In the Pipeline Part II: When the Plumbing is Clogged

Long long ago, I asked if it was better to go on the market while ABD, in a "trial run," or deal with finishing the dissertation first and have a gap year while going on the market (for me, the "gap year" is much more about "how will I eat and pay the rent" and much less worry about gaps opening up on my CV).

Having survived two job market attempts now, it is clear to me that the answer is "PUBLICATIONS!!!!! PUBLICAAAAAAAAAATIONS!!!!!! Publications You Motherfucker! We Rejected Candidates Who Had Published Entire BOOKS As Not Worthy To Even Wipe Our Feet and We Should Charge YOU For Forcing Us to Look At Your Sniveling Job Materials You SCUM, UNPUBLISHED SCUM I SAY!!!!!!!"

And those were just the ones kind enough to send the Please Fuck Off letters. Most schools seem to think that acknowledging failed job applicants will make them ritually unclean, as if our unworthiness will rub off on their schools and make them drop a level in the US News and World Report Rankings.

So, Ok ---- after going off and crying in a corner for a while I went back to the twin tasks of working on my dissertation and getting stuff out to publishers. (Don't even get me started on how my department assumes we will finish the whole program, including the dissertation, and graduate in four years, teaching the whole time, including getting trained in comp and then moving back to Eng after a year, with no summer support and almost no help or advice on publishing or even time to wedge in some work on publishing --- but anyway.) In fact, you may remember that after Mostly Disastrous Job Market Year #1 I got right down to work on a chapter and three articles (one of which got rejected and I scrapped), and I sent out finished manuscripts into the publication pipeline last summer. (Then I went out on Truly Disastrous Job Market Year #2. But we won't talk about that now.)

The problem now is that those pipelines appear to be clogged.

I mused about this a little last year when I compared the constant process of having ideas and writing them up and sending them out and getting them back to either juggling or pinball. I understood, at least I thought so at the time, that the whole publishing process was another of these aspects of being a professor where you need to be incredibly self-directed and able to think ahead and organize long periods of time, being able to shoot something out there and then turn back to do something else, keeping busy, while your shiny little idea pinged and panged back and forth and set off little lights and buzzers until eventually it came back and you thwacked it back off again.

I had no clue that the ball might hurtle off into the ether and be never seen or heard from again.

Now what? It's been eight freaking months, people! I would like to have something worthwhile on my CV when I go (sigh) back on the market yet again in the fall. So if I'm getting rejected, I would like it to happen now so I can go take my pinball and play it in another game and get it rolling along its new tracks before market season again. (Has my metaphor lost anyone yet?)

Or alternately, if it's any good, I would like to hustle along some revisions and shoot it back out there, because it has been pointed out to me that sending an article out to a top journal, such as, I don't know, PMLA, takes absolutely no skill whatsoever and thus doesn't really count for much on a CV. I have been further informed that there's no point to listing a revise-and-resubmit on one's CV either; no one will care or count it as a publication unless you can say "accepted" and "forthcoming." Someone else told me that "grad students these days" will list articles as "submitted" to various journals when they haven't actually submitted anything yet but they have been thinking about it, and so search committees treat CVs with submitted publications exactly the same way as blank ones. Turns out, some of my peeps here did exactly that, to which I said, thanks guys. Way to help me out.

If you want any advice (and would actually take it from an unpublished scum like me: look at the turnaround time of the journals you want to submit to. Harass your profs and people in your field, if need be. I think that journals that publish quarterly or more often meet more frequently and have faster turnaround times than journals that only publish a couple times a year, or annually. Or maybe I just picked super duper slow venues.

With one journal, I've been checking in since MLA (someone told me that December "doesn't count" in journal turnaround time because everyone knows the semester is ending and full of grades and holiday preparations and then it's MLA. I totally accept that. I waited until I was back before trying to nag people.) This has become a routine for me now at the top of each month:

• send rent check
• send polite nagging email to journal

And then, a few days later:

• rent check clears
• return email explains that the editorial board has not yet met to evaluate the reviews of my article

This is getting frustrating. I had set myself up for the idea that publishing anything takes about a year, but this is looking like it will take years before it actually appears anywhere in print. I mean, I've been told that the best I can hope for is a revise-and-resubmit since it's very rare to be straight-up accepted by a journal. I've also been told that it takes about as long to go through the R&R part as the first part, if not longer.

Crap! Crapitty crap crap! I wouldn't be so upset about all this if I didn't feel the pressures to get something real on my CV in time for the next job season! I would just go back to writing more things and pinging them out. Do people on the tenure track feel the same way, what with tenure standards and internal reviews and whatnot? Gah!

