Differently smart

In high school, I was pretty sure there was only one kind of smart.

I mean, yes: I knew that people might be smart in different areas--a whiz at math wasn't always a great writer--but I still saw intelligence as a thing that one either had or did not have, or that one had to a greater or a lesser degree. In other words, I didn't have much of a "growth mindset." At most I had an "if I work really hard, I probably won't fail" mindset.

Even in college I tended to see my peers as belonging to one of basically three categories:

1. REALLY smart (and therefore terrifying)
2. normal
3. pretentious poseur who's probably faking it.

In my first two years of grad school I further reduced the categories: everyone was either terrifying or a poseur.

Gradually, though, I started to realize that not everyone who was intimidatingly learned or articulate in seminar was equally good at other things. At first I could only flip the binary around (so-and-so must not really be smart at all!), but eventually I was able to accommodate the idea that people simply have different strengths. Some of my peers were miles ahead of me in certain areas, but that didn't mean I was doomed. On the other hand, the one or two things I turned out to be good at--even unusually good at--were hardly some secret key to success.

Maybe this is obvious to normal people. But the idea that being good at one thing doesn't make a person smart in some absolute and holistic way is still something I struggle with. I admire, excessively, those who have talents I don't--especially if they're ones I wish I had and feel self-conscious for not having--and then am sometimes confused and disappointed when they turn out not to be as good at things I consider easy and basic.

And when it comes to rarer and more extraordinary gifts, I'm often very slow to recognize them. It's easy to identify the good writer, the spell-binding speaker, and the person who seems to have read three hundred years' of scholarship in five languages; it's harder to identify those with a special knack for helping other people grow and make intellectual connections: the person able to completely restructure and revitalize a major, identify and nurture pathbreaking new work as a journal editor, or who can, in five minutes' conversation, transform your understanding of your own project for ever.

But though I resist it, I suppose it's comforting, too: if most people aren't good at everything, that means there are more cookies to go around.

And if there's one thing I believe in, it's more cookies.

Teaching without teaching

I've been thinking about what we learn from our advisors, and how: the doctoral candidate may design the topic and do the work, but the resulting dissertation is often recognizably "the kind of thing X's students do."

In a limited way, this is just about specialization or methodology: you work with Advisor A if you want to do book history; Advisor B if you're interested in Lacan and gender; Advisor C if your project is on political theology. Grad students may come to their program knowing they want to work on a given subject with a given supervisor, or they're exposed to those topics and methods during their coursework, or they're gently or not-so-gently steered toward a particular approach by the questions their advisors ask or their suggestions for further reading.

But so much of what a scholar does or is known for can't be taught directly. If your advisor is a masterful prose stylist--or has a knack for exciting archival discoveries--or is a brilliant close-reader--or has built a new theoretical paradigm--well, how exactly does one teach that?

When I was deciding whom to work with, I was deciding between two people. I chose my advisor over the other logical choice purely because of what I perceived to be our temperamental or work-style compatibility. Otherwise, I thought the two were pretty equivalent: I'd taken classes from both; both worked on the kinds of things I was interested in; both were smart and well-regarded. I had no sense that their approaches or emphases might differ, or that that would matter.

I don't know, actually, that my dissertation would have looked much different if I'd worked with my other possibility, though I can now see clear differences between the kind of work both do and it seems obvious that I made the better choice. (But then we're back where we started: did I make the right choice because my work was always a better fit for my advisor's interests. . . or does it just seem that way because the work I produced emerged under her supervision?)

But though the overlap in our field of interest is significant, I haven't, in the past, thought much about what I might have learned from my advisor about research, writing, and thinking. Partly this is because we had a very hands-off relationship, but it's also because advisors usually don't teach us the most important things in any explicit way.

Still, I think there's one major lesson my advisor taught me. She communicated it in many ways over the years, but the first and most obvious instance happened at the lowest point in our relationship.

I had just submitted a draft of my first chapter and was meeting with my full committee to discuss it. My advisor and I had met one-on-one a few days earlier, and between that meeting and this I was pretty sure she'd written me off. She said almost nothing, letting the other two members of my committee do the heavy lifting. My draft wasn't great, but they tried to be encouraging, asking questions and making an effort to help me reframe the central text I was analyzing.

Finally, I said, "look: I know this draft isn't going anywhere. But I have this--I don't know, feeling--that this text is really doing XYZ. But that's totally unprovable, and ridiculous, and I know I can't argue it, so I'm stuck."

My other committee members gave no sign that this was any more or less interesting than anything else I'd said, but my advisor reacted as if I'd set off firecrackers in her office.

"YES!" She said. "That! Write that."

It would be wrong to describe this as a major turning point; I left the meeting feeling marginally better, but I still didn't know how I could possibly do the thing I vaguely wanted to do--and that particular chapter gave me trouble well into the revisions for my book manuscript. But in retrospect, I see my advisor as imparting two related lessons:

First, have faith in your own weird hunches, even if you don't yet have good evidence for them--and even if you can't articulate, in words, why the thing you think might be interesting actually is interesting. Not all of them will pan out, but they are, truly, your only hope for originality.

Second, don't be afraid to make a big claim. "Big" doesn't mean world-changing or paradigm-shifting, but something whose stakes are obvious and up front. We tell our students that a good argument should be contestable, and the same principle applies to scholarship: an air-tight case isn't exciting. One that says "okay. . . but what if we looked at it this way?" is.

My advisor and I are very different, and I've never expected to have anything like her career. Still, from this distance, I'm pretty sure that she's responsible for whatever argumentative and intellectual fearlessness I've acquired.

Getting out of grad school alive

I started grad school fifteen years ago next month, and the other night, as I was falling asleep, I had a vivid recollection of the apartment I lived in for my first four years and what falling asleep there had been like. It was a narrow studio, longer than it was deep, with my bed only a few yards from the front door. Under the door, even in the dark, a bright strip of light from the hallway shone in. Every second or third night I'd be unable to fall asleep, convinced that the framed poster that hung over the head of my bed was going to crash down in the middle of the night. So I'd take it down and hang it back up in the morning.

