Kermit's Log

bullets of literature

2008-05-31T10:20:00.003-04:00

So, hey, teaching literature! How about that? It's something I kind of know how to do!
Especially when the students are all, "hey, let's talk about literature!" Seriously, I have a good bunch of stus. A few of them have actually taken lit classes before, or are even majors, so there are some solid insights coming out of them, but I don't even care so much about that as about the fact that they are all well-socialized to the seminar classroom, in the best sense. They are all talking, but not too much; they listen to each other and sometimes even talk to each other! My hypothesis is that the presence of two middle-aged women, university staff working toward degrees, helps a lot with this; it's a reminder that student also =s human being, instead of just 18-22-year-old degree machine. But whatever the cause, at the end of the first week they are already meshing well together.
Three hours is so. long. Wow. At the end of the first class I could barely hold it together, even though we were talking about The Simpsons. Group activities and individual writing are going to be crucial for the second half of these classes.
Compared to teaching writing, it's so much easier to come up with lesson plans, because I know what my goals are. I'm starting to realize that a huge part of my bewilderment at teaching writing was the fact that I wasn't convinced about the stated goals of our writing program, and so I went into class with little idea of the overall point of the lesson. That and I decided it was a good idea to teach a 300-page novel.
Oh, and? I am trying to be very Zen about the fact that having 7 students instead of 9 might mean a $1400 pay cut. I keep telling myself that I can be disgusted and offended at the system that encourages the devaluing of academic labor to the equivalent of a per-student stipend (since, of course, we only do as much work as the total amount of students pay for!), while remaining detached in my own situation. (I can only be incredibly glad that I have other supplementary jobs that will get me through the summer comfortably.) But I am also composing a letter that I will send to the office that decides these things once I graduate detailing the ways in which I find this system horrifying.

"real teaching"

2008-05-16T13:35:00.002-04:00

I've mused before on the crazy format of my summer class, which starts in less than 2 weeks -- twice a week in 3-hour blocks. What I'm noticing as I've started to lesson plan (and yes, I'm planning relatively far in advance, but it's not really a subject I know well, plus I'm nervous/excited about actually teaching literature, rather than a process-oriented comp class) is that the format is forcing me to mix things up dramatically. Lecturing, in-class writing, group work, brainstorming, video viewing, reading & discussing new material, all the tricks are getting pulled out of the, uh, bag of tricks. Plus I'm coming off a few weeks of fairly intense pedagogy discussions, so I'm all, student involvement! goal-oriented lessons! set my priorities and come up with new ways of getting them there!

But I wonder how much I would have felt correspondingly limited by the more traditional format of two 1.5-hour classes per week. Since in that case, I would have assigned slightly more reading altogether (because whatever they say, I find it impossible to fit in a full semester's equivalent of reading in six weeks), and probably felt less need to come up with a variety of ways to cover that material during class time. Instead, as I said, I'm doing lots of writing exercises, lots of peer review & group discussions, hopefully encouraging the development of transferable skills like attentive critical reading, plus spending slightly more time introducing new written and visual material in class.

This is quite different from the seminars I took as an undergraduate, which were generally guided large-group discussions that rarely varied in format and that were pretty exclusively focused on whatever reading we'd done for that day. So on the one hand I'm feeling all self-congratulatory and whatever, like I'm bucking some kind of pressure to conduct shapeless discussions all the time, and on the other hand I'm just relieved that the format is giving me an excuse to shift a lot of interpretive work onto the students, since I don't know much about the material and would have to do a lot of work to have a more teacher-driven class.

I think what my stuffy head is preventing me from saying more clearly and succinctly is, isn't it great that good teaching sometimes equals lazy teaching?

crashing

2008-05-03T00:17:00.002-04:00

Whoa, nothing more recently saddening than getting home after a long day of delayed travel and finding no one but little bugs in the kitchen.

Conference III: bullets of the rest, and zombies

2008-05-01T14:12:00.005-04:00

The interactive part of my seminar went well. The person who ended up reading was already familiar with the text, which, although not what I'd intended, wasn't bad for the point I was making either. And the audience expressed appreciation for how I'd incorporated it. I'd definitely do it again, in the right circumstances and for a definite reason.
The conference banquet was held at the same location as a high school prom. Not quite as good as the first conference I ever went to, which was in the same hotel as a debutante ball, but still, not bad.
I found my first gray hairs in the bathroom at the banquet.
Meeting other grad students at conferences is weird, especially when you don't work on the same things at all. You're not really there to meet each other for any reason, but you're thrown together by the fact that you're not affiliated with anyone who's introducing you to anyone else. If that makes any sense.
Meeting really famous people is weird, since no matter what you say, the power differential is such that you're sucking up.
LB describes our awesome meetup! Best meal I had in Cali, with the most attractively tattooed company.
But the best dessert was homemade coffee and Thin Mint ice cream. Hand-cranked by two adorable kids, their parents, and me. Aw.
The best single talk I heard was on Romero's zombie movies. I had to leave before the session was done, but I really wanted to ask the zombie expert: ARE THERE FAST ZOMBIES? Like, are the creatures in 28 Days/Weeks Later or I Am Legend zombies? They do attack you and make you one of them. But they are not the slowly encroaching, inevitable menaces of all-consuming capitalist culture that slow zombies are. Or are they? Discuss.

Conference II: the ugly

2008-04-30T21:25:00.003-04:00

My seminar*, or, how Anthro Foucault Guy became my nemesis.

Day 1: 2 papers presented. Ensuing discussion on bodies, dead and alive.
Anthro Foucault Guy: You know, there's this REALLY INTERESTING guy named FOUCAULT. Maybe you guys in literary studies** have heard of him. blah blah BODIES IN PRISON blah blah CARCERAL. ...fast forward a few minutes... FOUCAULT IS A GENIUS.
More discussion on death and temporality.
AFG: Let me inform you about something called CULTURAL RELATIVISM. Anthropology knows a lot about this. It goes like this: other cultures have other notions of death. This changes how they feel about death when they're alive. Like, in some tribes in South America, death is just part of existence. etc.

Day 2: 3 papers presented, among them mine. Ensuing discussion on literary repetition.
AFG, to Kermit: You know, in anthropology there's been a lot of work done on repetition, having to do with chant and ritual...
Kermit: Yes, actually, in the context of my broader project, I've looked at some works that link anthropological studies of chant and ritual to forms of lyric poetry.
AFG: stays pretty quiet.

Day 3: 3 papers presented, among them AFG's. AFG's paper is written in a notebook, and we are instructed to excuse him if he stumbles because his handwriting is not so neat. The paper's argument goes as follows: "Foucault (gently caress book by Foucault) is a genius, but if you combine his views in Discipline and Punish (gently caress book again) with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, you discover that the individual has individual ways of reacting to structures of power. [Translates somewhat haltingly, on the spot, a passage from Foucault. Translates somewhat haltingly, on the spot, a passage from M-P.] I really think that it's necessary to think about individuals and how they actively participate in disciplinary structures. Plus, the physical structure of the prison is necessary for its disciplinary structure to be effective."

Discussion ensues, with an emphasis on the words "I think that," always delivered with a flair of machismo.

Kermit: (deciding that AFG needs reminding that other people might possibly have thought about Foucault and discipline before) What you're describing as the individual's participation in disciplinary structures sounds a lot like 20th-century revisions of the Marxist idea of ideology, which discuss how individual people are drawn to want to become part of the dominant cultural field, rather than having it imposed on them...
AFG: NO. Marxism is TOP-DOWN. My point is that individuals can respond to things individually.
Kermit: Yes, and these theorists have thought about this.
AFG: NO. MARXISM IS TOP-DOWN.
Moderator: Well, what you're describing sounds a lot like a problem other people have pointed out in Foucault, but what strikes me about your account is... ... and I've generally seen Foucault as a post-Marxist ...

At this point I must break into the first person. No one else (out of the 6 people left in the room) was willing to call AFG out. This shook me, not out of respect for the integrity of the discipline or anything like that, but because AFG was talking with such a combination of sycophancy and egotistic confidence. I wanted to say:

Guys. We are supposed to be colleagues here. When we are too concerned with maintaining polite conference conversation to call bullshit, that's when jerks can get away with dominating other people by delivering wrong assertions or rehashing arguments with macho confidence, and that's just wrong.

I politely made my excuses to the moderator and left early.

*The format of this conference was unusual in that we were supposed to meet each day with the same group of people, to whom we'd each present our papers.
**Anthro Foucault Guy is an anthropologist. This was a literature conference.

Post-conference etiquette

2008-04-30T18:05:00.003-04:00

I kind of want to follow up on a panel presentation by someone who works on a very tangentially related issue to the stuff I work on. I'm thinking of emailing him along the lines of, "Hi, I only got to ask a quick factual question at your presentation, but don't you think it's interesting that XYZ?"

That email wouldn't be for any purpose other than to continue the discussion that started at the conference. I can't figure out whether it's normal or presumptuous to assume that this person would actually want to continue that discussion with a random person he hasn't actually interacted with, apart from a small question? (I tried to look for him later at the conference, but it was crowded. I suppose I could have gone to later sessions he was going to be at, but that seemed too much like stalking to me.)

out of commission

2008-04-23T14:37:00.002-04:00

Leaving tomorrow. Back next week. See y'all when I see you.

T-4

2008-04-20T18:45:00.003-04:00

Four more days until I leave for conferencing and not-quite-family visiting in sunny Californi-a. And it better be sunny, because let me tell you, I am so ready for some beach time. And maybe seeing some weird fish, because I loves me some weird fish.

Yeah, it's not actually a fish, but it sure is weird. And aquatic.

The past month has been challenging, in some familiar ways--lots of scheduled academic and musical commitments that have been enjoyable but sometimes overwhelming--and some not so familiar ones--persistent worries about a very elderly grandmother (in the hospital, recovering from a nasty fall and subsequent surgery), and fewer people than usual to step back and chill out with. And indeed, more of the same between now and Thursday: conference paper to finish, two other people's work to read, and a dress rehearsal and concert, plus hoping that the grandma is up for a visit before I leave.

So right now, California = sun, ocean, free continental breakfasts, lots of free time outside of the 2 hours/day I'm committed to conferencing, hanging out with friends both academic and bloggy, weird aquatic creatures, cable TV, bike riding with one kid, playing let's pretend with another, and peekaboo with a third, and spending time with some welcoming and friendly adults who are easy to talk to and will let me alternately help out and play the guest. And I'm hoping that even though I'm taking the redeye, I'll come back rejuvenated, and that life will be livable at more than a day-at-a-time level.

audience

2008-04-19T11:09:00.002-04:00

Hmmm, funny things happen when you start thinking about who your audience will be for an academic paper.

You start to ask yourself what would make them actually interested in your paper. More difficult because the conference I'm going to is extremely general, and my paper was put together very loosely with others out of the general pool.

I can give a 20-minute reading of some stuff from a novel that's interesting on a moment-to-moment level. But to make it interesting on a holistic level requires some framing. No wonder I keep rewriting the first two pages of this talk.

Worthwhile trivialities

2008-04-17T17:38:00.002-04:00

I've only just started, and already I'm frustrated with the process of turning parts of my finished chapter into a conference presentation. So I'm trying to think only of the immediate next step in the process. Jenny Davidson's post today was serendipitously helpful in this regard:

No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text to a new level...

From Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Audience participation

2008-04-16T10:46:00.002-04:00

Yea or nay?

