Run away, run away!

There’s a grand tradition of officials close to dictators jumping ship and fleeing to Britain.  The Libyan foreign minister just did.  The other person who comes to mind is Rudolf Heß, who was Deputy to the Führer.  On the eve of operation Barbarosa, he hopped in a plane and up and flew to Scotland, allegedly to try to negotiate peace with the United Kingdom.  It didn’t really go over so well with anyone involved, but oh! the propaganda campaign the Nazis put out to try to explain this little fiasco!  It was amazing!  He was, according to Herr Goebbels, alternately mentally ill, an occultist, a traitor, and hallucinating.  All this to say, I can’t WAIT to hear what Ghaddafi has to say about his ex-foreign minister.  Maybe the problem was all those hallucinogens in his Nescafe.

The Truth.

“What’s the point of being an adult if you can’t have a stout ice cream float for dinner every now and then?”

— From last night, when some buddies gathered to celebrate the conclusion of a dear friend’s first round of the exams.

Bulk ferment.

In my note to the readers that accompanies my upcoming colloquium paper, I refer to the piece (a draft of my dissertation prospectus) as “still in bulk ferment stage (nb: baking metaphor).”  (I think I’ve overused the perfunctory “This is still very much in progress…”) I feel like my weekly bread turned out a lot better than my written work this weekend; can’t I just submit these loaves in lieu of my paper??

"Final rise, or, Lit Review"

"Dusted and scored, or, Methodology"

"Boule, or, Archival Sources"

"I sliced it too soon, nom nom nom, or, Contributions to Other Fields."

I think we’d all be better off this way.

Oh nobody knows the trouble I seen…

Nobody knows but Kitteh.

I can has Weimar Republic?

I’ve been catsitting for one of my very dear friends this week.  I have gotten her cat to respond to “Kitteh.”  I have also crooned to him nonstop in lolcat speak, discussed with him the merits of the Bolshevik revolution, and debated the efficacy of a commissarial dictatorship.  I worry she may never let me catsit again.   For the record, his take on the collapse of the Weimar Republic is that Reichspräsident Hindenburg’s kitteh was like, “Ich kann hat Republik?”  And Hindenburg was all, “Nein! Aber ich kann hat Artikel 48, lol.”  It’s the truth.

But know who else knows the troubles I seen?  That friend.  And my friends here in general.  Empathy is not to be underrated.   I just sent the “I love you, but I’m crawling under a rock for a while; see you on the other side” email to my family.  The next month is going to be the mother of all pressure cookers, and I just can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to chit-chat — or to pretend that the way that they understand my exams is actually what it’s like.   My family loves me, as best as they know how, and to the degree that they understand what my life is like and what it means to be doing this, they’re really proud of me.  But they don’t quite get it; it’s not exactly legible to them.  My parents are a nurse and a mechanic; while my mom eventually got her MS in nursing, she got both that and her bachelor’s while I was also in undergrad.  So when I went off to Unicorn University, I was literally traipsing off into an entirely different world — nevermind PhDLand.  When they call and I’m in full-on panic mode or despairing over a draft of the dissertation prospectus, they say, “I’m sure you’ll do great!”  or “It’s almost over!” It’s nice to know that they support me, and I know they’re doing the best they can.  But the quiet support of my friends means so much more right now.  We all get it: yes, we know it’ll be over soon; we know we’ll be fine.  But we know that in the meantime this is pure. misery.  And somehow, that’s really reassuring.

Also really reassuring: a kitteh on the lap.  Just for the record.

Thuggery 2.0

Not much time to comment on this right now, since I’m busy dealing with Weimar’s right-wing thugs.  But take a peek at what Wisconsin’s right-wing thugs are up to.  Prof. Cronon, who wrote a really balanced though critical op-ed in the Times this week, wrote another piece on his blog. And now he’s under attack from the Wisconsin GOP, which is making perverse use of the FOIA.  This is so distressing, y’all.  Apparently intellectual/academic freedom only applies when we’re talking about the rights of a conservative teenager in a pinko liberal commie’s class.

Conversation

(Wonky breaks courtesy of gchat)

her: next up, good old frederick jackson turner

but he can’t have more than 500 words.

me absolutely not.

cut him off!

her: and by he, i mean he and everyone involving decisions about how we periodize american west history

me: no more!

the man’s gotten enough words in his time! to the footnotes with him!! the footnotes!!

her: though maybe i can just fold some of that into my progressive periodization conversation.

me: (whereby i imagine footnotes to be like guillotines)

her: say that five times fast.

they totally are.

though mostly i imagine them to be like the bins under my couch and bed

where i shove things i need, but don’t have room for in my living room

me: heh. i imagine them like daggers.

there to ward off attacks.

her: very true.

me: 🙂

her: though maybe fewer daggers are necessary in historiographical essays?

me: good point.

yours are bins.

though we can imagine them to be pretty baskets

with ribbons, like in the south.

her: ha.

