Today's Zen Story / Yesterday's Commonplace Book

1. Today's Zen Story

I actually calculates the basics of my federal taxes back in January because I needed to get some numbers for a financial aid form. I found that I owed around $850-900. While I've owed that much before, this was particularly disheartening / panic-causing / traumatic / thwarting / depressing because I thought I'd finally gotten my withholding figured out at this point in grad school, when I wasn't freelancing, and so on. That was not a particularly stellar evening, to say the least. At the time I decided to take my dad's advice and just not think about it for a few months, keeping the money in the savings side of my checking account until April.

I revisited my taxes today, and, perhaps needless to say, I had to work through a lot of aversion to get there. Even when I finally sat down at my desk, I was procrastinating like mad, and I would stop every few questions to go through all the usual internet places: Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, my Not-NYU email account, Nerve (yes, alas). Since I hadn't figured out the exact tax back in January, I didn't know exactly what I was in for. And it wasn't encouraging to see that I'd made an adding error in my income that had it *under* by $100.

And then I realized that I'd missed one of the personal deductions, so that I'd calculated my income as several thousand dollars *over* what it actually was and was thus looking at the wrong tax table altogether.

I still owe a few hundred dollars (and I can't get the NYS forms to work on my computer, so I have to wait until Monday for that), but it's about $500 *less* than I thought it was going to be, than what I've been assuming and stressing out about for the last two months and change.

I can't even really describe the sense of relief, not unalloyed by sheepishness, that I'm experiencing.

2. Yesterday's Commonplace Book

"Already how am I so far
Out of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?

--Robert Browning, "Two in the Campagna"

In resisting idolatry, is the reluctant lover protecting himself against illusion? Or in looking for intimacy without risk, is he losing part of his soul? Because the heavy caesuras match the lover's halting heart, they contradict his boast of confronting no obstacles or barriers. Since the words that appear to lurch forward over the line endings are brought short by early-breaking caesuras they also inadvertently disclose to the attentive reader far more than the lover intends to say.

--W. David Shaw, "Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue"

Also from Shaw:

But the despair of the jilted lovers in Maud and "Locksley Hall," like the anguish of St. Simeon decaying by slow degrees on his pillar, is a mere pretense. Such speakers act out a fantasy of anguish in order to escape genuine despair.

In the archive of the evanescent

"...a certain silvery grace of fancy, nearly all the pleasure of which is in the surprise at the happy and dexterous way in which a thing slight in itself is handled. The sweetness of it is by no means to be got at by crushing, as you crush wild herbs to get at their perfume....A sudden light transfigures some trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing-fan, the dust in the barn door. A moment--and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again." -- Walter Pater, "Joachim du Bellay," from The Renaissance

It's probably a travesty of modern literary studies that people think that all you have to read of Pater is the Introduction and Conclusion to The Renaissance. This last line to me seems to be worth a hundred gemlike flames and I'm not sure we understand that either.

A few days into our correspondence, I told him that I was writing a secret dissertation motivated by the question of walking on water. This is true. It has already developed here, it is still developing--and I am slowly, belatedly, beginning to find it everywhere in Browning. It is the place where my life and my work--very long estranged, breached by teaching and other alienations--strain back to touch each other, promising the kind of coherence that I used to take as a kind of birthright, back when life looked a lot easier because we didn't know a damn thing about it. It's something with moments, like the Browning sonnet I posted last month, to get beyond asserting and against...I am sitting at my desk right now and looking at the quote I wrote out from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind a few months ago, the quote about "losing its balance against a background of perfect balance." The right to a beginner's mind not entirely recognized where I am, except in matters that are convenient to others. (A brush with triggermemories of the Worst Job I Ever Had this morning reminds me that I will never volunteer to organize an academic conference if I can help it.) And yet. Finally clearing spaces, a few at least, and this is all I can do for now. Withdrawing from the world, from excuses to spend money taking car services instead of just walking in silence, a withdrawal from talking to people all the time so that I can come back to my archive of the evanescent, to start thinking again.

"And what does the spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom....For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world. Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom?" -- Pater, "Wincklemann"

Robert Browning, "Youth and Art" (1864)

"Each life unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired, --been happy."

A young man and a young woman live in the same street (probably in a neighborhood a bit like my own) as they pursue their artistic vocations--his as a sculptor, hers as a singer. She's telling the story: "You wanted a piece of marble, / I needed a music master" and "For air we looked out on the tiles, / For fun watched each other's windows." An unspoken intimacy develops, though neither one ever talks to the other. Yet even in spring, the time of year when birds of a feather flock together, as it were (and I take the image from the poem itself), they never really intersect, no sign is given, no connection made--as if genre and gender are impassible, allowing only these sorts of passive-aggressive performances that have her singing "in a playful mood" to the "foreign fellow" of a piano tuner as revenge for the models she sees going into his studio, "some minx / Tripped up-stairs, she and her ankles."

It should have been different, of course. They should have gotten together, swept each other away to heights of artistic achievement. But our young artists aren't "rash" and they grow up and sell out instead. He becomes academically respectable, she marries "a rich old lord," their old rivals still stand unchallenged:

And nobody calls you a dunce,
And people suppose me clever:
This could but have happened once,
And we missed it, lost it forever.

This one strikes quite close to home, particularly in the stubborn suggestion that the intimacy might be all in Kate's head as she recalls this time in her life, a time whose poverty is marked not only by the images of picking at crusts but also by the way in which intimacy is fashioned from absences, from the missed possibilities of encounter in a shabby street, and from a kind of romanticization of the camaraderie of struggling artists in the city. How easy it is, in these kinds of situations, to begin to look out of your window as people go about their lives across the street in their own homes and to think that maybe they're looking back and thinking as hard about you as you are about them. (And it's not just starving young artists in the city--isn't this one of the fantasies that gets played out in American Beauty? and other movies, I'm sure.)

The text of the poem is here.

Bonus epigraph, for something

Already how am I so far
Out of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?

Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? Off again!
The old trick! Only I discern—
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

--Browning, "Two in the Campagna," stanzas XI and XII

A poem a day and other more specific resolutions

In spite of my decision to do rather than to resolve that I outlined last night (right before the awful bass started up again, prompting me to make two trips upstairs to have my knocking on the door ignored, and nearly necessitating another night of sleeping on the floor of my living room and much angst), I am also thinking in terms of some more specific ideas for supporting my overall intention to live for myself. Many of these take the form of more traditional "resolutions"--for instance, I'm joining the gym my friend Caroline goes to on Monday and we are going to be responsible for helping each other get back in the habit of going. (Personally, I think that once the semester starts I'll be shooting for a minimum of twice a week, since it's not somewhere I can walk to.) I let my membership at the Erstwhile Teaching College gym lapse once I wasn't teaching there and no longer could keep my workout clothes in my desk--plus, it became really out of the way when I started teaching at Not-NYU, which doesn't have its own gym facilities. And I do feel better when I'm going to the gym at least occasionally. There are also things about keeping my apartment in better shape, buying a few things that will improve my life in concrete and necessary ways (one of those alarm clocks that gradually makes the room brighter, an external hard drive for my Mac, an electrostatic mop so I don't have to keep buying Swiffer sheets, and so on).

