Replacement Shopping

You know, I may have forgotten how to blog. Let's see if I can just type random things in here and see if I get my skills back.

I need new black boots. You'd think this makes me happy but it doesn't. I mean, new black boots? WTF!!! I have those! Why can't I spend my money on something entirely new and different that I don't already have? Like, um, purple boots! Or teal! Or neon orange wellies!

And when I was thinking this as I was assessing the damage to my boots (they've leaked water for a while, now there are some tears right along the tabs where I pull them on), I realized why I both like and hate shopping, and why it is so hard for me to get rid of stuff.

I have a terrible time dumping ruined or old clothing and then replacing it. It seems that this does nothing to satisfy my shopping urges, for "replacement" is almost like not buying anything, there's no newness, no fresh idea, no feeling of infinite possibility. This is why I have several coffee-stained khakis and haven't bothered to get new ones. I have khakis and I don't want to buy any more. Even though they are not really acceptable for teaching any more because I am a slob who spills things. Cleaning these "basics" out of my closet doesn't give me any feeling of accomplishment either, since I'm not really making any room if I'm just going to buy new ones. And nobody walks in and compliments you on nice clean khakis without stains the way they do when you walk in with some sort of new and different pant or skirt combo.

This explains why I have so many different colors of shoes in my closet right now, as I've been tempted, off and on lately, to buy shoes and I always get something totally unlike everything else in my closet. And this works for shoes since my clothes are pretty boring, so when my other "basic black" shoes got too beat up I got rid of them and didn't replace them. Unless you count the embroidered or the rainbow or the snakeprint shoes. But this tactic does not work for dress pants and it doesn't work for rainboots.

Of course, we've probably had our two rainstorms for the year already and I could hold off until next year. That's what I did last year, after all. Which led to me forgetting all about it, wearing the boots like normal all fall, and then being unpleasantly reminded of their new non-waterproof status during the big deluge. But the little tears are bad enough that I can't be seen in public with them any more --- it looks like they are flaking apart up by the cuff. Meh.

I need new fuzzy house slippers as well, as long as I'm complaining about things I don't want to bother replacing. See how long it takes me to get to those purchases.

And while we're on the subject of boots, I've been smitten by that knee-high-boot-over-skinny- jeans look. Mainly because it showcases the whole boot, unlike boots under pants. And I love the really warm brown leathers and simple gold hardware that are on a bunch of boots these days. But besides the fact that I just bought some new jeans (took a long time to get around to replacing the old ones of those, too) and they are rather flared instead of skinny, I worry that being short and, uh, plump, would not go well with the boot-jean look. I mean, I look really stumpy and wrong in those tiered broomstick skirts everyone was wearing a while back, and the same with maxi dresses. I am a squat little square not a rectangle, and the horizontal line of the boot tops would probably cut me up like skirt lines do. And I'm not really skinny legged to fit that skinny jean look either. This wouldn't resolve the black boot dilemma, anyway.

I wonder if all this resistance would go away if I had a job with a real paycheck. Maybe. I'm certainly interested in getting a new couch or new desk. Oh, that reminds me ---- there's a chair out by my recycling that I was tempted to exchange for my crappy desk chair. Both are crappy cheap office chairs from officemax, but mine has arms. Arms that are crumbling apart and have big chunks missing from either cat damage or slobby-me damage, depending on which square inch you are looking at. But even though those arms look terrible, I still like having arms on my chair, so I left the other one out by the recycling. And then it got rained on so the point is moot. Moot like a boot. Heh. See what I did there?

Ulcers! Awesome.

I still need to undergo more tests to discover to what extent my anguish is mental vs. immunological or gastrointestinal (to say nothing of existential), but I am back to eating some things. Just crying all over a doctor and having a massive breakdown over the whole situation did wonders. It's amazing how much I wanted an authority figure to tell me that X was wrong and Y was definitely right and give me some rules to follow unthinkingly.

In other news, I was surprised by a couple writing-sample requests for some VAP-y things, and I sent them my articles. ... Meh. You'd be amazed how meaningless all that stuff seems to you when you are obsessed with being unable to breathe.

And just to continue my position as the poster child for why you should not go to graduate school, let me remind all those prospective grad students that we've been here, metaphorically, before.

Peeking at the Medusa

Self knowledge is so hard. There are so many ways I'll procrastinate before actually working up the courage to look at my writing, my revisions, my comments, even if I already know that the outcome is good and that the revision suggestions are minor. I have to creep up on them, trick myself by circuitous routes, bargain with myself, create calming rituals while polishing my shield to a mirrorlike sheen.

