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Today, Barack Obama gave the keynote address at my little alma mater’s commencement ceremony. I, of course, on my peculiar piece of English earth, could not attend. So my Victorianist and I wired ourselves into the webcast and prepared ourselves for a healthy dose of Hope, Audacity, and other such forms of inspiration.
He was, of course, inspiring. Aside from a bit of vaguely offensive stumping, his speech on the value of investing in small changes in the interest of creating bigger ones, was, yes, inspiring, luminous, et caetera.
But you know what? Michael S. Roth, my little alma mater’s new president, was more inspiring, more luminous. Michael Roth was the one who made me cry. Michael Roth was the one who made me proud to be an alumna of this institution, who reminded me why I value as deeply as I do the lessons that I learned there, who reminded me of the urgent need for me to take those lessons with me into the world.
His words, in part:
Being in the company of students as gifted and energetic as Wesleyan’s class of 2008, gives me faith that we may well be able to reject the status quo, to build a politics and a culture of hope and community rather than of fear and divisiveness. Your thoughtfulness and courage, your questioning and your exuberance keeps me from becoming cynical and pessimistic. If you engage in the serious politics of change, if you participate in the struggle for social justice and sustainable economic growth, I believe we can change course. Now, it would be easier for you to use your smarts, your sophisticated learning, to be funny and hip, to be smart and ironic. But you don’t have to take this path of least resistance. You have the moral and intellectual capacity to take the path of actually making real progressive change, of becoming productive idealists.
For many generations of students, Wesleyan University has stood for the opportunity to connect serious intellectual and aesthetic work with making a difference in the world. Wesleyan students have the talent, the capacity and the drive to create something new. This year’s graduates, like Wesleyan alumni before you, will contribute to shaping our culture in the future, because otherwise it will be shaped by people for whom creativity and change, freedom and equality, diversity and tolerance, are much too threatening. We are counting on you to help shape our culture, so that it will not be shaped by forces of oppression and violence.
Violence remains one of the sad, disturbing parts of our lives. It is the loud noise that keeps us from hearing the music of the world. Violence not only destroys meaning, but it has the potential to disrupt our very capacity to make future meaning. Wesleyan University resists that violence [...] As scholars and artists, as scientists and as writers, you also set an example against the de-meaning that is violence.
You will hear people tell you that the greatest protection against violence is surveillance, that greater security is developed with higher fences to keep out the foreigners, or that we must project violence on distant shores to keep our homes safe. DO NOT BELIEVE THESE MESSAGES. Please remember that your education stands in opposition to non-sense and cruelty; please recall your capacity to create when others around you call for destruction.
This “education” is an investment in the fate of the universe. I wonder, sometimes, what my choice to pursue a career in what we quaintly call “higher education” actually means. Today, Michael Roth reminded me that to be an educator, and to do it well, is to insert one’s entire being into the fabric of the universe and shake it as hard as one can.
That is what the best among faculty of my alma mater do every time they step into a classroom. That is what makes them shapers of the minds of a body of students known for their commitment to meaningful change. My fellow graduates are all, in one way or another, teachers. They teach every day of their lives. They are invested in transmitting their commitments and their passions. My alma mater is a community of committed teachers, and I am feeling very powerfully at this moment my connection to that community.
We don’t have to be rabble-rousers (though some of us are, and brilliantly). The material we teach doesn’t have to be “topical,” or whatever, for it to be useful. The men and women whose student I have been blessed to be have taught me many things in many ways, but all of them have taught me mindfulness. They have taught me to respect the complexity of the universe, and to engage it with all my intellectual might. They have taught me that this is what resistance means — that to engage, to refuse stasis, to create, is to shake the fabric of the universe.
That work will be mine to carry forward, one day — rather soon, really. I look forward to it more than I can possibly say. Today, a quirky young intellectual who by some miracle has got his hands on the presidency of my little alma mater reminded me that I owe it to myself to rise to the challenge of that work, and that I will be damned lucky if I can live up to the example my teachers have set me.