Reassurance requested:

I'm putting together a conference presentation that I think begs for some good old-fashioned audience participation. Namely, the presentation is structured around 4 discrete paragraphs from the novel my last chapter was about, and I think 1 or 2 should be read out loud by members of the audience. I'm planning to distribute xeroxes and ask for volunteers.

I'm hoping this will work for a few different reasons:

First, the argument is partially about the ways in which this piece of writing is difficult, which include having to punctuate it as you go along, and the ways in which it becomes rhythmic and chant-like. I think getting another reader to enact this difficulty (and hopefully overcome it to some degree) and this effect would make a dramatic and useful point.

Second, this particular conference operates on a seminar model, where I'll be presenting to a group of people who'll all be presenting to each other over the course of three days. I'm presenting on the second day; hopefully we'll either all be comfortable with each other by then, or it'll serve as a belated icebreaker.

Third, our session is 8-10 a.m., all three days! And I'm scheduled to kick off that second morning! Granted, I'll be jetlagged in a good way, but that may not be true for other people, and a little spontaneous performance should wake them up.

There's no reason not to do this, right?

RBOConferences and female beauty

2008-04-14T09:42:00.005-04:00

There's a conference I want to go to next fall. Do I hedge my bets and propose 2 things, when I don't really want to end up doing both if both end up accepted? Or do I just propose one, and hope that it all works out? The former means both extra work now, and extra work preparing for the conference, but the latter runs the risk of not getting to go to the conference at all, when I'd really like to.
Honestly, at this point, I'm not really excited about extra work.
In preparation for another conference I'm going to in a couple of weeks, I have to write a paper, fine, but I also have to decide whether or not to shave. It's been a year and a half.
This brings up all kinds of questions of self-presentation: will being unshaven in a beach town (or, in a couple of months, in front of summer students) make me feel uncomfortably self-conscious and conspicuous? Even if it does, is it worth compromising what I've grown to realize is a political stance?
Not that I advocate hairiness for one and all, but seriously, think about how much hair removal is taken for granted as Something One Does. In my part of the country, men and women both need a serious reminder that it's a choice. And my legs are that reminder, dammit.
When I was twelve or so, and reading teen magazines, I was so excited to finally get to shave. The joke was on me, though, since of course the "getting to shave" was always a "having to shave." Having the wool pulled over one's eyes by ideology, that's fun, until it stops being fun.

j. leth. and lack

2008-04-10T12:44:00.004-04:00

I've been on a Jonathan Lethem kick lately, ever since I read Gun, With Occasional Music and realized that J.Leth. in fact is not functionally identical to J.Franz., who writes Boring but Important Novels of Family Angst.* In fact, in both Gun and Girl In Landscape, Lethem is brilliant at taking genre conventions (of Chandler-esque detective fiction and classic Westerns, respectively), adding bizarrely fascinating sci-fi elements while avoiding the excessive discursive explanations common to many sci-fi novels, and plunking down self-aware but non-angsty protagonists in the middle.**

As She Climbed Across the Table, which I just finished, also takes a recognizable genre--the campus novel--and adds a sci-fi element: a physicist has created a Lack in his laboratory, a kind of hole in the universe, and the Lack demonstrates signs of intelligence. He (it soon becomes gendered) accepts into himself only certain items, apparently without rhyme or reason, and rejects others. The narrator's girlfriend, also a physicist, falls in love with Lack, becoming more and more obsessed with him. The narrator, a professor of anthropology, grows cranky and worried in response, and in fact one of the things I disliked about the novel is the narrator's occasional lapses into narcissistic, sexist White Noise territory.

While I'd give the novel a qualified recommendation overall, I'm bothered by Lethem's clear use of a stereotype in portraying the one deconstructionist professor interested in Lack, when just as clearly he investigates many of the actual philosophical problems that deconstruction brings up over the course of the novel via other characters and plot developments. The prof in question is described as "a tiny, horse-faced man who dressed in impeccable pinstriped suits, spoke in a feigned poly-European accent, and wore an overlarge, ill-fitting, white-blond wig." He writes "slim, unreadable volumes" subject to "savage attacks by his enemies," and speaks in reductive simplifications of high deconstruction that could be interpreted charitably if they weren't spoken by a character we're clearly meant to despise. At the university's Christmas party, he's surrounded by fawning female students.

But Lethem takes a number of deconstructionist (and -ish) questions completely seriously: how does Lack structure everything and everyone else around him? What does it mean to fall in love with something of your own imagining? (This latter question is, again, parodied by a professor of gender studies, who makes statements like "It's natural to love the Other" seem totally unreasonable by virtue of her self-righteousness.)

I'm a little mad that Lethem knows that these are real questions, but he puts them in the mouths of people we're obviously meant to distrust and not take seriously. It seems like he means to make fun of the culture of academic seriousness, which is all well and good, but getting rid of seriousness doesn't mean that philosophical questions must only ever be addressed obliquely. Simply saying "the death of the author" shouldn't make you a laughingstock.

This frustrates me much more here than in, say, White Noise, exactly because Lethem clearly knows these are interesting questions--the whole novel is evidence of that. So it's not that I'm mad at the novel, or want to stick up for deconstruction as such in the face of a perceived attack. But the characterizations simply feel gratuitous, and I'm left feeling like either I'm missing something, or that Lethem just made a mistake.

*OK, I haven't actually read it, but the two pages I read in the bookstore were boring enough to put me off. And no, I didn't think the two were actually the same person, just of similar ilk.
**I haven't read Motherless Brooklyn yet, but I'm assured of its similar type of greatness by reliable sources. I had been postponing it because of yet another mix-up, this one between MB, which is about a private eye with Tourette's, but has little to do with being motherless in Brooklyn, and Fortress of Solitude, which is an autobiographical novel ABOUT growing up motherless in Brooklyn. Come on, you can see why I was mistaken.

Paying (and reducing) taxes on grad student stipends

2008-04-09T11:54:00.001-04:00

My post on taxes is up at The Economical Academic. Head over there and take a look at that and some of the other useful posts!

listening to yourself

2008-04-08T22:38:00.002-04:00

One of the most nerve-wracking things about writing, or recording your own voice or movement, is reading or playing it back to yourself later. Cringing is inevitable. Perhaps a gentle white lie to anyone else reading or listening, to the effect that you think it might be OK and not the most embarrassing piece of work ever.

But -- tonight I made an audition recording. I listened to it, expecting to cringe, and no cringing occurred! Even the places we decided to re-record were adequate, just not actively good. No cringing = triumph!

a new forum

2008-04-08T22:33:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow I'll be cross-posting here and at a supremely useful new site, The Economical Academic, a space for grad students and recovering grad students to discuss financial matters. I'll be posting on the boring, but potentially useful, topic of paying (and reducing) taxes on stipend income (or non-W-2 income more generally). Thanks to psychgirl and ecogeofemme for inviting me! And thanks also to k8, whose post on TEA directed me there in the first place.

Noisy fish

2008-04-08T10:05:00.002-04:00

After being around people a lot, you start to realize how other animals are. Here, an article about fish so noisy they disrupt people's sleep. There's also a multimedia feature where you can hear some of the noises referenced.

a problem (mere flotsam and jetsam)

2008-04-07T18:25:00.004-04:00

I missed both of last week's yoga classes. There are 6 more scheduled over the next 3 weeks, then it's over. Because of travel and rehearsal commitments, I'll miss 4 of these. Does that make it more or less tempting to schedule something that would preclude going to one of the remaining two classes I can attend? And if I do that, what's the likelihood of my going to the last one? And does it make a difference that I'm wasting only around $5/class?

a good advisor...

2008-04-07T16:55:00.003-04:00

Out walking, I saw the following slogan on a bus shelter ad:

"A good advisor is the most important way to avoid the horrors of trend chasing."

Turns out to have been for an online financial services company, but I imagine it holds true for those of us in humanities departments as well.

walking in place

2008-04-07T12:51:00.002-04:00

After sleeping 12 hours last night, I finally feel like myself again. However, it's discouraging that the first piece of work I did today was take notes on a book that, on saving the file, I discovered I'd already taken notes on. The two sets of notes were almost identical.

Next up, I think I'll rewrite Don Quixote.

spring is here

2008-04-05T12:22:00.002-04:00

At some point in the past few weeks, spring snuck in. We're not having below-freezing temperatures at night and it's generally in the 50's during the day. I'm still tired and having difficulty getting back to work, but it's nice to retire the winter jacket.

RBO my critical importance

2008-03-29T10:51:00.003-04:00

So, I have this friend who's by far the most academically "productive" grad student I know. He's written a dissertation and landed an awesome job while publishing more than one article on basically unrelated topics and guest lecturing in his advisor's courses. His response, when I described to him what I've been doing the past few weeks, was that he was impressed that I could take on so much.
Er, I think I should be worried at this point.
I also had my first (that I can remember) stress-related dream, which is that I accidentally missed the lecture I'm organizing next week, and had to reschedule the whole thing. Because my presence is obviously crucial to the success of this enterprise.
In a perverse way, it's OK that things are crazy now, because now I know precisely how much is too much while trying to write. But I'm just about ready for it to slack off. Ready..? Ready? OK, how about.... now?

six-word memoir

2008-03-27T20:39:00.004-04:00

Tagged, twice, for what's going around.

Instructions:

1. Write your own six word memoir

2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like

3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere (link to the original post seems to be gone)

4 Tag five more blogs with links

5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

Given my frenzy of activity lately, I have to focus on the verbs:

sleeping doing thinking (gerund) eating sleeping

You're in if you want in. Olly olly oxen free.

different types of work

2008-03-25T17:55:00.003-04:00

I'm right squat in the middle of a few weeks of switching back and forth between lots of different kinds of work. Holy Week was intensely busy, and I couldn't really find any energy to think about things other than singing, and finding the mental capacity to sit through service after service. In fact, I think the lack of mental engagement I felt from church overload translated to my inability to think about academic work last week.

This week I start rehearsals for a fun and weird concert with a group I haven't sung with before, and am particularly eager to make a good impression on. I'm also swinging by campus city for less than 24 hours to conduct the first round of interviews for grad students hoping to work at new TA training in the fall. Next week is the second round of interviews and the last of this year's lecture series that I'm organizing. In the midst of all this, I'm working (slowly slowly) on my actual dissertation (as opposed to the virtual dissertation, which is all done and was submitted last year).

Hope to be able to think luxuriously later. For now, it's write, eat, and run off to campus city this evening. And sorry if you've commented recently and I haven't responded -- attention will be paid, I assure you.

why I like dissertating

2008-03-19T16:44:00.002-04:00

... because I can laze around all day feeling sleepy and gray (and it is, after all, gray and rainy out), noodle around the internet, watch an episode of Lost, do some cooking...

honestly, today is among the sleepiest of days, as LB can attest. Soon I'll have to get on the train and head to Holy Week rehearsal -- I don't think I've blogged about deciding to bite the bullet and take a job with a church choir a couple months ago, but I'm glad I did. Except when there are four crazy long services in the next four days, but hey, at least they end with a celebration and lots of chocolate.

the uses of "secondary readings"

2008-03-18T17:38:00.002-04:00

When I can't focus on dissertation work, I noodle around with the syllabus for my summer course on detective fiction. This afternoon I've been working through the process of matching so-called "primary" and "secondary" readings; that is, figuring out which (if any) critical works to teach with which texts (fiction or film), helped by the convenient online availability of the reading assigments from last year's version of the course.

