Tired. But the Show Must Go On!

The only news I have to report, is that I have no news to report. Nothing happening job-wise, and bashing my head against two chapter-rocks at once is just like bashing my head against one. Looking around the department, all of the advanced (I used to say “old”) grad students are as disillusioned and cranky as usual, and all of the newbies are just as clueless and imprudent as usual (this new crop --- eh. They’re weird. They need to start looking at themselves and start thinking much more strategically. This is the first time I can remember a cohort being really unable to identify themselves as different and separate from the undergrads.) Meanwhile, the grads in the middle of their program arc are all so overworked they’re sick and sniffly and running around crazily. (I must have been bowled over by three today alone.)

I know I’m spoiled by the California weather and all, but it being January, it would be nice if the dept. could shut off the air conditioning in our part of the building.

I’m liking teaching, as usual (though not the impending grading). I’ve hit a new level of … comfort … with my classes. It may seem odd that I’ve taken 10 years in the classroom to get comfortable enough to banter and make pre-class small talk with my students, but that’s always been the hardest, most awkward thing for me to do. For some reason, this quarter I’ve just felt so much more at ease, able to tease my students a bit (like the one I saw today playing solitaire while I was handing out stuff for the prof in lecture) and also able to call on them --- and harass them when they can’t answer --- in a way that comes off as pleasant and non-intrusive and funny. In the past, I’ve been so unsettled and freaked out about singling out students for tasks by name (Stu 1, why don’t you read this paragraph here? Stu 2, can you tell us about ____ in that paragraph?) that I may do it once and then it feels weird and I shy away from it the rest of the class. I gotta admit, doing a rather cruel icebreaker that put students on the spot seemed to somehow set the tone of the course for me. Maybe them too. It helps that this course is in no way related to my interests or research. It also helps that I like studying everything and love to learn new things, so that I’m still interested and energetic regardless of what I’m teaching.

One thing I still need to work on though is shutting up in class. This has always been my Achilles heel --- I took these huge anonymous gen ed lectures as an undergrad and loved watching some charismatic lecturer showboat his (no --- well, yeah, mostly his) way through a course in some highly entertaining and exuberant performance. I loved that. I wanted that. Coming from a girl who did drama in high school and always longed for but was never quite brave enough to venture stand up comedy, it’s not surprising that I wanted the chance to be outrageous and captivating and educational on some stage somewhere and become a professor myself. That quality of large public performance being primarily associated with professordom in my mind. Upper-division classes, those smaller venues, were alright but since they often became a struggle over who would control the floor, myself or the professor, they didn’t quite draw me the way the Big Survey did --- or heck, even my intro bio and astronomy classes, which I remember as quite entertaining and funny. Those lecturers (and yeah, these were not the tt profs giving the 500-person lectures at my undergrad) were very aware of their audience and its level of attention, and were not only willing to push the entertainment factor to keep students awake but clearly took great pleasure in pushing at students who were not paying attention or being respectful --- poking at them in ways that were funny, not mean.

I suppose that by invoking the idea of entertainment that many times I’ve shocked and alienated a lot of people who claim on their blogs to really dislike that passive, consumerist, tv-style model of education. And I’m sure that all the people who have done or read education research that underscores just how horrible the large lecture format is in terms of actual education quality are shaking their heads at me right now. I dunno. I really liked it. But then I love learning things, so I’m sure I’m a bad example of what people get out of the large lecture courses.

