Grad School Report - Spring 2008 (Week 11)
Sometimes right after class is done for the night or for the week, I feel a sudden depression that takes me by surprise. It is a kind of emptiness where I don't know what to do with myself. . . It is a tiny taste of that feeling I get after each semester is done, that unfocused anxiety of "shouldn't I be doing something?" And of course I should be doing something.
I should be doing research for my Literature of the Middle Ages paper on the theoretical political implications of Aelred of Rievaulx's Spiritual Friendship and how material and political equality could help to foster spiritual friendship by mitigating a lot of the worldly obstacles to it. In other words there is a communistic undertone (and practical reality) to monastic practice that ignites my own political imagination, but that makes me wonder about its place within and seeming lack of influence on the political systems the church was situated in. ladybird97 has been kind enough to take time out of preparing her dissertation defense to email me suggestions on secondary sources for this and a chapter of the dissertation itself, for which I am ever so grateful.
I should be drafting a letter to my A Brief History of the Lyric professor to see if he will let me write my final paper on hip-hop, but before I do that I need to have more of thesis than just "I want to write about rap." The MFA poets in class are being allowed to write papers that reference their own work, while the MA Education folks in class can choose to write something about poetry and pedagogy OR a straight up research paper, while us English MA people can only do the straight up research paper. If I am going to be limited in that way I still want to shape the project to be about something I am interested and that I think is relevant to current forms of poetic discursive expression. In particular, I like how rap lyrics seem to simultaneously contain both definitions of discursive.
1. Reasoning; proceeding from one ground to another, as in reasoning; argumentative.
2. Passing from one thing to another; ranging over a wide field; roving; digressive; desultory.
I should be reading Dante's Vita Nuova and Richard Wright's Black Boy (the latter being such a great book to rediscover after not having read it since the 9th grade).
I should be deciding which story to hand out to my students for the class I am teaching at the end of the month (part of me is chickening out about giving them the "Tralala" chapter from Last Exit to Brooklyn).
I should writing paper proposals for graduate conferences (though every conference I have found out about so far has not had a theme amenable to my particular literary and academic interests).
I should be looking into post-graduate programs so I can figure out what I am going to do next. I should be preparing for my Comps which I take on May 3rd. I should be just laughing, enjoying myself, taking a deep breath and being happy to be doing/having just done something that I really love.
But none of that changes the feeling of lethargy and emptiness that comes immediately after. . . Not all the time, just lately. . . The last couple of weeks. I'm just tired and my back pain makes me cranky, and even if that isn't really it, it is a good enough excuse to keep from looking at deeper causes. . . If I think I am tired now, constant self- reflection is fucking exhausting.
So anyway, enough whining. . . Let's go through the weekly report thing as quickly as possible:
Monday: My English 2 students had a lively discussion about "My Friend Judith". In Literature of the Middle Ages we discussed Parzival some more and I tried to stay awake (even breaking my one cup of coffee a day that must be had before noon rule). Heck, some people in my class hate the text so much they started a Facebook group about it. I didn't join. Mostly I doodled in my notes and looked at the professor with feigned interest when I sensed him scanning the class for a face that registered understanding and support. "I'm there for you, man. . . Even if I'm not following this shit." My one contribution all class was me saying, "Killicrates! Yep, those are funny names. . ." when discussing the list of knights accompanying Feirefiz and Parzival when they meet for the first time and fight. Our paper proposal is due this coming Monday. I mentioned it above.
Tuesday, while I was in A Brief History of the Lyric the Mets were blowing their two run lead and getting crushed by the Phillies for the 9th time out of the last nine times they've met. In class we discussed metaphor and cliche in the context of reading Robert Burns "A Red, Red Rose" - but it is "To a Mouse" that I really loved, reminding me on my meditations on my murderous urges and animal pity that I wrote about back in February of 2006. Oh, but in the discussion of the trite and cliche, I loved when this woman quoted Led Zeppelin lyrics to illustrate the point that the cheesiness of lyrics ("If the sun refused to shine / I would still be loving you") in songs can be mitigated by the presentation and emotion. I followed this up with talking about how I personally appreciate earnestness. And then we discussed Wordsworth's "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" and his poem "Daffodils," which you might know as "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," which is how I've always thought of it. I really like that poem despite being a bit played out.
