I passed my orals on Wednesday, with distinction. I'm happy, but still pretty exhausted. Lots of socializing that night, and an amazing time with The Poet last night and this morning. But people today told me I looked more relaxed, so perhaps not reading for my orals is agreeing with me.
I ran into The Professor in the Strand, which is funny for reasons I'm not going to write about here. This was good--I was able to make sure he wasn't mad at me.
The fears have lifted, at least for now. A lot's still up in the air about the summer, the fall, and all the rest, but the tired is just tired, not scared, not frustrated. I don't have to keep my arms wrapped so tightly around my body. And one of the really amazing things about the last few days--the last week and a half, even, was being reminded of friendships and people wanting to be my friend, and being able to be friends to people. Even if it's just a matter of some strategic Facebooking. It makes me feel less isolated, and though it doesn't keep all the demons and desires back, it makes a nice break occasionally. (Interlude: I worked in the library on Monday and walked past K there. I didn't talk to him, but I felt his presence in my entire body. It was the most vivid physical sensation I had all week.) Oh, and it was actually really cool that E. remembered my exam and emailed to check in on Thursday--I mean, I know he had to put it on some calendar, but even so--I'd only mentioned it in passing when we were emailing around his birthday.
I'm off to Wisconsin in the morning. I should really pack for that, but instead I'm trying to sort through several enormous piles of paper while watching Dirt online. I should probably also sleep. I'm trying to make this a real rest / vacation--while I do need to hit the ground running when I get home, I don't have anything that has to be done before the end of the month, so I'll let the ideas come slowly. I'm not even taking any theory with me--just the first volume of Richard Holmes' biography of Coleridge, a book on Zen practice that The Poet gave me, and the last two issues of the New York Review of Books. Okay, I may get jittery and throw in some Trollope. But, seriously--I'm not bringing anything crazy like de Man or Nancy. That's huge.
The other thing I will be doing--probably not so much when I'm in the woods, of course--is beginning to repair some of the relationships that got crushed under the juggernaut of reading and other stress. There are phone calls to return, Facebook messages to reply to, and hanging out to be done. Hopefully the summer will be good for that.
I'm also turning 28 tomorrow--well, in about 10 minutes, actually. I hope that being 28 is less stressful than being 27.
Showing posts with label orals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label orals. Show all posts
5.23.2008
5.17.2008
A quick sigh
I'm about to read a couple of chapters out of D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police for my impending orals.
I wish I could tell The Professor, and I hope he'll still be my friend when all of this is over.
Also, briefly: am pretty sure I made it through the dept. party last night without doing or saying anything untoward (at least not that anyone will remember). With that being said, I am pretty sure I met a few people whose existence I only knew about from Facebook--you know, the people who know like 30 of the same people that you do, but you have no idea who they are--and that might have been creepy. I know I told a handful of people I was sleeping with The Poet, but no one who I think would super-care. I'm not sure how I ended up with a bottle of wine at the end of the night, since I was mostly drinking whisky. It was a good party, but an encounter I had in the library right before reminded me of how much of this is a play of surfaces. Was also reminded of that when I saw that I didn't make either of the committees I was running for. (I'm the alternate for one that was actually reasonably competitive, but the people who made it aren't the types to flake.) There is an element of the races I was in that felt like a bit of a beauty contest, but I'm trying not to care too much. After all, I do run my own club and can be pretty sure that I will do so unchallenged until I graduate. And lots of good people got other good spots. But, yeah, there was that brief high school moment when they posted all that.
Also, I woke up today with that tickle in my throat and the utter exhaustion of an impending cold. So it's been rather terrifyingly unproductive in these parts today (hence the sitting down to read Miller at 11:00)--it's too bad that "blogs that recap the Babysitters Club and other YA series with plenty of snark" is not one of my three lists, as I did quite a bit of that today. I am sure I will be fine on Wednesday regardless of what happens, even if I stopped reading now. But I won't, and I do really want to get to the rest of Excitable Speech and at least read the periperformative chapter from Sedgwick's Touching Feeling, and I haven't braindumped the vast majority of my poetry readings. Ideally, all I will do on Wednesday before my exam at 4 will be to grade my students' papers, turn in grades, and just think and outline my preliminary remarks. Though I have a feeling I might be re-reading Jude The Obscure instead.
I also probably need to raise a posse for Wednesday after the exam, as The Poet double-booked himself and won't be able to see me until Thursday, most likely. (This too is slightly irritating because there was something else I wanted to do then, but it involves school people and judging from people's reactions last night I think doing something deliberately where we will be seen together may be more trouble than it's worth. I mostly just hope the cold clears up.
I'm turning 28 a week from today and will be in Wisconsin when that happens. Butterburgers and fruit wine will be involved. Mostly, I'm just hoping that being 28 is better than being 27, as being 27 has pretty much sucked all around.
(Speaking of birthdays: because I have no sense of my own best interest ever, I did end up emailing E. on Monday. He seemed genuinely happy to hear from me--I was willing for it to be a 2-email exchange, but he kept asking questions. We may get together in June.)
Okay, Miller. Sigh.
I wish I could tell The Professor, and I hope he'll still be my friend when all of this is over.
Also, briefly: am pretty sure I made it through the dept. party last night without doing or saying anything untoward (at least not that anyone will remember). With that being said, I am pretty sure I met a few people whose existence I only knew about from Facebook--you know, the people who know like 30 of the same people that you do, but you have no idea who they are--and that might have been creepy. I know I told a handful of people I was sleeping with The Poet, but no one who I think would super-care. I'm not sure how I ended up with a bottle of wine at the end of the night, since I was mostly drinking whisky. It was a good party, but an encounter I had in the library right before reminded me of how much of this is a play of surfaces. Was also reminded of that when I saw that I didn't make either of the committees I was running for. (I'm the alternate for one that was actually reasonably competitive, but the people who made it aren't the types to flake.) There is an element of the races I was in that felt like a bit of a beauty contest, but I'm trying not to care too much. After all, I do run my own club and can be pretty sure that I will do so unchallenged until I graduate. And lots of good people got other good spots. But, yeah, there was that brief high school moment when they posted all that.
Also, I woke up today with that tickle in my throat and the utter exhaustion of an impending cold. So it's been rather terrifyingly unproductive in these parts today (hence the sitting down to read Miller at 11:00)--it's too bad that "blogs that recap the Babysitters Club and other YA series with plenty of snark" is not one of my three lists, as I did quite a bit of that today. I am sure I will be fine on Wednesday regardless of what happens, even if I stopped reading now. But I won't, and I do really want to get to the rest of Excitable Speech and at least read the periperformative chapter from Sedgwick's Touching Feeling, and I haven't braindumped the vast majority of my poetry readings. Ideally, all I will do on Wednesday before my exam at 4 will be to grade my students' papers, turn in grades, and just think and outline my preliminary remarks. Though I have a feeling I might be re-reading Jude The Obscure instead.
I also probably need to raise a posse for Wednesday after the exam, as The Poet double-booked himself and won't be able to see me until Thursday, most likely. (This too is slightly irritating because there was something else I wanted to do then, but it involves school people and judging from people's reactions last night I think doing something deliberately where we will be seen together may be more trouble than it's worth. I mostly just hope the cold clears up.
I'm turning 28 a week from today and will be in Wisconsin when that happens. Butterburgers and fruit wine will be involved. Mostly, I'm just hoping that being 28 is better than being 27, as being 27 has pretty much sucked all around.
(Speaking of birthdays: because I have no sense of my own best interest ever, I did end up emailing E. on Monday. He seemed genuinely happy to hear from me--I was willing for it to be a 2-email exchange, but he kept asking questions. We may get together in June.)
Okay, Miller. Sigh.
5.16.2008
Another Friday, in disjointed form
I'm feeling better today than I've felt on recent Fridays. Possibly the big change being that I woke up to a mouse poop-free kitchen this morning. The Poet helped me pull out the stove yesterday morning to figure out where the mice were coming from, and I sealed up the hole with some tinfoil and about a gallon of caulk. (Left over from when my mom was here and the soap dish fell off the wall in the shower.) And, at least for now, this is holding. That was easier than I expected it to be, but it's still the kind of thing that needed another person and a leveler head than mine to force me to deal with it. I mean, I would have figured something out eventually, but I'm sure this would have ended up being a huge, distracting, and stressful issue.
And that, my dears, is why I need people in my life.
If I can stay in this mood--not exultantly great, but not churningly miserable--for the next five days until my exam, then I should be okay. The exam itself will probably be anti-climactic, but I do feel a little bit crunched with the Victorian lists, in terms of secondary and theoretical sources. I'm also somewhat regretting my decision to put Robert Elsmere on my list, but finishing it seems (irritatingly) central to my Victorianist street cred. So I press onward with Mrs. Humphrey Ward.
The big intellectual realization of the last couple of days has been a sense that I'm entering a new (and smarter) phase in my relationship to theory. Like, all of the sudden it's fun in all kinds of new ways because I have a better working knowledge of Hegel and Kant. And so de Man and Bataille suddenly make sense. That was kind of cool. I'm also really enjoying Judith Butler's Excitable Speech. I've--embarrassingly, perhaps--managed to get four years into an English PhD without ever reading Butler until now--I mean, certainly, I get the whole performativity thing--but this book is pretty damn good so far. And I can feel the ideas starting to take shape in my head: the dissertation, the articles that I have to start on when I get home from Wisconsin, and so on. It feels good, but everything I do is also edged with a bit of fear and doubt, too. Self-doubt: not so much that I lack the ability to carry this out but more that I don't trust my brain not to keep turning against me, not to collapse like it has so many times recently, not to get distracted. Fear: what if none of the paying jobs for the summer and fall work out? I can't get through the summer on $2500. I hate worrying about money, worrying about the logistics of feeding myself sometimes. (One of the best things I did for my work this past week was order a pizza that I ate for a couple of days--but I'd like to not get fat this summer.) And so on. I'm not going to dwell. I need to get back to work soon--I don't have a lot of time today, since I have to leave for school around 2:30-3:00.
It's the department party tonight. Last semester, I made a big deal about being very careful not to get drunk and do anything stupid--I even skipped all the afterparties--and that's the night I met The Poet because I told him I liked the poem he'd read. Which is either the most or the least stupid thing I've ever done at one of these things.
He was very kind to me on Wednesday. But there are times when I think the strain will be too much. But this is a better Friday than I've had lately. He's sending me some beginning Zen books to read while I'm in Wisconsin.
I sometimes wish I could love him--that's what that was, last month, almost an attempt at a performative, a self-projection. On a certain level, this would all be so much easier if I loved him. It would help explain why I'm doing all of this. Maybe I will find at some point that I do love him, and that realization will help at least to retroactively transform some of the darkness of this past couple of months. Sometimes I come close when I am with him, but I am never fully off the razor edge. It's still lacerating to admit that I did love K.--and you can say all you want about how of course I would love him because he's the super-inaccessible married guy and of course that's what I always go for: if I think back to the submerged moment, back in October, where all of this became possible, when I felt something drop in my stomach: it was before I knew he was married, and my biggest worry was still, ugh, I can't be with anyone who's a student here.
