FREDRIC JAMESON AND FUTURAMA: A NOTE ON SOME XMAS PRESENTS

Happy 2012 to all readers! I hope the new year finds you well.

The Weeknd have been remixed by Slim K, their albums offered now in chopped & screwed form. Do I really need complete remixes of three albums I already love? Yes, yes I do. I'll probably write something up about these remixes at some point over the next few days, so if you're interested in (even more of) my thoughts on the Weeknd, stay tuned.

The most exciting thing to happen so far in 2012: my Xmas present to myself--a reward for a semester of hard work--arrived today.

I can't wait to start reading this. I picked it up in a bookstore a few years ago and read the chapter on Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (a totally underrated series of novels, especially the first book, Red Mars, which is an absolute classic--maybe they're not actually underrated, but I've never come across anyone talking about them). I didn't have the cash at the time (and buying a book like this in the bookstores around where I'm from is a rapid road to penury), so I'm glad to have finally tracked down a copy for a reasonable price. Jameson's writing on science fiction, which I encountered when I first started grad school and was exposed to theory as something other than a useless mass of pretentiousness to be avoided at all costs (not to say that none of it is that), was a pleasant surprise. That someone with a big name was writing about science fiction was particularly important to me because I'd been given the impression in undergrad that to do English Studies and to be at all serious (and taken seriously) one must avoid things like science fiction. Given that science fiction was a) just about the only thing I read from the age of about 7/8-18 and b) what got me interested in reading and talking about books, this was quite a blow. Since those dark times, though, I've come to (re)embrace my love of the things I wasn't supposed to talk and write about (like science fiction, music, cartoons, etc.). Huzzah!

This actually pairs quite well with a present from my parents:

I'd seen most of this season, but there were a couple of episodes I'd missed. Having a chance to sit down and watch them all in order, I think they made a slightly more favourable impression on me than they did on television. The season as a whole doesn't match the heights of the four movies between Season 4 and Season 5, but it also manages to avoid the lows of those movies. Overall, I'd say the quality is somewhere around the second half of Season 1 and the first half of Season 2. Considering that the second half of Season 2 is what I would consider the beginning of the Golden Era of the show, that's not too bad, and the animation has never looked so good. There were a few moments of absolute brilliance--"Lethal Inspection" provided an all too rare poignant moment for both Bender and Hermes, the middle act of "A Clockwork Origin" redeems an otherwise irritatingly didactic episode, and "The Prisoner of Benda" is nearly as much fun as "The Farnsworth Parabox" and its Professor-Zoidberg/Fry-Leela subplot provided one of the season's genuine belly laughs. 

I missed a lot of the sixth season and need to catch up with the DVDs at some point, but I do think that the show is moving in a positive direction, even if it will never quite recapture the dizzying heights of Season 3 and Season 4, when nothing seemed out of reach of the show--the Fry and Leela dynamic has obviously shifted, and they can't quite recapture the sweetness that it added to episodes like "Time Keeps on Slipping," "The Why of Fry," and "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings." Some of the most distinctive writing voices are missing and their absence is felt, but when the show gets out of the way of itself and lets the characters provide the humour and pathos without the zaniness and gags, it can still shine. Speaking of shining, the packaging for the DVD is absolutely gorgeous.

COLLOQUIUM = SUCCESS!

There have been a number of stressful occasions over the course of my academic life. I would say about three of them qualify as having been especially stressful: taking the GRE, taking my senior comprehensive exam in undergrad, and my MA thesis defense (to list them in chronological order). The presentation I gave yesterday at the October installment of our department's colloquia series can officially be added to that list. The actual presentation itself wasn't very stressful (all I had to do was read what was in front of me), but given that I had 20 minutes to present and the colloquium itself was to run for an hour and a half, even with a brief introduction I was potentially facing an hour of questions. I was assured this would not be the case, but the colloquium went the full time, and I had to deal with my hour of questions.

After I'd finished reading, there was a moment of calm, and it seemed like I might end up with only a few token questions. Thankfully, it was just a moment, and then the questions started. I felt a little flustered by some, and it always seemed to me that I wasn't doing a very good job of answering questions or making my answers coherent, but a number of people said that they thought I handled the Q and A well, which was a relief (here's hoping they weren't just being polite...). Actually, there were a number of times when I was tempted to pull up my blog on the computer at the podium and just start reading from a few posts.

Overall, it was a good experience. I didn't have to deal with a hostile crowd by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a very smart one, and I'm glad to have had the experience of fielding questions from a very smart crowd that was not hostile (in case I have to face questions from a smart, hostile crowd sometime in the future).  I tried to enjoy the experience as much as I could. When else am I going to get a chance to present my work to the entire department (almost) and have them pay attention, offer feedback, ask questions, etc.? It certainly felt nice to offer a piece of work that I think is representative of my best abilities as a scholar--kind of show off-y, but in a good way. One of the most satisfying bits of feedback I've received is that the presentation was very easy to follow for people who haven't read Giovanni's Room. It's always a drag when you're unfamiliar with a text, so that is something I tried to be very conscious of as I finished up my presentation.

I woke up this morning to a nice message in my inbox from the professor whose class I'd originally written the paper for (and with whom I'd been discussing some of the issues I brought up in my paper over the past few months). Now, a few more revisions of the full version (to go along with the fifteen or so of the short version I presented) and it should be ready to go out. Not a bad way to end the week, I guess.

FUN WITH WORDCLOUDS

(click to embiggen)

A wordcloud of the presentation I'm giving on Friday (via wordle). I rather like this. No real surprises in terms of what shows up most frequently. I've read this paper aloud enough that at this point I could probably almost give you an exact count for most of these words. I remember a friend of mine telling me that he would often end up memorizing large chunks of the stories he wrote (particularly first paragraphs) from incessantly going over them to get the wording just right. I'm not quite there yet with this, but it's awfully close.

Some statements from Zizek's appearance at Occupy Wall Street (which I mention briefly in the paper) seem to run parallel to my argument in a rather satisfying way:

[W]e are the beginning, not the end. Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions--questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. . . . People often desire something but don't really want it. Don't be afraid to want what you desire. (via Verso and NY Observer)

Sounds like someone's been reading his Capitalist Realism, based on that first part. I'm operating under a time limit, and this version of my paper comes right up against that limit, otherwise I might start with Zizek. Another time, I guess (or maybe in the actual full version of the paper). Perhaps it'll come up in the Q&A afterwards.

