audience

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

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

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

• 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

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

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

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

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

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)

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...

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

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

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

• 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

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

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

... 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"

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

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

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.