Saturday, November 3, 2007

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....

Monday, October 29, 2007

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.

Friday, October 19, 2007




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.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007


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?

Monday, September 10, 2007



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.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

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.

Thursday, August 30, 2007

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.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

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.

Saturday, August 25, 2007


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.