Words’ End

As I just wrote on IM, “You know you’re an academic when, case #254: you’re STUCK IN YOUR OFFICE on a SUNDAY because the door latch is broken.” Totally serious. I can’t even get to my printout! Aaaaaaiiie!

Someone from Facilities is supposedly on their way over. In the meantime, an update.

Elliott, the car I’d had for eight years, has bit it. A stupid accident of the sort that… you just stand there and laugh. Who woulda known that going at ten miles per hour could crumple up the hood and front to the point where the car would be pronounced totaled?

Well, it happened. Nobody was hurt, thank goodness. They’ve taken the car away. We have a rental, and have purchased another car – although we won’t have it for a few more days. A Honda Fit. It’s supremely odd to have bought a new-new car, but given available options and our needs, this was the prudent thing to do.

I’m full of nervous energy. The project is two months and a bit away from conclusion. There are at least three papers to write before then, and it would be good if they didn’t suck. And then the dissertation, which I cannot WAIT for, but which will undoubtedly bring procrastination demons with it. It’s like the boss level in a video game: slay the procrastination demons (who look suspiciously like those wraith guys from Mordor), get to the golden cup – or the degree, as it happens.

It’ll All Be Fine. Now, if only my brain could turn into a brain again… *pokes the mushy puddle with a stick*

*mushy puddle EATS the stick*

Ack.

Hey, you know what I’ve discovered? Stephen King isn’t all that bad. I have practically swallowed up the first two books of the Dark Tower series, which is not so much horror as dark-fantasy-meets-pulp. Its protagonist is a gunslinger named Roland. I’m happy to report that yes, he does in fact have enough qualities to be That Roland, and so reading King is officially dissertation work. iWin!

Now I am freed by way of Facilities’ help over the phone. Time to go where the internet isn’t, and make another attempt at writing a certain proposal.

It really, really gets to me when I spend untold hours on a fellowship application, submit it, receive a personal e-mail by way of receipt, even… and then get rejected and do not hear about it. Honestly, considering the number of things I apply for, I expect to get mostly rejections. But why keep me stringing along? You want to reject me, fine; I applaud the many people who’re better suited to your venture. But do let me know, and preferably in a timely manner, so that I can go on with my life. How hard can it be?!

In academe, I cannot assume that silence equals rejection; things take forever, deadlines are hopeful at best and arbitrary as a matter of fact, people have too many things to do and continually overcommit. So I cannot take silence for an automatic no: they may just be running late. So it sits on my plate, for no reason at all, and I play the “should I e-mail them? should I wait some more?” game. Worse: weeks after the supposed notification date, I e-mail the authorities in question and get a form letter in response. For goodness’ sake! If you have a form letter, why in the world didn’t you send it to me before??

You wouldn’t know it from this post, but I’ve had an excellent day. Roland^HT is coming together; we got haircuts and they are great, and for all of the stress that accompanies the week preceding a big event, it’s also by degrees easier to work long hours: the adrenaline keeps me going. I honestly wish I could call that up whenever I wanted, and get a lot of work done in a haze of sleepless, delirious joy.

While, it might seem, being a female weblogger may be a frustrating, futile affair, I’m not discouraged from posting. What I am discouraged by, at the moment, is the weight of the Thesis. It is seeping into my bones, massive and menacing, as expected around this time. I am yet a year and a half away from graduation (best-case scenario), but there’s a lot to do, and it is monumentally difficult to take a project of this magnitude one step at a time.

Last year, I took a look at Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis. Of course, she isn’t proposing that the “you”-subject of the book only work for fifteen minutes each day. She is, however, proposing that I make myself do fifteen minutes of good, solid work, and then see where that leads me. There’s more, of course – a book’s worth of decent advice, actually – but this is the gist. If things just aren’t productive on a given day, that’s okay. Squeeze out the fifteen minutes and go on with life, doing things that you feel can be accomplished at this moment when your brain just isn’t in the right frame of mind to dissertate.

It takes me a while to get into a good working groove on Roland. [Once|If] I do, several more good hours are likely to follow; but the getting into it part is difficult. So I’m adopting Bolker’s advice, with modifications. A two-and-a-half-hour stretch set aside, in which I can only work on thesis. If thesis isn’t going, I’ll participate in activities that require no external input (thinking, meditation, yoga) and produce no external output (no blogging or cooking or cleaning, for example).

Part of me wonders whether this will affect my personality, as it is expressed in relating to other people. Will I become less likely to seek others’ company? More likely to go for long walks? More or less articulate about the subject of my thesis, let alone other important topics? Hm.

On a different note entirely, there are no official provisions for collaborating with others on the subject of one’s dissertation, in the humanities. Or are there? Am I just not seeing guidelines where some actually exist? Perhaps I will contact the Graduate Council again, and formally arrange with them for technical collaboration with a colleague. So that there aren’t Issues later.

Of course, if said colleague releases some code as open-source (or a Creative Commons-type license), then even a formal permission shouldn’t be necessary.