The light blogging, reader, can be laid at the feet of any of several causes — frenetic/ecstatic work-madness; a real, honest-to-god social life (girl scout’s honor, it’s true); the charms of a certain beguiling Victorianist; laziness; the usual sense a graduate student gets of having nothing to say because her entire life can be summed up in one sentence: “I, uh, read a lot.”
Beyond the ecstatic bounds of everyday existence (happiness, reader: it’s possible), life lately has been mostly ruminating. Fantasies about my future life as a Ph.D. student in American City* occupy a large slice of my time, to be honest. It is a tremendous relief even to be able to entertain such fantasies, let alone to have in my grasp the promise of their realization — or of the realization of something like them.
What they do for me, these fantasies, is to put my life here at Brit Uni into context. Only when I got my first offer did I realize that part of the anxiety that was turning me into a giant ball of goo for so many months was the sense that, without the opportunity to take the next step in my academic career, my work here would have no purpose. This work delights me, inspires me, frustrates me, yes — this work is a total experience, and would be worthwhile for its own sake. Yet I had always, I now realize, the constant nagging fear that this M.A. might turn out to be just one more in a series of detours I’ve been making since I finished undergrad. What if I found myself, come March, applying for teaching jobs? Or, come September, (o horror) temping and scrambling anew to discover some direction for my life?
I’ve felt much the way I did my final year in undergrad — what is this for? Where am I going? When can I start something big, something ambitious, something serious? I wasn’t ready, then, for that something — and was mature enough at least to know that. Just two years later, I am ready — I am sure of it.
This is big, reader. This Ph.D. Combined with the idea of what comes after it, it’s bloody huge. That alone thrills me — the joy of embarcation. Or rather, the joy of having already embarked, and now at last setting a firm course. I discover, suddenly, how far I have already come — how much I’ve learned already, how much this study has shaped my thoughts, my habits, my intellectual and professional desires. How swiftly I have begun to hone myself. How dear to me are the relationships that I am forging. So swiftly! I’ve been here only five months, and already, so much has changed, or grown, or come out of absolutely bloody nowhere and knocked me flat with shock. And think! Think what six more years of this will do. A whole new person — a scholar, a professional — will come out of this. She is, indeed, already beginning to emerge.
I have a purpose, suddenly. It seems insane, I know, to pin such a grand thing as “purpose” on such a trivial thing as admittance to a graduate program. But that trivial thing gives shape to my current universe — what I am doing is not just a lark, after all, but a substantial project, a job, a professional endeavor.
One great constant in the life of a student is her sense of the insignificance, the insufficiency, of her own work — she has wild ambitions, and never the time, the energy, the resources, nor simply the intellectual wherewithal to realize them. Nothing, nothing is ever enough. The compensation for that frustration has just been delivered to me: this insufficiency becomes acceptable when it becomes part of a process, an apprenticeship, this continual building and rebuilding of self or selves.
Most importantly, this sense of purpose has cleared away the dross of uncertainty so that I can get down to the essence of my life here: the immediacy of present work. I love it, reader. I love this work intensely. And now, even now, I get to experience the extraordinary joy of beginning, slowly, to transform that love into a viable career.
What luck I have, reader. What tremendous fucking luck.
—-
*When everyone’s contractually agreed to be everyone else’s partner of whatever sort, the pseudonyms will become more descriptive, in keeping with my overall unstated blogging ethic of transparent pseudonymity.
Fall term papers: complete; submitted. Minimally sufficient in one case; totally disastrous in the other. The process of the former taught me a great deal, enough that I don’t mind the mediocre product; the lack of process, as well as the poor product, of the latter will stand as a lesson. (Namely, Do Not Ever Do That Again.)
Ph.D. applications: complete; submitted. I’m feeling optimistic, triumphant, and frantic, all at the same time (think 3rd movement of Beethoven’s sixth symphony).
