Scriptophilia

Starting tomorrow, I'll be subletting my apartment for 7-10 days to a grad student I've never met before. It's funny how the mere fact that he's a grad student at my university means that he's somehow not crazy, and that it's okay for him to stay unsupervised in my apartment with all of my stuff.

Yeah, I'm a little nervous about it. But not too. And he did pay in advance.

However, I am (naturally) clearing out all of the stuff that I wouldn't want a stranger to rummage through whilst I'm away. Specifically, my diaries and sketchbooks and other writings. And, good lord, I've accumulated a lot of that kind of thing.

Seriously! I filled three boxes. And I left the scrapbooks and photo albums and whatnot, because those aren't so private (although I do have a penchant for rather elaborate, very text-oriented albums (I hate the word "scrapbook" now that it's become a verb) chronicling my various trips). I actually counted recently and discovered that I have 32 diaries. Thirty-two. Four of those, I think, are dream diaries, from a brief period in my late twenties during which I wrote down every single dream I had. The thing about writing down your dreams, though, is that the practice improves your recall, so after a while the dream-recording was eating up pretty much my entire morning, every day. Faced with this tedious and really quite ridiculous time-suck, I finally stopped. But still, that's 28 proper diaries, and the dream diaries are equally private, of course.

I also tend to write fiction longhand, at least for the first draft. In 1999, when I was somewhat underemployed, I wrote a 200,000-word novel--by hand. (Typing it, a few years later, was a real bitch.) So that's about four very densely filled notebooks right there.

Then there are the notebooks full of terrible poetry from grades 7 through 12. I keep these, of course, even if None Shall Read Them, Ever.

And what else? Oh yes, binders full of creative writing spanning the years 1988-1997. And binders full of letters and emails and that sort of thing from about the same period. And a big envelope full of letters that I didn't put in binders (having decided sometime in 1997ish that I didn't like punching holes in such things).

There are also all the books I've bound myself, of course. Some of these are, um, "artistic" creations of my earlier days. Others are carefully bound "editions" of actual (unpublished) text: for example, the satirical romance novel that my friends and I wrote in high school. (It's hilarious.) Or a collection of emails sent between me and a friend prior to our Epic Journey of 1999. The latter actually look pretty nice, since my binding skills improved greatly once I'd taken a class.

I remember when I was a lot younger, imagining the pleasure I would feel at having an entire bookshelf filled with nothing but my own writings. Well, I've long since surpassed that goal. Before long, I'll have stocked an entire bookcase.

The Good and the Bad

The tension is mounting! The blogosphere demands to know: What did I do on my birthday????

Well, really nothing much. My SignifO sent me flowers, which was lovely, and we'll have dinner when I'm in his neck of the woods next week. I went to a nearby riverfront park that I hadn't been to in a while; that was kind of a mistake, because there's heavy construction going on right next to it, and the new highway seems to have consumed about a third of the (already very small) park. That was kind of sad.

Then, after kicking around for a while wondering what to do with myself, I called up my friend H and we had a grand old evening of indolence and indulgence: a couple of beers at the ONLY (well, almost the only) outdoor waterfront bar around, then carryout Thai food and a romantic comedy of sorts. That was fun.

Also my brother and his fiancee sang me Happy Birthday, complete with musical accompaniment, over the phone. See? His fiancee is awesome.

So 31 was ushered in without much fanfare. Of course, as my mom reminded me when we spoke yesterday, there WILL BE a "party" when I go out to visit the family next week. My family makes a bit of a fuss around birthdays: there's always a Special Dinner of some kind, and presents, and usually (now that we're all of age) a bottle of champagne. But seeing as I'm going out there for my brother's wedding, I'm not sure how much time/attention I can expect to get. Not that I really want/need any. And as for the presents, well, I'm currently feeling that I shouldn't be allowed to have any possessions, at all, so I'm not sure that I need any gifts. But on the other hand: I love presents!

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On an entirely different note....

One of my mom's cats had to be put to sleep this morning. He died of that scourge of older felines: kidney failure. He was a very sweet cat and will be missed.