One thing I just thought of this morning, however. One of the more famous stories about Robert Browning is that he made a New Year's resolution to write a poem a day in 1853. He kept this resolution for roughly three days, but one of the poems that came out of it was "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. I don't write poetry, but I do--of course--write about poetry. I tell people that I got into the field I did because it made me happy; that's something I feel like I've lost sight of over the past couple of years as I've started to go pro, as it were, with the exception of a few emotionally fraught late-night recitations of Maud and "Dejection: An Ode." So my version of Browning's resolution is this: I will read a new poem every day in 2009, starting now. Obviously, many of these will be poems related in some way to my work, and there will be days when I no doubt will read many new poems for reasons other than this resolution. But I want this to be somewhat separate, even as I leave room for it to serve multiple ends. The only reason for doing this is to stay in touch with the reasons why I'm doing this in the first place, beyond the specific instrumentality of the dissertation. I'm also going to try to record this here--even if it's just noting the name of the poem and a brief description, as I'm probably going to do today. Probably the quickest way to fail in this would be to expect to have brilliant close readings about everything.

I'm starting with a Browning poem, because I'm reading a lot of Browning these days anyway. ("A Death in the Desert" was incredibly haunting--possibly in ways that will make me rethink the basic chapter proposal.) And so:

Robert Browning, "Confessions" (1864--originally in Dramatis Personae). Short poem of 36 lines in nine stanzas...speaker is a man on his deathbed talking to his confessor, remembering the world not as a "vale of tears" but recalling instead trysts with a girl in his youth, evading the eyes of everyone in her house to meet her in the lane...joys of evasion, perhaps? (The dying man as a recurring scene for RB--of course there's "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's" and "A Death in the Desert" but also an image in "Childe Roland"....) Most interesting, perhaps is the speaker's use of the line of "physic bottles" on a nearby table to evoke the "suburb lane"--mentioning the Ether bottle twice, the second time in a way that somewhat collapses the referential levels: "As she left the attic, there, / By the rim of the bottle labelled 'Ether,' / And stole from stair to stair."

The aforementioned prospectus post

...which I can no longer afford to delay, now that I've finally read the last couple pages of "The Angel in the House." (Seriously, I don't know why more people don't read this poem. It's amazing in its ability to generate wtf? moments. I have a post about this up at the group blog where I use my own name, should anyone be interested.)

Okay.

I need to pick up the threads on my prospectus, which have been completely dropped since I crashed midweek. Before that, though, I was actually doing okay. I didn't do a lot of writing last week, but I did put in some intensive work on my bibliography, which mainly meant sorting out several stacks of files into piles that made sense--one stack for theory, one for general articles on the field (including both periodization and state of the field articles as well as ones that treat multiple authors or non-poetic texts) and finally, one for critical articles on individual poets. There's a lot on the bibliography that I will probably never look at, but I decided that it's easier to take things off the list than put them on there later on. And, for what it's worth, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of things I had looked at and did know about. (A lot of these particular files were from when I wrote the fake prospectus for a class in the spring of 2007.)

The bibliography thing also had the advantage of helping jog my memory about the state of the field. It's lucky for me that the big journal in my field published two issues devoted basically to self-reflection within the last five years, though I do wonder if the field is almost too-self-reflective to the point of being almost paralyzed. And in some ways, skimming through a couple of the articles (especially the ones that are calling for a greater attentiveness to language and performativity) helped me better understand the contribution that my article is going to make to the field and the kind of intervention that VIE was steering me towards. While I continue to see myself as a theorist more than a historicist, I've gotten to the point where I can deploy the historical strategically when I need to. And I'm beginning to think, too, that what I got in the habit of calling "historicism" (after The Professor) is probably closer to an untheorized materialism, the kind of scholarship that makes book reports from the archives. (I ran across a particularly egregious example of this recently, where the author was basically making a very basic argument about a certain poet, with the only real contribution being that s/he had OMG touched the book!) But I'm beginning to think, too, that in order to get anywhere, the field is going to have to get even more comfortable with explicitly theoretical gestures rather than crypto-theoretical arguments that attempt to erase their provenance. (I wish I could be more specific, but I can't totally do that here.) I think that my committee member who says that deconstruction has largely become an uncontroversial part of the tools of close reading; I'd say the same for gestures of attentiveness to historical context and the situatedness of the text. Where we go from there--as a field, as a profession, seems up for grabs.

It's possible that one of the reasons I've had such trouble getting the actual prospectus down on paper (as opposed to notes and paragraphs and sets of disjointed ideas) is that I was trying to start with the texts when I needed to start with the field. When I did the fake prospectus, I began with Tennyson, Arnold, and Wilde--now that it's for real, I realize that I may have to begin with the recent work in the field more generally. For some reason, this feels like a capitulation to...something: I mean, shouldn't my dissertation be coming directly out of the texts from day 1? There's a very specific place in Coleridge that sparked all of this: shouldn't my prospectus begin with that? I'm finding the answer to be no. What I realized when I was going through my files (especially those reflective issues of the journal in which I will soon be published) is that my thinking on this topic has always been directed, at least to a certain degree, towards making an intervention in the field. But I think my project makes more sense in that context. And that feels like a weird place to be. What I need to do today (one of the many things I need to do today) is to push back against that weirdness and just write the way it works. I think I'll be a lot better off when I get that down.

One of my other big realizations of early last week is that I've been a Victorianist all along, despite the forays into Romanticism. At least for dissertational purposes. I mean, I do still plan to talk a lot about Coleridge and a few others. But I don't feel compelled to talk a lot about, say, Shelley or Keats. (I managed to get through my orals with a Romanticism list that had no Keats on it.) On the other hand, I do still want to talk about things like the sublime, and I'm worried that there's going to be a huge time gap that I will need to somehow justify from a thematic perspective. Possibly by applying de Quincey. I'm suddenly aware of the ways that my interest in the Long Nineteenth Century is spread rather unevenly....I'm all about, say, the 1790s and the mid-1810s Coleridge. And then I don't really care about anything until the 1850s. I'm slowly inching into the 1860s and, with Augusta Webster, touching barely on the 1870s. And then there are several female poets of the late 1880s and 90s that I love but really can't justify writing about here. Ditto for Wilde. This leaves huge swaths of uncharted decades that are making me ever so slightly nervous. I may simply just have to atone for it all by promising to write my second book on the 1830s and 40s.

I've been walking around for several weeks saying that I'm going to write my chapters on concepts and themes rather than on a single poet or text. While I'm not going to discard that right away, I may do single-author chapter breakdowns. I can't really see past chapter 1 and whatever chapter the article becomes right now. And I'm not sure I'm really going to know what I'm writing about until I do the first chapter. This is a bit scary. But this is the point at which I should probably remind myself that the prospectus is less a document for planning the dissertation as it is the creation of a projected document that people would want to give you money to work on. Meaning that I don't necessarily have to write the dissertation that gets prospectused. If I can keep that in mind, I should be able to get it done fairly quickly, as I'm sort of frustratingly good at writing documents that predict interesting projects that I don't really intend to write. Of course, this makes me miserable later on, but it gets you through. And then I can go back to reading for a little while and perhaps coming up with an abstract or two.

