Grad School Report - Spring 2008 (Week 14)
What was it I wrote in the fall when break fell on the 13th week of the semester? "Like a superstitious skyscraper we skip thirteen." I like that, and we have done it again. I did not have much of a spring break to speak of, as I worked for most of it, but I did take last Thursday and Friday off, going shopping for an entertainment center with my sister as this was to be my Christmas present from her and my mom, but it just never happened until recently. As it turned out the one I wanted was more than I was willing to let them pay, so I paid for half of it myself. It is being delivered tonight.
I should have been doing more schoolwork during these four days, but mostly I procrastinated. I did eventually grade the stack of papers I had and prepared for teaching class on Monday (see below), and finished re-reading Last Exit to Brooklyn and skimmed some Derrida for my paper on friendship, but mostly I frittered away my time preparing for my Saturday game, editing some old writing of mine, playing video games, watching baseball and episodes of Daybreak.
One thing I did do was email my professor for my A Brief History of the Lyric class to ask permission to write about rap lyrics for our final paper. I wrote:
As I mentioned at the beginning of our last class, I had in mind doing something a little different for my final paper. While I am more than able to write something about more traditional poetry and the elements of lyric, with its musicality and subjectivity, I would really like to write about hip-hop (i.e. rap) lyrics as a contemporary example of discursive lyric.
One of things that intrigues me about the discursive approach of many rappers is how it simultaneously falls under two possible 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.
While I know writing about song lyrics threatens to cheapen academic discourse with self-indulgent miring in popular culture, and it also often either fails to account for the effect the actual musical components of recordings/performances in helping to support the lyrics and suggest meaning, OR the writing becomes too much about the musical elements of a specific recording/performance to the detriment of the lyrical examination, I think in the case of hip-hop I think the strong rhyming structures that rappers use to create their songs lends itself to a lot of the terms of musicality we use when discussing poems that are not set to actual music - in particular syllable stress, rhyme scheme (including use of internal rhymes), word play, formal experimentation, and a strong self-conscious (meta-lyrical) component that often seems to give on-going commentary on the song itself, creating interesting ways to interpret lyric, and allowing us to examine how these songs seem to disrupt their own narratives creating a simultaneously fuller and split sense of subjectivity.
My forays into research on this topic have uncovered a lot more academic treatment of hip-hop than I expected, with articles examining its structure, content, social impact, history, broader musical influence and postmodernity - So I am not worried about secondary sources.
He replied:
Osvaldo,
Sounds like an excellent topic. Yes, more & more has been written about it, but very little, I suspect, in the context of "discursive lyric." I'd suggest narrowing it down to a discussion of "discursive lyric" in a few songs (2,3,4) by one hip-hop artist or in a few songs (2,3, 4) by different hip-hop artists. You can then discuss in some detail the use of reason/argument, the wide-ranging digressive quality, as well as the propulsive musical elements in the songs and the way "subjectivity" is explored and expressed.
I expect you'll write a fine paper.
Prof. A.
I choose to interpret that "fine" in the same way one might say, "Damn that girl is fine…" But yeah, this made me very happy and I have been having fun reading through academic tackling of hip-hop culture in general and rap music in specific (remember, the latter is just one aspect of the former, though obviously the most pervasive one in "mainstream" culture), and I have also been figuring out lyrics and footnoting them in the way you see notations for poems in the Norton Anthology of Poetry - a requirement because of the specificity of slang in rap lyrics, which is not only unique to a sub-culture, but to particular times, as I am using rap songs from the late 80s to the mid-90s, and also because of the very specific references to events and beef and battles in the hip-hop community.
On Monday I taught the English 2 class while the professor observed, and led the students in a discussion of Alice Munro's "The Moons of Jupiter". Unfortunately, it appeared that most of the students had not read the story. I did my best to go through it and develop the discussion with those who had read it, and tried to broaden the discussion to allow those who had not finished or not received the handout because they were not in class the day it was given to take part as well - but I don't think I was very successful. I mean, I was successful with the four or five students who did take part in the discussion, but I guess that wasn't satisfying to me. I wanted the discussion to not be dominated by the same students, and I wanted to open the story up for them without playing the "guess what I am thinking game," which is something I have observed in undergrads, and is probably something conditioned from grade school - the idea that as a student you are trying to figure out the answer that the teacher already has in mind. I want to break that habit.
