Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Last Update on Chapter 1 (for now)

I have finished my revisions! Sort of! Until my director comes back with more!

But in the meantime, I'm going to start thinking about Euphrosyne and her messed up relationship with her father. I'm totally excited.

(Embarrassing: I keep thinking of finishing my revisions as a version of that scene from one of the Ace Ventura movies where he goes: "Aah have ex-or-CISED the demons! This place is clean!" Why, brain? Why?)

Monday, October 19, 2009

Revising Update

I'm on page 32 of 46, debating whether to give it another hour tonight or just try and cram it all in tomorrow afternoon when I'm supposed to be doing 12 other things. I have to be up at 7 a.m. tomorrow to teach, but leaving it till tomorrow makes the deadline remarkably unlikely. I'll have some ice cream and contemplate.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Rividing Revising

I've been revising (or procrastinating revising) my first dissertation chapter for over a month now. Obviously this isn't an ideal situation; I'd hoped to have the chapter put to bed—for now, at least—by Oct. 1, and as it stands I'll be lucky to move on by Nov. 1.

If I had more time and less teaching, I think I would genuinely enjoy the process of revising. I get to flex my underused editing muscles, which satisfies the little copyeditor in my soul who cackles at the sight of red pens and correction fluid. I also get to go on mini-quests, searching out obscure bits of information. Yesterday I spent an hour trying to track down Anglo-Saxon law on widows; this morning I looked up a chain of words in the Dictionary of Old English and wrote one of my best paragraphs ever about the seemingly tangential issue of evening light in Sodom. Tomorrow I will investigate early medieval drunkenness.

Some of these mini-quests are quite satisfying. Others are frustrating in the extreme, either because they take aeons or because they're ultimately fruitless. Or both. In the end, my hour of research on widows turned into a one-line footnote that might not survive the next round of edits. I could have fixed several pages in the hour it tooke me to straighten out one missing reference.

Most of the holes in my writing have not been quite as difficult to plug as I anticipated, but at the same time there are many more than I remembered leaving—probably because some of them were left unintentionally. Revising is soul-killing in ways because it is the process of recognizing all your flaws as a writer. Mine currently include poor introductions of quoted material, an obsession with the phrase "it seems," and weak topic sentences. Forgive me, Clairity, for I have sinned.

Also discouraging is my mental exhaustion with this chapter. I'm tired of talking about Genesis A, even though I think it's a fabulous and under-regarded poem. I, however, have given it more regard than I really have time for, and I want to move on to fresh ideas about stacked graves and incestuous identity theft. Perhaps I will surprise myself and work in some of the little research tangents I'm going off on in these revisions, but I have my doubts.

So this is just to say that I'm going to try to push through the rest of my revisions this weekend and return the revised chapter (and two copies with intervening hand-written comments) to my advisor by Tuesday. You may ask me about it Tuesday afternoon and keep me honest, because I can't spend more time on this. It's not practical. Even if I have to do another set of major revisions down the line, I need to draw these to a close, let my soul's little Thinker out to play. Oh, and give my tiny Copyeditor a sedative—she's kind of a bitch.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Monday, October 12, 2009

God Bless You, Oscar Wilde

Quote from Wilde's De Profundis, which my students are reading for tomorrow:
To me one of the things in history the most to be regretted is that the Christ's own renaissance which had produced the Cathedral of Chartres, the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St. Francis of Assisi, the art of Giotto, and Dante's Divine Comedy, was not allowed to develop on its own lines but was interrupted and spoiled by the dreary classical Renaissance that gave us Petrarch, and Raphael's frescoes, and Palladian architecture, and formal French tragedy, and St. Paul's cathedral, and Pope's poetry, and everything that is made from without and by dead rules, and does not spring from within through some spirit informing it.
I strongly agree. And that is why I'm a medievalist.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

The Areas of My "Expertise"

I assume it was as busy a week for y'all as it was for me and that's why you're not posting/commenting/joining. Lame.