New Year’s Resolution: to be more careful. Not to involve myself in debacles of the sort that the term papers devolved into. To pace myself, forgive myself little gaffes in the interest of not committing big ones. To approach my academic world with more professionalism, more maturity. More on this, likely, later.
New term: one week old. Fresh, exhilarated. Dealing with my reservations (and resolutions) as responsibly as I am able. Ideas percolating, forward momentum gathering. Too much fracking Shakespeare.
Dissertation: the idea has been conceived. I’ll not name it for fear of jinxing it before it develops into a full-fledged diss-fetus, but, you know. Zygote. (Which, in some circles, counts as a life, so I’m already halfway there!) With any luck, three hours from now it will have an advisor (a midwife? a grandparent? a baby-daddy? this metaphor is taking me in unfortunate directions).
Holiday, tremendous need of: mounting. Paris next weekend? Yes.
There are two important questions looming large in my head at the moment.
One: Why. Why. Why. Why. Why, when William Rastell took it upon him painstakingly to collect Thomas More’s English works into a single volume, did he have to print the goddamned thing in fucking blackletter? …Okay. Fine. I know why, or have a good guess. But still, reader, what the fuck. Ow.
Two: Hang on, Mouse. Look at you. Surrounded by books and papers, growing the headache that ate Louvain, advancing so slowly, and down dead-end paths most of the time, at that. You have no idea what you’re doing. Nearly everyone you know thinks you’re crazy for doing this. So why are you doing this?
In the midst of a thesis crisis about two years ago, I asked Professor Wry why she does this.
“Because I love it.”
I refrained from noting that that is the excuse battered folks give for standing by their abusive partners. I refrained from yelping hysterically that love is not enough. Instead, I asked her how she gets through the rough patches — though it’s impossible to know if she even experiences them.
“I just love it. Put me in an archive and I’ll be happy for days. It’s fun. It’s sort of like being a detective.” All this delivered in a quasi-monotone through her characteristic unreadable half-smile. It didn’t help me at all, but a weirdly compelling image popped into my head of a trenchcoated, fedora-ed Inspector Wry smoking a pipe and speeding over the moors in a sleek vintage Jaguar to uncover clues about some centuries-cold case.
Compelling because so completely not-me. I don’t have a detective’s brain — the coolheadedness, the gift of shunting distractions and abstractions and the general chaos to the side and digging straight through to the heart of the matter. I’m excitable and hasty and overfond of big concepts, easily distracted by shiny textual objects. I get so worked up when I encounter a problem that I have trouble cooling down enough to look at it properly. I don’t have the quiet, methodical patience I’ve noted in every person I’ve met who does good work in this field. I certainly don’t have the quick-zoom capacity I’ve noticed especially in Wry and in the Heretic, the ability to move rapidly between extreme closeness to a text and the bright, stunning clarity of the big picture, all the while maintaining perfect control over both.
So bound up with the “Why am I doing this?” question is the “Am I capable of doing this?” question. The latter, I suppose, must be left to the side for the nonce. If I look at it too long, my head will explode.
I am doing this, too, because I love it. For more than that, I am doing this — reader, forgive me — I am doing this for the beauty of it. Because that beauty is real. It hurts sometimes (damn you, Rastell, you rat), but it is always there. So often nearly inapprehensible — those are the most excruciating moments. That’s where anxiety comes from — the fear of never reaching through, never laying hands on what is beautiful. Then fear that no one will share my sense of what that beauty is or what it means, of being stranded and alone with only my sense of the world. Accompanied always by the fear of being thought myself unbeautiful.
But this beauty — sometimes, it’s just too big. I begin to marvel sometimes that I don’t just abstract myself out of existence — I need somehow to learn to anchor myself to the minute, the precise, the knife-sharp. I need to unlearn my fear of the archive.
Reader, I need a fedora, a detective’s badge, and a Jaguar.
