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Grad students especially, but also everyone else: go now — now — to this new blog, The Economical Academic. Kermit’s post today about taxes made my heart sing — not because I’m afraid of taxes, but because it’s refreshing to see useful, clear information get disseminated with a view to actually helping people. Other posts on budgeting, debt, and so on promise that this blog will continue to be a productive, practical place. Huzzah.
Updating the blogroll to add:
Servetus, of (Almost) Without Footnotes. I have no idea what her deal is, really. And that’s what I like.
Margaret Soltan, of University Diaries. If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Cardinal Wolsey, of Cardinal Wolsey’s Today in History. Tudory goodness.
Kathy G., of The G-Spot. Great new cultural-political blog by a poli sci Ph.D. student. No idea where she gets the time for all those posts.
And please also go check out Luz, a lovely little web comic about sustainable living in urban environments, narrated by the very charming Luz, who puts me completely to shame.
Poetry to follow.
[This blog has not lost its politics. They are simply in hiding. Someday when they're a little less shell-shocked they'll come out to play.]
Or, Madoc and the Welsh Indians, or, The Perfect Term Paper Topic.
Because actually writing the paper itself is too difficult, why not write about the paper? At least that way I can convince myself that I am thinking thoughts that will, eventually, matter.
So, the M.A. term paper. A form that frustrates me deeply; a form of which I deeply desire… well, mastery. After two more years of this, shit, I had better be a master. Which brings us to the frustrating point: in terms of the actual writing, there’s a lot about the M.A. term paper that will never apply to any other form of scholarship, ever again. It’s usually shorter, and thus more constricted, than most articles. It needs to stand on its own; it’s not a section of a monograph chapter, or the abstract of a larger project. It is very tightly bound by time. (Unless you are one of those crazy incomplete-fiends, in which case I don’t understand you and kind of fear you.) On the face of it, it seems a form not very worth the mastering — or at least not the extensive, dead-horse-beating mastering of it that I, with my extra M.A. year, am in for.
However, it’s never a bad thing to learn to write tight prose, as carefully researched as possible, on a deadline. So I can’t say I don’t approve of the enterprise. And we might as well learn to do it right.
At the beginning of this term, thanks to my Victorianist, I stumbled onto The Perfect Term Paper Topic. My eyes were aglow as I scanned EEBO results and article titles in my first, swift preliminary searches. Before I had even read the appropriate materials, I knew what they would do. [Yes, this worried me later -- what if they didn't? But they did. And then some.] I could already see the argument of my paper, watch it laying itself out before me.
It fulfilled what I now realize are all the important criteria:
1. Fun! Goofy, and weird, and exemplifying all the goofy, weird things I tend to adore about my period.
2. Contained. There just simply is not that much to say about this that can’t be said in about five or six thousand words (the efforts, in this case, of a few insane Welsh nationalist monographs to the contrary notwithstanding). It tells its story swiftly.
3. Researchable. One of the toughest things for me about term papers is understanding what my limits are — not my own intellectual limits, but material ones. How much time do I actually have? Do I live near one of the world’s greatest major research facilities? (Check!) How much do I already know about the terms of the broader debate(s) in which my blabber about this thing will situate itself, and how quickly/easily can I learn more? [Aside: deciding to do my thesis in an area almost wholly foreign to me? Yeah. Dumb.]
4. Fits into a context in which it can address important questions, but – this is weirdly crucial for me – doesn’t attempt to pose any radically new questions, or do anything to pose the old questions in a radically new way. This paper, for example, has a lot to say to both British (as in, “Archipelagic”) lit-history and post-colonial lit-history, a lot to say about how the two should talk to each other more often and why, and so on. But on the whole, it’s a fairly pat argument — it knows the most recent scholarship on the issues, knows where its loyalties lie, and marches in step with that vanguard. It disrupts nothing; yet it pushes the structures, language, ideologies it’s inherited as far as it knows how.