This week I have done exactly one hour of revising work on my dissertation. That is not promising. My other tasks have included being an enormous stress-ball Tuesday when S.S. was here (she gave great lecture; who doesn't love mummified hairless cat photos?), teaching three classes--all went relatively well, grading 14 papers (only 3 to go!) and attending Intro to Grad Studies to give them the dubious benefit of my senior-graduate-student wisdom.

There were five of us on the panel, and to some degree the advice we gave about graduate school was very similar and boiled down to this: get to know people and don't dick around. Which: brilliant insight, no? However, there are nuances, and we supplied them in spades. My particular version of this advice leaned hard on its first half, and I'm interested in puzzling out why. Therefore so are you, by default.

To some degree I think it is because I'm a natural at the latter half; I'm dead on schedule to be out of here in six years, which will put me ahead of the Iowa average TTD by over a year and the national average by four years. I've always liked making lists and crossing things off them; graduate school is just a big list of tasks to complete. I also like to do things fast. I spent all of first grade racing Michael Wahlstrom to turn in Mrs. Zahm's worksheets first, and it's stuck.

Getting to know people, though, that's where I fall down a bit. I hate getting to know people. I have six friends, and 99% of the time, that is plenty. The glad-handing, ass-kissing, and general being-niceness of building relationships, especially professional relationships, sucks all the energy out of my being. People make me tired. I don't know why; like the lists thing, it has always been that way.

But relationships feed speed. Having K. stick up for me on the quals committee may not have been strictly necessary, but it definitely let me think about other things that were more useful. I made it through comps because I had graduate school friends who listened to me bitch endlessly about it, and through the prospectus because I had a good enough relationship with my advisors that I could tell them that we were all being insane, and they both recognized when enough was enough and said "Good enough." And now I'm moving forward with the dissertation. Cordial relationships with more advanced graduate students have gotten me a ton of advice, which I love [to ignore, sometimes].

There are things I've done wrong, though. I haven't kept up contact with people I've met at conferences the way I should. I have relatively few non-medieval mentors, and none outside the English department. I have likewise few friends outside the department, which makes my world insular at the best of times. Occasionally I wish I had more people to study with; my friends in IC are all solo studiers, by and large.

So I hope the graduate students take my advice to heart, and that things go as well for them as they have for me, by and large. And I hope that somebody, somewhere, makes them believe that offices are for socializing, e-mail is for procrastinating, and Lacan is for disregarding.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Professionalization and Maturation

I'm writing the introduction for S.S.'s talk Tuesday, and it has brought me around again to what I think is one of the central professionalization questions for any young member of academe:

How do you suck up without seeming to suck up?

Or, more delicately, how do you express your admiration for a more senior scholar without sacrificing your dignity?

S.S. is a scholar I genuinely admire; I think her work is both smart and important, which are, from what I have gleaned, the most effusive compliments we can give around here. She's a good writer and a better thinker, and above all else, I want her to like me and think that I'm smart and worthwhile, too. Okay, really above all else I want to not embarrass myself in front of the entire department, but then that other thing.

Unfortunately, nobody really tells us what the rules are for dealing with senior scholars. What's a sufficient excuse for approaching them? How do you maintain contact without annoying them? Etc., etc. Clearly to some degree it's a matter of personality and individual preference, and every approach is not going to work with every scholar, as I learned when I got blown off by a big-name Anglo-Saxonist at Kalamazoo this year. (Yes, still bitter.) By the time we start thinking about approaching these people scholar-to-scholar rather than student-to-teacher or advisee-to-advisor, it is too late to practice on our own senior scholars because the mystique is gone. We respect them but we don't fear them, or at least not for the same reasons.

Clearly the only answer is respectful trial and error, as well as development of a thick skin, which graduate school promotes anyway. But I'm still going to fantasize about some sort of master database on the internet, where upon receipt of the Ph.D. every scholar enters his or her individual preferences for dealing with peons and makes everything a lot easier for my ambitious but awkward self.