As you might guess from the quotation marks above, the terms "primary" and "secondary" have been bugging me, especially because as an undergraduate I tended to take them literally. Critical essays weren't pieces of writing in themselves, they were commentaries on the main attraction, and as long as I gleaned the information they contained, I didn't have to read too carefully or actually think about how they were written. Two things changed in graduate school: first, in-class presentations that required attention to detail, synthesis of an argument, and analysis of that argument's presuppositions and construction. Second, teaching composition and learning a bit how to use critical essays as models for student writers.

So one of my goals in putting together this syllabus is to build in ways to help students recognize and negotiate different types of secondary readings, especially because these particular students will likely not have had much guidance in this area (probably not a whole lot of literature majors). I'm mentally categorizing them something like:

Background readings that provide historical information I don't want or need to deliver in lecture format. There aren't that many of these, and I'm going to label them as such.
Readings that introduce key theoretical terms or conceptual frameworks, usually in the context of close readings of particular texts.
Readings that offer one interpretation of a particular text and provide an opportunity to discuss how that interpretation is contextualized, introduced, and supported.

My plan is to have each student present orally on one reading from category 2 or 3. In addition, I'll have some exercises with category 3 readings when we talk about how to construct an analytical argument, and the concepts from category 2 readings will be recurring themes in lectures and discussions.

What productive uses of secondary/critical readings in a literature course am I missing? Suggestions for using them in the classroom? Or experiences of particularly good or bad moments with secondary readings as teacher or student?

pseudonymity and disciplinarity

2008-03-17T19:19:00.003-04:00

In conversation with Mike Shapiro, the question came up as to whether I'd ever considered writing a non-pseudonymous academic blog. Like Mike, I admit to being deeply curious about what would happen if a modernist blogging community were to get started (as distinct, perhaps, from a more general literary theory/philosophy blog community that I'm not really invested in). So I've been thinking about his question from two directions, the academic one and the pseudonymous one.

First, pseudonymity. The reason I don't use my real name is first and foremost self-protective non-Googleability, both for employment reasons but also because my department has, in the past, not been particularly kind to grad students with blogs. One could pretty easily make the case, I think, that this is related to the content of those blogs, but the climate as a whole doesn't currently seem like a welcoming one. Finally, I can't quite remember, but it may be that when I started blogging I had been reading only pseudonymous academic blogs. That is, it wasn't clear to me there was any alternative, and I haven't found a pressing reason to switch.

That being said, I don't really care if people who first encounter me as Kermit find out my real name, where I go to school, etc. I figure if they're reading academic blogs in the first place, they're probably not about to point and laugh mockingly. (I think Dr. Crazy has managed a good balance here, in that it's not impossible to figure out what/who she works on, but it's not at the forefront.)

Second, topicality/academicity/what have you. Again, I think this has a lot to do with models: many of the blogs I was reading, and the bloggers I wanted to interact with, when I began to blog were a mixture of personal observations and discussions of work -- the process, rather than the subject matter, of teaching and writing. Now, this clearly has something to do with pseudonymity, as some people are very careful not even to reveal their discipline, much less their sub-field, online. For me, however, it had to do primarily with the fact that I wanted to join already-existing conversations that seemed trans-disciplinary. I wasn't inspired to blog by the desire to start a new conversation, in other words, and until now I wasn't sure how large the audience would be for more specifically topical writings. It may now be time for a modernist blog upsurge, in which case I'll gladly help get the party started. But I'm also reluctant to lose touch with the more generalized blog community I've felt connected to over the years with material that could be seen as overly-specialized, so I don't think I'd plan to turn this into an all-academic blog all the time.

Also, if I had to analyze my reaction to tights woman in an academical fashion, my head might explode.

what I do not know about

2008-03-16T22:30:00.002-04:00

Scene: the local designer-markdown store, hosiery section. I am trying to decide whether I need more tights.

Characters:
Kermit is wearing jeans, sneakers, and a fuzzy purple zip-up outer layer. Hair in ponytail.
Normal-looking friendly woman is in her late 20s, short bobbed hair, small silver earrings, a bit of lipstick.

Friendly woman (suddenly turning): When is it too late to wear tights with a skirt? Spring?

Kermit (thinking frantically): (Never? When your legs get cold? Do I look like I know the answer to this question? I don't even shave my legs! It's funny that tights are OK but stockings are unacceptable, fashion-wise. It's funny that I know that. Why does such a reasonable-looking woman desire the answer to such a fashion-conscious question? Quick, think, when do legs get cold? Aha, when your skirt is short, or when it's night!) (out loud): Uh, I think it depends on the skirt, I guess... and I think at night it's more or less OK...

Friendly woman, smiling enigmatically: Mmm, OK, thanks.

oops! wrong chapter!

2008-03-14T10:15:00.004-04:00

Hmmm, I'm starting to write this second chapter, and having difficulty figuring out how it's going to fit with the dissertation project as I originally imagined it. Let's return to the proposal and see what I said about it.

...checking... aha!

I seem to have forgotten that what my first chapter is about is not identical to what the dissertation project as a whole is (supposedly) about. Notably, how I described the project to people in the context of showing them the first chapter is not actually how I initially envisioned it. Which might mean revisions alllll the way down the line, but not something to bother about now. Whew. OK, back to work.

yesterday's prophecy fulfilled, tomorrow's written

2008-03-12T22:12:00.004-04:00

6 hours of travel (door to door)

6 hours on campus

41 applications discussed in the (surprisingly efficient)

1.75-hour meeting

4 books checked out of the library (as opposed to only

1 returned; must work on the ratio here)

1 large serving of tofu meatballs on rice and veggies for lunch + 1 serving of pork and veggies and more pork and veggies and rice for dinner = lots of rice

bonus prophecy:

around 180 people in my high school graduating class, according to the class list that arrived with a save-the-date for my reunion

~ 10% are people I have any interest in seeing

90% chance I'll go anyway, because it's convenient and I'm at least slightly curious whether the guy who owns a brewery will offer to cater. Mmm, free beer.

psyching myself up!

2008-03-11T12:56:00.002-04:00

Let's pretend that tomorrow, instead of being annoyingly filled with transportation, is an exciting opportunity!

First, I'll have all of a 2-hour bus ride to reread Cane. I won't be distracted by noodling around on the computer, so I'll be taking my time and reading carefully. Or else, if it's nice out, gazing at the New Jersey ~~chemical fields~~ landscape.

I'll get to campus. Be able to check books out from my very own university library instead of importuning others to extend me their borrowing privileges. Browse the ~~over-heated~~ stacks. Practice in a soundproof practice room instead of bothering my neighbors in my apartment. Eat cheap, convenient and healthy lunch from a food truck.

(have a long long meeting about who to interview for grad student training positions. shhh, forget this is happening, although it's the only reason I'm actually going to campus)

Use the return 2-hour bus ride to finish Cane, if necessary, and/or keep reading Wizard of the Crow, which is a good good read.

Get home and eat (hopefully delicious, hasn't been made yet) leftover pork and rice and veggies.

That almost sounds like a livable day.

conference proposals and current work: yea or nay?

2008-03-10T12:21:00.003-04:00

I'm toying with the idea of proposing a roundtable session for next fall's M/S/A conference -- toying in the sense that I've already written the proposal, but am hesitating mainly because I'm not sure people will find the proposal as it stands interesting enough to apply to. It's on a topic that is integrally related to my current chapter, which is making me wonder about the timing of conference applications vs. current academic work, and I thought I'd ask the readership:

When you apply to a conference, do you apply based on the work you're doing then or the work you think/hope you'll be doing when the conference actually takes place? There's such a time lag on these things (this application, for example, would be over 6 months in advance of the conference proper) that I've never applied to a conference based on projected work. I could apply to M/S/A with the expectation that, by November, I'll be working on the chapter after this one, and guess at the issues that will come up. But I prefer to have more or less worked out my thoughts before sharing them in such a forum, and I also just find it hard to get motivated about a topic I haven't thought much about yet.

What's your standard practice (if any)? What have you done in the past? I'm curious about what level of investment you have in your material before you feel the desire to have a conversation about it.

Teach me about taxes before I hurt myself

2008-03-05T14:50:00.003-05:00

edited: freakout is over. Everything is fine. I actually looked at some of the forms in greater detail and figured them out. However, I did realize that doing my taxes online resulted in omitting some very significant data, which I will remember not to overlook this year. I might still want to learn a bit about this stuff though.

OK, today I received a letter from the IRS saying that I owe them $4000!!!! from last year's taxes.

I suspect I know why this happened, it has something to do with mutual funds. I am consulting with the guy who does my parents' taxes (they are both self-employed and own a house and can't deal with the huge hassle that is taxes) and it should come out OK.

However, this is really upsetting me because I realize that however much I WANT taxes to be transparent, and however much I would like finance and investment to be transparent, they are just not. It's not the kind of thing where, even if you're a relatively intelligent person who's good at math, you can look at the forms and realize intuitively what's going on. You have to learn some shit.

How do I do this? A "for dummies" book?

fill in the blanks

2008-03-02T18:45:00.002-05:00

Luckybuzz has be-memed me with an appealingly nameless set of fill in the blank questions.

1. I can’t believe I’ve never…

seen Psycho.

2. Every time I think about … I still cringe.

the time in eighth grade when, in an attempt to act cool, I made fun of a classmate in a piece of fiction writing and read it out loud in class

3. I wish I’d …when I had the chance.

broken up with my high school boyfriend over the phone (as opposed to not discouraging him from traveling to see me)

4. I’ve never felt so out of place as when I…

got on the train in Tokyo wearing a t-shirt and shorts.

5. … is/are my guiltiest pleasure.

Blogreading

6. I hope … knows how grateful I am for …

my boyfriend... his convincing me to eat fruits

7. In my darkest hours, I secretly blame … for my dysfunction.

myself

8. … changed my life forever.

Autocratic male choir directors

LB tagged 5 people, but I think a bunch of people who comment here regularly aren't big on memes, and I haven't really been keeping track with sitemeter of who else is reading. So if you enjoy the meme, I offer it with pleasure.

go to town with kodos

2008-02-29T17:16:00.003-05:00

Dr. Curmudgeon has the intriguing idea that, as we use leap days to reorganize the year, we should take this opportunity to re-punctuate or otherwise reorganize a text. In this season of political rivalry, I've had Kang and Kodos on my mind, particularly Kodos' inspirational speech as she's running for president, disguised as Bob Dole. It needs very little re-punctuation, but a few formatting changes will give you a sense of the poetry of the cadences.

My fellow Americans.
As a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball.
But tonight I say: we must move forward, not backward. Upward, not forward! And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!

Kodos: go ahead! Throw your vote away!

PFO* from other grad students!

2008-02-28T00:08:00.002-05:00

I'm too lazy to link to it, but you may recall that I applied for a travel grant from my graduate student government which demanded a 4-page form, an abstract of the talk, a letter of recommendation from a faculty member, and the naming of my firstborn child. I've applied for and been awarded this money twice before, so the hassle has always seemed like an obnoxious assertion of authority that would nonetheless get me $300. But this evening came an email PFO culminating in the phrase "We hope you are not discouraged." Too bad, because I was planning to weep, and never again aspire to present at an academic conference! Or perhaps I will gnash my teeth, and abandon my once-fervent faith in student government! Bless your hearts**, members of the travel committee of my student government, but it will take more than your rejection letter to discourage me.