Nobody wants to look at a monster. Because once you find a monster you have to do all that work to slay it, and who wants to get off the couch for that? Risk, too. But what might be worse is if you go looking and discover it's not a monster at all, but something quite ordinary, and the quest is no quest but rather some everyday type of clean-up event. And then who are you, if not a heroic slayer of monsters? You'll have to figure that out all over again.

And so I avoid looking at the medusa, because, even though I know that really she's beautiful and she's laughing, everyone goes on and on about how terrifying, horrible and dangerous it is to look, and I end up paralyzed in spite of myself. I have to work myself up to it, bit by bit, knowing that if I can just make it past the inertia and the shock I will be fine, just like how I hate starting to write like I hate starting to exercise or just about anything else, but once I am in the middle of it I enjoy it all.

Small steps, then. I open the file while heating up some lunch. I print the essay while eating. I download the readers' reports, then write a blog post. All the while I tell myself, "you are doing fine. You have already taken a step towards revising with this little step, so you can stop at any time. But since you have already taken that little step, why not the next one? Why not turn over the page and look into that mirror?"

And then? And then?

Yes, and then. Now.

The Difference Between the English BA and MA?

I'm still thinking about the point (and thus implicitly, the structure) of graduate studies in English. I know: dead horse, etc. But a post by Rohan Maitzen over at Novel Readings gave me more things to chew on.

Maitzen points out that the PhD's aims and goals, at least some of them, are so specific to the academic study of literature that they do not easily translate to the world outside of academia:

One goal is to become reasonably fluent in a style of argumentation and writing that is not universally practised, as anyone who has ever coached a student initially trained in, say, Dr. Stainton's field, philosophy, to do work in literary criticism (as I have) would know. A related goal is mastery of, or at least familiarity with, a vocabulary that really has little or no place outside the academic study of literature.

And further on Maitzen writes:

If writing a thesis isn't even altogether good preparation for writing a scholarly book, it is surely disingenuous to discuss it as if it's a reasonable task to undertake if what you are eventually going to do is become a public servant, a school teacher, a lawyer, the administrator of an NGO, a novelist, or a small business owner. As for the seminars and the qualifying exams, again, it seems to me a mistake to talk about them as if they operate according to the same principles or serve the same purposes as undergraduate courses.

And at another point in the post she points out that while practicing critical reading and writing skills are important to graduate programs, on the one hand it's more of what undergrads do, but in more depth, and on the other hand the new and different stuff (see above) is very specialized towards academia --- towards the profession.

This made me think of the people who complain that high school has dumbed down or fallen apart or otherwise "failed" to the extent that college is like what high school was, and that's why you have to teach kids today basic math and communication skills. I'm not sure I buy that "golden age" narrative about high schools, but I'm sure you've heard it before.

So is the MA supposed to be more of the same undergrad experience, or something qualitatively different? Is the MA supposed to "remedy" something that was lacking or deficient in students' undergrad educations, or is it supposed to add new and different skills and experiences? Are students supposed to go to grad school because undergrad has somehow "failed" them?

And depending on how you answer those questions, the next set would be: then should the MA be structured like the BA, as courses and papers and exams, or like the PhD, or what? Maybe the problem is not that the MA in English shouldn't exist, but that it should be totally transformed into something different.

I'm just playing a little thought experiment here.

To quote my own comment I left at Novel Readings,

If [the MA] is just more of the same, then that doesn't seem useful (big heavy scare quotes there). If it is different, then what exactly is different and why is that a good thing?

Maybe it means that our undergrads should be going to grad school, but in a more "professionalizing" field whether that be admin or publishing or technical writing, once they've had the wonderful life-changing deep-thinking experiences of an undergrad English major. (And I do agree that the BA is wonderfully useful, and that anyone with the slightest interest in English should go ahead and major in it. It's just that grad school doesn't seem intrinsically worth it the way undergrad did.)

I've always liked the descriptions of the English major (and the liberal arts in general) as this wonderful, transformative, life-changing experience ----- you read these great works of literature and think very deeply about yourself and the world and the meaning of life and it cracks you like a nut and oh my god! I can feel my mind expanding as I try to contemplate all this craziness and what does it all mean?!??

It's kinda like a secular version of religious rhetoric, in a way, how you're supposed to ask the Big Questions about Who Am I and What Is My Purpose In Life. I mean, living a life without purpose or missing the point of existing is as bad as living your life without thought of saving your soul and the afterlife, right?

