A purely hypothetical scenario (but of course!): Let’s say one delivers a paper at a conference one sunny July. The response is gratifying, particularly for a PhD candidate, particularly because one audience member solicits the paper for a forthcoming special issue of a Rather Nice Journal. The publication has been running behind for various reasons, but they're going to wrap it up soon and would like to consider adding your paper as a latecomer — pending approval, which is reasonable. The catch: can you revise and submit within a month?

“Why, yes!” you say, being hungry for pubs, and so you do. You get a pleasant note of acknowledgment and thanks back, promising a yay or nay shortly. October comes but the response doesn’t, and so you inquire of your advisors re the proper procedure for these things and eventually drop a brief, friendly email inquiring as to the status. No response. In January, you send another one, hoping you maintained a laid-back tone, but you also mention that this is your market year and so if they won’t be needing it, you’d like to submit it elsewhere. No response.

Let’s say that it’s now been 10 hypothetical months since your submission. The special issue is not out, so far as you can tell. In a special twist, you discover that the journal is generally running behind because of financial problems.

What would you do? Assume that your piece has been rejected without comment? Assume that the lack of rejection means that it's still in play? Would you politely withdraw and submit it elsewhere as soon as possible, or would you wait until a full calendar year has passed?

Posted at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Puttanesca, salad with purple carrots, and an array of vegan deserts. With plenty of red, red wine. And excellent friends.

The resulting Wine and Chocolate Flipbook, shot by all of us with G's camera and featuring a smiling, happy M, is here.

Posted at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Lately around here:

Him: Um, why did you leave the water running?
Her: What?
Him: The water you turned on five minutes ago.
Her: The water is running?

15 minutes after breakfast was served.
Her: Honey, did you know the stove is still on?
Him: Um. No.

Her: Good morning!
Him: Did you know you baked the new Le Creuset pan with all the labels still on it?
Her: I did not.
Him: Yes. Yes, you did. I was up until midnight scrubbing that off.

Le sigh.

Posted at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In other news, I managed to bump the word meter along by about 3,500 words. I’m not done with InaDWriMo yet, dammit.

Posted at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At the age of 25 I went from being the kid next door ... to being called a major American writer -- that's a role you just don't fit at 25. ... I used to feel I was secretary to someone named Norman Mailer, (and) to meet him you had to meet me first.

Obviously, he got over it. In spades. RIP, old lion.

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Lately, a couple of folks have asked me if they should go to grad school for an MA instead of an MS. Like just about everyone else, I'd say no. If there’s anything else you’d be happy doing, you should do it, particularly if it pays well and isn’t all-consuming. If you’re still thoroughly convinced an MA or PhD is what you want, then my answer changes to maybe — but only if you have some practical frame of reference because you racked up a a few years of industry experience. There’s a big difference between “I don’t know what else to do” or “I don’t know what else is out there and am scared to find out” and “Dude, this is really where I want to be because it makes me happier than any of the alternatives.”

If, after all that, this is something you really do want to consider, then do your research. (And if the idea of doing this research repulses or merely bores you, that’s a pretty solid clue that this isn’t your line of work.) Make sure there aren’t going to be surprises — especially about the job market. I know some very smart people who still, in this day and age, are surprised that their English PhDs haven’t resulted in a tenure-track Literature job. Nobody told them and they didn’t go looking for the answers before they started. I was lucky in this regard: the second I said out loud that I wanted a Lit PhD, someone sat me down and asked me if I ever wanted a job or an income. Look up the average student loan debt in your field and the average number of years until you might achieve a decent income. Read a bunch of academic blogs and get a solid understanding of the general work load of a grad student or professor. Find out what will be expected of your teaching and your research, and where you think you might fit in the university hierarchy. Consider whether or not you really care where you live. Begin to build some sort of vision of who you think you might want to be and who you might be able to be as an academic, and what the actual day-to-day reality of that life might look like. Consider the worst-case scenario as well as your romantic ideal, and figure out if you can live with both of them or something in-between.

I am happy being a grad student, but part of the reason for that is because I tried to minimize the surprises as much as possible. (Which doesn't mean there haven’t been some unavoidable ones anyway.) The books above were helpful for me. I started with Getting What You Came For, which I still recommend to the occasional student who tells me they really, no kidding, want a graduate degree. If you get through it and still want to sign up, then read the others to get an idea of what might be expected of your teaching and what you’ll go through when you’re looking for a job. Keep reading academic blogs as well, because there’s really no substitute for real-world commentary (although you’ll also find a ton of negativity there; nobody wants to write about the good stuff very often.)

Grad school can be a lovely thing, full of mind-blowing revelations and smart conversations and interesting students. It’s also late nights and low pay and each of those revelations comes with the attendant realization that what you thought before was probably wrong. It demands a certain sort of personality, occasionally insane drive, the willingness to delay gratification, and a modicum of luck. Best to educate yourself in order to minimize your reliance on the luck part of that equation.

Posted at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Lina (who I only just discovered and blogrolled) is suggesting the resurrection of InaDWriMo in November. I’m in. Anybody else?

Update: Official sign-up is here.

Posted at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You might have noticed that things seem quieter around here since the semester began. It’s because of the usual reasons, namely being that there are just some things that I don’t write about here, and my job is usually one of them. That’s especially true now that my department has transitioned from a Department of Rhetoric into a Department of Writing Studies that has incorporated faculty from several departments and taken on the first-year writing program, among other things. We’ve changed colleges (College of Food, Agricultural, Food, and Natural Resources to College of Liberal Arts) and campuses (St. Paul to Minneapolis). Transitional years are best not blogged by graduate students who would like to have a job, I think. But as you can imagine, it still takes up a fair amount of brain space, which means that it crowds out some of the other things I might be writing about instead.