*term borrowed with gratitude from here
**Southerners assure me this phrase can bear as much condescension as you can stand to bestow on it

"there's something wrong with my pants"

2008-02-27T11:58:00.003-05:00

A comic genius has taken Garfield comics and removed all traces of Garfield. The results are astounding.

edited to add: In a totally mind-blowing way! Really, check it out!

old work, new work, plus a question

2008-02-26T18:03:00.003-05:00

bonus question comes first! Can one easily get from Long Beach to Irvine by public transportation? (I'm talking to you, SoCalians... any hints? I have the chance of free lodging in place IR but conference will be in place LB.)

Very little success at breaking into Chapter 2 thus far. Exacerbated by the bout of drinking-and-discussing-movies that followed the diss workshop on my Chapter 1 last night. That discussion had some resemblance to a confused octopus--one tentacle would latch onto something and drag itself in one direction, another tentacle would get distracted and start playing with tentacle 3, and they'd end up in a knot, while tentacle 1 persistently grabbed onto its object and tentacles 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 watched amusedly or patted me on the head. (No one-to-one correspondence between persons and tentacles should be implied.) The bulk of the suggestions were either minor or things I already figured I'd have to deal with whenever I return to the chapter; the one larger interesting conceptual issue that came up happened in a side discussion while other tentacles were arguing amongst themselves about what the role of theory should be in a dissertation chapter.

One of the slightly annoying aspects of the meeting was that the faculty member who attends, and whose interests actually overlap with mine, didn't have that much to say, and what he did say was along the lines of "theory sucks, get rid of all other voices in your chapter." (I believe I will get rid of *some* of them, thanks.) Thus far he hasn't been particularly active in giving feedback, perhaps because he doesn't want to seem overbearing as the only faculty member there; what feedback he gives is often polemical in a non-hostile way (i.e. one can argue with him without worrying about a Faculty Power Dynamic). What I'd been hoping from him and from the other students was that if they didn't have substantive improvements to suggest, we could discuss some of the issues in a more collegial way. That happened with a couple of people, but not as many as I'd hoped.

So... not *the* most useful meeting, but not the worst. I received independent confirmation of my adviser's comment that it's "very much a first chapter" (translation: still working through some larger issues that frame the argument overall; overly polite). And today I received confirmation that going to sleep at 3:30 results in a lazy day.

beginning over

2008-02-20T18:32:00.001-05:00

I have a stack of a dozen library books acquired in the past two weeks. Another stack of books I own, mostly ordered from online used booksellers in the past two weeks. A folder of PDF's on my computer, downloaded over the past two weeks. At home, I face computer paralysis: I could start working at any moment, so I don't ever actually start. I stare at the computer screen, surf, occasionally reread a fantasy novel, wait until it's time to start cooking dinner (soon!). I need some good cathartic days at the library.

nailed it!

2008-02-19T18:51:00.003-05:00

Why are bullets called "bullets"? Why not "nails"?
I nailed an audition today, I think. Everyone in the room (two auditors? and the accompanist) seemed musically nerdy in my kind of way, or at least they all knew the musicians on my resume whom I've enjoyed working with a lot. And the director called my performance "stylish"!
The one bent nail, as it were, was they asked me to sightread a passage from a Britten choral work without accompaniment--it was moderately tricky and leapt around some, and I needed one re-do to get it right. For the sake of contrast, at most auditions I've been to the sightreading is much easier: early music that mainly moves in sensible intervals, with the accompanist playing all the other parts so you have a sense of the harmony. I usually read Britten mostly by where I think the harmony is going, so taking that away was at once disconcerting and kind of fun.
I think my three good auditions this academic year have finally offset the one bad one I had in October. I suppose it's the way of the ego that it's 3:1 despite the fact that I had plenty of excuses for the bad one (it was the afternoon of my dissertation proposal meeting, for one, and I foolishly decided to climb up a big hill to get there rather than taking the bus).
Now to keep my fingers crossed they'll have a soprano slot for me next season!

advising vs/and mentoring

2008-02-19T00:22:00.003-05:00

The graduate student government recently sent out a survey about the kind of relationships we have with our advisors. Of course, I was stymied by the very first question, which asked if we agreed or disagreed with the following distinction between advising and mentoring: "advising" would indicate procedural help (choosing courses, meeting deadlines) and feedback specifically on the dissertation project. "Mentoring" would indicate advice on larger professional questions (conferences, publications, marketability), as well as an attempt to help a student develop his or her academic interests.

I ended up agreeing with this distinction, but not until I had considered the types of relationships I've had with faculty here. I think what I've seen as a lack of advising all along could be better characterized as a lack of mentoring: as my department's grad chair loves to proclaim enthusiastically, I'm very good--stellar, really--at the procedural part of grad school. Meeting requirements, scheduling exams, and registering are all administrative skills that I have. I didn't even think that "advising" would characterize prodding or instruction about those issues, because I never thought to ask about them--they were just things you did or didn't do.

But if "mentoring" is demonstrating interest in my work, and encouraging professional development, I haven't had that much. My current advisor is good at the former but not the latter, which makes sense given that he came to academia from a non-traditional path and isn't very interested in checking off boxes on my CV (conference presentation, check! etc.). The two professors who mentored me early on work in a different field, but I was almost persuaded to switch fields after encountering their active enthusiasm and willingness to acquaint me with their professional context. (I'm glad I didn't for several reasons, the main one being that the more actively mentoring of the two soon left for a Premium Fancy-Pants Job.) The feedback I've received thus far on my dissertation chapter has been positive (yay!) but non-specific, showing more curiosity about where I'm going next than encouragement to push the ideas I presented in the first chapter further. And I truly appreciate that, insofar as they're concerned about Getting It Done and don't want me bogged down in details; at the same time, I want to see how my ideas stand up to argument. It seems a shame to immediately move on to the next chapter just when I've gotten this one into good shape!

I do have a group of potential mentors: the dissertation reading group that's discussing the chapter next Monday contains a number of people (grad students and one faculty) who are familiar with the subject matter and generally eager to challenge productively things like terminology and scope. I think (hope) they'll be my toughest audience.

Bullets of cheese (with one hidden bullet of work)

2008-02-18T00:25:00.003-05:00

Tonight I went out to a nice dinner ("nice" = the casual front room of a fancy restaurant, sitting at the bar). For dessert, we ordered a plate of 5 cheeses. Our friendly waiter/bartender gave us 7. Then he realized that he had mistakenly given us a different goat cheese than the one we had asked for, and gave us a big sample of the original one.
I must have eaten a half pound of cheese tonight.
Then he asked if we "liked booze," and made us delicious cocktails out of cognac, Benedictine, absinthe, and Chartreuse.
I think he liked us because we were a) younger and b) much more willing to chat like normal people than most of the other folks at the bar. Half of them were just waiting for their tables in the fancy section of the restaurant to open up, and half of them were super preppy. Also c) we expressed enthusiasm when he described the special appetizer, a plate of charcuterie made from pigs that had just come in from some special farm. What can I say, I like eating special pigs.
We all introduced ourselves as we were leaving, but now I already can't remember his name. Something like Travis.
Sitting at the bar is usually a good idea; this I have learned from friends who have waited tables/tended bar themselves. Stay there long enough eating cheese, and you make friends with Travis, who gives you free cocktails.
I really don't think I'm committed to a professorial career. I like it when people compliment me on my writing, but I like it just as much when they compliment me on my teaching, or when I feel like I've done a good job at it. That is, when I graduate I'd be more than happy to teach high school or work in an administrative capacity at a school, if it meant I wouldn't have to return to a long-distance relationship.
Between the cheese and the booze, we had a great conversation about Michael Clayton, the thriller genre, and horses, but I can't start to reproduce it now.
We walked about 5 miles to the restaurant; think that offsets the half-pound of cheese?

dead poets society and the congo

2008-02-15T12:53:00.002-05:00

or, what I might use to start my next chapter, w/o the blog-specific colloquialisms.

Anyone remember this scene in Dead Poets Society? Robert Sean Leonard et al. have formed a secret poetry club that meets in the middle of the night in a cave in the woods. They paint themselves with mud (or paint?) and sit around a fire declaiming dramatically. They have cast off the jackets and ties of prep school repression, show their skin, mess their hair, and experiment with drums. Soon they are dancing through the woods to a pounding drumbeat, reciting a verse that until a few years ago I wouldn't have been able to identify:

THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.*

The chant starts almost at a whisper, and crescendoes until the boys are screaming into the air and wildly waving.

Those two lines, of course, are from Vachel Lindsay's poem "The Congo," now held up as an example of the white primitivism of the 1920's, when white authors fell in love with Harlem and purportedly African rhythms. The effect the poem has on the Dead Poets Society boys is, however, completely divorced from race on the surface. Nothing else in the movie (that I recall) turns to Africans or African-Americans as representatives of authentic rhythmic feeling, capable of reconnecting soulless prep school boys with their bodies and souls. The mere reference to the Congo (exotic, mysterious, Other) in combination with the poem's admittedly catchy rhythms (I've heard pop songs with exactly the same beat) drives the boys wild.

And I don't think the movie is wrong. Why and how is probably what my chapter will be about, although without prominently featuring Vachel Lindsay.

*You can find the rest of the poem here.

all snazzy

2008-02-13T22:51:00.002-05:00

Anyone read this who goes to the M/S/A conference and would be interested in participating in a roundtable next fall? I already so don't want to present a whole paper, but I need to get money from my university somehow, and the roundtables I've been to actually seem relatively low-pressure and fun. There's a lot of time still, but email me if you might be down.

things keep getting in the way

2008-02-11T18:09:00.000-05:00

Of intellectual-type work: I have a part-time administrative job that pays pretty well, for the effort required, but now is a time of peak effort, including taking a day trip to campus Wednesday to put up colored flyers. I don't even get a staple gun to brandish menacingly at the undergraduates lining campus walkways, thrusting flyers of their own in my face. Or perhaps... perhaps the office I'm working for just happens to have a staple gun! In the meantime, a lot of trivial email exchanges are required.

Of self-respect and relaxation: paperwork for conference travel grants. The grant administered through the Dean's office is a 1-page application, with a line for my grad chair to sign off on it. The grant administered by the graduate student government is a 4-page application, with the additional requirements of an abstract, a letter of acceptance, and a letter of recommendation from a faculty member explaining how, precisely, the conference is "relevant to the student's professional development." I've filled this out three times, each time wondering whether it was worth enduring such petty, institutional-ego-boosting bureaucratic nonsense to get $300 of reimbursements. Unfortunately, the answer is always "yes."

Of eating a more vegetable-centered diet: My household received gifts of 4.5 lbs. frozen fish, 1 lb. crab meat, 1.5 lbs. frozen chicken, and 1.5 lbs. frozen pork this weekend. Because mothers = providers of protein.

Of more kvetching: Petula Clark on the Muppet Show.

(I might be a) minor email annoyance

2008-02-06T13:42:00.000-05:00

I was about to post a brief email correspondence between myself and a committee member, in order to neurotically worry about whether I had given her the impression that I expected her to drop everything and immediately read my chapter draft. But on reflection, no, I did not.

Speaking of which -- I'm having a hard time getting a sense for how often I am expected to *meet* with committee members to discuss my work. I'm planning to send them all drafts via email as I write them, but given that they're all strong in different areas I'm working on, it might be unrealistic to expect one meeting per committee member per chapter. On the other hand, given that I'm not on campus often, it could be nice to have one-on-one conversations that would also serve to remind them of my (occasional) physical presence. In support of that hand (a wrist brace?), they're all pretty interesting people to talk to.