But of course, if he really wanted to do me a favor he would have left me alone.
I'm not going down this road today. I have to write out some questions for the Romanticism portion of the exam, and do a bunch of Victorian poetry stuff. I wish the weather were less disgusting so I could wear my dress.
I haven't talked to The Professor since Sunday. I feel bad about this because for once it wasn't totally about him. (Though it was a little bit, just not the initial thing that made me angry / sad.) I keep wanting to email him again, but at this point I may just have to wait until my exam is over, keep working without hanging out with him.
I kind of miss my students already, but not enough to grade their final papers today.
And that, my dears, is why I need people in my life.
If I can stay in this mood--not exultantly great, but not churningly miserable--for the next five days until my exam, then I should be okay. The exam itself will probably be anti-climactic, but I do feel a little bit crunched with the Victorian lists, in terms of secondary and theoretical sources. I'm also somewhat regretting my decision to put Robert Elsmere on my list, but finishing it seems (irritatingly) central to my Victorianist street cred. So I press onward with Mrs. Humphrey Ward.
The big intellectual realization of the last couple of days has been a sense that I'm entering a new (and smarter) phase in my relationship to theory. Like, all of the sudden it's fun in all kinds of new ways because I have a better working knowledge of Hegel and Kant. And so de Man and Bataille suddenly make sense. That was kind of cool. I'm also really enjoying Judith Butler's Excitable Speech. I've--embarrassingly, perhaps--managed to get four years into an English PhD without ever reading Butler until now--I mean, certainly, I get the whole performativity thing--but this book is pretty damn good so far. And I can feel the ideas starting to take shape in my head: the dissertation, the articles that I have to start on when I get home from Wisconsin, and so on. It feels good, but everything I do is also edged with a bit of fear and doubt, too. Self-doubt: not so much that I lack the ability to carry this out but more that I don't trust my brain not to keep turning against me, not to collapse like it has so many times recently, not to get distracted. Fear: what if none of the paying jobs for the summer and fall work out? I can't get through the summer on $2500. I hate worrying about money, worrying about the logistics of feeding myself sometimes. (One of the best things I did for my work this past week was order a pizza that I ate for a couple of days--but I'd like to not get fat this summer.) And so on. I'm not going to dwell. I need to get back to work soon--I don't have a lot of time today, since I have to leave for school around 2:30-3:00.
It's the department party tonight. Last semester, I made a big deal about being very careful not to get drunk and do anything stupid--I even skipped all the afterparties--and that's the night I met The Poet because I told him I liked the poem he'd read. Which is either the most or the least stupid thing I've ever done at one of these things.
He was very kind to me on Wednesday. But there are times when I think the strain will be too much. But this is a better Friday than I've had lately. He's sending me some beginning Zen books to read while I'm in Wisconsin.
I sometimes wish I could love him--that's what that was, last month, almost an attempt at a performative, a self-projection. On a certain level, this would all be so much easier if I loved him. It would help explain why I'm doing all of this. Maybe I will find at some point that I do love him, and that realization will help at least to retroactively transform some of the darkness of this past couple of months. Sometimes I come close when I am with him, but I am never fully off the razor edge. It's still lacerating to admit that I did love K.--and you can say all you want about how of course I would love him because he's the super-inaccessible married guy and of course that's what I always go for: if I think back to the submerged moment, back in October, where all of this became possible, when I felt something drop in my stomach: it was before I knew he was married, and my biggest worry was still, ugh, I can't be with anyone who's a student here.
But of course, if he really wanted to do me a favor he would have left me alone.
I'm not going down this road today. I have to write out some questions for the Romanticism portion of the exam, and do a bunch of Victorian poetry stuff. I wish the weather were less disgusting so I could wear my dress.
I haven't talked to The Professor since Sunday. I feel bad about this because for once it wasn't totally about him. (Though it was a little bit, just not the initial thing that made me angry / sad.) I keep wanting to email him again, but at this point I may just have to wait until my exam is over, keep working without hanging out with him.
I kind of miss my students already, but not enough to grade their final papers today.
5.11.2008
With less than ten days to go before my exam, I fail miserably at pulling myself together
You know those days that kind of lull you into a false sense of security that makes you think that--even if you know the goodness is only temporary, you don't have to know it in a conscious sense--so you start to relax a bit and have a couple of good thoughts and start to process everything that's gone on in your head and your heart and then all the sudden the day just turns on you and you're on the train crying on your way home?
This was one of those days.
As per my Facebook status of the past few days, I don't really want to talk about it. What's the point, really? It's not that there's much that can be done, when it comes down to it. It's mostly just having to face the reality of my not being particularly good friendship material. In a lot of senses. I'm good at being marginal, the person you see every now and then, I'm apparently great at being the mistress, as well as the girl you'll hang out with until you get an actual girlfriend and then you can't hang out with me anymore. When it happens, it won't be the first time. And you, like K. and E. and so many people I knew when I was in college, will have the satisfaction of waking up to her every morning and looking around and knowing that you did the right thing even though it was hard at the time and no hard feelings, etc. And the story ends with you living happily ever after and I, as K put it in an email to me this week, go on to "negotiate [my] other ethically questionable relationships." Because somehow, as The Professor said and didn't mean to say but kind of did because it sounded so right didn't it--if it happened twice, then it must be my fault.
I was already kind of depressed and a little bit angry, but that's the thing that made me cry.
Do I break up with The Poet simply because I realized this week that I'm not in love with him, and because he's married and all of that? But he calls in to check with me to see how I am. I think he might love me and maybe that's enough right now--at any rate, it's all I can muster--I can barely return phone calls, when they come--especially with the time of the semester and the time of my orals.
Here's my paradox: I'm not hot enough to be your girlfriend, but I'm too hot to be your friend. The "you" here isn't referential--it's the same paradox I've been caught in for years, minus the five-year suspension when I was in an increasingly abusive relationship with someone who was constantly berating me to have more confidence while trying to undermine the things I did have confidence in. So excuse me if I'm a little bit fucked up about this right now.
What I will miss about K is not the sex. That only happened a handful of times; I knew I wasn't going to sleep with him on Monday, and I didn't and it's fine. What I'll miss is the chance to put my head on his shoulder and watch the local news. And that's something you can't do on the first date.
Except with E, who I've been thinking about a bit more lately. (Hey, what's a few more dredged up traumas while we're at it?) Because I think we did watch a movie that first night, and that was usually a part of things. That sounds dumb, too much like a routine, and maybe that's why I wasn't the one he fell in love with. But at the time it was wonderful, and the only other person I did that with--have done that with, in a long time, was K. E is turning 40 tomorrow--I recently removed this from my Google calendar, but it's hard to forget the person who got you pregnant and happens to be exactly 12 days and 12 years older than you are. Once when we were in bed he asked me if it was going to be weird when he was 40 and I was 28 and I said I didn't think he was planning on keeping me around that long.
I should pretty much stop talking, ever.
I have so much work to do before the 21st. So much actual thinking. And I need to be not wretched to do it, or I have to find a way to work through the wretchedness. I'll start by finishing Oliphant's autobiography before I got to bed. This is an oddly appropriate choice, though readable only to those of you familiar with her novels.
This was one of those days.
As per my Facebook status of the past few days, I don't really want to talk about it. What's the point, really? It's not that there's much that can be done, when it comes down to it. It's mostly just having to face the reality of my not being particularly good friendship material. In a lot of senses. I'm good at being marginal, the person you see every now and then, I'm apparently great at being the mistress, as well as the girl you'll hang out with until you get an actual girlfriend and then you can't hang out with me anymore. When it happens, it won't be the first time. And you, like K. and E. and so many people I knew when I was in college, will have the satisfaction of waking up to her every morning and looking around and knowing that you did the right thing even though it was hard at the time and no hard feelings, etc. And the story ends with you living happily ever after and I, as K put it in an email to me this week, go on to "negotiate [my] other ethically questionable relationships." Because somehow, as The Professor said and didn't mean to say but kind of did because it sounded so right didn't it--if it happened twice, then it must be my fault.
I was already kind of depressed and a little bit angry, but that's the thing that made me cry.
Do I break up with The Poet simply because I realized this week that I'm not in love with him, and because he's married and all of that? But he calls in to check with me to see how I am. I think he might love me and maybe that's enough right now--at any rate, it's all I can muster--I can barely return phone calls, when they come--especially with the time of the semester and the time of my orals.
Here's my paradox: I'm not hot enough to be your girlfriend, but I'm too hot to be your friend. The "you" here isn't referential--it's the same paradox I've been caught in for years, minus the five-year suspension when I was in an increasingly abusive relationship with someone who was constantly berating me to have more confidence while trying to undermine the things I did have confidence in. So excuse me if I'm a little bit fucked up about this right now.
What I will miss about K is not the sex. That only happened a handful of times; I knew I wasn't going to sleep with him on Monday, and I didn't and it's fine. What I'll miss is the chance to put my head on his shoulder and watch the local news. And that's something you can't do on the first date.
Except with E, who I've been thinking about a bit more lately. (Hey, what's a few more dredged up traumas while we're at it?) Because I think we did watch a movie that first night, and that was usually a part of things. That sounds dumb, too much like a routine, and maybe that's why I wasn't the one he fell in love with. But at the time it was wonderful, and the only other person I did that with--have done that with, in a long time, was K. E is turning 40 tomorrow--I recently removed this from my Google calendar, but it's hard to forget the person who got you pregnant and happens to be exactly 12 days and 12 years older than you are. Once when we were in bed he asked me if it was going to be weird when he was 40 and I was 28 and I said I didn't think he was planning on keeping me around that long.
I should pretty much stop talking, ever.
I have so much work to do before the 21st. So much actual thinking. And I need to be not wretched to do it, or I have to find a way to work through the wretchedness. I'll start by finishing Oliphant's autobiography before I got to bed. This is an oddly appropriate choice, though readable only to those of you familiar with her novels.
5.10.2008
Telegraphic: Bataille on Hegel on sovereignty. Also, shoes and the radio.
“The essential thing is that one cannot attain it consciously and seek is, because seeking it distances it.” --Georges Bataille, "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice"
This comment feels rather widely applicable right now. It also somewhat misrepresents how I've spent my day. I was pretty listless, took a long nap even though I had already slept for eight hours or more the night before. Did too much poking around on Facebook. (I'm now friends with someone who works for Focus on the Family--how crazy is that?--But he's an old friend of mine, someone from camp who was really, really cool back in the day--or at least I thought so 10 or 12 years ago.) So I decided to drag myself over to Atlantic Center to use the two DSW certificates I had that were about to expire. I think I'm taking one pair of shoes back, as they aren't fitting as well at home as they were in the store. A much better (and, as I cannot help myself from saying, fiercer) purchase were these. I'm not sure the picture does them justice. The heels are about 2in, which is still a little high for me, but they don't feel as high as my other pair in that height--possibly because of the slingback thing.
This may seem like an entirely frivolous post, except for the fact that a year and a half ago, I didn't have any shoes with more than a 1-inch heel that weren't platforms. This might be a transformation worth thinking about at more length at a time that isn't now.