Brought to you by the letter S.

It snowed here today.

See?

I don’t mind that it snowed.  The warmer weather and that odd green stuff on the ground after the snow melted were just one more reminder that spring — and my exams — were upon us.  Not that the exams themselves will disappear beneath these measly 2 inches, but it’ll do for another day’s worth of denial.  Snow-denial did work, however, for the lucky children of all the public and private schools around here.  A month ago nobody would have batted an eye at this, but this morning NPR woke me up by listing all the school closings.  I guess they had already put the salt trucks and plows away for the season.  Don’t they realize where we live!? (Not that the roads even needed plowing.  Maybe everyone else is just weary, too.)

I’ve been sick.  That’s sort of why I started writing here.  The lovely people at health services gave me some great drugs (woohoo!) and some not-so-great.

Today, I am having a bad reaction to one of them.  It’s scary. And now I’ve been sick for a week: that’s a lot of books.  And that sucks.  Seriously.

Shit.

Gender Trouble.

The NY Times (which is actually doing me a favor by cutting off my supply access to their articles come 28 March, since mainlining the lede does tend to get in the way of studying) had this article on gender, the professoriat, and the academy yesterday.  I have a lot of things to say about this, but the for today I’ll leave it at this: I am so grateful that I was raised, academically, by fierce, feminist women.  At Unicorn University, where I went to undergrad, the majority of my professors were women, and I was lucky to be surrounded by so many women who were honest-to-goodness role models in every sense of the word.

I’m lucky here, too, though I experience the gender politics a little differently (more — much more — on this later).  One of the professors on my committee, The Absolute Professor, was one of the first women hired into this department.  I wish I could sit down with her and just chat some day about what it’s been like for her to be in the academy for the past 30 years — what’s changed; what hasn’t.  Maybe The Absolute Professor isn’t exactly a heart-to-heart kind of person, but she’s certainly not without compassion and empathy (she has this uncanny ability to dish out the best advice, even if you didn’t know you needed it).  When I started here, I was terrified of her.  But now it’s more like a healthy fear of god.  And I adore her.  Even as I fear her wrath.  I can sort of get a sense for what it’s been like for her through the ways she mentors me.  She’s tough — boy is she ever tough — but she’s also wry and insightful.  In my first year teaching here, she gave me some of the best teaching advice I’ll ever get.  I was TA’ing a class that was — how to say this politely? — problematic at best.  I was responsible for two weekly discussion sections (out of 6 total in the course), in which attendance was optional on a weekly basis.  And we had to teach parallel “mini-courses” within the sections.  And the class was neither chronological nor thematic.  Where was I?  Oh, right: The Absolute Professor.  I went to her one day early in that semester for tips on how to establish some sense of structure and normalcy in a sections that were — almost by design — unstable: how to make students want to come, how to convince them that they really should come prepared, how to make section worth their time and mine.  But I also had this problem: there were these two students — male — in one of my classes that seemed to be challenging me on everything.  And, of course, mostly through references to the History Channel — references that in general had nothing at all to do with what we were talking about.  I figured there were several things at play: age (I was definitely on the young-ish side of things), the usual early-semester boundary-testing, the fact that people act out when they don’t have structure, and, yes, gender.  So I asked The Absolute Professor what to do.

She dispensed her wisdom thusly: “Ethel Louise, you will encounter misogyny in your career.  And you need to be on the look out for it, whether it’s directed at you or your students.  But first you have to figure out exactly what’s going on.  Pay careful attention.  Because what might be going on is that these students are boys.  Boys with no social skills who don’t know how to interact with their instructors or their peers in this kind of setting.  Boys who are awkward and actually just need to be socialized.  Who need to be shown how this is done.  And maybe messed with a little.” (This actually ended up being the case.  More on that another time.)

She paused.

“But if you’re sure it’s misogyny — you must crush them.”

Frogging graduate school?

In knitting, there’s this delightful term that belies the frustration of realizing a project is FUBAR: Frogging.  It’s a play on the near-homophone when we say we’re going to “rip it apart.”  Get it — rip it?  Ribbit?  Frog?  Anyhow, when you decide that, for whatever reason, a piece is not to be salvaged, you frog it.  Perhaps you’ll start over on the same project using your reclaimed yarn, perhaps it’ll be used for something entirely different.