I just don't see why you'd need to go and experience this again, after having this experience in undergrad, if it worked. And if you do figure out your reason for being in the world, you should, I don't know, go out and enact it.

I'm perfectly willing to abandon all talk of "usefulness" and "applicability" and "professionalization" when talking about the BA: forget your paycheck; this is about your life! But it seems like MAs in English are both too professionalized and not professionalized enough: if MA programs were very upfront and pushing this rhetoric of, the degree has no economic or professional payoff, only pleasure and transformative self-discovery, then that would be one thing. But most MA programs, when you look at their web sites or materials, actually sell a blending of both this personal enrichment side and how the degree will make you attractive to future employers (considering that for both programs I attended, when I went to the campus career center, the first thing they told me was that I needed to take that MA degree off my resume, this is a bit disingenuous at best).

And I don't think that, say, learning how to write an abstract and then giving a paper at the campus grad conference is actually doing much on the professionalization or the world-perspective-changing side. So ok then, how should an MA be different?

Glug.

Remember how I used to joke that California has seasons, they're just tsunamis, fire, mudslides, and earthquakes instead of the usual fall winter spring etc?

(pics from the LA Times and SF Chronicle)

I need to stop making that joke.

The cats and I are fine, by the way --- not even a leaky roof. But Let me tell you, they have not learned how to do drainage anywhere in this state, and so getting on to campus or walking anywhere is totally crappy and cold and went and leaky right now.

Grumble. The downside of waiting out the rain is that two days in you start talking like a character from the Shining. Or your cats start to respond in kind when you mumble at them.

I found the solution to English-major postgrad employment:

Man Masquerading as Fashion Model Bilks Wealthy Men

from the la times:

For would-be sugar daddies perusing SeekingMillionaire .com -- "the meeting place for wealthy and beautiful singles" -- there was much to like about profile #160127. "Bree" identified herself as a 23-year-old model from Newport Beach, and the accompanying photos showed an emerald-eyed beauty with a mane of silky brown hair and a wraparound smile that seemed both sexy and sweet.

"Just looking for Mr. Right," her brief self-description read. If the pictures -- one in a backless dress at a party, another in a clingy halter top -- seemed somehow familiar, a quick Internet search offered an explanation: Bree Condon, 23, of Newport Beach was a successful model and aspiring actress who'd done a Guess jeans campaign and posed for Maxim magazine's swimsuit issue.

The profile beckoned on the site for nearly two years, and some who responded soon believed they had embarked on a romantic relationship with Condon. There were no face-to-face dates, but there were intimate phone conversations, nude photos and the enticing possibility of a future with a gorgeous cover girl.

None of it was true, a fact that came to light last month when police officers, prodded by a private investigator hired by the real Condon, knocked on the door of a budget motel room in Austin, Texas. Inside, according to police, they found an iPhone that had been a gift from one suitor, a small dog paid for by another and a 24-year-old man with a very high-pitched voice.

Clearly this is the perfect use of an English major's writing talents, basic familiarity with technology and digital publishing, and knowledge of the theories of the performativity of gender. Of course, there is the whole bit where he got caught and is in jail now, but hey, they got Madoff too, eventually. And getting about 15 grand out of each client? There's a job with some serious scalability.

Grad school as enrichment exercise?

I know you're all probably sick of the topic from the other day, why go to grad school if you're just going to have to retrain completely once you're out on the other end, but I'm still hung up on this. First of all, I'm disappointed that most of the people who responded to my post were fellow grad student/unemployed types, who largely agreed with what I am saying, and I haven't seen any responses from the tenured-types who posted the original statements about "tough luck but you should have known this going in" yet.

But there is another level of feeling to consider here --- I went back and looked at my posts from years past to find some examples of the proper tone of anger and despair and profanity. And I'm talking about the "finishing the dissertation" posts, not the job market ones. You see, one thing I've noticed about being done is that I no longer live under this immense cloud of doubt and fury and rage and despair that was finishing the dissertation. I think profs forget the extent to which writing and finishing (and worrying about not ever finishing) puts you in a state of intense misery that somehow magically goes away, to a large extent, once you file, even if you do still get depressed about the job market or paying rent or whatnot.

I'm talking about waking up in the morning and feeling like a big weight is going to press the air right out of me. I'm talking about feeling bitter and downright ugly most of the time. Grad students working on their dissertations are miserable, emotional creatures at their best, and tend to respond to everything through that perspective, consciously or no. And then professors write about these same grad students and are surprised when everything that comes out of the grad students' mouths is angry? Hello, dissertation writing is this horrible period of stress and uncertainty even when you have a clue about where your next paycheck is coming from!