The AFSCME union, which represents our clerical, health, and technical workers, has been on strike since the first week of school. It began as a rather friendly strike (as these things go), with waving and honking, and has mostly remained so. The tone is beiginning to change a bit this week, though. Eleven students (and a professor and staff member, according to some reports) began a hunger strike in support of the workers on Tuesday. This morning, picketers slowed traffic in front of the main parking garage on the St. Paul campus until traffic backed up for several blocks. The tone in front of the garage was fairly unpleasant, but not ugly. (Think Minnesota Nice unpleasant, not Typical Angry Union unpleasant.) When I came back out three hours later, things had cleared out, but it makes me wonder where all this is headed.

I’m finally getting the chance to teach with wikis this semester after two years of teaching presentations. In my Professional & Technical Writing course, the students have split into five groups for the collaborative Instructions assignment. Each group gets a wiki with which to built their text and ancillary documents. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

It turns out that these students don’t code, not even a little bit. When we were beginning to work with the wikis this morning, I asked if any of them writes HTML or CSS. Not a hand went up, even though they’re nearly all web natives and almost all of them are on FaceBook. It makes sense, once you think about it. They’re mostly 19 - 21 now. LiveJournal and Blogger launched in 1999 — a good eight years ago. MySpace and Facebook are both almost four years old. This group never had to know code; to them, the web is just something you write on. They are fully generation web 2.0.

'Tis the season for talks. I’m talking about using blogs to teach digital composing next week in a graduate seminar on Teaching Digital Writing. I’ll primarily be discussing the Internet Tools & Issues course I taught last spring, and that reminds me that I also need to talk about that here. The week after that is Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s), where Mary Jo Wiatrek-Uhlenkott, Jeff, and I will do a panel on constructions of public trust. Mary Jo is talking about the legal rhetoric surrounding public breast feeding; Jeff is examining the invisible role of women photographers in late 19c photography parlors, where a male name on the shingle connoted a more trustworthy public image; and I’m discussing trust and authority in Wikipedia. The week after that, I’m doing a live chat with an undergrad class on wikiality. And sometime later this semester I’m going to talk to another class about blogging and 'zines, if I accept another invitation that showed up this afternoon. And then I think no more talks for a little while.

Regardless, I still have time to cook. Fall brings the urge to stockpile, and we need a pound or so of garlic, some honeys, and some jams. I think I’ll make the first pumpkin pie tonight. I’ve been having roasted red pepper soup with sandwiches at lunch this week, and I’ll probably whomp up a pot of squash soup this weekend. Gawd, I love fall.

Posted at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I finished revising the article yesterday and sent it on its way. Even if they're not able to use it, I’m glad I went ahead and submitted it. It’s encouraging that someone wanted to know more about what I had to say, but the big thing is that it finally got me over the hump of sending something out. It doesn’t seem like some mystical thing that Other, More-Grown-Up Academics do anymore. Now I’m thinking perhaps I can whomp this other piece into shape and get it out the door before the semester starts.

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I finished the summer teaching on Wednesday night, and calculated and uploaded final grades yesterday. And then I took a day off, more or less. I had an appointment with The Physician in the morning, in which I was informed that I'm entirely healthy. (This is happily coupled with the fact that my spouse is feeling much better after some medication adjustments. Back story here.) Then Mister Husband and I went off through the cities, tracing our way through a road system that is entirely broken not only by the bridge collapse but also by construction season. Getting anywhere in this town is going to be rather interesting for awhile. But we were never lost, and scooted through a few new-to-us neighborhood that we're going to have to come back to. Used bookstores have been pillaged. Paper Source has been visited. Shrimp, scallops, crab legs, and beer have been consumed. I am (gasp) proceeding through the last of the Harry Potter, despite my rant last week. The fridge is full of fresh corn, tomatoes, eggplants, and champagne grapes.

I am ready to soak up the last five weeks of summer. That also means appreciating having a lot of empty hours for research. Article deadline in 10 days. Another article that I’ve been twiddling around with for almost two years now, and I really want to get out the door before September. Conference paper due in October. Several days of archival research to do, at least. (Probably more than that, since some of it involves some issues to do with attic Greek, which I am unlearned and painfully slow at.)

August is generally my least favorite month, but I keep reminding myself that this August is all time, and it's time I don't have to sell my soul for. I'm determined that it will be lovely.

Posted at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted at 3:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Since I started the Ph.D. three years ago, I’ve had this quote tacked to the bulletin board above the desk in my study. It’s from a 8/2/92 interview that Susan Sontag did with the New York Times:

SS: And compared to the standards I was setting myself, I didn’t think I was so smart. I thought that I cared more than other people. If they cared as much, they could do what I was doing. I didn’t think I was a genius. ...

The essays were a tremendous struggle. Each of the large ones took nine months to a year. I’ve had thousands of pages for a 30 page essay — 30 or 40 drafts of every page. “On Photography,” which is six essays, took five years. And I mean working every single day.

NYT: When you say working, are you looking things up, checking references?

SS: No, no, I don’t look anything up until after I’ve finished and I’m checking. No, it’s just writing. I’d get started, and then I’d run into a ditch, and then I would start again — and again.

Then, today, Debbie Hawhee posted a quote from Malcolm Cowley’s 2/28/52 letter to Kenneth Burke. It’s joined the Sontag on my bulletin board. Debbie’s nicely summarized the background over there, so look at it first before you read this:

Also there’s something I’ve told you before and am telling you again and this time you had better listen while the hand is laid gently on your shoulder and before the hand takes you by the collar. Set finite and measurable limits now to the “on Human Relations” and stick to those limits and finish the book. Otherwise you will have so projected yourself into the book that it becomes your life and can’t be finished for fear of ending your life. And furthermore it won’t be as good a book as if you held it at a little distance and worked on it as an object or organism outside of yourself, because large parts of it will be too subjective and obsessional. It’s not you after all, but only something that you’re making, and the you has other sides that also have a right to be made clear.