Yesterday I saw a student from my year — not in my program, but also about to start her comprehensive exams — post on facebook something to the effect of, “I wish I could take everything I know now, go back to August 2008, and start all over.”  I was about to “like” the statement, but then paused.  To be fair, I paused trying to decide if I actually like-liked the statement, or whether it was more worthy of something like, “Amen, sister,” in the comments.  (Darn you, Mark Zuckerberg, for only allowing me to “like” rather than “sympathize” or “agree” or “hear what you’re saying.”  Why, WHY must you narrow the spectrum of my e-affect?)  But anyhow, I was trying to figure out how to affirm what she had said and realized: I don’t.

On the surface, I agreed with the sentiment: If I had known three years ago what I know now; if I had had different strategies in reading and studying; if I had better foreseen where my interests would lead me; if I had had a different framework for deciding what was important and what wasn’t; if, if, if — then maybe these exams I’m staring down wouldn’t seem so daunting.  Maybe it would feel like there had been a little more coherence, a little more direction, a lot more discipline to my approach to graduate school (or at least course work).  Maybe I wouldn’t lie awake at night thinking about all the days or weeks or projects that felt like utter false starts, wondering if I will have made up for them or whether, because of those wasted few weeks in my first year of graduate school, I am completely. and. utterly. screwed.  Maybe I wouldn’t feel such turbulent anxiety about all this.  (Though honestly?  Knowing me?  I probably would, anyhow.)  Maybe.

Since in general in life we don’t get mulligans, and since none of us would WANT to have to go through a second shot at our comprehensive exams, it’s sort of a moot point.  But let’s pretend that we could — would we actually want to?  Would we want to frog the project, soak and dry the yarn, wind it again, and cast on the project anew?  Maybe make a sweater instead of a shawl, or maybe just not screw up the shawl so badly this time?  I dare say — in the case of the graduate school project — no.  The knee-jerk reaction is simple — for me, at least.  My second year here was hands-down the worst year of my life.  I was soul-crushingly and abjectly miserable, and I would not want to relive that year for anything in the world, thankyouverymuch.  “But wait!” the reader objects.  “You can frog out all the misery of that year, too!” Hm… maybe.  I’m not sure.  But still.  I think at the end of the day — or, more precisely, at the end of the third year — the false starts have been part of (wait for it!) the process. (Why yes, this is a normative claim, and yes, I am trying convince myself of this as I write!)  Perspective comes hard-earned, and while I wish this experience felt less like a medieval Ordeal or auto-da-fé sometimes, it isn’t exactly supposed to be easy.  And I’m pretty sure that even if we had started with MAs in hand — the closest it gets to starting the PhD process with already-earned graduate school wisdom — other things would still kind of suck sometimes.

So, yeah.  If I could go back and counsel first-year Ethel Louise, I would urge myself to read The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy a little more carefully the first time through.  I would tell myself to follow my instinct and not bother with that trainwreck of a research paper my first year.  But really, I doubt younger me would listen to older me.  She’s one stubborn little pipsqueak. And anyhow, if she hadn’t agreed to present a second colloquium paper in her second year and then scrambled to pull it together and finally presented it, she wouldn’t have stumbled unwittingly onto her dissertation project.  So there.

I think what I hear my colleague saying — and this is the part that resonates with me — is, “I wish I felt more confident about this.”  And to that, amen. I wish this didn’t feel so awful sometimes.  I wish my mind didn’t spend frantic moments harping on what in retrospect seem to have been wasted time and missed opportunities.  I wish I felt a little more (okay, a lot more) confident heading into this — that my confidence didn’t feel like a facade.  I wish I didn’t have to wrest myself constantly from this vicious cycle of guilt-anxiety-panic-paralysis.  And so I’m trying to absolve myself of that guilt and redirect that energy to things like, oh, I don’t know, Franz Fanon.

“I wish I could take everything I know now, go back to August 2008, and start all over.”  “I wish I felt more confident about this.”  Mark Zuckerberg, why won’t you give me a button that lets me “kind of like, but more of a qualified like, because it’s really more along the lines of empathizing with a certain reading of what I hear you saying while also showing solidarity and support”?  Is that really too much to ask??

The time has come, the walrus said.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”

(The Walrus and the Carpenter, Lewis Carroll)

The time has come when all the things — important things!  exam things! history and theory things! — banging around in my mind have started to feel as disparate and disjointed as shoes and ships and sealing wax.  It happens also to be the time when anxiety about the aforementioned exams keeps me up at night, even when my body is so tired that my eyes won’t focus on the words on the page anymore.  And the time when the practice of writing and I need to make peace with each other.  So, here I am, making use of the blogspace claimed last summer.  I am choosing to see this as part of the process.  I think reflection is important, and I think community is, too.  My paper journal remains sacrosanct, but hopefully this outlet will open up an opportunity to become more mindful and thoughtful about what I do — and, with any luck, a little less neurotic.