BALDWIN'S GIOVANNI'S ROOM ON A COLD AND WET MORNING

It was cold here last night and it's shaping up to be a cold, wet weekend. The weather forecast looks like we're not about to get above 10C or so with a ninety percent chance of rain. Fall weather, but the depressing kind--not the crisp, cool, bright days that can make Fall so pleasant. The lawn of the house across the street bears remnants of what look like patches of frost. After a relatively mild winter last year--in the midst of it had about a month without snow--I'm wondering if that might not suggest we're in for something a little bit more severe this time around. I wouldn't be opposed to that; the winters of my youth were kind of a draw in moving back East.

In Oregon, this kind of gloomy, wet, cold day would've counted as a fairly typical winter day. As someone who grew up with lake effect snow every winter, I found Oregon winters incredibly depressing. I never descended into the levels of SAD or anything that severe, but I could understand why some of my friends were buying sunlamps to make it through the winter, an urge I've never felt during snowy winters here in the East. As I don't have any particularly outdoorsy plans for the weekend, I'm fine with the weather cooling down a bit--and even the rain is not a total downer--but I would like the sun to make an appearance from time to time as I sit at my desk (the whole reason that I'd put it under my big window in my bedroom/living room). 

On the slate for this weekend: some lesson planning for upcoming classes, some reading for the courses I'm taking, and some working on the paper I'll be giving in front of the department not this Friday but the next. At some point I need to finish that Facebook post, too. I'll do my best to have it up by tomorrow. I'm most excited to work on the paper, though, as I had to submit a title to the organizers so they can start "publicizing" the event (sending out an email to the department), which made it seem real. The person writing the email had told me I could include a brief description of my project if I wanted and, after writing a three hundred or so word abstract, I emailed her back to ask about length. The upshot is that the abstract wouldn't work (too long) and I didn't really have time to whittle it down, so no description in the email. That's fine with me. 

Writing the abstract was really helpful in that it gave me a picture of the whole argument, as abstracts are supposed to do. I'm revising a course paper, and while I'm not shifting entirely away from what I'd said in that paper, the argument definitely has a new focus and approach now, one that I was still unsure of how it would work. Once I've actually written the thing, I'm sure it'll bear no resemblance to this abstract (one of the great joys of writing is an unexpected development in the argument, of course), but I feel like I have more of a map now than I had with just the scrawled comments in the margins (mine and my professor's). More (most?) importantly, this now feels like the first piece of writing I'll have done that captures what I want to do as a scholar, how I want to address texts, and why I have an interest in this field. It's a good feeling--the original paper itself was hinting in that direction, but I was still in the grappling with ideas phase and I don't think the paper ended up really communicating what it should have. Now I have the chance to do just that, and I'd really like to take advantage of that opportunity. 

The paper is on James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, a novel that I read for the first time in the spring. Prior to reading it, Baldwin had always been something of a minor figure in my mind--"Sonny's Blues" and "Going to Meet the Man" are fine stories, but I don't know that I'd really taken notice of him. In terms of writers working the same terrain, to a certain extent, I would've taken Ellison and Wright over Baldwin if you'd asked me. Now, I'd take Baldwin over both of them. Giovanni's Room is an extremely strange novel, but it's also in possession of a haunting, hallucinatory beauty that is at the same time deeply unsettling. I don't think it's going too far to call the novel an expression of the uncanny; the heimlich and the unheimlich reverse so often in the novel that they become hopelessly tangled and enmeshed, just as Freud noted they do in any uncanny artifact, encounter, or situation. Given that this is, to a certain extent, my preferred mood when it comes to texts, I was right on board with the novel from the opening pages. The titular room itself couldn't be a more uncanny space:

I remember that life in that roomed seemed to be occurring beneath the sea. Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning, our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning [I think this should be surface] until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. By then anguish and fear had become the surface on which we slipped and slid, losing balance, dignity, and pride. Giovanni's face, which I had memorized so many mornings, noons, and nights, hardened before my eyes, began to give in secret places, began to crack. The light in the eyes became a glitter; the wide and beautiful brow began to suggest the skill beneath. The sensual lips turned inward, busy with the sorrow overflowing from his heart. It became a stranger's face--or it made me so guilty to look on him that I wished it were a stranger's face. Not all my memorizing had prepared me for the metamorphosis which my memorizing had helped to bring about.

 In keeping with the uncanny, the room itself cannot be avoided. Its repetitions will haunt the narrator forever, replacing a;; heimlich spaces with unheimlich spaces; unheimlich because of their resistance to description other than by reference to the original room, the space the narrator cannot (will not?) describe:

I scarcely know how to describe the room. It became, in a way, every room I had even been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni's room. I did not really stay there very long--we met before the spring began and I left there during the summer--but it still seems to me that I spent a lifetime there. Life in that room seemed to be occurring underwater, as I say, and it is certain that I underwent a sea change there.

Good stuff, that. The uncanny is no more than a footnote in my paper, but it would be interesting to see if it appears in any of Baldwin's other novels or stories (I'm fairly certain it's lurking not too far behind the words in "Going to Meet the Man"). Anyway, a project for another day.

BASIC DISPLAYS OF COMPETENCY

I spent a lot of time yesterday working on an abstract and a rationale for a panel I'm putting together. In and of itself, neither task was that difficult (although I was a little concerned at first that there weren't quite as many points of intersection between the three arguments as I'd hoped, in the end I found a solid through-line), which was a happy discovery. It could just be that my mind is looking forward to the readings I've assigned my students for the next few weeks, or it could be that the extended discussion on the purpose and value of scholarly work in class on Monday night is continuing to hum away in my brain, but I kept imagining how writing this abstract and rationale would have gone a year ago, or two years, or five years ago. This is, of course, not the first time I've wondered about such things.

One year ago it would have been difficult--I could have managed it, though I doubt that the finished abstract and rationale would be of the same quality as what I produced yesterday. Two years ago? I'm not sure I was ready to produce the rationale: I think I would have been able to write one, but I'm not convinced I really understood how to make it do what it needs to do (basically, the whole creating a conversation that the papers are each contributing to would have been okay, but getting across any kind of "So what?" or "Who cares?" point was not my greatest skill). Five years ago? Not a chance. Five years ago I'd never even written a conference length paper for an English class. It's shocking now to look back and realize that, but it wasn't until the very end of my third year of undergrad that I wrote a conference length paper for an English class. Most English classes I took required essay exams, not papers.