I now know why people often find it so instructive (among other less superlative qualities) to attend academic conferences. The recent one at Brit Uni, on Early Modern Stuff and Things, gave me a great deal to think about, and not only in terms of the field or the content of the papers presented.
One of the wonderful things about this conference — which reflects a wonderful thing about Brit Uni’s early modern bits — is that it was genuinely interdisciplinary. Historians and literary scholars, comparativists and… nationalists?, chattering productively and incorporating each other’s domains to give the wee neophyte spectator (yours truly) a real sense of scope, of what breaking down disciplinary boundaries can actually produce. I listened to whole historical papers without ever realizing they were presented by historians, so literary were their reading practices; I was astonished by the archival footwork and periodized story-telling accomplished by papers on verse forms. One gets the sense that academic study of this period is, at long last, and slowly, slowly, slowly, shedding its disciplinary corsets and moving toward what Timothy Burke, sundry at the Valve, and others have been flippantly calling “everything studies.”
In spite of this slow-gathering momentum, which seems to facilitate expansion out of disciplinary hidey-holes and into a broader collective effort at grasping “the past,” what it is and what it means, there remain some aspects of academic behavior that are very puzzling to an idealistic wee mouse. Now, I’ve done enough careful listening (thanks, Petri Dish faculty, for imparting knowledge you didn’t know you were imparting — in the words of Stephen Sondheim, children will listen), blog-reading, sardonic-academic-novel-reading, and attended enough talks to know that certain phenomena I observed at this conference are not unique to it.
I am totally freaked out by the persistence of academics’ tendency toward individualism and narcissism. I can’t possibly be the only one. Reader, I know it sounds so naïve, so eager-young-studenty, but this thing we are engaged in, this Scholarship, this Academy, is it not, well… that is, isn’t it a collective effort? Are we not, in the end, when the bureaucratic hoops of fire have been jumped through, the markets negotiated, and the administrative kinks worked out or put to bed, all working together to seek understanding of, a language to describe, a way of interpreting the worlds we inhabit? I think we are — and yes, god damn it, I include myself in this. I may be wee, I may be inexperienced, I may be in all things a neophyte, but I may also have something to bring to the table — and even if I don’t, I am an apprentice to this trade and you, Professor X, can’t survive, can’t perpetuate yourself, without me.
Self-defenses aside, I continue to be bowled over by the vigor with which academics guard their terrain, guard it as their personal property. I understand that work is precious, that if one loves her own ideas she is not to be faulted for it, if another feels he needs to defend his own agenda against the inevitable onslaught of oblivion, then defend it he must. However, a few points.
1. It is not an indignity to cite — copiously, if appropriate — the work of those who have gone before and paved the road for you, even if their particular area is not exactly parallel to yours. (“Everyone knows that…” is not a legitimate citation, by the way. It is true, however, that most or all of your audience is familiar with the source of your methods/theoretical foundation/purpose/etc, and you embarrass yourself by not acknowledging that source.) Kudos to Grandmotherly Big Name for presenting a genuinely collaborative paper.
2. Neither is it illegitimate to present a paper that asks genuine questions, which genuinely seek answers and are not merely grand statements in disguise (thanks to a Hilarious Historianess for presenting just this sort of paper last week). You do well, not ill, by your own work if you openly ask for comment on one bit or another of your paper or project — the most successful paper sessions I attended last week contained a good bit of this; the least successful ones were composed of ideology polemically presented, masquerading as thoughtful papers. Ironically, students and junior sorts are the worst offenders in this regard.
