MLA Day One: pride goeth before a you-know-what

I've been at MLA for 24 hours now, a sojourn made more pleasant by the fact that my luggage returned from Barcelona full of shoes and other good things--and then I went to DSW and bought a pair of these at 80% off.

So all has been well on the sartorial front, and if you don't consider that a crucial element of the conference experience, you're no friend of mine; I consider the dressing up and playacting part of conference-going one of its distinct pleasures. A good paper is that much better when it's heard in new shoes, while a lovely suit (whether one's own or someone else's) is a welcome diversion during a bad one.

Being well-shod, however, is no defense against native stupidity--nor will pretty clothes distract anyone when you wipe out in the lobby of the main conference hotel. Late to meet someone for dinner last night, I burst out of the elevator the moment the doors opened, taking the marble floors at a gallop. . . and thus treated everyone behind me to the spectacle of my catapulting forward for three long, slow-motion yards before hitting the floor.

Guess I can't wear that outfit again.

Good News/Bad News: Christmas Edition

Good News: I got back to the family homestead with spectacular ease on Monday night--both my flights were more or less on time and more or less uneventful.

Bad News: my luggage wasn't so lucky. It got routed not to Northwest City, but to Barcelona. It's unclear where it is now or when it will reach me.

Good News: I packed a sizable carry-on, in which were most of my toiletries, my clothes for MLA, and my jewelry.

Bad News: my checked luggage contained all my shoes, the power cord for my laptop, and my Christmas presents.

Good News: looks like now I have to make a trip to DSW!

Bad News: I left Cha-Cha City with temperatures in the teens and two feet of snow. . . and found the same conditions when I arrived here.

Good News: in Northwest City, it's gorgeous; even in the 'burbs we're hemmed in by hills and towering evergreens. And I can't remember the last time we had a white Christmas.

Bad News: did I mention the hills? And the fact that Northwest City is ideologically opposed to salt and to snowplows with metal blades (you know: the ones that actually work)? We haven't gotten mail, UPS, or newspaper delivery in days.

But we're all here, and able to get off our particular hill as necessary (albeit with a struggle). There are agreeable smells emanating from the kitchen. And this year we have power! So it's a merry Christmas indeed.

Wishing the same to you and yours~~

Trivia question

This one's for my Renaissance peeps:

What seventeenth-century book does the INRU rare books library have more than 20 different editions of--all of them in English and all published within the same year or year and a half?

Going home, again

I'm back in the bosom of my alma mater, on a fellowship at the rare books libary. Being here has been weird, but pleasant. But also weird.

Aside from the city where I grew up, I've lived nowhere as long as I lived here--and although I can't imagine a set of circumstances that would return me again for any length of time, you never know: the woman I'm subletting from turns out to have been in my undergraduate class; like me, she came back for graduate school, and now teaches at a university 40 minutes away. Her landlord? Also from my graduating class. As is another of the building's tenants. Today I'm having lunch with a college friend who recently moved back as well.

I guess people are always doing that--moving back to places they've lived in before, or just not leaving in the first place--but continually returning and continually leaving is an especially estranging experience. When I returned here for graduate school, after a couple of years away, I occasionally had moments of feeling unstuck in time: walking across the main quadrangle, I'd suddenly forget where I was going, or what year it was: I was going to meet HK for dinner in her dining hall, right? No, wait: she'd graduated three years ago and now lived in D.C.

It was strange being back in a place that I'd once known so well, and where every corner had associations with my younger self. For a couple of years, I described the experience to people as what I imagined living in the same city or small town all one's life would be like: having layer upon layer of different memories attached to the same places.

But I now think that's wrong. If you live all your life in the same place, you have a sense of progress and continuity; the town changes as you do. I have all kinds of relationships with this institution and with this city, but they're not continuous: I've come and gone, as an undergraduate, an alumna, a graduate student, a city resident, a commuter, and effectively an adjunct.

Now I'm a fellow, and a temporary resident of a neighborhood I didn't previously know. But as I walk to campus I walk past the apartment I sublet for a summer when I was 20 and working a 9-5 job. I stop in at the coffee shop I discovered as a freshman, returned to in grad school, and where union representatives still tirelessly organize. I pass the health plan and remember what a long schlep it was from the train station when I was commuting. And as I approach the rare books library, I can see, in my mind's eye, the photo of me and my roommate standing there at our college graduation. I have another photo, shot in the same location, where I'm in my doctoral robes.

I like myself plenty, but running into all these previous selves is getting exhausting.

