My Life and Thoughts

Inspired by the example of a certain pobrecito anónimo, I’m writing my third blog entry in as many days!  This is about my latest adventure as a D-list writer. OK so a couple of months ago I was contacted by a very dear friend—an A-list writer of YA fiction, and an editor at the weekend edition of a well-known American newspaper—who asked if I might like to write something about my escapades in grad school, for a series of 2000-word “fun” pieces by “serious” writers, including, but not limited to, “Mamet on buying a house.”  Naturally this appealed to my spirit of challenge: as if I couldn’t make my experience in grad school sound at least as fun as David Mamet’s experience buying a house!  “You’re on, Mamet!” I thought, hitting the Send button.

Over the next few weeks, however, I started to get some vaguely sinister emails from my editor friend, about the changing climate at her workplace, which was specifically taking ”a turn for the more ‘insightful’ and ‘intellectual’”; the 2000-word “fun” pieces were now supposed to suggest the tone of the London Review of Books; my friend had been instructed to edit out hilarity and to “tone down the ‘personal angle’”; etc.  Of the sample article I received, exemplifying the new serious house style, I will mention only the characterization of “leverage” as: “the Hamburger Helper of finance.”  As a result of these developments, my assignment morphed from 2000 words of breezy personal reminiscences, into an incisive report on “what’s wrong with academia and why it’s good to sometimes leave the ivory tower.” 

This—frankly speaking—filled me with alarm.  Now I may be the poster child for something… but leaving the ivory tower definitely isn’t it.  And I mean, it’s not like I didn’t have my share of absurd and unpleasant experiences in grad school, but, as one of my history profs observed of Bertrand Russell’s womanizing: “The twentieth century has seen worse.” 

Deciding to address my problem scientifically, I made up a “what’s wrong with academia” questionnaire, and sent it to some literary grad students.  They are really cooperative and kind people, so within 24 hours I had a medium-sized collection of: (a) entertaining and absurd stories about graduate student life; and (b) statements to the effect that “grad school is a great privilege, anyone who complains about it is a spoiled whiner” (phrased more or less delicately).  For gender-troubling purposes I may specify that most of the men responded (b), while most of the women responded with a combination of (a) and (b).

I think there are two potentially interesting pieces that somebody more motivated than me could conceivably base upon this material: one about how people tend to live their subjects of research (”research = me-search,” as one respondent put it); and another about the gap between academic research and undergrad teaching (viz. the difference between “naïve” and “professional” reading: to quote another respondent, how do you “correct” a student who states that Karamzin’s Poor Liza is “about date rape”). 

As for “what’s wrong with academia”: my preliminary finding is that there isn’t anything more seriously wrong with academia than there is with lots of things in this—let’s face it—vale of tears.  To quote from another questionnaire:

Graduate school sometimes sucks and can be demoralizing, but probably not as demoralizing as being a corporate litigator stealing from the very poor to reward the very rich and still having to work long and tedious solitary hours doing probably irrelevant research and being kicked about by men who frequently mistake you for the waitress.

To make a long story short: after some degree of inner turmoil, I backed out of the assignment.  I had never done this before and felt really bad about it, but my editor friend was super-gracious and understanding.  OK Mamet—you win this time.  But you haven’t seen the last of me yet! 

In the meantime, it seems that ”absurd grad school” will always be a quenchless spring of entertaining/ horrible stories, a sampling of which I will mention here.

Re: the bleeding-over of dissertation research into real life: a student writing a dissertation on synesthesia develops “hysterical blindness”; another writing about physical pain ends up with carpal tunnel syndrome, and has to write the whole dissertation standing up, in twenty-minute stretches, while wearing some kind of special mittens.  Some unnamed person writing about graphomania, double-entry bookkeeping and the “problem of the time of writing” ends up writing so much that she runs out of time and graduate funding!  What a crazy story. 

Re: academic conferences, a colleague from Turkey recalls: “[Turkish novelist] Elif Şafak was sitting next to Franco Moretti in Istanbul and the latter was giving a lecture on the geneology of novels and then Şafak was pouring some water to her glass after which there was this horrible accident and there was water everywhere!”  In response to a question about “Kafkaesque administrative experiences,” the same colleague remarks that “doing a PhD in Turkey is itself the Kafkaesque experience”: “Prior to handing the application papers for the PhD programme, I was told that ‘With this beard on your face it is not possible for you to attend this thing. So you go cut.’”

Other anecdotes involved the dubious behavior of “really old” professors at candidacy exams: falling asleep, attending to personal hygiene, or bombarding students with trivia questions, including this, from an unnamed Slavic department:  “Name all the works of Russian literature you can think of in which the protagonist is a dog.”

Above: a student project from a class on computer graphics design 

In closing, here is my favorite anecdote re: job interviews:

What they advertised for was a person that could do “modernism and/or postmodernism.” When I arrived at the interview, one of the interviewers asked me in completely hostile tones why in the world I work on postmodernism when that stuff is just a flash in a pan and it’s completely irrelevant. “Umm — didn’t you advertise for a person working on postmodernism?” Then a fight (verbal!) broke out between two of the people on the committee, who started to argue about the merits of postmodernism. Later it turned out that they are a husband and wife. The third committee member asked me what I thought about the representation of Catherine the Great’s breasts in some 18th-century ode.

Dear readers, I leave you today with what I feel certain to be a postmodern commentary on that very 18th-century odic representation:

Tags: academic life, beards, comparative literature, d-list, dissertation, graphomania, Keith Gessen, politics, Turkey, YA fiction

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.