One of my greatest pleasurs of staying in on a Saturday to work (besides not having to be around a bunch of yobbos and frat boys) is listening to Danny Stiles on WNYC.
Speaking of that work, I think it's time to move on to some Derrida. As you might have guessed, I have not even gotten near De Man yet.
This comment feels rather widely applicable right now. It also somewhat misrepresents how I've spent my day. I was pretty listless, took a long nap even though I had already slept for eight hours or more the night before. Did too much poking around on Facebook. (I'm now friends with someone who works for Focus on the Family--how crazy is that?--But he's an old friend of mine, someone from camp who was really, really cool back in the day--or at least I thought so 10 or 12 years ago.) So I decided to drag myself over to Atlantic Center to use the two DSW certificates I had that were about to expire. I think I'm taking one pair of shoes back, as they aren't fitting as well at home as they were in the store. A much better (and, as I cannot help myself from saying, fiercer) purchase were these. I'm not sure the picture does them justice. The heels are about 2in, which is still a little high for me, but they don't feel as high as my other pair in that height--possibly because of the slingback thing.
This may seem like an entirely frivolous post, except for the fact that a year and a half ago, I didn't have any shoes with more than a 1-inch heel that weren't platforms. This might be a transformation worth thinking about at more length at a time that isn't now.
One of my greatest pleasurs of staying in on a Saturday to work (besides not having to be around a bunch of yobbos and frat boys) is listening to Danny Stiles on WNYC.
Speaking of that work, I think it's time to move on to some Derrida. As you might have guessed, I have not even gotten near De Man yet.
My conversation with The Professor, &c.
(Scene: yesterday, at West Village Coffeeshop.)
"But at one point, you were talking about love [with The Poet]."
"Yeah, but I pulled back from that--all of the sudden, I was like, wait a minute, what the fuck am I doing even entertaining the idea of that?"
"So that cryptic post wasn't about [The Poet]?"
"No, it was about K."
"Then he's the one you're in love with."
And that's when I started to cry.
----
I don't really remember much about yesterday after I met with my committee chair, a meeting that was mostly about my exam in 11 days but I kept slipping, almost schizophrenically, into these other modes--I will have to pull myself together before the actual exam, stop taking all of these poems so damn personally. (Seriously, though, Augusta Webster is *amazing*: "The Castaway" is what did me in on Thursday night.) It makes me a good Victorian, but possibly gets in the way of my being Victorianist. And then it was back in the lounge and there were all these people there (there always are around that time on Fridays, but still) and people were showing these amazing art projects and it was all very warm and fuzzy and smart but I was feeling a bit shredded. Somehow managed to stay and have a long conversation about Mary Wollstonecraft and madhouses with a guy from my program who I don't know that well and then to dinner with more people I don't know that well, and I know I was *not* entertaining because all of the sudden my life doesn't feel all that entertaining; it hurts and it hurts bad and I know there isn't anyone I can really blame, but tell me: how can you really control who you fall in love with? If I could, I absolutely would...and I've tried, don't you realize? I vowed I would never love anyone like I loved The Professor (and I've even told him that before), and I have stuck to that. But there are apparently a thousand wrong ways to fall in love (and to be loved) and the odds of hitting upon the right one and the consequences of more and more wrong ones--what's a girl to do? How do you go back? I'm not sure I can. I wouldn't know how to be first in someone's life. Even with my ex, I always played second to him. It almost seemed safer just to go along with K or The Poet--trying to live out a certain always already, but that's clearly failing too and I'm no longer sure that I like The Poet enough to go through all of this, to risk so much, to put up with so much. But what do I do? I'm not playing to win, I'm playing to keep myself in the game rather than curled up shaking in a corner.
The weather was horrible yesterday, in part because that cold, pissing rain makes it impossible to maintain one's dignity of appearance, and that's all I had going for me yesterday. But the consolation prize is that you can explain a lot away by having walked there in the rain without an umbrella.
I'm hoping that today will be better. Got all of my TV watching over when I got home last night. And then even watched a movie (The Usual Suspects--damn, Gabriel Byrne is hot), which I never do. So hopefully all the goofing off is over in one blow. Today and tomorrow I'm doing a big theory push: Bataille's "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice," de Man's "Rhetoric of Temporality" (which I'm hoping to be able to actually understand), and three Derridas: "From a Restricted to a General Economy" (great theory, hard way to live, as The Professor and I also noted yesterday), "Psyche: Invention of the Other" (an all-time favorite with me), and "No Apocalypse, Not Now." It's hard not to be cheered by this list, which will allow me to put off grading, thikning too hard about Aurora Leigh and hopefully will let me get the churning in my stomach under control. I'm supposed to get some important medication today as well, but I' not entirely optimistic since it's coming via UPS and I've had really bad luck with UPS in this neighborhood. But maybe.
I have a feeling The Poet will call. He often does on Saturdays, while he's running errands or just done surfing or something. I don't know yet what I'll tell him. I don't have the mental strength to break up with him right now.
I did a lot of snooze button pushing this morning and ended up waking up to this Weekend Edition story on Charlie Brown. When they post the audio, I want to listen to the beginning to figure out what the occasion for it was. It was kind of a sweet piece, nothing too offensive, but now that I'm looking at the website, I'm a bit troubled by their pitching it as "Authenticity and Honesty." I think even for Charlie Brown, it's more complicated.
"But at one point, you were talking about love [with The Poet]."
"Yeah, but I pulled back from that--all of the sudden, I was like, wait a minute, what the fuck am I doing even entertaining the idea of that?"
"So that cryptic post wasn't about [The Poet]?"
"No, it was about K."
"Then he's the one you're in love with."
And that's when I started to cry.
----
I don't really remember much about yesterday after I met with my committee chair, a meeting that was mostly about my exam in 11 days but I kept slipping, almost schizophrenically, into these other modes--I will have to pull myself together before the actual exam, stop taking all of these poems so damn personally. (Seriously, though, Augusta Webster is *amazing*: "The Castaway" is what did me in on Thursday night.) It makes me a good Victorian, but possibly gets in the way of my being Victorianist. And then it was back in the lounge and there were all these people there (there always are around that time on Fridays, but still) and people were showing these amazing art projects and it was all very warm and fuzzy and smart but I was feeling a bit shredded. Somehow managed to stay and have a long conversation about Mary Wollstonecraft and madhouses with a guy from my program who I don't know that well and then to dinner with more people I don't know that well, and I know I was *not* entertaining because all of the sudden my life doesn't feel all that entertaining; it hurts and it hurts bad and I know there isn't anyone I can really blame, but tell me: how can you really control who you fall in love with? If I could, I absolutely would...and I've tried, don't you realize? I vowed I would never love anyone like I loved The Professor (and I've even told him that before), and I have stuck to that. But there are apparently a thousand wrong ways to fall in love (and to be loved) and the odds of hitting upon the right one and the consequences of more and more wrong ones--what's a girl to do? How do you go back? I'm not sure I can. I wouldn't know how to be first in someone's life. Even with my ex, I always played second to him. It almost seemed safer just to go along with K or The Poet--trying to live out a certain always already, but that's clearly failing too and I'm no longer sure that I like The Poet enough to go through all of this, to risk so much, to put up with so much. But what do I do? I'm not playing to win, I'm playing to keep myself in the game rather than curled up shaking in a corner.
The weather was horrible yesterday, in part because that cold, pissing rain makes it impossible to maintain one's dignity of appearance, and that's all I had going for me yesterday. But the consolation prize is that you can explain a lot away by having walked there in the rain without an umbrella.
I'm hoping that today will be better. Got all of my TV watching over when I got home last night. And then even watched a movie (The Usual Suspects--damn, Gabriel Byrne is hot), which I never do. So hopefully all the goofing off is over in one blow. Today and tomorrow I'm doing a big theory push: Bataille's "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice," de Man's "Rhetoric of Temporality" (which I'm hoping to be able to actually understand), and three Derridas: "From a Restricted to a General Economy" (great theory, hard way to live, as The Professor and I also noted yesterday), "Psyche: Invention of the Other" (an all-time favorite with me), and "No Apocalypse, Not Now." It's hard not to be cheered by this list, which will allow me to put off grading, thikning too hard about Aurora Leigh and hopefully will let me get the churning in my stomach under control. I'm supposed to get some important medication today as well, but I' not entirely optimistic since it's coming via UPS and I've had really bad luck with UPS in this neighborhood. But maybe.
I have a feeling The Poet will call. He often does on Saturdays, while he's running errands or just done surfing or something. I don't know yet what I'll tell him. I don't have the mental strength to break up with him right now.
I did a lot of snooze button pushing this morning and ended up waking up to this Weekend Edition story on Charlie Brown. When they post the audio, I want to listen to the beginning to figure out what the occasion for it was. It was kind of a sweet piece, nothing too offensive, but now that I'm looking at the website, I'm a bit troubled by their pitching it as "Authenticity and Honesty." I think even for Charlie Brown, it's more complicated.
5.09.2008
On breaking even as a pyhrric victory
You could say, I suppose, that I played my cards the best I could this week, that I succeeded in what I had set out to do, minimize risk, not doing anything that would jeopardize the shred of a relationship I do have--breaking even, at least--no worse off at the end of the semester than I was at the beginning. And maybe running into K. in the library will be less awkward now and even though The Professor and I haven't talked since last Friday and he's clearly not going to Indiana with me in the fall I will still be able to send him my articles as I write them. And the poet will be around most weeks to spend a night in Brooklyn and leave again in the morning back to Jersey and the rest of his life. And I'll fix the stupid health issue that I've let go on too long already, and eventually the school I want to adjunct at in the fall will let me know about that, and my friend's husband and I will work out my working at his firm, and I'll go to the library on the days I'm not there and I'll write my articles like I said I would. And the summer will pass this way--maybe I really will go shopping at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket on Saturdays and start going back to the Cafe on Sundays and keep up the gym going even when / if my ID card doesn't let me keep my gym bag in my desk. And perhaps I will learn to play by the rules again and maybe--well--I don't know. I'm done hoping for right now, I'm done asking, and I say these things knowing I'm not. But I'm so tired of living like a Liz Phair song and all the books and poems I'm reading tonight remind me that it's one thing to become disillusioned with the straight path that life has to offer, but it's another thing to let go of those illusions, and I've never claimed to like this only to accept it, but in the end it may not matter how much I set out trying to do the right thing, how much I tried to suspend judgment and take what was there, not trying to ask for more.
Right now I am playing for the present, playing to avoid the return of the abyss of a couple of weeks ago, playing to avoid being as wretched as I was in January and February because I will not be able to write a dissertation under those conditions. When my life works, as it did, in various fleeting moments over the past three weeks or so, it was wonderful, inspiring, exciting. But these things collapse so fast. And it's all quicksand. There is a part of me that wants to play for keeps, that maybe wants a reason to consider staying in New York once I graduate, something more than all of this, than being the other woman. But it's hard to go back. I don't have much more to risk--I don't want to let go of what I have, even if it's basically a 56-year-old guy with a wife in New Jersey. At least he cares enough not to make promises he can't follow through on, not to be so rigorous in pushing me away.
