Day 15 (<21): Bad Bad Dobby

cardio: 10 mins rope, 15 mins wii
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: gouda, sourdough toast, apple, vitamins
lunch: two eggs, "home fries" (potatoes, onions, tempeh, zucchini)
apartment clean?: approachably

Haiku:

I'm a fat ass waste.
Even my video games
call me overweight.

Yes, that's right, I've crossed over into "Overweight" by Wii Fit standards.

But at the end of a very unfit week, I did send to my advisor a reasonable excuse for a second chapter draft-in-progress. Reasonable enough. I workshopped it with some colleagues on Friday and they liked it. So we'll see.

Suddenly there is all this creative writing to do in the meantime. Randy wants me to adapt Measure for Measure to modern political scandals, but still in verse. I'm writing the verse component to a storybook gift that my friends are putting together for our other friend. And Ara wants me to write the book for the Where the Wild Things Are children's musical adaptation at her new theater teaching job in Marin.

I'm glad I'm sort of becoming the go-to guy for playwriting among my friends. But now I'll have to deliver on something more than haiku.

Day 14 (<17): Bad Dobby

cardio: 20 mins extrabike, 15 mins ellipshicle
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: ahi tuna burger on sourdough toast, miso soup with tofu, vitamins
lunch: shrimp and cocktail sauce, sourdough toast, apple
apartment clean?: passably

Well, it has happened: I missed three days. I'm working towards a deadline and all, and... yeah, no excuses. Bad Dobby. Bad bad bad Dobby. Moment of truth: will I get back on the ball?

So, today should be Day 17. Which means I'm three days in the whole, so I must put in three extra days before I can consider myself caught up.

In other news, Ara convinced me to go for a week on no saturated fat. Literally none. I can't even cook in olive oil. I can eat pasta with tomato sauce, but I can't put parmesan cheese on it.

I think Socrates said that the unqueso life is not worth living. I wonder if hemlock has any saturated fat.

Day 13: Salute Your Shorts

cardio: 10 mins jumprope, 10 mins Wii Fit
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty-five
crunches: forty
breakfast: egg salad, baguette, vitamins
lunch: Whole Foods salad bar (pea shoots, dandelion shoots or whatever, peas, corn, bleu cheese, Diestel turkey, falafel)
apartment clean?: reasonably

Ask me whether I made it all the way to the men's locker room before I realized that I had not packed my gym shorts, and thus was unable to work out. I had already left the house for the Old English Reading Group, which I was late for; I was not supposed to use up my one day per week (note the change) of working out at home on a day when I had already left the house; I am already behind in a workweek in which I am supposed to complete a draft of my play (by Sunday evening), a full dissertation chapter draft (by Monday evening), and a novel (by Monday 11:59pm). And I should definitely not be wasting my time on the English Grads list-serv:

"The videos [of police brutality at the UC protests] are horrifying indeed.

But to anyone teaching a composition course this semester: remember, as Paolo Freire and Miss Jean Brodie have both pointed out, that to educate is to lead out -- not to put in or deposit or inculcate, which would indeed be the opposite, and which, regardless of your own politics or opinions, is an inherently oppressive act in the classroom.

It is far more revolutionary, and far more effective, to allow the students to reach their own decisions about what is happening here (rather than to inform them about your own), and to provide them with the critical thinking tools to make their own opinions, and actions, duly complex and mature. Rather than simply swaying people one way or another, you'll help build a group of educated people who is not so easily swayed.

In other words, the most revolutionary thing you can possibly do is what you were already doing, assuming you were doing it right in the first place, since our composition classes are supposed to center on critical thought. Lead out, draw out, the natural instincts for critical thinking that are already in place. Guide them the tools to go out and research, deeply, what is going on. Never present them with any material, however straightforward it may seem, that is 'just the way it is.' Because no one, and certainly not any of us, is capable of a statement free of subjectivity, and that is exactly what we're trying to teach these students.

If there are students in your classroom (and there are) whose current reading of the situation is opposed to yours (and mine), it is still your job to encourage those students to find the words and voice to think through, investigate, and communicate their reading. And once such a reading is exposed to the critical thought necessary for such an investigation, the reading will change because the student will change. Any other approach will cause a dissenting mind to (rightly) clam up at the back of the room and grumble about 'these liberals, making assumptions, wouldn't hear me anyway, wasting more of our time.'