Rest in peace, little friend.

Oddments

• My digital camera is officially, entirely broken. But it was almost 5 years old. But still, this could cause more inconvenience than I would've thought. I'm trying to sell some stuff on ebay and, while most of it's been photographed, this might inhibit my ability to sell more stuff. (That might be for the best, really--given the type of stuff I usually try to sell, posting on ebay is usually more trouble than it's worth. E.g. I just sold a board game for $3, which means I have to walk all the way to the post office and mail it. Is 30 minutes of my time (round trip to the PO) worth more than $3 (actually about $2.50, when you subtract listing fees)? Survey says: Yes.)
• I've been working on the syllabus for my upper-level course for the fall, and frankly I'm afraid of it at this point. We need to cover a certain range of texts most of which fall pretty far outside of my field, and which aren't particularly easy. Looking online, I've found that other people have packed well more than I have into similar courses, but I can't imagine reading that much in such a short period of time. Or maybe I've grown lazy in the Fellowship Years? Maybe undergraduates are happy to read a difficult book every week? I don't know. Of course, I still haven't read most of the texts that I'm putting on the syllabus, so they might be shorter than I think they are. This is all part of the summer-of-preparations.
• I've decided to make a blank scrapbook/album for my brother and his fiancee's wedding present. I genuinely believe that I enjoy bookmaking. But every time I make a book, I suspect--at least, I experienced it this time, and it had a certain familiar air--there's an awful lot of cursing. My back hurts from bending over the table to cut each sheet of paper into exactly the right size, things don't stick together when they're supposed to, and there is glue everywhere. Everywhere. I do, however, make pretty nice-looking books, if I may say so myself. --I was going to add that I'll post some pictures of them, but I can't! Oh well. At least that's one task off the table.
• I am becoming increasingly anxious about my move. There are now two different ways for it to go down. The first involves hiring movers and then renting a car. The movers would take my stuff to a storage unit in GradCity, and then I would drive the necessities out to VSLACtown. (I haven't driven, by the way, in 5 years, so this alone is a source of stress.) The second involves hiring movers, renting a truck, and THEN renting a car. In this scenario, the movers will move my furniture and things into a rented truck (this is only if a moving company agrees to do this, by the way), which I will then drive to a storage facility in MomCity, and then I'll drive a rental car out to VSLACtown. The advantage here is that my stored items will be a lot more accessible than if they were to remain in GradCity, to which I will have no reason to return except to get my stuff. And my mom's place is sort of on the way to VSLACtown. But the disadvantage is that my first driving experience in five years will then be with a truck instead of the somewhat friendlier car. Oh god I just don't want to think about it.
  
• Tomorrow is my birthday. What will I do?
  

Playing to My Weaknesses

I'm working on an article that I submitted to a journal a while back, and that came back with a "revise and resubmit" verdict (the best I was hoping for, actually, so I'm pleased).

My big obstacle du jour is that one reviewer suggested breaking the article up into sections with individual headings. And I am total crap at coming up with titles. I have three subsections, all with unbearably old-fashioned and clunky headings. The third is the worst--it's the "synthetic" part of the article, where I draw together the primary subject, another set of texts I'm connecting it to, and then the overall "theme" (that's not the right word, but I don't want to waste time on this) of the article. I'm playing around with things like, "[Subject], [Set of Texts], and [Theme]." Yuck. Yuck! I hate this part.

One Pile in Particular

Okay. Here's something that you guys might be able to help me out with. I've begun plowing through the mountains of papers, notebooks, and so forth, and I'm facing several conundra. Some of this stuff I've moved from place to place for, well, ten years at least, and it's dawning on me that I might not need it. Some is more recent and more obviously related to My Field. So here's the question.

What should I do with the following things?