I've been trying to figure out what I've done in the past fifteen years, and finding the list wanting--professionally I'm perfectly on schedule, if that's the right word, but haven't done anything grand--but then I went back to the journals I kept in grad school. I kept a journal for a dozen years, from roughly ages 17 to 29, but haven't so much as laid hands or eyes on them in a decade. They lived in a sealed-up cardboard box, which I moved from place to place and then shoved in the back of a closet. Until now, I'd never had the nerve to re-read them. I knew what was in them, basically, and didn't want to revisit it.

But yesterday I did, and the experience was. . . surprising. I'll say more about that in another post, but reading the ones from my first two years of grad school make it clear that I was a lunatic. I remember with some clarity how depressed I was, and some of the reasons why, but that's not the same as reading entry after entry about walking home from class crying, about weeping at this party or that party, about my increasingly elaborate and paranoid social fears. No wonder I slept badly.

It's hard to believe how late I stayed up, how little I slept, and how much I drank. In retrospect it's clear that most of my friends were lunatics, too--even the ones who weren't literally alcoholics or addicted to drugs were in crazy, anguished places. My journals are full of worries about this friend who seems to have lost a quarter of her body weight, and that friend who's having an affair, or the other who's picking up strangers in bars. And I recount, drily, the story about this one falling over backwards in his chair or another passing out face-down on the table.

So though I was going to come up with a list of what I've done in the past fifteen years to make me feel accomplished and cheerful and whatnot (M.A.! Ph.D! Tenure-track job! Articles! Tenure! Book!), I have to say, I'm just glad we all survived.

Rewriting the past

I'm just back from a week of research at the rare books library at my alma mater, which was a complicated experience. The research end of things was great: I put in six to eight hours every day, got through a ton of material, and feel I now have a firmer grasp on some of the background material for my second book project.

When nonspecialists ask me about my research, I usually say that it's about how we deal with the past: how people find a language to describe experiences or identities that the culture doesn't recognize; how they narrate events that even they may not understand; how they reimagine the past to cope with traumatic change. That's the big take-away and what animates both of my book projects (and no one wants to hear me talk about Early Modern religious prose for longer than it takes me to say "Early Modern religious prose").

But as I spent my week thinking about the ways sixteenth and seventeenth century ecclesiastical histories narrate the past to bring it into alignment with the present, I had a disorienting sense of going through a similar process myself.

The thing is, I don't know what my relationship to my alma mater or its city is anymore, or why I keep going back. It's surely not a city I'd think to visit if I didn't have any prior relationship to it, but given that I know the rare books library inside and out (literally, since it was one of my work-study jobs in college) and it's the major collection closest to my home, it makes sense to regard it as my default rare books library. I also have lots of friends who live or work in Grad School City or its immediate environs, as well as a deep attachment to many of the city's shops, restaurants, museums, and theatres.

But although I like going back and I'm always eager for an excuse to visit, I'm not really sure why. I was unhappy almost the entire time I lived in that city in grad school and I fled after my fourth year. (Indeed, I was so unhappy, so early, that I started saving money in my second year because I needed to believe that I'd be able to leave.) And although I say that I loved my college experience, the reality is more complex. I loved my friends, my classes, my extra-curricular activities. I believe that who I am today is profoundly shaped by that institution. But on an actual, day-to-day basis? I was anxious and stressed and often mildly depressed.

So being back is strange, although it's not as fraught these days as it was several years back, when I had a month-long research fellowship and felt I was continually running into all my past selves. Once in a while, though, I was still taken by surprise. Looking for street parking one morning I got caught in a long loop of one-way streets and found myself a couple of miles from campus alongside a building that a guy from my cohort had briefly inhabited. All at once I was thrust back to September 1999: he'd thrown a party there, that first month of grad school. There was nothing remarkable about the party; we'd only just met one another, and the ten or twelve of us sat around in a circle chatting and drinking wine out of plastic cups. I remember it as a pleasant evening. But seeing that building I felt, hard in my gut, what the rest of that year was like, and the year after.

Flashbacks like that happened a few times. More bizarre were the actual live people I stumbled across whom I'd known in grad school but had no reason to suspect were in Gradschoolandia these days--like the guy whose voice I heard from another room of a coffee shop and instantly recognized, or the woman I saw from across the library, still wearing a coat I remembered. I didn't love either of them and I don't think they loved me, and seeing them, similarly, returned me to the reasons I'd been dying to leave that town in the first place: so small, so insular, so hard to escape. What were they doing there?

For that matter, what was I doing there? Why do we all keep coming back?

I think, sometimes, that it's because I can't quite get my head around the fact that I was so unhappy somewhere I should have been happy. I don't really understand who I was in grad school, or what it says about who I am now. That's old news to long-time readers of this blog--or anyone who has perused the vast archive of posts tagged "grad school trauma." But on this visit, in an unexpected twist, I wound up talking about some of these things with my dissertation director.

We had lunch one afternoon, which was the first time we'd seen each other in perhaps three years. It was lovely from start to finish. At some point she mentioned that she was proud of my successes, and added that she was especially proud because I'd managed them without--she suspected--having gotten much support from her in the early years. I said that I wasn't going to disagree with that statement. . . but that I understood, now that I advised undergrad and M.A. theses, how complicated the advising relationship was and how prone to mismatches or misunderstandings due to different emotional and personal styles. I added that I felt I'd been a very different person in grad school, radically different not only from who I am now, but not much like who I was before grad school, either: that I saw myself as a mostly optimistic and self-assured person who for some reason had been a disaster of insecurity and timidity for most of six years.

She, in turn, did not dispute that statement. But we wound up having a nice conversation about how hard it is to predict future results--our own or anyone else's--and how interesting it is to watch and see how life turns out.