3. Do not be perplexed by me, or by any other neophyte you may encounter. Do not give us the “Well isn’t that cute” look, nor the “What are you doing here?” look, nor the “And just how do you know that?” look. We are the next generation, and we are trying to learn from you. You are teachers, whether you like it or not, and you are just as much so at the tea break between paper sessions as you are in a classroom. We try not to be in your way, and we will do our best not to make you go beyond the call of duty. But say hello, why not? If you and we are both sitting alone, why not join us, just once, just once remove the burden of socio-professional awkwardness from our shoulders. You are secure in your positions, we are not. You will not be damaged by being seen to take a youngling, however briefly, under your wing, to put her at ease with inane chatter regarding the quality of the tea. If we do something stupid, feel free to smack us down, put us in our places — but be direct about it. Don’t just pretend we don’t exist, and when we insist on existing, don’t be so obviously put out by it. Please. Oh, and should we actually do something intelligent? Should we — just hypothetically — ask the thoughtful question that gets the otherwise dead discussion finally rolling? Please, please try not to look quite so astonished.
4. Oh, and if you really are only here to present your paper? At least make the gesture of attending, say, one other session. To do otherwise is rude.
I have more to say about the issue of collaboration in the academy, but those were the bugbears of this past conference — which, by all accounts, was a much friendlier, cosier, more comfortable one than most. I witnessed almost no open antagonism, no one to my knowledge fell asleep at any inappropriate time, nor were there to be found (undue) drunkenness or lasciviousness. Nearly everyone admitted having learned a great deal, and seemed actually to mean it. Nevertheless: what is up with the narcissism?
The thing about applying to grad school, reader, is that no one can tell you how to do it.
Sure, you can grill your professors and your academic friends. You can pester your friends who are already involved in the kinds of programs you’re considering, and then force them at knifepoint to show you their statements. You can read Robert Peters’ wonderful book (closing your eyes and covering your ears and yelling “NAH NAH NAH NAH NAH” during the scary parts). You can peruse the blogosphere and read the copious advice people you’ve never met have to give (and give, and give, and give). And you will come out of these various conversations and readings much more prepared than you were before. True.
But, for better or for worse, Ph.D. applications especially are a very personal process. Applying to college, you apply to an institution. There are all kinds of tricks for outwitting admissions offices (I know this because I sorta worked in one). Numbers — grades, board scores, class rank, and so on — play a bigger role than they do for grad programs. None of your high school teachers’ names will be recognized by anyone in admissions, and field is not an issue, so you just ask your biggest fans and / or the best writers for letters. Aside from your interviewer, who is usually not an academic, you don’t ever have to communicate with a living being even once throughout the entire process. If you can learn and use the proper buzzwords and finesse the bureaucracy (and if your numbers are good, and you can construct a coherent sentence both on paper and in person), you can get into college. Looking back, it seems like a no-brainer. (Though I’m still not sure why the Petri Dish took me. But that’s another story.)
For a Ph.D., on the other hand, you don’t apply only to an institution. You apply to individuals. People. Humans (hopefully). You can’t finesse them, because you don’t know them personally. You know their work, sure, but no one can tell you, say, how Professor Hottie McHotpants at the University of Infatuation will react to your tone in an e-mail. No one can tell you whether McHotpants (or will she prefer that you call her Hottie?) really even wants more students interested in Notions of Incipient Discursivity in Early Modern Maltese Cesspools, since she’s been working on them for twelve zillion years and probably just wants to teach Jane Austen to the elderly until she retires. There’s no way to know, even based on her work, whether she will appreciate you if you’re honest and let your inner Theory Junkie out in an interview, or if she’d prefer you show the skepticism about theory that’s trendy in her field at the moment. Will she care that you’ve spent a lot of time and energy on things totally unrelated to her field, on other things totally unrelated to the academy, or does she not believe that there is a world outside her field, outside the academy? Will she like your gumption, or want you to be more subservient (so she won’t feel guilty exploiting you later)? Will she prefer to see a lot of accomplishment and drive in the direction of your chosen subfield, or a demonstration of how truly varied your interests are? When (errr, if) she reads your writing sample, is there a word or phrase that will offend or annoy her? A word or phrase that she will love?