The other journal is stuck too --- after a few reminder emails I got a response that they would be happy to work with me and that they were sending back the readers' reports after X happened. I think that may be an unofficial revise and resubmit, and the editor was very very nice and encouraging. So I have all these hopes and excitements about this one. But. The reader reports have never arrived. The polite, questioning emails I have sent about them have never been replied to. X deadline is months and months away and I could see that, if this editor is organizing the X as well, the editor is not doing anything journal related in that harried and crazy time. So now what do I do about this one? Or that one? Gahhh!

Some people have told me that this turnaround time is completely unacceptable and I should pull both articles and start again. But I have no assurances that starting again somewhere else would be any faster. And I would like these articles to go in these journals; that's why I submitted to them first. And I haven't been rejected by either. And that last, hopeful-sounding email from the one journal, like the faint shadowings of land to some shipwrecked survivors, really did seem like they wanted my article if I only fixed whatever mysterious things the reviewers suggested, but since I never did see the reviewer reports, it feels like the land was really a mirage, never to be seen again.

I have gotten some conference proposal stuff out for Yet Another Idea, and I am working away at finishing the dissertation. But, you know, the timing on these won't be quite right for the fall job market either. Dangit! I was hoping my mantra would be The Third Time's The Charm, not Four More Years.

What to Bring to Conference Papers

I recently (well no, a while ago) did my due diligence and departmental support by sitting in the audience for someone's talk on campus. Luckily ABDs like to procrastinate, or else no one would ever have an audience for student talks and round-tables and such. (Of course, if you want to fill your panel's audience, I have made suggestions for packing the aisles in the past.)

And I believe that advanced grad students (I hate the term "old") and professors do a valuable service, sitting in and critiquing the presentations of new grad students, and ideally they model how to be good audience members as well, but I could probably write a whole other, much funnier, post about all the right and wrong ways to be the audience at an academic talk (Flavia has an amusing example of audience body language here). Grad students with conference experience can give advice on presentation style and hopefully nip some of the embarrassing tics or unfortunate conference assumptions before the new grads venture into larger venues and bring humiliation down on themselves and the department. (One tip: when you are asked to give a "bio" of yourself to the panel organizer, that means a short statement about where you are studying/working and your interesting current or past research. Not a 10 page actual life story or personal philosophy. And for heaven's sake, not in verse.)

So while I believe sitting in these talks is part of my uncompensated service requirement, to help out our department and the profession, the one I listened to most recently taught me much about what I do not want to hear about at a conference presentation. Which made me wonder, what does one bring to a presentation of one's work? This is not surprising as I can over-think anything to the point that I no longer have any clue how to do it, including writing or reading my own name if I stare at it hard enough.

I think the question of what to bring varies from conference to conference, depending on your expected audience (is it an author-specific conference? a field conference? interdisciplinary?) and the particularities of the field or discipline you work in. But I think of the conference presentation as one small part of a larger conversation with scholars, with the end goal to use your research to somehow help or teach them.

So, for example, I could see that simply bringing the existence of a text to your colleagues' attention could be a valuable project in itself, if it is a recently recovered or relatively unknown text, and so you bring them the text and show how it fits into their larger canon or framework.

Or, conversely, you want to bring in some context that no one puts with your text --- I love presentations with lots of pictures, but that could just be a comment on my own deficiencies in paying attention at conferences.

Or, perhaps, your specialty, like mine, is Bizarre Metaphors and you love to yoke together the most disparate texts imaginable --- say, for example, The Piano Teacher with Jane Austen's Emma --- to show us something new and surprising with the comparison. (This works often with theory --- oops, excuse me, Theory --- and the bringing together of texts with theories that are not commonly used on those texts. It's sort of like the person at the potluck who brings poached pears with pickled greens and then convinces us that this unlikely combination is in fact terrific.)

But what you should not do is to point out an unusual image pattern in an Extremely Familiar Canonical Text and then enumerate the appearances of these images In. Excruciating. Detail. Particularly if you find yourself running out of time and frantically jettisoning bits of your talk that explain why these patterns are important. Nor should you set up such elaborate framing and clarification and foreshadowing statements that you have to declare you are out of time as soon as you get to the "meat" of your argument. Nor should someone be able to summarize your paper before they've heard it.

