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Today:
I set to work at last on the rest of the applications. Still to go: University of Stillanother State, Dead White Man University, Notastate University.
I calculate that I have written precisely .5% of my term papers, due 14/01.
I get my hair cut.
I ponder the possibility of submitting not a paper on my More book, but rather a title, an epigraph, and a series of excellent footnotes.
A man in Pakistan shoots Benazir Bhutto in the neck and blows himself and twenty-odd others to smithereens. The Conscientious Orientalist is shocked. I, as usual, am not. I wonder, irreverently, if I would be able to call her brave if I did not think her beautiful. I wonder if I would be able to call her brave if she were not a woman.
My father outdoes himself, astonishes me, by referring to Pakistanis (all of them) as “barbarians.”
I watch a televised crowd carry Bhutto’s coffin, hundreds or thousands of people, yelling and weeping and shaking their fists. I wonder whether our American culture would not be improved by a greater proclivity for yelling and weeping and shaking of fists. I watch the fires and the crowds, and listen to my father’s voice, “fucking barbarians.”
Tomorrow:
Home to the 42nd Street library. Hope to get that word count up to, say, 15%. Polish that Stillanotherstate application; click “submit.”
To the Morgan Library, to gaze lovingly at old things, be overawed as I always am that it was once possible to obtain those books as a private collection.
Reunite with the Progressive Schoolteacher, the Rhetorical Tranny, the Foucauldian Bombshell, the Boy Lawyer.
Go, in general, about my business.
My life, by any standard, is a quiet one. My world, miraculously, is at peace. The universe is capable of astonishing incongruities.
So, reader. I said that I have no doubts or reservations of any kind about my new university. This is still, mostly, true. However.
The library.
Reader, I am so unbearably spoiled. I knew that I had been blessed by libraries, but I didn’t know how blessed, how spoiled. The libraries that taught me what libraries are include: the Petri Dish’s substantial collections beautifully housed, Georgetown University’s ugly, depressing but well-stocked system, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library’s Humanities branch. I spent more time than I needed to in one particularly Victorian reading room in Beloved Library during undergrad, or wandering the stacks, my fingers trailing over rows of spines, or curled up under Tolstoy, tucked away where no one could find me and my books and my papers. And that is where the self who decided to trip off across the ocean to nourish the Scholar Within was born.
Libraries, in short, are important to me, as they are to probably everyone who reads this, and probably in much the same ways. The space, as much as the content, of a library shapes my experience of work. I have been spoiled, spoiled, spoiled.
Yesterday, I had my first serious poke around Brit Uni’s library. What an incredibly, horribly depressing place. The light inside is the same colour as the light inside Penn Station. The walls are a greyish-brown concrete. The windows are small and ill-placed, the ceilings heavy and ponderous (also concrete). A sense of darkness huddles over every space. I can’t imagine doing work there — except, perhaps, for the chain-yourself-to-a-desk-because-this-has-to-get-done-NOW-no-excuses kind of work to which poor spaces are sometimes suited. Just as well, because it closes at nine. (What on earth do the undergrads do about that?)
And its collections are… well, sparse. It boasts a respectable number of volumes, but most of these are multiple copies of single books used in classes. The books are poorly looked-after, scribbled over and over and over, their spines cracking and bending. Many of them are paperback, and therefore disintegrating. Many Big Works of scholarship in the areas I’m familiar with (early modern and modernism) are not represented. Forget any of the Medium-to-Not-So-Big works. What is there tends to the radical, which pleases me — but seriously, kids. Are we really all traipsing off to the British Library every time we have a vague research need that can’t be satisfied by the internet?
“Yes, mouse,” will come the tired, impatient-growing reply, “we are. And you are effing spoiled rotten.”
I will note, however, that as far as I can tell the pre-modernists are conspiring exceedingly well to funnel as much cash as they can into special collections — as noted, this library holds a surprisingly spectacular array of early books, for which a brand-new, extremely shiny reading room has just been installed. For this, I am deeply grateful, and such a thing is not, ever, to be discounted.
What my experience of dismay comes down to, of course, is money, and the place of higher education within the socio-economic structure of this country (of most of Europe, for that matter). I never realized just how wealthy the Petri Dish is as an institution — a wealth that could only be accumulated in a culture that prizes higher education for its elitism, not, as in Europe, for its populist potential. The P.D. and Brit Uni are roughly equivalent in terms of “quality,” well-regardedness, general pedagogical philosophies, overriding political tone, and Archetypal Student. Except that (well, white, Northeastern, educated) Americans feel that an education that doesn’t cost a fortune isn’t worthwhile, while Britons are still scandalized by the fact that they have to pay anything at all for what was once free. And so the P.D. is shiny and bright, and its resource cup spilleth over, while Brit Uni is a little scruffy around the edges, and gives a sense of a bit of a scramble to maintain what it has.
