Pursuing Perfection at Graduate School

A Transparent Process

brownarnold — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:52:11 +0000

I’ve decided that my new year’s resolution is to be more reflective about my writing/thinking/researching process. I’m starting the comps process, like, next week, and I’m freaking out about it but I’m also really, really excited about it. I’m also doing some cool things and I’d like to talk about them.

First reflection: I say “also” too much.

One of the things I really liked about HASTAC was how a lot of people were excited when Siva Vaidhyanathan was spending time talking about his writing process and his failures before he published a really successful book. What if more of us did this? Would academe change a little bit? What if we talked about all the things that we do that aren’t related to our projects? I ride a bike and I spend a lot of time doing that. It keeps me sane and I like it because I don’t have to think about my project when I do it. When I come back to my project, I still like it.

So, I’m going to start using this blog to do that. I’m going to make it (semi) habitual, and I’m going to talk about what I fail at as well as what I succeed at. I’m starting to feel more comfortable about this whole academic world I’m in (although there are still parts of it that I find so, well, weird).

So first, I need to stop making this blog about anonymity. My name is Erin Beard, and I’m a Ph.D. student at MSU.

Graduate Student Snow Days

brownarnold — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 04:23:03 +0000

The university shut down today. It hasn’t done this for several decades, so it was a big shock to everyone. Honestly, when I moved to the Midwest, land of the stalwart, I thought I would never see another snow day again. I was mostly pissed off about the prospect of a blizzard because it meant that I had to do everything I normally do, except in the snow. On Monday morning, I warned all my students that the only possible reason we would not have class was if the university canceled classes. I wouldn’t count on it, kids–do your homework.

I had my psychoanalysis class last night, which was in danger of being canceled if the forecast made it look like we would have to go home in white out conditions. It did not, so we had our regularly scheduled class and spent nearly three hours talking about Lacan’s button-tie. It was really fun. I was glad we had class; otherwise, it would have been rescheduled for Friday or Saturday. (only in grad school, right?) We found out that classes for Wednesday were canceled before class started, so we all left class and went home to make soup, drink, and watch a movie. I think maybe we all felt normal for once.

I sent out an e-mail to my class telling them how the plans and due dates were going to shift over the next two weeks, and no one seemed to have a problem with this, except for one student, who sent me this lovely e-mail:

“And here I am replying at 5:21 in the morning after pouring my heart and soul into Paper #2 over the span of 10 hours because I thought everything was due on the 2nd. Are you taking this assignment a week (or two?) early, or should I hold onto it for peer review?”

I can’t even begin to say how insane this e-mail is. A) The due date for the second paper is next Wednesday, and it’s clear on both the syllabus and the individual project schedule I make for every paper. B) Is he actually mad at me for moving back due dates and/or for making it snow? C) If you have been writing all night long (obviously last minute) then why would you want to hand in the paper early? D) DON’T TELL ME YOU WERE WRITING THIS LAST MINUTE. E) Oh, sure, then on peer review day you can shoot the shit. F) Who is this person? G) If you already knew the university canceled classes for the next day, why on earth would you pull an all-nighter? It’s highly possible this kid didn’t know for some reason, but I doubt it.

My students this semester are so weird. I really should have included in my reply that this student needs to go to bed. Immediately. He’s obviously delirious.

I really did nothing today except grade a few papers. I know the correct grad student thing to say is that I used all this extra free time to do more work, but I did not. I mostly watched TV, did laundry, baked stuff, and read Lydia Davis. It was awesome.

My Project is Awesome, Bitch.

brownarnold — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 05:11:26 +0000

This is what I told my friend to say to her committee. Sort of. She was really nervous about meeting her entire committee for the first time and of the possibility that they would shoot down everything, so I told her to say everything like she was going to say “bitch” right after it in her head. It at least lightened the mood so that she wasn’t freaking out so much before meeting with them.

I’m not quite to the committee-assembling point yet, but I feel like I’ve made significant progress in the past semester. Part of this was taking an amazing class in Victorian Lit with the senior Victorianist here, and part of it was the fact that all these thoughts that have been floating around in my head over the past year finally coalesced into awesomeness.

I met with her earlier this week to talk about the paper I wrote for her class and about the conference to which I’m going to submit an abstract. She really liked the paper, and she said that I’m doing interesting things with Badiou and Levinas. The paper was on a really obscure novel that has absolutely nothing published about it anywhere, and I’m really hoping to put a chapter about it into my dissertation, so we talked about what I would do and expand on if I wanted to do that. (And who knows, maybe I could find an archive somewhere and make a research trip out of it.) The best part about it was that she said that no one is doing this, which is basically like hitting the merit-based lottery that you have to work your ass off for. I was really excited. The conference I want to read this paper at is in November, so I’ll have the summer to work on improving the paper and lengthening it a bit.