But on the other hand, I don't see him as a friend in the way that K and the Professor were. Our relationship is sex, literature, and drinking--with some humanity mixed in. (After all, he did bring me a drink token from the night he spent at the L&L talking to me on the phone.) But it doesn't have that same stomachdrop excitement to it. And of course I'd have to trace longer genealogies here that I don't have the time for--K is a distinct improvement on The Professor in that he actually finds me attractive and pursued me for it--there's just that huge other glaring problem. And he's right, in a way, that him 10 years younger and single probably would be a good match for me.
Somebody please find me that man and make me fall in love with him.
Yet in terms of the spring semester at least I am no worse off than I was when I started, not really. Some wasted efforts of course, but not all lost in that they carried me through those long middle sections--The Professor and I renewed our friendship just long enough for him to read my conference paper and K probably kept me from going insane while my mom was here. So I try to stay thankful for these tiny things even though right now they hurt, hurt badly. But this was the game I was playing. I wish I wasn't playing it.
And the rules don't work in the subjunctive, so I do what I have to do again, pull myself together for another hour of reading and the meeting I have to plan for tomorrow. Take a deep breath and tell myself that my orals reading will all get done. Wonder if I should tear those last couple of pages out of my journal. Send one last email to say, yeah, we'll see each other in the library, and it'll be fine and that's how we'll be friends and it won't make me miserable this time, I promise.
Do I sound self-pitying? I'm not trying to, actually. But I have been reading a lot of Victorian women poets lately, and am probably overidentifying. Suffice it to say that Aurora Leigh, even as it reasserted itself as perhaps my favorite 19th century long poem, was also very much behind that collapse at the end of Spring Break.
And I still think back to my "September 10th" moment--literally, though perhaps disingenuously--but, really--the last time I was entirely happy was on September 10, 2007. It was the first day of German class, and the most perfect date I had with E. It was the night I got pregnant, and in the overnight my grandmother died. And everything's been out of joint since then. I wouldn't even know how to put this all back together again.
Right now I am playing for the present, playing to avoid the return of the abyss of a couple of weeks ago, playing to avoid being as wretched as I was in January and February because I will not be able to write a dissertation under those conditions. When my life works, as it did, in various fleeting moments over the past three weeks or so, it was wonderful, inspiring, exciting. But these things collapse so fast. And it's all quicksand. There is a part of me that wants to play for keeps, that maybe wants a reason to consider staying in New York once I graduate, something more than all of this, than being the other woman. But it's hard to go back. I don't have much more to risk--I don't want to let go of what I have, even if it's basically a 56-year-old guy with a wife in New Jersey. At least he cares enough not to make promises he can't follow through on, not to be so rigorous in pushing me away.
But on the other hand, I don't see him as a friend in the way that K and the Professor were. Our relationship is sex, literature, and drinking--with some humanity mixed in. (After all, he did bring me a drink token from the night he spent at the L&L talking to me on the phone.) But it doesn't have that same stomachdrop excitement to it. And of course I'd have to trace longer genealogies here that I don't have the time for--K is a distinct improvement on The Professor in that he actually finds me attractive and pursued me for it--there's just that huge other glaring problem. And he's right, in a way, that him 10 years younger and single probably would be a good match for me.
Somebody please find me that man and make me fall in love with him.
Yet in terms of the spring semester at least I am no worse off than I was when I started, not really. Some wasted efforts of course, but not all lost in that they carried me through those long middle sections--The Professor and I renewed our friendship just long enough for him to read my conference paper and K probably kept me from going insane while my mom was here. So I try to stay thankful for these tiny things even though right now they hurt, hurt badly. But this was the game I was playing. I wish I wasn't playing it.
And the rules don't work in the subjunctive, so I do what I have to do again, pull myself together for another hour of reading and the meeting I have to plan for tomorrow. Take a deep breath and tell myself that my orals reading will all get done. Wonder if I should tear those last couple of pages out of my journal. Send one last email to say, yeah, we'll see each other in the library, and it'll be fine and that's how we'll be friends and it won't make me miserable this time, I promise.
Do I sound self-pitying? I'm not trying to, actually. But I have been reading a lot of Victorian women poets lately, and am probably overidentifying. Suffice it to say that Aurora Leigh, even as it reasserted itself as perhaps my favorite 19th century long poem, was also very much behind that collapse at the end of Spring Break.
And I still think back to my "September 10th" moment--literally, though perhaps disingenuously--but, really--the last time I was entirely happy was on September 10, 2007. It was the first day of German class, and the most perfect date I had with E. It was the night I got pregnant, and in the overnight my grandmother died. And everything's been out of joint since then. I wouldn't even know how to put this all back together again.
5.01.2008
Somebody said they saw me swinging the world by the tail
I recovered from last week well enough to cope with the rest of my weekend--a day of grading, another of working, trying to prep the rest of the semester, and cleaning this place up. Then my mother came on Monday. The plan was that she was going to be there until Friday, but through a chain of events involving a mistake with the calendar, she's actually not going home until next Tuesday. This is a long time. It's not particularly helpful for my orals being in three weeks. Or for just my being myself. It's the wrong kind of interaction with other people--I haven't really been alone at any point--even if my mother's out, I still have to be on the line for stuff.
Meanwhile, back in St Louis, my little brother got his appendix out last night.
It's okay, I guess, and I'm getting a few things out of it--mainly a new bed, hopefully--but still. It's disruptive. I like to be able to choose my disruptions better.
Other things. It looks like I'm getting an article out of the conference paper I gave, as I have gotten a couple very charming emails from the very important scholar in my field since then. This means I'm basically writing two articles this summer. I have to keep in mind that I'm not working from scratch, that one is basically a revision (albeit an extensive one) and the other is more or less a chance to work up everything I cut out of the conference paper. But, in order to be able to eat, I'm also trying to get a job at the law firm where the husband of a friend of mine is a partner. Best case scenario would be that I work there 2-3 days a week, spend 10 hours in the library on the other days. This kind of arrangement scares me, though, and that was partly what last Friday's meltdown was about. I say that only because I combined the working / paper writing thing during my first grad school summer and I remember it being miserable and lonely. But I'm trying to convince myself that the structure wasn't the problem and that I was miserable and lonely because my ex (then boyfriend) was making it so. Also, I really do think the first summer of grad school is awful. So I'm hoping this will be better. Also hoping that I get the class(es) at Not My School for the fall, since that would allow me to make some decent money for what will in a lot of ways be different and hopefully slightly less frustrating work.
The Poet has been in Chicago for the last couple of days on a business trip partially scheduled to coincide with my mother's visit. I sent him to the L&L a couple nights ago, and he called me from there. Somewhat ironically, the fact that he's in Chicago means that we can actually talk on the phone at night, which we can't do when he's home. It's nice to be able to do this, gives me the closest thing I've had to private space this week. I think he's coming back to New Jersey today, though, and it's still going to be almost a week before I see him. Needless to say, I have been pretty quiet on the issue of this whole relationship while my mom's been here--I've said merely that he lives in Jersey, is in my department but also has a real job, on a business trip this week too bad you can't meet him. Oh, and he makes me happy. In the meantime, we had dinner with The Professor last night and have made tentative (and work-killing!) plans to go to the Cloisters / Upper West Side with him on Sunday. My mother pronounced him charming but didn't seem to be too disappointed that we aren't a couple.
Also, K. called me on Tuesday night and we talked for awhile. That was the one real bright spot / personal-life accomplishment of Spring Break--becoming friends with K. again. I can thank Facebook for providing the space to let that happen. Well, Facebook and my being drunk enough to finally resolve just to add him as a friend and see what happens. But it was good. We exchanged several emails that allowed us to establish a kind of common narrative about what happened--a nice change of pace from recent experiences with that. And, if nothing else I think we're finally moving past the whole slightly hurtful stressy non-encounters in the library, maybe even figuring out how to be friends. I think to some extent our friendship will always involve a bit of playing with fire, but maybe that's okay. I'll probably have a little bit of a crush on him for awhile. But I can live with that. We're tentatively planning to hang out next week when my mother is finally gone. But I kind of want to see The Poet more. That's how things probably should be.
I read a lot of Shelley for my committee member meeting yesterday. I'm in a very different place with Shelley than I was two years ago. I found it very hard to get past the biographical elements of "Epipsychidion"--in part because I feel like there's an enormous ethical problem with turning women into heavenly bodies. And even as I knew that my response was incredibly simplistic in a lot of ways and tried to fight it (I spent a lot of time reading Shelley when I was in coursework, so I do *know* more or less what I'm supposed to get out of a sympathetic reading of him), I couldn't really feel comfortable with a lot of it. (Oddly, I still really love Prometheus Unbound in some ways.) A lot of this has to do with my ex, who really does have a Shelley complex--this sort of totalizing visionary existence, where anyone who resists you on anything can't ever be doing it for legitimate logical or ethical reasons, rather they must be stupid or perverse or fearful. I had that feeling while reading Shelley this week and it really did bring me back to that relationship. And I'm sure it's not a coincidence that I loved Shelley most when I loved D. the most.
On the other hand, I reread Frankenstein kind of reluctantly, but have never loved it more--in part because I'm finally at the point where I can geek out on the romanticist intertexts.
I'm actually done with all the primary texts on that list. Not so the others, and it doesn't help to not really have time to myself this weekend. Tomorrow is the big Victorian conference that my department holds every year. I'll be moderating the afternoon session and am apparently going to have to find the bios of the people myself. Should probably get on that while I can still print them.
I'm sure it will all be fine, and that next week at this time I'll have a real-person mattress and will be with The Poet.
Unrelated side note (because everything else in this post has been so coherent). There's an actual real live bar in my neighborhood--like a block away. This is the most lovely news I've gotten about this place in awhile. Who needs a decent grocery store when you can stop at the beer garden on the way home from the crappy grocery store? This news somewhat mitigates the fact that the soap dish in my bathroom fell off the wall while my mother was in the shower. I may have perhaps been overzealous in scrubbing the tiles last weekend--all that cheap white paint really is holding this place together.
Meanwhile, back in St Louis, my little brother got his appendix out last night.
It's okay, I guess, and I'm getting a few things out of it--mainly a new bed, hopefully--but still. It's disruptive. I like to be able to choose my disruptions better.
Other things. It looks like I'm getting an article out of the conference paper I gave, as I have gotten a couple very charming emails from the very important scholar in my field since then. This means I'm basically writing two articles this summer. I have to keep in mind that I'm not working from scratch, that one is basically a revision (albeit an extensive one) and the other is more or less a chance to work up everything I cut out of the conference paper. But, in order to be able to eat, I'm also trying to get a job at the law firm where the husband of a friend of mine is a partner. Best case scenario would be that I work there 2-3 days a week, spend 10 hours in the library on the other days. This kind of arrangement scares me, though, and that was partly what last Friday's meltdown was about. I say that only because I combined the working / paper writing thing during my first grad school summer and I remember it being miserable and lonely. But I'm trying to convince myself that the structure wasn't the problem and that I was miserable and lonely because my ex (then boyfriend) was making it so. Also, I really do think the first summer of grad school is awful. So I'm hoping this will be better. Also hoping that I get the class(es) at Not My School for the fall, since that would allow me to make some decent money for what will in a lot of ways be different and hopefully slightly less frustrating work.
