the problem with the undergrad

channeling the undergrad, it seems, is a double-edged sword. on the one hand it meant that i turned in my chapter on friday, on the other, that the second half was pretty horrible. hastily written, too breezy, not exacting, too rambling (i.e. in no way resembling something i would call "good" or "smart" or "compelling"). the real problem is that i fall in love with my archival findings and tend to fall into show and tell.when i dropped it off, my advisor asked me "will there be an argument here or will i have have to go hunting for one?" fair enough. i have a long history of not making arguments (and yet i'm so argumentative in the rest of life. right j?), but i actually think there are several arguments in this chapter, though many may well been hidden behind my shameless encomium to anna ticknor.

the real problem is that now i'm at a weird crossroads with the academic job market starting up in a couple months. do i switch over and start writing cover letters and teaching statements or stick with the dissertation and try to bang out my Jane Addams chapter in six weeks? I'm also coming up against the fact that though trained as an antebellum lit. person, i'm essentially essentially writing a dissertation on progressiv era female educators, making that chapter on walt whitman seem increasingly out of place. also making the need for another major lit. figure more pressing. and yet i ask, why can't i just keep writing the cultural history (or as some would say, the now defunct, totally unacceptable, apolitical-old-school-american-studies junk)? it just feels very weird to be writing so out of the period that i thought i would be focused on. this also makes it feel daunting to write my dissertation descriptions for the job stuff. the project no longer resembles the prospectus and yet it doesn't really resemble anything yet.

but on a much more positive note, while i have spent much of the last six years believing, really believing, that i'd never finish, i can now say to myself -- and to you my faithful readers -- that i will finish my dissertation. hell, i think i might just be close to halfway there.

return of the undergrad

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been trying to finish up my long-overdue chapter on Anna Ticknor's correspondence school. Even as I've made good progress, I've gotten hung up on certain parts, and for the life of me I can't figure out a conclusion -- long speculative remarks about the University of Phoenix and evangelical homeschooling or stick with the nineteenth century and just end it when Ticknor dies (a deadend?). I don't know. In any case, my adviser has been clamoring for a draft and has finally said that Friday is the deadline (neither of us are good at deadlines, but this one is hard and fast for a number of reasons). Instead of freaking out, becoming paralyzed, and doing nothing (i.e. roughly the last 2 years), I'm channeling my undergraduate self. The student who could sit down, write fifteen decent pages, sleep on it, edit it, and hand it in...early. That girl fled the country about five years ago, and I've been hunting her down ever since. It all just seemed so much easier back then and the stakes felt so much lower. Plus, I've felt for a long time that college is designed to make students feel smart. I'm probably as guilty as the next teacher on this score (though I've been fighting grade inflation one "C" at a time). Grad school, by my reckoning, is designed to make students feel not smart. Ultimately, this is probably an important lesson, but to write from that self-conception is damn near impossible. Those voices, though, are going on mute for the next 45 hours and this girl's making a mental return to the mountains of vermont....

when the schedule gets off

the key to my turn (or the key that turned) in productivity has been abiding a consistent schedule. wake up (after at least 8, but no more than 9 hours), eat enormously large breakfast (i try to eat 80% of my calories by 2 pm), brush teeth, and try to get out the door. the bulk of the day has to be open and has to be spent in my library carrel. if i can get in 5-6 hours in there, i'll at least emerge with something (about 50 pages since the routine began in june). but if i don't get in there, it just doesn't happen. nope. no way. nothing.

take yesterday for example. i woke up too early (thus making me sleepy and foggy for the rest of the day), headed to the southern historical collection to do a bit of freelance research work (diversion #1 and not a great idea) and then messed around on my computer for several hours trying to figure out the best way to get this woman in Australia her digital images (below #1). all that work somehow turned into a lunch date, a doctor's appointment, a thank-you-gift sewing hour (see below #2), and then an evening of bicycle riding and yoga at the gym. in short, not a lick of my own work. and it's all because I got off my schedule first thing in the morning.

so i'm off to the carrel RIGHT THIS MINUTE...