I think I'm always looking for things in academic books that literary criticism is no longer able to deliver. And, as I begin my own project, it's possible that I'm beginning to realize the impossibility of my being able to live up to my own expectations.

On the plus side, the summer's article writing experiences seem to have had the effects of making me a more generous reader. Not in the uncritical "this is published so it must be good" way that I was when I started grad school, but in a way that nonetheless tempers the tendency to go into every article ready to rip it apart or be disappointed. That's probably a necessary stage to go through in grad school, and it's no doubt a side effect of certain seminar assignments, but in my case it was probably taken to more of an extreme because I was hanging around with The Professor so much. Cultivating a bit of generosity has, at least, begun to make my intellectual life a bit more rewarding.

I kind of just want to put off writing for another day and curl up with something old school like The Ethics of Reading, but I'm not going to.

Realization: my approach to my prospectus thus far has been plagued by the same problems as my approach to my personal improvement. Both of these projects have been undertaken with something less than the strategic organization that they require and as a result I've been wasting energy trying to think along too many different lines at once, forgetting what I already know, and having very little to show for the effort. I've also been worrying about the wrong things a lot of the time. I finally revisited the assignment sequence for the dissertation prospectus in our department's required course and realized the value of that kind of process and of at least revisiting it selectively to build on the work I completed a year and a half ago. Would that there were an assignment sheet for fixing one's life and not being all about the negative attention getting.

Anyway. Probably time to start working with the specifics that I can't post here. Either that or grading. (Shudder.)

I discover what my problem is.

Well, okay, perhaps not in a cosmic sense or anything. But, see, yesterday was another day of basically just huge frustration with the Victorian project--possibly even more frustrating since I had a really incredible zazen session in the morning--at least in the sense that I finally broke through the barrier of constantly wondering what time it was and really beginning to feel like I was starting to constitute a present that was something other than the usual mindracing of past/present. But that didn't translate into better writing, and when I headed off to the party last night, I was more than a little frustrated with the two paragraphs I had in the new version, and also just generally feeling like I was losing touch with the purpose of my work again--kind of coming back to the place I was emotionally with all this back at the beginning of July when I had lunch with FCM, a place where I do actually know that I'm no longer approaching this correctly, but can't get myself back together on my own. I need a pep talk, I thought to myself.

And that's when it hit me. Talk. Talking. Like, to people. In person. When was the last time I had a meaningful face to face conversation, I asked myself? I had been at home, except for my whirlwind trip to the Greenmarket (orange cherry tomatoes, more summer squash, peppers, a wheat baguette, ground turkey), all day. Friday I also worked from home. Thursday I went to the library but the only person I saw there was K, and I didn't talk to him. Wednesday I had been coming home from FCM's apartment and...worked from home. Tuesday I had worked at FCM's apartment, since I'd been planning to see The Poet Tuesday night, and when that feel through, I stayed in, talked to him on the phone, and watched Bring it On on Hulu. The last face to face conversation I've had that didn't involve a food / drink purchase was, I calculated, Monday night when I ran into my friend S. at West Village Coffeeshop.

Whoops. No wonder I was going a little bit crazy. No, crazy isn't even the right word, really. Except for being disappointed when I couldn't see The Poet, my solitude had largely been of my own making. I like taking advantage of FCM's place when I have the chance to, and I was also grateful to be back in my own home. Thursday was not a particularly productive day in the library, and I thought that maybe taking a break for a few days would help. I'm actually kind of proud of myself that I don't take every chance to talk to K.--in a way, this makes me feel better about the situation. And I'm really happy I stayed here on Friday, even if it wasn't super productive. But, even for me, this was kind of an excess in alone time, even in the summer.

Needless to say, I was really glad that I had a place to be last night, to be with a large part of my favorite people from my program in a setting that wasn't quite as debauched as usual. It's not like I felt the need to talk about my project per se, but more the sound of hearing my own voice and the voices of others that was regenerating. I had an especially nice talk with a guy who was in a seminar with me a couple of years ago--it had been a class that affected a lot of people deeply and long afterwards, and I was glad to be able to compare experiences. All in all, there was something oddly affirming about the whole night: everyone looked *spectacular*, people seemed happy and rested or at least not actively stressed out, L. brought cranberry wine from Three Lakes, and (at least in terms of the conversations that I had with people), there seemed to be far less of the general gossip about other people that occasionally makes me feel bad when it's over. And I was also able to reestablish what I hope will become a practice of not drinking so much that I'm completely out of it for two days.

Which is not to say that I've gotten much done yet today. I slept in, shot some emails back and forth with The Poet, sat, had some food, listened to some podcasts from the San Francisco Zen Center, and took a nap. Now, obviously, I am blogging. But I don't feel as twisted up as I have for the last couple of weeks, and I've finally remembered that there was nothing in VIE's email to me that said, "Start from zero with your article and redo the whole thing"--this was my idea. And even my revision, while it does involve some rewriting, was never supposed to be that.

To wit (and this is in some ways the impetus of this post, as far as externalizing something like this helps me get it done), the parts of the article that need actual writing rather than tweaking are:

* The intro, though this involves mostly moving up and combining the three or four paragraphs about the passage that are currently scattered on pages 6-13.

* What comes immediately after the intro, for obvious reasons. This will involve the insertion of criticism and a greater engagement with Adviser's work on Poe and my author.

* The discussion of the "signs of death" debate needs to be streamlined and tied more closely to the poem and to issues of reading and signification.

* The fiction pieces I'm using along with Poe need to be discussed separately in terms of their relation to ideas, not discussed randomly in the middle of the piece.

* I need to extend the discussion of the sleep / death articulation in the section on knowledge in a way that brings it back to linguistic signification and the signs of death debate.

* The final section on the governing metaphor in the broader Victorian literary context needs to be expanded substantially and brought back to issues of reading at the end.

This all looks like a lot, but it's different from actually rewriting the article. And I should be able to at least tell VIE where things are tomorrow even if it does take me a couple more days to whip things into shape. Though I should probably get on that about now.

----

The Poet sent me an email this morning asking me what I thought of the John Edwards thing and telling me that his wife had been forwarding him the NY Times articles, but that she'd attached a note saying, "It's okay, you know that you have the green light from me for your affairs." (Or something like that.) My general feeling, to the extent that I've given it much thought, is that it annoys me when people are aghast at the idea that adult life and adult relationships are complicated, and I think we'd be a lot better off as a society if we approached relationships with less of a one size fits all mentality and recognized that there are many ways of not conforming to the norm that don't necessarily make them less ethical. I'm speaking here mainly from my experience as being increasingly pegged as "that chick who dates old married dudes" and from feeling like I'm just kind of tired of talking about the whole thing. With that being said, it doesn't seem to me like Edwards was being particularly ethical about the whole thing, and he was also being stupid. Given that he was running for president in the United Fucking States, this would have been a good time, methinks, to keep it in his pants or at least have used protection. It does infuriate me, as a Democrat who has always kind of liked the guy, that he could have gotten the nomination and then had this story break, which would basically have fucked us all over in the country for at *least* another four years--in a way that even the Bill / Monica thing didn't have the power to do.

