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....