Posted at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It hasn’t been all big balls of twine and water lilies and orchestra performances* around here lately, although it would be easy to get that impression. I’ve been teaching two nights per week, rummaging around in the diss research in the mornings, and I was at SHARP last week to talk about my new research on Chambers. I’m glad to have gone, since it gave me chance to discuss one of the central arguments of my dissertation: that the Encyclopedic Author is a distinct construct from the more typically-discussed Poetic Author. Generally, when we talk about authorship studies we’re talking about the Author who writes novels or poems. We spend quite a bit of time thinking about sources of inspiration for these genres, whether they’re the Hellenic notion of external, spiritual sources, or the Romantic idea of inspiration from internal, personal genius. When we talk about what an author is and if they’re dead, we usually mean this sort of author.

My argument is that the Encyclopedic Author deserves consideration because of his function as a textual curator. What does it mean when your central mode of composition is to collect a bunch of other texts, determine their quality, splice the best information from them together with the latest data, and transform it into a new text? What does this say about authorial agency and authority? Where does it leave inspiration? Additionally, we have to deal with the question of whether or not human knowledge is beyond ownership and the idea of the encyclopedist as someone who both draws from and contributes to an intellectual commons.

I was more nervous than usual beforehand, since my audience was primarily 18c lit specialists and I’m not one of those. It was a little odd to be back among the conventions of Lit culture — everyone was dressed more formally than folks would be at a Rhetoric conference, and everyone was introduced as Dr. or Prof. rather than by their first names. They were a good time, though: pleasant and supportive, particularly during the Q&A session. I got a tentative offer of publication for the piece, which has me rather excited. And it means that I can’t slack off on writing for the rest of the summer, which is helpful because I’m a girl who needs an impetus. Finishing is a good one, of course, but an article seems so much more immediate.

*I never got around to writing about that last one, but the short version is this: if you ever get a chance to see Tan Dun’s Elegy: Snow in June performed live, don’t turn it down. It’s one incredibly eerie cello surrounded by four percussionists, each playing at least six instruments. I counted two xylophones, a full set of chimes, gongs, bells, a full timpani array, bongos, snares, and athletic whistles. And paper to be torn, and other things I’m forgetting. It sounds all messy and pomo, but it’s actually very measured and beautiful.

Posted at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I picked up this poster at the Arbus exhibit at the Walker last July, and promised myself that I'd get it framed after I passed my exams. An albino, female sword-swallower seemed like an appropriate image for that sort of a milestone. Since my other, informal doctorate is in procrastination, it took me six months after exams to haul it to the framers and then another month to get it back. I think it’s going to reside in my campus office for the time being, unless it freaks out the students too badly.

On a related note: right after I passed, Clancy said she'd be curious to see how I felt about the exams process a year after the fact. It hasn’t been that long, of course, but right now, I remember the whole thing as fun. I find that extremely odd. Last summer and fall I actively hated the preparation process, but now I remember the luxury of it being my job to read. And I remember twice-weekly study group meetings, which were always reassuring. I loved the intensity of writtens, and my orals were a total smack-down hoot. Despite all that,there’s no way around the fact that exams, from start to finish, were long and tedious and grueling and immensely stressful. If I was married to a less understanding, less all-around-awesome man, I probably wouldn’t still be married. I suspect that I’m still seeing some health repercussions from them. Still, I’ve somehow come to remember them very fondly.

Posted at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Xtin wrote a few weeks ago about metaphors for grad school, most particularly the Penguin of Death. For me, it’s been Scrat and the Acorn of Graduate School:

The acorn, obviously, symbolizes Finishing. I became so invested in this metaphor that I asked my parents for an acorn necklace for my birthday last year, and they obliged:

Posted at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

One of the things about being a grad student for years on end is that you learn how to have a lot of fun for not very much money. This seems like a useful thing to know. Out of the 20 days we spent on the road, we actually paid for two nights of hotels. The rest was generous use of family guest rooms, travel reimbursements, frequent-stay points, and credit card thank-you points.

Learning to be cheap is the price you pay for the general freedom afforded you in grad school. I’ve worked an industry job and I’ve worked this job, and it’s not new news to any of you that I vastly prefer this one. You work a lot, but you mostly pick those hours. If I’ve going to work 60 hours per week, it helps if 50 of them are my hours. Those are my school-year hours; I work less in the summers. And I didn’t work at all for the three weeks I was on the road. (Hell, I barely even read — took a stack of Ray Bradbury along, and didn’t even make it all the way through the first one off the top, Dandelion Wine. According to my anal-retentive listkeeping, I’ve read 33 books so far this year, but none of that happened on the road.) When I came back, there was still a paycheck coming in. Compatriot G. and I were talking about our luck yesterday at lunch. We haven’t gone to work in a month, and a paycheck appears! And we’re both teaching one class this summer. We’ve both spent summers filing and toiling in kitchens and painting houses and working smelt decks, and now we get to do this? And they pay us what we think is relatively good money? Two nights of my week are spoken for this summer, and on those nights I work inside, in air conditioning, never getting my hands dirty. Barring unforeseen melees, when I finish the night my clothes will look pretty much the same as they did when I started. The work is work I love to do. And the rest of my time is mine, for working on my own work and for finding my own play.

One of the best things about living in a tundra town is that the people bust loose in the summers. Minnesotans are out during the months of the year that they can be, and all summer there will be festivals and concerts and exhibitions. If they’re not free outright, there’ll be a cheap night somewhere in the run. A few days ago, I saw The Brass Kings at the Mill City Live series. (Steel guitar, washtub, and washboard. I’d never seen a washtub played before except on TV.) Then we wandered through the Daniel Corrigan exhibit (technically proficient but uninspired) and the Mill City Museum (free because of our Historical Society membership, but completely worth the usual cost of admission.)

