Eh, it goes, it goes

Well I haven't really been posting a lot, but then, I haven't really been doing much. Relaxing, a bit of travel/sightseeing around the home town, a bit of plugging away at the chapter first leg of the book Defender of the Universe project.

I freakin' hate plugging away at things. Yeah, yeah, I'm making some progress. But it doesn't feel like a lot of progress --- incremental progress is hard to see as it goes along, and a dramatic makeover is always ... well, more dramatic. This is like watching a tree grow, or paint dry. Meh.

Plus, while the chapter looks better, it doesn't look magnificent. Or done. Now, a lot of it is pretty much re-written, and today and yesterday I pulled all the new criticism for the last text (yes, I cover multiple authors and genres in here, silly overambitious me) and plopped it in. Man, is that easier with some authors than others! Stupid canonical authors. Anyway, there are still some parts to revise, and the parts I have revised are ... eh. I want magnificent, not meh.


The chapter as I envisioned it:

The chapter as it stands:

See? Not bad, but not impressive. Sigh.

I have a couple weeks before I head back East from mom and dad's house, and I am pretty sure I can finish up this chapter by then. But I'm not sure about it being magnificent, and my plan was to revise all the chapters in the time it has taken me to do one. Siiiiiiigh. I've made progress, but it's not progress that really shows up on my cv or for a new year of job applications. Grumble. How depressing. I'm gonna go eat chips and salsa instead of think about it any further.

Whack-a-Citation

Hello, I'm making progress on my chapter. Unless I'm not. I don't seem to be moving forward, but I am certainly expending a lot of energy waving my arms over here.

Undine writes while wrestling snakes, I seem to be playing a game of whack-a-passage. Every time I rewrite, review, and unbold one messy section of my chapter, I move something to a different section and mess that up instead, and there are just as many bolded sections with notes to myself 1. as when I started.

And don't even ask about what happened when I opened up the footnotes! Not only had I not been looking at the footnotes, back when I read through that huge pile of criticism I stuffed a bunch of notes and crap down in the footnotes, as if they were seeds that would magically grow into beautiful flowers. They didn't. And I was stupid enough to look back there. I thought of using the metaphor of opening up the walls of a really old house, but no. The correct way to describe it is this:

Damn crap stuffed in the footnotes and left to rot. I thought this place was looking pretty good! That'll teach me to follow the odd smells.

I hope your summer writing projects are going more smoothly.

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1. Eh, that bold sentence is crap. Go back later and make it not suck.

Arrrgh! The "Chapter" of Unnecessary "Quotations"

I am still alive. I think. The problem with staying someplace very quiet and with completely unstructured time is that there is very little to distract you when you have cramps. I haven't been working on my book manuscript Voltron, Defender of the Universe for the past couple of days since it is hard to concentrate on stupid little details like making sense argumentatively when you are pissy and crampy and annoyed.

Today is a bit better. The chapter is also a bit better --- except for the spots that I had fixed and then discovered a big pile of notes on recent scholarship I made before flying out here and that I have just now dumped back in and bolded. Le Sigh. One step forward, three steps backward, roll on the ground in misery. That's my process!

The real trouble will be looking at the final subsection, which I keep glancing at and going, why is this pointless boring shit here in the chapter again? I know it has a point, but it is not coming out clearly, and this idea is so old to me I am tired of it. Clearly I cannot deal with it while crampy and lacking sleep.

So instead I am cleaning up my prose back near the beginning and waging war against my own grad-student-ness. Seriously, what was my obsession with sarcastic scare quotes? They are everywhere, littering my chapter --- really only this first, lumpy, apprentice chapter --- with their sarcasm and explanatory shortcuts. But in a lot of cases, I don't want to simply remove the scare quotes and let the words stand --- like "good behavior" and "nobility" and "purity" --- well, maybe purity would still work there --- so I have to rewrite each damn sentence. And I keep finding more of them! Stupid scare quote compulsion! I don't "hate" you, scare quotes, I hate you! With no irony at all! I send all my extra quote marks to the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks to rot where they belong.

Grumble grumble grumble "reality" in quote marks, my ass. What was I even trying to say there? I need to get me a sharpener to fix up all those dulled, pointless words. "Words," even.

Summer Revising Plans

You may remember that last summer I wrote an article, which I named Floyd. Actually, I had an idea near the end of spring semester, finished drafting and revised the article over the course of the summer, and dragged out the cleanup, editing and formatting over all of fall semester because I have a very heavy teaching load. And then finally had it to the point where I could send out the article in March.

Ok, you probably remember this but I am really reminding myself since I have a bad habit of misremembering how long it takes me to actually write and revise something --- not that it's not good in the end, and not that I don't work, it's just that it takes time and was never as easy or instantaneous as I remember it.

However, this year I am not revising an article but a book. I am tired of calling it The Book, the dissertation, the diss, the manuscript, or any such iteration. But do I give the whole manuscript a name? Does each chapter get its own name? Is there some sort of animal that can explain the fundamental nature of the dissertation-revision process, like Floyd the condor did, in his ungainly way, the clumsy and lumpy article-writing process?