In a meeting I had with a professor a couple weeks ago, when I mentioned my anxieties re: my lack of publications--specifically, that I'm starting to feel like I'm falling behind the rest of my cohort in that regard--the response I got was "it's not a race." I don't entirely believe it, but I desperately hope it's true. In a lot of ways, I feel like it took me a year of work in my MA program to wind up where the students with whom I'd entered program had started. By the time I'd finished my MA and was ready to start my PhD, I think I'd reached the point at which most people are starting to apply for PhD programs. A year into my PhD program, it seems like I'm where a lot of people were a year ago. Being able to spend a few hours yesterday afternoon and write those two documents seems to me like a good demonstration of some basic PhD student (and perhaps graduate student at any level) skills. If grad school and professional development aren't a race, that's a good thing, because I think I just managed to get my shoes on. If it is a race, well, I was always better in the second half of my races, anyway.

Now, next test: I need to have a paper ready for presentation to the department three weeks from Friday. If this presentation goes well--and if a few people give the new draft of the whole thing (rather than the condensed version I'll present) a thumbs up--this will be the first thing I send out. Fingers very much crossed, here. Of course, one sop to my confidence: I've been made co-organizer of a panel at ACLA (the same one that had been shot down by MLA). If you'll be at ACLA in March, come say hello!

THOUGHTS FROM A CONVALESCENT

I've been sick for the past few days--surprisingly sick for what seemed like a simple cold--but after about sixteen hours of sleep last night, I'm feeling much better today. I still sound like hell, but at least I don't feel miserable. Obviously I haven't done a whole lot of anything while I've been sick so this update might be a little thin.

I went to a screening of the humanitarian group Invisible Children's film Tony on Wednesday night (this was probably a mistake in retrospect: I felt like crap Wednesday morning, and spending all day on campus having to be awake and somewhat sociable probably did nothing to help my immune system fight off what was coming), and I found it an interesting presentation, if flawed. While I support the group's work to help villages warn each other of, and possibly fend off, attacks from rebel groups in central East Africa, and while their film made at least a token gesture to the idea that white people coming in to Africa and throwing money and consumer goods around does not, in fact, fix anything, I was uncomfortable with the overall tone. There was more than a hint of orientalism (perhaps that's not the exact word I want--maybe just othering or exoticizing Africans?) throughout the video, with the titular man shown to be both a person of tremendous perseverance and a kind of cipher for all the desires, dreams, and guilt of middle and upper class whites about Africa, a kind of "look, we gave him Nikes and rap CDs and he likes us just so much and we're just such great friends, isn't it great?" type narrative. I couldn't help thinking that if Christian Lander had been there, he could've used the film to illustrate any number of points in Stuff White People Like (I think the entries on "Nonprofit Organizations," "Having Black Friends," "Awareness," "Documentaries," "Knowing What's Best for Poor People," "T-Shirts," "Following Their Dreams," and "Self-Importance," at the very least, could easily be illustrated by various aspects of Tony).* At the same time, the subtitles that appeared any time a black person spoke in the video--while all whites remained unsubtitled even when the sound quality of handheld footage made it difficult to make out any words--was, I thought, a telling touch.

The purpose of the video was less to tell the story of Tony than to explain how Invisible Children is the coolest organization you could hope to be a part of, one that will help you "follow your dreams" and realize your "true self" through its internship program: driving around in vans and fundraising for the group by showing their movies and speaking to high school, university, and church groups. The mix of handheld and professional camera work, combined with the quick cuts and trendy camera effects, made it feel like a well-made YouTube video diary. Coupled with the stylish t-shirts and bags on sale after the screening, and the organization's social network style fundraising website, it seemed like a great pitch to capture teens and and university students. The roadtrips appear perfectly designed to serve as material for cooler Facebook status updates and tweets than those of one's peers. Ultimately, I was left cold by the film (and by the personality of the organization's founder, who came across like Tucker Max running a nonprofit), even as I found many of the group's goals admirable. I'd required my students to go to the screening, but I'm less comfortable with that decision now than I had been. A complicated issue, to be sure.

Other than that, not much more to report. As I said, being sick sort of wiped out the last few days. I've (slowly, oh so slowly) been working my way through James Fennimore Cooper's The Pioneers, and while it has more points of interest than I'd been led to believe, it's hard to overcome Mark Twain's masterful putdown of Cooper and give the novel the benefit of the doubt. I'm twenty chapters in and there hasn't been much in the way of plot yet; however, I've been assured that much will take place in the next twenty--for the sake of my brain, which is in danger of turning to mush if I come across another two-page description of what one character or another is wearing, I certainly hope so. On the plus side, this week we're talking about Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in my other class. You might say I'm a little excited: a play about academics is awesome--it's not often I actually get to talk about my primary scholarly interest in class.

A sign of the times as I finish? A balloon (it looks like one of the bright plastic helium balloons) shaped like a man just floated across the sky above the houses across the street.


*Of course, part of what makes that book ride the "this is funny"/"this is painful/infuriating" line so well is its accuracy: you can laugh at the foibles of those around you and feel outraged/find yourself forced into justifications about the things you like. The book also goes a long way, I think, to furthering the idea that "white" is, more and more, an economic designation: the last time I filled out the checklist in the back of the book, it told me I was less than 20% white despite my being practically translucent and able to burn on a moment's notice in sunlight; I simply don't have the kind of disposable income necessary to be "white." Of course, this refers to a fairly narrowly defined idea of whiteness, one that groups on the right might be less willing to embrace, even though it shares a particular kind of anti-intellectualism underneath its well-cultivated appearance that would fit in well with the right (the constant belittling of the humanities [and higher education in general], the disparaging remarks about intellectual figures [both Zizek and Lacan are presented as nothing more than fodder for PoMo posers, devoid of any real substance]).