The Poet has been in Chicago for the last couple of days on a business trip partially scheduled to coincide with my mother's visit. I sent him to the L&L a couple nights ago, and he called me from there. Somewhat ironically, the fact that he's in Chicago means that we can actually talk on the phone at night, which we can't do when he's home. It's nice to be able to do this, gives me the closest thing I've had to private space this week. I think he's coming back to New Jersey today, though, and it's still going to be almost a week before I see him. Needless to say, I have been pretty quiet on the issue of this whole relationship while my mom's been here--I've said merely that he lives in Jersey, is in my department but also has a real job, on a business trip this week too bad you can't meet him. Oh, and he makes me happy. In the meantime, we had dinner with The Professor last night and have made tentative (and work-killing!) plans to go to the Cloisters / Upper West Side with him on Sunday. My mother pronounced him charming but didn't seem to be too disappointed that we aren't a couple.
Also, K. called me on Tuesday night and we talked for awhile. That was the one real bright spot / personal-life accomplishment of Spring Break--becoming friends with K. again. I can thank Facebook for providing the space to let that happen. Well, Facebook and my being drunk enough to finally resolve just to add him as a friend and see what happens. But it was good. We exchanged several emails that allowed us to establish a kind of common narrative about what happened--a nice change of pace from recent experiences with that. And, if nothing else I think we're finally moving past the whole slightly hurtful stressy non-encounters in the library, maybe even figuring out how to be friends. I think to some extent our friendship will always involve a bit of playing with fire, but maybe that's okay. I'll probably have a little bit of a crush on him for awhile. But I can live with that. We're tentatively planning to hang out next week when my mother is finally gone. But I kind of want to see The Poet more. That's how things probably should be.
I read a lot of Shelley for my committee member meeting yesterday. I'm in a very different place with Shelley than I was two years ago. I found it very hard to get past the biographical elements of "Epipsychidion"--in part because I feel like there's an enormous ethical problem with turning women into heavenly bodies. And even as I knew that my response was incredibly simplistic in a lot of ways and tried to fight it (I spent a lot of time reading Shelley when I was in coursework, so I do *know* more or less what I'm supposed to get out of a sympathetic reading of him), I couldn't really feel comfortable with a lot of it. (Oddly, I still really love Prometheus Unbound in some ways.) A lot of this has to do with my ex, who really does have a Shelley complex--this sort of totalizing visionary existence, where anyone who resists you on anything can't ever be doing it for legitimate logical or ethical reasons, rather they must be stupid or perverse or fearful. I had that feeling while reading Shelley this week and it really did bring me back to that relationship. And I'm sure it's not a coincidence that I loved Shelley most when I loved D. the most.
On the other hand, I reread Frankenstein kind of reluctantly, but have never loved it more--in part because I'm finally at the point where I can geek out on the romanticist intertexts.
I'm actually done with all the primary texts on that list. Not so the others, and it doesn't help to not really have time to myself this weekend. Tomorrow is the big Victorian conference that my department holds every year. I'll be moderating the afternoon session and am apparently going to have to find the bios of the people myself. Should probably get on that while I can still print them.
I'm sure it will all be fine, and that next week at this time I'll have a real-person mattress and will be with The Poet.
Unrelated side note (because everything else in this post has been so coherent). There's an actual real live bar in my neighborhood--like a block away. This is the most lovely news I've gotten about this place in awhile. Who needs a decent grocery store when you can stop at the beer garden on the way home from the crappy grocery store? This news somewhat mitigates the fact that the soap dish in my bathroom fell off the wall while my mother was in the shower. I may have perhaps been overzealous in scrubbing the tiles last weekend--all that cheap white paint really is holding this place together.
3.28.2008
On Mary Wollstonecraft and running to stand still
What a long time it requires for us to know ourselves; and yet almost everyone of has more of this knowledge than he is willing to own, even to himself. I cannot immediately determine whether I ought to rejoice at having turned over in this solitude a new page in the history of my own heart, though I may venture to assure you that a further acquaintance with mankind only tends to increase my respect for your judgment, and esteem for your character. --Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)
My committee member and I met to talk through Godwin and Wollstonecraft this afternoon. When I got to the coffeeshop (the same one where I once saw Paul Bettany), I told her that I'd figured out what Godwin meant about the Letters... being a book calculated to make a reader fall in love with its author.
Unfortunately, it came out sounding a little bit lame. But it still had the feeling of a profound revelation for me when it first crossed my mind this morning in the frenzy of preparation for the discussion now over (this has been the general motion of the week). This is how I wrote it in my notes this morning:
Does G find the letters to be calculated to make the reader fall in love with the author in part because the author is still in love with the person she’s addressing? Actually, it just occurred to me that there’s another thing here…there’s something hot for a certain kind of man about an obviously intelligent woman who feels—-and feeling here is almost entirely inseparable from suffering and from doing so with a kind of frankness—-allowing oneself to be seen at one’s lowest point: as W herself says at one point: “I felt like a bird fluttering on the ground unable to mount; yet unwilling to crawl tranquilly like a reptile, whilst still conscious it had wings.”
I should have just blogged this thought when I had it because it looks lame here, too. It felt more profound in the context of rereading my notes on the Letters and also, I think, in light of the fact that this week I have begun to articulate to some of my committee members and friends and really anyone who will listen the emotional effects of my orals reading. Namely, that I have been much happier since I got Charlotte Bronte out of my system. Because that was also about suffering and the reification of it by others. Yet, it's also connected to well, shallower things, more personal ones, some just ridiculous. The emotional equivalents of the ligers and tigons that distracted me from Tennyson earlier in the week.
But perhaps I should go back further. I started working on Wollstonecraft about two years ago. And I realized today, in going back and rereading certain texts and my notes on others, that I am much better positioned to understand Wollstonecraft than I was in the spring of 2006. If nothing else, I am profoundly grateful that a woman like her existed and that she left an archive. And I am grateful that Godwin wrote the Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, even with all its misreadings (and they are legion), imprudences, and, indeed, reifications of her as a suffering subject. (There's a particularly unforgettable image early on where the young Mary throws her body on top of her mother to shield her from her father's blows.)
In part, the fact that I can read around Godwin's impositions on Wollstonecraft is due to my internalization of the latter and also to the experience of the last two years, to my own reflections on why I once told The Poet that I don't believe in narrative (like many other people in my life, he thinks I should write a novel, which is laughable to anyone who reads this blog, I'm sure).
This post is also about feeling like I've spent this whole week doing work that gets consumed almost right after I produce it. Like I've been waking up at 7:00 in the morning to prepare for things that are over by 3. This is a weird way to live sometimes, especially because I don't feel actively stressed out. (Looks like there may be an advantage to dating a Zen master after all.)
---
Related but tangential: Is there a bad version out there of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"? This may be one of the most beautiful songs in the world.
----
I hope that the effort it just took me to type all of this out is worth it in terms of clearing my mind so that I can work this weekend without obsessing. I really must get ahead on prep and finish the conference paper. And apply to the next conferences, of course. And read Coleridge, Gaskell, and perhaps some early Tennyson.
Now off to Williamsburg for drinks and dinner.
3.19.2008
Tangential
So, I'm typing my notes from reading Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and I find myself wondering whether The Matrix isn't, at bottom, an inherently Rousseauistic text. I mean, okay, it's a little bit too communitarian in the end, since Rousseau is all about the solitary individual, but what these works seem to share is the sense that man (against anything that Hobbes et al. would say) is essentially good (think Morpheus's defense against the Agent Smiths in the first movie, a scene that has always bothered me precisely because I am something of a misanthrope [yes! Shocking! I know.] and am also still shaped by a certain kind of Calvinist upbringing and would thus never suffer for those kinds of ideals) and a suspicion of "progress" in general as increasing our interdependece in a way that is ultimately detrimental to ourselves. And the Matrix movies also seem to share a belief that transparency in our language and interactions should be a goal--even if it can't be fully achieved--I mean, isn't that what the point of getting unplugged is?
I could be completely off base here, and it's been awhile since I've seen The Matrix while I was sober. And perhaps I'm being too reductive in limiting this just to Rousseau--perhaps there's a more general "Romantic" element of The Matrix to be explored? Surely someone's done that...(n.b. Google seems to say no to this, but Google also doesn't believe that I meant to search just for "romanticism" and so also pulls up hits for "the matrix" and "romantic," which is not particularly what I am interested in.)
I could be completely off base here, and it's been awhile since I've seen The Matrix while I was sober. And perhaps I'm being too reductive in limiting this just to Rousseau--perhaps there's a more general "Romantic" element of The Matrix to be explored? Surely someone's done that...(n.b. Google seems to say no to this, but Google also doesn't believe that I meant to search just for "romanticism" and so also pulls up hits for "the matrix" and "romantic," which is not particularly what I am interested in.)
Early to bed, early to...well, at least I woke up before the Brian Lehrer Show came on
(I'm trying to begin my days by blogging or at least journaling. Partly to remind myself to balance reading with writing. Also partly because if I don't write out some of this stuff I either brood about it and fail to work or I feel the need to tell people who don't necessarily need to know it.)
So I really thought that I was going to get up and start working at 6:30 or 7:00 this morning. When I rolled over it was 9:23 and I had been having one of my bizarrely crowded Wisconsin-related dreams. My whole family was at the house and then some. And K kept calling me but we never really ended up talking. Or he might have actually been there. I checked my messages when I got up this morning just in case this particular disturbance was occasioned by him rather than me. (We did have a sort of hurried and possibly planned on his part encounter in the library on Friday, but Friday was really complicated.) In retrospect, I realize the entire scenario was absurd because I don't get cell phone reception in Wisconsin. (Not the whole state, just where we are.) Or it might have been partially in St Louis. Oh, and I'm pretty sure that some of the characters from Friday Night Lights were there.
The point is that, in spite of my best intentions, I was in a dead sleep until 9:23. I must not have even heard the alarm go off. I think I need to get one of those alarm clocks that makes the room brighter because my bedroom doesn't actually have any windows. It's fine because I keep the door open to the living room, but when it's raining (like today) or just plain dark in the room, things can be pretty bleak. This may also be a necessity if I get that adjuncting job that would have me teaching composition in the Village at 8:00 in the morning.
Why I thought that it would even be possible for me to get up at 6:30 and start working requires a slightly longer explanation. For what it's worth, that's what I did yesterday. But let's go back to Sunday. On Sunday, I gratefully returned to my own home. Not that housesitting wasn't fun, but I was definitely ready to come back home. Also, the cleaning crew showed up at around 9:30 while I was in the shower. Granted, this was an improvement over their having woken me up at 8:25 on Friday morning, but it still increased my desire to head back to Crown Heights, especially since the information I had was that they were coming "midday." Anyway, I reestablished myself at home, then turned right around to go back to school, where I got about half of my grading done (the reading of the papers, but not the commenting or deciding grades) as well as a few other things, all with no awkward or painful run-ins with K. What did not get done, however, was grocery shopping, as somehow by the time I got back to Brooklyn, the Key Food, the fruit stand, and the overpriced yet okay in a pinch bodega fronting as a grocery store were all closed. Determined not to spend more money and time eating out, I went home to scrape together a meal from my extremely bare cupboards.