I was trying to use the story to disrupt and expand the idea of "selves" that the students have been reading and writing about in their psychological approach to the class texts that the professor has been emphasizing. On the bright side, during the discussion those students who were involved did bring up some insights I had not considered, and I love that feeling.
One funny moment was when this older woman who also teaches class in that room interrupted me in the middle of class to remind me to put away the wooden wedge used to keep classroom door open because "they keep disappearing."
Anyway, after class I was feeling pretty down about the results of my teaching, but yesterday morning I got an email from the professor telling me he had sent word to the woman who runs the composition classes at Brooklyn college of the "fine work" (there's that word again) I did for him and with the class and thanking me for it, and reminding me to send her my proposed syllabus and other required info for getting hired on as composition instructor with my own class of freshman in the fall. So I am in that process now, and psyched!
In Literature of the Middle Ages we discussed Hoccleve's "Complaint," which struck me as a medieval record of seasonal affective disorder. I found the language (Middle English) to be huge obstacle to my comprehension of this poem, and had to read sections of it aloud over and over to get a sense of some it, feeling more frustrated than enlightened. But at least I was able to read enough of it to follow class discussion and even take part a little, which was something I had not done for Parcival, and barely did for Dante's Vita Nuova.
We got back our paper proposals and I was shocked to see that he graded them! If I had known he planned to do that (who grades paper proposals?) I might have spent more time on it, but then again I got an 'A+' on it, so really what else was there to do? I knew that the professor would like my concentrating on the philosophical underpinnings of the tensions friendship and their potential political implications, as he has a very strong philosophical bent, and when I had a class with him before our philosophical outlooks were often parallel. I only wish the proposal was enough and I did not actually have to write the 20-page paper on Spiritual Friendship that it proposes. Regardless, his comments (he told me I "hit the nail on the head") and a few more suggested sources were very encouraging, now I just have to actually start it.
Tuesday we slogged through another session of A Brief History of the Lyric discussing Coleridge's "Ode to Dejection" and Shelley's "Ode to the Western Wind." I like Shelley despite, if not because of his "embarrassing subjectivity" (as my professor put it). It is easy to make fun of "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" two hundred years later. We started on Keats as class ended (another of my all-time favorites - I don't care what anyone says, I still love the Romantics, despite, if not because of my own cynicism). We fall further and further behind the syllabus.
Someone actually already handed in their final paper… Two weeks early! I can't imagine doing that. Even if I had already written it, I would have set it aside and then re-read it just before it was due to make last minute adjustments - then again I am the kind of person that if it were not for deadlines I could tweak a paper ad nauseum… I plan to write it this weekend (a week early) to give me time to work on the monster of the Lit of the Middle Ages class, but as it is I keep changing my mind about which songs I am going to do, even though I already have a title of it: Let Me Take You To A Higher Level: Discursive Tension in the Raps of Blastmaster KRS-ONE.
Wednesday: I sat and reviewed literary terms for part one of the comps (see below), while my students wrote an essay on either Hemingway's "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" or Joyce's "Araby." I had never read the latter before, so I quickly read it. Good little story, but I could see how its theme might be obscured by too quick a reading. As usual I wandered around and helped them when I could and tried to keep them off of wikipedia, and discussed the papers on Ibsen they had been handed back with a few of them. At the end of class I collected the papers and will grade them for next Monday. Just one more thing to add to the list of things to do…
All this time I been calling my Wednesday night class, Lopalia LoBats, for "The Language of Place and Location in Literature of Brooklyn and the South," but I recently realized that it is "The Language of Space and Location…" So it should really be "Losalia LoBats," which does not roll off the tongue as well for me… Anyway, we have used the term "place" a lot, not just for locality, but in discussion of social/cultural roles of characters, as in, 'knowing your place." So, I'll be sticking with the name I gave it, even if it is technically 'wrong'.