As I was saying ---- I love the performance side of teaching; I love the lecturing and telling stories and talking, just trying to get a reaction out of the students. I’m not good at relinquishing control (and I’m very good at remembering and talking about stuff off the top of my head), so I have trouble shutting up and handing over the reins to the class. TAing is, of course, complicated by the fact that I have no control over the reading schedule or how the assignments are set up, so whatever I do want to do in section has to mesh with someone else’s vision of the class. And often, I’m taking notes in lecture with another notebook open on the other knee, trying to figure out how to triage the material for discussion, particularly when the prof is either a) cramming in way too much information, b) assuming the students have background that I don’t think they actually do, or c) throwing massive amounts of complex theory at them without really explaining it. Sometimes I have to navigate all three. So really, often section is all about figuring out what the prof said in lecture and why it is important and what that has to do with the other stuff we read two weeks ago. In those cases I run class like a bunch of rapid-fire questions, interspersed with my explanations, or, when I have time and energy, I work up group projects and parcel out the various confusing bits of lecture. When I have a tight agenda, and when I need to make sure they actually understood what, say, the carnivalesque is, I can’t really let the students dictate where the discussion goes. And secretly, I’m quite all right with that.

I’d make a new year’s resolution to work on fostering discussion rather than being the center of attention in this course, but the prof’s pacing and the topic of the course are working against me. Plus, it takes more time for me to prep group work or actually write out discussion questions or plan an activity, and I have already vowed to not spend any more time on this class than I absolutely have to — I have my diss to finish, and besides, they’re not paying me enough for me to be a wonderful amazing life-changing teacher, just an adequate one.

Ok, don’t want to end on quite that negative of a note, so here are some cat pictures, and I will close with the profound, informative, and exuberant statement: my cats are cute!

(You little putz --- that was my water you just washed in!)

THIS IS THE POST THAT WILL END ALL YOUR PROCRASTINATION

And insomnia,
That will miraculously inspire you to great heights of creativity in your work,
And unblock your faculties.
This post will be the post to end all posts,
To stop for once
And for all
All whining, malingering, and spinning
Of wheels.
After this, all tasks will seem easy
And the muses of academia
Will whisper you such sweet nothings
As have never before been recorded on a tenure file.
Your reason for being will suddenly become clear.
After reading this post,
Writer’s block will only mean
The display stand for your trophies
And your laurels,
And ideas shall appear faster
Than spam in your inbox,
Your prose flow more prolifically
Than a porn site updating its RSS feed.
As soon as you read
It you will work unceasingly,
Never again counting the minutes till lunchtime
Or hitting the check new mail button
Vainly.
Nor will you ever agonize
Over a forgotten synonym
Or behold, after a day of work,
An empty word file,
And a spotless floor.
The birds outside will go unstared at
And the mailman ungreeted.
This post will make the machinery of your brain
Thrum.
And this marvelous post will say:

The Dark and Stormy Night of Revision

It has been cold and rainy here (January is California's one month of winter) and the dark, soggy weather has made me feel disinclined to work. Oh wait --- no ... no, I always feel disinclined to work, rain or shine or earthquake. Well then I really have nothing of news to report, then, do I? Carry on, carry on.

The cold rainy weather does inspire in me certain desires (besides a longing for decent municipally funded drainage systems, as the whole dang town is a puddle): I have cravings for a Victorian gentleman's library. You know the one: crackling fire in a polished grate, big leather armchair and ottoman drawn up to it, the muted colors of a turkish rug underneath and walls of rich mahogany bookcases stretching up to impossible heights and someone cute beside my chair to feed me the occasional bonbon.

(The only drawback is that I hate fine editions and even hardback books; I am a book whore and I don't mix wit de quality, no sir. All my books are dog-eared, broken backed and have cookie crumbs hidden in their creases. And the gaudy rainbow colors of my various paperbacks wouldn't go well with the elegance of the fine mahogany bookshelves. But, whatever, this is fantasy. I mean, obviously. I don't really want to kill a bunch of cows and deforest Sumatra and colonize the Orient for its goods and hire the local working class at exploitative wages to polish my andirons, but, I'm just sayin': it's a tempting fantasy when it rains, innit? But anyway.)