In short, when you consider what to bring to the conference paper, consider what your audience already has. You wouldn't bring tomatoes to a salsa convention, of course, but you might consider even further than that and realize that you probably won't need to bring chips, either. Or perhaps you do, but you bring only a little bit and balance it all out neatly on the plate with other things. And there's the trick of it, right? Dr. Crazy has been blogging about the frustrations of writing a conference paper --- actually, it may be at the article stage now --- where she has to "write tight" to fit the constraints. And balancing all the things you have to say in order to bring your colleagues something lovely and useful in the time constraints of a conference paper is fucking hard.

Personally, I find my conference papers written "from the ground up" to be a huge mess compared to the ones I had the time to write out a huge rambling lumpy argument and then cut down from the chapter. But I think I need to learn how to start with smaller, self-contained ideas and "write tight" up from them because I need to go to conferences more often than I produce chapters. Bleah. I'm still not at the stage where I have ideas that occur to me at the level of arguments. I still start with "whoa, that bizarre image keeps happening in this text!" and then I have to brainstorm and write my way up from listing every instance in excruciating detail to developing some sort of argument about them to then figuring out what the stakes are for my argument and then finally turning it into something that resembles academic writing. And whoo! is that a lot of work. But at least I know to cut out all the useless early crap and I know when I'm far from done.

So if you see me at some conference, bring me something tasty and new and unusual. I'll be the one with the roasted garlic and jicama.

A Question for the Ages

Whew! Fifty essays, four days, a long and tiring TA meeting to prep the final that will soon descend upon us (and we didn't even have the sure-to-be-equally-long-and-painful paper norming session yet), and my mind is about as sharp as cream cheese. Mmmm, cheese for brains! (drools.) I have about twenty posts I want to write and another twenty I want to respond to, but that will have to wait for some sleep.

I gave up on cooking supper tonight and went straight to the Trader Joes chocolate raspberry sticks. Weight and health will return as actual concerns after this bout with grading, but not during.

So it's time to ask my peeps for some important and highly intellectual help: what shoes do you wear at a graduation? Under the fancy robe-thingys? At an outside ceremony which involves processing in down a long grassy hill?

I'm thinking any sort of spiky heel thing would get stuck and at best, aerate the turf, and at worst, send me careening down face first, perhaps to start a huge chain of pratfalls like those cool displays of dominoes that make patterns, except that this would not actually be cool at all, barring perhaps those sadists in the audience.

On the other hand, everyone's doing those ballet-flat type shoes, and I think if you are already short and have wide, flat feet like a duck (thanks for pointing it out, Dad!), those shoes don't fit very well or look particularly flattering either.

And while huge ass-kicking Dr. Martins or maybe even motorcycle boots sound great on a metaphorical, message-sending level, I'm not sure that I actually want to go for that look.

So, what to wear, what to wear? Suggestions?

I should add that I am a fashion schizophrenic (no offense meant to actual schizophrenics) ---- I bounce back and forth wildly between wanting whatever makes me "fit in," as in blend in and be invisible among the crowd, and, desiring wild and funky stuff that either seems "unique" (yes yes, I know how loaded that term is for the fashion system) or sets me apart as too smart for or somehow transcendent of the fashion system. Sometimes I aspire to both at once, which I understand is not really the way to go.

So: color? Should you stand out, contrast, wear black or neutrals? The school colors?
(Some of you might recognize that I have these in leopard-print... but leopard-print just doesn't seem the right tone for graduation, does it?)

Strappy sandal-ly things or closed? shoes? Go for funky and weird or try to make your feet the most unobtrusive things about you? Eh?(I've been liking bronze lately... no clue why. I'm a little scared of pointy-toe-ness.)

I went and pulled a bunch of pics off zappos. You can see my random, occasionally retro, tastes:

Some of these are cute and some of them are so hideously ugly that I'm fascinated and must have them anyway. Isn't that strange? And I thought I had uploaded more sandal-type shoes, hmm. Where did they go?

So, I like all of these or am fascinated by the idea of wearing something that screams, Look at my hideousness! I don't know if any of them would go with regalia or what I want; I'm mostly posting pretty pics for my own amusement and am completely open to suggestions.

What say you? And: send me you relaxing and mindless shopping entertainment suggestions! As I will have finals soon, very soon.

Yet Another Break from Grading

I need a grading breather. Of course, this is after the break I took to cook a large and involved lunch, the break to wash dishes, the break to get coffee and settle in at the neighborhood coffee shop, etc.

But man, it feels like Groundhog Day. The Bill Murray movie, not the media event. Every day it's: get up, put some clothes on and go to a coffee place so I can't avoid grading via sleep, grade things, avoid grading things, come home and relax and avoid the dissertation after grading things --- is it Monday? is it Tuesday? Did the weekend actually end or am I just going to be doing this for the rest of my life? Urgh. Please end soon.