In other words, this is safe ground for experiments. Experiments in method — what if I read x, y, and z kind of thing and see what they do to a, b, and c in three or four paragraphs? What if I push myself to do something a little further over the disciplinary boundary than I’ve yet been willing to step — something more (gasp!) historical? Experiments in style — what if I write the conclusion the way I usually write the introduction (aha!), and do something spiffier up front? What if I take this old tired jargon word and replace it with this fresh term that just came to me in my sleep?
The argument, essentially, should make itself. The argument should be the easy part, because you should know going in what your materials are about to do. What matters in this form is process — what you learn by doing it. What matters is not the argument (x does y in ways k, l, and p, but not m or o, because of z, g, and h) but how you build it, where you find its supports and how you look at them, how you tell the story.
Here we are with what’s already a long post, and I have yet, indeed, to tell the story. Perhaps for later. Along with the Worst Term Paper Topic Ever (Which Is Also Good And Beneficial In Its Own Way, But Jesus God Am I Frustrated With This Shit), which is the other half of my writing life at the moment. Yin and yang, my dears, yin and bloody yang.
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.
Cue the Gloria of Bach’s B-minor, babies.
Your mouse has just got her first offer. From her second-and-very-nearly-first choice.
No more worrying. No more fretting. No more distraction from my beautiful current world.
Acceptance. Validation. And a fuckton of sweet sweet fellowship money.
(I think this anxiety is what’s been causing the blog hiatus — which we may now consider over.)
If it were up to me, reader, there would be no such thing as grades. I see where honors like “distinction” or, well, “honors” can be valuable, and can reward exceptional talent or skill, but regular-term grades? Nonsense. Useless nonsense.
Now, Brit Uni’s system is by far the worst I’ve ever encountered.
Bullshit item #1: Term papers are submitted “anonymously” to two “anonymous” examiners. Anonymous? My ass. One examiner is the tutor for the course, the other can only be one of two people currently teaching in my department, in my period. The course tutor will know which paper is mine, because, um, s/he helped me to develop it. Hello. And there aren’t that many students on my M.A. In one case, there were only two of us in the class, and our styles are totally different. It will be easy to tell which paper belongs to whom. Aside from “anonymous” commentary sent back through official channels, examiners (and thus tutors) are not officially allowed to discuss a student’s work with her. [!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]
Bullshit item #2: The earliest (earliest) possible return date for marks and commentary is one month into the new term. Which is only two months long. Most students tell stories of having gotten their marks only at the end of the following term, and of never having gotten any comments at all. Now, how is this supposed to be useful? (Again. Very few students on this M.A. If my undergrad profs could turn around twenty or more twenty-page papers in a week, surely these folks can handle less than ten in a month?) At the risk of sounding like a snowflake, how the hell am I supposed to learn from last term’s experience if I don’t get feedback, or if I don’t get it in time to implement it in the next round of papers?
Bullshit item #3: These papers are treated more or less as unseen exams, with access to books. Faculty are not allowed to read drafts of their students’ papers, or to give feedback on anything more substantive than a “plan.” Students are not, in fact, allowed to have their drafts read by anyone who is not an official Uni writing-center worker. If one of my tutors or one of my classmates reads a draft of my paper, it is said to give me an “advantage.” Um, well. Yes. That’s correct. It would be pretty bloody fucking advantageous if I could have a conversation with my mentors and my cohort about my work. I might even, well, learn something. And write a better paper! Please explain to me what’s unfair about that.
The system, I’m guessing, was designed in part to protect students from faculty bias, and in part (mostly) to protect faculty from grade-grubbing students, and to reduce in general the risk of litigiousness that comes with any assessment arrangement. (The whole problem would be solved with many fewer person-hours and a lot less money and paper if you did away with grades entirely. Ahem.) I’m all for protection, and grub-prevention, but I think this is extreme.
The other side of that coin is that this not only impedes a student’s learning process, it also impairs her ability to develop a close relationship with her mentors through work. It forces her to operate more or less in a void. Worst of all, it puts the entire emphasis on product, and none at all on process. I couldn’t give two shits about grades, as long as they’re not awful enough to hurt me later. What I care very, very deeply about is… well, learning. Is that so ridiculous? What shows up on my transcript is so astonishingly much less valuable to me than even a half-hour’s conversation with one of my teachers. If that conversation could, just once, be about my written work, it would teach me more than I will ever learn from the number spat out by a big, unwieldy, “anonymous” bureaucratic assessment-machine.