The past is a problem that can't be solved. But it can be reintegrated, renarrated, and reimagined.

No one has the advisor relationship they want

Last weekend I was hanging out with some other recently-tenured friends when the conversation turned to grad school and our relationships with our respective dissertation directors. We're all in different fields, went through different programs, and the nature of our advisor relationships were also quite different. But the conversation made me think, not for the first time, that dissertation directors trail only one's family of origin and certain romantic partners in their emotional and psychological impact. And as in those cases, an advisor's importance has less to do with what they actually do or don't do (i.e., whether they're objectively cruel, thoughtless, or neglectful) than with the fact that they're intimately involved in our lives at a crucial and difficult stage.

At this distance, I feel confident in saying that no one has the relationship she wants with her advisor while a grad student, just as virtually no one has the relationship she wants with her parents while a teenager; the problem is that you're not yet the person you want to be--whoever that is--and you're radically dependent on someone else. This complicates even the best relationships.

But here's the thing: unlike one's parents, the only purpose of an advisor is to get you to the point where you don't need him or her--where you know, experientially, that you can write a persuasive chapter, a publishable article, a dissertation, a book. And any advisor who helps you get there is a good advisor.

Now, don't get me wrong: there are certainly better and worse advisor relationships. Some are objectively bad (an advisor who doesn't read your work, belittles it, steals your ideas, makes sexual advances) and some are just bad-for-the-individual (a personality mismatch). And a bad relationship can do real damage. But few advisor relationships are so good that the advisee is never anxious, embarrassed, playing the suppliant, or terrified of letting his or her advisor down. And everyone has to learn, sooner or later, to trust herself and her own intuition, to find other mentors and collaborators, to do work without the (literal or figurative) voice of her advisor in her ear.

Accordingly, there are "good" advisor relationships that don't serve the advisee well: a close relationship isn't helpful if you depend too much, or for too long, on your advisor's advice or approval.

These days, I'm happy with where my relationship with my advisor is at, and I don't think much about its past. But if there's a bigger lesson here, it's that one can't escape the need for external sources of approval, especially in one's early years (as a child, as a scholar), and it's normal to cathect on those individuals or imbue those relationships with all kinds of magical thinking. But one is happier the more internally-motivated one becomes. Mostly, this just comes with time. But it's never too early or too late to try to separate one's sense of self from extrinsic sources.

Against potential

I want to go on record as hating "potential." And "promise," too--promise is a real bastard.

Now, I assess potential all the time: in the classroom, in recommendation letters, and in job interviews. I don't expect this to stop soon. But potential is always a projection, and the younger or more junior a person is the easier it is to read him through the lens of your own experiences and biases. This student reminds me of that other student! So, she'll probably turn out the way that one did. This job candidate got his degree from Program X! So, he's probably about as strong as their other grads.

Or: I've never seen a person like this succeed. So I won't believe it until I see it.

I make such judgments when I have to, but I'm wary of them. I'm wary even though, as an Ivy-degreed white lady, the promise game has long been rigged in my favor. As far back as I can remember, I hated being evaluated by my potential. I wanted to have done something, not to be judged capable of doing it eventually. And I was terrified that those judging me were wrong: that their assessments were based on something trivial, some one smart thing I had said or done, or some superficial resemblance between me and a prior success. It was nice to be thought well of. But I never really believed it.

(Which may, incidentally, have something to do with my predilection for uncomforting or unkind authority figures.)

So I never understood the grousing in certain quarters about grad students becoming "too professionalized," and I never understood those who were sorry to trade their graduate institution affiliation on their name-badge for that of the less-elite institution that had hired them. To me, "professionalization" was a relief: I could stop worrying about whether I sounded like an idiot in my graduate seminars, or whether I was sufficiently praised and petted, and by whom, and what it all meant--instead, I had concrete goals like attending conferences and publishing articles. And as for my name badge? I hated worrying that people were only talking to me because they thought I was junior faculty at my alma mater. The place that hired me as a lecturer, and then the place that hired me as an assistant professor? Dude, I got those jobs.

Indeed, the best thing about my current career stage may be my confidence that any judgements about my "potential" are now--for the most part--grounded in what I've actually done.

I don't presume that my specific neuroses are widely shared, and I know that many people of my class and background are at least a little sad that they no longer live in a world of limitless options (now I'll never live in a yurt! now I'll never play saxophone on the streets of Paris!). But on the whole, even the most golden of former golden boys and girls seem happier and more grounded as adults than they were as students.

And in any case, we're past that now, all of us: past the stage where our futures are being constructed out of whole cloth by our elders: those people who thought they could predict who, at age eighteen or twenty-two--or who among a group of unpublished, inexperienced ABDs--would go on to stardom.

Well, most of us are past that.

Some people, it seems, still do get described chiefly in terms of their potential or promise, even many years into their career (and/or absent much experience or success in it). And some people get to be The Next Big Thing year after year, or are regarded as up-and-comers for decades.

If I dislike the rhetoric of potential when applied to those who are nothing but potential, I especially dislike it when applied to those who really should have delivered on it by now.

On the internet, every week is old home week

As I've been trying to finish up revisions on an article, I've found myself taking an increasing number of internet breaks--the five minutes that stretch into ten that stretch into a whole afternoon gone. To be fair, I entered this particular rabbit hole with the best of intentions: I wanted to see if an acquaintance's book was out yet, so I could ILL it. But Googling him led me to his CV, and then to looking up his publications in the MLA database--and the next thing you know I was looking up practically everybody I've ever known to see what they've accomplished since the last time I checked in on them.

And, well, that takes a while.

But I'd defend this particular episode of Google- and career-stalking on these grounds: it's been forever since I last indulged in it.

My first two or three years post-degree were a different story. I felt I was keeping obsessive tabs on how everyone else in the profession was doing: not just people in my field, but acquaintances from grad school and their colleagues. It wasn't about envy or feelings of rivalry (at least not most of the time); I really felt I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing and at what rate. In grad school, there had been a pretty clear series of hoops to move through, and we moved through them at more or less the same pace. And when one of my compeers got a journal article accepted or went to a conference, I knew it.