At NYU, in September 2001, when our chancellor ordered classes to reconvene after only a week (part of the 'return to normalcy' thing -- you want to talk euphemistic emails?) my TA walked into our 45A recitation and said, 'In the coming months, you are going to be bombarded with text. You probably already have been. It is our job, as literary scholars, to parse, analyze, and closely read texts, to uncover not only what they say, or what they appear to say, but how they say it. So in the coming months, you will discover just how important our work can be.' And then she produced three handouts, each one with a different text that represented a different 'side' of the 9/11 attacks -- Pat Robertson, who blamed LGBT and Communist New Yorkers for bringing down God's wrath, a blogger in Palestine who laid the blame entirely on aggressive US foreign policy in the Middle East, and a conscpicuously 'centrist' article. And then she said, 'Well? Go. Analyze. Let's discuss the form, not just the content, of these texts, and how they relate to agenda (or the construction of an agenda), etc etc.'

I would suggest that if anyone is going to bring up recent UC events in their classroom, they run a similar exercise, bring in texts for interpretation, etc. In any case, open a discussion, but don't comandeer it. Know that you, too, have an agenda, and that in that classroom, you are very powerful and loud -- though it is on you to get students to claim more power, and more voice, for themselves, regardless of whether you completely disagree with them. Feel free to steal my TA's ideas, as I have. I will not post this to bSpace.

Let's remember that a video from the grassroots, like an email from the top down, like our own classroom plans, is a text, one that we cannot simply take at face value. It is part of our job description not to take it at face value. Or we can do it on our own time; but when we are educating, our responsibility is to train students to read more deeply, think more complexly, and so forth."

Day 12: Wiiiiii

cardio: 10 mins (figuring out the) jumprope, 10 mins (remembering how to use the) Wii Fit
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: leftover vegetable pie, an apple, vitamins
lunch: dry salami, maple yogurt (Australian-style), beans on toast, bread and cheese
apartment clean?: passably

I must be quick, since I'm rushing out to go see Performing Diaspora at CounterPulse. Quick updates:

1) I was wrong. Old school protest can have significant effects -- if the protestors are willing to step out of their comfort zones. They have, and the media is paying attention.

2) The jumprope workout will work perfectly, I think, and since it is a bit more intense than the cardiomachines, I can unguiltily bolster it with some Wii Fit stuff, which means I'll get to start reporting back here on my weight and BMI and such (didn't get a chance to write it down today, but the cute little computerized voice made fun of me for not having reported back in months, then called me overweight). This will make it much easier to balance fitness and dissertation. Three weeks and counting -- woot.

Day 11: Mr. Roper

cardiomachine: 20 mins leakybeaky, 15 mins ellipsis
(read James Joyce's Ulysses)
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: one eggs, beans on toast because I wish I were British, an apple, vitamins
lunch: dry salami, maple yogurt (Australian-style), cold cauliflower soup (Ara's mom's recipe), a few brussels sprouts
apartment clean?: reasonably

Last weekend we saw DV8's To Be Straight With You at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and it was one of those rare pieces of art that was both politically effective and artistically virtuosic. Not least because of a monologue, made up of text from an interview with a young Caribbean homosexual whose father stabbed him when he came out of the closet, a monologue which a dancer performed while performing Olympic-level feats -- with a jumprope.

A fucking JUMPROPE.

Keith (see yesterday's post), who is friends with that dancer, and told me that the dancer had once been a competitive jumproper, and that the director just decided that he'd have his performers use what they know. Keith said, "You know, they say that ten minutes with a jumprope is as intense a workout as a thirty-minute run." The Jump Rope Institute (yup) confirms that this is true (click here). Of course, I could never jog because the impact is bad for my bad arches, and so, the elliptical and exercise bike are my albatrosses.

Cut to me in the stretch room at the gym today. One of the biggest difficulties in this new fitness plan is simply getting to the gym -- when I need all the time I can to deal with pressing dissertation deadlines, and plays that just won't get written, an unnecessary trip away from the home office fucking sucks. And I hear this Indiana Jones whoop-crack sound and I look up from my downward-facing-dog and see, again,

a fucking JUMPROPE.