This goes back to something that never ceases to bother me: the academy is a community, not a machine. Yet institutions, especially big ones, so often refuse to recognize that. A university should be based on human relationships, to the greatest extent possible. That sounds so idealistic. But really? All I want is to hand my work directly to the person who fostered it, and have her hand it directly back to me, with her near-illegible scribbled marginalia decorating it. That is human. It’s also, apparently, too much to ask.
One of my other resolutions: remember to be exhilarated.
This week, reader, I don’t have to remind myself. Exhilaration abounds.
This time last week, I couldn’t see straight and couldn’t imagine it might be even remotely possible to re-start on a high note, to face the new term with the joy and energy with which I am accustomed to face these continual academic startings-over.
Lucky me.
From blank slate to three exciting projects, in the space of a week. The zygote has a midwife (who might die if he knew that term was being applied to him). Both courses have term paper topics, if tentatively (not even zygotes — amoebic little things, really, but feisty ones).
I’m returning to things I love (hello, medieval Wales!) with a fresh mind, and forging ahead into uncharted territories.
The wonderful (and, at less optimistic moments, terrifying) thing about being a student is that you can have three brand-new projects going, and you can take comfort in the knowledge that they are preliminary experiments rather than grand gestures.
This life? It thrills me to my bones.
Term papers due: 14/01.
Word count: 1267/5000; 0/5000.
Say it with me, reader: fuck.
With the exception of my undergraduate thesis, I have never not done this. I’ve never drafted and re-drafted a term paper. I’ve never not left something until the absolute last moments. I have never finished something without a tremendous amount of pressure hanging over my head. For that matter, I’ve never properly finished something.
I can’t yet work slowly and methodically over extended periods — I work best in bursts. The other day, I spent six hours at a library desk, not counting breaks. I think I wrote about two sentences. Then, in the forty minutes I spent at a coffee shop on my way somewhere else, BAM, 350 words. Good ones, too. Wallowed around all day today, accomplished nothing. Mom pokes her head in, asks me if I want to go to a movie in an hour. Sure, I say. But crap!, got to get to work. BAM, another 300-odd good, solid words.
Burst by burst, scraps of an argument get slapped onto a page. Later, when my head is clear, I go back to them, and then I can spend hours picking up the throughline of the argument, out of the muck in whatever introductory paragraph I’ve slapped up, and gently and slowly securing it as I progress through the rest of the scattered bits, shuffling them around, securing them to that central line. I tie it off and leave it for a while; then I go back, slacken here, tighten there, sneak in a pretty little arabesque or two, and finally nail each end to something solid.
That final, organizational process is the most fun, the most beautiful — for that, I have (almost) endless patience. It sometimes devolves into inane tinkering, but it’s usually great fun. I remember learning how to do it — Professor Wry taught it to me, perhaps inadvertently, as we stitched up my thesis together. And she taught me to enjoy it.
I’m not an undergrad anymore, reader. I’ve begun an apprenticeship. You can’t do objectively good work in M.A. term papers. Everyone knows this. Objectively good is not the point. These projects are preparatory; they’re about process, not product. This is where I need to unlearn those habits, develop new rhythms, learn slowness and method in my approach, forsake the slapdash and the quick fix.
But I’ve still to figure out how to make the initial stages work the way I want them to, without someone else’s whip flailing at my back. One of the things I love about Brit Uni is that no one’s breathing down my neck. One of the things that cripples me is that no one’s breathing down my neck. My undergraduate self was motivated, in part, by passionate desperation to please her teachers; my graduate self, evidently, cares more about meeting her own goals, about not falling on her face when she tries to test her wings. She’s growing up.