Breakage

Earlier this month I broke up with the man I'd been dating since February. I've mentioned or alluded to him on-blog several times, but never properly introduced him--and maybe nothing is greater evidence of my shittiness than the fact that I'm only doing it now, after we've broken up, in an effort to assuage my conscience or whatever it is that I'm doing.

This is the first time I've broken up with anyone. Back in my early 20s I did pull a few fades with guys I'd gone out with a handful of times and just wasn't into--but it felt inconceivable that I could tell them as much. And several of my friends have argued that, in a sense, it was I who broke up with my long-term partner--since I was the one with persistent dissatisfactions, who had suggested that the relationship would end if certain changes weren't made. I'm fond of this interpretation, but the fact remains that I wasn't the one who actually ended things.

Each of the times I've been broken up with has been awful, but I wasn't prepared for how awful it would be to initiate a breakup, too. I knew I'd feel bad and probably rather sad. I didn't know I'd cry for three days.

I suppose it's always hard to cause another person pain, but when that person is someone you truly think is fantastic, who has been a perfect boyfriend, and is even--in all the usual and some unusual senses--a great "catch," it's hard, too, not to believe that you're crazy or at least ungrateful and possibly constitutively dissatisfied.

But I spent months telling myself that I was crazy, and that as long as being with him made me happy, I shouldn't worry about that vague sense that something was missing or my feeling--which I could never explain--that this wouldn't work long-term. Surely I was just resisting commitment, or wasn't completely over my previous relationship, or whatever. He was amazing. My friends loved him. Surely I'd settle into it.

And of course, it's not impossible that I could still settle into it, given yet more time, but I don't think so. I've never understood what people mean when they say "trust your gut" or "follow your heart": I don't feel things when I make decisions; I tend to know, with great clarity, exactly what it is that I should do. I didn't break up with him until I knew it was the right decision. Or rather, since knowledge implies the ability to explain--to point to specific problems or incompatibilities--maybe it actually is more accurate to say that I felt it to be right.

But what I feel, primarily, is awful.

Happy 400th, Big Johnny

You ask what I am thinking of? So help me God, an eternity of fame. What am I doing? Growing my wings and practising flight.

-- John Milton, Letter to Charles Diodati (1637)

In the second semester of my sophomore year of college I signed up for a Milton course. I had no idea who Milton was, but taking that course (along with one on the Romantics) was the only way I could get out of the second half of the Brit Lit survey. I'd disliked the instructor I'd had for the first half of the survey and I'd heard that the Milton prof was great. . . so, yeah, whatever: sign me up.

It's still hard for me to know to what degree my becoming a Miltonist is due to Milton and to what degree it's due to that particular instructor. All I know is that from the second week I was in love with either Milton or the version of him my professor delivered.

I mean--Milton dreamed vaguely of greatness, but feared he was already too late to achieve it? Hey! I dreamed vaguely of greatness! Milton went back and lived in his father's house for seven years after graduating from college? Hey! I was majoring in English! I'd probably wind up back in dad's basement myself!

As I'm suggesting, my initial feelings of affinity for Milton weren't profound or even deeply-rooted in the works themselves. Still, I think the young Milton is a more sympathetic and recognizable figure to college students than most instructors assume--and for me, anyway, the same held true for the older Milton: I probably only half understood the content of his prose, but I knew I loved its language and the fierceness of that mind.

So while Donne wins most people's votes, it's Milton who's always been my secret boyfriend. (Come to think of it, that might explain some of my actual boyfriends.)

This is something that teachers of Milton have to acknowledge: that the personality of Milton is so central to his works that liking him--that personality--is almost a necessity for liking his works. If you don't respond to whatever you perceive his personality to be, you won't respond to his works. With other authors I try to limit or even eliminate the amount of biographical background I give, but with Milton there's no help for it; the man appears on every page.

So for those who love the guy, it's good news that the week of his birth also marks the birth of a new Renaissance blog--and only the second by a Miltonist.

Fuck the dramatists. This is the year of my boy JM.

A query

Why is it that stray assignments--those turned in late, done as make-ups, or somehow separated from the rest of their batch--take three times as long to grade?

The archival imperative

For my freshman and sophomore years of college, my work-study job was in the university's rare books library. The actual tasks I was assigned weren't challenging--I paged materials, reshelved them, and worked on photoduplication orders--but it was entertainment enough for a nosey and bookish 19-year-old. I'd wander among the stacks and pull out illuminated books of hours or slivers of papyri just to gape at them, and I'd do my photocopying very slowly indeed, reading as much as I could of Ezra Pound or Edith Wharton's letters and trying not to drop the boxes in shock when I came across another American writer's hokey but very nude photographs of teenaged boys.