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME AND OTHER POINTS

This morning at 8:30 I turned 25. Happy birthday to me! Seeing as how one of my students told me yesterday that he's 24, this is probably a good thing: I'm still officially older than all of my students. The prevailing trend from friends who've wished me happy birthday today is something along the lines of "I can't believe how young you are." I'll take that as a good thing--a sort of maturity for my age--rather than a "My god, you look so terrible I'd never believe you're only 25!" type of thing. How did I spend my birthday, you ask? Scrambling to finish reading for class and giving a presentation. About the usual, then. Birthdays are usually good for flushing out a few long lost friends and reestablishing lines of communication, though, and that's definitely been the case today.

A few thoughts to make this post not a total waste.

1. I can't believe that no one has used this song in the opening scene of an action or gangster movie. It seems like any director with a movie set in an urban space who wanted to introduce his/her protagonist as some kind of tough, gritty, impossibly cool figure would jump on this. I can see it now: various quick-cut establishing shots of the city, a pause and a black screen for an instant, then at 2:12, BAM!, shot of protagonist walking down the street. Perfect. If there's a movie that does this already, I need to see it yesterday.

2. Pitchfork did an interview with Alan Palomo (aka Neon Indian) in anticipation of the release of Era Extrana today. It's a good read and confirms my impression (based on a five minute or so conversation with Palomo after a show) that he's a genuinely nice guy. I was particularly struck by Palomo's statements that:

I can’t pretend that I don’t subscribe to Internet music culture in that I discover new music and old music simultaneously. In order to generate something that’s indicative of the future, we’re trudging around this cultural wasteland of the past and finding these little pieces to play around with and recontextualize. It can all feel like one big collage piece.
But it was important for me to not use any pre-existing material and completely self-generate this album on both the audio and visual sides. You can’t always just put color filters in 80s aerobic videos or take stuff from public-access and look at it in this very ironic, self-conscious way. That only takes you so far. . . .
[A]ll you can do is ignore the annoying hum of the machine and focus on making art that makes you excited to be alive.  

and

Well, Era Extraña translates into a couple of things, but the thing that I thought was really funny was that the word in Spanish for "strange" is also the word for "to miss something." It’s rooted in the same sensation. And I do have this eerie feeling of rapidly-approaching singularity, or the idea that by the time that I’m 33, reality will not exist in the same plane as it did before. It's cool, but also a little creepy.  

On the one hand, this seems like the legacy of life after postmodernism: irony is dead and tired, we've murdered the real, history is done, there's nothing left but to make pastiches until the sun goes nova. On the other hand, though, "making art that makes you excited to be alive" and considering the combination of "strangeness" and "miss[ing] something" that the album's title conjures up seems to underscore the connection of Neon Indian specifically--and chillwave in general--to hauntology. I've only had a chance to give the album one listen, but I'm very interested/excited to see what it reveals on deeper listens.

3. I had a great meeting with a professor yesterday that left me feeling a lot less panicked about, well, everything. Sometimes it's nice to hear someone say banal platitudes like "it's not a race," "everything will be fine," "don't worry," etc., etc. I floated a vague dissertation idea that was well received (and somewhat backfired when I mentioned that I'd written my MA thesis on a similar topic--now the professor wants to see my MA thesis and I'm mortified at what the response will be. I'm really proud of having done it, but the thinking and the writing [oh god, the writing] is kind of embarrassing at this point), and after lying awake the other night worrying that I have no direction or purpose in my academic life, I now feel like I have a path to follow, even if it's shaky and not really constructed yet. It's enough to let me sleep, though, which is all that matters at this point.

ADVICE, PUBLISHING, ETC.

I've spent a good deal of time during the past few weeks reading the advice posts over at Graham Harman's blog Object-Oriented Philosophy.* They are, I think, incredibly helpful, both in terms of offering useful and immediately applicable practical advice about writing, professionalization, publishing, etc., etc. and in terms of keeping up one's morale, finding happiness in one's work, and avoiding the soul-crushing despair of life as a graduate student. Also, it's just nice to read someone who is knowledgeable about writing discuss how to get better at writing: how to write more effectively, how to write with greater speed, how to remove barriers to writing.

I find the constant encouragement Harman offers to simply do work--and to do it as often as possible--a wonderful spur to productivity. However, what I find most useful are his posts on publishing and the ins and outs of academic writing (minus some of the points focused specifically on the discipline of philosophy). I will be the first to admit I know nothing about publishing. In my MA program, the general approach to the issue was don't think about it, don't worry about, and don't try it (this might have been different from the advice given to the MFA students with whom I shared office space and classes. They seemed to be forever in fear of not sending things out for publication often enough). Even as I made my transition into a PhD program, the advice I left my MA program with was "don't even think of publishing anything before you finish coursework." My advisers suggested I focus on conferences and leave publishing to the advanced stages of my PhD (there was a practical consideration here; as one professor put it, a bad article will never go away, but no one knows about a bad conference paper after you give it).

So there I was, happily entering a PhD program with no worries about having nothing on the horizon in terms of publishing. I hoped to get into a few conferences, but I was generally focused on doing well in my coursework. Of course, once I started the program, I discovered something quite different: everyone was obsessed with publishing and having things ready to send out. Several people I met already had publications (and had not followed the no-publications-during-coursework guideline I'd received); others had things under review or were preparing things to be sent out. I was a little bit confused and a lot scared. What was I to do?

Full disclosure as to the extent of my naivety re: the professional aspects of my discipline: I didn't (still don't exactly, to be honest) even know how to send something to a journal. I didn't know how to find a journal to send something to. I didn't know you had to wait for a decision while your article was under review (I assumed you sent it in, someone read it, and you heard a “yay” or “nay” pretty soon after). Now it can be a painful, embarrassing, and quite scary experience to ask a professor you've just met (and whose approval you desperately want to receive considering your own painful self-doubt re: your abilities, the reasons you were accepted into the program, your relative merits w/r/t those of the other students in the program, etc., etc.) about those kinds of things. Mostly, I didn't ask those kinds of questions. Some answers I managed to pick up by piecing together various remarks from colleagues. Some answers I managed to guess by doing a bit of research. The vast majority of my questions are still unanswered, though, and it's difficult to make myself as vulnerable as I know I will feel when I ask those questions to a professor, so I don't ask them. I remain ignorant of these things (not a good policy, clearly). The advice posts at Object-Oriented Philosophy are answering some of those questions, and the answers are written in such a sympathetic (though not condescending or patronizing) style, even when they are dealing with the harsh realities of life in the academic world, that I'm beginning to feel a little better about things.