All this thinking about Victorian comfort brought to mind my favorite writer, Edward Gorey, and since I've been in the early stages of chapter-writing lately, I thought I'd share with you my favorite bits of his on writing. Now, I'm at the very preliminary dreaming-up-ideas part of writing, not this next part, revision, but it is still quite appropriate to my overall writing process. This is, of course, from The Unstrung Harp; Or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel.

I've mixed up the description and the pic here because wandering into the kitchen to "think" your way through a PBJ is such an important part of the process ---- I've become a bit more of a sitter than a wanderer lately, but much of my writing is still migratory. I've had to curb the number of migrations to the kitchen, but I used to have a writing circuit alternating the computer and the various destinations of refrigerator, bathroom, and mailbox (as in: please, please let me have contact with the outside world.) Now of course, I blog. More contact with the outside world, even less movement than before. Sigh. I foresee this causing problems somehow in the future.

The next step in writing, if you can make out the text here, involves reading what you have written and making decisions about it, an agony if ever I knew one. I should do that hand-to-the-head pose from melodrama more often; perhaps it helps with writer's block.


And, of course, the pain of actual revision, with or without a decanter of sherry:

As Mr. Earbrass points out, rewriting "is worse than merely writing, because not only does he have to think up new things just the same, but at the same time not remember the old ones." Mr. Gorey, I should add, has a wonderful gift for making lists, as the first sentence on that page shows. I do wish I was writing and being miserable in a large Edwardian (as in Gorey) country estate rather than a graduate-student apartment; it seems somehow more bearable. Or dignified. Or at least you have some spare rooms and a taxidermied fantod under glass.

Anyways, the rain is now a drizzle and some sun is actually peeking through across the way, so I suppose I should go work. Or eat something. Or put on something slutty and big sunglasses and drive my Hummer over some homeless people while tossing out reams of stock options. Because, after all, this is California.

Imaginary Ipod list

In the comments to my previous post, St. Eph says that Monkey Mind is her newest imaginary band name. I like it, except for the part about it having monkeys. Do you think they'd dress like the guerrilla girls? They'd be the only exception to my anti-monkey philosophy. If it could be called a philosophy. Antipathy? Knee-jerk reaction?

So as if in connection to this upswing in imaginary bands, Dr. Zombieswan did a meme where you randomly generate an imaginary band and album. I quite like it, both the idea of the randomness, and the fun of being creative. I tried it, and it reminded me that I still want to learn (well, re-learn) Photoshop.

Here are the meme rules:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post the result in your own journal.

Here is an imaginary album off my imaginary shuffle:

Ok, so I tend to lengthen album titles. Other than that I didn't cheat. Who would this band sound like? A bit jangly? Sort of Wilco-ish but not quite? As long as they weren't indie in a precious kind of way, I would probably like this band --- they seem like they might be Norcal versions of The Cold War Kids, who I'm quite smitten by. But why, I wonder, wouldn't they use a picture from their namesake? Maybe this is their second album. (btw, if this is the part of San Jose I think it's from, there's a great little microwbrew, or was, right near the old historic buildings. Delicious as snooty yuppie California food can only be.)

Now when I first heard this imaginary band, I thought I hated their stompy, honky-tonk, bluegrass-meets-Led Zepplin kind of sound:

But they kinda grew on me, raspy lead vocals, cowbells and all. They have such a nasty sense of humor, and some wonderful stompy drinking songs. They make me wish I had the guts to crash a dive bar and pick a fight with a bouncer.

And finally, after getting two non-imaginary album titles and some boring disambiguations on the random click, I was almost ready to give up, but the potential of this album title inspired me to cheat and actively search for a picture, as well as creatively re-spell the name of some Enlightenment philosopher dude:

You may remember the short-lived Situationalist art band Knees von Esenbeck from when they were put on trial for attempting to replace the insides of a nuclear warhead with silly putty during one of the nuclear disarmament protests of the early 80s. This is their exceptionally hard to find second album, released with Djiane Koos on vocals (run through a synthesizer) because Bram Hvardson was still in jail on trafficking charges. Some people have compared them to Devo but I find Devo to be far more cheerful by comparison. Track 14 is always cited as an example of their extreme minimalism because most people did not even notice that it was on the album. Musicologists subsequently discovered that this track is an elegantly balanced tune in baroque fugue style, recorded at pitches that only dogs can hear.