There’s no way to know. So the advice I will inevitably get will be “Be yourself — be professional, but be yourself — and you will naturally fall into place.” Because even if you can tailor yourself to the very image of what McHotpants desires in a student, that image is likely to be very different from what her colleagues at Infatuation desire. You will want McHotpants and co. to ask you, and not some role you play, to join their department; you, and not Applicant 4758835, will be working with and relating to these people on a daily basis for five-to-(gulp)-ten years. So, from the get-go, you’ve got to maintain your sense of yourself. And that’s precisely what’s terrifying: “Be yourself.” You can’t game the system. There’s no bag of tricks to let you off the hook. You can’t fake your way into this, the way you faked your way into the Petri Dish and all the other colleges you applied to. In print as well as in person, you just have to be, legitimately and naturally, a rock star. No one can tell you how to do that.
Which means, of course, that in order to communicate your rock-starness, in order to write about it and package it and market it, you have to believe in it. That (and not, contrary to popular opinion, “admitting you have a problem”) is the first step here. And no one can tell you how to do that, either.
Horace is calling for posts: “required reading for graduate students.” Inspired by this post by Dr. Crazy, which scared me, um, just a tiny bit. And then caused me to do a lot of important considering.
As you, devoted reader, know, this could not be more timely for mouse here. She’s coming down from her Acceptance And Validation High and beginning to quake in her little mouse-sized boots. (Did I tell you this would happen? I totally told you this would happen. At least I know myself well.)
I do a good job of cycling through freaking the eff out and rationalizing the freak-out, between threatening to jump and talking myself down. First I got angry at Dr. Crazy for her post, which I deemed unnecessarily and intentionally intimidating. Then I freaked when I realized that she’s probably one hundred per cent dead-on, particularly as she’s been applauded by many around the ’sphere for perfectly evoking the grad experience. Then I said to myself, “Hey, mouse, you know what? You were just saying that the academy is a cult, that graduate school is a long and humiliating mortification-of-the-flesh induction into that cult, and that if you get to a point where you can’t take it any more, that’s probably a sign that you don’t want to do this for your whole life after all, and it will be good to know that. You know that Dr. Crazy’s right, and what she describes is, after all, what you’re looking for as you dash across the sea to begin your fiery baptism.” I realized that Dr. Crazy’s post was a kind act — sort of like when my dentist said to me the other day, “I’m not going to lie to you, this is going to hurt like fuck.” And then he stuck a sharp thing in my gums and it did hurt like fuck, but I was grateful for his honesty and my mouth is now a better place.
Dental divagations aside, I think I have a few things running in my favor as I begin this process. I record them here to help me through the next explosion of anxiety.
1) I’ve been lucky to receive an excellent training in academic rigor — thanks, Petri Dish. I have no illusions about what graduate work looks like, about what kinds of conversations I will be expected to participate in, what level of discourse I will be expected to maintain, to what standards of critical thought and breadth / depth of knowledge I will be held. I have also had the benefit of excellent mentoring that has provided me with what I need to keep up with various debates of which I will need to be aware, and with a strong sense of the value of tenacity (a nice euphemism for “monomania,” dontcha think?).
2) I neither expect nor want a repeat of undergrad. I don’t think of this embarcation as the start of a voyage into the Wonderful World of Lit-Lovin’. I am healthily nostalgic about my time in the Petri Dish, where I was profoundly happy, but I do not miss it. In my final semester, I knew I was ready to leave because I found myself having the same kinds of conversations over and over. I had gleaned what I needed, and was ready for the Next Step.
3) Having a handful of friends at various stages ahead of me in the Cult (not to mention reading way too many blogs) keeps me sober regarding the day-to-day realities of graduate students and of young – or not-so-young – academics. It also inspires me to keep up with their modes of exploring the world and conversing about it.
4) I am blessed – this is not language I use lightly – with the support of a few individuals who have shepherded me through my novitiate thus far. Some of them knew me as a very wee mouse, when I made a lot of stupid mistakes, and have watched me turn myself around without ever witholding their support. That support, and my sense that I must continue to earn it, will continue to be a deeply important anchor as I progress stubbornly along this insane path.