Anyway, my reading of these posts is quite timely: one of the posts mentions that presenting a paper at a conference and then not at least attempting to transform that paper into a publishable article is a waste of one's mental energies. Considering I've not looked at the last paper I presented since I read it, I guess it's time to dig that out and take a look at it. I'm actually fairly confident that I can turn it into a decent essay in a relatively short amount of time. I have no idea if anything will come of working on this paper, but I have to think that it would be better than leaving it rotting on my hard drive. Besides, if I don't try and do something with it (and, at this point, I've been working on this paper on and off for over a year), what am I left with? Certainly no prospects for scholarly success. It would be nice to go from zero to two pieces of work to send out in one leap. After all, as the advice posts I've been reading keep saying, going from nothing to something is the hardest step.

Well, it looks like I've just talked myself into another project this summer. My father has asked me to pressure wash and stain the deck he's just finished building when I get home, so I will presumably (after some physical labour) have a nice place to sit and work for a month or so. I've also got some concrete goals to work towards and I look forward to a productive (but enjoyably so, productive on my own terms) summer vacation before school and teaching start up again in August.

*I was introduced to this subject this year in Louisville at a presentation I'd decided to attend on a whim. I don't pretened to understand the real heavy-duty philosophy that Harman (and others in the loose constellation of philosophers working on similar themes and issues), but this is a nice example of how chance encounters can sometimes lead to the most productive new areas of information (a point Harman himself makes over and over again in the advice posts).

BORGES' PHANTOM CLASSROOM

I volunteered for an event being held on campus today and, as I had been warned it might be quite dull, I took a book with me, Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. I find reading Borges to be a lot like working out after a period of not doing so: it takes time to limber up and for the first few pages or stories, like the first few minutes of a run, I struggle to find the rhythm that I'm used to. After awhile, though, I'm able to find my rhythm and start moving pretty solidly through the pages (usually just in time for Borges to turn my mind inside out). After the usual period of struggle today, I found myself enjoying the bizarre worlds Borges conjures up seemingly out of the leftover scraps of other stories. I spent most of the day reading through the book, when I wasn't directing high school and elementary school students to the classroom they needed to find.

One passage in “The Circular Ruins” made me sit up and take notice, and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since. During the lunch break, I'd sat with a friend and some visiting high school teachers as we ate the pretty terrible pizza that was on offer. The high school teachers asked us about our own teaching and wondered if we might be able to recommend some books, stories, or poems that we wish all high school students had read before they entered out class and to suggest the most important writing skills students could bring with them to university. Needless to say, this was a fun discussion. What made it so pleasant was that the high school teachers treated my friend and I like real teachers. We were not just grad students teaching the classes that tenured faculty couldn't be bothered with, nor were we some kind of bumbling apprentice who would someday figure this teaching thing out. The high school teachers we sat with regarded my friend and I as peers and colleagues, people who could share knowledge about the business of teaching and who had expertise to impart w/r/t to the classroom and the curriculum. After returning to my post and picking up Borges, I came across a description of teaching that damn near nails what I think is so magical about the encounters you can have in the classroom:

The stranger dreamt that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater which in some way was the burned temple: clouds of silent students filled the gradins, the faces of the last ones hung many centuries away and at a cosmic height, but were entirely clear and precise. The man was lecturing to them on anatomy, cosmography, magic; the countenances listened with eagerness and strove to respond with understanding, as if they divined the importance of the examination which would redeem one of them from his state of vain appearance and interpolate him into the world of reality. The man, both in dreams and awake, considered his phantoms' replies, was not deceived by impostors, divined a growing intelligence in certain perplexities. He sought a soul which would merit participation in the universe.

Cosmography and magic (and any number of other subjects) are all part of what comes out of a literature class at its best, I think. I know there are classes that I've taken where I've come home so charged with ideas, so full of newness, so disturbed, that it's been impossible to stop thinking and has taken me hours to settle down enough to do any work or to go to sleep. In the proper setting, new worlds are birthed, new horizons of understanding glimpsed, new perspectives found, new arguments raised, and new questions asked. This event is one of the reasons I find teaching freshmen to be exhilarating: that moment when suddenly nothing is the same for them anymore, when they've come further than they ever have before and cannot help but think new thoughts and entertain new opinions. It doesn't happen with every student, unfortunately, but I see it happen with enough of them to keep me engaged and interested. I want to help them find those souls that merit participation in a universe that is more difficult to live in than the one they live in now because I think life in that universe is richer than the one they live in now and they deserve to live in a richer universe (provided they work to get there).

At the same time, though, I understand why many of them get frustrated and choose not to head for this new universe. Everything is more complex there: no one will make their decisions for them anymore, no one will tell them how to think or what opinion to hold. Even the things they thought they knew how to do become defamiliarized. Reading can make things more confusing; writing can lead to mazes of uncertainties and doubts. Of course, there are positives to go along with this: reading can open whole new areas of existence and writing can offer the thrill of working right at the very limit of one's knowledge. I know it's those two sensations I'm always looking for and trying to introduce my students to. I love that sense that every word I put down is a step into darkness, into a place I've never been and that I'm creating as I write, or that every page I turn somehow makes the world, brighter, louder, more vibrant, more complex, more ambiguous, and more mysterious.

I felt something was missing from my teaching over the last half of this past semester. Somehow, I tried too hard or pushed in the wrong directions or something, but the experience was less “cosmic” and more tedious, I think. The promise of the circular amphitheater in which the stranger lectures was just not there. Borges' character ultimately abandons his dream of the classroom. However, I'm not ready to abandon the parts of his dream that I share just yet. He considers it a failure, a hallucination that will fail to bring about a new soul he can bring into existence. I don't know that I disagree entirely; I do think, though, that it helps to create the dreams that can do it, if nothing else. It's been nice this past month to have a break from teaching, but I'm starting to get excited again for fall and to return to the classroom. I'll be teaching at 8:00 am on MWF, so I will be the first teacher my students have in their university careers. This is the first time I've had this opportunity, and I can't wait. Maybe I'll read them that Borges passage on the first day and tell them how much we have to look forward to together.

ALL WORK AND NO PLAY...