(quilted coasters pattern from Last Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts)

threads

Since Arlo died and I didn’t return to my usual summer teaching, I’ve been carving out more time for the things that I actually enjoy. With my improved writing schedule, I also feel far less guilty spending the evenings creating non-academic goods.

When you’re a graduate student in English, everyone always assumes that you learned to read before you learned to swallow and that you spent the entirety of your childhood clutching Charles Dickens or even the Bobbsey Twins. There’s a reason for this image and most people I’ve come to know during my own grad student tenure do, I guess, fit the bill. Not me. I grew up in rural northern Michigan with a surgeon father (e.g. he wouldn’t know a novel if it cut him with a scalpel) and a mother who was too harried by her children and her own job to model the life of the mind. I suspect there was very little that attracted me to reading when I was young. I preferred floating in the lake and knitting by the stove to turning the pages of C.S. Lewis. And even as I wanted to want to read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder, I just really preferred Little House on the Prairie.

So I filled my time making things. I received a play sewing machine when I was five (the needle was plastic) and a real sewing machine when I was ten (the needle was metal… and sharp). After that, I was endlessly amused by stitches and fabric, stuffing and sizing. My grandmother, a tough woman who traveled 3000 miles by train with her twin sister to join the WACs (or maybe the WAVEs) during World War II because there wasn’t enough food on the farm and she believed it was the right thing to do, was a seamstress also. For years she made all of her – and her children’s – clothes. This meant that by the time my mother had her own kids, she had no interest in spending her evenings cutting out poplins and hauling the Singer up from the basement. I suppose it skipped a generation.

When I sew now, I feel connected to my grandmother. I see her guiding my hands, telling me to let up the foot pedal, watch out for the final stitches on a zipper. She used to iron and cut out her patterns with military precision, flummoxed by my slapdash doings. And she arranged her pieces just so, making sure not an inch of fabric was wasted. My sister inherited her exactitude, but I’m looser with my stitches, okay if the corners don’t meet and the seams need to be taken out four times before I get them straight. I worry endlessly in every other aspect of my life, but when my hands are working, my head is at rest.

I’ve always felt sheepish talking about my domestic desires, my preference for linen over cotton, my knowing a French seam from a flat felled one. Somehow it still seems a signifier for my bookless childhood, my hopelessly unerudite beginnings, my country ways.

diversions

i knew something had changed when i found myself sitting in my carrel for six hours yesterday even as i was turning blue from a hideous hangover. the words on the monitor occasionally flopped about, but still i wrote a couple pages before heading home and falling into a sack of misery.

it's too bad that i can't seem to find a place to work at my own house, but the distractions are everywhere and if i'm not careful, i end up making something like this (see below) instead of typing sentences like this ("These intimate texts come to mediate – and enable – the students’ participation in the larger project of community building"). i need to type better sentences than that one, but you get the idea. the carrel is better than my office at school where there is always the temptation to go and chat with someone in the hall instead of typing those sentences. so it looks like it's seclusion for this one.

flora, fauna

on may 27th my beloved hound took his last breath and i painfully said good-bye. arlo was companion, witness, and guide for 11 long, trying, loving years. he was also the thing that structured my entire existence -- and only now that he's gone have i really engaged with my work in a constant, substantial way. if jesus died for the sins of all christians, perhaps arlo died for my dissertation. how considerate of him.

but now i look for him in other places. i wish i had a photo right now of the baby bunny who was born right after he died. he almost always sits in our back yard, and when someone approaches, he just stares right back at them. unflinching. i call him arlo and somehow his lingering presence reassures me that something of the hound is still with me carrboro.

i've also nurtured some black swallowtail butterflies with a bunch of parsley that i think i'm growing more for them than for me. my friend told me that butterflies (though perhaps just monarch ones) are the recycled souls of dogs (or maybe of anything). so i guess that arlo abounds in my own backyard.

it's funny how i look for the pale traces of him everywhere even as his box of ashes sits on my bureau. that part of him -- the physical, the dust -- just doesn't resonate with me in the same way. which doesn't, of course, mean that i'm ready to scatter him anywhere in particular just yet...