It was different once I had a tenure-line job. For one thing, my colleagues were at different career stages, so it was harder to assess what would be an appropriate level of production for me at mine. For another, there was only one person in my subfield. And for three. . . we just didn't talk about that stuff too explicitly. We talked about teaching, departmental business, our personal lives. And while I had a mentor and a very clear T&P document, I didn't have a sense of how my department's promotion and tenure standards stacked up against other departments', or even of how much my colleagues were actually doing (as opposed to the minimum of what they and I needed to do).

So I tracked the progress of people I knew who were in my field and closer to my career stage. There was a certain woman a few years ahead of me in the profession who became my aspirational benchmark. I didn't really know her and our work wasn't especially related, but for a variety of reasons I decided that whatever she was doing (the places she was getting published, the fellowships she was receiving) were a good index of what I should be shooting for.

There were some smart things about this strategy. I was able to identify and pursue opportunities I wouldn't otherwise have known about, and keeping my ear to the ground, as it were, helped me to make better choices about where and how to spend my professional energy.

At the same time, though, it wasn't totally healthy to be constantly comparing myself to others. It's also wrongheaded to think that you can take a valid measure of anyone's scholarly or professional development--including your own--on a semesterly or yearly basis. Scholarly time doesn't work like that. Sometimes a person goes three years with no new publications because of a backlog at a press or journal, or because they're immersed in a massive book project--or because they got pregnant or married or divorced or depressed. During other periods, they might seem to be in constant motion as everything piles up on their CV at once.

Coming to this realization may be why I've stopped keeping active tabs on other people's professional lives. Sure, I know how my friends are doing--because they're my friends--and I'm eager to hear about new work by those I admire. But I no longer think that I'm learning much about what I should be doing or where I stand by comparing myself with others.

*

So what was behind this recent flurry of Google-stalking? A deep aversion to working on my article, for one, but I think I also thought that now--when most the people I know are five to eight years post-degree--some patterns would be more apparent and it would be easier to assess who's doing what. And I'm curious, in a more distant and less personal way, about what it means to be a scholar at early midcareer at this historical moment in the life of the profession: what does that path of a young(ish) scholar look like in this day and age?

But while it's easy to identify the extremes (those who have published twice as much as anyone else and those who have dramatically underperformed or overperformed whatever the conventional wisdom about their early "potential"), the signal is still pretty fuzzy.

What we need, obviously, is a longitudinal study.

I'd hazard a guess that it takes 10 or 15 years post-degree to start to see the shape of anyone's career very clearly. In the same way that it's pointless to hyperventilate about what a loooooser you are on the eve of your five- or ten-year college reunion (because seriously, no one's who they're going to be yet, and anyone who thinks they are is the boringest person alive), it's pointless to compare oneself too closely to others professionally. Just do your thing and go to the damn reunion.

So maybe we should check in on each other only every five years, as we do with our college classmates. We could even submit ridiculous self-narratives and assemble them into a handy bound volume.

No, you're right: that's what the internet is for.

Letting the advisor go

I'm applying for approximately 87 different things this fall, most of which require lining up the ol' recommendation letters. But for the first time in more than 10 years, I didn't ask my dissertation director for one.

Advisor remains the biggest name I could rally to my cause, and a small part of me wonders whether that isn't reason enough to ask: the patronage-model-cum-magical-thinking that sustains grad students hasn't entirely left me. But a larger part of me is relieved not to have to go there, by which I mean to go back there, to that anxious, cringing, supplicatory phase of my life.

It's not about Advisor herself. I could ask, and she'd probably write for me. She's been good to me over the years. Nor do I think it's inappropriate to have one's advisor write on one's behalf many years after the fact: some people remain close to their advisors, in a relationship that evolves into friendship and even collaboration. But that's not true of our relationship: I see her from time to time and send her cards at Christmas and that sort of thing, but she doesn't know my recent work hardly at all--certainly not as well as the mentors I've acquired since graduate school.

More important, though, is my reluctance to revisit that particular phase of my scholarly life. Longtime readers will recall that my experience of grad school was Not Good. It's increasingly clear that the problem was with me, or with grad school as a phenomenological state, rather than with my program or my advisor; I've reflected before that grad school made me incapable of the friendships that I needed and wanted from my classmates, and I was probably similarly incapable of the advisor/advisee relationship that I wanted.

For the first few years after I got my degree, I worked very hard to develop a new, adult relationship with Advisor. And it worked well enough. But there are reasons both personal and professional--matters of temperament as well as specific events in our respective lives--that mean we're never going to have what Cosimo and his advisor have, or what some of my other friends have with theirs.

Once that would have made me sad or frantic: not having my advisor's love, in the way I wanted it, felt like a personal failing, a sign that I wasn't deserving of it. But some relationships are never quite the right fit, and some we outgrow, and most of us manage to find others who do love us in the way we want to be loved.

I'd been planning to ask Advisor for a letter. I'm sure she'd have written a strong one. But when it occurred to me in September that I didn't have to--that I had professional friends who were senior scholars who liked my work, that I didn't have to reenter that particular tortured headspace--I felt so relieved that I almost burst into tears.

Autres temps, autres moeurs

My first year in grad school I was invited to a casual dinner at the home of one of my professors. I don't recall what we ate, but it was something easy, served buffet-style, and the eight or ten of us sat companionably around a couple of coffee tables and end tables, some of us on sofas and chairs, others on the floor.

This particular professor was a WASPy New England gent (who wasn't actually a WASP, but with his patrician features, full head of white hair, and marvelous honking voice he might as well have been), and his home suited him: an exquisite old place that managed to be homey and elegant at the same time. There were many things to remark on there--those Oriental rugs were obviously really old! and who painted their entire downstairs Wedgwood blue?--but the thing that blew my mind was when his wife gestured toward the sideboard and I saw two long ranks of wineglasses laid out, both white and red.