Yesterday we ended up at the tiny-yet-amazing Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis, viewing their current Mapplethorpe exhibit. (Mister Husband wrote about it.) Seeing that grouping of photographs arranged so simply in the small storefront space provided a completely different, somehow purer, experience of Mapplethorpe than I’ve previously had in larger exhibit spaces. That gallery is one of the small gems of the Twin Cities.

The magic thing is that we have the time to get out for such things. When I had a job, this never happened. When I was taking the LSAT prep course a couple of summers ago, other students were appalled that I would accept a professor’s salary instead of a lawyer’s. But the thing is, I would never want to do a lawyer’s job or live a lawyer’s work life. The Awesome Russian Lawyer’s wife and daughter are headed to Moscow and points beyond this summer, but he is staying right here and working. It makes him a little sad. It makes me a little sad for him. And when I wonder why the hell I’m not in law school, it reminds me that trading a larger salary for more time seems like an even swap to me.

Posted at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I started writing conference proposals for various aspects of my diss research last November. So at this point I have some presentations lined up, one of which is SHARP in July. On the one hand: good for me, giving myself some external deadlines that I must meet or face certain public embarrassment! How well I know myself and my many, tragic flaws! On the other hand, my lazy side completely hates me for doing this to myself.

In about 35 days, I need to be able to coherently detail Ephraim Chambers’ conceptualization of encyclopedic authorship. This is totally doable, provided I don't screw around at all. And there’s the rub, because summers and their general lack of structure are never easy for me. This summer I’m teaching, which is good. But the teaching is for a long stretch two evenings a week, which throws off my usual up-at-5:30 schedule that I employ when I need to seriously get things done. So my current plan (which sort of but not totally mimics Debbie Hawhee’s) is to get to my desk by a decent hour in the morning, work on diss-related matters until 1 or so, then move to whatever other work needs to be done for the day, and then play on the evenings I’m not teaching. This will be interrupted by at least a few road trips, since there’s still some Minnesota left to see and Mr. Husband has research in Madison, but it should still generate a reasonable pile of Done.

Posted at 10:07 AM | Permalink

A gift from Mister Husband for defending my proposal, and meant to be a companion to the other dissertation mascot. It came from the Newport Aquarium, which we visited last week.

Posted at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The prospectus, it is defended. And final grades for one course are submitted.

Tomorrow: more grading. Then more writing.

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I wrote most of my master's thesis to Annie Lennox's Medusa and Tori Amos' Strange Little Girls. So I think it is not a coincidence that Patti Smith’s new all-cover CD, Twelve, arrived in my mailbox today, when I've been writing the second conference proposal that features dissertation material.

I also suspect the diss-writing will feature copious replays of everything Lucinda Williams ever recorded. Lucky, lucky Mr. Husband, whose study is directly adjacent to mine through an open door.

Posted at 9:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April Fool’s Day seems like a good day to seriously commence a dissertation, doesn’t it? It worked really well the last time I bought a car. Seriously.

(For those who wonder: no, I haven’t defended the proposal yet. But I’ve been told not to wait around in the meantime.)

Posted at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Since early January, I’ve been working on getting the dissertation going. This is the first time I’ve launched a project of this scope, and the way the process has impacted my life has been curious. I expected that I would need to talk my way through it, that I would need a lot of tangible support, and so I set things up accordingly. In late January, I gave a talk on my topic to a graduate seminar, and the discussion that came out of that was very helpful. I met with one member of my exams group several times, and that was energizing. I kept going to weekly dinners with C., and meeting E. and B. for lunch occasionally.

The thing was, I was writing until I started talking. I hardly wrote at all when I was most social. Then I noticed myself unconsciously withdrawing from a lot of contact and using various excuses to do so. C and I haven’t been able to get out schedules to sync, E took a new job 30 miles away, and B has been dealing with family tasks. I checked out of writing group for the time being. I’ve been scarcer around the department, which The Powers That Be are fine with. (As far as they’re concerned, a very visible dissertator is probably not doing much dissertating.) Once I had withdrawn from those things, I started writing again, and I wrote more and more. As I’ve finally finished the first full draft of the prospectus (28 pages, longer than it should be), I haven’t even been inclined to blog or flickr. Haven’t answered most non-business email, and have been sadly lax about calling my parents. I hang out with Mister Husband, but even then the introvert switch flips a little quicker than it normally would.

It's turned out that I needed to sit in a room by myself and wait for things to form. It's an active sort of waiting, but still waiting. I think it’s being in a position to notice the things that normally happen on the back burner of my brain and bring them more to the front. It’s writing things down before they can get away. Some people in my life have understood, but more have been offended by my lack of availability. I’m not sure exactly how to deal with this. I miss people and don’t want to upset them, but I’m also very interested in this other Thing, which really has to get done.

I wonder if this is what starting big projects will become for me. I wonder if this is how it works for other people. I wonder if after this thing gets underway I can start going out into the world again, or if hermitizing is a part of the whole process.

Only one way to find out, I guess.

Posted at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Hand-coding a tiny bit of the text for the diss prospectus sample analysis.

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Greg Schneider (known elsewhere on this blog as Compatriot G) and I recently did a department workshop on the comprehensive exams process, along with John Logie and Mary Wrobel. The DGS asked to include our handout in future editions of the grad student handbook, so I thought I’d also post it here in case it might be useful to others. It’s licensed as noncommercial/attribution/share-alike, so borrow and modify it for your own graduate program’s needs if you like.

There’s three pages of practical tips, the things that you learn as you go along but really wish you had known going in. One of the most useful things in it is the resources section, which includes links to AKMA’s recent take on exams as well as Becky Howard, Tim Burke, and Matt Cornell’s posts on reading effectively. Go take a look. And if there are other things that should have been on there, please feel free to leave them in the comments for future stressed-out examinees.

Posted at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

via the nonist

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This stuffed sting ray was a gift from Mister Husband when I passed my orals. It’s been living on my desk ever since, partly because I wasn’t sure where else to put it, and partly because obviously it should be where it and the hillstream loaches (also known as sting ray loaches) can see each other.