"...maybe even American Samoa!"

2008-02-05T21:41:00.000-05:00

I'm listening to primary results on NPR, and I'm so taken with Brian Lehrer's excitement that he might actually get to hear from voters in American Samoa! ("If my producers let me.") That is all.

update: He just used the phrase "little trolls" to describe his minions who are fanning out across every state having a primary today! Awesome.

Culling

2008-02-04T18:25:00.000-05:00

For the past month, my work has been extremely directed -- taking paragraphs and moving them around, or rewriting, or (toward the end) shifting around sentences or rewording overgeneralizing words like "history." (It's amazing how many things "history" can mean, actually, if you are lazy and don't pay much attention.) Now, though, I'm operating under the assumption that my committee won't ask me to re-write that entire chapter, and starting to think about Chapter 2. Since, why not go in order? And less flippantly, because I think I need material that I'll develop in Chapter 2 to be able to write Chapters 3 and 4.*

And rereading my dissertation proposal today, I was struck by how MUCH I said I'd do in this chapter: first, provide historical background on a particular issue, focusing on author-researchers A, B, and C; then, discuss texts G and F; then, close with a particularly nifty meta-critical discussion of critics N and P. But the historical background section has the potential to be huge, especially since I am fascinated with author-researcher C and, before looking at the proposal, assumed he'd be on equal footing with G and F. Anyway, I'm looking at a large amount of work fundamentally different from the work of Chapter 1: in that case, I was focusing primarily on a single text, with digressions that always quickly fed back into the discussion of that text. Chapter 3 will, I think, work similarly; Chapter 4 will discuss a few different authors but without as much need for historical background.

Frankly, history frightens me: it seems like it has the potential to become infinitely engulfing, as though I could lose myself in historical context and forget about the rest. And the work I'm facing in the immediate future is the process of culling useful and interesting bits from the history. But I'm impatient; I like totality, and history seems unlikely to provide that sort of satisfaction.

* I'm a bit annoyed at myself for writing that self-congratulatory sentence, but I'll let it stand, since it's true. I feel like simply asserting that your literature dissertation has an overall argument (rather than existing as a number of relatively independent chapters) is self-congratulatory, but perhaps I'm translating my personal goal into a norm?

Piecework

2008-01-31T10:40:00.000-05:00

I'm contracted to teach a a six-week summer course, and I'm pretty excited, constantly thinking about tweaking the syllabus and matching up readings and films. A few weeks ago, I received my official contract, which includes the pay scale for the course. A flat fee IF AND ONLY IF the enrollment is 9 students or above (up to 15). Otherwise, a stipend of $500/student.

The worst part? The difference in pay between the 8th and 9th student is $895. Almost a fifth of the total.

The work for this course is fun -- I get to learn about a genre I'm not really familiar with, at least in a scholarly sense -- but there's no way that one fewer student = $895 less work (or even $500).

The person who taught this course last year claimed that he didn't advertise the course at all, and ended up with an enrollment of exactly 9 students. With that in mind, I know I'll be doing at least a bit of publicity -- those brightly-colored posters that go up around the halls somewhere toward the end of April, that I never believe actually work.

The finished thing

2008-01-30T14:48:00.000-05:00

Good news! But first, a parable:

My first year of college, I'm hanging out in my dorm room with some friends, and a friend of theirs whom I'd just met. Let's call him CM (for Cookie Monster). Maybe we've just watched Monty Python -- we're lying on the floor or the futon, cracking nerdy jokes or some such. The conversation hits a lull, and CM turns to me and asks nonchalantly,

"Do you have something that I could eat all of?"

I look nonplussed.

"I just, feel like eating all of something."

I remember there is a partially-eaten box of cookies that could be sacrificed to the Monster's all-consuming (literally) hunger. He eats them. End of parable.

I can't really describe how confused I was at that moment. I had never associated the activity of eating with the idea of consuming a pregiven quantity. For days, I quoted him bemusedly to other friends. But (while I still don't tend to choose my food according to my ability to eat all of it) I do understand his obsession with finitude and completion.

The news is that I've submitted a chapter draft to my advisors. It's (temporarily) finished. That's what I've been working on the past four weeks, ever since getting back from California. And I kind of found it impossible to write anything else, including blog posts, while I was working on it. I had to get it done, to the point that I even typed up the bibliography.

I don't really know why I found the cookie episode so bewildering at the time. I love consuming all of things.

A (valedictory) book meme

2007-12-15T16:45:00.000-05:00

Ms. Belle has tagged me to name five books I read (or re-read) in 2007 that I love, or that are important to me. Like Belle, I'm a compulsive re-reader (items 1, 2, and 4 are all repeats, and I think I actually picked up 3 in late 2006).

1. The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt. I recommend this novel to everyone, except they're always thrown by the fact that the title is, coincidentally and unluckily, the same as the extremely mediocre Tom Cruise vehicle. Seriously, this is one of the few contemporary novels I compulsively reread. The Amazon reviews (link above) are actually pretty accurate, though they don't totally capture the exhilaration.

2. Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth. Told from the perspective of a young Jewish boy growing up on the Lower East Side in the 19-oughts -- the mental noodling around of a kid trying to figure out who and where (sometimes literally) he is. Fantastically poetic translations of Yiddish dialogue into English.

3. Writing Analytically, by David Rosenwasser & Jill Stephen. Not exactly a pleasure read, but this book saved my ass when I got fantastically frustrated with the text I was supposed to be using in my writing seminar. It gave me some comfort to think that some people, at least, actually connect good academic writing to inquisitive and focused thinking.

4. Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh. Another book with a misleading title: while it is in fact sci-fi, "Cyteen" refers to a planet, the center of research into human cloning, and production of clones, in a politically complex universe of settled worlds. Nuanced and well-thought-out, set in a realistically intricate network of interpersonal and interstellar politics.

5. Found in the Street, by Patricia Highsmith. Highsmith writes such tightly constructed and unnerving psycho-sexual thrillers; this one is set in the seedy Greenwich Village of the early '80s, and gives a great portrait of the neighborhood in addition to a cast of slightly or extremely weird residents all fascinated by a teenage girl.

I'm supposed to tag five people, but if you're reading this, and have commented here, or I've commented on your site, I'd be interested in reading your responses. So leave me a comment saying you've done the meme and I'll come look; I'd rather leave this one open.

Oh, and why "valedictory"? Starting tomorrow, I'll be on vacation in sunny Californ-I-A until shortly after Christmas, and I'm not expecting to be able to post much, if at all. So auf wiedersehen until then!

November's over

2007-12-12T11:24:00.001-05:00

I've taken down the word meter. Not because I didn't like the elegant red line going (most of the way) through the box, but because the work is, for the moment, no longer about producing words and now about shoving things around on the page and actually thinking about what I'm writing.

What, you mean I could have been thinking *while* I was writing? Nah.

A few questions about writing, citation, and aesthetics

2007-12-10T16:04:00.000-05:00

What does it mean that I'm considering the chapter as it stands to be a placeholder for a similarly-structured, but entirely different, more sophisticated argument, that exists only nebulously in my head?
More practically, how long will it take to turn the former into the latter? (edited to add: uggh, after today's work I'm not sure I have such a firm structure after all)
How much revision will I get done if I print out the chapter as it stands a week from now, and take it with me on vacation to visit family for the holidays?
Why do graduate students in literature departments sometimes use MLA, sometimes Chicago citation style? Aren't we all "supposed to" use MLA? Which means that footnotes don't contain bibliographic information?
What makes Book Antiqua font so purty?

in which I apologize for laziness

2007-12-07T12:04:00.000-05:00

I've been realizing lately why I love the whole drafting process: it lets me be one lazy-ass writer. I write without worrying about making my thoughts intelligible to anyone else, including my future self re-reading the draft. Explaining is, honestly, a lot of work. Things that are completely clear to me require explanation not only of the ideas themselves, but also of the premises behind the ideas, why they fit together in the first place, when all I want to do is keep thinking on my own. The draft of this first chapter is in many ways like an outline in sentence-and-paragraph form: the ideas are there, but in a kind of intellectual shorthand. They're all placeholders for an actual act of communication with potential readers, the kind of writing into which I plan to revise the chapter.

Paradoxically, on this blog--which, potentially, has many more readers than my dissertation will--I never revise for clarity. If you can't read my mind, deal with it, I seem to say.

This may not be the best way of expressing thoughts more complex than "I am hungry for rice pudding," however.

So my apologies if that most recent post, and others in the more exploratory vein, are vague or confusing or not productive of conversation. I may start actually using that "draft" button on Blogger.

media we talk about: assorted thoughts

2007-12-07T11:47:00.000-05:00

I had a conversation yesterday that dealt with the fact that when you put a bunch of (literary) academics in a room with each other, and perhaps some beer, they're (we're) much more likely to get into a heated conversation about movies or TV than about books. A couple of explanations were proffered, in ascending order of interest:

a) books are work, movies aren't;
b) we're more likely to have watched the same movies/TV shows recently than we are to have read the same books; which leads to
c) an important component of the viewing experience of visual media is our memory of having watched--where, when, how--and our misremembering of details of plot, character, etc. (with a nod to Stanley Cavell here). Watching a movie is always an event; it's Poe's ideal of the medium you consume in one sitting (Poe suggests 100 lines as the perfect length for a poem for this reason--more than that, your butt gets tired and your mind starts to wander). The amount of time you spend thinking about a movie can be much longer than the movie itself. Books, you can carry around with you, flip through the pages to find the part you don't quite remember. We're much less accustomed to relying on our memories of novels (poetry would be a different matter, I think, associated much more with a tradition of memorization).

Internets: what say you? Do you agree with the premise? What about TV shows, especially novelistic ones whose plot continues over many episodes/seasons (The Wire)?

the drawbacks of outlining

2007-12-03T13:16:00.000-05:00

I just drew up a sketchy outline of where the rest of this chapter needs to go (along the lines of "topic a: 5 pgs, topic b: 5 pgs, topic c: 5 pgs").

My immediate train of thought:
1. I can write each of those sections in a day.
2. I know more or less what they will contain. I have notes for each of them.
3. I AM DONE WITH THE CHAPTER! NO MORE WORK NECESSARY! TIME TO CELEBRATE!
4. Because isn't it what's in my head that counts?

I'm an acquired taste

2007-12-02T20:06:00.000-05:00

Your Score: Fennel

You scored 50% intoxication, 50% hotness, 100% complexity, and 25% craziness!

You are Fennel!

You're a cool cat. Crisp, clean, fresh, and extremely complicated. You're like quantum physics or modern jazz. Think Niels Bohr meets Ornette Coleman. You may look normal now, but once you sprout, you look kind of, uh, funny.

Link: The Which Spice Are You Test written by jodiesattva on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

The 7 meme

2007-12-02T19:35:00.001-05:00

I've been tagged by the Doctor Who Does Not Exist to tell you 7 random facts about me. First, the rules:

1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and/or weird things about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random [?? how is this possible?] people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

After rolling my 20-sided die, I've come up with the following:

1. I didn't eat fruit until after I graduated from college, when I started living with someone who made a commitment to change my taste buds. Now I'll eat most fruits (especially tropical ones), but whenever I'm given a plain, unadorned fruit, I still have a moment of wariness.

2. My grade school best friend and I nicknamed each other based on our initials. She was "lamp." Better than "lump," right?