In the long run, this job turned out to be a useful introduction to archives and archival work. In the short run, it made me an object of mirth among my friends as I started adopting some of the library's organizational systems for my dorm room.

Take my correspondence files. I was once a serious letter writer, and up through my late 20s I still routinely wrote and received longhand missives. (These days it's dwindled mostly to cards--albeit sometimes with substantial notes inside--and at best a few letters a year.) Inspired by the manuscript collections I worked with, I started filing my correspondence the way they did in the archive, and I continue to do so today: I slit the envelopes along three sides, unfold the pages or splay open the cards so that they lie flat, and use the envelope as a loose jacket or clip around the relevant pages. Then I order them chronologically within file folders labeled by correspondent and alphabetized by last name.

I suppose it's a little eccentric to treat these letters--some of them going back to when my correspondents and I were 16--as if they deserved the care accorded to Pound's or Eliot's. However, not only is this the maximally efficient way for me to organize and refer to my correspondence, but it also encourages as healthy and non-sentimental an attitude as it is possible for the kind of person who hangs onto all her letters to have. Sure, it's lovely to take out the missives of an old friend and see her handwriting and familiar stationery. But keeping her letters in a file cabinet implies that they are, ultimately, historical and biographical records rather than objects to fetishize.

When it became clear that my ex and I weren't getting back together, I printed out all the emails I'd saved for one reason or another over the years, deleted the electronic copies, and interleaved the printed versions chronologically with the cards and notes I'd already filed. Then I wrote a terminal date (2001-2007) next to his name on the folder tab, slipped it back among the 30 or 40 other folders in the drawer, and rolled it shut. It felt like an agreeable bit of housekeeping: I wouldn't be stumbling upon shoeboxes of letters under the bed or stay email messages when I wasn't expecting them, but neither would I live to regret shredding or burning or deleting those items in a misguided attempt at "closure." If I needed them, they'd be there--along with hundreds and hundreds of letters from the more important and more enduring people in my life.

I'm pretty certain that none of my correspondence will be sought after by scholars of the future, but I have a mania for organizing and historicizing my own life: hence that box of old journals I lug with me every time I move, those files and files of letters--and, I suppose, this blog. Perhaps it's a disease peculiar to academics.

GEMCS: Day Three

I've compared conferences to sleep-away camp before, but this one felt more like being back in college: some of the papers were great; others I survived by doodling and passing notes with friends. All our meals were noisy, joyous affairs--full of argument and gossip and drink. And every night Ally and I stayed up late, talking into the dark from the warmth of our beds.

As in college, though, this had its downside. One morning we had to get up early for a friend's panel, and when Ally's alarm went off we'd had only a few hours of sleep and were still half drunk.

"Oh, God," I moaned, realizing that I had my own panel that day.

"Why did I set my alarm for 7.35?" she asked. "Seven-thirty-FIVE? What the hell?"

We lay there for a few minutes, thinking.

"Do I owe you money?" I asked. "I must. Goddamn hotel bars."

"You gave me loads of money." Then she laughed. "[That thing] was pretty funny."

I looked at her blankly. "What?"

She repeated herself.

"That did not happen. You're making that up."

"We need coffee."

"Shit. Shitshitshitshitshit."

"Starbucks. Across the street."

"Is my brain broken?"

* * * * * * * * * * *

It was not, in fact, broken, and the day turned out to be lovely--because, just as if we were still 22, we rallied with astonishing speed, attended every session, and went out again that night.

I'm grateful that I'm not 22 and this isn't habitual. Still, I have renewed respect for my students.

GEMCS: Day Two

The assembly of that ad hoc committee was successful.

GEMCS: Day One

I've just arrived in Philly for the sometimes-annual, always-chaotic conference of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies--an organization that Augie's former department chair refers to as "the Unitarians of the conference world." Although I've been holed up in my room for the past two hours, responding to student emails, I'm settling into the conference experience nicely.

A few bulletins from the front:

On the train into the city, I accurately IDed all of my fellow conference goers. The dudes with beards and glasses were easy, the younger folk a bit harder. Still: carrying a garment bag and reading Harpers? A bit too self-conscious in one's hipster-dom (as if determined to recreate Williamsburg in Omaha)? Them's academics.
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As I was rolling self and suitcase into the hotel, an older dude somewhere behind me cried out in annoyance. I looked over my shoulder, and it appeared that he had stumbled, but it wasn't clear how. Whatever had happened seemed minor, so I kept walking--down a hall and around a couple of corners to the reception desk. Suddenly the man (bearded and bespectacled, natch) was at my side and shouting, "YOU COULD HAVE APOLOGIZED!" "Excuse me?" I said. "I tripped on your suitcase! You could have apologized!" "Well," I said. "I'm sorry that you didn't see my suitcase."