I’ve been hammering away at the diss proposal while it lounges around and watches, and it’s become sort of obvious that it’s the dissertation mascot. I would have thought something more sinister would take up that position, but I can work with a sting ray.

(This is totally Billie’s fault, of course.)

Update: “Sting rays wound anyone who tried to catch them and inject a powerful poison. They love music, the dance and witty remarks.” — Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia, 1642.

Posted at 1:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

1. Like Billie, gotta work on the diss every day. Every morning, actually, since I teach MWF.

2. Prep on Sundays, so as to leave the mornings free for writing.

3. Confine teaching to teaching days. Because when I’m teaching online, it’s too easy to pop in to check on things at odd moments and thus be teaching all the time.

Posted at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Back in August, a bunch of us made new school year resolutions. I happened upon mine while digging through the archives this morning, and I’m running about 60/40.

1. Write incrementally.
Heh. Maybe a semester devoted to the big blurt wasn’t the best time to set this goal. I did manage to work fairly incrementally on my NCA paper and I wrote here far more regularly than I anticipated. But did I make regular, daily progress on any articles? No. Gonna keep working on this.

2. Sit the damned exams.
Done.

3. Move about for a bit every day.
This went badly, thank you very much. One of my goals for the diss process is to figure out how to balance intellectual work and attention to the physical. Because I suck at that.

4. Screen phone calls consistently during working hours.
I’ve become excellent about this. It drives my father nuts. But I reduced my worktime interruptions considerably, and my thought process has noticeably benefitted.

5. Maintain non-teaching days as sacrosanct working days.
I also award myself quite a few points in this area. I thought it would go downhill quickly, but it was surprisingly easy to refuse invitations and lock myself in my study on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There were only one or two Work Days when I ended up out and about for unavoidable appointments.

I sorta scoffed at this resolutions business in August, but it’s worked out pretty well. I’d do it again.

Posted at 11:29 AM | Permalink

I was sitting in the afternoon light yesterday, stirring a bowl of frosting, when it suddenly sunk in that I never have to take another test again! There’s gauntlets aplenty in the academic life, but no more in this particular format. Unless I eventually lose my mind and take the LSAT again, but that’s a long-way-off-and-maybe-never.

But I get ahead of myself. Everybody told me I should celebrate on Friday, and I certainly didn’t disagree. But I had no idea what I wanted to do, either. I didn’t want to go Out or to any parties, because the oral exams had flipped my introvert switch. I didn’t feel like drinking, because I’ve been resorting to one-beer-in-the-evenings for the past five weeks in order to sleep, with the consequence that I suddenly associated beer with exams. And I didn’t feel like drinking anything harder. So Mister Husband was put in charge of the occasion, and we went on a date.

“A Date” ended up meaning Cecil’s Deli for their famous reubens and a trip to the Mall of America Aquarium. (Because of course there are sharks in the basement of MOA. Where else would they be?) We hadn’t been before because I was afraid it would be really cheezy, but it was actually a pretty good aquarium for it’s size (which is larger than you’d think). Better than the Great Lakes Aquarium in Duluth, and almost completely empty because of the time of day we went. So we lingered in the tunnels, watching sharks and sting rays and loggerheads swimming above us. I got to pet juvenile sting rays, who seemed to like it, and watch the pups in the nursery.

Then we went to Williams Sonoma for cookie cutters. (Turns out their holiday pancake molds also work really well for cookies.) When we got home, there was a congratulatory monster sequoia disco inferno poinsettia from my parents waiting outside the door.

And then C and I spent most of yesterday baking:

Posted at 8:53 AM | Permalink

I’m ABD!

I’d like to thank my rockin’ reading group, my patient committee, my supportive family and friends, and most of all Mister Husband, who put up with all of my angsty, angsty angst for the past few months. I’ll get to return the favor to him in the spring.

Now, off to a very late lunch.

Posted at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

1. Steal from Geoff Sirc's Funeral Ceremony of the Anti-Proces II: A happening for CCCC and prepare six answers for the first six questions asked, regardless of what they are:

1. That is a very good question. I should not want to spoil it with an answer.
2. My head wants to ache.
3. Had you heard Marya Freund last April in Palermo singing Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, I doubt whether you would ask that question.
4. According to the Farmers’s Almanac, this is False Spring.
5. Please repeat the question...
   And again...
   And again...
6. I have no more answers.

Posted at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Are you people tired of hearing about exams yet? So am I, at least a little. But I want to finish writing about some things I did to prepare so that it’ll be there for future examinees and googlers. It was helpful for me to rummage around in Clancy’s archives and read what she was thinking when she took hers, and so I’d like to pass it on. If this bores you, feel free to skip these entries — my feelings won’t be hurt.

So anyway, writing sprints. The weekend before I took my first two hour in-house exams, it occurred to me to write a one hour answer to each question, just to see what would come out. I had been working on outlines, but actually writing the answer struck me as a better process for my peculiar mind. It turned out that I was right. It let me see how far I could get without notes while still having the luxury of cracking into various resources when I got stuck. It let me reason my way through argumentative structures and find out really quickly what wouldn't work for me. It blew a lot of false securities out of the water, but it also showed me that I could in fact write a substantive answer really quickly. The writing was raw, but all the meat was pretty much there.

I mentioned all this to Derek, and was delighted to find out today that he ran with it and it seems to have worked well for him. (His prep seems much more fine-tuned than mine was, so I expect him to completely rock anyway.) He also commented on the rawness of the writing, because what else can you really expect when you’re going full-tilt for an hour straight? And it occurred to me that another benefit of doing sprints is that your brain holds onto those clumsy sentences you generate. It percolates them and whirls them, and when you sit down to write the real deal, what comes out is almost a 2.0 draft. At least 1.7 or 1.8, anyway. Much better than zero-level.