So I'm bringing that up just as a reminder to put the recent "attacks" in the comments sections into perspective.

But then when I was rereading my old stuff (a lot of which I softened with humor because I didn't want the blog to be nothing but bile at all times, so quoting appropriately is sorta hard), I found this:

Sorry to return to my usual bitterness but that's what passed through my mind as I was reading the IHE review of Frank Donoghue's The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. ...

I haven't read the actual Donoghue book yet, but the interview goes over the familiar blah blah we all know of increasing costs and corporatization and reliance on adjuncts, with the often-repeated-elsewhere conclusion that tenure and tenured professors are dying out. The keynote is sounded at the end of the article, which I shall post here in all its depressing glory:

"Q: What are key steps that could be taken to restore the tenure-track professoriate?

A: The tenure-track professoriate will never be restored. Two factors seal its fate. First, the hiring of adjuncts continues to outpace the hiring of tenure-track professors by a rate of three to one. It’s silly to think we can reverse the trend toward casualization when, despite a great deal of attention and effort, we can’t even slow it down. Second, the demographics of American higher education don’t help us either. For 40 years, students have been moving away from the humanities toward vocationalism. This trend has been accompanied by an equally pronounced shift in enrollments from four-year schools (with English and History majors) to community colleges, where the humanities have never had a strong presence. Tenure-track professors don’t have a place in this new higher education universe. Much as it pains me to say it, I never considered putting a question mark at the end of my title, The Last Professors."

I don't believe that tenured profs will die out completely ---- there's still room for those few endowed chairs at wealthy, private top universities, for example ---- but I could see the balance shifting as high as 90% -10. What would that system concretely look like? How would it feel on the ground? And is this really going to be a case of that metaphor where you boil a frog in water by gradually raising the temp a couple of degrees at a time?

Just thought we all needed a reminder of this, because I don't think this is a case of having a market and then having a couple of bad years, I think we've been having a terrible situation for years now and this new crash/recession will be what finally ends tenure, professorships, and any thought of a living wage in the academy, permanently.

There are good comments on that post, too, including (if I may) my own, where I point out the university system doesn't even need to exploit any individual grad student or postgrad for very long (so all our big talk about "only doing 3-4 years on the market before quitting academia altogether" is plenty enough to supply all the adjuncts they need, as long as they have a steady supply of new suckers.)

But from my yesterday's post I am infuriated by Rohan Maitzen's comment about advising students on to grad school:

I do try to emphasize very strongly that past the MA level, graduate school in English is currently structured as professional training, but for a profession it is increasingly unlikely a graduate will be able to enter, at least on the terms s/he would like. I say over and over that while you might do an MA for further enrichment, it no longer makes sense to consider a PhD in that light, because all the program requirements are really structured to prepare you to be a "productive" and successful academic.

Seriously??? Two fucking years of "enrichment"? Who does that? Who the hell does that? You didn't, because your programs all helped further you into your current academic job! "Enrichment" to me sounds like something totally unimportant one does for fun --- I did after-school programs for enrichment. I took summer camp for enrichment. Some people go backpack across Europe for 6 months for enrichment but even that is too long for me. Who actually goes and devotes two years of their life to an MA program just thinking it was a fucking book club that would have no impact on their future career or earnings or networking potential?

If all you get from an MA program is "enrichment" then there is no fucking reason to go --- look, novels cost from about 11 to 20 bucks a piece and you can go off and "enrich" yourself by reading them at home, after working a real actual job. What the hell does the MA add to that? A lot of programs have their reading lists online; you can download them and read along without paying 10 grand and while moving forward in some actual career ladder that will work for you, and take a bit of the money you are earning and get season tickets to the symphony.

There is nothing going on in English or MFA or even History MA programs that you don't have access to; unlike the "entry cost" of certain subjects like film production or physics that are not feasible to do on your own, the entry cost of reading around in English or History or writing creatively is practically nil. You want community? Go start a message board with 20 friends who you love and who love to talk about books and link it with your own blogs or video logs and have at it for free! Trust me, it's way cheaper than paying for an MA or getting paid to teach freshman comp for an MA, if you don't plan on being a teacher later. And if an MA or PhD is nothing more than enrichment, somewhere between getting a hobby and going to church to improve yourself, why even go? You're just going to have to retrain for that job-nobody-wants-which-is-why-someone-is-willing-to-pay-you-for-it, anyway.

Gah!