One of the other things I hate about the gym is how laws of probability necessitate that most of the people at the gym on any given day will be people who go to the gym regularly. Fucking in-shape undergrads walking around in muscle shirts while I grunt through my paltry twenty pushups don't you judge me. And one of those very fit undergrads was right there, jumproping.

And it was so cool. Criss-cross, double spins, or whatever the hell, superfast, I just watched in awe for a second, which was embarrassing, and besides, at the gym, you're not supposed to look directly at anyone, which is another reason why I hate it.

And another thing I hate about the gym is the elliptical, because all that work doesn't go anywhere, because elliptical-walking is neither a transferable nor an impressive skill. But jumproping, as we have seen, is. And if I do that frequently enough, I could have something neat to whip out at parties.

So I bought a jumprope. Weighted handles, for my fitness enjoyment. And now, two days out of my weekly four, I can get my cardio in without going all the way to the gym. The foot impact, which is light if you're doing it right, shouldn't be a problem for my feet. In fact, I think it might make me lighter on my feet.

Oddly, I just realized that the dance piece we saw at Yerba Buena the week before that had a major section that mimed a jumprope, which we discussed at some length in the car on the way home. THE FATES HAVE TOLD ME TO JUMPROPE.

Day 10: Everybody's Fight

cardiomachine: 20 mins psychbike, 15 mins ellipsicle
(William Tydeman's The Medieval European Stage, 500-1550)
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: two eggs, potatoes and toast at Ann's Soup Kitchen, vitamins
lunch: root vegetable tostada from Tacubaya in West Berkeley (compliments of my lovely wife)
apartment clean?: certainly

Ann's Soup Kitchen has a 15% discount for anyone wearing UC Berkeley gear. Before I stepped up to the counter, I quickly grabbed my Cal gym shorts from out of my bag and put them on over my jeans -- the cashier told me that the discount only applies on Fridays, but that, yes, the shorts would have counted.

On the way from Ann's to the gym, I bumped into a former student of mine. She asked if I was going to the rally. We spoke for a few seconds, I awkwardly said "Well, I'm not teaching this year, so I've got nothing to strike from... it isn't my fight, I guess," then she went to the rally, and I to the gym.

Later on, I sent her this email:

"It was nice to run into you today -- just to let you know, I did end up attending the end of the rally, and marched through the streets of Berkeley in the protest. Two minutes after we spoke on Bancroft, I realized that I had actually said the words 'this isn't my fight,' which is untrue anyway, especially because any fight, anywhere, that affects access to education is a fight I shohuld consider 'mine.' I
don't agree with everything that the protestors were saying, but I reminded myself that marching in solidarity is not the same as marching in lockstep, and that an imperfect gesture is still sometimes better than no gesture at all. So, thanks for reminding me, if only accidentally, of what my priorities are."

My voice is hoarse from the chant-yelling (when I do such things, I do them right, and yes, I did get on the mike for the giant speaker system so that I could rustle up the crowd); my favorite part was when we marched outside Berkeley High and did a special cheer just for them:

This is everybody's fight!
Berkeley High is hella tight!

As usual, the Berkeley protesters have offered up a massive prix fixe spread of broadly-defined and often half-baked demands and philosophies; I prefer to order a la carte. At the march, between the deafening calls and responses, I discussed with Keith (from Performance Studies at UC Davis) all of the points I complained about in yesterday's post, particularly because Keith's thesis is on a relevant topic. Keith shrugged after a while and said, "Yeah. It's hard to be smart at a protest." I said, "Exactly. Exactly." And we marched on, in solidarity but by no means in lockstep.

Day 9: Stupor Mario

cardiomachine: 20 mins excitebike, 15 mins ellipsical
(William Tydeman's The Medieval European Stage, 500-1550)
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: top sirloin, one egg, half Ara's apple, vitamins
lunch: Musical Offering Cafe -- lentil vegetable soup, salad, bread
apartment clean?: particularly

There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, well, not for three days, but then it's of course back to business as usual. And while putting your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, would make the machine stop, it would also result in hurt feelings all around, and potential physical injury -- and so, the owners of the machine have kindly cordoned off a specific time and place in a "free speech zone" that will keep protestors away from the dangerous gears. And in that zone, when you use your safe, inoffensive, glib, and generalized chants and signs to protest the machine, you've got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine could theoretically be prevented from working at all, if it ever came to that, though of course it will not.