Anyway. Back to work, I think.

Sometimes I think that the thing I do best is writing about not writing

I'm getting nervous about the Victorian project again. I've frozen up so many times on this project (more than I've recorded here) and I always seem to freeze up in the matter of beginnings and structure. Even since its humble beginnings as an abstract last fall, my idea about this particular section of this particular poem has resisted my attempts to frame and situate it. Somehow, I managed to muddle through and get the abstract selected. Then there was the conference paper--same problem. I ended up writing a lame-ish intro just to get it done and figured that since I was the first paper on the morning's first panel on the last day of the conference, no one would really remember it anyway. And I think I was mostly right in this and was much praised afterwards--except for when Adviser told me later that someone had said to him that things were a little slow at the beginning. Two months ago, when I was writing up a pitch of sorts to VIE--same problem, and this time a fraught conversation with The Professor in West Village Coffeeshop ensued. (He was good at that particular function, when I could get him to actually help me with it rather than tell me to go reread a certain book which works better for him than for me because he never really understood what I was asking.) And so I threw something up.

Now, obviously, since I'm in a revision stage at the moment, based on a number of incredibly generous and thoughtful suggestions from VIE (seriously, dude is *amazing* and I never would have believed a year ago that I would be on a somewhat still starstruck and tentative first-name basis with him....), I have an introduction, right? But I'm not happy with it. Thematically, it privileges one part of my argument over all the others, and it's somewhat embarrassing that the name of the poet I'm discussing doesn't appear until page 6. (Did I mention that, if all goes well, this is appearing in a bicentennial issue of this particularly important journal for said poet?) Not okay. So there's the part where, from a structural standpoint, I need to raise certain issues earlier like, you know, the section I'm discussing. And then there's the fact that the intro that I'm trying to write my way out of was the result of some spectacular time-wasting on Google Books--lots of impressive sleuthing and a surprise encounter with Mrs. Gaskell ensued, but I'm a little bit wary of presenting this to the audience of this journal and people who are actually seasoned Victorianists without doing some archival work that I don't have the time or ability to do. The whole thing was basically a heuristic, and I kind of got seduced enough by it in the last draft to leave it in. But now I'm scared, and the several days that I've spent rereading and making notes on the 33-page original have convinced me that all it does anyway is set me up for some really annoying repetitions about 15 pages in. (Of course, when I mentioned to VIE that I was planning to redo the introduction, he was all like "Don't kill [anecdote] too quickly! It's representative of [idea that is interesting but increasingly beside the main point of my argument." So I'm thinking footnote.)

The larger problem I think is that I love the re-envisioning part of revision. Seriously, I've spent like three days writing ideas on the paper copy of this article (which is 33 pages, though somewhat less on screen after I inputted VIE's edits), going over the criticism that I need to work in, crossing things out, making questions in the margins--almost as if I was looking at someone else's work entirely. And of course that's kind of the case. I am able to distance myself from my work pretty quickly (except, of course, when The Professor was reading it, but we've solved that problem)* and I'm also fairly good at putting off decisions to the future self who will be writing. Thus, it's very easy for me to forget that I'm also going to have to be the one who puts all of these ideas into motion, into writing. (Unrelatedly, I'm sure this is both symptomatic and constitutive of why I'm a fairly good composition teacher.) So Friday's self is not particularly pleased with Wednesday's self--or even my afternoon self who was so thrilled to discover a parallel in theological discourse that would go so well with a discussion about knowledge and language. And, see, the problem that Writing Self has with Revising Self is often that my instincts in revision about what needs to be done are right.

And I have had moments with this project where I have been on top of things, really feeling like I'm engaged in hard core academic work, something really substantial. And it's exciting. But if I'm thinking carefully, these moments aren't the ones where I'm actually writing. Then, I start to get nervous, start reading blogs, drink a beer to loosen up, get tired, wonder if I'm too groggy to think. And it's sometimes hard for me to tell what's going on with myself.

This is actually something I'm trying to make room to examine through sitting zazen--not in a fully purposeful way, of course, since that's not really the point of this kind of meditation, but in the sense that one of the things I've realized even at this super-early stage of the practice of sitting still for 15-20 minutes first thing when I get up is just how fucked up my relationship to time really is. Like I can sometimes be very protective of it to the point of being ungenerous (especially for things like calling my parents) or of adding stress to my own life (I worry about it obsessively when planning trips to the city, going to the gym, and so on). And it was even a concern when I started thinking about taking up this practice, what it would do to my mornings, whether taking the time to do that would slow me down elsewhere. But then I started noticing that even though 15 minutes of sitting often has me wondering what time it is, whether I actually set the timer correctly or not (in my first attempt to sit, this question became so obsessive that I finally got up after like three minutes, verified that I had indeed set the timer correctly and then had to start over), I can still drop 30 minutes like *that* futzing around on the internet--I mean not even blogging, just clicking around, looking for something to read, something to do, hoping for an email that will rouse me for like three seconds and that I will probably put off responding to anyway. This is almost like a lower form of doing nothing...and I want something more.

But even though I've tried to actually be very aware of what I've been doing today and, if not prevent a lot of these driftings away, at least hold them in check, I'm still frustrated. It's very hard to stay in the present moment, to not have my mind racing over everything else I have to do--mainly, planning for my new class because it involves making a course packet that will probably take some time to process. But there's really nothing I can do on that until midweek anyway. Right now I should be grateful to be working with a generous editor at a prestigious journal and getting this opportunity before even writing a prospectus--but these are also all the things that make the beginning part really fraught, that make it a lot easier to scribble notes on the last draft and wonder if I need to go back and reread some more criticism just to be sure. (On that last point, I know I don't. I spent a couple of days doing some very focused reading and I know where my interventions need to be made.)

And now, of course, I'm at that liminal point in my night where I've been working pretty much for 12 hours (with admittedly varying degrees of productivity), where I'm not quite tired enough to sleep, wondering if I should pull an all nighter, worried about the effect it'll have on tomorrow if I do. There is obviously the Greenmarket, which will be a quick and strategic trip, as I have some food at home already and will be more oriented towards portable lunches, since I am racking up the drinking nights for the coming week--all the more reason why this edit needs to be more or less in shape by sometime on Monday. I'm also going to a party for a grad school friend in the evening...hopefully it will be small enough (if Facebook tells the truth) that I will not feel the need to get more drunk than the six pack of beers that I am bringing and talk inappropriately about The Poet and that I will be home early enough to get work done on Sunday. The Poet also said he'd call me tomorrow...he's in Puerto Rico for work (nice life, he has). Things are okay with us again. Minor adjustments.