Thank you all for indulging me in my fun. And thanks to Medieval Woman and Dr. Sharna for passing on a link to me in LOLcat form.

Monkey Mind

First I must state that I have an irrational hatred or monkeys. I cannot stand them. I hate those stupid 80s movies which had chimps dressed up in various costumes, smoking cigarettes or flapping their mouths to hilariously dubbed dialogue. I hate their whole Gorillas-in-the-Mist- chest-beating, mythological trickster-being, SD-Wild-Animal-Park cavorting, poo-flinging antics. I hate their brightly-colored butts and their wrinkled faces and their long skinny fingers squick me out. Go ahead and accuse me of finding them abject because they are troublingly like humans but so frighteningly alien --- and completely lacking in dignity --- at the same time. Go ahead. I'll agree. And as long as I can have nothing to do with them I will leave them quite alone.

However. I've been thinking about my friend's exercises in meditation lately, and trying to see if it has any connection or relevance to the writing process. You see, she goes to a Buddhist meditation retreat on Saturday mornings, and she was telling me about how hard it is to concentrate, even with the multi-ringed symbols and the chanting and the breathing and the practice. How near impossible it is to truly focus on something, really and truly, even when you think you are shutting everything else out. Concentrating down on one thing in that setting just reveals to you how jumpy and uncontrollable your thoughts are all the time --- I don't know about Tibetan Buddhism (which she practices) but Zen calls this "monkey mind": unlike what we may call stream-of-consciousness in fiction courses, "monkey mind" is this never-still, constantly-wriggling-out-of-our-attempts-to-control-it chaotic motion (a "stream" seems more passive and contained, even if constantly flowing.)

So my mind these past few days has seemed like a tree full of riotous monkeys. Which ones are the ones that make that whoop-whoop sound? Howler monkeys? Gibbons? Whichever --- just picture a big-ass tree completely aswarm with wriggling, climbing, leaping, shouting monkeys. I want my thoughts to move like this:

See? Orderly, streamlined, focused, rational --- productive? Hello!?!

But maybe, I've been thinking, I need to stop fighting Monkey Mind --- or maybe find some different way of dealing with it, because I agree with those people who claim our minds just don't work assembly-line fashion and really are more like a tree full of monkeys. I don't have any actual deep pronouncements or conclusions about this yet, sorry. I don't know if that means that I'm going to start meditation practice (unlikely) or study up on it more or throw out the notion of machine-like productivity or what, but I'm thinking about the way I think and the way I work these days.

Today I tried something I haven't done since I was working on my undergrad thesis: about 30-45 minutes of writing (brainstorming and outlining, in today's case) and then I'd go back to bed. My undergrad roomies used to joke that I wrote papers in bed, as if the mental effort of writing out a paragraph was too much and I had to give up for the day.

But, you know, back when I did this as an undergrad, I would immediately drop off to something like the edge of sleep and just sort of ... float ... there. I wasn't asleep --- I was vaguely conscious of what all was going on in the room --- but I wasn't directly, consciously focusing on the paper I was writing, and I wasn't forcing myself to think of one thing or another. Thoughts would just slowly float to the surface and burst, like bubbles. And they'd be all over the place from what I wanted to do with my life to the interesting color metaphors in the novel I was writing on to the cute guy who worked with me at the paper to a favorite street in undergrad city to a commercial jingle. And then suddenly I'd get up after about 15 minutes of that and start writing something again. (Not a finished paragraph --- it comes out as notes and questions just like when I am consciously writing.) And when I'm forcing myself to concentrate on the project at hand while lying there it doesn't work. There seems to be something important about the fact that it's this floating, waiting process --- reading something unrelated to my writing (or even directly related) or watching tv or even cleaning stuff ends the process.

