Monthly Archive for December, 2006

progress: finally.

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on December 22, 2006
in Academia and Depressertation
. 6 Comments

The current dissertation chapter is done. I imagine the committee will have a few suggestions for editing, but, for the moment, it is done. And now here is the embarrassing confession: I was half-done with it in June. Yes, FUCKING JUNE. This should have been finished in July, in between all those visits to the phlebotomist to sell my plasma, but at the time, I was too stressed and worried and depressed to get anything done, so I ignored it. A week ago today, I opened the document and started working on it again, and today, I finished it. I didn’t even work on it every day this week–some days I was at Temp Job.

The ridiculous thing is, I know that working on this over the summer would have made me feel better about my situation–I may not have had money, but at least I would have been getting something done, right? But no, sadly, my brain didn’t work that way. Instead, it just sort of…froze. Now of course I am kicking myself, but there’s nothing I can change about that. All I can do is keep working as hard as possible over the break, so that by the time classes start again I will have even more to show for it. In a week, I wrote half a chapter. I think in the next two weeks, I can at least have a decent draft of another one.

I know now (because I have been reminded; because I knew before) how much better working makes me feel. I love writing; I shouldn’t have been looking at it as a chore. My whole project is exciting, to me anyway: I’m working with writers I love and I’m saying something I think needs to be said, not just for me but for the whole sorry state of things. In the end, of course, I don’t expect more than six people will read it, but it still matters.

All week I have had the feeling of my brain rushing on ahead of my body, working and scheming and bringing things together and sharpening them. Most of the time my fingers can’t keep pace, and a lot of the time I find myself still working during the evening or in the car, so I record messages for myself on the phone or I email myself from work, worried I will lose track of things; trying to hold on to them. Even though I just got home with a really goddamn satisfying draft in hand and I should be celebrating somehow, I still feel like writing. So I am writing this.

I felt like making a happy announcement, sure, but I also just really want to have some sort of reminder, should I fall down in the hole again, how fucking good it feels to see my way out of it.

patriarchy, i grow weary of your suspenders

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on December 20, 2006
in Academia
. 14 Comments

I tend to get my feathers in a ruffle lately when I’m reading literary criticism.  You’re probably all nodding along, like, "No shit, Alfina, literary criticism is lame. It is SO LAME.  Why would you want to subject yourself to that crap?"  And then you can all have a great big laugh, because apparently I am supposed to be on the way to becoming some kind of asshatted literary critic myself, which means not only will I be contributing to the problem (and ostensibly also SO LAME by association), but I will also be forced to read and engage with it all the time.  All professional-like, and shit.

I didn’t always feel so ruffled:  in the heady undergrad days, before I had to espouse some kind of critical methodology like I was choosing a religion, I found all stripes of the stuff to be fascinating–kind of like when I was sixteen and liked reading about different religions, all "oh, this month I’m so into the Tao."  At the end of that phase, though, I wound up becoming an atheist, and I suspect that’s what’s happening with the literary field, too.  I’m doubting that any of those methodologies, least of all the ones that are so trendy right now, are going to tell us anything about books at all. 

I mean, on the one hand, you have your post-structuralist stuff, where language is a faulty representational system and oh how it pains us, but on the other hand you’re left with the dubious outcroppings of Marxism–and the Marxists don’t even have to read the text, let alone pay any attention to language.  All they have to do is arch an eyebrow and call something "problematic."  Then, of course, the one hand meets the other hand, and what you get are a bunch of earnest grad students all "Well, due to the inscrutable nature of the semiotic system, the meaning of this text has been completely obscured. And, while I can never claim to know what it says, I suspect it is re-inscribing the dominant patriarchal system / classicist hegemony / heteronormative assumptions, and it is therefore [cue eyebrow] highly problematic."  And you know there is nothing that makes me want to roll my eyes more than grad students and their earnestness.

I get that this sounds childish, but can we just remember for a damned minute what it was like to love a book, or a poem or–if you must–even a play? Feeling swept up or elated or punched in the stomach by mere text on a page–text that didn’t stay on the page, that is, but leapt up off of it and whacked us in the face? Something so engaging we stayed up all night to finish it, or, when we did finish, we went right back to the beginning to start again?  Even if it was written by some white dude all entangled in the suspenders of patriarchy?  Because I am weary of having to seek out "the problematic" in everything I read, and I am weary of the cynical reader who is too caught up in worrying about the fact that art is representational to appreciate it, and I am weary of being weary.  No, this is not a pipe; yes, it is a damned fine painting, you know?