1. Old issues of professional journals, such as Speculum and PMLA. On the one hand I think that I should keep these. I want to keep them. They make me feel like a scholar, they're nicely bound, they're somewhat expensive, and they might (might) come in handy some day. On the other hand, they take up a ridiculous amount of space. I can see keeping them all very happily if I could store them in, say, an office which I planned to use for the next 30 years or so, but at this point--? What do you do with these things?
2. Notebooks from grad school. Specifically, notebooks with teaching notes from courses I've TA'd, as I've essentially decided to scrap my course notes unless they're directly in my area of specialization (Marxist Theory, for example, while interesting, is unlikely to be noticeable in its absence. And were my notes really that good?). But there might be a chance I'll teach, I dunno, Ibsen again, and maybe the stuff I came up with the night before section back in 2001 was really profound? Maybe? Any chance, any chance at all?
3. Notebooks from college. I actually only have one of these still kicking around, but it contains all of my notes from my senior year, somehow (I apparently didn't take many notes). Its potential value, however, is not scholarly so much as sentimental. It's full of drawings and doodles and sarcastic comments and fragments of fiction, as well as quotes that I liked. So...I might keep this, even though I'm unlikely to look at it again. Well, I do look at it every time I move, but that's about it. Oh well. It's one notebook, after all.
4. Notebooks from (yes, I admit it) high school. In my high school English classes--which were excellent; it was one of the best HS English departments in the nation--we kept these elaborate reading journals in which we responded to discussion questions, did close readings of passages, and the like. I think I only have two of these (both composition books, so fairly small). I'm not sure why I'm keeping them, other than that it never occurred to me until tonight that I could throw them away. The scholarly value, again, is pretty much nonexistent. But might they help me to think about how to teach close reading and composition? I kind of wish I'd kept the assignments, too, but that would have been pretty weird. Anyway. Value or no value?

So what say you? The pile of Paper To Recycle grows higher, and higher still. Ever higher, I say! Higher and higher, onward and upward! Et cetera!

The glory!

Piles

Last night I realized that I'm moving in two months. And since I'll be spending approximately half of that time in my boyfriend's city, that means that I have something like 5 weeks left in which I'll need to sort through the accumulated detritus of 3 years in the same apartment, sell or otherwise dispose of a great deal of stuff (I hope), and figure out what needs to go into storage and what's coming with me. And, oh yeah, pack.

So I've kind of started. When I move, I take a long time: I'll go through every file and folder, throwing away duplicate copies of papers and old bills and whatnot, and it takes me a couple of runs through my bookshelves and closets to decide what I really can't stand to get rid of. The system, so far, is a piling system. I have piles for

a) recycling (paper)
b) paper to shred
c) things to "donate" to my department (which means, basically, abandoning them in the TA office--hey, it's just books and the odd New Yorker; people will use them)
d) things to sell on ebay
e) things to sell on half.com
f) things to sell to other grad students
g) things to donate to the Salvation Army
h) things to leave curbside.

Of course, some of these piles are not discrete, but in fact filter into one another. So, something that I can't sell on ebay might end up being advertised to the grad student community and then wind up at Salvie's. You get the idea.

I don't like disarray in my house. I'm very neat. So the prospect of filling my apartment with piles is disturbing: however, I am lucky enough to have a big walk-in closet that I don't actually use for clothes. (Clothes are confined to the very small closet. I have my reasons for this.) So the piles are being stored in there.

Yes, it's fascinating times. Stay tuned for more posts on such exciting subjects as, Where did all my silverware go? and How badly I need new socks.

On Grad School, or, Somehow this turned into a substantive post

[Note: Because this ended up being a rather long post about grad school and Its Effects, I'm linking to Horace's Call For Posts on the subject.]

[ETA: I've edited and added a bit below, because I realized that what I wrote originally about grad school may have been overstated, and didn't exactly express what I was trying to say.]

All right, I don't really have much to say, because I haven't actually been doing much of, well, anything. But my readership has dropped precipitously this week, so I do feel a certain obligation to at least say Hello and that I do plan to write something in here again someday. Something that may be amusing, perhaps, or that may simply satisfy whatever voyeuristic urge it is that leads us (and I may only be speaking for myself here) to read other people's blogs.