Speaking of place, this week's reading was Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, which concerns itself with the lowest of places and lives in the Brooklyn imagination… These are low-life's low-lives… And I love it, (again) not despite the discomfort it causes, but because of it. And the "Tralala" section is one of the finest examples of writing I have ever had the pleasure of discovering back when I first took this book out of the Brooklyn Public Library in 1992.
We struggled with the apparent nihilism of the text and it is really hard to say anything about because it is so troublesome. I really encourage people to read it, but be forewarned, it is incredibly violent and often disgusting and not one of the characters is redeeming in any way that any of us could think of, and there are also these modernist flourishes where unlabeled dialog and streaming description mix into each other, and there is a lot of textual experimentation with punctuation and phonetic writing. Rather than trying to say anything about it, let me instead give you the bible quote from Ecclesiastes that opens the first chapter (each chaper starts with a Bible quote) and see if it tells you something about how one should approach this text:
For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast; for all is vanity. - Ecclesiastes 3:19
I couldn't have said it better myself and I believe it wholeheartedly more than any other part of the Bible. But the reason I include it is because my professor has often mentioned this interesting idea she got from a class she once took, wherein they read the beginnings (and only the beginnings) of some 80-something novels, looking to see if there might be some way by which the author and reader form a sort of contract; that is; there is nearly always some indication at the beginning of a novel of how it is to be read. Think of it as coded instructions to carry with you for the rest of text. So, if you take that biblical quote as as the instructions for the rest of Last Exit to Brooklyn, then perhaps you can imagine something about what you are to make of it.
Next we read one of my favorite authors, Flannery O'Connor. Haven't read any? Well, get to it! I honestly don't remember when I was first exposed to her short stories. Was it in high school? That doesn't sound right… At Earlham? Seems more likely. I vaguely remember reading her at New Paltz, but I feel like I already knew who she was…
I am not sure why, but this just made me think about how when the semester is over I need to take an afternoon to re-organize my bookshelves (I have four three-tiered shelves and two two-tiered ones in my living room). For the last two years I have just been stacking books in every space I could find and replacing some in the spots with others just to get them out of the way, and it has gotten to the point where I cannot find anything and can't recall if I lend stuff out. I am meticulous with my CD collection, having everything in a precise order and having a system for knowing when a CD is not in the case, but it the uniformity of size that aids in that endeavor. Books do not submit to such limitations, so some other form of organization rather than purely alphabetical needs to happen with the books (my CDs are in alphabetical order by artist, but then chronological within artist - which is ideally how I would like my books to be), as if you have a small paperback between a large hardcover and a medium trade paperback, it is impossible to read the title from the spine. Sorry for the digression…
Saturday I take my comprehensive exam, and I have been trying to prepare by reading the definitions of literary terms over and over. I could not find a copy of the book the department recommends using for the definition of literary terms, so I got a different book which is a little out of date and am supplementing it with book for a class from my first semester which has a general overview of literary theory. I am much more worried about defining terms than the essays, because 1) I can rock out an essay with no trouble, and 2) there is no way to know what the essays will be about. I can only hope that I am well-read enough at this point to be able to write them with concrete examples.
Here is an example essay question:
The critic Mikhail Bakhtin posits that the novel comprises "a plurality of independent unmerged voices," in other words different kinds of language, juxtaposed to emphasize that they are in a condition of conflict. Bakhtin's example is the novels of Dostoevsky, but the concept is far broader (Sidney's sonnets, The Canterbury Tales, plays of Shakespeare, Dickens's novels, Ulysses). Discuss the plurality of voices in two works (not necessarily novels) drawn from different periods.