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Being simultaneously lazy and mesmerized by repetitive, time-sucking tasks, I scorn the iron and the ironing board provided in hotel rooms. Instead, I hang my suits up on the shower curtain rod and flick water all over them, smoothing out the wrinkles as I go. Would turning on a hot shower, closing the door, and letting the garments steam out be equally effective? Yes. Do I do this? No.

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I was shattered to learn that the promised panel on "gin culture" didn't materialize. I'll have to assemble an ad hoc committee to investigate.

My finely-tuned annoyingness radar

I get irritated more easily than most people--and "irritation" is exactly the word for what I feel: an itchy inability to bear whatever it is for another moment.

Anyone who is at all intimate with me knows this--and knows, equally well, to ignore me when I leap up, flapping my arms in agitation and crying, "I hate it! I hate it!"

"Yes, Flavia," my friends say. "I know you do."

Victoria calls this my "finely-tuned annoyingness radar," which may be a more charitable description than it deserves. I don't react strongly to obvious tics or nervous habits--perhaps on the understanding that those aren't fully under a person's control--but other, seemingly more innocuous behaviors send me into fits. "WHY," I ask, "does so-and-so DO THAT? It's awful. It's annoying. It's counterproductive and socially hostile."

(Rarely are these things that bother other people. When I begin a sentence with, "don't you hate it when. . . ?", the answer, usually, is "no.")

I've recently rediscovered that one of the things that sets off my radar is a certain kind of academic writing. I'm not talking about the kind of academic writing that we all hate and all make fun of; I mean writing that is self-consciously not that kind of writing: writing that is almost quite good, but that cherishes its goodness a little too much, massaging an extended metaphor here and an exotic phrasing there--and altogether filling my nostrils with the sickly-sweet smell of self-love.

I hate that shit. And me being me, I have to respond. "Yuck," I write in the margins of one page, and "Are you fucking kidding me??" at the top of another. I corner my colleagues in the office, shaking an open book at them. "Will you LISTEN to this?" I say. "It's so awful. I have to read it to you!"

The itch must be scratched. But I fear I'm already a terrible, terrible crank.

MCMXIV

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day--

And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

--Philip Larkin

Morning, again

What a week! 95 Theses Day, soon followed by Guy Fawkes Day--and, oh yeah: there was an election in there, too.

I'd been thinking about the 2000 and 2004 elections a lot as this particular cycle wound down. The former happened in my second year of graduate school, and one of my classmates held a big party where we all huddled around her t.v., drinking bourbon and laughing and waiting for our home states to pop up on the map. Needless to say, it turned into a long night (and an even longer four years).

In 2004 I was back in the big city--though still in grad school--and I didn't have a t.v. The election hadn't been definitively called by the time I went to bed, but by the time I got up early the next morning to fly to a conference it was clear that Bush had been reelected. I sat in the airport talking to my then-partner on the phone. He was a libertarian Republican who'd cast his first Democratic vote for any person, for any office, for Kerry. I was arguing that maybe it would be okay--that at least Bush would get stuck with the fucking war he started--but he was almost in tears. "You don't know these people," he said. "I grew up with these people! They're gay-baiting creationists and there's nothing to stop them now."

We hung up, and soon one of my grad school friends arrived at the airport: we were rooming together at the conference. We stared at each other, unable to muster up much conversation. Our conference was at a college in a deeply red state, and I don't remember very much of it--just that everyone looked as if their father had just died.

I've been thinking about those elections, and about those people. The woman who held the election night party in 2000 finished her Ph.D., but is no longer in the profession. One of my classmates, who kept declaring that he was going to D.C. to protest Bush's inauguration (which he did) by throwing feces at his motorcade (which he did not) has disappeared. He fell into a dissertation worm-hole, and I've heard nothing about him for years. The friend I shared a room with at that conference in November 2004 is the same friend I'm sharing a room with at a conference in November 2008.

Just before Election Day I spent some time with another person I was friends with in grad school, but who (for various reasons or for no reason) I've barely seen or been in touch with for the part five years. We spent some hours catching up one-on-one, and after we parted I felt strangely transformed: it was as if I'd both recovered access to my grad school life--but in a new and better way--and realized, definitively, that that era was behind me.

I started grad school nine years ago last August. Eight years ago Bush was elected. Next month, my Ph.D. will be three years old. And the month after that, President Obama will take office.

Here's to fresh starts.

Happy (belated) 95 Theses Day!

It was Friday. But really: isn't every day 95 Theses Day?



I've watched this at least a dozen times. It just keeps getting better. (Via IvyGate.)