5) I am healthily aware that I am at a turning-point in my academic “career” (that’s “career” as in “the herd of antelope went careering over the cliff without ever seeing what lay ahead of them”). The other day I listened to Professor Wry talk about her current book project, which looks like it’s going to be quite the event when it’s finished, with a mixture of awe and fear. Awe at her critical creativity and at the sudden sense that I was watching someone come into her fullest intellectual individuality and strength, watching her own joy at recognizing and testing that strength; fear at the dawning realization of how terribly far from that achievement I am myself, and how terribly difficult it will be to get there. (Wry’s been tenured for a while, and this will be her second monograph.) I found myself wanting to emulate her interests, her curiosities and methods of inquiry, and realized that in many ways I am still a babe hiding behind her mama’s regalia.
Originality is not expected, nor should it be, of undergraduates. The work I’ve done to date is entirely – and fittingly – derivative, synthetic, in the most basic of ways. Or simply emulative. Now is the time to begin to ask myself to think, read, and write as myself, and to be aware of how that self is changing and developing, and use that change and development in my thinking, reading, and writing. I have no illusions about how difficult that will be, or about how much time and work it will take to begin to make that change. And I’m okay with that.
6) More simply, Brit Uni seems like a kind place, and has, to all appearances, a wonderfully cohesive community of postgrads and faculty. I think it will offer me the support and structure that I need. This is an enormous source of relief.
7) I have spent a year just about as far from the academy as a mouse can get, and gained the appropriate Perspective that allows me to see just how much I do want to throw myself into it and stay there, and how much I do, after all, belong there. I didn’t realize how important this was until Wry noted that at this time last year I was a little ambivalent, and more than a little freaked out, and that now I have a clear set of goals and a plan to achieve them. I didn’t get there consciously, but I think that’s made the process all the more important.
8) Starting with an M.A. seems on all fronts like an excellent way to ease myself into this process. It will give me time and space to develop, particularly as a writer and as a participant in an academic community. I started undergrad before I was ready, which had disastrous consequences (see “stupid mistakes,” above) that took a lot of getting-out-of. I know that I think and react slowly, that transitions take a lot of energy and time for me, and that I must therefore tread carefully. I also know that I have carefully considered every aspect of the decision to do this program(me), and that I am going about this in the way that makes the most sense for me. To start a Ph.D. now would, perhaps, prove to be foolish (see “antelope,” above).
In other words, I am cautious, and doing my best to keep myself alert to inevitable blindsides, confusion, and upsets. I think this caution is really what people are recommending when they give me the canned Grad School Talk that I quickly came to loathe and only now begin to appreciate.
The bottom line is that there’s no way to know what you’re getting into when you decide to join a completely mystified cult whose very members warn you about joining. The very best you can do is to keep that notion firmly at the front of your mind, keep yourself aware of your self, and plow ahead.
That and maintain a healthy skepticism about Kool-Aid.
Not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Thank heaven. Appropriate doses of hilarity and bizarrerie.
I loved my paper going in, but as with everything I’ve ever done, I worried about it. Needn’t have. Confident about it, and happy to put it on the back burner until I have an opportunity to resurrect some of it.
Got to meet some neat folks, including one particularly fabulous person whom I’d been looking forward to meeting, who had wonderful things to say about my paper — things of both the complimentary and excitingly constructive varieties — and from whom I learned a lot. One of those experiences that remind me why I want to do this crazy thing I’m trying to do.
And a great book, free, into the bargain.
Note on Fabulous Person’s plenary talk: I will never again think of Michel Foucault as anything but “Papa Bear.” Appearances perhaps to the contrary, this is, I assure you, a good thing.
Now, good bloody night.
“Je n’aurais pas eu le culot d’aller réclamer mon livre à Dieu sur le Sinaï, même si en tant que souris j’avais trouvé l’énergie de grimper sur la montagne.”