On the other hand, the terms are things that while often talked about are rarely definitely defined. As one of my former classmates I ran into said, "It is kind of weird to have to write a paragraph defining 'metaphor.' It is a form we use all the time and a word we use fairly often, but to actually give a definition? You have to stop and think about the best way to express an otherwise simple concept."
"You can just say, 'Metaphor is a funhouse mirror," I replied with a smirk.
I should have been doing more schoolwork during these four days, but mostly I procrastinated. I did eventually grade the stack of papers I had and prepared for teaching class on Monday (see below), and finished re-reading Last Exit to Brooklyn and skimmed some Derrida for my paper on friendship, but mostly I frittered away my time preparing for my Saturday game, editing some old writing of mine, playing video games, watching baseball and episodes of Daybreak.
One thing I did do was email my professor for my A Brief History of the Lyric class to ask permission to write about rap lyrics for our final paper. I wrote:
As I mentioned at the beginning of our last class, I had in mind doing something a little different for my final paper. While I am more than able to write something about more traditional poetry and the elements of lyric, with its musicality and subjectivity, I would really like to write about hip-hop (i.e. rap) lyrics as a contemporary example of discursive lyric.
One of things that intrigues me about the discursive approach of many rappers is how it simultaneously falls under two possible 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.
While I know writing about song lyrics threatens to cheapen academic discourse with self-indulgent miring in popular culture, and it also often either fails to account for the effect the actual musical components of recordings/performances in helping to support the lyrics and suggest meaning, OR the writing becomes too much about the musical elements of a specific recording/performance to the detriment of the lyrical examination, I think in the case of hip-hop I think the strong rhyming structures that rappers use to create their songs lends itself to a lot of the terms of musicality we use when discussing poems that are not set to actual music - in particular syllable stress, rhyme scheme (including use of internal rhymes), word play, formal experimentation, and a strong self-conscious (meta-lyrical) component that often seems to give on-going commentary on the song itself, creating interesting ways to interpret lyric, and allowing us to examine how these songs seem to disrupt their own narratives creating a simultaneously fuller and split sense of subjectivity.
My forays into research on this topic have uncovered a lot more academic treatment of hip-hop than I expected, with articles examining its structure, content, social impact, history, broader musical influence and postmodernity - So I am not worried about secondary sources.
He replied:
Osvaldo,
Sounds like an excellent topic. Yes, more & more has been written about it, but very little, I suspect, in the context of "discursive lyric." I'd suggest narrowing it down to a discussion of "discursive lyric" in a few songs (2,3,4) by one hip-hop artist or in a few songs (2,3, 4) by different hip-hop artists. You can then discuss in some detail the use of reason/argument, the wide-ranging digressive quality, as well as the propulsive musical elements in the songs and the way "subjectivity" is explored and expressed.
I expect you'll write a fine paper.
Prof. A.
I choose to interpret that "fine" in the same way one might say, "Damn that girl is fine…" But yeah, this made me very happy and I have been having fun reading through academic tackling of hip-hop culture in general and rap music in specific (remember, the latter is just one aspect of the former, though obviously the most pervasive one in "mainstream" culture), and I have also been figuring out lyrics and footnoting them in the way you see notations for poems in the Norton Anthology of Poetry - a requirement because of the specificity of slang in rap lyrics, which is not only unique to a sub-culture, but to particular times, as I am using rap songs from the late 80s to the mid-90s, and also because of the very specific references to events and beef and battles in the hip-hop community.
On Monday I taught the English 2 class while the professor observed, and led the students in a discussion of Alice Munro's "The Moons of Jupiter". Unfortunately, it appeared that most of the students had not read the story. I did my best to go through it and develop the discussion with those who had read it, and tried to broaden the discussion to allow those who had not finished or not received the handout because they were not in class the day it was given to take part as well - but I don't think I was very successful. I mean, I was successful with the four or five students who did take part in the discussion, but I guess that wasn't satisfying to me. I wanted the discussion to not be dominated by the same students, and I wanted to open the story up for them without playing the "guess what I am thinking game," which is something I have observed in undergrads, and is probably something conditioned from grade school - the idea that as a student you are trying to figure out the answer that the teacher already has in mind. I want to break that habit.