I especially need a break because I just read a certain student's paper. You know the one ---- the one who went missing during weeks five through seven; the one who bombed the midterm; the one whose comments in section I never know how to deal with because they are pretty literally on the level of "Space aliens! This message is coming from above as mind control!" The one who asked me if this whole problem with knowing how to determine an interpretation couldn't have been solved by the use of video cameras back then (and presumably, I guess, a time machine); the one who the Prof, when observing me, noted I put such a hard "spin" on said student's comments that I never really engaged the student's (off the wall) theories; the same student who, the following week, tried to answer one of Prof's questions in lecture and who he had to put the same kind of "ummm, well, let me restate that..." spin as I had (vindication of a sort!); the one who, during week 8, suddenly interrupted section to blurt out "Wait, you mean that because the course is called [insert title of class here], we're going to use [insert title of class here] form of interpretation?"

The same student who turned in a forceful and eloquently written essay that strongly proved the paper prompt and showed none of the comprehension problems or logical gaps of the past quarter? Yeah, that one.

Sigh. And now I have to think about issues of trust and acceptance, about whether to take this essay on its self-evident merits as a sign of improvement or as a sign of sneakiness. Now I have to go talk to my prof and fellow TAs. Now I have to see if I have any other samples of the written work still in my possession. Now I have to consider ideas of evidence and proof from a different angle than what I've been teaching my students ---- or, in a way, there are similarities to this other sort of textual analysis. But now, in short, I have a lot more work than I did a few minutes ago. And it's work that is far more depressing.

Can you get a charley horse from grading?

'Cause I think I did. Seriously, the back of my leg is tight like nobody's business, and it keeps cramping up. Who knew that you had to stretch to safely achieve Couch Nirvana? That sucks, since I've never been much of one for yoga. (Obviously, or I might be able to sit still and grade without hurting myself. What a dork!)

Hopefully its actually due to the changes in the weather. I couldn't sleep last night and I have a headache today --- either because of the huge change in air pressure or the relentless wind is bringing in pollen. After a week of beautiful, warmish weather, I put away my extra blankets and space heater, which caused the nighttime temperatures to promptly plummet had me shivering confusedly all night. (I wake up, but not enough to process the logic whereby I could get up and get more blankets to not be cold! I just go back and forth from thought A (why am I awake?) to thought B (why am I cold?) and never actually resolve the issue.)

Oh, and I bought new plants to replace the ones that died outside my front door. They died from the night temperatures dropping to right above freezing, so as you can see, I really tempted fate three different ways. In related news, my dad had people come and clean the windows at his place, which explains the rainstorm currently moving through the Bay Area. Don't even ask about the family history of camping.

Sigh --- I need to get back to my piles of papers. Especially since I took a long nap rather than grade my quota yesterday, so I have extras to push through today. This morning's batch was neither particularly good or particularly bad. Which makes me neither particularly interested nor particularly uninterested in coming back to them. Although I guess there will be the relief of crossing that off my to-do list for today. But on the other hand that just means that I will have them back on the to-do list when I wake up tomorrow. Sigh. There are disadvantages to being able to take the long view of things.

I would work much more productively (as in, at all) if I had an appropriate reward for finishing my quota --- got any good suggestions? Maybe you could leave me funny stories in the comments along with ideas for rewards. Or put something lovely and entertaining on your blogs. Or dear god, do something --- I've emptied my bloglines and my emails and I'm going to need something for a short break between essays 3 and 4!

So leave comments, bring chocolate, every little bit helps, people.

Fantod Under Glass

I didn't get any more essays graded. (Yet. I didn't get any more essays graded yet. After all, I can still force myself to grade more tonight, right? Right?)

Instead I took a long nap that made me even more tired when I got up from it than before. Too bad I didn't have my camera within easy reach, because my cats piled on me and napped with me, making cute poses and inducing me to further sloth. It was nice.

In the spirit of not doing very much at all (my specialty) I tried to look up what a "fantod" was, as Pseudonymous Grad Student seems to have them. The howling fantods, that is. I was picturing something rather like the Dementors from the last Harry Potter movie ---- a sort of crushing, terrifying despair that completely sucks the life out of you. But the examples listed in the OED (yes, hello, I am a geeky grad student) sounded so unimpressive: the fidgets, or a state of nervous irritability. Well, that hardly sounds worth writing home about. Humpf.