I was astonished, first, that anyone owned that many wineglasses. But I'd also never realized that having separate kinds of glasses was a thing: no one in my family owned two sets of wineglassses, nor could I remember ever going to a house where they'd been in evidence; to me, they were the special province of restaurants. The fact that my professor and his wife had laid them out for us grad students, in our jeans and our sweaters, strongly intimated that they hadn't thought twice about it. They just lived in a world where each beverage demanded a dedicated glass.

But I'll tell you what: when you get married, you throw a bunch of things on a wedding registry. And even when you say "no gifts," half your guests still buy you gifts. And someone, inevitably, buys you those sixteen white wine glasses and sixteen red.

And when you get home at 10 p.m. from a long day of teaching and you put on your flannel pyjamas and you eat your dinner of cold pizza standing up at the kitchen counter, you'll be drinking your red wine out of a proper red wine glass. Because a person's gotta have standards.

On being, and teaching, the above-average student

Following Tenured Radical's example, Dr. Crazy and others have written several interesting posts about their own formative experiences in college--basically, how they got to where they are now, often after having been academic fuck-ups or just academically indifferent. They're all great posts, with the underlying message that, as professors, we should never write off the disengaged, the sullen, or the screw-ups, because those kids, too, can get it together, sometimes quite suddenly, when something or a series of somethings sets them alight.

That's a message I agree with profoundly, having seen it happen among a number of my own students. However, that wasn't my experience in college. I wasn't an academic fuck-up any more than I was an academic star. I was thrilled to have gotten into a fancy college, and once there I was a good, dutiful student whom I suspect almost none of my professors or TAs remembered once the semester was over. I didn't talk much in class, and though my essays were better than average they continually failed to deliver on whatever promise they might have shown: I would often get warm, encouraging comments on the first essay in a class that had two or three, and very few on the later essays as it became clear that I wasn't interested in or able to push myself further. The problem is this: I had a beautiful prose style and a strong, engagingly eccentric voice, but my literary analysis was hit or miss and I really didn't understand what I was doing, what made an essay an A- instead of a B+, or what I could do differently. (I was frustrated that I was stuck in this B+/A- limbo, but I didn't seek out help and no one spontaneously gave it to me.)

The closest thing I had to the kind of formative experiences that TR and Dr. Crazy describe was the Milton lecture I took in the spring of my sophomore year. I adored the professor and either adored Milton or transferred some of the adoration I felt for my professor onto Milton himself. However, my TA gave me a B- on my first paper, far and away the lowest grade I'd ever received. It scared the shit out of me, and partly because I loved the material and partly because my TA was the first person to actually tell me that I didn't know what the hell I was doing, I killed myself for the rest of the semester. I rewrote the paper for a B+. I got 100% on the midterm, 97% on the final, and spent literally three weeks slaving over my eight-page final paper, on which I also got a very high A.

Then over the summer H.K. and I wrote a ridiculous, irreverent play, "The Fifteen-Minute Milton," and sent copies to our professor (with whom we'd never had any personal interaction) and our TA. Our prof sent us a very sweet note, our TA never replied, and that was that.

It wasn't actually a transformational moment, however, in the sense that it set me on the path to a Ph.D. or even to noticeable academic improvement. I did go on to take four other classes in Renaissance lit and three in Early Modern history, but I never did as well in a literature class again. I liked many of my classes, often quite a lot, but my essays continued to straddle the A-/B+ line and I wrote a truly horrible senior essay (also on Milton).

No one ever told me that I should go to grad school, or praised me for my critical acumen; when I asked the woman who became my senior essay advisor to work with me, she cheerfully agreed--and then added, "Did you know that David [one of the other students from our seminar] asked me to advise his essay, too? He's REALLY SMART."

That was not something anyone said about me in college, and neither did they say it about me in graduate school. My early graduate work was fine. I didn't give evidence of not belonging. But no one ever suggested that my work was exceptional or indicated that they expected great things from me; in fact, I had a complex for a long time about having been admitted just because I had the right "breeding": I feared I'd gotten into the M.A. program because I'd been an INRU undergraduate, and then into the Ph.D. program because I was already taking classes with doctoral students. (That may in fact be true--I have no way of knowing--but it's not something I worry about any longer: lots of us have unfair breaks of one sort or another, but if our work is good, then fuck it.)

But I plugged along, diligently or maybe desperately, not getting a lot of feedback or more than a basic level of support, and my work got better and I grew more confident. But honestly, I haven't ever felt, not since high school, that I was anyone's favorite or anyone's golden child (as long-time readers will recall, I got this job as a very late hire, not having originally been among even the semi-finalists). I've always been a small fish in a big pond--but it's a nice pond, and a pond of my choosing, and I'm happy I get to swim in it.

So if my experience as a student affects my teaching, it's that I wish both to build up my overlooked students and to rattle my more confident ones. I'm allergic to arrogance and complacency, even when it comes from students who are, arguably, smart enough to get away with it. Teaching at a state institution means there's often a wide range of abilities in any given classroom, and students who write pretty well and have pretty good insights tend not to get pushed and do tend to get complacent. They're big fish in a small pond, and as such they're petted and praised and often not encouraged to recognize how far they still have to go.

It's a tough thing to teach--real confidence alongside real humility--but I guess I see my job as not letting anyone think they're good enough, yet, but that they have the potential to be.

Getting It Published, Part 4

(For previous installments see here, here, and here.)

One night, midway through grad school, I was out at a bar with some friends when a woman a few years ahead of us walked in. I knew her only slightly, but one of my friends jumped up. "Hey! Did I hear that you just submitted your dissertation? Congratulations!"

We crowded around her, awed and impressed. Most of us had barely written a single chapter at that point.

"God! That must feel amazing," said one. "Does it feel amazing?"

"You must be so happy. Wow. You must be so proud." Said another.