Seriously: exactly what member of senior management ever shook in his boots for a strike that had a predetermined end date? With all due respect, I am glad I am not teaching this year -- because, though solidarity would compel me to cancel my classes in honor of the strike, I would do it grudgingly. (I hope that going to the library and gym doesn't count as crossing the picket line.) This kind of nonsense is more of the typical snakeoil that makes a continually abused body of students, educators, and staff feel like "well, at least I'm doing something."

Either strike or don't; no real strike could be as safe and pleasant as this one is promising to be. I wonder what Mario Savio would say.

Today, I broke my promise to myself that I would not read any emails at all related to the budget crisis. And it cost me work hours on my dissertation -- what could have been time spent in a worthwhile and relevant scholarly pursuit was instead squandered on an endless, facile, discourse. Which is exactly why I made the promise to myself. And I will not break it again.

But I kept the promise that counts -- and I think I took out my frustration on the exercise bike.

Day 8: Chutes and Ladders

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(skimmed notes and biblio for William Tydeman's The Medieval European Stage, 500-1550)
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: one egg, baguette, cheese, vitamins
lunch: I simply do not remember, but I did eat lunch
apartment clean: yes

My new hard drive has arrived, as has my old one. The thingy that Dell made me buy in order to extract the old data has failed completely, and so I dropped the old hard drive at the Used Computer Store on Shatuck (for a forty-five-buck diagnostic, they said they'd give it a shot) and moved on as if the data was lost for sure. I've kept various projects -- my dissertation, my play, my National Novel Writers' Month project, this fitness blog thing, etc -- in purgatory for weeks now, and they're all too time-sensitive for that. So I'm calling it a done deal, and if the brain cavalry does come riding in at some point, all the better.

Or, rather, another day of re-organizing and backing up everything. I'm technically posting this on Monday, two days after my last trip to the gym (this, like the prior few posts, are backdated because of all the computer trouble). And I've spent the last 48 hours installing Windows 7 (might as well do it now, and yes, it is much better), adjusting and replacing various programs, and then sifting through all the data I have left, salvaging what I can, and organizing my entire external hard drive while I was at it (except music, which is an ongoing project and all doubled on Ara's Mac anyway), so that future backups can be quick, easy, and frequent. Then I triplicated all scholarly and non-scholarly writing onto my flash drive. And I uploaded most of my photos to Picasa, in neat, safe little albums that will sync to my hard drive periodically.

I have been sitting here at the living room table, doing all this. And there's still more catching up to do. But I'm glad I'm finally moving forward, yo. And I get mad props for continuing the fitness thing into a second week, even as my data disappeared beneath me.

Day 7: The Date is a Lie

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Lambert Danaeus's "On True and Christian Friendship")
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: Mom's pumpkin bread, vitamins
lunch: tapas at the Musical Offering Cafe
apartment clean: yes

I had limited computer access this week while I waited for my new hard drive from Dell. I'm posting these entries after the fact, but I promise they're all true.

Day 6: The Date is a Lie

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Gilbert Walker's "A Manifest Detection of Diceplay")
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: leftover miso-cornmeal porkchop and Annie's mac and cheese, vitamins
lunch: leftover slider and fries from the gourmet burger place on College Avenue
apartment clean: yes

I had limited computer access this week while I waited for my new hard drive from Dell. I'm posting these entries after the fact, but I promise they're all true.

Day 5: Bakhtin Stings

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike (no elliptical: there was a long waiting line, and I had run out of reading material)
(read Mikhail Bakhtin's "The Role of Games in Rabelais")
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: leftover miso-cornmeal porkchop and Annie's mac and cheese, vitamins
lunch: leftover slider and fries from the gourmet burger place on College Avenue
apartment clean: yes

I so almost did not make it to the gym today. As in I didn't make it there until about 5:30pm, when the post-work rush makes the place very crowded, and when the people who run the place do not adjust the lights for the fact that the sun has long set below the skylights, so the place is just a sweaty tired and dim chore. But I went.