On a happier note, today really seemed like early fall. I know that's kind of a perverse thing to say--the other way I could put it would be to observe that it was a really good day to work inside, by which I mean inside with the windows open and a lovely breeze with no need for the air conditioner to be on and storms rolling through and none of that humidity that makes thinking such an enormous pain in the ass. It may be a sign of my lack of full socialization into the academic profession that I don't dread August yet. It's obviously busy (though I get a reprieve, since New Teaching College starts a week later than my own institution), but there's a sense of possibility in the air (it is the new year, after all) and something shifts so that I no longer feel like I'm the only person in the world who's working. It's easier to concentrate this way.

Now if only I could produce the brilliant revision portended in the notes to my draft.

Oh, and the vaguely inappropriate dreams about people I know? Still continuing. Thanks, unconscious, for making me feel like a dirty old man instead of simply dating one.


*In the interest of fairness, I should mention that he did send me a text about 10 days ago apologizing for causing some of my recent meditations here. I sent back a reply that said basically, "it's okay, I think I know what my deal was now," and we haven't talked since.

Oh, right, so I have this blog...

Yeah. So. Really haven't been doing much of interest lately. Well, got the Romanticism Project sent off on Friday, so that was good. But it seems like a long time ago and I've already put it out of my head so I can focus on everything else. Also, I did a lot of drinking and goofing off for about 48 hours after that. Mostly fun, but also a long recovery. House/cat-sat for Fabulous Committee Member. Hoping I didn't kill her husband's tomato plant. Threw together the beginnings of the syllabus for the fall class. And went back to the Victorian Project. It needs a big overhaul. I think I can do it, but it's daunting. I'm sort of debating at the moment whether to push myself to start that tonight or just take a (not entirely deserved) night off and go to bed early. (Which I may not be able to do, since I keep having trouble falling asleep at like 2.) I could compromise and read more.

Had a number of dreams about people I knew while housesitting for FCM. Most of these could be described as vaguely to entirely inappropriate. I also had a dream where the premise was that everything of the last year and a half was the dream and I was still with my ex. That one had me shaking a bit when I woke up.

Also while at FCM's apartment, I read Gary Shteyngart's Russian Debutante's Handbook on a whim. It was kind of awesome. I don't read much fiction published after, say, 1900 and almost nothing of the last ten years, beyond some Murakami (and even that might be older) and whatever's in the New Yorker. But maybe I should start. I mean, I do only have one of Trollope's Palliser novels left for my before-bed reading.

I feel like it's been kind of a frustrating week with The Poet. I don't really want to go into much detail right now. I mean, in a way it's just kind of your basic *relationship* stuff...which of course generates its own drama because I get thrown back into worrying about having a relationship. Not the way I was in June, but somewhat similar. Without the need for Xanax. In a way, I'm trying to look at some of this as a blessing in disguise, where circumstances step in to hold things in check a bit right at the point where I get ready to let go a little bit too much. If that makes any sense. I think this is all of a piece with the walking on water thing.

As the fall semester starts, I'm going to be co-blogging (under my real name) at a field-specific blog that one of my colleagues has started. It's listed on my Facebook profile if you're interested.

Sometimes I have these really great moments where I really feel like I'm getting somewhere. Clearly, however, these moments are not currently connected to this blog. Perhaps when I'm not starting down 10,000 words of my own making and wondering how to make them make sense.

Things that are being, have been, or will be revised

The Victorian Project
Sent the draft of the Victorian project to VIE yesterday afternoon--yes, a week after our original deadline. I haven't heard back from him, but I'm crossing my fingers that it will be okay since a) it wasn't a "real" deadline, just a suggestion to allow for another substantial revision before the real deadline and there's still time for that if necessary, b) he was on vacation until Friday, and c) I'm not sure that there was anything else I could have done to have made it go much faster. It's a 10,000-word piece right now, and between 7,500 and 8,000 of those words did not exist prior to this draft. And I think that it's probably one of the better things I've written, ever.

The Romantic Project
...is due at the end of the week. I'm still not as confident in this as in the Victorian project, but I'm feeling okay about it. Doing a read-through today, comparing notes, figuring out what to focus on. I want to tweak a few things, amplify some points, maybe ditch a couple of others as being more trouble than they're worth, but I'm actually starting to believe that Committee Member was right when she said that it was close, or at least fine to go out to the reviewers. Hopefully, this means that I'll be able to have a relatively normal sleep schedule this week, since last week really got out of control. As I am no longer 20 years old, I also no longer get the same kick out of seeing the sun come up at 4:45 on a Wednesday morning.

My feelings about the way The Professor read the Romantic Project
I made myself sit down after lunch today and actually read through The Professor's comments on the Romantic Project. It's possible that with the distance of a few weeks, and 10,000 decent words on my Victorian poet behind me, I was better able to handle it. Okay, so it wasn't a total hatchet job. Some of the comments were actually helpful, and a lot of what I'd been unhappy about was just him being him. And I get that. And I can take it. But it wasn't completely what I'd needed from him, and I'm still no longer sure that I should be writing everything to meet his approval. I'm not quite as angry as I was. We haven't communicated since he sent me the comments and I wrote a (somewhat passive-aggressively grateful) acknowledgment that I'd gotten them. He called me last week, but I didn't pick up the phone and since he didn't leave a message and I didn't call back. It's possible, of course, that he read my post here about that. But none of this is really at the top of my list of things I'm coping with this week.

Mornings
I've sat every morning (or whenever I get up, which has mostly been before noon, but sometimes just barely), except for Friday when I was with The Poet in DC. The second week has been harder than the first; I'm struggling a bit with the posture, trying to figure out how to make it work for me without slouching, and I'm finding that it takes me almost the whole time just to really get in the right position, and then my timer goes off. I do attribute a couple of insights about the Victorian Project to the sitting, though, and I think overall it's a good thing--helping me to, slowly, shift my understanding of what it means to do nothing. And maybe The Poet can help me work on some of this later in the week. In a more general sense, though, this is giving me the impetus to change the way I deal with mornings in general--instead of getting up and going right to the computer, which slows me down and stresses me out, I get up, have some coffee, sit, and get in the shower. Ideally, anyway. It's not getting me out of the house much faster yet, but I do feel a bit better.

Exercise plans
...have pretty much fallen off the table due to this latest round of intensive writing. I need to get them back in gear, since I only have the membership at Erstwhile Teaching College until the end of August and won't be able to renew it until later in September. I suddenly noticed yesterday that I've gained a bit of weight as of late. Probably time to drink a little bit less beer, make sure to eat all the beets I keep buying from the Greenmarket.

How I feel about Amtrak
The first thought I had upon arriving at Penn Station on Thursday morning, sweating and on about four hours' sleep was...clusterfuck. However, this was before I got on the train (not even an Acela) and discovered the joy that was the Quiet Car. This made for a lovely, lovely trip, except for the part between Philly and Baltimore, when it filled up with teenagers who I'm sure thought they were being quiet. The Poet and I took the Acela back up together and that was also fun, mostly because we had a lot of wine.