3. Ratatouille bored me.

4. Spaceballs is probably the movie that I've seen most often--probably 10 times at least from ages 8-10. At that time, I don't think I'd seen any of the Star Wars movies yet.

5. In high school, I wore fishnets and a sparkly leotard and tap-danced on a giant dime in our production of 42nd Street.

6. If I could gain any skill instantly, it would be the muscle memory required to really efficiently operate in a kitchen -- knife skills, how to flip things in a saute pan, what perfectly done steak feels like, etc. Nonetheless, Ratatouille still bored me.

7. Road trips are my favorite type of vacation. I love maps, and route planning, and finding parks to stop at along the way, and the consistency of Subway (at least in the U.S.).

I will tag: Jane Dark, Lucy, Brazen, JM, heu mihi, Bardiac, and Pilgrim.

blogging the lost (or not yet found)

2007-11-30T12:26:00.000-05:00

It's the end of November, and I've accomplished a little more than half my writing goal for the month. (If you add the approximately 4000 words I could instantly import from another document, the percentage rises rapidly, but I'm not yet at the point in the chapter where those words are actually relevant...) The word meter will remain.

But I'm blogging in the hopes of finding something I never had in the first place: I'm at a point where, in every single outline of this chapter I've ever written, I simply put "link X to Y." OK, but now I actually need to justify this link in the context of the chapter. Oop. Link? Are you out there, and will you explain yourself to me?

This may be a point I just skip, and come back to later, but it would be much more convenient for my lazy brain if it would come to me instead.

Henna - results!

2007-11-29T16:08:00.000-05:00

Because graduate students have nothing better to do than change hair colors, and because I had a bag of henna I'd been given and never used, two nights ago I dyed my hair for the first time. It started out dark brown, so I didn't worry too much that it would turn out carroty:

(before: the back of my head, weird angle)

I basically followed the instructions on this website, except it turns out I didn't quite have enough henna to glop it on as thickly as you're supposed to. Even so, it felt like I was giving myself a delicious mudbath. Scratch that, I did give myself a delicious mudbath. Deliciously stinky - kind of a combination of clay with lemon, producing a smell not unlike dried fruit. I proceeded to wrap my head in Saran Wrap and walk around the apartment with a Saran beehive for three hours. (No photo of that, unfortunately! But it kind of looks like this.) I felt very Jetsons-take-on-50's-housewife. And now I have auburn highlights!

(photo goes poof)
(after, looking more washed out yet sultry than normal)

This might become a monthly tradition, although I think it would benefit from being a multi-person activity -- it was hard to get to the back, and it's just plain fun to glop mud on someone else's head.

BSG: Razor

2007-11-27T17:11:00.000-05:00

Anyone who cares has already seen it, right? right? No need to be careful of sensibilities here? OK then.

First off: it was an extremely satisfying viewing experience, for sure. But at this point I have such a reflexive response to this show that you could probably play the opening music (the Morse-code-like pulsing over shifting harmony) and flash Olmos' face a few times and I'd claim it was a satisfying viewing experience. The moments I enjoyed the most were those that reminded me of pleasures I'd lost touch with -- you never knew whether a Lee-Starbuck scene would end with tension or banter. The back-formation of the character of the Pegasus XO in the Pegasus-Resurrection Ship episodes, when he creeps out Tigh with the story of Cain's shooting her XO in Razor. The examination of different levels of the command structure, and how easy or hard following orders can be.

The decision to "humanize" Cain's actions after the initial Cylon attack was a somewhat risky one, I thought, because they could have psychologized away what were potentially defensible military tactics. Especially true with the torture of Gina. But Michelle Forbes ultimately, I think, carried the day on this--she more fully fleshed out Cain as a character, clearly, but without making the force of Cain's decisions rest on the mere fact that she developed a personality.

The only thing I actively minded was that Shaw didn't survive the episode. Yes, I realize it would have required some plot maneuvering to excuse her absence from the end of Season 2 and Season 3; and the acting wasn't incredibly memorable. But it did feel as though she was being used as an excuse for backstory, and after her plot function died, poof, that was it. I wouldn't have minded having her reappear in Season 4 as a petty officer of some sort, or perhaps training new comm officers in an episode dealing again with the question of how people get trained for what kinds of jobs.

More bullets of working at home

2007-11-27T17:06:00.000-05:00

It's really satisfying to write a chunk that hangs together internally. I should write in larger blocks more often (this is, in fact, what I had been doing before Thanksgiving).
How is it possible to have a pretty full refrigerator, yet not be able to make a dinner for two people out of those leftovers?
Answer: have 6 of those containers be homemade (not mine) coconut jam and pickles.
I'm going to henna my hair this evening. I should have done it this morning, in fact, since you're supposed to let it sit for a few hours and I've just been sitting at home all day, but this morning I didn't know I was going to sit at home all day. I'll try to post before and after pictures.
Do I really need to leave the apartment today? Perhaps dinner tonight will be Motley Leftover Assemblage after all.

Bullets of creeping

2007-11-26T15:12:00.000-05:00

Though still getting over my sickness, I did manage to push the word-o-meter up a bit just now.
Too bad November, Writing Month, was also Sickness Month and Repeated Travel Month. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'll meet my original word goal by the 30th.
Although I forgot that it's possible I'll be pasting in a chunk of this chapter from an already-written paper. Well, not literally pasting in, but enough so that at some point the chapter may suddenly get a lot longer.
My new, and I think feasible goal, is to have a patched-together monster of a chapter by the time I leave to visit family for the holidays, Dec. 16.
"Patched-together monster" = chapter that is still not comprehensible to anyone else but me, but which I can print out, bring with me, and mark up/rearrange heavily while I'm away. Hopefully resulting in a draft that it's possible to show other people by mid-Jan.
At this point, it's easier not to think about showing other people anything, ever, since I can't currently look at what I've already written without shuddering a bit. I should say that my ultimate goal is shudder-less prose, which generally means I've written something respectable.
My inner standards aren't all that shoddy, after all.

will resume shortly

2007-11-25T14:42:00.000-05:00

I've been sick the past few days with a mysterious sequence of symptoms (nothing serious, merely confusing). Luckily, I did not have to cancel my appointment to sit on a friend's couch watching BSG: Razor last night.

Maintaining the physical plant

2007-11-19T16:23:00.000-05:00

Now that this morning's waking-up high has passed, I'm worn out. I'm tired from resetting my circadian clock, and my voice is still tired from the 5 hours in bars Saturday night (not, actually, that they were super loud, as bars go, but 5 hours of talking over music will wear you out no matter what). I just tried to practice and it feels lousy, not the kind of lousy where more practice can overcome the lousiness; I can't tell whether working through it is a good idea or not.

It's hard to explain to other people what status singing has for me, mostly because in work, one is supposed to be psychically (if not physically) monogamous. Academia is usually seen as a vocation, outside of which there are hobbies, but nothing you're supposed to devote mental energy to. Likewise, if singing is your career, you might have a "day job" to flesh out your income, but you don't usually care about it or go to school for it. I've gotten impressed, curious, and extremely suspicious looks from members of both professions when I explain that I'm "serious" about another part of my life. It's hard for singers & conductors to imagine that I can have a "day job" of scholarship and teaching, when those are professions one is supposed to be extremely invested in. In a nutshell, neither "singer" nor "graduate student" is seen as a viable "backup" for the penury of the other (although, while I'd be able to make ends meet without singing, I'd have to find a "day job" or extremely lucrative church singing job to drop out of grad school. But it would be possible.).

So part of me feels strange, awkward, when I think about whether a night out on the town will result in annoying vocal irritation; aren't I a grad student? But aren't there also singing opportunities in this city that just aren't possible anywhere else? Shouldn't I take advantage of that fact while I'm here, and not yet at the whim of the job market? And shouldn't I feel justified (weird, but justified) in having two! different ways that I enjoy making a living?

Afternoon surprise!

2007-11-19T13:14:00.000-05:00

For once, I am not going to spend the afternoon sitting in front of my computer wasting time on Internet while trying to work. Because I actually got up in the morning! and worked in the morning*! Mornings are nifty.

But now how will I spend the afternoon? I have FOUR WHOLE HOURS before a dinner guest comes over, then a dissertation colloquium meeting this evening. I think I will LEAVE THE APARTMENT NOW. Oh baby.

*If you extend "morning" to 1 p.m., or pre-lunchtime.

updated blogroll

2007-11-18T17:50:00.000-05:00

I've finally added some blogs I've been reading for a while, but only through hitting the first letter of their titles on my browser and looking at the page. If there's anyone I've left out, remind me.

the agility of the brain

2007-11-18T17:00:00.000-05:00

Whew. The end of an intense week, which included 5 rehearsals, 1 concert, 0 nights of getting to sleep/waking up at reasonable hours, 4 delicious bite-sized "chorizos in a poncho" (akin to pigs in a blanket), 1 conference acceptance (with the promise of staying at a swanky hotel! anyone up for a bourbon party?), and 2 birthday parties in 1 night (followed by the rejuvenating 3 eggs this morning [or rather, afternoon], of course). All this has decreased the agility of the brain.

I'm not sure the word count business is working for me. I'm generally a goal-oriented monster -- when I ran cross-country in high school, one of my motivations for running faster was to get the race over with sooner -- but word production may be the wrong kind of goal at this point. The pressure to get the words down, I think, has made it more difficult for me to linger on what I'm writing. On the one hand, isn't that the goal of Writing Month? Spew, and think later? And maybe I'll return to that next week... but before I can spew, I need blocks of time with the computer and books. So for the moment I'll be concentrating on time worked, rather than on words produced.

I am boring even myself, here. Did I mention I went to sleep at 5:30 a.m. and woke up at 1:30? The muzziness of the brain cannot be overstated.

What is more exciting?

Cooking
Thinking about alternative career paths than academic professorship
Practicing
zzzzzzzz.

Intruder alert (he was probably there all along)

2007-11-14T11:26:00.000-05:00

Lacan just snuck into my current paragraph.
Oops.
Hi there. You and your mirror make yourself right at home, now.

notes: falling back & [job] applications

2007-11-13T15:03:00.000-05:00

falling back [i.e. end of daylight savings] dilemma:

Must choose between going out and running errands while it's still light out, and getting the writing-in-present-tense done. Bah. Lack of sunlight = grumpiness.
update: Writing-in-present-tense is done for the day; it feels like I've truly gotten a start on this chapter now!

I'm applying for no jobs, but:

I learned that the final selection for a singing workshop I applied to mid-September won't happen until Dec. 1. The up side is that I can stop worrying that no letter in the mailbox = delayed rejection. The down side is that I have an inkling about what applying to academic jobs must be like.

Help! I'm trapped in the future tense!

2007-11-12T13:38:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I ran up against a wall of proposal-speak. Everything that I wrote was in the future or conditional tense: "I would like to...," "This chapter will...," etc. This makes sense, since the things I've written most recently have all been, in fact, proposals, dissertation & conference x 2. But to actually write an argument, I need to snap back into the present tense of literary analysis.

I tried sketching out the structure of the chapter (which had helped with the diss proposal), and ended up realizing that all the interesting readings I wanted to do were smushed into a single sentence that basically said, "readings go here." No wonder I was stuck in the future; I was taking the work of the present for granted.

So this afternoon I would like to write a few pages about my object of study, with, like, quotes and everything. Rather, "I will write a few pages." What should be "I am writing a few pages..."