That turned out to be a mistake. Something I ate, whether the defrosted lentil soup from a couple of weeks ago, the frozen blueberries I had for dessert, or (as I suspect) a couple bites of tahini while the soup was heating up gave me stupid food poisoning. The irony of throwing up at 7:00 in the morning after my first night of sobriety in a week did not escape me.
So that kind of killed Monday. I cancelled my appearance at my field meeting, dragged myself across the street for ginger ale and a single sleeve of saltines that cost me $1.99, and resolved to wait the thing out until I could work again. That never happened. But, as a result, I ended up going to bed at around 9 and getting up at 5:30, and proceeding to work basically a 12-hour day, not including the commuting to teach. I got all the prep done, but had to take about two and a half hours after class to finish the grading. (That was too long, I realize.) After a trip to Target on my way home (I had to get some basic food as well as pens, as I completely ran out of stupid pens over the weekend, too), I was pretty exhausted, so I figured I'd just go to bed early again and get up early again.
Well, thus endeth that experiment. I kind of knew I was sunk last night when, despite being unable to keep my eyes open for even one more page of Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, I found myself unable to stop tossing and turning. And I think my sleep was fitful, at best, especially if I was having those kinds of dreams. And I think my plans for the day were at best overly optimistic. If it continunes to rain, I'm not going ot the grocery store either. It's far enough away to be a pain in the ass and enough of a shithole not to be worth it if it's raining. This doesn't bode well for my newly-formed resolution to eat fewer processed foods and do more cooking, but, well, I live in the hood. People here clearly don't *want* decent grocery stores. And no matter what A. says, not all of us can just zip up to the Union Square Whole Foods to grab some fish. My friend M says she's going to start bringing me to the Fort Greene Farmer's Market to meet both seasonal produce and age-appropriate single boys. That may help get this resolution off the ground. I may also start trying to patronize the Flatbush Co-Op that I just read about, but not until my conference paper is written. That kind of excursion would also entail a fairly high probability of running into the K, since as best I can remember, it's basically around the corner from his house. Brilliant.
Yes, I realize this was an incredibly boring post, and one that's probably not going to be improved if I mention things like having rearranged my living room furniture, deciding that I need to slightly alter my approach to orals note taking, or saying that my plans for the day involve adding Victorian women poets to one of my orals lists, typing notes for Rousseau, and writing a draft of my Tennyson paper.
On the other hand, this may all be a fascinating placeholder for some of the other things that are going on. I'm still a bit emotionally hung over from Friday. For some reason, it was just so damn *complicated.* Suffice it to say that I did not, for example, expect Thursday night to end the way it did. It was something I'd thought about in a general sense, but apparently I'll do all kinds of things after that many drinks. (I haven't decide if I'm blogging that in full yet.) The morning was weird and restless, even when I had a decent seat for a couple hours at West Village Coffee Shop, then school was a bizarre series of run-ins. Not just the K, but some dude that I know from a completely different social circle and had an awkward non-sexual night with in December (I actually just saw and avoided him, feeling cowardly). And, potentially, at the back of the room where our recruitment event was being held, someone who may actually be responsible for the absolute worst thing that happened to me last year, something that I have told very few people about and may never blog. Plus a bunch of other encounters, renewals of friendships, long discussions--well, suffice it to say all I did during the day on Friday was sleep on the couch where I was housesitting and finish Confessions.
Anyway. I do have a lot of things to do today that I should probably start on, especially since I'm not into my fourth hour of work like I thought I was going to be, and also because I am seeing the Poet (my new pseudonym for the guy I don't really know how to talk about since he is absolutely 100% wrong for me and far too old and probably deserves to have a reputation as kind of an ass and yet makes me fairly happy at least in the sort of half-relationship that is all I am able or willing to have with him) tomorrow night which means I really must dispense with most of Rousseau today.
Okay, working.
So I really thought that I was going to get up and start working at 6:30 or 7:00 this morning. When I rolled over it was 9:23 and I had been having one of my bizarrely crowded Wisconsin-related dreams. My whole family was at the house and then some. And K kept calling me but we never really ended up talking. Or he might have actually been there. I checked my messages when I got up this morning just in case this particular disturbance was occasioned by him rather than me. (We did have a sort of hurried and possibly planned on his part encounter in the library on Friday, but Friday was really complicated.) In retrospect, I realize the entire scenario was absurd because I don't get cell phone reception in Wisconsin. (Not the whole state, just where we are.) Or it might have been partially in St Louis. Oh, and I'm pretty sure that some of the characters from Friday Night Lights were there.
The point is that, in spite of my best intentions, I was in a dead sleep until 9:23. I must not have even heard the alarm go off. I think I need to get one of those alarm clocks that makes the room brighter because my bedroom doesn't actually have any windows. It's fine because I keep the door open to the living room, but when it's raining (like today) or just plain dark in the room, things can be pretty bleak. This may also be a necessity if I get that adjuncting job that would have me teaching composition in the Village at 8:00 in the morning.
Why I thought that it would even be possible for me to get up at 6:30 and start working requires a slightly longer explanation. For what it's worth, that's what I did yesterday. But let's go back to Sunday. On Sunday, I gratefully returned to my own home. Not that housesitting wasn't fun, but I was definitely ready to come back home. Also, the cleaning crew showed up at around 9:30 while I was in the shower. Granted, this was an improvement over their having woken me up at 8:25 on Friday morning, but it still increased my desire to head back to Crown Heights, especially since the information I had was that they were coming "midday." Anyway, I reestablished myself at home, then turned right around to go back to school, where I got about half of my grading done (the reading of the papers, but not the commenting or deciding grades) as well as a few other things, all with no awkward or painful run-ins with K. What did not get done, however, was grocery shopping, as somehow by the time I got back to Brooklyn, the Key Food, the fruit stand, and the overpriced yet okay in a pinch bodega fronting as a grocery store were all closed. Determined not to spend more money and time eating out, I went home to scrape together a meal from my extremely bare cupboards.
That turned out to be a mistake. Something I ate, whether the defrosted lentil soup from a couple of weeks ago, the frozen blueberries I had for dessert, or (as I suspect) a couple bites of tahini while the soup was heating up gave me stupid food poisoning. The irony of throwing up at 7:00 in the morning after my first night of sobriety in a week did not escape me.
So that kind of killed Monday. I cancelled my appearance at my field meeting, dragged myself across the street for ginger ale and a single sleeve of saltines that cost me $1.99, and resolved to wait the thing out until I could work again. That never happened. But, as a result, I ended up going to bed at around 9 and getting up at 5:30, and proceeding to work basically a 12-hour day, not including the commuting to teach. I got all the prep done, but had to take about two and a half hours after class to finish the grading. (That was too long, I realize.) After a trip to Target on my way home (I had to get some basic food as well as pens, as I completely ran out of stupid pens over the weekend, too), I was pretty exhausted, so I figured I'd just go to bed early again and get up early again.
Well, thus endeth that experiment. I kind of knew I was sunk last night when, despite being unable to keep my eyes open for even one more page of Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, I found myself unable to stop tossing and turning. And I think my sleep was fitful, at best, especially if I was having those kinds of dreams. And I think my plans for the day were at best overly optimistic. If it continunes to rain, I'm not going ot the grocery store either. It's far enough away to be a pain in the ass and enough of a shithole not to be worth it if it's raining. This doesn't bode well for my newly-formed resolution to eat fewer processed foods and do more cooking, but, well, I live in the hood. People here clearly don't *want* decent grocery stores. And no matter what A. says, not all of us can just zip up to the Union Square Whole Foods to grab some fish. My friend M says she's going to start bringing me to the Fort Greene Farmer's Market to meet both seasonal produce and age-appropriate single boys. That may help get this resolution off the ground. I may also start trying to patronize the Flatbush Co-Op that I just read about, but not until my conference paper is written. That kind of excursion would also entail a fairly high probability of running into the K, since as best I can remember, it's basically around the corner from his house. Brilliant.
Yes, I realize this was an incredibly boring post, and one that's probably not going to be improved if I mention things like having rearranged my living room furniture, deciding that I need to slightly alter my approach to orals note taking, or saying that my plans for the day involve adding Victorian women poets to one of my orals lists, typing notes for Rousseau, and writing a draft of my Tennyson paper.
On the other hand, this may all be a fascinating placeholder for some of the other things that are going on. I'm still a bit emotionally hung over from Friday. For some reason, it was just so damn *complicated.* Suffice it to say that I did not, for example, expect Thursday night to end the way it did. It was something I'd thought about in a general sense, but apparently I'll do all kinds of things after that many drinks. (I haven't decide if I'm blogging that in full yet.) The morning was weird and restless, even when I had a decent seat for a couple hours at West Village Coffee Shop, then school was a bizarre series of run-ins. Not just the K, but some dude that I know from a completely different social circle and had an awkward non-sexual night with in December (I actually just saw and avoided him, feeling cowardly). And, potentially, at the back of the room where our recruitment event was being held, someone who may actually be responsible for the absolute worst thing that happened to me last year, something that I have told very few people about and may never blog. Plus a bunch of other encounters, renewals of friendships, long discussions--well, suffice it to say all I did during the day on Friday was sleep on the couch where I was housesitting and finish Confessions.
Anyway. I do have a lot of things to do today that I should probably start on, especially since I'm not into my fourth hour of work like I thought I was going to be, and also because I am seeing the Poet (my new pseudonym for the guy I don't really know how to talk about since he is absolutely 100% wrong for me and far too old and probably deserves to have a reputation as kind of an ass and yet makes me fairly happy at least in the sort of half-relationship that is all I am able or willing to have with him) tomorrow night which means I really must dispense with most of Rousseau today.
Okay, working.
3.11.2008
For not to think of what I needs must feel
(With apologies, of course, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.)
So for the last couple of days, I've been house-and-cat-sitting for one of my committee members and her partner while they're at an international conference. They don't live all that far from me, but it's a much nicer/cooler part of Brooklyn than where I make my own home, a part that I've always loved without actually being able to afford living there. It's a nice place, without being over the top or pretentious--though they're clearly people with very good taste who take pictures of themselves looking photogenic in culturally important locations. They are also the kind of people who don't keep any processed food around, and when they do, they put it in glass jars in the cupboard. (That's actually a good lesson for me, since I've already been making halfhearted attempts at living less on things that come from freezer sections and snack aisles.) I know they are doing me a favor by giving me this chance--and my committee member was right, it is really nice to be liberated from my own belongings, books, and distractions, but it's also left me feeling more than a little displaced as I muddle through the rest of my life at the moment. It's not a bad thing, and I'm certainly grateful, but I suppose I was hoping for a little, I don't know...inspiration? I mean, I've gotten a lot of reading done (this week, it's Rousseau's Confessions, Genette's Narrative Discourse, and a lot of guilt feelings about Tennyson), and it's not like I haven't been writing at all--it's just that the writing has mostly been notes on George Eliot novels and responses to my students' paper drafts. (At some point I would like to do a post on the amount of writing that goes into teaching comp--it's not something that I've seen covered before, but it's been on my mind, as several of my students have mentioned in conferences that they were pleasantly surprised that I read what they write and respond to it.)