24 hours in DC
Had I not gone to the the college I actually attended, I would have gone to Georgetown's School of Foreign Service instead. That's what everyone who knew me at the time thought I was going to do. Coming back to DC for the first time in seven or eight years got me thinking about roads not taken, and about what I would be doing if I had moved to Washington instead of New York. And then, about a half hour after I got to the hotel, I started laughing, realizing that I'd probably be doing pretty much the same thing--having sex with a married politician in a hotel room on a Thursday afternoon. The Poet also thought this was hilarious, though I realize this is going to be one of those stories, like the "How I met K after German class" one, that not everyone finds funny.

In general, 24 hours in DC did for me what five days in Wisconsin didn't: namely, make me appreciate living in New York and want to go home. The restaurant where we had dinner was kind of a joke, and I got carded three times at two of the bars we went to--The Poet found that pretty funny. Our hotel bar was awesome, but closed at like 10. But, as 24 hour periods go, it was really nice, surprisingly relaxing--and it gave me a chance to spend time with The Poet in a way that I don't usually get to because of all the...well, all the extenuating circumstances. We had a really good talk on the train ride home, about all kinds of things. I also took a picture of us with my laptop camera. Now I just need to get another one where it doesn't look like I have roughly eight chins. Because I'm pretty sure I don't, at least not yet.

My idea for this blog post
This was a much more boring post than I was planning it to be, though I'm not sure what I expected, considering that I've spent most of the last week either writing or watching Grey's Anatomy. (I don't care what people say about it being realistic or not, but I find the Derek-Meredith dynamic completely realistic and very similar to K and me--though I've never met his wife and he was the one cheating.) Which means it's probably time to get back to work.

In which I attempt to be my own adviser

This has been a frustrating day for work--I was at home all day (with the air on, alas) waiting for a UPS shipment and by the time it came it was too late to go into the city even if I wanted to. In reality, it's been a slow week all around--I had sort of an epic drunken trek through Brooklyn last Sunday after banging out a first draft of the Romanticism project; Sunday's insanity was followed by A's wedding drinks, which was destabilizing on its own and also in Williamsburg and thus requiring a 90-minute trek home; and the overall result is that my sleep schedule is still off, but with very little to show for it. Things looked up briefly on Tuesday afternoon as I spent a lot of time making notes on the latest hard copy of the Victorian project, but it was mainly downhill from there. Yesterday (Thursday) I was so tired at school that I just called it quits and ran errands until it was time to run my area meeting, and despite saying that I wasn't going to drink afterwards, I had four margaritas by about 8, came home and did who knows what but it certainly wasn't make dinner, crashed out early after talking to The Poet on the phone, and was up from about 1 to 4 a.m. anyway. I probably should have just made coffee and got to work. But of course I didn't do that. I have been trying to work on the Victorian project all afternoon, evening, and night, but it's not going anywhere--I'm feeling totally blocked, and nothing seems to be helping. I'm starting to panic a bit--it was one thing to throw myself on the mercy of my one committee member for the Romanticism project, but I can't do the same thing with the Very Important Editor of the Very Important Journal, who suggested last month that I send him something around the 20th. (To cover my own ass even then I qualified that with a "thereabouts"--I think that sending something by Wednesday, as long as it is decent, should be acceptable.) It has also been very hot in here--I tried to get through the day with just the fan on and not the A/C, but that was probably stupid. So I think I'll go to school and try to work tomorrow, even though I absolutely despise school on Saturdays.

I don't know what my problem is. It's not the same thing that was wrong with the Romanticism project. I know what I want to do, I know where I need to go. I am trying to stick to outlines and I have several sheets of paper with reminders to myself about what the main parts of the paper need to be and I have tried to be ruthless, in looking through the last working outline that spun wildly out of control, about cutting off lines of inquiry that really don't apply, sticking to the things that the Very Important Editor (hereafter VIE) responded to positively, but also being selective about that. I am not, for the moment, trying to connect the text I'm working on with a bunch of the author's other works. I don't feel the same need to do insane amounts of new research that I did on the Romantic project--though I probably should force myself to read that Gothic Convention book. But for some reason I can just not get started. I have ten disjointed and repetitive pages pasted in from other files, but I can't make them work into a coherent introduction--I think in part because the argument I'm making is somewhat complicated. Or, it's not so complicated, but it's one of those things where I really need to make all three parts come together because I'm not sure any one section really stands alone as interesting. If that makes sense. And I think it will work. But, it will work only if I get the introduction right and I can't seem to do that. I had this problem the last time around, too, so (since that was an outline) I just kind of shrugged and started with "This article makes the case..." Which was unsatisfying to both me and VIE, and we discussed the greater advisability of trying to steer clear of that kind of academese. Unfortunately, beyond that I've got nothing. I've tried out a couple of things but nothing's taking and I feel like I'm wasting a lot of energy spinning my wheels. And I'm mostly just damn frustrated with myself because, after all, a lot of this paper is about fucking premature burial--and if that doesn't lend itself to compelling beginnings, I don't know what does. But I worry about it getting out of control, and I worry that my outline and main points keep sliding out of my head. I've never been good at the whole "framing" thing, and no one seems able to help me.

Speaking of which. I know the other thing driving me right now is the hatchet job that The Professor did on the draft of my Romanticism project. I might be overreacting, and I probably shouldn't have read the email at all, let alone even skimmed his internal comments. But I did. And it's been eating at me since Tuesday, distracting me from the project I'm supposed to be working on, and undermining my confidence at the moment when I really need all the affirmation I can get. I don't mean that I think the draft is by any means perfect, and if I wanted a totally positive reading, I would have sent it elsewhere. I'm used to this with him. But. I'm not used to getting this critique when it's coming from a place outside of our friendship, when the next step isn't to talk more about it in person, when I don't sense any real...I don't know...interest? caring? Like some kind of investment in my success? I know that some of it is meant to be sparring, but...I haven't had the heart to do that with him for awhile--something kind of snapped for me around the night I went out with E. And even though I feel a lot better emotionally in general (and in the specific terms of my interactions with K. and The Poet), I can't muster up whatever it was that allowed me to be friends with The Professor, at least not on the terms that he was offering. And I guess maybe I was hoping that he'd notice, or care. But he didn't. And I knew he'd still be good for the reading and commenting, but what I didn't know was how different that was going to feel when it wasn't backed up by friendship.

(It sure as hell isn't backed up by mentorship. One of the things I always try to do, when reading his work or anyone else's, is offer suggestions where I can for improving things and not just ripping it apart. This is not something that is being reciprocated.)

So, basically, once again, The Professor succeeds in undermining my confidence. (This, as some of you may remember, was something of a theme of last summer as well.) I guess this particular undermining just comes as more of a surprise is all. But perhaps it shouldn't. I think one of the reasons why this is feeling slightly more oppressive this evening is that I needed to consult the hard copy of a seminar paper I wrote on this text about two years ago, and of course the copy I have is not the one where the professor of the class praised it but the one where The Professor wrote his comments. I refer to this as the paper that sucks ass; I totally understand all the ways it went wrong and all that. And I have a certain memory of having been a bit disappointed (but not destroyed) when it failed to impress The Professor as much as I wanted it to. But reading those comments now? Just...wow. It's clear that I was totally in love with him at the time; otherwise I don't think I would have forgiven some of it.