Also, I've been following some of the various discussions (on Reassigned Time, and Practica, and Academic Cog) about grad school and what it means; I'm thinking vaguely about writing something about it, but haven't made up my mind. So don't hold me to this vague thought, or anything. I have a lot to say about the good and bad of grad school--but so much of the last few years has been made up of alternately complaining about and celebrating the process, that that particular font of wordiness may be exhausted. I'm not sure. The thing is, grad school seemed better and better to me as I got closer to completing it. And then the job market came along and fucked with my emotions for a while, but I don't really blame grad school itself for that (I mean, the market sucks, but I have no idea how that could be resolved, given the state of the world). So I don't know.

I guess what happened (okay, here I go, but maybe only for a minute) is that the first few years of grad school were psychologically very messy. I had no idea what was going on. I felt that I had to pose and compete and I was still utterly lost--at the time, I blamed this almost entirely on my not having taken any theory courses as an undergrad. But then a few semesters went by, and I got to know some other people from my year in other departments (my department was tiny, and my cohort even more so), and learned that they were all baffled, too. And that many of the people who spoke up a lot in seminars were doing so because they felt an obligation to fill the silence. (This in itself could easily be the topic of another post....) And then I found something that I wanted to work on, and began to specialize. And, in short, I started to feel more like myself--still like something of an impostor, of course, but as though my personality didn't have to be smothered under a big pile of "problematizes" and "liminals" in order for me to take myself seriously.

Here's the thing: For some people, like me, it takes self-confidence to admit that you don't understand something. And I adamantly did not do this until I was maybe in my third year--but good god, it was so refreshing once I did. I should note here, however, that I often voiced things to other grad students that I didn't say in seminar. Basically, what I'm advocating is an easing-up of the anxiety to appear a certain way at all times; one shouldn't just spout off one's opinions and display one's ignorance in class. But, in class, it is okay to ask the occasional thoughtful question--even if that question exposes the fact that you don't know everything that's going on. Maybe this is obvious to other people, but it wasn't obvious to me--not for a long time. It took work for me to get there.

Here's a little illustrative example. In the honors seminar I took as an undergrad, we were asked to write a short response to the question of why we engaged in literary scholarship. The other students, by and large, had big high-falutin' reasons--perfectly good reasons, about effecting social change and understanding our culture and the like. I probably didn't think about the assignment much, to be honest, but I do remember the answer that I came up with: Because we like it. Because we enjoy reading and talking about books.

That sounds kind of faux-naif to me now, but I meant it sincerely. And what I think happened to me when grad school stopped angsting me out was that I remembered that that was what I was there for--to read books and talk about them--and that I fundamentally enjoy doing that. I don't need to be all Marxist or Lacanian or whatever, and Derrida just doesn't do it for me, okay? I want to read cool shit and find interesting angles on it. Again, this isn't the kind of thing I'd say in class, but it was important for me to keep it in mind as I did my own work and wondered what on earth I was going to write my dissertation about.

Remembering that was like coming back to myself, and it meant that I didn't care so much about coming across as the most brilliant and polished and accomplished scholar in the world. As a result, I believe that my work improved: I was more willing to ask questions, say what I thought, and try out different ideas. My dissertation ceased to be terrifying. My life certainly improved. My self-image did, too.

So I don't see grad school as having annihilated my personality, or re-formed me as a different kind of person. Rather, I went through a shift kind of like the shift I went through early in college, when I was intoxicated with my freedom (not to mention all the alcohol and drugs) and found myself trying to be something that I wasn't, quite. I was so concerned with having the biggest, fullest College Experience that I wasn't really doing what I wanted to be doing, and once I stopped worrying so much about being a particular way (I'm not even sure what that "way" was--uberliberal quasihippie experimental supersocial college girl, I guess), I felt this tremendous relief, as though I'd come back to myself. And while the "alternative" self that I was trying on in grad school was different, the experience was in many ways the same--only where in undergrad I worried about missing a party, in grad school I worried about not finishing my reading.

Same basic idea, though.

So okay I wasn't really going to write all of this, but hey! It seems that I had Something To Say.