So, hmm. I don't particularly want to write the rest of my dissertation at home in bed --- for one thing, there is still a huge temptation to not work and just surf the web instead --- but on the other hand, I did six cycles of this today and was able to put in more writing effort than I do when I force myself to focus. So, I'm still pondering this whole thing.

I'd ask about other people's writing processes, but I'm worried that everyone will post descriptions of it all coming exceptionally easy and working like robot welding arms cranking away every day for 10 hours and make me feel bad. Or mock my antipathy to monkeys. I warn you, I'll fling mental poo at you if you do!

If pushing one rock is back-breakingly impossible, maybe rolling two at once won't be so bad?

I may be crazy; please someone stop me if so. Rather than work to close the deal on chapter 4, today I started brainstorming stuff for chapter 5. Heaven help me. I think I may be committing a grave stupidity. I have a negative model for this, after all ---- Prof. Nonsequitor, who had three books 80 % written when s/he went up for tenure and had a huge tussle of a tenure bid. There are good reasons to focus down on one thing at a time and get stuff signed off right away. (Oh, Prof N. came here from somewhere else on the tt and had a book and an edition already, so all turned out well ---- don't worry that tenure standards are being lowered and people are tenured based on phantom books at our fine institution.)

This means I have personally seen what it is like to create crazy, ambitious, all-over-the board projects or to start too many projects and then try to get through the various hoops of academia. But still, I'm feeling a little stuck on my Ch. 4 draft, and very very blah about it. I went back to it and solved one of my problems ---- with some distance and perspective I could see that I needed to cut a huge chunk anyway and that resolved the way my argument wasn't quite consistent ---- but now it's about 30 pages and I'll need to expand things and flesh stuff out (hopefully not funyunize) and I Just. Really. Don't. Want. To. Look. At. It. Gah.

So I've been beginning the brainstorming process on Chapter 5. If I get really stuck, I hope that it will just send me back to finishing Chapter 4 with renewed vigor. Maybe I can trade off between them and work faster that way. I'm just hoping I don't become one of those wild-eyed grad students skulking through the library for years in subjugation to their architectonic masterpiece but never showing anything written or finished to anyone until the very end (if there is a very end).

(why are there no pictures of Quasimodo in the bell tower on the internet? Come on, people!)

Anyways, warn me if I'm about to do something stupid. Or better yet, volunteer to finish Ch. 4. It's pretty much all mapped out already --- all you have to do is clean it up for me.

Haha! I have snatched funding from the jaws of ... something funding-related!

Calloo, callay and all that: I am employed!

And no, I'm still up a creek on the "real" job search, but I have a TAship for this quarter now. I am so excited to have my fees paid! Truly, I don't know what I was going to do for rent, considering that the amount they let you take out for subsidized loans is now smaller than your fees here. But all has come through in the end.

Luckily, there was an emergency and they needed to fill something at the last minute ... if this hadn't come open after the quarter had already started they wouldn't be able to "emergency override" my (non)funding status. Really, I think this is more about always having desparate nad docile experienced TAs around than "protecting" us from becoming permanent grad students here, but I am not in any position to complain, or even analyze, the situation right now. Nor can I complain about the subject matter, which I have absolutely no interest in, or the crappy times and locations. But whatever ---- I'm getting paid, and 10 weeks is gonna be up like that! And what ever happens during the first week anyway? I'll get caught up in no time!

This may put some interesting new wrinkles in my "need to get a draft of the chapter done Thursday" deadline, but I'm sure I can work around it.

And so, back to the editing and whatnot. Soon I should have something interesting to tell you ---- whether it will be good or bad, I can't yet say.

In the interest of keeping you amused until then, have a cat picture: