Ah, youth. Except not.

If anyone out there is longing for those blissful, starry-eyed days when you were just thinking about applying to grad school, you must go read Mouse (of Notes of a Neophyte)'s interpretation of the grad school Statement of Purpose essay. Every time I re-read it, I weep helpless, delighted tears.

My favorite paragraph:

You know what else I really love, I mean besides mint-chocolate chip ice cream? I really really really love this Really Exciting Thing That’s Happening In The Field Right Now but That You Hate Because It Was Inaugurated By Your Evil Nemesis Whose Name I’m About to Drop as My Personal Hero. I’m using the work of Your Nemesis, whose work changed my life and rescued me from the brink of suicide, to do toootally awesometastic research, well not really research so much as vague thinking, in Area You Hate. How neat is that!

And that last part, about awesometastic research (a/k/a "not really research so much as vague thinking")? Sounds curiously like what I've been describing in my fellowship applications!

Plus ça change, yo.

Elizabeth: The Paranoid, Propagandistic Years

Augustana and I went to see Elizabeth: The Golden Years this weekend, partly out of a sense of professional obligation (Augie, as her pseudonym suggests, works on a later period but sometimes pinch-hits for the Renaissance) and partly out of a desire to see some really pretty clothes. We had, it must be said, extremely low expectations.

But given those low expectations, we had a damn good time--a better time, I imagine, than the fiftysomething couple in front of us who kept shifting or half turning around in their seats every time we burst out laughing at a solemn moment or had a whispered coversation about whether Mary, Queen of Scots could really have had a Scottish accent--because dude, wasn't she raised in France?

Other bloggers have already commented on the historical liberties the film takes, and while I don't mind some condensing and collapsing and shuffling around of events, I was initially irritated by the depiction of the period's religious politics. As Augie noted, Philip II of Spain, whom the film presents as a fanatical Catholic, is basically a caricature of a modern-day Islamic fundamentalist bent on holy war. In fact, the film suggests that all its Catholics are somehow in league with each other against Elizabeth, and that Spain sent its armada not because of English interference with Spain's New World holdings, and not because of English support for the United Provinces--but because Philip was really mad that Elizabeth had Mary executed.

But as the film went on, I started to enjoy its naive nationalism and the fever-swamp of its religious paranoia. It reminded me of actual Early Modern propaganda--and you'd better believe there's nothing Flavia loves more than propaganda. Then I began thinking about how awesome it would be to teach clips from the movie alongside, say, The Faerie Queene (for Book 3, the clip of Elizabeth in armor on horseback, surrounded by fluttering flags with the cross of St. George, would alone be worth the DVD purchase price).

It's disappointing that the filmmakers are promoting such a luridly nationalistic version of history--and that there seems, for instance, to be no irony in their portrayal of Elizabeth as an enlightened and religiously tolerant ruler in contrast with Philip--but that wouldn't make it any less effective as a teaching tool. Just as in The Faerie Queene: what's true of almost every villain? They're Catholic! And how do you know they're Catholic? Look out for the rosary beads! (Seriously, I think there are more rosaries in this movie than there are actors.)

And if all else fails, there's educational value--surely!--in oohing and ahhing over some pretty dresses.

All me, all the time

I was brushing my teeth the other night, not thinking about anything in particular, when between spitting and rinsing I found myself muttering, "Thus does the whirlygig of time bring in his revenges."

For a second I had no idea where that line had come from. Uh. . . Shakespeare, right? And. . . Twelfth Night? Yes. Duh. I was teaching Twelfth Night that week. But what was that particular line doing rattling around in my subconsciousness?

I shrugged and went to bed, but the next morning I found myself thinking about that line some more, as well as some of the play's many other references to time ("Time, thou must unravel this, not I/It is too hard a knot for me t'untie"), and I realized how consonant they are with a lot of the thinking I've been doing lately. "Man," I said aloud at one point, "I should totally re-read Twelfth Night again!"

And then I laughed, embarrassed at myself.

Re-read it, why? For its fortune-cookie wisdom? Its secret messages to me alone? Isn't this exactly what I want my students not to do--to believe that a work of literature has value only insofar as it relates to their lives. . . and that as soon as it doesn't, it's pointless?

Of course, I don't believe that about Twelfth Night or anything else I read or teach, but sometimes I do think I have a tendency to relate too intensely and too personally to the things I work on. I worry that this is naive and unprofessional of me. But I also wonder how one can help it.

There are scholars, I'm sure, who do what they do for the sheer intellectual challenge of it all, and who derive immense satisfaction from that. But even though the "personal" element of my work isn't at all obvious--it has nothing, for example, to do with gender- or religious- or class-based identification, or with events in my personal or family history--I can't pretend that my scholarship is somehow perfectly objective or that it doesn't reflect, in a deep and fundamental way, my own personality and my understanding of human nature and institutions.

I guess there's value to this awareness, and I know that discovering aspects of oneself in the intellectual and cultural productions of another age isn't the same thing as imposing oneself or one's beliefs upon those works (in the former case, one is hopefully expanding and challenging oneself and one's preconceptions; in the latter, one is finding only what one is prepared to find).

Nevertheless, I still feel vaguely ashamed and Billy Phelpsian when I admit to such things.

Where are you going, where have you been?

I received my new passport in the mail the other day--just two weeks after sending in my application, thankyouverymuch, U.S. Department of State!--and after getting over the hideous graphics (eagles, flags, amber waves of grain) and quotations about liberty and so forth, I dug out my two earlier passports to compare their format and layout and to think a bit about where I've been and where I might be going.

One place I've been and don't want to go back to: long permed hair and feathered bangs, which is the look I'm sporting in the passport that I got at age 17 (the eighties, apparently, came late to the west coast, because this was in 1992). I'm also rocking a headband, weird dangly earrings, and frighteningly large eyebrows. I got that passport before going to Japan on a six-week exchange program between my junior and senior years of high school, and the second and final time I used it was four years later, between my junior and senior years of college, when I decided to spend a month travelling around the U.K. by myself, interrupted by a short jaunt to Belgium to see The Expat. (On that trip I got continual shit from the passport control people, who would scrunch up their faces before allowing that, maybe, I could be the girl in the photo.)

My second passport, though it's now ten years old, bears a photo that's still recognizable as me, albeit with longer hair and softer, more tentative features. My expression, too, looks tentative--I look young. I remember being delighted with that passport, for both its photo (at some abrupt moment in my life I went from being completely unphotogenic to looking better in photos than I do in person) and its sense of promise. I was planning a trip to Paris for a week over Thanksgiving--my first vacation from my new, grown-up job! and I was going to Paris!

But that passport--or maybe it was my life--didn't quite live up to its potential. Back in 1997 I was certain that I'd go somewhere new every year or two, but I became mired in debt and then mired in grad school and didn't go abroad again until 2004, when I spent two weeks in Korea visiting HK. A research trip to the U.K. a few months later and a conference in an unnamed European country in 2005 made me think I might make good on at least some of my early promise as an international glamor girl--but instead I wound up running down the clock on that passport with only another research trip to the U.K. this past summer to show for it.

But! Now I have this new passport, with its awful graphics and a not-terrible photo and a whole lot of blank pages. I'm planning a trip to Italy in the spring and hopefully I'll be back in London this summer for a conference--but what about the next nine years? Where will I have gone and where the hell (or who, or what) will I be then?

Other, I mean, than forty-fucking-two years old.

Fall break goodies

So Evey and I hit the mall yesterday--and not our local mall, neither, but one requiring a significant drive each way--and I returned home with the following:

1. Two M*A*C lipsticks, one in "Diva," a dark berry/plum color, and the other in "Ruby Woo," a traffic-stopping red with a seriously retro matte finish. (I think I may only be able to wear the latter at night, in dimly-lit establishments--it's pretty fabulous, but possibly more drag-queen fabulous than movie-star fabulous.)



2. A pair of pointy red shoes in shiny shiny calfskin--perfect with my navy pinstripe suit. (All y'all going to MLA, keep an eye out.)


And heck, because it's fall and a time for new beginnings and preparing for the long winter ahead, I also spent some time contemplating new moisturizing and skin care regimens (winter is a time of killing-spree-inducingly dry skin for your Flavia) and finally took a leap of faith and credit card on one. Then I dug out ye olde humidifier, vacuumed, did two loads of laundry, and (thanks to a new-agey store called, I kid you not, Archimago) "smudged" my apartment with white sage. Whether evil spirits were actually inspired to flee the premises I can't say, but it sure smells nice in here.

So yeah. Now I'm hanging out in my sweetly-scented apartment, grading papers in track pants and blindingly bright lipstick. When I get bored? I get up and put on a different lipstick.

Who says the academic life isn't a glamorous one?

Governed by imperatives

Many years ago Victoria observed, mid-phone call, that my life seemed to be "governed by imperatives." (I believe this was approximately one sentence before or after she commented that I have a classically addictive personality.) And I suppose that's true--I have a long mental list of things I must know and must do and must have (some of them regularly, some of them soon, some just at some point before I die): travel and foreign languages and stationery and social skills and movies and housewares and beauty routines and cocktails and clothing. . . and on, and on, and on.

This weekend, however, at least half of my imperatives are of a much less self-improving, beautiful-life-living sort: it's RU's fall break (read: a six-day weekend), and I have 50 papers to grade and research proposals to write and a windshield to replace and--hey! did I mention those 50 papers?

So blogging may slip down that list of imperatives, somewhere beneath going to the mall (lipstick!) and catching up on several weeks' worth of magazines (cult-chah!) and joining friends for a drink or three or five.

But rest assured that y'all are among those imperatives. I'm just juggling some others, is all.

Theme and variation

Last week it occurred to me that virtually all of my friends are, RIGHT NOW, in the midst of major life changes: some have finally finished school and are starting new careers; others are going back to school after having worked for a decade; some have just had their first baby; others are getting married or divorced.

Initially, this just seemed like more of the same. Since graduating from college, many of us have made some kind of change on a near-yearly basis--switching apartments, cities, employers, or boyfriends in a blinding blur. (So many of my friends have moved so many times that I have to hunt to find anything in my address book--half the entries are scratched out and the rest are written in any old place, under any old letter.)

But these, I think, are truly big changes, and ones that will shape at least the next few years of our lives. But. . . shape them how, exactly?

I've been complaining a lot, to a lot of people, about not knowing what the narrative of my life is supposed to be, and in one of those conversations HK reminded me that I used to go around offering, from Kierkegaard, the observation "life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward."

(And okay, that's a pretty shameful revelation--but if you think there's nothing more annoying than a 20-year-old who goes around saying, "as Kierkegaard says. . ." you'd be wrong: at one of HK's law firm interviews, when asked about the unusual series of jobs she'd held since college and what they added up to, she commented, vaguely, that one of her friends used to say [the above quotation]. Her interviewer replied, "Actually, that's Kierkegaard. I mean, your friend didn't just make that up.")

And what strikes me about that induced memory isn't the total profundity of that quotation, but the fact that. . . well. . . I guess I've always felt this way. Back when I kept a journal, I had this experience with some regularity. I'd flip through an older volume, start reading, and discover, hey! That thing in my current life and those deep self-realizations it was provoking? Uh, I'd already had them. Like, five years earlier.

As humbling as these moments are, especially when they involve having made the same fucking mistakes or operating under the same flawed assumptions, there's also something comforting about them. I have changed, in quite a lot of ways, so there's a pleasure--even if it's a rueful one--in signs of continuity.

And so now, thinking about the Big Changes that many of my friends are experiencing, I'm resisting the urge to say--whether in sorrow or in delight--"Things are totally different! Life will never be the same!" Because every single time I've ever thought that, I've been wrong. And maybe it simply is that we remain mostly the same people and tend to persist in the same behaviors, but it's hard not to feel that there are larger narrative patterns at work when doors that appeared closed suddenly open; people disappear only to reappear; and answers arrive to questions we weren't aware we had asked.

Still. One part of my past self that doesn't need to reappear? The quoting philosophers part. The pretentiousness there's probably no help for.

Perhaps you should talk to my friend, Sallie Mae

Faithful readers may recall how I regard INRU's periodic attempts to convince me that, without my "generous financial contribution," the institution will totter into immediate poverty and/or a lower slot in the U.S. News rankings. However, when I'm solicited as an alumna of INRU college, at least I understand why: many of my classmates are indeed making the big bucks, and we also tend, as a group, toward irrational nostalgia and institutional chauvinism.

Today, however, I received a solicitation from the dean of INRU's graduate school. It opened by conjuring up the inspirational sight of this year's crop of new graduate students at their matriculation ceremony, and. . . well, actually, that's where the dean lost me.

The matriculation ceremony? I'm supposed to feel a rush of nostalgia at that memory? (Or any memory from graduate school?)

I read an essay in the Chronicle a few years back where the author asserted that there was no one he knew who had gone to graduate school in the past 25 years who hadn't left feeling brutalized, and that pretty much matches my own experience. Were there good and even great things about my years in grad school? Well yes: there were a few. But were they things that I associate with the institution itself and its management of my education, teaching assignments, salary, et cetera? Fuck no.

More to the point, it's former graduate students--a group of people not known for its deep pockets--whom INRU is asking to send money. Sure, a few alumni may be biotech start-up millionaires or highly placed policy wonks, but that must be a small minority, and even those alumni are likely to feel more allegiance to their undergraduate alma maters than to the place where they received their MAs or PhDs.

Also: don't most of the graduate school's alumni probably work at institutions of higher education? And don't most of those institutions probably have--I'm just speculating here--vastly smaller endowments, operating budgets, and faculty salaries than INRU? So when I'm told that, without my contribution, INRU won't be able to continue offering competitive tuition and stipend packages to its incoming graduate students--well, I'm pretty much obliged to tell the dean to fuck right off.

Really, though, I wouldn't have given the letter a second glance had not something in the first paragraph jumped out at me: in the middle of describing that affecting scene at the matriculation ceremony, Dr. Dean writes that the sight renews feelings of inspiration "in returning students and faculty AND THE WONDER OF LEARNING."

Yes, that last phrase is all in caps--on his lovely, deanly letterhead (what did he think he was writing, a blog post?). And no, it doesn't make grammatical sense.

But you know, if this is who's running the institution these days. . . maybe I should write that cheque after all.

Recommenders: advice

So I'm applying for fellowships of various sorts for the first time since grad school--which means that, also for the first time, I'm confronted by the need to start finding recommenders from places other than grad school. Many of these fellowships only require two recommenders, and for those I'm set: Advisor is writing one and a good professional acquaintance (a well-known mid-career academic whose work I very much admire) has agreed to write the second.

However, at least one of these fellowships requires three recs, and I'm uncertain where to turn for that third one. My department chair would do it, and she's an excellent letter writer, but she's not in my field and I'm not sure that a letter from her would be remotely useful or appropriate. I could call upon another professor at INRU whom I've known since I was an undergrad and who's read pretty much everything I've ever written--but (a) s/he has gone above and beyond in writing me recommendations for everything imaginable for more than a decade now, and (b) I really want to get away from grad school recommenders, both because I think it will look better for my applications and because I'm genuinely interested in forging new relationships with mentor-type people.

Now, I have another possible third recommender, but I'm worried that we don't know each other well enough and that it might be presumptuous of me even to ask. We met less than a year ago, but we've had some fun interactions over meals at conferences; s/he read one of my articles and then engaged me in very complimentary conversation about it; s/he offered to read something else of mine--an offer that for various reasons I couldn't/didn't pursue. And oh yeah: this person is also kinda famous.

So I'm not sure. I guess it doesn't hurt to ask, but I have deep anxieties when it comes to making other people uncomfortable or putting them under any sense of obligation--and I worry that we might know each other well enough that Possible Recommender wouldn't feel able to say no. . . but would secretly resent the presumption.

Anyone have any pertinent advice, here?

Stick a fork in it

THANK GOD: I'm finally done with that essay on Neglected Author. Yeah, the one that I've had all summer to revise. For various reasons, I've had a serious block on this project--more an emotional block than a mental one--and so even though there really wasn't much that I had to do to the thing, every time I thought about it I Just. Couldn't. Deal.

But with the deadline approaching, I dealt.

Most of it was relatively easy. But yesterday I spent FOUR hours and today THREE hours revising exactly two sentences. Over and over and over and over. Does the improvement in the sense of the paragaph equal the time spent working on it? I'm not at all sure.

But I do know there's little in life that's more satisfying than the moment the right wording finally comes to me: "That's it. That's fucking fantastic," I say--trying not to look in the nearest mirror and observe that the fucking fantastic originator of the sentence is still unshowered and in her pyjamas. "Goddamn, that's good."

So yeah. I'd be, like, celebrating if it weren't for the fact that my reappointment materials--all two binders' worth of them--are due tomorrow.

Statement of teaching philosophy, here I come.

All or nothing

Sometimes I wonder whether I have, if not a death drive, then at least an impulse toward some of the milder forms of self-annihilation.

How else to explain the way I schedule my life?

In a typical week, I'm on campus Tuesday through Thursday and at home (or just, you know, elsewhere) Friday through Monday. It sounds like a sweet schedule and in many ways it is, especially since on Wednesdays I often don't go in until after noon. But what this means is that I am profoundly ON for several days--and those days are usually long and frantic--and then I'm OFF.

I work during the weekend, of course, but somehow most of my grading and course prep always gets left until Monday and I spend most of that day--and usually until 1 or 2 a.m.--finishing it. On Tuesday I rush to campus, where I spend nine hours (half of them jumping up and down in front of a classroom and the rest trying to be smiley and perky for my office hours or my colleagues), rush home, rush to my Italian class, inevitably have to stop by the grocery store, and finally return home at 10 p.m. looking like I've been beaten with the underside of a toboggan. Wednesday is another day of massive course prep and office hours and the occasional meeting. Thursday is a repeat of Tuesday, sans Italian.

And then? Ah, blessed freedom! Then it's all about sleeping in and puttering around the apartment and reading magazines and going out with friends. Sure, I get work done, but it gets done in the context of an essentially relaxed, unstructured day: a few hours here, a few hours there, and always with a spare half hour to check blogs or paint my toenails.

And honestly, I don't think I'd have it any other way. I love my leisurely days at home, and if the only way I can get them--or can feel I've earned them--is by bringing myself to the point of utter collapse on those other days, so be it.

Because it's not just about teaching or the exigencies of the academic schedule; I've always been like this. Many's the time I've been out all day running errands, and I'm starving and my feet hurt and I have to pee--and yet somehow I'll come up with five more things that I absolutely have to do before I go home. No, I can't get my drycleaning tomorrow--I'm out NOW! I have to get it NOW! And I need to get a ream of paper at Staples! And to swing by the drugstore! And finally I get home with a pounding headache and my hands shaking from hunger and in the foulest possible mood. . . but at least I've freed up the next day, or part of it, to do nothing.

Maybe it's that I feel the obligatory tasks must be got out of the way as soon as possible (as a kid I tended to eat my vegetables first for just this reason), or maybe it's that I have a strong reluctance to contaminate the more-fun with the less-fun.

Or maybe it's simply that inertia exerts a profound pull on me: a Flavia in motion tends to stay in motion, and a Flavia at rest tends to stay at rest.

(Speaking of which, dudes: I gotta cut this short. There's a bottle of whiskey and a DVD with my name on them.)

Still searching what we know not, by what we know

I just finished Areopagitica, which I'm teaching tomorrow.

I cry every time I read it.

God, I'm a dork.

Friday cat blogging

I know you've all been wondering how the pseudonymous Nero and I have been getting along for lo these many weeks now. Do these photos answer that question?

Probably not. But here they are anyway:




Although Nero's surprisingly good about not needing to be in my lap, on my keyboard, etc., when I'm working, he does insist on our being in near-constant physical proximity. (You can't tell from this image, but the rest of his body is curled all the way around my hip.)




Egad! A stowaway!

Oddball appeal

What is it that prods students in the direction of odd projects and paper topics?

Sometimes, of course, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the assignment. The student who decides to do a "close reading" of Comus for her first paper--even after being told, repeatedly, that a close reading needs to take either a single short poem or a passage of no more than 20 lines as its subject--simply doesn't know what she's doing.

Other times, it's less clear whether the student does or doesn't know what he's doing. That student who chooses to do a close reading of an obscure sonnet--one that wasn't assigned and that would require a considerable amount of historical background even to paraphrase? Well, who knows why he chose it. Maybe he misread the syllabus and thought that it was assigned. Maybe he knows enough about the context of the poem to have been intrigued. Maybe it struck him as baffling, and therefore compelling.

It's those last possibilities that interest me most. Is it intellectual curiosity that motivates someone to write on something about which he knows very little? Or is it a desire to do something new--and maybe in some senses easier--by avoiding the well-trod path?

I must admit to a personal interest in these questions, since I work on texts that are generally understudied--even those by well-known writers tend not to be counted among their "literary" productions. These days I don't think of what I do as particularly unusual (we all have our weird specialties), but as I puzzle over what could possibly be going on in my students' heads, it occurs to me that I was one of those students. And it also occurs to me that I don't have a clue what was going on in my own head then--or possibly even now.


* * * * * * * * * * *


As a sophomore I took a course on Milton, and I became fascinated by a minor work that we'd barely read or discussed. I had absolutely no familiarity with its genre or the issues behind it, and I don't think I could have told you, even then, exactly what attracted me to it; it was just weird! and different!

So naturally, when my senior year rolled around, I decided to write my thesis on it. And naturally, my thesis was a total fucking disaster.

Now, that disaster wasn't entirely my fault--my advisor was a straight-out-of-grad-school junior faculty member with no experience as an advisor, nothing but a cursory familiarity with the texts I was looking at, and (as I later found out) some significant drama going on in her personal life. But deciding to work on something so different from any text I'd ever encountered, and mainly because it was different. . . well, maybe that wasn't a smart decision on my part.

The experience was so traumatic that I became convinced I wasn't cut out for grad school.

Somehow I wound up there anyway.

While there, I proceeded to write a bunch more papers on weird texts and topics, some of which were equally disastrous and some of which started to be halfway decent as I learned how to ask the right kinds of questions. I designed a special topic for my oral exams (we had a bazillion topics that we were examined on at INRU, so this was just one of them) that might as well have been entitled, "weird stuff that interests Flavia mainly because she's never read or encountered it before." I spent a summer in a rare books library doing keyword searches ("WEIRD and STUFF") and indiscriminately paging everything that the catalogue turned up, whether ponderous 300-page tomes or broadside ballads.

Basically, I didn't have much more of a clue what I was doing than I had had in college. (I continued, and still do continue, to be unable to explain exactly why I'm interested in certain things--in the early stages of a project, I'm likely to say something like, "Well, I'm working on [totally random work]. Some of the stuff that [author] is doing seems weird. So yeah. I'm trying to figure out what's going on with that.")

Eventually, it became a dissertation. And now that it's done, and some of it's in print--and now that I have a job and some professional status--it doesn't seem odd at all.


* * * * * * * * *


But sometimes I still wonder why I always went for the neglected stuff--and not so much the cool neglected stuff, but the stuff that even many of my grad school colleagues let me know they found hugely boring.

Now, I'm absolutely in love with the material that I work on, but I wonder whether I wasn't also, however subconsciously, intimidated by the thought of working on more canonical works. I remember walking through the stacks at INRU at some point in grad school, looking for the four or five books that at least briefly discussed one of the works I was writing on, and passing the endless shelves of books on Shakespeare. "God!" I thought. "How does anyone write a dissertation on Shakespeare?"

I still wonder that. Somehow, writing on Shakespeare always struck me as more work than writing on the weird stuff I wound up devoted to. Maybe that's a sign that I took the easy way out--or maybe it's all a matter of perception. After all, I'm perfectly content to bumble about blindly as I try to come to grips with an entirely obscure text in a hybrid genre that deals with a historical event I know nothing about.

Or as I've been known to say in the classroom, "My God! I love this! I don't understand it AT ALL!"

Simile of the week

Courtesy of G-Fav, whom someone once described, not inaccurately, as "pure Dada":

"It's like having a conversation with the typeface Helvetica."