I was trying to use the story to disrupt and expand the idea of "selves" that the students have been reading and writing about in their psychological approach to the class texts that the professor has been emphasizing. On the bright side, during the discussion those students who were involved did bring up some insights I had not considered, and I love that feeling.
One funny moment was when this older woman who also teaches class in that room interrupted me in the middle of class to remind me to put away the wooden wedge used to keep classroom door open because "they keep disappearing."
Anyway, after class I was feeling pretty down about the results of my teaching, but yesterday morning I got an email from the professor telling me he had sent word to the woman who runs the composition classes at Brooklyn college of the "fine work" (there's that word again) I did for him and with the class and thanking me for it, and reminding me to send her my proposed syllabus and other required info for getting hired on as composition instructor with my own class of freshman in the fall. So I am in that process now, and psyched!
In Literature of the Middle Ages we discussed Hoccleve's "Complaint," which struck me as a medieval record of seasonal affective disorder. I found the language (Middle English) to be huge obstacle to my comprehension of this poem, and had to read sections of it aloud over and over to get a sense of some it, feeling more frustrated than enlightened. But at least I was able to read enough of it to follow class discussion and even take part a little, which was something I had not done for Parcival, and barely did for Dante's Vita Nuova.
We got back our paper proposals and I was shocked to see that he graded them! If I had known he planned to do that (who grades paper proposals?) I might have spent more time on it, but then again I got an 'A+' on it, so really what else was there to do? I knew that the professor would like my concentrating on the philosophical underpinnings of the tensions friendship and their potential political implications, as he has a very strong philosophical bent, and when I had a class with him before our philosophical outlooks were often parallel. I only wish the proposal was enough and I did not actually have to write the 20-page paper on Spiritual Friendship that it proposes. Regardless, his comments (he told me I "hit the nail on the head") and a few more suggested sources were very encouraging, now I just have to actually start it.
Tuesday we slogged through another session of A Brief History of the Lyric discussing Coleridge's "Ode to Dejection" and Shelley's "Ode to the Western Wind." I like Shelley despite, if not because of his "embarrassing subjectivity" (as my professor put it). It is easy to make fun of "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" two hundred years later. We started on Keats as class ended (another of my all-time favorites - I don't care what anyone says, I still love the Romantics, despite, if not because of my own cynicism). We fall further and further behind the syllabus.
Someone actually already handed in their final paper… Two weeks early! I can't imagine doing that. Even if I had already written it, I would have set it aside and then re-read it just before it was due to make last minute adjustments - then again I am the kind of person that if it were not for deadlines I could tweak a paper ad nauseum… I plan to write it this weekend (a week early) to give me time to work on the monster of the Lit of the Middle Ages class, but as it is I keep changing my mind about which songs I am going to do, even though I already have a title of it: Let Me Take You To A Higher Level: Discursive Tension in the Raps of Blastmaster KRS-ONE.
Wednesday: I sat and reviewed literary terms for part one of the comps (see below), while my students wrote an essay on either Hemingway's "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" or Joyce's "Araby." I had never read the latter before, so I quickly read it. Good little story, but I could see how its theme might be obscured by too quick a reading. As usual I wandered around and helped them when I could and tried to keep them off of wikipedia, and discussed the papers on Ibsen they had been handed back with a few of them. At the end of class I collected the papers and will grade them for next Monday. Just one more thing to add to the list of things to do…
All this time I been calling my Wednesday night class, Lopalia LoBats, for "The Language of Place and Location in Literature of Brooklyn and the South," but I recently realized that it is "The Language of Space and Location…" So it should really be "Losalia LoBats," which does not roll off the tongue as well for me… Anyway, we have used the term "place" a lot, not just for locality, but in discussion of social/cultural roles of characters, as in, 'knowing your place." So, I'll be sticking with the name I gave it, even if it is technically 'wrong'.