In which I am a puppy

2007-11-11T12:52:00.000-05:00

I consider myself of average social prowess, plus or minus depending on the amount of effort I'm willing to expend. Every now and then, though, I feel decidedly uncool, in a way that humanities graduate students are not supposed to. To wit, the latest example: sending an (over-?)enthusiastic email to a new-ish friend about some good news pertaining to her and her boyfriend, in which I alluded to a conversation we'd had a month ago, both mildly liquored up. Now comes the moment I often fear when a friendship is getting off the ground: was I too forward? Puppy-ish? Overeagerness is decidedly not an attractive attribute, but the "over" in "overeager" is a variable dependent on the situation, on the "coolness" of the parties involved. Transparently assuming an intimacy that doesn't quite exist yet can be a gesture of friendship, or it can be an unwelcome imposition that makes the addressee want to step slowly away.

(Commenting on unfamiliar blogs can take on this texture as well, since (in my mind) some bloggers are "cool" enough to shy away from my presumption. Perhaps if we spoke a language that had the familiar/unfamiliar second-person pronoun switch (the "tu"/"vous" distinction in French, for example), this difficulty would be lessened.)

How much is too much?

2007-11-10T12:24:00.000-05:00

I'm signed up to teach a 6-week summer course on detective fiction/film--restricted pretty narrowly to the whodunit genre, as I really don't want to get into police procedurals. Law & Order is not really my bag: everyone I know thrives on its predictability, but I don't need to watch our justice apparatus in action over and over again to feel warm and fuzzy, Sam Waterston aside. (Isn't he, really, the Jimmy Stewart of our time? But I digress.)

I've mostly fleshed out *what* I want to teach, a mostly chronological progression from tried and true genre classics into Highsmith, Hitchcock, and Auster. The class meets twice a week for 3 hours; the students will write some sort of response for each session, loosely structured around literature or film analysis exercises to get them warmed up for paper-writing. Theoretically, each class session is supposed to equal a week's worth of class during the regular semester, which is where I'm getting stymied. In principle, I'd have no problem spending a week or its equivalent on, say, a short-ish Chandler novel and its film adaptation. But add a couple of secondary essays, and fitting that into a 3-hour class session without inducing brain overload seems difficult.

As students or as faculty, how much is too much?

academic eye strain

2007-11-08T17:07:00.000-05:00

I.e. the worsening of vision that takes place after too many accumulated hours in front of a computer screen.

I had my annual eye exam this afternoon. Things were looking grim as to a prescription change; then the lights came on and I put my glasses back on my face. The gruff-but-kindly eye doctor said, "Look, I'll show you how things will be better now. Can you read this?" and put up on the screen a line that had seemed unintelligible when viewed through the lenses of the diagnostic apparatus.

"Yes," I said, and proceeded to rattle off the letters. He was nonplussed. Apparently my glasses allow me to see with an improbably level of clarity, at my current prescription. So I'm getting a pair of trial contacts that are a bit worse, and we'll see what they do; my current fear is that my eyes will continue to get marginally worse every year of my life, even though they're supposed to stop changing when you're what? 25?

writing update

2007-11-08T15:35:00.000-05:00

Conference proposal is drafted! (Horrible draft that doesn't say anything, but still.)

Hope to revise it later this afternoon to actually say something.

update: Proposal says something coherent. Or, at least, suggests a coherent paper-that-has-not-been-written.

brief notes, writing day 1

2007-11-01T13:17:00.000-04:00

favorite word that I used in writing today: "presumptuous"
"You don't need to have read/remembered/assimilated all previous work on your topic before you start writing." Yes, but it's very, very hard not to feel the contrary, especially because it's important to me not to feel like I'm writing into a void--that is, I would really like to engage with other people's ideas. Dissertation should not = narcissism.
I need to go through this monstrously long book and pick out quotations that I will probably use in my writing. Does this factor into my word count or not? My inclination is no, and I will count them when I actually figure out where they go in the as-yet-unwritten chapter.

RBOGrrr

2007-10-31T19:55:00.000-04:00

The grumpiness that always kicks in before a writing stint has kicked in. The result being that I've been moody and distant and only feeling like watching TV all afternoon. The cause being this thing, which is starting tomorrow and for which I must provide myself with necessary appurtenances, buttons and counters and the like. Whatever, I don't know how to put buttons around, so just the counter. See? I just used the word "whatever."
But! I received a fun book (which I've read) and its sequel (which I haven't) in the mail today! Not to mention I finally caved into the Amazon 4-for-3 deal on books under $7.99.
Every year for my birthday I usually get one "nice" present from my parents ("nice" meaning of higher quality than I'd typically buy for myself). This year it's going to be a saute pan. Anyone fastidious enough about kitchenware to give a recommendation? I've visited this site for hints, but any personal experiences would be appreciated.
Now I have to put a counter on my sidebar. Grr.

meme of 4

2007-10-24T15:59:00.000-04:00

Dr. Brazen Hussy has sparked a resurgence of the 4-meme.

Four First Names of Crushes I’ve Had

1. Scott
2. Ben
3. John
4. Seth [gee, how boring]

Four Pieces of Clothing I wish I still owned

1. All the sunglasses I've lost over the years
2. Ditto umbrellas
3. Maroon wool hat with fleecy lining
4. ? I really don't regret moving past the fashions of the '80s and '90s.

Four names I’ve been called at one time or another

1. [Lastname]
2. Kermie/Kerm
3. Pieface
4. [Kermit L.] (I have such a common first name, for my generation, that there were 4 others in my kindergarten class. For a while, I even referred to myself with my last initial.]

Four Professions I secretly Want to Try

1. restaurant critic
2. homemaker
3. arts administrator
4. Supreme Court justice

Four Musicians I’d most want to go on a date with

1. my boyfriend
2. Terminal Degree (a friend-date?)
3. Hugh Laurie
4. Q-Tip

Four Foods I’d rather Throw than Eat

1. Bitter melon
2. Bananas (plain)
3. Doritos
4. Any carbonated drink sweetened with corn syrup
Bonus!: Tonic water. I disliked gin and tonics for the longest time before I realized I actually do like gin, and hate tonic.

Four Things I Like to Sniff

1. Coffee
2. Stinky cheese
3. Whatever I'm cooking
4. Fall leaves scuffed on the sidewalk

You're tagged if you want in...

a note on timing

2007-10-23T18:47:00.000-04:00

My gym's swimming pool is open for two 2-hour blocks each day: 1) during the time I have the apartment to myself, and feel slightly obligated to practice, and then get hungry for lunch; and 2) in the evenings when I don't feel like leaving the apartment, and am also getting hungry. I think I have an eating problem.

academic structuring

2007-10-22T13:54:00.000-04:00

1. Dr. B. Hussy is facilitating a round of International Dissertation Writing Month (InaDWriMo) in November. I'm planning to get a lot of background reading and research done in the remainder of October, and start writing the first chapter in November. I'm planning to submit a conference proposal then as well. So I'm aiming for a (comparatively) modest 12,250 words over the course of the month--that adds up to around 40 pages of dissertation writing, plus the 250-word proposal. Those 40 pages will constitute most of the chapter, and at least get me to a point where I can use some of the material I wrote for a seminar last year to round it out. And it won't feel modest to me at the end of the month, if and when I get it done! This means a lot of research for the rest of October. And a lot of structuring: I know in general terms how the chapter will be organized, and have written a broad outline, but there's some theoretical background I'm not sure where to incorporate.

2. Impulse buy of the month: a used laptop off of eb@y (a corporate lease that was returned, so it's a few years old, but a model that's gotten great reviews). I'm hoping to take it to the library to take notes on all those sources, rather than checking out stacks of books I don't really need on a daily basis.

how to write

2007-10-17T14:24:00.000-04:00

Writing graduate seminar papers was always a three-step process. 1. Conduct research. 2. Several days of misery and paralysis. 3. Write paper, trying to adhere to a rough schedule (write x pages over y days, then revise).

I'm about to write a dissertation. My previous method isn't going to work. Partly, I know this because it just plain feels different: I'm not miserable all the time. Instead, I'm suspended in a state of readiness: I know that I could start writing at any moment. Instead, I read blogs, write email, look for/read more sources (and the research part of things is in no way over; it's just that I do have things to say now), practice, swim, cook large amounts of lentil soup.

So I'm going to shake things up a bit, try to give myself a bit more structure by waking up earlier than I have been (this morning involved 8? hits of the snooze button, by god) and writing first thing.

Anyone have a similar experience, in having to change your writing process for different genres/lengths/modes of writing?

peripheral costs of living

2007-10-17T12:50:00.000-04:00

Just got a recall notice for two library books. They're due by Nov.2; I wasn't planning on going back to campus til Nov. 5. That comes to a $6 fine. It would probably cost at least $6 to mail them. It would cost me nothing (except some friend favor points) to hand off the books to my friend and get him to deliver them for me, if he happens to be going to campus before then. Let's keep our fingers crossed for that last option, yes?

In the meantime, you still have a chance for a free present. Get 'em while they're hot.

singing update: longish

2007-10-16T16:42:00.001-04:00

Kermie, you ask, what is up with the singing these days?

It's been a bit awkward, since to sing anywhere in the fall I would have had to audition in the spring, when I wasn't living here yet. It was the first September in 19 years (since 1988!) I didn't have a group with which to sing/perform regularly.

First, I started lessons again with my former teacher. The motivational benefit here is large, since even when we haven't scheduled our next lesson I'm doing pretty well with the practicing. I'm currently weighing the pros and cons of sticking with him (pros: I'm making progress in the lessons, he's terrifically nice and charges less than many teachers; cons: long travel time, spotty scheduling, he doesn't kick my ass nearly as much as he could/should), but for now things are fine.

I made a recording to apply for Fancy Choral Program. I'm not holding my breath here, since some really top-notch people are involved and I'm thinking it's about time I'd be hearing from them if I'd gotten accepted, but it feels good to know I made a stronger case for myself (musically and via letters of recommendation) than I did two years ago, when I last applied (and got rejected).

I auditioned for a couple of choral directors and contractors, and have my name on lists to audition for a couple more. (Interesting fact: many conductors book professional choirs via choral contractors. When the contractor gets a call saying, for example, "I need 30 singers for a performance of the Messiah on December XX," they look through their list and call a bunch of people.) There's a fair amount of lag time here -- I just signed on to perform in a concert in April, for example -- so nothing coming up in the near future.

And I'm subbing (filling in when someone can't make it) with my former church choir on occasion. This has been an unexpected pleasure, since when I sang with them full-time, the atmosphere was toxic and I felt very insecure about my own abilities to consistently produce the kind of sound and tone the conductor demanded. Said insecurity was compounded by the toxic atmosphere, which I didn't truly recognize until I returned this fall to find that the group was--normal. Healthy. Everyone trusted each other and was happy to be singing there, the result, I learned, of a two-year-long purge on the part of the conductor. And there have been technical improvements in my own singing over the past three years. I left kicking myself for not jumping at one of the soprano positions when they were still open (fairly late into the fall, no less!), but alas. So I'm hoping to sub fairly often, and perhaps transition into a full-time spot if one opens up for next fall.

What I haven't done: gotten on the sub lists at any other churches, auditioned for the contractors/conductors who might not be fun to work with. In other words, I've been moderately picky, which might contribute to the fact that I'm not doing much performing at the moment. I'd love to remain picky and get work, but I'll see whether that's possible.

Real, live mail!