At this point, I feel really confident about my long-term project and its prospects. It took me some time a boat load of reading to get to this point, but I’m on my way.

In other news, I was accepted to a conference in Amsterdam. The paperwork for funding is working its way through four different university apparatuses right now, but I’ll find out soon whether or not my department, my college, the graduate school, and the international studies program are going to pay collectively for it. I can’t really go if they don’t, but there’s a good chance that most of it will get covered. I’m going to cross my fingers, because I really want to go to Europe, bitch.

The Worst Feeling…

brownarnold — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 20:30:07 +0000

…,second to feeling like you don’t have intelligent thoughts, is:

Getting your work done for the day and remembering that you have a very large stack of papers to grade, then spending half an hour feeling guilty about not grading.

I Passed my Exams…

brownarnold — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:52:38 +0000

by opening my professor’s beer bottle without an opener. All one needs is the edge of the porch, really. Granted, my exams won’t be for another two and a half years, but, hey. I told him I would hold him to that statement.

The Reading List

brownarnold — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 15:29:55 +0000

You know the semester has begun and that I am procrastinating when this post goes up. I’m taking three classes (because I’m insane like that) again and teaching First-year Writing. My classes are: The Disappearing Subject: Unbounded Sensibility in Victorian Literature, Science and Aesthetics; and The History (and Theory) of the Book in America. It’s a C19 semester! I’m also doing an independent study on The Novel in Latin and South America. I’ll be reading from translations for those, alas, because I do not speak Spanish. But I’m taking it with a pretty well-known novel scholar here, and I want him on my committee. Plus, this looks good on my transcripts for job market time. This list will be long. Here goes.

The Disappearing Subject

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Maud and In Memoriam
Thomas Hardy, The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved
Edith Johnstone, A Sunless Heart
Robert Browning, various poems
George Eliot, The Lifted Veil
Richard Marsh, The Beetle
Wilkie Collins, Armadale
May Sinclair, Mary Olivier
George du Maurier, Peter Ibbetson
Henry Maudsley, Physiology and Pathology of Mind and Body and Will
Samuel Butler, Life and Habit
F.W.H. Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death
Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly
Vernon Lee, The Beautiful

Articles

Nikolas Rose, “Assembling the Modern Self”
Theodor Lipps, “Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense-Feelings”
Dr. C.B. Ratcliffe, “A Speculation about Dreaming”
Forbes Phillips, “Ancestral Memory: A Suggestion”
Rae Greiner, “Sympathy Time: Adam Smith, George Eliot, and the Realist Novel”
Helen Stoddart, “‘The Precautions of Nervous People are Infectious’: Sheridan Le Fanu’s Symptomatic Gothic”
Athena Vrettos, “‘Little Bags of Remembrance’: du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson and Victorian Theories of Ancestral Memory”

The History of the Book

Eds. Finkelstein and McCleery, The Book History Reader (We are reading too many essays from this to list them all)
Casper, Scott, et al., A History of the Book in America: Vol 2: The Industrial Book, 1840-1880.
Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853
Nathaniel Hawthorne, House of Seven Gables (supplementary)
Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (supplementary)
Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading
Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest
Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies
Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, In Four Articles: Together With A Preamble To The Coloured Citizens Of The World, But In Particular, And Very Expressly, To Those Of The United States Of America (supplementary)
Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (supplementary)
Thomas August, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral life in Nineteenth-Century America
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (supplementary)
Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture
Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital

The Novel in Latin and South America (excuse the lack of accents)

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions
Alejo Carpentier, Explosion in a Cathedral
Octavio Paz, Convergences
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
Elena Poniatowska, (I haven’t decided on a title yet because I still have to figure out which novels are translated)
Luisa Valenzuela, Clara
Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives, Amulet
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
Isabel Allende, Of Love and Shadows
Javier Marias, A Heart so White
Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co.
Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat

There you have it: my semester.

Five More Years?

brownarnold — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 18:35:40 +0000

My entrance into the Ph.D. program here passed pretty uneventfully. I got home from four weeks of traveling and opened my mail, and there was the letter that said I was officially a Ph.D. student. It was short. I called my parents and told them the news, and then I watched Gilmore Girls. Our department has been in an uproar over the past few months because the DGS is going to another school, so someone else had to take care of my application. I was starting to get worried because they hadn’t emailed me. Instead, they sent a letter, and I was a Ph.D. student for about 3 weeks without knowing it.