Speaking of place, this week's reading was Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, which concerns itself with the lowest of places and lives in the Brooklyn imagination… These are low-life's low-lives… And I love it, (again) not despite the discomfort it causes, but because of it. And the "Tralala" section is one of the finest examples of writing I have ever had the pleasure of discovering back when I first took this book out of the Brooklyn Public Library in 1992.
We struggled with the apparent nihilism of the text and it is really hard to say anything about because it is so troublesome. I really encourage people to read it, but be forewarned, it is incredibly violent and often disgusting and not one of the characters is redeeming in any way that any of us could think of, and there are also these modernist flourishes where unlabeled dialog and streaming description mix into each other, and there is a lot of textual experimentation with punctuation and phonetic writing. Rather than trying to say anything about it, let me instead give you the bible quote from Ecclesiastes that opens the first chapter (each chaper starts with a Bible quote) and see if it tells you something about how one should approach this text:
For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast; for all is vanity. - Ecclesiastes 3:19
I couldn't have said it better myself and I believe it wholeheartedly more than any other part of the Bible. But the reason I include it is because my professor has often mentioned this interesting idea she got from a class she once took, wherein they read the beginnings (and only the beginnings) of some 80-something novels, looking to see if there might be some way by which the author and reader form a sort of contract; that is; there is nearly always some indication at the beginning of a novel of how it is to be read. Think of it as coded instructions to carry with you for the rest of text. So, if you take that biblical quote as as the instructions for the rest of Last Exit to Brooklyn, then perhaps you can imagine something about what you are to make of it.
Next we read one of my favorite authors, Flannery O'Connor. Haven't read any? Well, get to it! I honestly don't remember when I was first exposed to her short stories. Was it in high school? That doesn't sound right… At Earlham? Seems more likely. I vaguely remember reading her at New Paltz, but I feel like I already knew who she was…
I am not sure why, but this just made me think about how when the semester is over I need to take an afternoon to re-organize my bookshelves (I have four three-tiered shelves and two two-tiered ones in my living room). For the last two years I have just been stacking books in every space I could find and replacing some in the spots with others just to get them out of the way, and it has gotten to the point where I cannot find anything and can't recall if I lend stuff out. I am meticulous with my CD collection, having everything in a precise order and having a system for knowing when a CD is not in the case, but it the uniformity of size that aids in that endeavor. Books do not submit to such limitations, so some other form of organization rather than purely alphabetical needs to happen with the books (my CDs are in alphabetical order by artist, but then chronological within artist - which is ideally how I would like my books to be), as if you have a small paperback between a large hardcover and a medium trade paperback, it is impossible to read the title from the spine. Sorry for the digression…
Saturday I take my comprehensive exam, and I have been trying to prepare by reading the definitions of literary terms over and over. I could not find a copy of the book the department recommends using for the definition of literary terms, so I got a different book which is a little out of date and am supplementing it with book for a class from my first semester which has a general overview of literary theory. I am much more worried about defining terms than the essays, because 1) I can rock out an essay with no trouble, and 2) there is no way to know what the essays will be about. I can only hope that I am well-read enough at this point to be able to write them with concrete examples.
Here is an example essay question:
The critic Mikhail Bakhtin posits that the novel comprises "a plurality of independent unmerged voices," in other words different kinds of language, juxtaposed to emphasize that they are in a condition of conflict. Bakhtin's example is the novels of Dostoevsky, but the concept is far broader (Sidney's sonnets, The Canterbury Tales, plays of Shakespeare, Dickens's novels, Ulysses). Discuss the plurality of voices in two works (not necessarily novels) drawn from different periods.
On the other hand, the terms are things that while often talked about are rarely definitely defined. As one of my former classmates I ran into said, "It is kind of weird to have to write a paragraph defining 'metaphor.' It is a form we use all the time and a word we use fairly often, but to actually give a definition? You have to stop and think about the best way to express an otherwise simple concept."
"You can just say, 'Metaphor is a funhouse mirror," I replied with a smirk.