On Thursday my students and I watched a big chunk of Ibsen's "A Doll's House" which had what appeared to be a relatively young Anthony Hopkins in it. . . but it might not have been him. I have never seen or read the play before and it seems a lot more complicated in its relationships than the Miller and Williams plays they have read/watched. They have to write a short paper on it due next class. Speaking of papers, before handing back the papers I graded for him the professor pulled me aside to give me two notes on what I had done. 1) That he enforces the rule that a thesis should always be one sentence (which made me sigh and say, "except when its not," to which he replied, "I am probably stricter about that than I should be.") and 2) that I had misguidedly told the students that the name of the short story should be underlined or italicized in the paper, when it should be in quotes. Oops! That was my fuck up, I thought quotes were just for poems and articles. I should have double-checked before making the comment repeatedly, since it is hard to keep all those arbitrary rules straight. No one has ever been able to give me a satisfactory explanation why there even needs to be a different format for referring to poems or short stories - articles I can kind of see why. Oh well. . .
In Lopalia LoBats class we started off with discussing people's final projects for the class which I am exempt from since I am only auditing the class. At one point the professor kind of jokingly had the class give me a round of applause for doing all the other work for the class even though I am not taking it for credit, I smiled, but inwardly cringed. I don't want a round of applause. I am just doing this thing that I love and trying not to feel like a dork about it. There is nothing in my life right now that gives me as much joy and satisfaction as being in school. A lot of people seem to see grad school as something to endure. I am seeing it as something to experience as fully as possible. After that we once again tackled Tropic of Capricorn, discussing the "CODA" where Miller's narrative voice seems to change drastically, revealing a kind of tenderness and vulnerability that was obscured by the bombast and narcissism throughout the rest of the text. In the end, we were all left unsettled, confused, conflicted about the text, which I am more than fine with. I talked about the absurdity of desire that seems to be underscored in the text (with sexual conquest being synonymous with consumptive capitalism) and one of my classmates made the connection between that absurdity of desire and stereotypical aggressive masculine sexuality. . . Why do we want what we want and how we want it? How is it we seem to have so little control over it? Capitalism seems to exaggerate that desire into something cartoonish and destructive.
Not much planned for the weekend. I have a friend's birthday to celebrate with a brunch or a lunch or a dinner or something on Saturday. . . But it will have to be brief. I have a ton of reading and a paper proposal to write up and Sunday is game day - also, I may try to squeeze in a brief visit to see mi abuela now that she's out of the hospital.
Peace.
I should be doing research for my Literature of the Middle Ages paper on the theoretical political implications of Aelred of Rievaulx's Spiritual Friendship and how material and political equality could help to foster spiritual friendship by mitigating a lot of the worldly obstacles to it. In other words there is a communistic undertone (and practical reality) to monastic practice that ignites my own political imagination, but that makes me wonder about its place within and seeming lack of influence on the political systems the church was situated in. ladybird97 has been kind enough to take time out of preparing her dissertation defense to email me suggestions on secondary sources for this and a chapter of the dissertation itself, for which I am ever so grateful.
I should be drafting a letter to my A Brief History of the Lyric professor to see if he will let me write my final paper on hip-hop, but before I do that I need to have more of thesis than just "I want to write about rap." The MFA poets in class are being allowed to write papers that reference their own work, while the MA Education folks in class can choose to write something about poetry and pedagogy OR a straight up research paper, while us English MA people can only do the straight up research paper. If I am going to be limited in that way I still want to shape the project to be about something I am interested and that I think is relevant to current forms of poetic discursive expression. In particular, I like how rap lyrics seem to simultaneously contain both definitions of discursive.
1. Reasoning; proceeding from one ground to another, as in reasoning; argumentative.
2. Passing from one thing to another; ranging over a wide field; roving; digressive; desultory.
I should be reading Dante's Vita Nuova and Richard Wright's Black Boy (the latter being such a great book to rediscover after not having read it since the 9th grade).
I should be deciding which story to hand out to my students for the class I am teaching at the end of the month (part of me is chickening out about giving them the "Tralala" chapter from Last Exit to Brooklyn).
I should writing paper proposals for graduate conferences (though every conference I have found out about so far has not had a theme amenable to my particular literary and academic interests).
I should be looking into post-graduate programs so I can figure out what I am going to do next. I should be preparing for my Comps which I take on May 3rd. I should be just laughing, enjoying myself, taking a deep breath and being happy to be doing/having just done something that I really love.