I finally got around to reading David Lodge's Changing Places today. I'd been meaning to for some time, and after finding a cheap copy in the used bookstore near me the other day, I could see no reason to put it off any longer. Part of the impetus behind my desire to read the novel came from the fact that it is, by far, the book I'm asked most often if I've read. This mainly has to do with my answer to the dreaded questions "What are you interested in?/What do you study?/What is your research area?" I never quite know how to answer those kinds of questions, so I usually mention that I'm interested in novels about the academy. The next question, almost without fail, is "Have you read Changing Places?"* Now I can say I have.

The novel was as funny and charming as people assured me it would be, and I enjoyed reading it. One particular passage early on in the novel detailing the scholarship (or lack thereof) of Philip Swallow describes a problem I often run into (though nowhere near to the extent of Swallow):

"Philip Swallow was a man with a genuine love of literature in all its diverse forms. He was as happy with Beowulf  as Virginia Woolf,** with Waiting for Godot as with Gammer Gurton's Needle, and in odd moments when nobler examples of the written word were not to hand he read attentively the backs of cornflakes packets, the small print on railway tickets and the advertising matter in books of stamps. This undiscriminating enthusiasm, however, prevented him from settling on a 'field' to cultivate as his own. . . . Seldom, indeed, had he drawn up a preliminary bibliography [for a project] before his attention was distracted by some new or revived interest in something entirely different. He ran hither and thither between the shelves of Eng. Lit. like a child in a toyshop - so reluctant to choose one item to the exclusion of others that he ended up empty-handed" (17).

I think we're to laugh at (along with?) Swallow here, but this seems to me like more of a description of a lively and active mind. As a professor once told me at a department party, "it's nice to be able to talk to people about something other than your own research." I have more or less settled on a field--or at least a time period--but I do genuinely love literature (along with various other cultural texts) and can get distracted rather easily by the next shiny thing that flies past my face. There are too many interesting things and not enough time to read them all, let alone talk about write about them.

Besides, it can be kind of fun to just let one's intellectual wheels spin and explore whatever appears. Rigour, discipline, and focus are important, too, but literary analysis is fun (or at least it is for me). I think anytime one analyzes something it can be useful and beneficial (if only to keep one's "mental muscles" in shape), even if just to serve as a reminder of how fun and pleasurable this can all be. That's what makes a book like Barthes' Mythologies so readable: his pleasure and amusement with his own work is there, transparent on the page. Now, this sense of fun, of pleasure, of (the word cannot be avoided) play, can be infuriating (as Derrida makes all too clear far too often, in my opinion) if it lapses into smugness and self-satisfaction--or if it ends up fostering or encouraging a kind of solipsism--but, by and large, I think it's a good thing. Cultural texts and literary analysis are tremendously powerful and serious things, but they are also bright, shiny toys in a toystore. I think I spend more than enough time working from the former position and not nearly enough working from the latter. I'm going to try, though, in the next year to recapture my sense of play. We'll see how this goes.


*Sometimes they can't remember the title of the book and can only vaguely describe the plot (and I can then guess the book because of other, similarly vague descriptions of the novel's plot), but they're almost always asking me about Changing Places. Occasionally, they'll ask about Richard Russo's Straight Man or Philip Roth's The Human Stain  (both of which I've yet to read), but 90% of the time, they want to know if I've read Lodge.

**If these are my two options, I'll take the back of the Cornflakes box, thanks.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN MY APARTMENT: HOW I SPENT MY WEEKEND

I had something of a minor existential crisis over the weekend. While this is not that rare of an occurrence, I'm usually pretty good at getting over any such crises and moving on to more productive things (usually this means the reading or grading I've been busy putting off). This one was more persistent than my standard-issue existential crisis, though, and what is worse, it was just silly. It ruined what was otherwise a nice weeked: sun to enjoy, movies to watch, and books to read.* Unfortunately, I spent more hours than I'd like to admit to feeling sorry for myself in ways that I thought I'd left behind with my teenage years (in all honesty, I'm pretty sure even my teenaged self would have made fun of my moping and pouting). 

Some background to the crisis: I had been feeling a little bit of concern/anxiety (though not a great amount, because it required me to think about the future beyond immediate tasks at hand, which I generally refuse to do) about the fact that the end of my first year of PhD coursework was rapidly approaching and I had yet to produce any piece of writing that anyone had deemed worth working on further and trying to publish. Why was this, I wondered. Did I not have any good ideas? Was my writing not good enough? Was I somehow missing a really important point about the things I write about? I couldn't answer any of these questions. I also didn't feel comfortable talking about them. They come across (at least to me) as so ridiculously self-absorbed and whiny that the idea of discussing them with anyone causes me (even now, in the comfort and privacy of my bedroom) to blush and shake my head.

While browsing through some journals, I came across a call for papers that seemed to fit a paper I was writing for class. Thinking that this might be the best chance I ever get to dip my toe into the bizarre and confidence-destroying world of academic publications, I resolved to revise said paper and send it off for consideration. At about the same time, I received word through the grapevine (read: the social networking websites of which I am a member) of a friend of a friend of a friend who was enjoying quite the streak of academic success lately. I generally am not a jealous and competitive person,** but this streak struck a nerve. I don't know the person in question very well (we've never gone to school together and my experience is limited to mainly social encounters). I've never been impressed by descriptions of the work this person does, though.*** Coupled with the already present anxieties described above, this news caused me to feel just a bit frantic. Now I definitely needed to get something sent out.

I was still convinced that the paper I was in the process of writing was my best bet in terms of producing something that could eventually be sent out. Once I'd turned it in, I waited for the paper to reappear in my mailbox so I could get to work on revising it. The paper never appeared, though, and--as any feedback I can get at this point will be helpful--I sent an e-mail to the professor asking for my paper. I also mentioned that I was hoping to use any comments I received on the paper to revise towards submission for publication. When the response came the next day, I managed to misread the professor's comment ("I made some recommendations about that on the paper for you," essentially) as a pretty firm dismissal of the idea of my pursuing publication of any form of this paper.

Needless to say, I was crushed (this was on Friday afternoon). My anxieties suddenly loomed large. I began to wonder what I was doing in a PhD program if I couldn't produce work that anyone thought was worth publishing. I was angry and disappointed with myself: I knew the paper was good (I'd received an "A" in the class), so the only possible scenario seemed to be that I'd produced yet another paper that was good coming from a student but wasn't the kind of work an actual scholar produced. I wondered if I'd ever be able to be anything other than a good student. I spent Friday night, Saturday, and most of Sunday consumed with disappointment, frustration, and self-loathing. I sulked and pouted. It was all melodramatic to the extreme. I've pined for girls in less embarrassing ways.