8 months later...

i'm not committed to coming back to this blog full-time or anything and i'm sort of hoping that no one even remembers it exists. i've also decided to broaden the scope, since for me the dissertation has never been the entirity of my life. so perhaps i now enter a new chapter: the dissertating life and its other pleasures. yesterday a friend mentioned that she was trying to come up with other verbs for working on the dissertation besides the typical "dissertating," which we all use in that snarky way, "yeah, i've just been dissertating all fucking day." her neologism: disserbating. and with that, i've decided to find pleasure in disserbating, or at least in life while disserbating. so much of the way that i've thought of my work for so long is as fundamentally masterbatory. i'm always self-dismissive like that. but what about at least noting the pleasures of such mental masterbation? i say bring it on.

this comes at a moment when i've realized that for me writing the dissertation is about showing up. it's about getting my ass to my library carrel and just sitting there all the day. everyday. i feel like i kept getting the advice to treat graduate school like a job, but that formulation never really resonated with me. and while i wish someone would have said "just show up everyday," i'm not convinced that i would have listened until quite recently.

so now i take my cues from horace: never a day without a line.

Upon the discovery of John Pierpont’s The American First-Class Book; or, Exercises in Reading and Recitation. Selected Principally from Modern Authors of Great Britain and America, and Designed for the Us of the Highest Class in Public and Private Schools. This is one of many American readers of the period (the 1830s-1850s), but the only one signed: “Abby May Alcott” (that’s Louisa’s little sister) and certainly the only one with the following scribbled note tucked inside the pages: "Please excuse Abbie for being late.--E.S. Alcott.” I have to assume that the note is from Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, another Alcott sister who died at age 23. The thing that cracks me up about this note is that it reminds me so much of the dynamic between Meg and Amy in Little Women. We all remember the episode of the pickled limes in the novel, right? Amy brings the tasty treats – and contraband – to the schoolhouse and is busted by the teacher who gives her a few hand lashes. This is the last straw for Amy in school, and Mrs. March, disgusted with her treatment, pulls her out. Beth (Lizzie), who has never been able to attend school because of her shyness and weak constitution, becomes her compatriot in home-schooling thereafter. That this note of excuse for Abbie comes from Lizzie’s hand suggests the latter’s overseeing her sister’s scholarly behavior. Or perhaps it was just pretty cool to hold the book that lay in the Alcott household, too see little Abby’s checkmarks next to certain selections. This discovery followed another cool one of yesterday, when I finally located something I thought existed but could never before find (below). It’s a Louisa M. Alcott reader for fourth-grade public school students, featuring really bizarre tales that often include really bizarre depictions of learning (by, for example, porcelain dolls and children made of bread…). I have long since been wanting to make claims about the way that Alcott circulated in actual curriculums, but I’ve struggled to find sufficient proof. This find goes a long way. Now if only the writing would follow….