Don't judge me for cutting out the elliptical for time's sake. The only way I can even allow myself to go to the gym is because I spend the majority of my time there going through dissertation-related reading. It is just too boring otherwise. Meanwhile, Bakhtin's writing is so fucking frustrating that it made me pedal extra fast on the bike. I mean, he is the classic example of a 60's/70's French theorist whose sense of fact-checking and objectivity is more unreliable than that of the medieval period which he studies.

Day 4: No Dice

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Felicity Heal's REFORMATION IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND)
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: leftover pot pie, vitamins
lunch: the remains of the pot pie; it is now all gone
apartment clean: yes, I even mopped the floor

Today was my first really productive day in a little while. Of course, it was productive only in the sense that I learned that the major editors' commentary on a key passage of the Chester plays (the dice game), around which my second chapter is supposed to orbit, is, well... completely wrong. Their grasp of medieval dicing terminology is not as tight as they made it sound. It's a minor point to the editors, surely, but to me... well. Then again, this whole hard drive thing has shaken up my dissertation brain in some good ways, potentially really productive ways, and the upheaval about the dice game is probably going to turn out to reveal something more complex and interesting than I had planned.

In other words, I AM ONLY EVEN CONSIDERING OPTIMISM ON ALL FRONTS UNTIL MY HARD DRIVE IS RETURNED TO ME.

Day 3: I'm a PC

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read James Simpson's OXFORD ENGLISH LITERARY HISTORY)
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: a pear, baguette, carrot juice, vitamins
lunch: chicken pot pie (see below)
apartment clean: yes

Excuses, excuses. Okay, maybe I'm using the computer failure thing as an excuse to procrastinate on my dissertation work and the whole thing is pretty flagrant. But I am very particular, and have always been, about my work environment: everything must be just so. Working on my wife's Mac is not just so; it is just so frustrating. There doesn't seem to be any organizing logic behind all of these pretty bubbles, bells and whistles. Even the keyboard is different. And I swear that the space bar is sticking, ever so slightly, since I uh, spilled a little bit (only a little bit!) of carrot juice on the keyboard (on a PC, I could easily pry off the space bar, wipe it off, and reattach). Plus, it takes time to be on the phone with Dell Technical Support, to get to FedEx or the computer store (with no car), and so forth -- about half of my work day for the past few days, actually.

None of this really explains why I spent a good hour and a half today making a chicken pot pie. But who knew that it would be as easy as making chicken in a pot, and putting it in a pie crust, and then baking? It came out exactly as I'd hoped, the chicken slighly overdone (better to err on the side of dry than of salmonella), but the black eyed peas, parsnip, carrots, onions, white wine/cheese sauce, and crust were all right where I wanted them. I've been doing an Eric Cartman voice since then.

And I made it to FedEx, which was farther away than I remembered, and the laptop is now sent. I've resigned myself to the probability that no data will be saved. But I have hope.

Day 2: Screw This

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Felicity Heal's REFORMATION IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND)
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: one egg, baguette, carrot juice, grapes, vitamins
lunch: leftover chinese from that good place on college near ashby
apartment clean: yes

The computer situation has worsened. I finally succeeded in getting the Dell Customer Care rep to understand that not only was my hard drive suddenly not working, but the tops of the screws were becoming stripped, so that I was worried that each time he had me remove and replace the hard drive would be my last. And lo and behold, after I hung up and tried to remove the hard drive one last time -- bam. One of the screws simply will not budge, is no longer a screw by any definition. I tried. Ara tried. The hardware store tried -- actually, various members of the family-owned business emerged one by one, trying an array of different gadgets. The used computer store guys tried. We tried everything, every home remedy, every online suggestion, there are none left, don't bother, and you know what? It's Dell's problem now. I called Customer Care back and now I'm sending the whole damn thing in, and they will either extract my hard drive or they won't and if they don't then it's on them to replace everything, because everything is under bloody warranty.

Except, as the Customer Care rep pointed out, my data. Let's be honest: the chances that I will retrieve anything off of my hard drive... are low. The next person to say, "Well, I guess that's why they say you should back up every week" gets a kick to the face. I don't know why anyone (my wife, my mother) has had even the slightest impulse to say that to me. Honestly. Thanks for the life lesson.