But none of that changes the feeling of lethargy and emptiness that comes immediately after. . . Not all the time, just lately. . . The last couple of weeks. I'm just tired and my back pain makes me cranky, and even if that isn't really it, it is a good enough excuse to keep from looking at deeper causes. . . If I think I am tired now, constant self- reflection is fucking exhausting.
So anyway, enough whining. . . Let's go through the weekly report thing as quickly as possible:
Monday: My English 2 students had a lively discussion about "My Friend Judith". In Literature of the Middle Ages we discussed Parzival some more and I tried to stay awake (even breaking my one cup of coffee a day that must be had before noon rule). Heck, some people in my class hate the text so much they started a Facebook group about it. I didn't join. Mostly I doodled in my notes and looked at the professor with feigned interest when I sensed him scanning the class for a face that registered understanding and support. "I'm there for you, man. . . Even if I'm not following this shit." My one contribution all class was me saying, "Killicrates! Yep, those are funny names. . ." when discussing the list of knights accompanying Feirefiz and Parzival when they meet for the first time and fight. Our paper proposal is due this coming Monday. I mentioned it above.
Tuesday, while I was in A Brief History of the Lyric the Mets were blowing their two run lead and getting crushed by the Phillies for the 9th time out of the last nine times they've met. In class we discussed metaphor and cliche in the context of reading Robert Burns "A Red, Red Rose" - but it is "To a Mouse" that I really loved, reminding me on my meditations on my murderous urges and animal pity that I wrote about back in February of 2006. Oh, but in the discussion of the trite and cliche, I loved when this woman quoted Led Zeppelin lyrics to illustrate the point that the cheesiness of lyrics ("If the sun refused to shine / I would still be loving you") in songs can be mitigated by the presentation and emotion. I followed this up with talking about how I personally appreciate earnestness. And then we discussed Wordsworth's "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" and his poem "Daffodils," which you might know as "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," which is how I've always thought of it. I really like that poem despite being a bit played out.
On Thursday my students and I watched a big chunk of Ibsen's "A Doll's House" which had what appeared to be a relatively young Anthony Hopkins in it. . . but it might not have been him. I have never seen or read the play before and it seems a lot more complicated in its relationships than the Miller and Williams plays they have read/watched. They have to write a short paper on it due next class. Speaking of papers, before handing back the papers I graded for him the professor pulled me aside to give me two notes on what I had done. 1) That he enforces the rule that a thesis should always be one sentence (which made me sigh and say, "except when its not," to which he replied, "I am probably stricter about that than I should be.") and 2) that I had misguidedly told the students that the name of the short story should be underlined or italicized in the paper, when it should be in quotes. Oops! That was my fuck up, I thought quotes were just for poems and articles. I should have double-checked before making the comment repeatedly, since it is hard to keep all those arbitrary rules straight. No one has ever been able to give me a satisfactory explanation why there even needs to be a different format for referring to poems or short stories - articles I can kind of see why. Oh well. . .
In Lopalia LoBats class we started off with discussing people's final projects for the class which I am exempt from since I am only auditing the class. At one point the professor kind of jokingly had the class give me a round of applause for doing all the other work for the class even though I am not taking it for credit, I smiled, but inwardly cringed. I don't want a round of applause. I am just doing this thing that I love and trying not to feel like a dork about it. There is nothing in my life right now that gives me as much joy and satisfaction as being in school. A lot of people seem to see grad school as something to endure. I am seeing it as something to experience as fully as possible. After that we once again tackled Tropic of Capricorn, discussing the "CODA" where Miller's narrative voice seems to change drastically, revealing a kind of tenderness and vulnerability that was obscured by the bombast and narcissism throughout the rest of the text. In the end, we were all left unsettled, confused, conflicted about the text, which I am more than fine with. I talked about the absurdity of desire that seems to be underscored in the text (with sexual conquest being synonymous with consumptive capitalism) and one of my classmates made the connection between that absurdity of desire and stereotypical aggressive masculine sexuality. . . Why do we want what we want and how we want it? How is it we seem to have so little control over it? Capitalism seems to exaggerate that desire into something cartoonish and destructive.
Not much planned for the weekend. I have a friend's birthday to celebrate with a brunch or a lunch or a dinner or something on Saturday. . . But it will have to be brief. I have a ton of reading and a paper proposal to write up and Sunday is game day - also, I may try to squeeze in a brief visit to see mi abuela now that she's out of the hospital.
Peace.