It's a hard line to walk. Because I want rigorous readers. Because a lot of time his readings tend to be spot on, because I don't entirely trust myself to reliably distinguish between his actual arrogance and my inertia or stupidity all of the time. Because I don't think I'm as good as my committee (or just random other people) seem to think I am, and so I'm more inclined to trust him because he's always ready to rip me apart. But I think maybe that's changing, that it's already changed w/r/t the nonacademic part of our relationship and all of the sudden this gets thrown into relief as well.

So I think that I'm better off taking my chances with my own committee members and with editors who have at least been impressed enough with me to think I'm not such a total idiot that I can't improve with a little mentoring and interaction. And this is what I know I need to hold on to. But it's hard, and the length of time I've spent writing this post and not writing my paper is a reflection of that. But, like so many other things this summer, I just have to work with what I've got. And I do feel somewhat better after writing this all out, even though it wasn't totally why I came over here.

To return to the article for a second. I'm probably going to have to do what I did the last time around (since this was the same place I got tripped up on back at the beginning of June with this project). Let the academese stand so I at least know what I'm talking about, then try to go back and put in something interesting. My main work for tomorrow and Sunday should be to articulate the body of the paper, not to cram an anecdote into the beginning. I should at least be able to get through the premature burial parts by some point on Sunday, since I practically know those by heart anyway. And I know my way around this poem, which is something. Beyond that, I let VIE tell me what to do, right?

And so. On top of all this, I've agreed to go to D.C. for about 24 hours later in the week. I'll be joining The Poet on a business trip, which seems rather ridiculously sketchy to me, but as it also involves the opportunity to spend the night in a hotel and thus to take the night off from trying to fight the bugs out of my kitchen and worrying about the effect of my air conditioner on my electric bill. So I'll cope. (I also think this week--he's also planning to come over on Sunday to do some studying--might be the last time he and I get to spend a lot of time together for a bit.) But it does kind of throw a wrench in a lot of other scheduling things and means that I have to be a lot more conscious of how I'm managing my time...like if I don't think I can meet up with people from school for Tuesday night bullriding and not have eight bourbons and get home at three in the morning, I may have to pass that up. Tomorrow (well, today, Saturday) night is the last performance of the last episode of "Hospital" and I will have to be similarly in control because I need Sunday.

And yet, I wrote all of this out and it seems doable. Since I'm already here, why not end on a list? Short of either magically writing the entire Victorian article in the next fifteen minutes or drinking a huge shot of scotch, retyping my list is probably the best way to get myself to sleep.

Saturday: Greenmarket in AM; school (dept lounge) in the afternoon / try to get something printed; Axis in the evening

Sunday: (The Poet, here)--edit what I wrote on Saturday, try to double the page count.

Monday: Completed / printable draft of Victorian project. Email VIE to tell him I have not forgotten our deadline. Get to the gym at some point.

Tuesday: Edits on Victorian draft. Input as many of the changes as possible, including the conversion to Chicago style (though at this point it may not be a top priority). Print stuff for Romanticist project. Print train ticket confirmation. Gym.

Wednesday: Work bee! Hooray! Get the Victorian project sent to VIE come hell or high water. Start working through the Romanticism project again.

Thursday: Gym in AM. Train at noon: work on Romanticism revisions.

...and so on. I do have until August 1 for the Romanticism thing--not a huge amount of time, but a week longer than I thought I had.

Last thing. The UPS shipment I got today was two sets of cushions so The Poet can give me some basic lessons in sitting zazen. This is the closest thing to a religious interest I've had in ten years.

Me vs. the Gothic

I'm beginning to think there's a common reason for some of the difficulties that I'm encountering with my two projects. (I think maybe I'll just start calling them the Victorian and the Romantic, though I've mentioned the specific authors / texts here frequently enough that it probably doesn't matter.) On the surface, they don't have a lot in common: the Victorian project has me reading books on live burial and playing around with what I can see of popular periodicals of the nineteenth century, while for the Romantic project I am mostly still treading water with philosophy--lots of Kant, some Hegel, and a smattering of more recent people like Nancy and Lyotard. (Derrida, as I was discussing with some faculty from my department last week, is oddly absent from both of my bibliographies right now, though I think that "No Apocalypse, Not Now" may end up having some relevance to the Victorian project.)

In both of these projects, however, I keep running up against The Gothic. And it's making things hard. The Gothic has always sort of skirted the edges of the work I do--last summer at this time I was working on an earlier version of the Romantic paper and it was centered around the theme of humiliation. I did a fair bit of coursework around early Romantic / late eighteenth century texts (particularly those by Godwin and Wollstonecraft) from the perspective of the discourse of sensibility, and the best thing I ever read in the last American lit class I took (more than three years ago now--it was my first year in grad school) was Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, which I still plan to teach and publish on someday. Dealing with these kinds of texts and just generally being someone who works on long nineteenth century literature means that I have to have a decent working knowledge / awareness of the Gothic and how it works.

But that doesn't mean, on the other hand, that I'm particularly interested in it. Okay, that sounds more horrible than I meant it to. I mean, I do like a good Gothic potboiler every now and then, and I feel like I can certainly appreciate what it is and how it does what it does, why it was important at the time, and so on. I guess it's more that my own critical investments are elsewhere right now and have been for a long time. What seems to be happening right now, though, is that the texts, concepts, and passages that I'm working on, have all largely been labeled as Gothic, and I'm finding that this makes reading them against that particular grain to be something of an uphill battle. And it's not even that I find myself wanting to argue that these texts are not Gothic (I mean, premature burial, yo), but rather that calling a poem "Gothic" or identifying its sites of sexual guilt or whatever doesn't actually constitute an interpretation these days. While the work of people like Eve Segdwick and Judith Halberstam (both of whom I've been skimming madly since last week) is aimed at showing the Gothic to be worthy of study and complex in itself, I wonder if the term as used by others is falling back into a critical shorthand. Not one used to dismiss entire passages--about 22 years ago, my adviser dismissed the passage at the center of my Victorian project as being "luridly gothic"--but certainly as a way to imply that there is a certain group of texts whose readability (and even whose unreadability) is assured according to this set of codes. And so the question for what I'm doing largely becomes one of the supplement, the so what, and the why bother. And I find myself wanting to say, "because it's just more interesting," but I do feel like I'm fighting against the weight of a historicist juggernaut here. But I soldier on.

The other common thread between these two projects, by the way, if the feeling that I'm completely behindhand on my de Man.

---
Mostly unrelated, before I go scavenge myself some lunch: a "Dickensian" toilet policy? Really?

...and then on other days, you're just kind of stuck.

Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.(Tennyson)

At least once a day--and often more--I find myself becoming Mariana in the moated grange. Which is simply to say that nothing happening is sometimes as bad as the things that happen, and often even more distracting.

Unwarranted disaffections

Nobody's who I want them to be today. If that makes any sense. I feel like that sounds horrible that way, but I can't figure out a way to explain it.

I'm really trying to finish the first round of Tennyson stuff today. I wish I had been at this point on Monday. I'm trying not to get paralyzed, and I did write for a bit yesterday.