I knew my paper was going to be dropped off in my mailbox at some point today, so I came to campus early (I didn't have class until 5, but I got to the office at around 11) in the hopes of catching the professor and explaining why I thought the paper was worth working on further and sending out for consideration. I did not manage to do this: despite sitting in the office all day, the paper appeared when I wasn't looking and without the professor ever materializing. Once I had the paper, I looked at the comments. I will quote the second sentence of the comments, as I think it most accurately explains both how terribly I misread the e-mail I received from the professor and what a waste of time my existential crisis was:

"I highly recommend you submit some iteration of this work for publication."

Whoops. I guess I called that one wrong. I went back to reread the e-mail I'd received on Friday. What had seemed like a dismissal now was revealed to be a simple note about the content of the comments: the professor wanted me to know I was not alone in thinking this paper had merit and should be pursued further.

Anyway, I feel slightly ridiculous now about wasting my weekend over all this. Life as a graduate student is already full of crushing blows to one's self-confidence without manufacturing further crises. I still feel incredibly anxious re: the whole publication issue when I let myself think about it (which I try to avoid doing as much as possible), but at least now I know I can produce stuff that I could conceivably send out.


*I finally finished The King in the Tree by Steven Milhauser this weekend. All three novellas in that book are excellent. More on this later.

**At least with my friends and academic work. I like helping my friends, and I enjoy celebrating with them when they reap the rewards their hard work deserves. I am, however, extremely competitive in other areas, especially the board game Risk. While playing Risk, I once managed to cause a former girlfriend to say she hated me (on my birthday, no less) because of my cutthroat approach to the game.

***I should probably come out and admit that I have a less than charitable view of this person's scholarly abilities based on the conversations we've had. Yes, I am a bad person. I am trying to rectify this.

BEING SOMETHING IS SCARY, PART I

I imagine this will have several more parts over the coming four years.

Tonight in class we discussed our proposals for our final papers. The proposals were collated by the professor and sent out in advance of the class so that we had a chance to read and comment on them. I found it quite interesting to read through the ideas, although at first I felt that my proposal didn't quite fit in with the general tone of the rest of the class. I drew on my discussion in this entry in crafting my proposal (this blog just proved itself useful!), and it seemed like I was, for the first time, presenting not just an idea for a paper, but an articulation of my scholarly persona and intellectual project.

The format for class tonight was simple: after some introductory remarks from the professor about several common-to-us-as-a-group critical and rhetorical moves to avoid in our writing, we spent about 15 minutes on each student's proposal, offering feedback and asking questions to help the author develop/clarify/strengthen/support his or her ideas. When it was my turn, I was a little nervous. As I said before, my proposal seemed slightly different in terms of presentation, end goal, and framework, and I was worried that I might not get useful feedback because of those differences. I need not have feared on that count, though, as my classmates (and the professor) were quite helpful and very supportive. What I should have feared (and what I quickly became terrified about as I spoke about my idea for the paper) is the nature of my project. As people asked questions and got me to clarify my goals for the paper, my claim seemed to get bolder and bolder and to take on an increasingly polemical tone. I kept thinking “Trying to get this published would be the end of me before I've ever started!” (I know, I'm counting ridiculous numbers of chickens before they hatch). At the break, though, the professor and I spoke briefly about where I was coming from, and the comments were largely positive and motivational: “As you kept talking and the stakes kept getting higher, I became more and more interested in what you're doing. Maybe there's something to be said for just putting your head down and going forward with this.”

I appreciate the support, but I'm still a bit daunted by what I've set up for myself. I guess it was a different experience articulating just what the stakes of my project are from writing the words on a page. As I made my way home on the bus, I wondered if there might be a smaller, easier way to dip my toe into everything before I dove in the deep end. A classmate's paper, though, dealt with arguably an even more difficult (and potentially explosive and controversial) idea with some grace and elegance. The author didn't shy away from the potential for negative reactions to the argument. She understands her scholarly identity and its potential pitfalls, and she's willing to put her head down and go forward with her work. I'm kind of in awe. Perhaps it's just that she's older than me, but I envy her calm and poise when tackling a thorny issue. I don't necessarily agree with her work (nor would I necessarily read novels in the same way that she does), but I appreciate what she's trying to do and why, and I'm glad I could see the way she handled questions about her project. I hope that as I grow into my scholarly skin (now that I seem to be gaining a sense of what that is) I will become more confident and less terrified, because right now I feel terribly unsure and as if I'm inviting doom upon myself.

FILE UNDER: CELEBRATING THE SMALL STUFF

So, the man from whom I have been attempting to get some sort of sign that he doesn't think I am a complete idiot (because I hope/fear he will be on my exam and dissertation committees--more fear, at this point) nearly let slip a compliment today when I spoke with him. In response to a question about whether he wanted me to use many secondary sources in the paper I am writing for him, he said “No, you don't need to. If you weren't good at working with theory, it would be tempting to use them [secondary sources] to sort of prop up your argument. For you and your paper, you don't need to bring them in except to support what you're already saying about the texts.” It's not overt or explicit by any means, but I think that means he a) thinks I'm good at working with theory, and b) thinks that my ideas are (somewhat) valid. He even smiled at me and invited me to come in and sit down when I knocked on his door (not his usual response to me knocking on his door). Of course, he could have been speaking in generalities and he could still think I'm an idiot. I prefer the first reading of the conversation, though (for obvious reasons).

Now, no one said being an academic was going to be pretty, but is this really what I'm getting excited about? I don't think I was this pathetic even in high school when the girl I had a crush who sat behind me in chemistry would occasionally condescend to speak to me while we waited for the bus (ah, to be fifteen again, when that meant BEST. DAY. EVER!*). Truly, grad school will do terrible things to a man. The definition a former professor offered to his young son when, upon encountering me sitting at a table outside a cafe doing work (for that professor's class, I might add), the toddler asked “what's a grad student?”--“Someone who really likes punishment"--seems more apt every day.


*I hated being fifteen. I don't ever want to be anything like being fifteen again. Or sixteen. Or really, most ages up to about what I am now.