at AAS

As tired as the subject is, I’ve spent a lot of time of late trying to figure out why dissertating feels so daunting to me. I see others do it everyday. I live with a dissertating roommate. I date a dissertating boyfriend. Many of my friends have dissertated to the point of completion. And still, it feels utterly overwhelming to me, and I’ve become fixated on the desire to pinpoint the moment when writing went from something that gave me pleasure – and in this weird blogisphere and in my personal letters it still does – to the nadir of my existence. Sadly I’m beginning to think it might just be the aggregate effect of six years of graduate school, several relationships with writers, and a slowly dwindling conviction about my innate ability. But as is often the case, as I was trying to articulate this last night to the aforementioned dissertating boyfriend, I realized that there’s this radical disjunction between my continued ability to make strong claims orally (my inclination is not to shy away from even somewhat hostile conversations) and my writing paralysis. I suspect that the inevitable record of the latter terrifies me, that I could be looked up, proved wrong, laughed at. In the former I can still muster energy and concentration, knowing that no one remembers any conversation for that long, though perhaps it may be wholly the result of being a fairly social-competent women in a field of social incompetents. That may be unfair to say, but come on. Talking aside, I think I’m also missing the key to writing: bravado (or something more like necessary arrogance). I know I once had it, or at least a healthy dose of confidence in the fact that I had something to say and that I could say it in a compelling way. Now all I can think is that while I may have something I think I want to say, I don’t trust that it’s right or interesting or relevant, and I certainly don’t trust that I can write anything in a compelling way (writing about not writing aside). I have to believe, though, that there must be a way to get it back. I keep hoping that I might stumble across a book or a person who could clear this all up, who could tell me to take two vitamin E capsules and to switch shampoos and then whoosh I’d be cured...

the two modes

shh... covert photography at the Boston Public Library

as i've finally taken up residence at the american antiquarian society (a very strange place, indeed), i've had reason to reflect on my gendered scholarly activities of the last couple weeks. the first is of the last post, working in the houghton library, a place where it seems like donating your left kidney wouldn't be enough to win you the respect of the research staff. i find myself so tense when i'm there that i worry that i might be literally looking at the manuscripts wrong. i expect to be chided at any moment (as i was for wearing my coat in last week: "your coat constitutes a container and must be removed immediately!" sheepishly i tried to explain i had no coat and that the guilty coat at the end of the table was not mine. it didn't seem to matter (getting yelled at for doing nothing wrong reminds me, by the way, of getting yelled at in the Prague post office every week for a semester because i continually offered too much money for postage). perhaps unfairly, i think of the houghton as a very masculine -- and muscular -- institution, housed in a university whose former president reminded us all that women are innately less constituted for science. now compound this experience with a truly baffling conversation i had yesterday with a very well-known historian. we started talking about alcott and he went on and on about this anti-catholic story that Madeleine Stern refused to publish with the other thrillers because she didn't want her beloved little woman to suffer from a damaged reputation. the historian went on to describe the story -- which actually sounds quite fascinating -- in great detail. i told him that i was teaching a course on alcott next semester and that i'd love to use the story. this is where the tenor of the discussion changed. he could not, of course, give me the citation. he'd been hoping to publish something on the story for a couple years and couldn't possibly give me the damned name of the story before his non-existent article comes out. what?! as annoyed as i was about his reluctance, i tried to smile and keep up the friendly banter. he then went on with this other tale about this story-paper writer who published a dozen stories set at a coed academy in the 1860s. again he described the stories as essentially perfect for my dissertation. i was practically drooling when he talked about how the group of stories offer a radical critique of institutional learning in the period, etc. but then guess what? yup, when asked for the damned author's name, he gave me this stupid grin and refused. that piece would definitely need to be published before he could share those details. are you kidding? i was baffled. here i am a j.v. academic in the throes of dissertation misery and he's a senior professor in the 6th inning of his career and he won't share the fucking name of an author in fear of my scooping him. come on.