Now I know for sure that I will be spending at least the next 5 years in the northern Midwest. It’s not the best place to live, really, (I miss Virginia more than I can say) but I like this school. I am in a long-term, committed relationship with school.

I’ve been working on my research this summer. I didn’t get much done when I was at home, mostly because the home where I grew up is rather pathological and it is an extremely difficult environment to work in. Don’t ask me what I was thinking when I decided to spend three weeks there. Oh well, aren’t we all disappointed my lofty expectations at certain points in our life? But when I got home, I felt at peace, and I was reminded that this is where I am supposed to be and that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else doing anything else. I got right back to work and felt really good about it.

This summer has been leisurely and productive, but I am ready to get back to the madness. I’ve never really liked summer, mostly because all my friends leave and I get bored with myself. I like having a schedule. I will say the opposite in October. But I know myself well enough to know that I like to stay very busy. I am excited for this coming year because A) I will be a Ph.D. student, B) I will be teaching a class on my own and C) three of my friends are living in my apartment complex. None of us have cars, so we will have a much easier time having our communal dinners, having communal study time, and helping each other out and going grocery shopping together. I hosted about 90% of the time last year too, so this will also take some of the hospitality pressure off me a bit. I love having people over and making food for them, and I love it when people feel comfortable enough in my apartment that they help themselves to things. But I also like being fed. We will be able to rotate meals at each others’ apartments. This will make some of the loneliness of living alone a little easier while still allowing me to have my own space and not deal with roommate issues.

In other news, I’ve been getting very strange headaches lately. They’re not really painful, but they feel like a pressure that covers the entire top of my head and sometimes reaches to the back. They make it very hard to read and think. It’s sort of like feeling dizzy without the spinning. They’ve been going for about two weeks now, everyday, and I’m beginning to really worry about what is going on in my head. I’m going to see a doctor on Monday.

Oh my god, it’s over.

brownarnold — Fri, 07 May 2010 23:30:12 +0000

I’ve just spent the last week and a half writing my guts out and so I cannot write anymore. I also can’t use my brain for at least a week.

But I just finished my first year of grad school.

Summer

brownarnold — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:41:43 +0000

I am quite excited about this summer because, for the first time in my life, I will not have to get a part-time summer job. I got a summer research fellowship, so I will be paid to do my own research for the entire summer! I proposed that I would write an annotated bibliography on my field of interest in the 19th C. and then rewrite a paper and submit it conferences/try to get it published. This also means that I can go anywhere I want this summer, so I’m going to visit home and other places, I think.

There’s also a yoga place downtown which is offering unlimited yoga for the entire summer for $300, so I’m doing that too. I figure I will need to keep structure in my life if I have no job other than researching and no classes to go to. I’m also planning on luxuriating in reading the Sunday Times on Sundays again.

I know what I’m teaching next year, too. I’m going to teach freshman comp, but it’ll be a stand-alone and I won’t be TAing for anyone. I’m really excited about this. The curriculum is ready to go, but I have as much flexibility as I want. Freshman comp is under a different department than English, so I’ll be working with new people. And I’ll only have 25 students instead of 75 or 100. I really wanted to teach this because I have less students, less in-class time, more time to spend with students, and I teach all by myself. Plus, I think I got a raise but I have to do the math on that. The downside is that I have to spend two 40-hour weeks in orientation in August, which I’ve heard is pretty grueling.

So there, updated.

How about in the comments, you share your working habits and what helps to keep you motivated and focused when you don’t have a deadline.

Productivity Blogging

brownarnold — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:59:11 +0000

Since I’ve gotten off of break mode, I have felt much more productive. I got lots of research done yesterday and graded 13 papers. I attribute this to Spring Break and doing absolutely nothing school-related for five full days. I know I should feel guilty about that, but I’m going to resist that because I feel so much better than I did a week ago, as the previous nervous breakdown post should show. Now begins the research and final paper countdown. Two months.

Today I:

Woke up at a relatively decent time (not entirely decent because of daylight savings time)
Read the last half of McGrane
Actually ate two full meals at the normal times
Ran errands before class
Went to class (and meaningfully participated!)
Enjoyed incipient Spring weather
Did three loads of laundry
Made dinner and baked cookies
Read most of Nightwood

Oh wait. I was supposed to grade five papers today.

Dammit.