Pep Talk

Chris gave me a pep talk last night about my situation here in grad school. He was pretty adamant that I've let myself drift into a terrible funk over the last few months, and, that like it or not I have to get a bit more psyched about the dissertation and less psyched about my teaching, caring about it a lot less than I do. He's entirely right, and I'm trying to turn over a new leaf. I spent this morning scrounging out my passport, collecting travel information, and talking to Brenna. I miss her and Bill desperately. Where has everyone gone?

In the meantime, I've seen _In the Mood for Love_ at the UVa OFFSCREEN series. It was just as good as when I saw it a number of years ago at Cornell; I'm very glad I was able to convince Chris to see it with us. I think he now understand the bizarre painterly and yet obsessional beauty of Won Kar-Wei's films. Before he graduates, we need to re-rent _2046_ and watch it with _ITMFL_ in mind.

On another note, I want to thank Jordan for his general injection of energy into my I-tunes. Up until now, my music life had sort of declined into a state of ABBA (from Chris's trip to NY) along with Tannhauser and some occasional listens to Johnny Cash. With then new additions, I'm now listening to the Icelandic group Mum, rocking out Fiona Apple, exploring the near-collected works of Death Cab for Cutie, and languishing in the serene (yet plucky) beauty of Badly Drawn Boy's _The Hour of Bewilderbeast_. And did I mention that I can now listen to the soundtrack of Life Aquatic?

Who cares if you're unhappy? As long as your life has a good soundtrack, you're set!

The Graduate Conference

Well today concludes the fourteenth annual Graduate Conferene in the English Department here. It's been a fairly good event, with lots of interesting papers (or at least the ones I've heard have been interesting). The keynote yesterday, however, left a little to be desired. The presenter started off by saying how pleased she was to be at the grad conference, telling us how she knew that we graduate students were the future of the profession because we were the scholars of tomorrow. She also commented that she always tries to keep current on what young people are studying. I kept waiting for her to cue up "The Greatest Love of All," but she didn't. Although, as the later moments of the presentation demonstrated, she could have done this without too much trouble.

This "you're the future" intro struck me as incredibly ironic. As a profession, literary and cultural studies is obsessed with new ideas, but these ideas come from a select number of literary celebrities who reign supreme over other scholars, most notably over graduate students. These celebrities are not generally young people. Young people are the once who have embarked on a long term apprenticeship in which they try to manage to think their way out of the near-crushing weight of old ideas, teaching assignments, and general abjection before eeking out a small corner in which to do their work. To say that we're the future is absolutely ridiculous. On the very same day, I was grading papers for my class, thinking over another idea for my thesis, and considering how I would moderate a panel the following day. I'm not the future; the work I do is the present. To suggest, however, that any of my work was changing the discipline is only false consciousness. Graduate students don't have any power in the discipline; we're too busy being disciplined to be changing the way things go.

The whole event got even more surreal as this unnamed speaker began her talk, which was a general free association exercise about bodies, diaspora, and home. The talk had no thesis, a very baggy overarching structure, and it mixed Virginia Woolf with Indian Partitian Literature with The Wizard of Oz with Nursery Rhymes. At one point, she quoted the "this little piggy" nursery rhyme whole hog. The speaker admitted that she wanted us to to see how ideas can explode off of one another, hence the anecdotal beat poetry style of what she presented. She also made sure to mention that she had recently been to south asia as well as to Dubai, the hotspot of the United Arab Emirates. Once again, this was insulting. Working on my dissertation and the number of conference papers I've given, I work constantly on making my presentation coherent, thought provoking, but also highly structured and focused. NO ONE in the department here who was a graduate student could get away with this presentation. The student would, in most instances, be flayed alive with questions about methodology. Hell, you couldn't even pass a comprehensive exam saying the things that our speaker said. And we paid this woman money for the presentation?

To take a line from Dickens, this presentation was a great example of "how not to do it." Yet it was also something larger: a demonstration by an older scholar--one who had tried to pay us lip service about the future--that she could do whatever she wanted and get paid for it. She made a mockery of what graduate students have to learn, demonstrating that the rules of the profession are all about power, and nothing else.

Waiting

No, the blog didn't die. Just been busy with a lot of different things. Right now I'm in yet another computer lab waiting for yet another thing to print. Started out the day by reading student papers, then ran errands, and finally read a bunch of plays for an abstract I'm working on. Last Thursday I saw _Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?_, the Edward Albee and Mike Nichols collaboration. A really great film; can't believe I hadn't seen the movie or read the play before. The weather's been warmer here, which is also a really nice change from the way it was about one month ago. Something to enjoy before the hideous humidity of summer hits. More later!