But anyway: the last backup -- only a partial backup, really -- was in late July, it seems. Beyond that, my dissertation is relatively safe because I have been emailing various drafts of everything to various readers. Some notes have been lost, but a lot of it was deadendage anyway. My teaching files are intact as far as the middle of the summer: the second half of summer teaching is gone forever. Files I kept for fellowship apps are gone; tax forms are still there. All our music is safe. All our photographs, I'm pretty sure, are safe (except possibly for unmemorable recent ones -- not sure).

And then there is the creative stuff. I wrote a ten-minute play over the past few weeks, and as I sent it out to a contest, I kept a hard copy for myself. It is now the only copy left. I made quite a few changes, some of them very good, to my full length play GLORY FOR YOU. All of those changes are gone, and the play is reset back to the state it was in when we held a private reading of it some weeks ago. Also lost are the massive notes and drafting that went into GFY, which has taken a fuckload of research. The only other creative pursuit that has received my attention since the July backup is my NaNoWriMo project, THE PHANTOM TUTORIAL, which I only began a couple of days ago anyway (and which, miraculously, I partially emailed to myself on the first day). Still, it will be tragic to watch the NaNoWriMo progress meter drop, rather than rise, when I confirm that 3500 words of progress are indeed gone forever.

In the meantime, there are some brightsides to this. It will force me to upgrade to Windows 7 (when I get my fixed computer back), and it will give me a sense of "new beginnings" in all of these pursuits, a good few of which (the play, the chapter) had grown a bit stale in recent weeks. I just wish my new beginning didn't have to happen on my wife's Mac.

Day 1: Just Not There

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Leah S. Marcus's THE POLITICS OF MIRTH)
stretching: yes
pushups: 14
crunches: 30
breakfast: one egg, baguette, pear, vitamins
lunch: breaded cod filets, malt vinegar, brie and crackers
apartment clean: yes

Today is not a fitting beginning for yet another new health resolution to begin. I just spent the last four hours on the phone with, and recovering from, Dell Customer Service. The service was nice enough, it's just that the product sucks: suddenly, for no reason, it's not detecting my harddrive. It's just not there.

And the data may never be recovered. Things I lost: my ten-minute play FOUND (spent most of last week writing it, though it survives in hard copy); my first three days' work for National Novel Writing Month (5100 words); some really massive changes to GLORY FOR YOU, my full-length play; and thankfully only useless bits of my second dissertation chapter (I've been dragging my feet... and I'm glad I did).

Give me one good reason why I shouldn't switch to a Mac this Christmas. Fuck Windows. I'm serious. I'm maybe serious.

In which Matthew writes a POEM

Last night I got bored, sitting at the light board, waiting for Ara's perpetually delayed house manager to give the go sign. So I decided to try my hand at writing a POEM. I know I'm not very good at POEMS, but all I had to hand were a pen, a notebook, and a bunch of pretty buttons, so I needed something to distract myself. This is the POEM I came up with:

          curry favor
          curry in a hurry
green curry
          curry the horse
          currier & ives

        carry on
        carry a torch
hari kari
        carrie bradshaw
voices carry


          corey haim
          corey feldman
north korea

The word you're looking for, by the way, is brilliant.

aphorism 7

[Lauri, having finally gotten certified to teach Fitzmaurice Voicework after two and a half years of training, workshops, and drama:]

As soon as you stop caring, things happen.

In which Matthew is a tourist

In what follows, fifth-year graduate student Matthew [so much for relative anonymity, see the comments section on this entry: oh, Internet] reflects on his experience "visiting" the Modern Language Association convention that recently took place in San Francisco. This is a somewhat extended version of Matthew’s less colorful (read: edited) account which can be found on his English Department's blog.

***

MLA members are the custodians of language, and language is at the heart of virtually all disciplines (at least the humanistic ones).
– Rosemary Feal, MLA Executive Director

The thirty thousand scholars of language and literature who form the Modern Language Association convene annually in late December. In a different city every year, we critique each other's research, we compare notes on teaching, we evaluate the current state of humanities education, and we perform the secret Illuminati rituals that determine how writers must properly cite A Publication on CD-ROM, Diskette, or Magnetic Tape (5.9.5). And we hold the preliminary interviews for the majority of academic jobs available in the humanities. Or we attend them.