so as troubling as these two experiences were, i want to offer two others that set these in bold relief. last week i spoke with another historian who is working on a book-length study of the society that i've been investigating. i got her name from the curator at the rutherford b. hayes presidential library and emailed her several questions about anna ticknor and her society. we ended up having a two-hour phone conversation -- on her dime -- about her research and mine. she made a lot of great suggestions, questions i should be asking myself, and modes of analysis possible given the sources. she offered to send me her work and she encouraged me to call with other questions (she also, by the way, mentioned that helen horowitz -- a historian i really admire -- is also at work on a book about the society, reminding me that it was probably a good idea not to center the whole dissertation on it). i hung up the phone with her excited to have someone else to speak with, another person who actually cares about this work. likewise, i spent last wednesday at the Schlesinger library, hoping to look at Charlotte Perkins Gilman's school work from her time in the society. I approached the circulation desk with my normal anxiety about procedure, but was greeted by a lovely woman who asked a dozen questions about my research, showed me the manuscripts that i wanted to see, and offered to scan them for me (she even gave me a cd). she even thanked me for using the collection! it was like the houghton turned on its head. when i mentioned to her that the schlesinger was a real improvement on the houghton, she just smiled and said "that's what we've been told." So i ask, what's up with snooty libraries and greedy academics? I know that I often make dangerously loose claims about many things, and I don't mean to suggest that male academics are bad and women are good (that's silly, i know), but this week has suggested that perhaps we all in the field could be a bit kinder and more generous (or perhaps i should deliberately try to have experiences like the former so as to hasten my academic exit).

glad to have that off my chest. more from AAS to come....

taken covertly at the houghton. shh.

Back at the Houghton Library on a wonderfully crisp autumn morning. After an early morning asthma attack (which was followed later in the day by a post-frosty run asthma attack), I set out to navigate once again the absurdities of the Harvard libraries. I thought today would be relatively simple because I went thinking that I wanted to see four letters Anna Ticknor (the matriarch of the society I’ve been thinking about for awhile now) sent to Sarah Orne Jewett. I had thought – wrongly – that the letters would illuminate Jewett’s time as a student in the society. Not so, instead they mostly feature Ticknor’s obsequiously tripping over herself to figure out why Jewett never returned some darn book from the society library. But she does delightfully conclude one letter from Lenox, Mass (a place I used to love to drive to for brunch and good yarn when I taught in Lakeville, Connecticut): “Here everything is lovely, the foliage unusually fine the weather very cool, and the world in great glory, the world of nature I mean, for the reign of fashion has not begun yet.” I couldn’t agree more.

I know, I know, it’s been a long while. In the past three weeks I definitely decided to 1. Write my dissertation as quickly as possible, 2. Not write my dissertation and get the fuck on with my life, 3. Write my dissertation as painlessly as possible, and finally, 4. To seriously reconfigure my relationship to my work. Part of #2 was the decision to pretend that this blog never happened (and really that the last six years haven’t happened either). But it seems that somehow I just keep going, if only to avoid having to be 40 and plagued by self-loathing that I didn’t write the damned thing.

In a fit of rage and anxiety – that lovely combination that makes me yell at my dog and run five miles a day – I decided that it would be a good idea to level with my advisor this week:

“I need you to know that I can’t, or rather don’t know how to, or maybe don’t want to write my dissertation.”
“and you think you’re alone in this anne, that you’re the only one who has ever struggled in this?”
“well, I don’t know, everyone else seems to be sailing along.”
“get over yourself, anne. now.”

I then went on to sob while she then reminded me (with equal parts annoyance and complete confidence) that this process was bound to suck for me, that I’d struggled with debilitating anxiety for the entire year before my exams, and that she was frankly surprised that I’d made it this far without a complete breakdown in her office. And so I left, knowing that I’d hang with it, knowing that it would indeed be a struggle, and even that periods of easy writing would be infrequent at best. But nevertheless I’d keep on.

Now I’m determined to rethink the way I think about my writing. Of late, I’ve stared at the screen and cried because every sentence feels impossibly difficult. The architecture of each paragraph haunts me. I obsessively worry that I know not even enough to make common-sensical claims. So it’s time for operation behavior modification:

1. write in 30 minute blocks with five sentence goals, i.e. not the pressure of a full paragraph.
2. if said writing is actually completed, allow myself to do whatever I want for an hour.
3. if said writing is not completed, force myself to do whatever I want for an hour.
4. do not even attempt to write in a linear progression; just choose a bit of material and start recording observations.