Another trick that worked well for a colleague of mine was fake-teaching. He would lock himself in his study for a few hours and pretend to teach the central texts on his list as well as the answers to his questions. He's much more verbal than I am, and it worked out really well for him. He passed the writtens well, and his orals are already a little bit legendary in the department.

The point is this: there will come a time in your prep when pouring over notes and outlines again is just spinning your wheels. You may find it very helpful to find ways to actually do something that gives you some clues about your possible performance and also produces some concrete results that you can work with. Sprints and fake-teaching aren’t the only things you can do, but they’re things that I’ve seen work.

Posted at 7:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I submitted the last of the exams this morning. Final stats: 21,419 words on 96 double-spaced pages. 5 of those pages were screencaps and there were probably about 10 pages of bibliographies, so I’d say roughly 80 pages of argument written over the course of 78 hours*. That seems about right for the wordcount. This was totally unexpected, as I’ve considered myself a slow writer for most of my grad school career. I was just hoping to hit the rumored minimums for each set, which were supposedly 2-3 pages for an in-house and 10ish for a take-home. Billie was right when she told me I’d be surprised by what would come out when I actually sat down to do these.

All told, I did learn a lot from the process. The questions pushed me, and I have more and different thoughts about the subjects now than when I started. I think I have bad drafts of three papers. I know more about where some of my weak spots are, and have got some reading mapped out for the three weeks between now and my orals. Some moments of the writing and thinking were fun, but as a whole this was generally not much fun at all.

Bottom line: I'm glad I did it and I'm especially glad this part is over with. Now I just need to pass. And then pass the orals.

*Fewer production hours, actually, since I don’t think I ever wrote for more than 12 hours straight. But I also sleep-wrote, so there were more than 12 hours of thinking time for each take-home.

Update, 11/28: Just got notification that I passed the writtens!

Posted at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Or, exam week comedy of errors:

Sunday, in preparation: Make pot of red beans and rice. Keep adding anaheim pepper, red pepper, black pepper, and white pepper, plus hot sausage, because the damn thing just won’t spice up. Whilst eating after it’s cooked down for four hours, wonder if there’'s any pepper vinegar in the house. Look over and notice that Mister Husband, no stranger to spiciness himself, cannot finish his serving because his lips are on fire. Conclude that he somehow got all the spicy.

Later, upon discovery that I have given myself the worst heartburn of my life (that lasts even into the next day), conclude that my taste buds have somehow gone awry. All week, my better half will have to wrest the pepper flakes from me lest I do further harm to myself.

As an added bonus, get pepper in eye. Flush with saline. Repeat.

Monday, 2-hour exam #1: Get up, stumble into bathroom, peer into contact case in preparation for putting them in. Discover that while I wasn’t looking, the toothpaste tube leaked into contact case and now the contacts are wrinkly like Ruffles Potato Chips and the whole thing smells mentholated. Throw away contacts, put in new pair, rinse rinse rinse case.

Show up on time and write four single-spaced pages.

Tuesday, 24-hour exam #1: Get up, stumble into bathroom, peer into contact case in preparation for putting them in. After doing so, discover that contacts are painfully minty fresh. Throw away contacts and case, flush flush flush with saline, put in another fresh pair. Take time out of busy schedule to go get another case.

Write 14-double spaced pages on the hellenic author and the rhetorical space in which we might find such a creature.

Wednesday, day of relative rest: Get up, successfully install contacts without mentholating own eyeballs. Hold office hours, teach class, lalala.

Go home and discover a notice from landlord that they will be coming to rip the radiator pipes apart tomorrow. Please to move everything away from the wall. Half of the living room (many archives, many books, very large speakers) is located on that wall. Call up landlord, freak out over lack of notice. Am told that really, they only need a very small section of the wall, and they’ll be very quick and quiet. No, the contractor cannot come another day and could not even give the management 24 hours notice. Thankyouhaveaniceday.

Manly cussing. By me. Mister Husband nicely relocates all the stuff. He’s been wonderfully dedicated to being The Calm Half this week.

Thursday, 24-hour exam #2: Write write write. All the while, bangety bangety bang. Buzzer rings, it's the advance crew come to rip the grates away from the wall. Buzzer rings, it’s a tiny Italian plumber. We bond over mutual deafness, and I retreat to my study. Bangety bang-bang from the living room. One of the staff is out in the hall hollering that one person can only take so much, and that they shall quit right now this very instant. Buzzer rings, it’s the UPS guy. Eventually no buzzer, but I look up from page 22 to see that an elfen maintenance staff member is standing in my study, telling me that they’re there to put everything back together again. I jump a foot, scaring her to death. Apparently my concentration and deafness were such that I didn’t notice that there were four people with monkey wrenches in my living room.

Still, write write write. 32 pages, 11 screencaps, 6418 words. I had no idea I could do that. I’m asleep by 9:30.

Friday, 2-hour exam #2: Up at 5. Proofread exam response, and email it to the coordinator. Of course it won’t go, it’s 2 megs. Zip and re-send. Rejected by system. Stuff and re-send. Rejected by system. Pack self up and go to school an hour early so as to meet submission deadline.

Load onto coordinator’s flash drive. Directly after, three variously compressed copies arrive in her inbox. Retreat to office for last minute cramming for Massive Memorization Question.

Begin writing precisely at 8:30. Write write write, with flash drive set to automatically save every 5 minutes. Manually save at other intervals out of pure paranoia. At 9:50, 5 1/2 single-spaced pages in, the power goes off. Screech, much louder than I ever meant to in an office. Power comes back on. Computer boots up. Yay! I don’t know the password! Boo! Go in search of coordinator, and learn she has gone to a meeting. Locate Department Goddess/Future Librarian. We go to hack into computer. 10 zillion password tries later, the machine gets suspicious and locks itself.

But the flashdrive was saving all that time! Let's power down, remove it, and see what’s there. Hmmmm. Only the first paragraph. I completely melt down, and Compatriot G manages to ooze sympathy and mostly hide his laughter as he bears the brunt of my ranting. He’s good that way.