Graduate students' futures are set in motion at this conference. Which is why, well before entering the job market as interviewees, some Cal graduate students attended this year's San Francisco MLA as tourists: to adjust ahead of time to the gravitational pull of a conference so massive. To see and not be seen, and to learn tips and tricks about the profession. (My space is limited here, so I'll present some abridged reflections on Sunday December 28, the second day of the conference).

I've attended the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress a couple of times, so I thought I knew what to expect from a large, interdisciplinary conference: an overload of ultraspecialized sessions, some deeply gratifying, but many in which my fellow murmuring graduate medievalists report on their dissertation progress and strive to be just barely more interesting, or louder, than the pattern on the carpet (kidding, guys, kidding).

But MLA is exponentially bigger in attendance and in import. The carpet pattern at the Hilton, as intense as it was (seriously), was no competition for the sessions I saw. In "Public Shakespeares," after Bryn Mawr's Katherine A. Rowe deftly analyzed three virtual Globe theaters on Second Life (one with a paid "acting company"), Harvard's Marjorie Garber presented her talk on "Shakespeare's Brand." With clever insights on branding in Sonnet 111 and in twenty-first-century advertising, Garber argued that American education in Shakespeare, which had once been representative of broad literacy, now threatens to overshadow and replace broad literacy. The National Endowment for the Arts, according to Garber, supports Shakespeare programs to the exclusion of other literature; its new Shakespeare in American Communities initiative, whose logo features the Bard's bust before a rippling American flag, appeared immediately after the White House cut back much of its funding for contemporary American poets, many of whom were protesting war efforts. (Politics nibbles at the edges of MLA, causing a productive unease that I, used to the isolation of medievalism, had not yet experienced. Some protestors at a separate event near the Hilton leaked into our lobby and marched silently, slowly, holding signs that asked what we, custodians of language and the humanities, are doing to prevent inhumanity).

"Liturgy, Literacy, and the Literary: Katherine Zieman's Singing the New Song" came next for me. Well-respected medievalists gathered at this session to present responses to Cal English alum Zieman's 2008 debut book. Andrew Galloway (another Cal English alum) discussed, via Zieman, the importance of "unanalyzable utterances" in understanding the words of the medieval liturgy, and cautioned literary scholars that too much attention to the meaning of words can eclipse the use of words. Then our own Steven Justice, shrugging off his narrower pre-planned topic, embarked on a relentless and at times unforgiving evaluation of Zieman's arguments, including examples of "unnecessary scaffolding" in her language which, when removed, would truly reveal the groundbreaking impact of the book. After the session, Zieman stood up, and was given only ten minutes (!) to respond to the respondents: extempore, Zieman summoned up a poised and very effective countercounterpoint. Go Bears indeed. The direct, aggressive (though never disrespectful) debate was representative of the kind of "big league" mentality that I loved about MLA.

I followed Zieman to "After Chaucer: A Roundtable," where she and five other medievalists discussed educators' overemphasis on Chaucer -- similar to Garber's Shakespearean complaint -- and how it has frustrated the study of less brand-recognizable literature from the period. Minot State University's Michelle M. Sauer called it the "Chaucer Conspiracy," citing countless examples of MLA job listings in the last ten years that have made it very difficult for any non-Chaucerian medievalist on the market to get hired.

At MLA, job anxiety weighed heavily on the sessions, the talkbacks, the informal conversations, straight through to Executive Director Rosemary Feal's convention blog: "Between the decline of available positions this year and the erosion of full-time tenure-track positions in the academic workforce overall, we are facing a situation that demands our advocacy and action." The California Report on NPR has done a feature on the subject.

After "After Chaucer" I considered, despairingly perusing the MLA publishers' fair, how I might strongarm old Geoffrey's brand name into my dissertation on sixteenth-century biblical drama. In one of the booths, I ran into a fellow tourist. We compared observations about the on-the-market grads we'd seen. We'd greeted and wished good luck to friends of ours; nearly all were visibly shaken, and many had looked us directly in the face with no recognition. One grad had passed me repeatedly on the street: he was not attending sessions, only walking around and around the nearby blocks. "I'm pacing," he said, and then, "I need this. I really need this." My fellow tourist and I parted in search of booze and comfort, off to the Cash Bar gatherings most appropriate to our fields of study. At the Old English Cash Bar, the fabulous Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe assured me that a Ph.D. from Cal, even in this market, was a powerful thing. And that helped.