That’s the plan for now. We'll see.

p.s. thanks heather for egging me on.

i know, i know. it's been quite a hiatus these last few weeks. day after day of transcribing documents has evoked little of interest and certainly nothing worth sharing. by the light of this photo, you'll see that i've returned to my library carrel at UNC. i had planned to be here only briefly and then depart again for new england, but life's complications -- involving a degenerating arlo and a friend who has inexplicably decided to renege on his dog-sitting promise -- mean that my plans have had to shift. i'm still hoping to get to the american antiquarian society in november, but my departure will necessarily be delayed. so in the meantime, i'm plugging away on my work on the society to encourage studies at home. i've reached that awkward (though if i were a better person i would say "exciting") stage of needing to figure out how to assimilate all that i've gathered into a chapter that in any way jives with the project as a whole. i think i'm always hopeful that i may be struck by some relatively benign form of lightning. i'm also having to face serious alcott revisions. i don't think i need to say any more about that...though it has meant that i'm finally engaging with reader-response criticism, which i'm sad to say, i somehow escaped during my course work. i worry that it often feels like i'm most compelled by that which is hopelessly passe, but who can resist it?

you know you've been away from home too long when the season starts to change and you're without autumn clothes. northern michigan turns chilly in september, often starts snowing in october, and is truly disgusting until april. so i'm on the cusp of real change. the leaves can be incredible here, though, and i've already noticed small bursts of red and yellow behind the asylum where arlo and i go walking. but i have only one sweater and its holes are growing -- so much so that i'm currently feeling sheepish about wearing it to visit my 89 year old grandfather tonight.

i've been starring at the computer screening for almost a week, transcribing hundreds of digital photographs of text that i took in the Boston Public Library archives in the summer of '06. most of them are quite good, but others are miserable -- poor photography compounding poor nineteenth-century handwriting. i'm nearly done transcribing (one more day!) and will then get to plot out my chapter on this correspondence society.


I'm maybe headed back to the chap in two weeks...in time to catch the end of summer in the South but after the extreme heat passes. not looking forward to another long drive...

p.s. Maura -- you can get Whitman's Brooklyn Eagle pieces in his The Gathering of the Forces. It's two volumes and I picked them up a few years ago at the Bookshop on Franklin St for less than $20.00. Back then they had another set as well.

I've got the spots. Perhaps you can see them, perhaps not, but they're all over my face. Little bumps everywhere. I was getting ready to chalk this up to the blended salad that I've been eating (drinking) for lunch (it's a really very vile meal, but one by which I manage to consume 4 cups of greenery). In any case, I think I've ruled out the blended salad (and the peach pie I made yesterday) and am now debating between excessive indoor sweating from the treadmill in my mother's basement (i should be clear: i sweat profusely on it; the machine itself doesn't sweat) or reading Whitman. While the former would seem the more obvious choice, I'm going with the latter. I've been feeling that overwhelming sense that thinking about Whitman is often like thinking about vomit -- it just pours and pours and pours out, and in all the pouring, it flattens itself. I also have had no access to the prose from my childhood hamlet of Traverse City, Michigan. What does it mean to be in a place where a girl can't even get her hand on Whitman's letters? So instead of pulling out my hair, I've ordered a couple of volumes of prose and correspondence (NYU has recently released all their Whitman texts -- Daybooks, Notebooks, Unpublished Prose, Letters, etc. in paperback). In the meantime, I've been transcribing all of my notes from the records of a cool homeschooling society that was fascinating and will be another chapter. In fear of jinxing myself, I don't want to talk too much about it. But suffice it to say, in 1880 their American history and American literature curriculum (mind you, almost no other school or college would teach anything called "American Literature" for almost another two decades) included the likes of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Washington Cable, Catherine Maria Sedgwick...and the expected Longfellow, Bryant, et. al.

turning to whitman...