Glancing at wall clock, I see that it’s time to go teach. So I gather up all my stuff, including a gigantic silly fruit bowl full of impromptu speech topics (The Fruitbowl of Doom), and go barreling into my classroom. Which is full of students who are not mine and an instructor who definitely is not me. I am an hour early; the Writing Center wall clock was never reset after the time change. At this point, I’m not even embarrassed. I crack up, and go back to my office.

Once there, I go across the hall to where Librarian Goddess is still working on the machine. It boots up! Word launches AutoRestore! And there is my entire essay, intact. And I have just enough time to finish it before it’s really time to teach. So I do. And it was fine.

I’m gonna sleep a lot this weekend.

Posted at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Am I writing about wikiality right now in a 24-hour exam question?

Why, yes. Yes, I am.

Posted at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As of tomorrow morning there’s no more prepping, only doing. I doubt I’ll be here much for the next ten days, but I’ll pop in occasionally to moderate comments and zap spam. I’ll probably still post over at Waterlogged, because the cory fry are growing up so quickly.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this Tenniel illustration and a link to the very first entry on this blog, back when it was named Areté and I was a wee Master’s student:

“I only took the regular educational course,” said the Mock Turtle with a sigh.

“What was that?” inquired Alice.

“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”

“I never heard of ‘Uglification,’” Alice ventured to say. “What is it?”

The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. “What! Never heard of uglifying!” it exclaimed. “You know what to beautify is, I suppose?”

“Yes,” said Alice doubtfully: “it means - to - make - anything - prettier.”

“Well, then,” the Gryphon went on, “if you don't know what to uglify is, you must be a simpleton.”

There’s more if you click through.

Posted at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Rice commented about the concept of exams-as-heuristic. I can’t believe I didn’t mention this before, but lo, I haven’t. Maybe I just wanted to wait and come out the other side and see if I really did learn anything. And maybe I’m just superstitious, and don’t want to jinx myself by talking about the actual questions of the exams yet.

Here at Minnesota, I’ve been heavily encouraged to use the exam process to further my research. The hope is that every answer will be either a draft of a dissertation section or a draft of an article. With the exception of a couple of questions concerning Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, all of mine skew toward specific things I’m working on. There’s a couple that I really hope I get asked, because they’ll help me start to write about the grant I worked on in the Med School over the summer. The rest skew toward my interest in hellenistic and distributed authorship.

The process of preparing has also been helpful for me. As close readers may recall, I originally found the entire concept of qualifying exams to be very rude. I was bitching about it to L. at lunch one July day, and he flared up right back at me. I should value the process, he said, because it’s the one chance you get in your career to sit relatively still and situate the field and texts in your mind. All this reading was for me. And in the end, it has been. No matter how I come out the other side of this in a month, I have a much better understanding of the larger conversations in the field and of the development of my subfields. I understand what they have to do with my specific interests. I had to pick up a couple of theorists that I didn’t cover in coursework, and I learned that I can read difficult, unfamiliar things primarily on my own* and generally figure them out. I know what other resources to look for and what questions to ask. And I finally figured out how to read in a somewhat intelligent manner — how to skim, how to seriously read a TOC and index. How to drain a book quickly.

So yeah, I buy the whole exam-as-heuristic notion. I hope that’s even more true in a few weeks.

*Glory be to Reading Group, though. That’s another post I need to write.

Posted at 7:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The part of all this that I’ve been dreading the most is the orals, which are scheduled for mid-December. There’s no clear consensus about them when I talk to our ABD folks and recent grads — descriptions range from ‘the most traumatic experience of my life’ to ‘pretty laid back’. So I suppose it depends on the person and the committee, like always, but I can’t help but expect the Spanish Inquisition.

I’m a pessimist by nature, though. (Johndan has a great line about pessimists never being unpleasantly surprised.) Working with a team full of habitual optimists over the summer has made me slightly rethink this position. (Slightly!) And two bloggers recently said things that made me reconsider my dread of oral exams. Derek views them as a chance to apply duct tape to spaces in his writtens. And Billie commented that orals would have given her a chance to clarify some spots in her exams, which were entirely written.

Orals as Shoring Up sounds much better than Orals as Torture. I’ll try to hold on to that.

Posted at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I’ve gotten curious about the exam processes in different departments. It seems like every Rhetoric/Writing/English department handles it differently, even though we all have the same general ideas about the outcome. (Don’t we? I think we do.)

Here, you test in three areas: Rhetorical Theory, Technical Communication Theory, and your subfield. (Mine is Intellectual Property Theory & Law.) I’m responsible for right around 100 works altogether, but my Rhetorical Theory list is longer than some others. You negotiate readings with each examiner, and some of them may also negotiate a question list ahead of time. (Not all of mine have.)

It’s reasonably rare to see someone in the department take more than six months after their coursework to prepare. Most of us who finished in May have either already examined or will before Thanksgiving. Examining quickly is heavily encouraged — not being done by Christmas would be cause for A Meeting With One’s Advisor in most cases. The general sense, I think, is that you should be familiar with the key texts in each area by the end of your coursework, and for the most part that’s true. It’s not uncommon to see someone examine with about ten weeks of prep. Most of us going up now started reading heavily the first week of September.

There are typically (but not always, depending on who you work with) two sets of writtens for each area: a two hour in-house, and a 24 hour take-home. Those of us in my reading group are doing them over about ten days. I’m not sure what’s typical. Then you wait three weeks, per Grad School rules (two for professorial reading, one for the Grad School to process the paperwork.) Then there’s a two hour oral examination with all four of your committee members (three internal, one outside).

And then, assuming you passed, later on there’s the oral defense of your dissertation prospectus.

So that’s what happens here. I know at Syracuse there’s an examination proposal, and at other places exams are entirely written. Fascinating. How does your department do it?