She laughed. "You know? Eventually you get to the point where you hate your dissertation--SO MUCH--that the only way to be rid of it is to finish it."

*

That remains one of the more useful pieces of advice that I received in grad school. Though I never grew to hate my dissertation and I don't hate my book, I've hated large parts of the writing process and I've gone through plenty of periods of feeling sick of this project.

Right now is one such period. So last week I finished my latest round of revisions and dropped the manuscript back in the mail to the press that had asked for an R&R. I'm not so foolish as to think that this represents the last round of revisions that I'll make, or even the last significant revisions. But though parts of the book can still be improved, the shape of the whole is pretty much what it's going to be; I can't take this particular project any further, intellectually.

I hope my new reviewers like it. But if they don't, I'm going to send it out to another press--and if need be to another and another--before making further revisions.

I like my book. I feel good about its prospects. But it's time to move on.

Survivor guilt

However it may have read, my previous post was intended as a comment about how generally happy I am--despite my native tendency toward irritation and dissatisfaction. It sometimes still feels miraculous that I got here, and by "here" I don't really mean a tenure-track job; I mean that I never fully imagined (although I thought I did, all the time) what my life would be like after grad school, or what I'd be like.

Long-time readers know how awful I found my grad school existence. But as of this month, it's been five years since I got my Ph.D. In August, I'll have been a full-time college professor for as long as I was a grad student. In October, I'll be going up for tenure. And so I guess it's time to say: yes, it was worth it.

Is it worth it only because I got a tenure-track job? I think not, and although I still have a lot of cynicism about grad school, the job market, and our possibly-dying profession, I don't feel much survivor guilt any more. I may not "deserve" an academic job any more than plenty of people who never got one, but five and six and seven years later, everyone I know who left grad school or the academy is doing fine: they're writers and journalists and arts-agency advocates; they live in cities they love; they're surrounded by smart friends and colleagues.

And maybe that's not what everyone wanted out of grad school, but it's why I went: I applied for an M.A. because I wanted to know more about literature and literary history--and because I thought the degree would help me get a job in a quasi-literary or artistic field. And I stayed for the Ph.D. because they let me. Along the way, I got professionalized and I came to love my teaching and my research, but the more important things I gained were the real things I'd wanted all along: new ways of thinking, new ways of being, and a life full of smart, interesting people.

I spent a lot of time in my twenties wanting to be "a person who": a person who did thus and such, or a person who seemed this or that. It's a particular life that I wanted, more than a specific job, and to my surprise, I pretty much have it. (As the Pet Shop Boys say, "I never thought that I would get to be/The creature that I always meant to be".)

Academia isn't the only profession that would have let me have this kind of life, but it seems, increasingly, like one of relatively few. Cosimo and I have been rewatching the first two seasons of Mad Men, and it's struck us that the real fantasy of the show doesn't center on the characters' handsome clothes and glamorous lifestyles, but rather on their relationship to their work: these are middle-class characters, none with advanced (or in some cases even college) degrees, whose work is creative and satisfying, providing them with their primary sense of identity and self-worth.

And for how many professions, or for how many people in those professions, is that true? Even people who work long hours in high-status fields like medicine or law tend to locate their sense of self elsewhere: they're locavores, world travelers, amateur photographers, or rehabbers of crumbling Brooklyn brownstones.

I don't feel guilty that I got an academic job. But I lucked into a profession that, for all its frustrations, is enormously rewarding; it bleeds into everything I do and am, in my leisure as well as my work hours. I wish that were true for more people.

Too long/not long enough

You know how you know that you've really and truly left graduate school behind?

When you encounter dissertators from your alma mater, who are working in your exact subfield, and you've never heard of them.

Or when you saunter over to your grad program's webpage, and recognize only two or three students' names, vaguely--and they're all 6th or 7th years.

Or when a departing staff member posts dozens of pictures from his goodbye party to Facebook, and the only people you can identify are a couple of senior faculty. (Those others: are they grad students? Staff? Junior faculty? Who the hell knows?)

But that shudder that runs through you upon seeing photos of the department lounge, looking exactly as you remember it--down to the ectomorphic grad student checking his email while balancing a bag of books on his lap?

That's a sign that it hasn't been quite long enough.

You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan

Once again, I missed my blogiversary: as of May 26th, I've been blogging for five years, four of them in this space.

That's a pretty incredible length of time. It's longer than I've ever lived in one apartment (four years) and approaching the lengths of my longest relationship and my time in grad school (six and six-and-a-half years, respectively).

It's hard for me to comprehend what that even means. I started blogging when I was finishing my dissertation and starting a job as a lecturer. I blogged about my second run at the job market, getting this job, and moving to Cha-Cha City; the end of one long-term and one shorter-term relationship, and the beginning of my current one. And in between there have been writing projects, a couple of fellowships, and conferences, conferences, conferences. If I keep at it--God help me--I'll probably be blogging the process of getting my book published and getting tenure.

And through it all, somehow, my navel has retained its charms.

Thanks for reading, peeps.

Credit for participation

I'm back from the Institute for Advanced Flavia Studies, and boy: was it an incredible week. Apart from all the scholarly work and hard thinking we got done, I found it interesting to be back in an intensive seminar environment for the first time since graduate school--and to see how everyone's personality emerged over the more than 30 hours that we spent together.

This is the sort of thing that I would have read quite differently in graduate school. During those first two years of coursework, the only yardstick I had for measuring myself--my intelligence, my ideas--was how well I performed in seminar, and I was fixated on how much and how fluently many of my peers spoke: when one of our professors asked them to "say more" or "expand that idea," they could! They could make big connections or assimilate new information on the fly!

I was never a great talker in seminar, and I lived in fear of being asked to "say more"; it was all I could do to get up the nerve to make an observation that I hoped was both relevant and not blindingly obvious. And it was hard for me not to read my limited oral participation as evidence of a fundamental lack: if I only knew more stuff, I'd be able to make more connections, more quickly. And if I were a more confident and articulate speaker, it would mean that I was smarter, that I had it--that thing real academics had.