See that hint of pleasure? I sent off my Alcott chapter yesterday. The ending is still unclear and I'm a bit confused about how to tie it all up, but for now I'm putting it aside (that is until I get some feedback). So for the first time in 11 months, I get to turn to something other than that damned Little Woman.

It feels exciting, actually exciting to begin on the Whitman chapter. Part of this comes from my almost complete lack of experience with Whitman. Sure, I've taught him and read him, but unlike my lovely friend Maura, I did not have a picture of him taped to my locker in high school -- which, by the way, is a sure sign that she is doing the right thing in life. I don't know the field or the major criticism, but it feels so fantastic to have it ahead of me. For all you Am. Lit folks, what great Whitman work do I have to read? I'm delighted to report that I have yet to locate any work on Whitman and education -- which may suggest the failure of my search terms, the irrelevance of the topic, or luck for the first time.

p.s. working today in the converted asylum in my hometown... perhaps I'll post my writings about it at some point.

i've escaped the angel! just as i was starting to feel antsy about finding a place to work away from the angel -- and eager to find one damn place with a good cup of tea in michigan -- i realized that there's a new and strangely perfect tea house six blocks from my mother's house. so now i sip on a lovely oolong and read through the chapter, which is nearly complete (maybe 2 or 3 more days) and prepared to send it off to my wonderful adviser who is likely ready to fire me for all my ridiculous delays. but it's coming along and i'm in the process of finalizing my boston research plans...a good day indeed.

What does it mean when you think you've been doing better work -- you've been feeling oddly good and content in the process -- and then you go back and read that work that you thought was so improved and you want to poke your eyes out because it's really no better than the other crap you were writing? Does it mean that you're simply a malcontent who will never feel satisfied? Is it the gods trying to tell you that even at your best you should hang it up? Is it that you've lost all perspective? Is it that damned dissertation demon whose strategic torture has simply gotten the better of you?
Whatever it is, this morning i felt like driving to a coffee shop, "accidentally" leaving my computer on a table, and waiting for a thief to relieve me of the burden. That way i could throw up my hands and say "well, there's no going back to it now." But instead, i sit at my mother's dining room table, with arlo at my feet, and the strange pastel angel looking down at me as i type. Come on Christian symbols, work your magic, save me from my writing angst.

as the semester opens in chapel hill, i find myself sitting in the public library in my hometown thinking how lovely it feels to finally -- for the first time in nine years -- have a semester free of teaching. i'm shocked by how much more i enjoy the writing and working on the dissertation when i'm not overwhelmed by preparing classes, grading papers, answering the needs of students. i supposed this must be why professors love and need sabbaticals so much. it also reminds me that my department needs to make dissertation funding a priority for students trying to finish. and while i had been really looking forward to teaching an Alcott class next spring, i'm beginning to feel like playing hookie is even better.

my time in the UP -- that's the Upper Peninsula for all you midwestern neophytes -- was wonderfully productive and i finally (after a pathetic year of pulling out my hair) came to see my project much more clearly. in fact, i think i finally reached an awareness of my work that i suspect my committee has believed that i've had all along. the easiest way to articulate this breakthrough is to say that i realized the limitations of didactic readings of 19th cen. texts (i'll ultimately argue that in didactic texts the content of the lessons trumps the form of teaching) and realized that alcott (along with my other figures) is far less interested in lessons as such and much more invested in methodology or pedagogy. After all, method can be translated broadly whereas particularized right feelings cannot be. I'm now working through this process of reading Little Men against the sentimental, didactic grain, which means concentrating my attention on its trope of reading lessons. It has meant that I needed to entirely rewrite my chapter (and ultimately toss out 95% of my year's research), but this seems like the right decision. so for now, the plan is to avoid chapel hill until the heat passes and until i complete this project (which i hope to do in the next week). and then make a quick trip to north carolina to drop off the pooch, meet with the adviser, and finalize plans for a research trip to boston in october.

more from the UP

freedom of the open road
the neighborhood:

public transportation

beach-side reveries