What I really need to do is write my conference paper. There were a couple of minutes yesterday where I felt like the intro was coming together, so at least that's good.
I don't know what to do, though, about my larger feeling that I'm just existing. I mean, I do actually have things to blog about. For one thing, I saw The Professor last week. Those of you who came over from the last blog may remember the rather large role The Professor played in my life from mid-2006 until about six months ago, when he bailed on me as a friend shortly before my abortion. (Yeah, since my Ex doesn't have access to this space, I can just come right out with that one--but most of you know that already, and it still feels better just to have that in play, period--someday I'll do the narrative of what was by far *not* the worst thing to happen to me in 2007.) Anyway, he shows up late to the Victorian Seminar my department runs last Wednesday, and he's sporting this awful beard. Like, "adding ten years and the suspicion that you're kinda sketchy" awful. And in that moment, I realized I was completely over him. It was awesome. We did end up talking at dinner--almost like old times--but as we left, I felt this unfamiliar sensation--the sensation of feeling....nothing. It was good, but also contributes to my general detachment and coldness.
Bonus fallout from last Wednesday: an outburst of jealousy from Our Mutual Friend. This has always been kind of rumbling in the background, but it took several days and a certain finesse of emails to get it out. All I can say is, would that The Professor had ever found me "disconcertingly beautiful." My life would be much less complicated now. As it is, I find myself the object of a crush from someone I am just not attracted to and I feel guilty about it.
Tonight I had dinner with my old friend A. She is clearly worried about me. It's funny, though. Both The Professor and my friend J seem to think that I am doing well, but A doesn't buy it. I don't feel like I have much in common with her anymore. It's not so much the student thing. It's more living in Brooklyn on no money and not getting invited out and they're all busy being engaged to age-appropriate people while I go out with a dude who's not that much younger than my dad and who I can't really talk about with anyone. And everyone seems to have that friend they're going to introduce me to....
Is it wrong of me to just admit that I can't completely make myself happy, and that even waking up to --- is better than nothing, even though I know better?
I think I will appreciate my home when I return to it.
I know I have stopped making sense. I should post this and go to sleep so I can regret this in the morning.
I miss inspiration, though. The last time I felt it, really, was the brief period with the first married guy, whom I'll call the Evanescent K, currently playing the role of the self-proclaimed douchebag who avoids me in the library.
Discussion question: Am I scary? Because there are, apparently, plenty of dudes who think I am? Complication: My students apparently think I am fun and happy and nice all the time. I shocked one of them as we walked to class last week when I said that I sometimes yell at tourists who are moving too slowly on the sidewalk.
Yes, I have been drinking. I went home briefly on my way here to drop off books, check mail, and get my own towels, and decided to bring a bit of bourbon over here. But I can't judge alcohol when it's in a vitamin water bottle, apparently.
I am actually kind of homesick for my own apartment. I think that's a good thing.
So for the last couple of days, I've been house-and-cat-sitting for one of my committee members and her partner while they're at an international conference. They don't live all that far from me, but it's a much nicer/cooler part of Brooklyn than where I make my own home, a part that I've always loved without actually being able to afford living there. It's a nice place, without being over the top or pretentious--though they're clearly people with very good taste who take pictures of themselves looking photogenic in culturally important locations. They are also the kind of people who don't keep any processed food around, and when they do, they put it in glass jars in the cupboard. (That's actually a good lesson for me, since I've already been making halfhearted attempts at living less on things that come from freezer sections and snack aisles.) I know they are doing me a favor by giving me this chance--and my committee member was right, it is really nice to be liberated from my own belongings, books, and distractions, but it's also left me feeling more than a little displaced as I muddle through the rest of my life at the moment. It's not a bad thing, and I'm certainly grateful, but I suppose I was hoping for a little, I don't know...inspiration? I mean, I've gotten a lot of reading done (this week, it's Rousseau's Confessions, Genette's Narrative Discourse, and a lot of guilt feelings about Tennyson), and it's not like I haven't been writing at all--it's just that the writing has mostly been notes on George Eliot novels and responses to my students' paper drafts. (At some point I would like to do a post on the amount of writing that goes into teaching comp--it's not something that I've seen covered before, but it's been on my mind, as several of my students have mentioned in conferences that they were pleasantly surprised that I read what they write and respond to it.)
What I really need to do is write my conference paper. There were a couple of minutes yesterday where I felt like the intro was coming together, so at least that's good.
I don't know what to do, though, about my larger feeling that I'm just existing. I mean, I do actually have things to blog about. For one thing, I saw The Professor last week. Those of you who came over from the last blog may remember the rather large role The Professor played in my life from mid-2006 until about six months ago, when he bailed on me as a friend shortly before my abortion. (Yeah, since my Ex doesn't have access to this space, I can just come right out with that one--but most of you know that already, and it still feels better just to have that in play, period--someday I'll do the narrative of what was by far *not* the worst thing to happen to me in 2007.) Anyway, he shows up late to the Victorian Seminar my department runs last Wednesday, and he's sporting this awful beard. Like, "adding ten years and the suspicion that you're kinda sketchy" awful. And in that moment, I realized I was completely over him. It was awesome. We did end up talking at dinner--almost like old times--but as we left, I felt this unfamiliar sensation--the sensation of feeling....nothing. It was good, but also contributes to my general detachment and coldness.
Bonus fallout from last Wednesday: an outburst of jealousy from Our Mutual Friend. This has always been kind of rumbling in the background, but it took several days and a certain finesse of emails to get it out. All I can say is, would that The Professor had ever found me "disconcertingly beautiful." My life would be much less complicated now. As it is, I find myself the object of a crush from someone I am just not attracted to and I feel guilty about it.
Tonight I had dinner with my old friend A. She is clearly worried about me. It's funny, though. Both The Professor and my friend J seem to think that I am doing well, but A doesn't buy it. I don't feel like I have much in common with her anymore. It's not so much the student thing. It's more living in Brooklyn on no money and not getting invited out and they're all busy being engaged to age-appropriate people while I go out with a dude who's not that much younger than my dad and who I can't really talk about with anyone. And everyone seems to have that friend they're going to introduce me to....
Is it wrong of me to just admit that I can't completely make myself happy, and that even waking up to --- is better than nothing, even though I know better?
I think I will appreciate my home when I return to it.
I know I have stopped making sense. I should post this and go to sleep so I can regret this in the morning.
I miss inspiration, though. The last time I felt it, really, was the brief period with the first married guy, whom I'll call the Evanescent K, currently playing the role of the self-proclaimed douchebag who avoids me in the library.
Discussion question: Am I scary? Because there are, apparently, plenty of dudes who think I am? Complication: My students apparently think I am fun and happy and nice all the time. I shocked one of them as we walked to class last week when I said that I sometimes yell at tourists who are moving too slowly on the sidewalk.
Yes, I have been drinking. I went home briefly on my way here to drop off books, check mail, and get my own towels, and decided to bring a bit of bourbon over here. But I can't judge alcohol when it's in a vitamin water bottle, apparently.
I am actually kind of homesick for my own apartment. I think that's a good thing.
3.03.2008
Sky Blue Sky
Last March was all Ides for me, really--I've been betrayed by so many of these mid-50-degree days walking down from Midtown past Bryant Park. It's worth remembering through all of this that 2007 wouldn't have hurt so much if there hadn't been so many bluesky days and letting yourself hope even though everything else was against it--and I remember how he and I talked each other in to believing in Spring even though we should have been smarter than that and this was the first time that someone asked me to save him from himself and I couldn't do it. And today for the first time I'm not wearing my winter coat--the black jacket and blue hoodie have come out and the sun is shining and somehow I have to write this conference paper and maybe it will all be okay today and I'll work steadily for the next nine hours and everything will be okay, okay, okay. How am I doing? I said something about being okay, less wretched, even if it's for the wrong reasons. I'm still willing to make certain compromises because it's nice to be admired by someone even if you can't introduce him to your friends or your mother. And it will never lead to the stomachdrop excitement and the almost manic bouts of confidence--and maybe that's okay, too, for now.
Wilco: I didn't die, I should be satisfied / I survived, that's good enough for now...
I'm justifying my late start at work by the fact that I was talking with my adviser about my conference paper. I have almost 40 pages of notes--not to mention the seminar paper I wrote a couple years ago on this poem--but I still haven't quite tricked myself into writing the paper. Hopefully with the rest of today, tomorrow evening after teaching, and Wednesday morning, this will come together. Though there are a couple of other things that need to get done.
Tentative plans--
Rousseau until about 3:30
Paper research / Writing from 3:30-8
Break to try to do the scanning stuff again. Ugh. Also delete some things from my school hard drive.
Back to writing until 10:30--try to have something that I can print.
Tuesday morning
Prep / Print / Verify Roster / Send email about the in-class essay / Grade the stray paper / Input grades so far / Make conference schedule
Work on conference paper and Rousseau while students are doing peer review and in the evening.
Wednesday - All conference paper, all the time
Except after all the 19th century stuff, when I should try to finish Rousseau
Thursday - Prep / Rousseau / pack for housesitting gig.
Wilco: I didn't die, I should be satisfied / I survived, that's good enough for now...
I'm justifying my late start at work by the fact that I was talking with my adviser about my conference paper. I have almost 40 pages of notes--not to mention the seminar paper I wrote a couple years ago on this poem--but I still haven't quite tricked myself into writing the paper. Hopefully with the rest of today, tomorrow evening after teaching, and Wednesday morning, this will come together. Though there are a couple of other things that need to get done.
Tentative plans--
Rousseau until about 3:30
Paper research / Writing from 3:30-8
Break to try to do the scanning stuff again. Ugh. Also delete some things from my school hard drive.
Back to writing until 10:30--try to have something that I can print.
Tuesday morning
Prep / Print / Verify Roster / Send email about the in-class essay / Grade the stray paper / Input grades so far / Make conference schedule
Work on conference paper and Rousseau while students are doing peer review and in the evening.
Wednesday - All conference paper, all the time
Except after all the 19th century stuff, when I should try to finish Rousseau
Thursday - Prep / Rousseau / pack for housesitting gig.
3.02.2008
I think your new haircut makes you look like a fool
...but of course I knew it was you the moment I saw you. I have pretty spectacular distance vision. Lucky me. And then I almost ran into you, when you were sitting on the floor in the aisle that has many of the books I work on but today I'm doing Tennyson not Coleridge so I didn't end up tripping over you.
Not that I'm going to be the one to talk first.