BEER, BURGERS, AND THE DISCIPLINE

A friend of mine was in town yesterday and we met up for drinks. He's currently in the process of deciding what school to attend for his PhD, so we spent some time talking about the visits he's made so far. This quickly became a topic about our respective projects and what we hope to do with our degrees. We're both very interested in the future of English Studies as a discipline and how to move our work outside of the academy. We're both also very excited about collaboration and about doing collaborative work in the future. Increasingly, I find the idea of working by myself on a project very depressing. I like talking with other people. I like sharing ideas and using conversation to make my ideas stronger. Why not take advantage of those facts to make stronger work with other people? It was all very exciting and refreshing to spend a few hours being unabashedly idealistic about what we (the people working towards PhDs and entering the field right now) can do.

One thing we both found very interesting is that despite self-identifying as students of English, many of the topics we were excited to talk about had only tangential relationships to literature. This is obviously not a new phenonmenon, but it is interesting to think about in the context of public perception of English Studies as a discipline both inside and outside of the academy (my own research interest; my friend explores similar questions in his work). What cultural products were these two English majors excited to talk about? Girl Talk (particularly his pairing of Aphex Twin and Soulja Boy), Kanye West, Arcade Fire, and Radiohead. Theory after 9/11 and the Freshman Writing classroom. Social media as a curatorial space for cultural artifacts. The term "American" and its many (contradictory) definitions. Restaurant menus and the legacy of Deconstruction.

Again, nothing there is really groundbreaking or revolutionary. That's sort of the point, though. That our conversation topics are standard (some might even suggest passe) to those within the discipline seems to work against the perception of those outside the discipline as to what English Studies does. When my sister asked me what I do, she was disappointed to find out it had little to do with grammar. For her, being an English major could only mean learning about the technical aspects of the language. At a New Year's Eve party, a friend in chemistry asked me what I do, but he couldn't reconcile my work with the English classes he took in high school and the one literature he took in university. Maybe we need to start demonstrating to people what it is that English Studies does today (and explaining why we do it), rather than letting people talk about our discipline by restricting its activities to what we used to do.

Anyway, those are just some idle musings. For now, I'm just glad I had the opportunity to talk with my friend and get fired up about being a PhD student. Coupled with the warm weather and sunshine of the past few days and a few stimulating class sessions recently, I feel refreshed and energized after our talk.

On a more prosaic note: I tried Five Guys for the first time ever last night. They make good burgers. Why didn't anyone ever mention this to me before?

READING PAPERS WITH MY YOUNGER SELF

I found out last night that the MLA panel I was helping to organize with a few other people got shot down. Unfortunately, I found this out after the deadlines for other MLA panels' CFPs had passed. Such is life, I guess. We're shifting our focus to ACLA and hoping the panel will run there.

On the brighter side, my prof liked the paper I wrote for him over spring break. It's nice to get some positive feedback after the feedback I received on the last piece of writing I turned in (for a different prof). I much prefer reading "The main stylistic item is the use of 'I/me.' While it isn't a mortal problem, it does weaken the authority of your voice" to "Ugly sentence," to take examples from the feedback I received on the two.

I've read back over the paper twice (I will obsessively read over anything when I get it back), and I'm a little happier with it now than I was when I turned it in (ah, the power of getting a good grade). What struck me as I read, though, was how different my writing is now than it was when I started grad school and before. I would love to be able to take a time machine back to three or four years ago and allow my younger self to read this paper. What would my response have been? I can only speculate, but I imagine it would involve some of the following:

• Confusion: I had a (how to put this?) limited grasp of literary theory at that point. My knowledge of postcolonial theory was nonexistent. Poststructuralism was similarly outside of anything I knew. I have the feeling that my younger self might have been a little bit lost during the first half of my paper (and not because the writing makes the ideas obscure. I literally didn't know anything about the stuff I'm talking about in this paper). My grasp is still limited, but I've come a long way since those dark days.

• Anger: My younger self would have had no patience reading through any of the theoretical stuff at the start of the paper. At that point, I considered the only worthwhile thing in any writing on a text to be a close reading of that text (yes, there are universities that are still pushing the New Critics as the vanguard of literary studies in the 2000s. I was at one of them). This is connected with the feelings above and below, but my younger self would have wondered what the point is of the parts of my paper that address what the (extratextual, larger, and more important) point actually is.

• Fear: My younger self was a pathological abuser of using critics to prop up what he said so that he never really had to advance an argument (I imagine this is why I'm trying so hard to prevent my students from forming this habit). Everything my younger self said came with citations to prove someone had already been there and to suggest that if you had an issue with an idea, take it up with the cited critic. To be making bold claims in a paper that are the product of my own thinking? I can hear my younger self whimpering.

• Pride (I hope): This last one is dicey. This paper really is so different from what I knew about literary studies and what I was writing three, four, or five years ago (hell, even last year, really) that it's debatable whether or not my younger self would have recognized any value in this paper. I like to think, though, that my younger self would admit that it's better written than anything I was then capable of. I would also tell him it's better argued and infinitely more interesting, but I doubt he'd concede that point. He's a stubborn bastard, my younger self is. 

Sometimes it's little victories that matter. I can definitely measure and see my own growth as a writer and thinker reading through this paper, especially when I think back to papers I wrote in undergrad (and even when I first got to grad school). This might not amount to much (it might only show how bad my writing was back then and still is now), but it is a tangible sense of progress, something that can be all too rare in this environment. I've decided to take this paper as an opportunity to celebrate small successes (something I constantly coached the members of the dissertation writing groups I ran to do but rarely have practiced in my own life). I'm not done with this paper by any stretch of the imagination. Now comes the painful and mystifying part: turning it into an article. Before that, though, comes a brief moment of celebration.

SPOILER ALERT: THIS NEXT PART IS EVEN LAMER THAN THE PRETENTIOUS META-REFLECTIONS ABOVE

My good friend wondered recently how to be happy in grad school. I don't know if I'm happy, but thinking about how far I've come and how hard I've worked to get here, I feel accomplished. I feel pride. It's a rare and kind of new thing for me. I know my friend has stuff just like this to feel proud and accomplished over (even if she would laugh this off or tell me I'm crazy). This is uberlame, but I hope that she takes a moment to feel proud and accomplished for all the times she's kicked butt. I'm glad I told all my dissertation group members to celebrate the little things because it turns out they do matter, and it feels kind of nice to do that sometimes.