What could I possibly use as the proper visual metaphor for the revising process for a bunch of separate-yet-linked chapter arguments? What could ---

 Oh wait.

 

I guess I'm working on the Green Lion.

Badassitude to commence shortly: Form Chapter One!

Portrait of a Cat (or two)

 Yes, life really is this uneventful here. Maybe I should redecorate just so that the pictures of us lazing around look a little different, eh?

Chillaxin'

Awwww yeah, that's the throes of abandon there! Timido has thrown off all his inhibitions and is completely without worries there.

I like it when I'm writing (*cough* or internet surfing, true) on the couch and he curls up next to me and just chills out instead of hiding under the bed or in the kitchen cabinets all day. After laying there like this for a while, he usually either balls up and attaches himself to my leg and purrs (awww) or he sprawls out and gets really comfy like in the first picture.

See, doesn't that look relaxed? Don't you wish your days were like this? (That's the Other Cat blurred in the background there. Timido is not a contortionist.)

I hope you are having a good summer. Mine would be better if I could get my cats to revise my book for me.

Discretion is the better part of --- oh never mind

Recently I went to one of the local poetry readings --- not because I thought there would be good local poetry (there wasn't) but because I wanted to see people before absolutely everybody scattered for the summer, and I am still, fitfully, trying to get on the good side of a certain clique of profs who are a bit of a boy's club. And I am soooo glad that there are postdocs here! I've said in the past it has been nice to have people to hang out and complain with who have no investment, really, in the department and are feeling culture shock. That way I can talk about the positive sides to the profs who have made a life here and not get them all defensive.  Also this means I have people in the same academic "life stage" as me and I am not hanging out with the MA students.

Now, our MA students are nice, many of them more my age than just out of undergrad, and are interesting people. However, they are not really socialized to the profession. Or, any professional norms, really.  I have chatted with them in the faculty lounge and been sociable, but distant. And I have wondered if I should expand my social network a bit and hang out with them more regularly. Nope. My first instinct was right.


At this poetry reading (at the local hippie bar/music venue/"coffee shop" that doesn't actually serve fresh coffee/oasis in the wilderness --- you have heard me talk about its benefits and drawbacks multiple times since I have been here), I listened, hung out with a postdoc and her partner, and then afterwards drifted inside to chat with a couple of the professors at the bar (these are English dept. people, though I have been introduced to quite a few biology profs at this bar. Dunno where the other departments go for a drink). One of the MA students came up. This was a painful performance to watch, made ---- well, neither more nor less painful but rather infused with a sort of inevitability and impending doom ---- by the fact that this MA student earlier had asked my name and if I was a postdoc and then hit on me, and then, after discovering that my fellow postdoc was not in fact an undergrad (and thus only worth brushing off) but a postdoc, had hit on her too, despite her wedding ring. There was much awkwardness involved.


The awkwardness continued, as I have already explained, with the same sort of slow impending doom of watching the Titanic steam toward the iceberg, as I watched this MA student alternately fawn on and insult these professors, and just have no clue how to talk to adult colleagues and sometime bosses. One should never expand on the crappy-ness of one's MA program to some of the people running it. Complaining that it would be better "of course, if you offered more grad classes" does not, in fact, help your position. Nor does bragging about the (low-ranked) PhD programs you were accepted into, while at the same time insulting entire fields of literature (studied by a prof and a postdoc at the table) help you dig out of the hole.

I don't know about what the profs were thinking, but I was wondering a) what it would be like to teach an entire PhD program of misfits and b) if this MA student would ever grow out of this foot-in-mouth syndrome. I had this very blank, plastic smile plastered on my face; I felt the most fake and Californian I ever have. But really, I had to keep my teeth clenched so that "wow, are you always this much of a dick?" didn't pop out of my mouth unexpectedly. I hoped that I came off as slightly more collegial and mature by comparison.


Things got worse when the student started telling us in great detail how drunk he was and purchased a pitcher for the table, telling us that ________ was better quality than anything we had ordered. "That is what I ordered," I said. "Here, top me off." The MA student talked some more about how he was drunk. By this point the profs were completely silent, almost frozen, and I was making bits of small talk with the other postdoc and kind of listening with abject fascination and horror to the monologue coming out of this guy's mouth. After dissing the company's ability to hold alcohol and the quality of the dept. literary magazine, which I guess he helped edit this spring, he asked if someone could drive him home.


"Yeah I could drive you home," said one of the professors. "____ street? Yeah, I could --- that's not too far from my place." I asked where that was (isn't it within walking distance?) and we all got off on a lively conversation about the stupidness of the streets and navigation around here, and suddenly, when we looked around, the MA student was gone.

"Where did he go? Has anyone seen ____? Hey, could --- someone should check the back, the bathrooms, see if he's passed out or something back there" said the professor. Nobody moved. The postdoc's partner reached out and emptied the last of the free pitcher into his glass.