.
K: Sort of. Yeah. So I kind of bring this up because I’m a linguist by training and I teach, or used to teach until very recently, ancient Greek and Latin. Now I only teach Latin. In fact, I’m nearing the end of my Latin.
BC: Oh, really?
K: I got…two and a half more weeks and I probably never teach Latin again.
BC: So you’re going to be what, just strictly media studies then?
K: No, no, no. I’ll be teaching classics courses in translation.
BC: Oh, I see.
K: And the occasional film class.
BC: All right. And this is actually, it’s kind of linked, so I’ll just, I’ll put this in, but how long have you been teaching at Beloit?
K: A long time. (looking at Marcus)
MS: Longer than I’ve been here.
BC: I don’t know why you’re looking at him for support.
MS: It’s been a very long time.
K: This will be year 30.
BC: Year 30? Wow.
K: Yeah.
BC: That is quite impressive.
MS: Does it get easier?
K: It does.
BC: It does?
K: It does.
MS: Okay.
K: After year 20.
MS: After year 20. Okay.
BC: You’re taking notes on that?
MS: (transcribing) 20 years is much easier.
BC: Okay, so…
K: (to Marcus) How’s your Spanish?
MS: I tried doing court interpreter training and I need to do the final exam for that.
BC: He speaks it all the time to dudes in the dining hall.
MS: She doesn’t understand it, that’s why I like to do this. Also because—
BC: He’ll say shit to dudes and point at me and I don’t know what he’s saying.
MS: It’s a fun thing to do so much because it’s been very useful for messing with people.
K: That’s good.
BC: Okay, so this is related to your time at Beloit. If you were able to, what is one thing that you would change about Beloit?
MS: Freedom of speech.
K: What would I change about Beloit?
BC: Yeah, we’re not on the radio anymore. So it’s…
MS: …it’s freestyle. Yeah.
K: I mean, the major issue that I have noted over the years is that Beloit seems to go from one economic crisis to another. So obviously if I could change something, I would somehow solicit from some very wealthy donor, a big pot of money to alleviate the economic crisis that the school has had to continuously negotiate.
BC: So, dip into the Diane Hendricks facelift fund?
K: Yeah.
MS: I was looking for something more tactful, akin to “I came to the person who made a documentary, was doing some reality in the area, building apartments, maybe making things just a hell of a lot more expensive…has a Vox article about them…”
BC: Okay, let the man speak.
MS: Also the richest woman.
K: Yes.
MS: Different from that individual?
K: Yeah. Different from that individual perhaps. I mean, when I first arrived here three decades ago, Beloit had sort of recovered from its most important historical crisis, which is when the school in the 70s went virtually bankrupt and had to bring in a president, first female president of Floyd College, and the only female president of Floyd College ever had, and handed her the axe and said, start chopping. And she, you know, got rid of like a third or two thirds of the faculty.
MS: So then if that happened, how did, if you don’t mind my asking, if that happened, how come GLAM survived? Because right now I think it’s fair to say it’s been reduced a bit.
K: Oh, you mean…okay, so the history of GLAM and Beloit is an interesting one, but it’s in the 60s and 70s when Beloit was at the center of American higher education, and it was doing the most innovative work in perhaps all of America in terms of at least small liberal arts colleges and even some major universities with the Beloit plan, which ended up bankrupt from the school.
So sometimes you do innovative work and it actually is, it’s not, it’s not the most cost effective. You’re doing this incredible stuff where you’re sending a third of your students overseas every single year.
MS: Chicago knows.
K: Yeah, to do all this sort of cool stuff, but no, um, uh, GLAM had a long and sort of rollercoaster ride. Yeah, before it, long before it was called GLAM, right? GLAM is a recent incarnation of its brother who’s just called classics or classical studies, for decades, for a century and a half actually. But no, I don’t want to go into that because that’s just boring in its history.
I mean, I got here 30 years ago and I come from a small college liberal arts town background. I grew up in Swarthmore, right? And Swarthmore is either first, second, when I grew up, it was either first, second or third small liberal arts college in America, right? It’s a version of Harvard. And I thought all small liberal arts colleges were like that, you know, billion dollar endowments and, you know, incredible resources and all the students were super nerdy and all they wanted to do is study 24/7. And, you know, I knew that Beloit didn’t have that kind of money or those kinds of resources because it had gone through this economic crisis and it had nearly gone bankrupt just, you know, 15, 20 years earlier. But it had slowly, slowly, slowly climbed out of that massive hole and it was doing okay.
And yet, if you look at what Beloit had 30 years ago in terms of resources and what it has today, it has half of what it had back then. So, our endowment was either two to three times larger than what it is now. So, we’ve actually had this slide where like, instead of having a major crisis, it’s been a lot of sort of minor crises. And that has an impact on faculty. It has an impact on, you know, the way you engage with the place. Knowing that you’re never going to be, not necessarily safe, not necessarily safe, but in a position where you can just sort of just worry about other things. You’re always going to be worrying about, you know, what’s going to happen with programs.
So, right now we’re in the process of going through that exact moment, right? They hired some outside consultants to come in and decide how they can reconfigure, repackage, put new emphasis on certain programs, probably more health sciences, more business. You know, they’ve been pushing that for the last couple of years.
So, it looks like that’s going to be more of…the humanities keep shrinking every single year. So, here’s a really large change. The humanities department used to meet in this room every couple of weeks.
BC: And this is the…what is it again? Which lounge?
K: This is the South Lounge of WAC. And when we used to meet, we’d have all the chairs that would go around like this, and they would be filled, and there would be like 40-some faculty members. And it was both the most onerous duty you had to do as a faculty member in the humanities, because our meetings were two to three times longer than those of the sciences, which at that point had like 20, 25 people at their meetings, and the social sciences, which had 30 or 35 or whatever. We had like 125 faculty back then. And over a third, maybe close to like 45, 50, almost 40% of the faculty were humanities faculty. We would all cram in here, and then of course all the English professors would just talk, non-stop, because they’d love to hear themselves talk.
BC: Yeah, naturally.
K: But it was this sort of sense of amazing community. I loved going to those meetings, even though they lasted like an hour, an hour and a half, and nothing ever got done. We just talked, because that’s all we do. But it was a sense of like, “we’re the center of the school”, and we have so many majors, and you know, the English department had like 10 faculty members, right? It was this huge program. It was the biggest program at the college at the time, right? And to see over 30 years, you know, everything sort of slowly shrink, shrink, shrink, shrink, shrink, shrink, shrink, becomes, you know, GLAM at its peak 15 years ago had, you know, three and a half faculty members.
BC: Three and a half?
K: Yeah.
MS: Oh, somebody must have gotten very hurt then.
K: (laughing) Well, we actually had, we had a really interesting ability to hire a full-time adjunct. And to do things like bringing in part-timers.
BC: Oh.
K: Because we had money, we had, we had a…
BC: So not half a person, it was a whole person half the time?
K: Yes. Yeah.
BC: Okay, that’s better.
K: Yeah. So, I mean, back in the day, it was…you had a sense that there was a lot more happening. And the humanities were, if not always front and center, they were valued. They were valued by students. There were a lot more students who were coming to Beloit just for the humanities.
BC: Right.
MS: Yeah. What do you think, other than economic trends, I guess, for, maybe for work and for the college over time, as you mentioned, it’s kind of been up and down. What do you think changed?
K: Well, I mean, I don’t think change is necessarily a bad thing, right? In terms of like the, the vibe that the college presents to the world, presents to, and the kind of students it attracts. I think, you know, and most of the faculty who have been around as long as I’ve been around…as long as I have, which is like eight other people, maybe in the seven or eight that are still, would say, if they’re honest, that we, again, because the type of majors we were attracting, many more in the humanities, many more in the creative sort of arts and things like that. But there’s a sense, I think that they were…they were here…not necessarily to get a job in four years. They were here because they thought this was a really interesting place to learn.
BC: Right.
K: And I think that is not as prevalent as it used to be. I think that’s changed. I think we’re much more like most American kinds of education. I don’t think we’re…you know, we…we can’t afford to be that type of institution anymore if we want to survive…and I’m on board with that, you know? I mean, I’m sad to see, to a certain extent, the humanities decrease and other fields increase, but it ends up paying the rent.
BC: Next question, and this is related to the paper: what do you think is the reason for the paper’s obsession with your image? It’s appeared multiple times in many mutations.
MS: (defensively) I don’t work there. I don’t know.
K: You don’t work there?
MS: I don’t work there. I don’t know.
BC: So what do you think is the reason for that?
K: I have no idea because I’m not a big, splashy professorial presence on campus, right? I always think of myself as the under-the-radar guy who teaches these weird, quirky classes in languages that are so esoteric that almost no one has either heard of them or they’re incredibly challenging, so our classes are really small. When I first got here, I was hired to teach Greek, right?
BC: Right.
K: And I loved it. I loved it so much I actually taught for the first 15, almost 20 years, an overload every single semester, so I would teach 4-4. So I was doing eight classes a year because the advanced, the intermediate and advanced Greek classes were always like three, four, five, six students. But that’s where my greatest pleasure was, right? Teaching the hardest subject you could teach at Beloit to this core group of crazy students who have no ability to figure out what’s going on, but are so interesting and interested in this bizarre subject. And it just allowed me to exercise my own brain in a way that was just wonderful. And those students became sort of so memorable because we would have, sometimes, classes at night. And everyone knew everyone because the classes were so small. And they had taken like three or four or five semesters of Greek with me. So I see them through, you know, from freshman to senior year.
BC: Yeah.
K: And I always think, I always think to myself, like, this is…this is the greatest thing in the world. I get to teach these classes to like a handful of students. It’s pretty cool. And I’m thinking…I’m never going to teach those big, splashy lecture classes where, you know, you get 25, 30, 40 students and you have dozens of majors and they go on to do interesting and creative things out in the world. My students will do interesting and creative things, but they’ll do it in much smaller numbers.
BC: I will say that previously you have attributed this sort of cult following to, um, and this is an exact phrase, your “bald pate”. You’ve used that several times. You’ve said that you believe that the obsession with you is due to your bald pate.
MS: Well, I mean, look at the shirt you’re wearing right now.
BC: “Pretty fly for a bald guy,” for the record.
K: (gesturing at Marcus) And this gentleman over here has remarked on this on numerous occasions over the past three, three plus years. I mean, remember in the Nothing to Do With Dionysus class where you would always pretend to be me and jump up on the top of the desk?
MS: It happened one time.
K: And then you filmed it, you guys filmed it.
MS: It was one time. Okay. It was one assignment. It was a long assignment, to be fair.
BC: Oh, was it at least a good bald cap?
MS: It was fairly choreographed. Yes, It was a decent bald cap.
I think it was an okay impression considering no one else was doing a Costa impression in that class.
BC: Right.
MS: Nobody else was, you know, going like, “you know, the interesting thing about ancient Greece…” Like, nobody was doing, nobody had thought of that yet. Kosta stand-up was in its infancy. Nobody knew what to make of it.
K: I don’t know because, I mean, I think I teach, in some ways, greater variety of types of classes than most other faculty members. So I’m not pigeonholed so much. I teach the language, obviously the Greek and Latin courses. So they’re, they’re kind of strange and unusual, but I also teach, um, for the last, like eight years now, film studies, um, which has something to do with my linguistic interest. Although it has a lot to do with my narrative interest. Like, I’m interested in the way narrative works…and how ancient narrative works and how it’s different from some modern ways that we think of narrative. But at the same time, it’s actually the same, if you look quickly at how narrative is constructed and how it has different ways that you can sort of create stories and storytelling. But also like doing that, which intrudes somewhat on the, uh, used to be the theater program. And now, now it’s part of the PART… the theatrical stuff, right. Where we look at the plays and then we try to recreate them and perform them. So, I like bringing that kind of multimedia sort of perspective to my classes. So like teaching the mythology class right now, which I’m going to be doing as an AMP in the fall. Probably my last AMP class that I’ll ever teach—definitely my last AMP class that I’ll ever teach.
BC: Man. You’re not cut out for dealing with freshmen anymore?
K: Well, yeah, because I’m going to be retired in three years.
BC: Really? Wow.
K: Yeah. So next year I start my next semester, I start my phase in retirement.
BC: I see. I see. You’re phasing yourself out.
K: Yeah.
(Marcus looks aghast)
BC: Marcus, you’re going to be graduated by then.
K: Yeah. You’re going to be graduating philosophy and I’m going to be graduating from my job.
BC: Okay, so also on the topic of the newspaper…the increase, the uptick of the Kosta images, of which I have been a part.
MS: You are a purveyor.
K: Yeah, so maybe it’s because the people who know me now work at the paper. I’ve always known people at the paper, but now there’s a core group that somehow wants to sort of push that particular agenda. I think it’s great. I think it’s wonderful.
BC: But besides the students who are obviously involved in the paper, have any other students or any other faculty, have they brought up the matter of the newspaper to you, or is that not really a thing?
K: No, I don’t think it’s really a thing. Yeah.
BC: Our impact is less than I thought. That’s good to know.
K: No, I have to point out to students, I said to one the other day, I said, “you need to look at page five. That’s where the real action is taking place.”
BC: Yeah, yeah, the Kosta page. For the record, that fully was not my idea. It was the idea of Claire, our arts editor.
MS: You throw your own people under the bus. You snitch. You utter snitch.
BC: I will say that Claire is deadly afraid that she will run into you one day. She doesn’t want you to recognize her because she’s so mortified about the Kosta page.
K: Tell her she should not be. Tell her. I think it’s awesome.
BC: Okay, but she also made the edit of Kosta Big Naturals. She created that, and I think that’s why she’s scared.
K: Oh, okay. No, I don’t mind. I think it’s good. I think we all should…we should all do the ancient Greek thing and cross-dress and get up on stage.
BC: Okay, and do you have a favorite among the images that have been published of you so far, just from your recollection? Are there any that stand out?
K: Well, I mean, the centipede one is just so creepy and cool.
BC: And it has limbs, which you like. You like limbs, you mentioned.
K: I love going out on limbs. I love breaking limbs. I love limbs being broken.
MS: Have you broken limbs before? Arms?
K: No, no, I’m talking about…you go out on a limb and then the limb breaks and then you fall because you had this crazy, shit idea. You wanted to see how far you could take it, and then you realize it’s not that good.
BC: And you mentioned that your sentiments are the same about tentacles. In multiple classes, you’ve said that tentacles are cool.
K: Yeah, well, that came up because of Godzilla, right? [Godzilla] vs. Biollante. Yeah, that was just so neat to see this plant grow tentacles and become this kind of weird hybrid thing. And then when I was doing some research on that film, I obviously stumbled upon the whole thing of the Japanese art and anime and getting into the more outre aspect of it with tentacle sex that the Japanese were into in the 80s and 90s.
BC: Yeah, it’s big, it’s a sizable niche even now.
K: Oh, really? Is that so? I didn’t know.
MS: Oh, why is that?
K: Yeah, tell us more.
MS: Do explain. Positively intrigued. I’ve said this in the art gallery. Half the people there would have been like, “Of course, we paint that regularly.”
BC: Did I bring you here to harangue me, Marcus?
K: You are the best haranguer, Marcus.
MS: Thanks, Kosta. I appreciate that.
BC: My last two questions, and they’re related. So first off, do you have any words of wisdom? Just anything you can think of on the top of your head. Anything wise to say.
MS: You have life experience. Betty does not. You see the predicament.
K: Everyone has life experience. We just have different kinds of things. The greater amount of it is…yeah, because I’m older. I mean, it’s mostly inevitable.
MS: Spanish would say you have more years.
K: I do have more years. I have three times the years of Betty. And almost three times the years of Marcus.
MS: Exactly.
BC: Wait, so you’re 60?
K: Yeah.
MS: I’m only 15, so.
BC: Okay, but yeah, so words of wisdom.
K: Yeah, no, I mean, I don’t know if I have words of wisdom so much as…Even if you stop doing something you were doing before as being the focus of whatever you’re doing…so for me, it was art. In high school and in middle school, I was all about art, especially graphic arts. I love graphic arts. I would just draw all the time.
And then I put that aside. I became an academic and buried myself in books for years and years and years. And then I had an opportunity to return to art, and I realized everything had changed. So I had to relearn everything. It was all computers now and digital and stuff.
BC: Yeah, yeah.
K: And everything like that. So I got into photography initially, and then I realized that photography is kind of boring because it can’t do anything.
I mean, the images, you can compose them and they’re really nice and they’re pretty. Or they’re interesting and they’re bold and they’re…but then I realized, oh, I can distort these images. And this is the very beginning of Photoshop and stuff. And it was really primitive. I used to do pixel by pixel.
MS: The technology looked like it did in Mission Impossible, like that first Mission Impossible movie, just as a frame of reference?
K: Yeah, no, I mean, it was… And I made, you know, gangbuster use of the studio art program here in terms of just using their equipment because I had access to it. And that’s how I got into, you know, doing this art. And then some of the art was based on like taking ancient things, taking ancient Greek and Roman stuff, and then melding it with modern stuff. Some of it was just, you know, just realizing if I can manipulate an image, I could do all these different things with it. And then it would create art that was slightly similar to like Indian art, South Asian art.