– Hélène Cixous
Sitting amid a pile of papers and books on my bed last night, with a laptop on my knee and a golden retriever on my feet, I was haunted by the following question:
What was Gayatri Spivak like as a graduate student?
Why Spivak was the Great Mind that happened to come to me out of the void is irrelevant. Last night I reached a certain point in my frivolous work on some of the weirder points in the work of a poet I adore mostly in spite of myself. I recognized that point — I’ve come to it before, and as I develop as a fledgling scholar I come to it more and more often. It’s the point at which I begin to fail to see the work in front of me because I’ve allowed my head to become clouded with A Crucial Theoretical or Methodological Question. Last night’s Question happened to be the same one that kept plaguing me (and perpetually provoking in my advisor the scary half-smile that earns her the pseudonym Professor Wry) throughout my undergrad thesis, and which happens to be The Question that The Field has been totally preoccupied with for at least twenty-five years, if not the entire twentieth century.
The reason I should not be bothered by this Question is not that it has been rendered unimportant by the unfathomable amount of ink spilled over it. It continues to be important, and sometime soon, I think, some bright kid is going to have to dig us all out of the inky muck by posing it in a new way. I should let the Question aside, and let the poems and my small measure of critical savvy do what they can for me, because I am simply not equipped to deal with it. Yet.
It’s the “not yet” that got me wondering about the wee Gayatri (or whoever). Part of the bizarro in-betweenness of being young and having a stellar, if troubled, undergraduate career behind me and an uncertain, if hopeful, graduate career ahead of me is located in that “not yet.” I’ve read widely enough in The Field — both the texts of the relevant period and the critical ink spilled over them — to be able to identify the crucial questions, and am up-to-date enough with the scholarship to be aware of some current confusion (not to say “impending crisis”). But I’m nowhere near well-read enough, nor are my critical muscles nearly well-enough developed, to jump into that morass myself. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t have a high enough opinion of myself to think that I should be entitled to bring something to the mess. I’m delighted to be, and to remain for a while, in the experimental phase of a fledgling scholar’s life. I was not That Kid who viewed her undergraduate thesis as an Important Contribution to her field. Still less do I view the current project as anything more than a line on a CV and a chance to throw a stone at my fears of public speaking.
It is nevertheless strange to experience this recurring or cyclical moment in my experiments — the moment when, having done the necessary footwork, having discovered something wonderful or disturbing in some text somewhere, having gathered whatever threads need to be gathered and begun to stitch together one of my characteristic weirdo patchwork arguments, I suddenly come up against this same glass wall. I bang my head against it for a while — usually with Professor Wry’s voice in the back of my mind, a drawling monotone gently dragging me back to the text, goddammit — only to fall back, exhausted and a little embarrassed, into the comfy arena of synthetic scholarship and close-reading.
As I said, I’m happy to be there. I dread the day when I’ll have to start publishing — my panties are in enough of a twist as it is with this “paper” I’m to give at this “conference” (believe me, the quotation marks are warranted). But the voice of doubt in the back of my mind, battling with the voices of encouragement, wants to know whether this is, really, a normal phase, or whether I’m not, somehow, behind the curve. The voice of doubt wants to know whether the glass wall is there for everyone, whether the wee Gayatri (or whoever) came up against a similar one over and over again. How perplexed were the looks her professors continually shot her over her inchoate seminar papers? How annoyed were her classmates by her incessant harping on the same theme? Am I alone here? The voice is countered by another that says I should feel good about being able to see through the wall — the “It could be so much worse, mouse” that tells me I could be hurtling at a hundred miles an hour towards fortified stone I won’t notice until it’s too late.
All this comes down to, I suppose, is the simple fact that it’s strange and also wonderful to be very young and a little too ambitious. So we’ll just let The Question linger there in the air and get back to work, aware of its lingering presence but happy to just let it be, for now.