I was aware of these differences, but they didn’t come home to me until I saw that library. It made me realize that I come not only from a wealthy family but from a whole culture of wealth — wealth of the big, material, institutional kind, and the expectations it fosters. I wonder what this has done to my brain. Am I intellectually “soft,” for having been raised on the educational feather-bed of a Northeastern SLAC? Has the fact that I have been accustomed to buying, not borrowing, my course books made me somehow weak? Why is it so embarrassing to discover that I am so deeply spoiled in ways to which I never devoted sufficient consideration?
(And, uh, that thing about tigers and stripes? Yeah, my next step today is to seek out a cheap copy of Renaissance bloody Self-Fashioning, because I refuse to use the one that has jargon spewed all over it in electric pink ink. We won’t even mention the state of the Shakespeare.)
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?
Reader, your mouse is now twenty-four years old. She is beginning to think that she will always feel as Clarissa Dalloway does, crossing a street on her way through Westminster: very young, and at the same time unspeakably aged.
Flavia’s recent post on age and aging, in which she notes her relief at having left her twenties behind in favor of a more directed, settled sort of life, got me thinking about this birthday more deeply than I usually might. Now, I get where she’s coming from, for sure. Having moved ten times in the past six years, I’m a little bit ready to, um, stop doing that all the damn time. Some settled domesticity would go a long way to making me feel less like a child and more like an adult. It would be nice, yessir, to live in a place with furniture that didn’t come off a sidewalk somewhere or out of someone’s dead grandmother’s basement. A stable income, however small, would also be… well, novel, and a little comforting. Knowing where I am going to be – geographically, if not psychically – a year, two years, three years from now would also be comforting. But since such stability is not my immediate future I am prepared to accept nomadism – plenty of perfectly successful cultures do it, after all – and to continue carrying my books (and my yurt) around on my back until something more predictable comes along.
However, there is a liberty to this thing called Youth that I am heartily enjoying. I’m not tied down by anything at all. I own virtually nothing, aside from my clothes and my books. I have no professional obligations or responsibilities of any kind, except for the necessity of not burning any bridges and of juicing the networks whenever possible. The extremely remote possibility of future children is still, well, extremely remote. A “long-term” partnership, also a remote potentiality, still means three to five years.
It’s not yet “too late” for anything. All those places to which I want to travel? All those books I want to read? All those love affairs I look forward to having? Still possibilities. The only question is which, and when, and with whom — not whether.
As I write this, I am realizing how much our culture, or maybe just I, define the difference between youth and adulthood in terms of property – what you make, what you own, what you can afford. I had a conversation at the beginning of the summer with Professor Zuckerman* about how grad school, and the dawn of academic life generally, can be infantilizing precisely because it delays the Stuff-accretion process that we tend to associate with maturity. She told me that she had found herself unsettled by the instability of grad school life and by her start in the professoriat because she longed for a solid domestic life in which fewer question marks would need to be appended to every aspect of her life. We talked about the odd phenomenon of advanced degrees conferring middle class status while simultaneously stripping away all real economic assets, and how part of becoming a grad student is accepting that your lifestyle will never be in accord with those of your non-academic friends.
I thought about this for a while, and then I told her that this instability is something that I intend to cherish, because it comes to take the place of the wider uncertainties of youth that setting myself on an academic path has eliminated. I have only recently realized just how many options there are in the world, how many possibilities I have shunted out of my line of sight in favor of professorial ambitions. While it will always be possible to jump ship and do absolutely anything else, I nevertheless frequently get the feeling that the path on which I’ve set myself is in some ways rather narrow, rather limited. If all goes as planned, I will never, say, move to Tblisi and teach French literature to young Georgians, or become a hack freelance journalist, or found a progressive free school in the woods. Which is all just fine, but I’m a restless, twitchy little soul and, to paraphrase Woody Allen, such a soul needs to maintain constant motion, or it dies.
Okay, so right now that motion is more like trying to keep my balance at the top of a loose pile of rocks in the middle of an earthquake — and it can only get worse — but I take what I can get. Maybe what it comes down to is that I just like to be scared.
*Who, if she reads this blog, which I doubt she does, is more than welcome to provide a better pseudonym, because this one, while moderately a propos, sucks.
** First image copyright Allison Reuling, second image whothefrack knows.
This morning, the Conscientious Orientalist asked me a question about available fields of study in early modern literature. You know, “uh, what is it that you want to do?” I listed a few (history of the theatre, Reformation antics, “women’s history” or whatever, (proto-)colonialism, so on). Which led to me talking excitedly about maps and mapping and knowledge and nation-building. Which in turn led to me thinking happily about how much I like talking about those things. The CO is a decent enough sort, and a good enough friend, to listen with genuine interest to my pratter.