And so I was just like experimenting a lot. I had so much fun. And then I realized, why did I go into academics again? This is so much more fun. But then this is my free time. And it actually made life so much more interesting, right? So doing something that’s not just what you have as a job. Having something that’s passion that you can do. And then keep reinventing that. Like right now, I don’t do art anymore. I did it for a couple of years. I loved it. I got really serious about it. And then other stuff came along and I had to do that. And then I got into music. And now I’m doing music and I can’t imagine myself not doing it. You ask me what’s going to happen in three years when I’m no longer teaching…I’m going to be doing music full time.
BC: Oh, what kind of music?
K: Just performing.
BC: Okay, so not like a SoundCloud rap thing.
K: No.
MS: So if you got into the rap game, that would mean…
BC: It would be lethal.
MS: You could win. You could show Drake what he’s worth. Send him running.
K: So now, yeah, actually most days I practice two hours.
BC: Wow.
K: When I was doing the art, I was doing…I think sometimes. I was doing three, four, five hours a day. I just got lost in it because it was so amazing.
And then…I had some success with it. That always helps.
BC: Okay, for my final question. Do you have any words of idiocy? So the opposite of words of wisdom.
K: Words of idiocy…
BC: Anything dumb you’d like to say.
K: Well, I mean…(looking at Marcus)
MS: Don’t look at me instinctually!
K: I mean, the one that…you keep bringing back with my fascination with limbs is…You know, to me, it’s both wisdom and idiocy.
You need to just go out, fall down, fall out of a tree and, you know, you’re
going to be a little bit more. You need to just go out, fall down, fall out of a tree and, you know, make a complete ass of yourself sometimes and own it, right? As opposed to, you know, cower in the corner and like pretend no one’s watching.
BC: Okay. Thank you. I’m going to jump off a tree now. That’s good advice.
K: I don’t think you should jump off a tree. I think you should climb the tree as far as you climb.And then…at the very end, decide “how much more can I risk this? Is it worth the view?”
MS: It could be worth the view. Climbing Mayer Hall was worth the view.
K: I mean, and I think you don’t do it all the time. You just do it at least once or twice where you just have that visceral experience. I think it’s just awesome. It just opens up so many potential vistas in your life. And I don’t mean that from a, obviously, literal sense. It’s definitely a sort of wonderful metaphorical kind of thing. You just, you go out there, you see what you can, and then, you know, you fall and you get back up.
BC: If you don’t die. That’s the crucial part.
MS: You sometimes give the advice knowing that those who receive it may not come back.
K: Well, I’ve never given the advice before except to Betty.
BC: Wow. I feel very special. I’m going to feel less special as soon as I publish it and it will be given to everybody.
K: Well, everybody who reads the paper.
MS: But is it the same advice if you republish it?
K: All 20 of them, right?
BC: (sputtering) I—what?!
MS: All 20 people every year who read The Round Table.
K: Every week during the publication year.
MS: It’s just enough of them to meet for a class on…what?
K: Well, you know what? I’m going to make sure everyone reads the paper that week.
BC: Thank you. Yes, it’s going to be in the upcoming edition.
K: So it’s going to be the last edition before you have one more edition before graduation, right?
BC: Well, yes, we have this week and then two weeks after that we have our last edition of the semester. I made sure that I did this before the end of the week so that I could get it into the upcoming one and not the one that’s two weeks later because it’s a hell of a long time to wait.
K: Do you have time? Do you have energy this weekend to do this?
BC: What, like the editing and stuff?
K: Yeah.
BC: No, but I’ll do it anyway.
K: Okay…I don’t want it to negatively impact the rest of your stuff.
BC: Everything negatively impacts me, Kosta. I’m weak of constitution. At any rate, it’s not like I got shit to do on the weekend. I’ll just, uh…Marcus, why are you looking forlorn at me?
K: Did you hear what she just said? See, I’m a linguist and you should be able to figure this out. She said she’s weak of constitution. Constitution. You know what constitution is, right?
MS: Yeah.
K: Yeah, It’s my name, Constantine.
BC: Oh, really?
MS: She’s Kosta weak?
K: She’s Kosta weak.
BC: What does that mean?
MS: You’re Kosta weak.
K: Constitution is to—
BC: No, no, like what does it…like, what would it mean to be Kosta weak?
MS: In practice or in theory?
BC: Yes.
MS: Those are key distinctions.
K: I’m weak of X. Well, it could mean two different things, right? It could be an objective genitive or a subjective genitive. Again, that’s the linguist in me.
BC: Well, this has been a unique and terrifying experience, so thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed. Thank you for not kicking Marcus out.
K: I was tempted.
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