Of course, as time went on, I learned a few things. I learned, first of all, that verbal quickness is a specific, discrete skill: one that can develop over time, but that bears no precise connection to intelligence and certainly not to originality or depth of thought. I also learned that no one--not the admissions committee, not my professors, and certainly not I or my fellow students--was capable of telling, in Year One or Year Two, which grad students had the most promise or potential, and who was going to make good on it. Intellectual growth spurts can occur (or not) at any time.

And now that I'm a teacher, I value oral participation differently. As a student, I saw it as being about individual intelligence: if I were smarter, I'd talk more. . . but I could learn plenty just by listening silently. As a teacher, I see participation as a dynamic, collaborative form of intelligence: talkative students are not always the best students, but they're actively engaged, and whether their observations are stronger or weaker, they can usually serve to advance the conversation. I now see, too, how much non-participating students (even or especially the smart ones) can hinder a class by depriving it of their voices.

So although I'm still not great off the cuff--I don't process aural information well or quickly--this past week I tried to hold up my end. I spoke rather a lot on the day we were doing material most related to my own work, but on the other days, over the course of 6 hours, I typically spoke only 3 or 4 times, usually rather briefly.

I consider this progress from graduate school, but I still envy the more verbally fluent. Yes, some of my co-participants thought aloud, and at length, rambling a bit until they got to a point--but it was usually a very interesting point once they got there. Yes, some of them recapitulated historical events or literary plots that we all knew, and that probably didn't have to be detailed aloud--but those reminders weren't tedious, and most of the time were generally useful. Yes, there were plenty of dead-ends, comments that no one chose to pursue--but you've gotta float some trial balloons.

I sympathize with my quiet students, of course. But sometimes I wish I'd been forced to talk more, both in college and in graduate school. If nothing else, it would have been useful to have learned, sooner, that it wasn't all about me.

Going long

My first semester of graduate school, I took a course taught by the woman who would eventually become my dissertation director. In our first class meeting, we signed up to do 10-minute presentations on certain contextual materials, one or two per week. My friend Ted volunteered to go first, at our very next meeting.

In what I would soon learn was characteristic fashion, Ted spent the intervening week reading his assigned text and an ad hoc collection of background materials, and he showed up for class with an armful of notes and photocopied images. He launched into a chatty but meandering presentation, pausing to share colorful anecdotes about the author's life, theories about the circumstances of the work's composition, and other more or less interesting digressions.

After several minutes, our professor interrupted him: "Ted, you've wasted five minutes. You have five more. Let's get to the text itself."

"Of course, of course," he said, agreeably--and he may have attempted to focus or speed himself up, but it wasn't apparent.

Our professor gave him another warning, at the two-minute mark, but when his ten minutes had expired without his having done more than allude to the work he was supposed to be presenting on, she cut him off mid-sentence.

"Well," she said, as she reclaimed the room. "I hope this will be a lesson to all of you. When you have ten minutes, you have ten minutes. You should prepare accordingly."

It was a fairly awful thing to do to a student in his second week of a Ph.D. program, in front of his entire cohort, but it had its intended effect: we learned that time and page limits were to be taken seriously--and that being smart and having lots to say didn't make us special or exempt us from the rules.

Whether it was my professor's doing or my own already-fierce ethic of responsibility, I now consider going long to be a pretty serious crime, at least when there's a captive audience of listeners or readers. My belief is that an extra 10% (which amounts to one extra page or two extra minutes on a conference paper) might be okay, depending on the circumstances, but anything more is a sign of astonishing disorganization, self-importance, and/or lack of regard for one's audience.

Recently, however, I was in a scholarly situation where more than half of the participants (all of them faculty) exceeded their time/page limits by an absolutely egregious amount--I'm talking about an extra 30%, 50% or in one shocking case a full 100%.

It's not that their work wasn't good; in some cases, it was very good. But when I (and you) sign up for the X-length version of your work, I don't want the Y-length version.

Some day, I'll have the balls to walk out, interrupt, or stop reading when time expires.

But surely I can fail again!

Since returning home from MLA and my holiday travels, I've been working fitfully on my manuscript. I'm revising the fourth of my five chapters, which needs a fair amount of cosmetic and organizational work, but very little in the way of substantive changes--in terms of research and argument, it's probably my strongest chapter.

But the other night, slogging through a round of changes, I found myself seized by the heart-clutching, tear-welling sense of hopelessness, panic, and despair that I hadn't felt in a long time. It's a un- or pre-rational feeling, pure emotion and physicality, like I'm going to expire on the spot. And though I hadn't felt it in a while, I remembered, more or less, how I used to pull myself out of it: by probing patiently, like a shrink or a father confessor, until I got to the heart of the crisis.

What is it? I asked myself. Is it this chapter?

No. The chapter is going slower than I'd like, and it's frustrating, but it'll be fine.

Is it the next chapter?

No. That chapter's a mess, but it's my last one, and even if I only make cosmetic changes now, with a good intro I can still send the manuscript out for review.

So is it the intro?

I don't think so. That will be hard. But I got a good start on reframing the project this fall, and it'll get written.

Are you worried about finding a publisher?

Not really. It may take longer than I'm hoping--but it will get published. And I can get tenure on the strength of my other publications.

Is it about all the stuff that has to be got done between now and April?

Hmm. Maybe a little? But every semester is like this, and I always get through it.

Is it--

Omigodit'sthenextbookandwhatifIcanneverwriteitandmyideasareamessand--

Wait, your second book? You've got to finish this one. And then you have a whole damn edition, whose 2014 deadline you'll be lucky if you can meet.

ButwhatifthisistheonlybookIhaveinmeandIcanneverwrite--

Hold up there. You're seriously freaking out about a second book?

And yes, it appears that I was, at least on some level--and when I realized it, I started to laugh. It seems that even after the real hurdles are past or are within comfortable reach (finishing the dissertation; getting a job; finishing the book; getting tenure), the need to freak out, to panic and despair, is still a live one. Surely there must be something for me to fail at! Or to send me into a hysterical paralysis of self-doubt!

The next time someone asks what I got out of grad school, that's what I'll tell 'em: the belief that there are always more things to fail at.

Extra parents

Cosimo has now met my dissertation director and I've met his. It feels like bringing someone home to meet the parents--except with a less clear script and a less clear sense of what the introduction is meant to accomplish.

When you take a new partner home to meet your actual parents, you're facilitating an introduction of people who might conceivably wind up stuck with each other for decades; even if they see each other only infrequently, the two parties will play a continuing role in each others' imaginative lives for as long as each is associated with you.

The same, presumably, is not true of the advisor/advisee relationship. Yes, my advisor is one of my most important intellectual influences, and yes, Cosimo is in an adjacent subfield and might have had a distant professional interest in meeting her (or she in meeting him). But it wasn't about anyone's intellectual or professional life--or if it was, it was about that weird space in which the intellectual and the emotional overlap and are indistinguishable from each other.

I spend a lot of time in that space. And in it, my advisor is mother, father, and both sets of grandparents.

Advisors are people too

Over the weekend I sent my dissertation director what I think of as my semi-annual email message; since getting a tenure-track job, I've rarely gone more than nine months without dropping her a note. Sometimes it's because I need something; sometimes I want to thank her for something; sometimes I'm giving her a heads-up that I'll be coming through town. And when none of those conditions has applied, it's simply seemed politic to stay in touch: sooner or later I would need something from her.

The subtext of these messages used to be, "look how well I'm doing! how on the ball I am! please be proud of me, or at least remember I exist." It's not that I didn't think she cared about how I was doing, and it's not that I didn't wish to have a genuine relationship with her; the desire for such a relationship may in fact be the primary reason I kept writing. But telling myself that it was strategic to keep in touch made it easier to contact this woman I'd never had a personal relationship with, and who was bound up in so many ways with my generally brutalizing experience of graduate school.

Seeing her one-on-one this past winter and even two summers ago, however, made me feel that we were getting closer to an adult relationship. It's not that I got to know more about her, really, for if there's one thing graduate students make it their business to know, it's every last scrap of gossip about their professors' lives; I've been thinking about my advisor as a person and a personality for a very long time. But that day in January I felt a sudden, intense emotion for her--something more than just admiration and the desperate need for her approval. It's the difference, I guess, between knowing that someone is a complicated person and not caring that they're complicated; at a certain point you realize or decide that someone is in your life, and matters to you in ways that aren't just about you.

So the message I sent was a strange hybrid. The bulk of it still foregrounded the important things that have happened in my professional life (i.e., how amazingly I'm doing, and how deserving of head-patting), but I added a few lines about my personal life and people we know in common before concluding by asking after several specific matters in her life. The combination felt awkward. I'm not sure it's a message I'd want to receive, or would know quite what to do with if I did. But it seemed like a good start.

Friends and colleagues

Last weekend was Augie's wedding. As long-time readers may recall, Augie is someone I knew slightly in graduate school who moved to Cha-Cha City the same year I did, for a job at a neighboring university, and who has since become a good friend. We were a couple of cohorts apart and technically in different deparments--but, given our shared background, I expected to see a bunch of people at the wedding whom I knew from grad school. What I didn't expect was to feel such a rush of warmth for them.

This has been happening to me a lot lately--not nostalgia for grad school, which I don't think is a period of my life I'll ever romanticize, but a sense of real affection and esteem for many of the people I knew there. Over the past year or two I've also had several friendships that began at INRU suddenly deepen and become more personal; I'm much better friends, now, with people I knew in grad school than I was while I was actually in grad school.

There are probably several reasons for this. One may be that I don't need the same things from these people now that I did then: during my first four years in the program, while I was actually living in Grad School City, I was terribly lonely and terribly insecure and my cohort was flying apart. I needed close, local friends who had some idea of what I was doing and enduring (academically and otherwise)--and my classmates for various reasons were not those people. These days I'm not lonely and not unduly insecure, and I have a great group of friends and colleagues. I don't need Grad School Friend A or Grad School Friend B to be my bestest friend ever, or my social or intellectual support system. That makes it easier to get to know them at whatever speed and with whatever limitations the relationship might turn out to have.

I got unlucky with my cohort (and possibly with my emotional and psychological makeup), but I don't think it's just me; everyone's happier now. Even when your program isn't cutthroat, as ours was not, grad school means living in a constant state of low-level panic about your abilities and your prospects; under those circumstances, it's hard to be someone you yourself like, much less to be open and generous enough to be a good friend to others.

I had a similar experience in college. Unlike in graduate school, in college I had a great group of friends--with whom I'm still very close--and yet I found INRU a socially and emotionally stressful place. One of my friends called it the "INRU cold shoulder": that experience we all had of walking down the street, seeing someone we knew from section coming toward us, and having a frantic 15-second internal monologue about whether we should say hello. (Will he recognize me? know my name? think he's too cool to talk to me? probably he IS too cool--but I should say hi anyway--well, I'll see if he says hi first--oh, no. . . he didn't.)

And yet, when I ran into exactly those same people in Manhattan, years after we'd graduated from college and years after whatever class we'd had together, we'd stop and talk for 35 minutes: eagerly, enthusiastically, unwilling to let the other person go. I think we missed college--or rather, we missed being so surrounded by smart, interesting people that we'd had the luxury of not bothering to know most of them.

So maybe that's what's happening here, too; it's been long enough for us to miss each other. This August it will be ten years since I started graduate school, six years since I moved out of that city, and three years since I took this job. I've been startled by the number of people from grad school who have recently friended me on Facebook, but perhaps we all want the same thing: to reconnect with those who went through it with us and whom we're abashed to find we never really knew.