It’s an awkward stage, is this academic adolescence known as the Master of Arts degree. I don’t trust myself to do this on my own, and yet here I am. The Heretic doesn’t want drafts of my More paper: he wants a paper, and knows I can write one, so off he sent me, with a sheaf of bibliography and his blessing, to write it. The Philosopher forked over some Benjamin and a pile of citations in French, Aristotled me and tripped off to bask in the Marseillaise sun, where my misadventures are the farthest thing from her mind. Professor Wry now greets me as a friend; her familiar grip on my hand, from the powerful guiding force of a teacher, has become the firm, reassuring grip of a friend.
And here I am, with my scraps of one thing and my blank expanses of the potential existence of another thing. On my own. We’re nearing the eleventh hour, reader, and I’m on my own. I need to learn how to do this. I am learning how to do this.
And frankly? It scares me fucking shitless.
Dorothy Gambrell is my hero because:
Except that by “begin” she maybe means “end,” but then again perhaps it’s all just one and the same.
This morning, reader, I passed a crucial threshold of this academic year.
I had my first official, large-scale meltdown. You know, the buckled-over, weak-kneed, good, hard sobbing fit accompanied by the slow, hard suffocation that can only be produced by stifling a wild, nearly uncontainable keening wail. The kind of implosion, occasioned by nothing in particular, that chokes and paralyzes, that throws everything out of proportion as the world expands and contracts with unbearable violence; the loss of sight and sense and the world-shattering fear that the breaking-down will never pass, that the floor or the walls or the book I hold hard against my chest will consume me and I will never emerge.
The inestimably good news about this, reader, is twofold:
1) It did pass, and is now officially over. It has to happen, now and then, and here, today, it did, and now it’s done. I can check it off the list, clear it from the desk, and make room for the next project.
2) I had the good grace to make it out of my program chair’s office and into a locked private space before any actual sobbing, bending-double, or teeth-gnashing could occur. This is a sign that I have, after all, grown up. A little.
And then I high-tailed it to London and took one of my signature endless walks in the perfect autumn afternoon, and in my gorgeous new winter coat and the grace of my gait and the wryness of my exhausted smile, I rediscovered the ground and the sky and the rhythm of my thoughts, and all was well.
Cleansed and calm, now, withdrawn into the safety of my nest of books and papers, into this gentle, fresh exhaustion, I’ll lie awake awhile, and then I’ll sleep, and tomorrow I will simply start again.
Okay yeah hi. It’s been ages. Whatever. I can’t think – at all (occupational hazard) – so you get Crap, Random Bullets Of.
– I finally have an internet connection at my house. Which is situated at the tippy-top of a very quaint hill, and has a hypothetical view of the sea. From the roof. Which I can’t climb up to. Now, I’m a slight little thing with sharp fey features, and I even played Puck once in a misguided high school production, and these things would appear to qualify me for drain-pipe-shinnying. Alas, I never learned how to shinny. I feel strongly that learning this invaluable skill should be added to my ever-growing List.
– With regard to that list: I’ve never learned properly how to use an agenda, or a calendar, or any computerized version of same. The only life-planning scheme I’ve ever really worked out is one long, long list. Which doesn’t get updated on time, which frequently includes things I have no intention of ever actually doing and on which very important things frequently don’t manage ever to figure, and which mainly serves the purpose of approximating productivity — list-making being, frequently, a far more soothing endeavour than actual work. I have recently progressed to insane post-it-sticking. My life will expand shortly into a level of business not containable in post-it format. Compounded by the fact that the post-its cover a broad range of logistical issues, totally unorganized by any discernable scheme but largely divisible into (a) things to read, (b) e-mails to write, (c) programs to apply to, (d) application deadlines, (e) talks to attend, (f) belonging to the emperor, (g) miscellaneous call numbers, with or without the titles to which they refer, (h) frenzied, (i) innumerable, (j) possible term paper and/or dissertation topics, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) scattered notes, with or without headlines pertaining to their provenance / context / relevance to anything at all, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. This is a problem.
– And furthermore, I am a graduate student. Exclamation marks in order? Sure: !!!. Yeah, I, uh, read a lot. More on that later, when I’ve succeeded in fully extracting my head from my ass, which, given the career path I’ve set for myself, may be… never.
… There. I’ve broken the blog hiatus. More inanity to follow shortly.