Posted at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Three 24-hour exams means a lot of writing music. (Plus, I somehow managed to set things up so I’m revising a conference paper right now.) Some summer infrastructure revisions resulted in my work music being spread over three iTunes directories on two Macs and a PC, and I’m working on getting it all in one place again.

But anyway, the bleg. Can anyone recommend music, pretty-please? I generally write best to music without words, although there are a few bands that work well for me (Mummydogs, early Concrete Blonde plus Mojave, Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, and Boss Hog’s Whiteout, which probably reveals something about me right there. Not sure exactly what, though.) Here’s what I’ve got so far, which is a combination of my own collection, some stuff I want to download, and some things folks recommended to Madeline when she was preparing:

Dick Dale (various)
Tom Verlaine - Warm and Cool
Frank Zappa - Guitar and Francesco Zappa
Vince Guaraldi (various)
Rachel Portman - the Human Stain soundtrack
Philip Glass
The Crouching Tiger soundtrack, minus the last two tracks
The English Patient soundtrack
Sonny Rollins - Skylark and Someone to Watch Over Me
Coltrane (various)
Thelonious Monk (various)
Ravi Shankar - Bangla Dhun
Bo Diddly - Aztec
The Brandenburg Concertos
Tchaikovsky Concertos conducted by Arthur Rubenstein
Bach Cello Suites by The Casals
Dead Can Dance (various)
Mozart - Symphony 39 and 41

What else do I need?

Posted at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Two thoughts are keeping my head above water these days. (“These days” being twelve days before I start sitting my writtens.)

Well over a year ago, I asked someone to explain the goals of the exam process to me. He explained it like this: Becoming a candidate means you are almost a colleague. Being a colleague means that the department can count on you not to embarrass yourself or it. If you go to a conference and are forced to write your paper in the 24 hour period before you deliver it, can you do it and still manage to be competent and make a convincing argument? When people ask you difficult questions about it during the Q&A period, can you answer them coherently and maintain a professional demeanor? In short: Is your knowledge sufficient?

That answer made the whole thing seem much more tangible and reasonable to me. I keep coming back to it now.

The other thing occurred to me recently, and I was telling Compatriot G about it yesterday while we were sitting in the gardens, enjoying the last warm day of the year and commiserating. (The three of us in the reading group are all going up before Thanksgiving.) Four and a half years ago, I left a very good job to come to graduate school. I’ve done nothing but think about this stuff since then, so one would hope I know something about my discipline and subfields by now. I have the good fortune to actually like my committee. They’re four of the smartest, funniest people I know. And now I get their undivided attention for awhile. I get to block out time to write about the things I like to think about, and then I get to sit in a room with all of them for two hours and talk about what I came up with. I’m at the point where I’m starting to get a handle on my approach to things, and I want constructive criticism. I want to know where I’m wrong and where I’m right. I’m about to find out.

Posted at 4:21 PM | Permalink

1. My Narrow Mind (16 Horsepower)
2. The Final Rhino (Adrian Belew)
3. The Blues Are Brewin’ (Billie Holiday)
4. This Is Not a Test (Bikini Kill)
5. I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass (Yo La Tango)

In other words: Barring filibuster of some sort, I will begin sitting my comps in 32 days.

I have nothing more to say about the matter at this time.

Posted at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

After all this, I’m still learning to read in something resembling an efficient manner. Years and years ago, a beloved Lit professor told me that he read every single word of a book, including the publication info and title pages. As an impressionable young undergrad, I figured he must know what he was doing. (In retrospect, it was probably just an OCD quirk.) I never took the read it all mandate quite that far, but I have been in the habit of reading almost every bit of a book for way too long. And in this racket, it’s not even really possible. I’ve gotten better during the past couple of years just out of pure desperation, and have made some real progress toward efficiency since I started doing my exam review work.

I did read Adler quite awhile back, but was put off because a) you sort of need to read the whole thing, irony of ironies and b) because of everything I had learned about Adler’s philosophy during my Lit degree. Here are two things I wish I had read about five years ago (had they existed then). The next time a panicked first-year grad student shows up in my office looking for advice, I'm a-sending them here:
Rebecca Howard’s step-by-step method
How to Read in College, by Tim Burke

Posted at 1:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I took the camera along on one of my last days at the summer job. The resulting set is mostly mundanities I wanted to remember, but perhaps it’s of interest if you’re curious (or nostalgic) about our East Bank campus. It focuses on the more Medical School-related parts rather than the Humanities sections — and those need another set, because there are all kinds of unexpected nooks and crannies over that way.

Posted at 11:13 AM | Permalink

(As seen at Workbook, and then quite a few other places, only I’m shortening it because longer resolution lists just don’t work for me. Too easy to thwart.)

1. Write incrementally.
2. Sit the damned exams.
3. Move about for a bit every day.
4. Screen phone calls consistently during working hours. I’m terrible at this.
5. Maintain non-teaching days as sacrosanct working days.

Posted at 9:25 AM | Permalink

As I’ve mentioned before, I teach a 3000-level course on Scientific and Technical Presentations. I’m making some changes this time around as I whack the syllabus into shape, and I’ll write more about that shortly. But at this particular juncture, I seek the infinite wisdom of my readers.

I’ve gotten good reviews both times I’ve taught this course, but one thing that consistently gets mentioned is a desire for more in-class speaking exercises. Right now, they interview and present each other on the first day of class and we do some impromptus later in the semester. They present formally and informally five times. But we don’t do any small, ungraded things that are just plain exercises.

This is a 55-minute, MWF class, so exercises can’t take a ton of time. From just reading the roster and not having met anyone yet, it looks like this particular class may be about 50% ESL. If it turns out that they are, I’ll need to be more careful than usual about culturally-dependent content. This rules out quite a few of the exercises I’ve heard about.

And so I turn to you, smart readers. What in-class speaking exercises have you folks used in class? Are there any books on the subject you might recommend?

Posted at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)