Yes, I *have* been a roiling pot of passive-aggressive angst today, and, no, it *wasn't* helped by having to quit working on my conference paper an hour and a half before the library closed only to spend that time trying to scan a bunch of stuff for my ridiculous workstudy assignment only to find that it's in the wrong file format and thus useless all because some dumbass was hogging the one scanner that doesn't have these problems by doing more than just scanning his documents, which is totally bad scanner etiquette so now I have to go back tomorrow and wrestle with this some more and do a bunch of other crap not related to my conference paper.
(For the record, technological shittiness and related issues of general library angst are the only things I get consistently upset about at my institution. This frustrates me even more than the fact that I still haven't gotten reimbursed for MLA. At least I got something out of that experience.)
The Mill on the Floss is less good than I remember it being.
I am going to drink a beer and then try to revisit what I can possibly cross of my to-do list when I'm in this mood. I'm thinking this would be a good time to tell the student who's missed six of the last nine classes that she's just out, plain and simple.
Not that I'm going to be the one to talk first.
Yes, I *have* been a roiling pot of passive-aggressive angst today, and, no, it *wasn't* helped by having to quit working on my conference paper an hour and a half before the library closed only to spend that time trying to scan a bunch of stuff for my ridiculous workstudy assignment only to find that it's in the wrong file format and thus useless all because some dumbass was hogging the one scanner that doesn't have these problems by doing more than just scanning his documents, which is totally bad scanner etiquette so now I have to go back tomorrow and wrestle with this some more and do a bunch of other crap not related to my conference paper.
(For the record, technological shittiness and related issues of general library angst are the only things I get consistently upset about at my institution. This frustrates me even more than the fact that I still haven't gotten reimbursed for MLA. At least I got something out of that experience.)
The Mill on the Floss is less good than I remember it being.
I am going to drink a beer and then try to revisit what I can possibly cross of my to-do list when I'm in this mood. I'm thinking this would be a good time to tell the student who's missed six of the last nine classes that she's just out, plain and simple.
2.09.2008
What I just said, but in Wordsworth's language
I deem not profitless those fleeting moods
Of shadowy exultation;
...
the soul—
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not—retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, to which
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain they still
Have something to pursue. (Prelude [1805] 2.331-32, 334-41)
This is particularly nice because it resonates with a certain Hegelian formation of going-beyond. I also like that he links memory with "possible sublimity"--it's philosophically elegant.
Of shadowy exultation;
...
the soul—
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not—retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, to which
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain they still
Have something to pursue. (Prelude [1805] 2.331-32, 334-41)
This is particularly nice because it resonates with a certain Hegelian formation of going-beyond. I also like that he links memory with "possible sublimity"--it's philosophically elegant.
The temporality of the sublime: an idea suggested by some lines in the Prelude
Quick note: When I moved into my current apartment in November, I got the keys about a week early and was able to be here before my official move in date to clean the place and buy a few things. This is essentially what I'm doing in this online space at the moment. I do plan to "introduce" myself more officially and lay out some of my ideas for this blog. But I'm also being pulled ahead by other work and other thoughts that I'd like to put here. Also, I haven't formally wrapped things up at my previous blog, though I know that the next post I make there will be my last. Perhaps there's a value in dispensing with some of those formalities anyway, in not making so many promises, setting up too many identities, and simply letting the writing set something up. So, on with the show.
I wrote out the following in a .doc file that's supposed to be dedicated to my notes on Wordsworth's Prelude. But I quickly moved on to some more "meta" reflections and realized that I needed to save some of them elsewhere, both to preserve the focus (such as it is) of my notes and to establish a separate archive for broader reflections. Enjoy, but cite.
“Oh, when I have hung
Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill-sustained, and almost, as it seemed,
Suspended by the blast that blew amain,
Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time,
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ears…” (Prelude 1.341-49).
What if the sublime is never accessible to a single consciousness at a single point in time, but is constituted through an act of recollection, in which two time bound consciousnesses come together? It’s memory, yes, but also not that simple—it requires that the adult look back on the child without attempting to lodge the sublime there. I’m not being clear. To go from a different direction. It seems that Wordsworth is able to get closer to the representation of the sublime than he’s really supposed to. The passage I’ve quoted above is a good example of how he can do that. The image is one of sublime peril—it doesn’t quite come out in the delivery, which is calm, but the more we think about the image, the more we can see that it’s a child quite literally putting his life in peril. That in itself is not sublime, since Kant tells us that nothing can be fully sublime if you fear for your life. The tone of the passage is controlled by the adult poet, reflecting on the situation. We know that the child survives because he has grown up to be able to reflect upon and write about this situation—so the fear for one’s life is not present in the consciousness and present of the writing of the scene. However, this site is not an occasion for the sublime either, since the other side of Kant—at least the way I read him—is that of overwhelming force—you have to take the danger as far as it can go, you have to project and in a sense give yourself up to overwhelming force. The paradox of Kant’s dynamical sublime is thus that the “safe place” necessary to the sublime is also what prevents the realization of the sublime. WW seems to attempt to resolve this conflict through a very specific mode of recollection: we take the peril and unknowingness from the child’s perspective and the safety from the adult writers—thus, the sublime (if it can be said to take place, and this question must always remain open in discussions of the sublime—this, to me is the point of Lyotard’s asking the “is it happening?” question in “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde”) takes place in this collision or collusion of the two consciousnesses, without ever being able to inhabit or decide them. Neither gets priority, and, for this reason, the sublime moment itself remains inaccessible and just beyond representation—it only “works” to the extent that words can be said to put these two moments into motion—the words on the page are a kind of gutter experience.
My structuring of this experience (and it doesn’t really have to be a child/adult divide either, though this is helpful as a preliminary discussion because it makes the differences more obvious) comes out of my attempt to explain the difference between Dickens’ representation of childhood experience in David Copperfield (1850) and de Quincey’s in Suspiria De Profundis. I’m still turning over the idea in the latter that “it is not the child who speaks”—for de Quincey, the child takes in experiences that he, as an adult, interprets later on. The structure in DC is much different—despite the fact that we know the conceit of the novel is an adult David Copperfield reflecting on his life, with the exception of only a handful of proleptic interventions, Dickens skillfully, but subtly, remains within the knowledge and perceptions of his narrator at whatever age he’s narrating. (This is a good example of a situation in which we need to rigorously distinguish the narrator and the focalizor.) the “Brooks of Sheffield” joke in the early chapters is a good example of how Dickens pulls this off; we also get this effect in Dickens’ judicious use of the present tense throughout the novel. Thus, in David Copperfield, it is always the child who speaks. So to speak. And this is why, though I do enjoy DC, it can never be a work of sublimity in the way that I think Suspiria (and the earlier and better-known Confessions of An English Opium-Eater) is. DC operates, more or less, on a continuous march of temporality, with anticipations that function as exceptions that prove the rule; de Quincey’s work—and, I think, WW’s Prelude—offers a ruptured and ultimately more flexible temporality that leaves room for the occasion of the sublime. (It is my intention to start speaking less and less of the sublime as such and more and more of the sublime occasion.) I should say, however, is that I don’t think this is the only way to work/write around/for the sublime—this is not, for instance, the methodology of Coleridge, which depends more on the troping of suspension. Of course, it's the image of suspension that first arrested me on these lines of Wordsworth's--a good example of the need to be attentive to slippages and overlaps.
I wrote out the following in a .doc file that's supposed to be dedicated to my notes on Wordsworth's Prelude. But I quickly moved on to some more "meta" reflections and realized that I needed to save some of them elsewhere, both to preserve the focus (such as it is) of my notes and to establish a separate archive for broader reflections. Enjoy, but cite.
“Oh, when I have hung
Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill-sustained, and almost, as it seemed,
Suspended by the blast that blew amain,
Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time,
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ears…” (Prelude 1.341-49).
What if the sublime is never accessible to a single consciousness at a single point in time, but is constituted through an act of recollection, in which two time bound consciousnesses come together? It’s memory, yes, but also not that simple—it requires that the adult look back on the child without attempting to lodge the sublime there. I’m not being clear. To go from a different direction. It seems that Wordsworth is able to get closer to the representation of the sublime than he’s really supposed to. The passage I’ve quoted above is a good example of how he can do that. The image is one of sublime peril—it doesn’t quite come out in the delivery, which is calm, but the more we think about the image, the more we can see that it’s a child quite literally putting his life in peril. That in itself is not sublime, since Kant tells us that nothing can be fully sublime if you fear for your life. The tone of the passage is controlled by the adult poet, reflecting on the situation. We know that the child survives because he has grown up to be able to reflect upon and write about this situation—so the fear for one’s life is not present in the consciousness and present of the writing of the scene. However, this site is not an occasion for the sublime either, since the other side of Kant—at least the way I read him—is that of overwhelming force—you have to take the danger as far as it can go, you have to project and in a sense give yourself up to overwhelming force. The paradox of Kant’s dynamical sublime is thus that the “safe place” necessary to the sublime is also what prevents the realization of the sublime. WW seems to attempt to resolve this conflict through a very specific mode of recollection: we take the peril and unknowingness from the child’s perspective and the safety from the adult writers—thus, the sublime (if it can be said to take place, and this question must always remain open in discussions of the sublime—this, to me is the point of Lyotard’s asking the “is it happening?” question in “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde”) takes place in this collision or collusion of the two consciousnesses, without ever being able to inhabit or decide them. Neither gets priority, and, for this reason, the sublime moment itself remains inaccessible and just beyond representation—it only “works” to the extent that words can be said to put these two moments into motion—the words on the page are a kind of gutter experience.
My structuring of this experience (and it doesn’t really have to be a child/adult divide either, though this is helpful as a preliminary discussion because it makes the differences more obvious) comes out of my attempt to explain the difference between Dickens’ representation of childhood experience in David Copperfield (1850) and de Quincey’s in Suspiria De Profundis. I’m still turning over the idea in the latter that “it is not the child who speaks”—for de Quincey, the child takes in experiences that he, as an adult, interprets later on. The structure in DC is much different—despite the fact that we know the conceit of the novel is an adult David Copperfield reflecting on his life, with the exception of only a handful of proleptic interventions, Dickens skillfully, but subtly, remains within the knowledge and perceptions of his narrator at whatever age he’s narrating. (This is a good example of a situation in which we need to rigorously distinguish the narrator and the focalizor.) the “Brooks of Sheffield” joke in the early chapters is a good example of how Dickens pulls this off; we also get this effect in Dickens’ judicious use of the present tense throughout the novel. Thus, in David Copperfield, it is always the child who speaks. So to speak. And this is why, though I do enjoy DC, it can never be a work of sublimity in the way that I think Suspiria (and the earlier and better-known Confessions of An English Opium-Eater) is. DC operates, more or less, on a continuous march of temporality, with anticipations that function as exceptions that prove the rule; de Quincey’s work—and, I think, WW’s Prelude—offers a ruptured and ultimately more flexible temporality that leaves room for the occasion of the sublime. (It is my intention to start speaking less and less of the sublime as such and more and more of the sublime occasion.) I should say, however, is that I don’t think this is the only way to work/write around/for the sublime—this is not, for instance, the methodology of Coleridge, which depends more on the troping of suspension. Of course, it's the image of suspension that first arrested me on these lines of Wordsworth's--a good example of the need to be attentive to slippages and overlaps.
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