Just now, I was re-reading my journal from my senior year in the Petri Dish. I’ve been wishing I’d kept better track of my life in undergrad-thesis-land. I look back with nothing but the purest fondness on the experience, and I keep wishing I had a record of the process of coming to that fondness. I find that there is more recorded history of that time than I had thought there was. Many entries gab inanely about anxiety regarding the difficulty of this or that esoteric and probably trivial point. Some post-advisor-meeting entries read like they were written by a puppy who’d done her very best to please and, to her shock and glee, received a biscuit. Some rage about the abstruseness of Absolutely Everything To Do With The Academy. Some record humorous scholarly soundbytes. There’s much in the way of Stunning Revelations and Unanticipated Setbacks, Infatuations and Disenchantments. And an entry dated only “t- 40 hours” closes as follows: “happy, contented, excited, relaxed, on top of my shit, and generally thrilled. occasionally jumping up and down. bursting into laughter / wry grin. winking at myself.” It’s true. With less than two days to go before the deadline for the most ambitious piece of writing I’ve executed to date, I was utterly delighted, more delighted than I’d thought it was possible to be with work.
That delight as it came rushing back to me, along with the smell of a New England campus in early April and the feel and shape of the afternoon light on the third floor of Beloved Library, provided a tremendous and unexpected comfort. It was as though the girl who walked down the steps, swaggering a little in her cowboy boots through the midday throng and past the chapel and under the trees, cradling one hundred and three printed pages in triplicate like a babe in swaddling, had leapt out of her collegiate spring to smack me on the head and, laughing wildly, tell me to stop worrying and look! look! isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it beautiful?
It is. Or can be. Angle, context, perspective are everything. But something about that beauty, real or nostalgically perceived, is simply true.
I am leaving in a month to do a strange thing: enter a whole new, unexplored world and at the same time and by the same means return to an old, comfortable, familiar and beloved one. It’s the damnedest thing, but I keep forgetting to remember how spectacular, how exciting, how beautiful that prospect is.
A few weeks ago, a certain Wise Person who likes to give really good advice gave me some really good advice: as you go forth into the universe, don’t expect to have your hand held.
Yeah yeah yeah, I get it, I thought. I’m a strong, independent sort of young lass, and I can totally hack it on my own.
But here’s the thing: I never have. Hacked it, you know. On my own.
Remember all that about applying to Ph.D. programs? Well, there’s a pile of stuff sitting on my improvised desk (an outsize endtable sequestered in a corner of this awkward half-room that no one ever uses) that hasn’t been touched in, oh, three weeks. Spreadsheets detailing various programs’ funding packages and degree requirements; printouts of English department websites; lists of faculty types and their publications; a halfheartedly scrawled-on copy of the second chapter of my undergrad thesis; a sheet of paper with seven different versions of the same sentence about Assia Djebar crossed out and rewritten, followed by the beginning of an eighth sentence about Nabokov; a book of practice GRE literature subject tests, and so on. Just sitting there. I haven’t even entered that room in days.
I’m not losing heart, I’m just lost. I have no idea how to do this stuff. I’ve been justifying putting it off in part by telling myself that I want to talk it over thoroughly with this person or that person, gather advice, before I continue. I realized, the other night, that what I want is not good advice, but to be told what to do, and shown how to do it. Which is weird, because that’s not something that anyone’s done for me since high school, and not something I particularly enjoyed about high school. But these applications have some kind of strange power over me, and I just cannot face them.
Part of this, of course, is my ineradicable sense that I am somehow extraordinarily inadequate. Your basic impostor syndrome: I sit down to write a new sentence or chop a limb out of my would-be writing sample, and can’t shake the feeling that I’m a total fraud. (In part, I just now realize, because in a way I actually am a fraud: I’m trying to sell the student I’ll be in one or two or three years, and not the person I am now. Which is impossible. Weirdly, this makes me feel better.)
Whatever. The bottom line is that I want my goddamn hand held, and that makes me angry with myself.
Okay, then, mouse, I say, take a deep breath. This is called growing up and you’re just gonna hafta do it sooner or later, so let’s just suck it up and make it sooner — say, nowish. Use that big smart brain of yours to carve out a little space for yourself, and get going. Screw sheepishness, screw inadequacy, screw all the bullshit and distractions that are keeping you from banging away at this thing. Just get moving, and the rest will follow.
Once I had that tiny revelation, another quickly followed: I’m not as alone as I think I am. I have very good mentors, and they care about me and about what happens to me. And part of that caring is helping me to see that I can, after all, accomplish things more or less under my own steam, and that I owe it to myself to do exactly that.
I just need to decide on a first step, and then kick this thing back into gear. That will happen tomorrow.
For now, the appropriate step is clearly beer and John From Cincinnati. Goodnight.
(Oh, image copyright Dorothy Gambrell blah blah etc. Thanks, Dorothy.)