2007-10-14T15:41:00.000-04:00

Seen first at luckybuzz's, chain mail, but fun!:

By the end of the calendar year, I will send a tangible, physical gift to each of the first five people to comment here. The catch? Each person must make the same offer on her/his blog.

Now, make me give you presents!

Some thoughts on purchasing

2007-10-11T12:05:00.000-04:00

Sometimes even those of us who generally buy things over the 'nets have to shop in person -- in my case this morning, I needed to replace an almost non-functional stereo before tomorrow. Music's an important part of my life, I enjoy listening to it while I'm working, and the previous stereos I've owned have both crapped out in the same way, so it was time for something a little nicer. Not super-fancy, but fancy enough for the store to exist in the Shopping Center to Rival in Extravagance All Merchants, or SCREAM. Which is what I felt like doing after setting foot in the place with the express intention of buying something. Previously, I'd poked my head in, maybe browsed in the bookstore when I'd gotten caught outside in a downpour, but now I was one of the shoppers; I had a purpose that coincided with the purpose of the mall, which was purchasing a luxury good.

None of the other patrons of SCREAM were wearing rain jackets or fringed cotton purses: I saw young and middle-aged hetero tourist couples; and women, many in heels, and well-heeled, meeting each other for lunch or coffee with or without kids. It didn't really matter, though -- whatever my rationale for doing so (I am sensitive! I appreciate music!), I chose to spend my wealth there, and we all had that in common.

It's clear that Internet buying isn't only about convenience (speed, availability); it's about the potential to dissociate yourself from a certain purchasing class. It's about proclaiming your taste to be your own; you're making this decision intimately, in private, without being interpellated as a particular brand of consumer who enjoys shopping in a stone atrium of black, gray, and silver. But our tastes are never our own, and I'm grateful for the reminder. It's been hard for me, this fall -- much harder here than it was when I was living on my own, in a neighborhood less accessible to public transit -- to resist turning shopping into a recreational activity; but thinking about the fact that the money I spend ultimately builds more SCREAMs turns my stomach.

Poke. Poke.

2007-10-09T13:53:00.000-04:00

I'm busy trying to distract myself from poking at the small patch of poison ivy rash on my left side. I'm starting to think that having poison ivy is the perfect incentive to do work, as I'm constantly thinking of new ways to distract myself from my corporeal existence.

DISSPROCOM

2007-10-05T16:49:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's dissertation proposal meeting, by the numbers:

Number of committee members: 3

Committee members I had imagined as Soviet bureaucrats, grilling me with sneers half-hidden under grizzled mustaches, adhering dogmatically to party principle: 3

Number of French expats: 1
Number of lapsed Mormons from Utah: 1
Number of Jews from New York: 1
Number of committee members with mustaches: 0

Percent of time spent discussing proposal: 20
Percent of time two committee members spent riffing off proposal: 80
Number of amused looks exchanged between the third committee member and myself at aforementioned riffs: at least 2

Number of times the word "promising" was used (not by me): 1
Number of nods at the word "promising": 2

Number of helpful comments: 1.5
Number of times my eyes bugged out of my head: 1
Number of chapters the French expat suggested I write by June, producing the aforementioned eye-bugging: 3

Drinks consumed last night in celebration: 3
Episodes of Battlestar Galactica watched: 2 (I know, disgustingly moderate on both counts)

Satisfaction at being ABD: Uncountable

Duck.

2007-10-01T13:05:00.000-04:00

Luckybuzz has tagged everyone to present their desktops to the bloggy world, and I'm having trouble getting through some mildly relevant reading, so here's mine (spruced up for the occasion, no less). I'm not sure what kind of duck this is, but the photo was taken in Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, outside of Cape Town.

Feel like sharing?

Head space/book space

2007-09-28T20:20:00.001-04:00

I meet with my dissertation committee about my proposal next week, and it's been hard to keep a real work ethic when I'm not sure how much they'll want me to revamp my project.

So after a satisfying voice lesson this morning, I had lunch and decided I needed to get out of the apartment, into a more receptive, less pressured place, and enjoy the end of the humidity that's been plaguing us. Apparently when some people walk, they think about things. My train of thought runs more to the "ooh! pretty bird! better walk around that woman handing a flyer. hey, lots of kids getting out of school buying coco gelado. wonder if they live around here or just go to school in the neighborhood. hmm, not as cool as I thought today..." and so on.

My first stop was a used bookstore that happened to have a 25 cent box outside, where I found a L'Engle Austin novel and the third volume in LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy. (I wished there were enough to replicate Jane Dark's offer of mailing some to friends, but alas it was only a small box.) Then I picked up a couple work-related books, plus Pasternak's memoirs--that last came as a surprise to me, but I'm a sucker for New Directions, plus its title is Safe Conduct--I suppose I'm also a sucker for pleasingly multivalenced titles. And it felt right to buy a more "serious" book that didn't have anything to do with the proposal.

I also found a pink cashmere sweater for $18 at my go-to used clothing/furniture store.

Then I came home and killed some zombies.

What's worth shipping??

2007-09-27T22:30:00.000-04:00

I'm $9 away from free shipping on a book I need to order; but whenever I come up with a book that might fill in the $9, it's much cheaper to buy it used.

Help! What book do I want that's worth buying online, new?

To my neighbors: three letters

2007-09-26T15:17:00.000-04:00

Dear upstairs neighbor,

Every time I start practicing, the floorboards creak above my head. I hope you're moving into another room because you don't want to be distracted by Bach, not because you detest the singing. Although even if you do: get used to it.

~~~~

Dear first-floor-window occupants,

Please open your window again so your cat can stare out onto the courtyard. He is cute, and I would like to make his acquaintance (and yours--from the size of your apartment, I'm pretty sure you're grad students too).

~~~~

Dear mysterious young man,

We've nodded to each other for around five years now. When I leave the building, you're sitting out on the stoop, having a cigarette. Sometimes you look miserable, and we ignore each other; sometimes you're more relaxed, and we smile and say hello. If it's living with your parents that's getting you down: sorry, man. For all it's worth, they seem nice. So do you. Here's to another year of anonymity.

Books: buy or borrow?

2007-09-26T13:42:00.000-04:00

My friend O. has four neat bookshelves. Each shelf is devoted to an author or topic that's clear at first sight, mainly because she owns all of these books: they're in their original bindings, rows of New Directions or Palgrave neatly aligned.

On the other hand, I have several indistinguishable shelves of mustard- and clay-colored library bindings. Because I'm cheap, and because I hate buying books I'm not sure I'll need, but then once I have them out of the library, why buy them? Although that then presents a challenge when it comes to note-taking: Word files? Looseleaf paper? Sticky notes? I don't have a consistent method.

How about you? And do you have different policies for "work books" and "fun books"?

Maleness and volume

2007-09-25T16:58:00.000-04:00

Ever played the acting game "Zip, Zap, Zop?" You stand in a circle: one person "throws" a syllable to another person, who in turn passes the next syllable on to another, and so on. The goal is speed and attentiveness; optimally, you'll pick up on your cue even before your prompter has finished pointing at you.

Yesterday I attended a dissertation-work-in-progress discussion group that felt surprisingly like that game, if the cues depended on sheer volume instead of on arm movements. The attendees included several very excitable men (and one woman) with the capacity to project the hell out of their comments, and to jump into the conversational fray when (frequently) provoked. Eagerness, rather than scholarly one-upmanship, was the tone for the most part: I know most of these folks, and they'll rehash the highlights of Bill Murray's acting career in the same way, leaping from point to point like squirrels chasing each other around trees--rather than, say, locusts devouring stalk after stalk of grain.

Catching up, hopping in, and finding just the right place to insert myself into the discussion? A big rush. Especially because that conversational style is, in my experience, predominantly or even exclusively male: joining in means I don't "throw like a girl." And it's fun to radically change my usual speech patterns, which can be full of pauses to search for the right turns of phrase (after one oral exam, my committee wondered if I couldn't break out the thoughtful comments without those pauses for... thinking). Last night it just wasn't happening, for a few reasons--

Physical positioning: I was one of the few people on the floor. The excited speakers were all in chairs. I don't have a soft voice, but it's not attention-grabbing enough to compensate for the physical disadvantage.
Playing the crowd: Many people in the room were quite familiar with each others' cues--they could see the handoff moments coming.
Expertise: I didn't have strong opinions about the subject matter of the paper.
Politeness: Speaking assertively while making constructive comments in a respectful way is just hard.

I was sitting near the evening's presenter, so sometimes I would turn to her and wag my eyebrows suggestively, as if to say "I, too, am finding it hard to order my thoughts." Hopefully the gesture was more Thoughtful-and-Sympathetic than Groucho- or Harpo-esque.

I'll attend these workshops monthly, but I might draw up some talking points before the next one.

Ima Sucker...

2007-07-30T23:54:00.000-04:00

for parody lyrics. In all the Simpsons movie, I laughed the absolute hardest during the rendition of "Spider-Pig" -- not even the original scene where Homer sings it, but a later scene when it recurs in faux-serious choral drag. I walk down the street singing "spider-pig, spider-pig, does whatever, a spider-pig does" in my head all day.

Good movie.

here/not here

2007-05-23T01:32:00.000-04:00

Just a note to say that I've been "around" for the past couple of weeks, reading/commenting, but I'll be off to LA for the next week and a half with limited computer time. Summer and all that.

abd!

2007-05-10T16:28:00.000-04:00

Done! With semester! With living on my own! With all hoops except the Very Large Hoop! Can now pay attention to things like cooking and cleaning and personal appearance! Could even add subjects to sentences if wanted to!

large geekiness

2007-05-09T16:30:00.000-04:00

I keep writing "D&G" as an abbreviation for Deleuze and Guattari in my notes for this exam. That's not the geeky part--it's that every single time I do it I chuckle in my mind because that's, like, the abbreviation for the fancy design house. Ha ha, still funny.

responsibility

2007-05-08T21:52:00.000-04:00

Why am I this bastion of civic responsibility?

eta: because you're avoiding studying and writing, you twerp!

I'm finishing up a stint as "president" of the grad student association in my program, exchanging diplomatic emails with the grad chair about things like summer funding and exam timing. In fact, I'm not necessarily gaining things for the department; I'm pretty willing to listen to the grad chair given that she's usually straightforward about financial and scheduling issues. But our discussions may end up clarifying an important financial point that's been obscure for years, so at least that will be somewhat beneficial for other students.

And I've taken on administrative and budgetary responsibilities for a grad-run lecture series for next year, which I'm actually kind of excited about: number crunching! and futzing around with scheduling!

I'm so managerial. Have I mentioned before that I just want to go straight to the top? If "top" means "bossing people around and having control over scheduling and feeling like I'm accomplishing concrete tasks." No passing Go or doing groundwork.

On waking up early

2007-05-08T07:54:00.000-04:00

It's better to have cute but frantic cats chasing each other around your room and hiding under your bed, than not.

Food is a problem

2007-05-07T16:56:00.000-04:00

For the past five days, I've worked more or less steadily during the days, and eaten out at night because of social and group commitments. I've been planning to cook the same asparagus risotto recipe for the past three nights, and each time something has intervened. Now I'm going to see Spidey 3 at 8 p.m. Do I shirk the work I'd been planning? Do less of it and leave time to cook beforehand? Not cook and eat a sandwich from the place around the corner?

I'm hoping it's option #2, but that depends on how much I get done in the next hour.

eta: Option #3. Why am I not surprised? At least I'm getting good work done on this project.