Other synonyms might include the heebie jeebies or the screaming meemies. Ok I like that last one, though it sounds more manic than what PGS was describing. (And heebie jeebies have always sounded like a junkie in need of a fix, even before I really knew what that was. So if I were queen of the world Word, I would officially declare those to be separate ailments, and impose a new, more existentially soul-sucking, definition on fantods, declaring the 19th C meanings of a generalized pissiness to be obsolete.)

Even more interesting, fantods have been mentioned, according to my quick internet search, in Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow, The Pickwick Papers and even in Huckleberry Finn. Huh. I've even read some of those books. Funny thing is I don't remember any mentions of fantods there, and the first thing I thought of when I heard the word was Edward Gorey:


From the same book I scanned in the last time, Mr. Earbrass, in the antique shop, is irritatedly wondering "why anyone should have had a fantod stuffed and placed under a glass bell."

I don't know, it looks kinda cute to me. Maybe that's because I can't hear the howling?

Beware the Ides of Grading

Ok, I'm up; I'm working. Sigh.

I did not do much of anything yesterday besides a couple loads of laundry. Ooh, and naps. I think I took three naps, which were highly important. That was how I celebrated throwing a chapter draft at my advisor on Thurs.

Now, I didn't finish it, not even at the "done is good enough" level; I'm just hoping that since it has a crappy introduction and you have to read about 15 or 16 pages before it starts to break down into some bullets and unfinished sentences, that my advisor will either be reasonably ok with that, considering that most of it is mostly written, or she just will have moved from reading to skimming by that time and not notice. But thanks to everyone who congratulated me. Now all I have to do is write one more chapter from scratch. And have a draft of that in about a month. And many other things. Sigh.

Like grading!!! Joy!!!!! The joy of grading!!!! I cannot tell you how thrilled and excited I am to read dozens of papers badly rehashing the same topic!!!! The excitement here is so thick one could cut it with a spork. Yee.Ha.

Thinking back to my class observation, I could conclude either that I am not pushing them enough to reach for a higher bar (or possibly not modeling the difficult types of moves I want from them) or, more cynically, that pretty much everything a teacher does has little to no effect on students' writing abilities. A lot of the time I fall into the cynicism camp. Ahh, yes ---- Camp Cynicism; I'm there right now, grading essays instead of making little lanyards and writing home to you all who are undoubtedly having a better time. But I'll show you! I will have s'mores with my papers. And then get promptly eaten by bears.

So far I am seeing a marked improvement in clarity in my students' papers ---- but that could be simply because the first paper was designed around a much more interpretive point while this one could be seen as a straightforward plot summary. It's not supposed to be, but I am getting quite a lot of it. They are doing a good job being very specific about what is in which text and using nice specific quotes to illustrate their tedious recapitulations of the obvious. This actually is a huge improvement over paper one and something I have been hammering at them, so I am grading in response to them taking me seriously. In the first paper (they have four texts ---- five, actually ---- that tell basically the same story) I got the vaguest statements possible, of the sort that since something roughly similar happened in one of the other texts, it must support the point the student is making about this one, even though it is completely contradictory.

So, of the papers I have read so far this morning (not that many, I'll admit), everyone is paying very careful attention to the differences between these texts, and all of them are more or less noting how these are very different portraits of the same "character" and that these different representations all tell us something different (for some of the essays, that last bit might as well be a quote from the thesis). However, even my strong students aren't actually asking, much less answering, why. Why would these authors tell the same basic stories in such different fashions? I mean, that's the interesting point, and the whole point of this class and the way it was structured. I can't tell if students are especially afraid of pushing too far in this direction with this kind of material, or if this is a larger, more general student problem. (I've definitely seen it in other classes.)

Is there something about, say, students and the high-stakes mania, with its overemphasis on getting the perfect grades and jumping through all the hoops and seeing college as a certification program, that is training them to not think on the level of why? Is this just one of the differences between "English majors" (or successful English majors) and "non-English majors" ---- that people who are already good at asking "why" in a specifically "English-y" way are the ones to become majors? I don't remember being taught how to see texts like this, for example. And I'm not saying that my students aren't smart, nor even that they can't ask why questions, cause I've talked to some of the bright and lively science majors for this class, and I know they ask lots of good questions in a very scientific-method way. But the idea that an author could have some sort of "intentions" or "tendencies" or even an "agenda" but that this point wouldn't invalidate what they are writing, this baffles them. They baffle me.

I'd say more, but my timer is about to go off. Back to the papers and the chocolate! Eh. Expect more postings with my later breaks.