I will admit that racism and sexism and homophobia and classicism and colonialism are all lame. They are SO LAME.  And I’ll admit that neither the word "pipe" nor the painting of a pipe is a pipe.  Fine.  Now let’s move on.  This is the New School; we read books here.

a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on December 17, 2006
in Paedagogy
. 8 Comments

I have been meaning to tell you all about the final project I had my kids do this past term.  Without getting into too many specifics about the subject matter of the class, I’ll tell you that they had a creative project to do–something incorporating similar thematic material or addressing itself to similar questions as the novels and short fiction we had read.  Whatever, blah blah blah; they had a creative project; this is my point. 

I told them they could work in almost any medium: fiction, personal essays, poetry, music, film, painting, drawing, comics, web design–whatever they wanted.  They also had to accompany the creative portion with a commentary explaining how they conceived of their particular project (remember this information for later!).  Some of the projects were really wonderful:  there was a funny short film, a couple of really impressive paintings, a promising short story, a sweet and sad short graphic novel, and oh my good glaven, so much bad poetry.  So much, y’all, and so, so bad.

I feel awful saying that, because lord knows I had the poetry jones* when I was their age, too, but in my defense I have to tell you that I did not write any awful rhyming couplets like these.  What is with the rhyming couplets?!  It’s as if they never saw or heard any other form of poetry.  I’d love to cite some really ugly examples for you, but I have made myself a sworn policy of not quoting my students’ bad writing any more, mostly out of the instinct for self-preservation in the employment world, but let’s be nice and pretend it is out of some earnest ethical concern.  Any rate, I can’t give you any quotes, but trust me when I tell you that it was the kind of poetry that makes you physically ill.  Can a person die of excessive cringing? Because if so, I was probably in severe mortal danger during all of finals week.  Just start making a list of words that rhyme with "love" or "alone" or "distress" and you’ll have the measure of it.

In addition to the people who should have a restraining order taken out to keep them 500 yards away from the English language at all times, there was a slew of people whose markers, scissors, tape, construction paper, and paint should be confiscated until further notice.  If a person has less artistic ability than the average first-grader, why, oh lord, why would that person choose to do an art project, of all things?  The lettering on one particular poster/collage hodgepodge looked like it had been accomplished by the artist holding the pen between her toes, and one diorama appeared to have been constructed in the dark, by a one armed monkey.  It was hard to resist the urge to blind myself with a pencil. 

I know this sounds horribly snobbish, but I promise that isn’t what’s behind it.  It isn’t that I subtly disagreed with their sense of aesthetics, or something, it was just honestly that bad.  Then, of course, I had to read the commentary portions I told you to remember back at the beginning of this terrifying tale.   They were all so earnest and serious and sweet, telling me about their sources of inspiration and what effect they were trying to bring about, what they had learned about themselves or about the other readings via the creative process, that I couldn’t bring myself to give any of them the truly awful grades I thought their "creative" portions "merited."  And I sat there at my desk, drinking my forty-seventh cup of coffee, and trying to think of nice things to say about the offending items. 

"Remind me to never again put myself in a position where I have to read my students’ poetry,"  I went around telling people for a week.  While a lot of the non-poetry-based projects were quite good, or at least passably interesting, there was not one single poem that I didn’t just loathe.  Never again. 

Oh, who am I kidding? That was ten times quicker than grading essays, and I am absolutely doing it again.

*I still have the poetry jones, but I think, I hope, my taste level has changed for the better.

open letter to twenty-eight

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on December 12, 2006
in Correspondence
. 11 Comments

Dear Twenty-Eight,

I am pleased to have occasion, finally, to write you.  You see, Twenty-Eight, although we have gotten to know each other very well, I have not had much to say to you.  Yes, we’ve spent a lot of time together–every day, in fact, for the last year–and yet I have never been quite sure what to make of you. 

In many ways you were nothing special.  Just another number, Twenty-Eight, I’m afraid I must say.  Day in and day out, you didn’t feel much different from most other numbers recent in my acquaintance.  Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four, Twenty-Five:  they were quite similar to you, as it turns out.  Twenty-Six as well–virtually no discernible difference.  Even more, you must recognize, you were completely indistinguishable from Twenty-Seven. 

I’ll admit, we did chance to meet under auspicious circumstances.  You are a perfect number.  You are a strong, tasty drink, the [double(seven and seven)].  You are a safe two-fold buffer away from Thirty, a number in itself rational, but one I am irrationally reluctant to meet.  You had promise, Twenty-Eight.