Looks like I passed my prelims.

I’m now ABD – All But Dissertation.

Wicked!

My prelim is in one week and two hours. There’s a symmetry to this one-two deal that makes me happy. Also, I’ve got an article due on the 30th. Consequently, I have been thinking Very Academic Thoughts. These are some of the things that have been on my mind lately.

Hypertext, the h word, is almost a bad word nowadays. Like Noah did, I went back to Theodor Nelson’s definition. “Let me introduce the word ‘hypertext’ to mean a body of written and pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. [and then in a footnote:] The sense of ‘hyper-’ used here connotes extension and generality: cf. “hyperspace.” The criterion for this prefix is the inability of these objects to be comprised sensibly into linear media, like the text string, or even media of somewhat higher complexity.” (This is from his talk at the ACM proceedings in 1965.)

Nelson’s done with that definition, it seems, it’s mutated and so has the computer. But we still attempt to find a definition for hypertext, or else to coin better suited words.

I am not saying anything new, but keep coming back to this: the “problem” isn’t with the term, the term’s fine. In defining it, Nelson hit on a quality intrinsic to the human experience. Everything, the world, is a hypertext; this is a scary concept to academics, because it is too vague and imprecise. Still, it’s unproductive to deny this, or to shy away from it. The question shouldn’t be whether a set of data is or is not a hypertext, but rather whether it’s interesting or revealing to represent it as such electronically.

The electronic medium is the most suited one in which to define the Roland corpus, because Roland is a hypertext spanning different media. He is in literature, film, theater, music, painting, drawing, sculpture, stone carvings… I’m probably forgetting something. (Are sculptures and stone carvings distinct, or is it all sculpture?..) Combining them, viewing them through the codified electronic eye acts as an equalizer. Any critical discourse affects the way we view an artifact, and critical discourse of several media which takes place in an altogether different medium fails to skew perspective in favor of one of the constituent corpus media. Am I making any sense, and if so, am I full of nonsense?

In writing the to-be-published article (as opposed to my written prelim, which is more than twice as long and will only be read by my committee), I omitted heuretics entirely. It is the lifeblood of my research, but I omitted it, finding it impossible to explain what’s going on with Roland^HT, put forth some preliminary conclusions and defend the heuretic approach, all in 6000 words or less. Greg Ulmer suggests scholarship as creativity, “a generative experiment: based on a given theory, how might another text be composed?” (Heuretics: The Logic of Invention 5). This feels liberating and right, both in my own research and in my thinking about teaching. (I’ll get to implement the teaching next spring, in “Codex to code: an introduction to humanities computing.”)

This’ll be its own article. But not until after prelim. And the two term papers. And the article. And Electronic Cabaret, at which I am apparently reading. Woot.

Besides academia, I am thinking about the summer. For all its foreseeable (and foreseen) difficulties, it will satisfy my wanderlust like no summer before it… mm, save perhaps 2002. Road trip down to Athens, through Roanoke where we get to stay with a friend I haven’t seen since December. After the conference, on to Huntsville, Alabama, where I’ll meet an exceedingly cool laser physicist MUDfriend whom I’ve never actually met in non-digital space. Then Memphis, the Mississippi river, New Orleans. West to Albuquerque, where Scott and Rachel are young doctors in residency and in love. Then Grand Canyon, and Los Angeles. Two and a half months in LA to do work and be with family, then drive north to Nevada, hang out with thirty thousand community-oriented nutjobs for a while, drive back east through Madison and probably Chicago.

In-between, learn perl, encode a 700-page text, digitize all my primary Roland sources.

I can’t wait ’til summer.

Oh, also, I’m thinking of applying for a Fulbright, and to that end am looking for experienced guidance wrt the application process.

Seen on a station wagon today:

ABD

(y’think it was a hint?…)

Four weeks from today, prelim. If I pass it, I’ll be ABD. I should be nervous, twitchy, frantically studying, and I’m not.

There is a lot of work to do, but mostly it isn’t overwhelming. There are times, hours or days at a time, when I find myself unable to work, and put aside books and computer in favor of other activities. I’ve enough experience with my own work habits to know that if the time ahead doesn’t feel productive, it won’t be; so there’s no use in trying. So I read books, see my friends, then dive in again.

The question is always there in the back of my head: is this wrong? Am I overly cocksure, setting myself up for failure? Is this feeling of “there’s only so much I can learn in a given time period” an excuse to not push myself?

Perhaps it is unsettling that this research is not as difficult as the research I did in the Italian Studies track. Yet, I am learning more now. Perhaps it isn’t as difficult because I seem to have found my Subject. But there are no guidelines, except for what my committee and I have come up with. There is no trial by fire, no hated rite of passage, only work.

I push, when I need to. (It gets me in trouble sometimes, this toeing of the dead-line.) I sleep and work at odd hours. I navel-gaze in a public forum (this one) and then go back to work. The hard part is, work is never certain. There is little to compare it to, there are few standards. But then I shrug, and decide again and again that I am willing to make a fool of myself.