The crisis that The Poet and his wife were having on Monday turned out to be a false alarm, but not so much of one that I've been able to see him since. This bothers me. The fact that it bothers me also means that I care and that in turn bothers me, and that for some reason makes me want to look up in the library and see K, even though I know he's teaching this month and it would be a bad idea anyway.

So I feel like I'm a bit knotted up, I want to see my damn boyfriend, and it's going to be in the 90s this weekend and I still don't have an air conditioner.

In which my best laid plans set a new record for evanescence

Today kicked my ass, plain and simple.

This is a hard way to start the summer.

At least, however, I had only gotten as far as the Manhattan Bridge on the B train before I realized, with a groan, that I didn't have my keys.

And at least when I finally made it back to Teaching College after another 45 minutes on several trains, the building was still open and my keys still where I left them in the bag I take to the gym and keep in my desk. But so much for being rewarded for making healthy choices, huh?

The Poet called me at 9:15 this morning about a library book. Except, as I realized later, it wasn't really about that. It was sort of a crazy conversation, and sometime in the midafternoon, I began to understand that he was trying not to come apart. And now I have a new unlikely phrase to add to my collection of sentences that I never thought would be necessary to use to describe my life, namely: my boyfriend's wife is dying. There, I said it, and it looks awful and, like so many of these things, I find myself wanting to protest, "it isn't as bad as it sounds." But this one does change the stakes in some ways. He had been at a work thing near school this evening--before the latest news, we'd planned to spend the night together. We met for a drink instead--it seemed schizophrenic, like so much of the rest of this day (did I mention that the stated project was to work on Maud?), and I could see his compartmentalizing skills start to fray, one minute talking about surfing or the contract he just landed at work or the department exam but then nearly breaking down at the bar. He says she is the woman who broke him, who made him understand what it meant to be a human being. And I hold his hand because there is nothing else I can do and I try not to be scared by how much I find myself caring about him.

None of this is, of course, conductive to a drama-free summer. I mean, there was going to be drama. But on day one?

On the other hand:

It's not that I didn't try to be healthy and productive, or even that I didn't succeed in some ways. My shoulders are still tight and kind of painfully so, but I went to the gym at Erstwhile Teaching College anyway, ate reasonably healthy food, and drank lots of water.

And it's not like I didn't get some good news along the way--mainly, that my adjuncting offer was formalized for the fall at the school that is near my undergrad alma mater. The idea of teaching two classes and doing so in Manhattan at 8 in the morning is a bit daunting--and I will actually miss my students at Erstwhile Teaching College--but I think this is the right move for a number of reasons.

And yet:

Writing doesn't feel easier like I thought it would post-orals. I still feel like an idiot when it comes to framing and I still don't think I can answer the "so what" question. Also, my shoulders really hurt, my kitchen is a mess, and the guy's coming in the morning to look at my toilet. So maybe it's about time for bed.

Ack.

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.

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.

"I keep making these to-do lists but nothing gets crossed out"

In that spirit, two passages I will try to live by, at least until my orals are over.

“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air your breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning.” --John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

“The moment the innocence or authenticity of our sense of being in the world is put into question, a far from harmless process gets underway. It may start as a casual bit of play with a stray loose end of the fabric, but before long the entire texture of the self is unraveled and comes apart. The whole process happens at an unsettling speed.” --Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality"

I am trying to be better today. It's another one that's all cold and gray and pissing rain; at least this time I'm not going outside much, maybe just to the bodega-like grocery story a block away because I could use soy milk and more coffee and probably some lunch.

I want creative work that's something more than self-immolation as performance art.

Finally, an accomplishment. And other miscellaneous notes

So I finally managed to push all the way through a draft of my conference paper, and not a moment too soon. It may not be that bad. It's certainly much more of a self-consciously oral text than any of my previous papers. This may mean that I am growing as a scholar in terms of confident self-presentation; on the other hand, I have to consider the possibility that I feel like I have something to hide in this paper. But I'm actually pretty confident in my thinking about this passage, even if I still do occasionally have these moments when I feel like [famous scholar who will be in the audience for this paper in less than ten days] has had every thought I could possibly ever have on Tennyson. But, given my experience as an audience member at this conference a couple of years ago, I am pretty sure that performance and being able to answer questions without looking like a jerk will count for a lot. Also, it's the first paper on the first panel on the last day.

I have been especially aware of my writing process with this project, in part because I had the bright idea at the beginning of the semester that I should use myself as an example for my composition students. I think to a certain extent this worked really well with this group of students. (Last semester, it would have contributed to the disaster area mentality.) In certain cases, I think it allowed some of them to trust me as an instructor more--not so much that I know what I'm doing (though I obviously hope they think I know what I'm doing), but more that what I am having them do is not completely arbitrary, nor is it something that I am unwilling to go through myself. While I've been pretty specific about how what I'm working on is different from what they're working on (in terms of the oral presentation and, of course, the stakes), it's helpful I think to be seen writing essentially an eight-page research paper when they are also writing five-to-eight-page research papers. It's also, incidentally, given me the opportunity to talk to them a little bit about what academics do. I kind of wish I'd had a better sense of that when I was an undergraduate, and these students by and large are even less versed in the institutional stuff than I am. My students are genuinely surprised that this kind of writing (let alone getting up and talking about it in front of a bunch of strangers with power over my future employment) is part of what I--and many of their other professors--do.

The extent to which this worked less well is only that, because of the way my work on this paper developed--which is to say, a lot of notes and a month to a "first draft" that has nonetheless been rewritten roughly eight hundred times--has rather limited me in what I have been able to share on a material level. I had this dream that I was going to scan copies of my own edits and post them to Blackboard, but that doesn't totally work with the way I wrote the paper. I also have completely dispensed with internal citations (which I don't tend to do even when I'm writing conference papers) and feel like this sets a bad example without wanting to go back and track down the line numbers of sections I know by heart just at this very minute.

From a non-pedagogical perspective, I do think I'm getting slightly better at churning these things out, even if it doesn't look like it. I'm improving in my abilities to work on many things at once. This is, for example, the first conference paper that I've written basically from scratch while teaching. And without smoking. I know that's not the biggest achievement ever, but it's something. (The second one may be bigger than the first.)

Of course, in order to achieve this final push, I drank a bunch of tea. Though I made a pot that was half PG Tips, half caffeine free blueberry, I'm still feeling a bit awake. Possibly not awake enough to read Coleridge, though. This would be less of a problem if I didn't absolutely have to do laundry tomorrow morning. Would also like to take care of the prep before I start rocking out 19th century style tomorrow, since my observation is Thursday.

I also somehow managed to run out of toilet paper without noticing. Thank god for takeout napkins. I should address that before The Poet comes over on Thursday night.

Finally, A White Bear, who always blogs more excellently than I, has a particularly excellent post about blending one's online and real life identities. This is a perpetual concern of mine (and, yes, this is part of the "other woman" identity that isn't sexual), and while I think I experience my identities differently, I like the way she's thinking. This reminds me, of course, that there's an email I need to answer, but I kind of don't feel like it at the moment. I am becoming quite thankful that The Poet has fewer issues than almost any other man in my life, period.

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.