But did you fulfill that promise?  Did you?  Huh?  Huh?  No, Twenty-Eight, no you did not.  You did not bring romance, prosperity, or academic success.  I would have welcomed such gifts from you, but instead you came around my house with only a pile of unfinished work, several unpaid bills, and at least ten unwelcome pounds.   It’s time for me to bid you a brisk farewell, Twenty-Eight.  I have dealt with you for as long as I am required by the laws of man or of time.

Never more synonymous with your dark cipher,

Alfina the Twenty-Nine

in which we learn how 0=55.

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on December 11, 2006
in Paedagogy
. 6 Comments

It’s the night before grades are due, which means everyone is on campus frantically sifting through stacks of papers, tests, and attendance sheets. The parking lot outside my office building is full, which comes as no surprise, since I’m in the building that houses the majority of Zembla U’s teaching staff. It’s the only real high-rise here, and all of the professors and instructors and fellows are packed in like bodies in a morgue, each with our own tiny, refrigerated drawer.

Things in my particular drawer are pleasantly calm: all I had left to do today was enter one more column of information and then calculate and submit the grades. Of course, like everything else in my life, I have way too many copies of the information stored in way too many places. I have hand-jotted lists in different colored ink all stapled together, electronic copies of papers with my comments added in (do I need to tell you how pleased I am that Word makes the margin comments all angry and red?), a few different Excel sheets, and, of course, a pile of data entered into the online system our school uses to manage courses.

I hate that system, let me tell you. Here’s the thing (and this explanation may take a while, so get comfortable): I take no joy in failing my students. I want them to learn, and improve, and figure out how to submit a paper that doesn’t make me want to cry. For the most part, this is what happens. Sometimes people come in clueless, but over the years I have come up with enough approaches to the problem that I can, eventually, explain to them what I want and how to do it. I can explain why a paper isn’t working and what needs to change to make it work. They just have to listen and act. That’s it. Any blockhead should be able to pull a C in my class, no problem. The only people who fail the course, generally, are the ones who either got caught plagiarizing (in which case failing is the least of their worries; they’re usually more concerned with the beat-down I am forced to deliver) or who simply don’t do their assignments. Unfortunately, I had a couple of kids in that latter category this time around.

One girl just plumb disappeared a couple of weeks ago and never handed in a final. I am assuming she is still alive. The other kid had the most stubborn case of writer’s block I have ever heard of. He was the one with “no opinions,” and despite several conferences in which we discussed the (interesting, smart) opinions he does in fact have, planned an attack on the paper, discussed strategies for getting started when there’s an ugly blank page facing him, discussed strategies for time management; despite the fact that he knew he would fail if he didn’t complete the assignments; despite the fact that when he told me he just wasn’t going to do it I refused to let him give up, the child did not turn in a damned paper!

What this all means is that I have to enter F’s into my gradebook, which I really do not like to do. And guess what? The stupid online course-managing application (this is going to get clumsy, let’s just agree to call it “Chalkboard”) doesn’t seem to like F’s either. If I do not enter a grade for the missing papers, Chalkboard doesn’t count them in the calculations, instead delivering an average based only on the completed assignments — this means that someone could only turn in one out of ten assignments, get a B on it, and still have a B for the course. The other alternative is, of course, to enter an F for the missing assignments. Chalkboard does not like this either. It calculates F’s as 55%. This makes no sense, as, in this case, there was exactly 0% of the work completed. I tried entering a 0%, but it switches this to an F, which it then calculates as a 55%. The logic, it is baffling to me! I tried to change the setting so that F=0, but, since I had already entered grades, my “permission” was “denied.” Motherfuckers. (And before anyone tells me not to use the system if it sucks so much, may I just add that I have to use it.) It’s a good thing I am still decent enough at math to figure out how to get an average of grades that are scores, letters, and percentages, each one weighted differently, ’cause I had to go Old School on those bitches.

Well, that was probably much more than you ever wanted to know about my grading process. To make a long story short, I (for once) did not wait until the last minute to do the grades, but even though I was almost done, I still had to monkey around with a ton of crap, at the end being saved, finally, by my rudimentary math skills. Yo. And now it is time to celebrate that I will not have to deal with any childrens for the next few weeks, and instead of being frustrated by their writer’s block, I can deal with my own. Fa la la la LA, la la la la.