But after the Cash Bar I was still sober in all senses of the word as I shuffled into "Publish and Flourish: A Roundtable on Academic Publishing for Graduate Students," hosted by the MLA Graduate Student Caucus. The Caucus had invited six professors to advise nervous grads like myself, I thought, on when and how to publish, and how it would affect our job searches.

And the Caucus leader seemed as surprised as I was when Stanford's Franco Moretti immediately attacked graduate-level publication in general, not only as an unacceptable distraction from dissertation work, but as symptomatic of our recent fall from a sense of "professionalism" still current only decades ago, when it was a "profoundly serious, deep, even religious commitment to a subject." We now focus on small publications and other "external signs" of professionalism, Moretti lamented, because the profession itself has "lost its fire. It's boring. It's not about the ideas anymore." Cal's Charles Altieri objected to Moretti's full prohibition of grad publication, but also rejected the implicit premise of the session, that any scholar (grad or not) should see academic discourse as a means of résumé-padding: "You submit [your article] when you have something to say. That's the time when you should try to publish something... Once you believe in it." And he offered some advice on how best to do it when the time comes, but paused to remark that the session, and sessions like it, tend to "create, rather than allay, anxiety," creating an illusion of standardized, general rules for a profession that should focus on the insight of individuals.

In other words, in response to the Caucus's questions about publishing and the job search, the roundtable rightly chastised them (us) for even asking. Where are our scholarly ethics, when our job anxiety drives us to publish only with the intent of "getting published," when we reduce our work to one more strategic marketing move? The speakers after Moretti and Altieri had similarly direct approaches, particularly CUNY's Ashley Dawson, who encouraged graduate students to organize to demand better support, and Williams's candid Christian Thorne, who appeared to be on the verge of tears as he begged aspiring graduate students to respect our profession and to stop clogging academic journals with hurried attempts at career-building when, as he put it, "ninety-five percent" of the academic writing out there is already "bad."

I'd heard an MLA anecdote between sessions that day, and after "Publish and Flourish" I looked back on it as an accidental parable. A very accomplished (but here nameless) professor, whose contributions to academic discourse most certainly qualify for exception from Thorne's "ninety-five percent," sat down with me in the lobby, and told me about his own experience at MLA as a graduate student. If my math is right, the story takes place before Feal's "decades-long decrease in the percentage of jobs on the tenure track in the academic workforce in general," a period roughly coterminous, I now realize, with the dimming of the profession's "fire," at least according to Moretti.

The anecdote: some long-past MLA had thrown this nameless professor into a state of shock too, and I imagine the Cash Bars didn't help, because at the interview for his "dream job," he found himself hopelessly hungover. He had been advised: "Remember, if someone asks you a question you're unprepared for, don't be afraid to take the time to pause and think." And an aggressive interviewer did ask a tough question, so he paused to think. "But the only thought that came to mind," the professor told me, "was, hey, the pattern on that carpet is really interesting..."

When the interviewer repeated the question moments later, he realized he'd fallen asleep. He did not get the job.

But the MLA lesson here (other than "don't go drinking the night before your interview" or "MLA carpet patterns can be hypnotic") is the professorial career that followed the anecdote: it was not built on anxious, generalized rules, or on conspiracy theories, but only on a solid corpus of solid work. His anecdote was a human story of a human mistake, and it reminds me that in order to study the humanities you have to be human: not a functional set of what Moretti calls "external" signs. Only humans, with room for failure and not paralyzed by fear, can maintain the kind of productive, active debate like the professors of the Zieman session did. I do not wish to belittle job panic, only to draw attention to the negative effects that it can have on the work we do, by skewing our attitudes about our work. We cannot address the situation with CV-padding and small fixes, but only by, as Feal put it, direct "advocacy and action" (if you're looking for a place to start, click here). But in the meantime, for me, the time for tips and tricks and tourism is over: it is time to get to work, and if I get my dream job in the process, all the better.

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