Stress

Things are coming along nicely, except for my stress level. It’s rising. The thesis, which I thought I would be stressing about, isn’t the problem. I’m about 8,500 words into it (close to 10,000 if you count the endnotes). No major stumbling blocks.

The stress is coming from choosing schools. We have also been accepted at the third school we applied for. Three for three. You’d think we were smart or something. All three are R1 research universities. There are 88 of those in the US, in case you’re curious. All three are in the top 30 of that 88. It’s a thin atmosphere up there. They all have budgets approaching that of small countries. All three accept relatively few applicants. I’m really flabbergasted that they not only accepted us, but seem willing to work hard to convince us that their school is the right one.

However, numbers on paper just don’t do it. I think I’ll just have to rely on my intuition, which served me well in the barroom days. I could tell when I walked in if it was a place that I wanted to be. We’re visiting two of them soon. I tell myself to wait and listen to that sort of sixth sense I used to have for sniffing out interesting scenes. Money is important, but it isn’t the only thing to consider. My girlfriend and I were talking about it tonight, after meeting a first year student from one of the programs who came to town. He stressed the “community” atmosphere. Most universities do.

Community makes me nervous. Some communities, I’m fine with and enjoy. Others just get on my nerves and make it hard for me to stay focused on what I’m doing because of all the energy expended trying to be a good “citizen.” I like the department I’m in because they leave me alone to do my thing. I am afraid of having to “join” a club that doesn’t have anything to do with me. Disciplines are big, and not everyone shares the same emphases—mine are kind of rare. That is why one of these schools really seems to want me. People always stress the “bonding” nature of the whole thing. But what if you don’t want to bond? Often, these days, I’d rather be alone.

But of course the whole idea is to share knowledge with other people. I’m fine with that, as long as they don’t feel compelled (outside the classroom or conference circuit, anyway) to make me. I am horribly nervous about that, nervous about the politics of schmoozing. Yeah, I know, they call it “networking.” But really it’s only slightly removed from the barroom schmooze. Cooperating on research, papers, or projects is one thing—politics is something else.

I hate not knowing. But knowing isn’t something that can be counted on in this situation. It’s an intuition kind of thing, and it does me no good to be nervous before I really meet those voices on the phone. I haven’t felt so introverted in years. I don’t like the feeling much.

I was reading a native peoples foundation site yesterday, researching funders for a project (the precise link escapes me now). It listed the board members with their tribal affiliations. However, several of the names— instead of having a tribe— listed a university. Sometimes, that’s what this feels like. It’s like choosing a new nationality, or racial label.

Process

It’s easy to understand why so many academic blogs I find go for just a few entries and then stop. It is hard to read and assimilate information and talk at the same time. Especially if one follows the social model of blogging as a form of conversation. Blogging didn’t start out that way for me. It was mostly about clearing my head, and making connections between material and the world. I also have a creative urge that has lain fallow for many years now, and the blog was also a place to let those spontaneous outbursts out. This space has been neither a journal nor a public forum, but rather notes for imaginary conversations. Sometimes those conversations are actualized, because I have some great people reading me from time to time.

Lately I’ve had the urge to journal a bit more about my “process” to use the compositionist term. Just to remember, really, and remind myself that I will live through this. I’ve had some bad experiences with writing projects (well, sort of anyway). I had a major paper on Blake blow up on me and cost me my honors status as an undergrad. It was an organizational problem. Good ideas, deep research, totally incoherent result (this is not an uncommon problem with expositions on Blake). I was working with a mentor who was just too much like me. His suggestions were so parallel to my own thoughts that I had great resistance to shaping it into his paper rather than my own. That paper got to around 50 pages and stopped. Cold. Not to be visited again.

That can’t happen to me now. I have refrained from getting any feedback until I have the structural issues straight in my head. I hit a wall at around 22 pages into my first chapter. It had a structure, but it was a blog structure—sort of free association around similar though not identical ideas. However, after a couple of days came a big insight—there was a more coherent structure hiding in it, I just hadn’t seen it yet.

Now, I’m shaping the paper to that structure. Of course there are some hollow spots in my research that I’m fixing, trying to cram overviews of complex areas into my head. But I know I can make this work. The problem is, it’s all theory. I told myself I wasn’t going to do that. I wanted to write about words and pictures, not theories. But the theories are fascinating, damn it!

But I hope to get this together in the next week or so, in order to get the heart of the matter. Real books in the real world written by real authors who really wanted these books to do something other than “reinforce the patriarchy” or “perpetuate the class structure.”

My old slogan used to be “maybe partying will help” (Minutemen reference). But my body really won’t take that anymore. This time, I’m hoping that I can make blogging help. But the problem is that blog writing and essay construction are not even remotely the same thing.

*Addendum— I think this blog began as a way of Thinking in Public. I suspect it will stay precisely that.

Difficult Choices

Pardon the long periods of silence lately. I’m about 5,000 words into the first chapter of a thesis (will it ever end?) and have been scrambling about trying to figure out where I will be next year. My significant other and I have been accepted to two Ph.D. programs so far (haven’t heard from the third one yet). We were a bit concerned, with competition being what it is, about applying when we both need to get into the same school. Now, it hardly matters what the third school says.

The first two schools that replied have fine programs, and it’s just a matter of who offers the best financial support. One of the schools is a new and innovative program, with lots of flexibility (essential for someone like me with wandering interests). The other school has nearly a hundred percent job-placement rate for its graduates. Naturally, I’m leaning that way. Competition for that school is really stiff. They only accepted seven people, and my household contains two of them. Needless to say, we’re flattered. The schools are unnamed here for reasons of paranoia— I certainly don’t want anyone changing their mind.

But there is little time to rest on laurels, when there is thesis and teaching work to be done. Oh, and the matter of the grant proposals that I need to get together for a non-profit, and the business of trying to get a grip on twentieth century language philosophy.

Ack, I wish I could clone myself about now.

Somehow, a fuzzy guest has taken up residence next to my Harvard classics and Habermas. Go figure.

A Tangent

While web surfing around for Leonardo, I stumbled on The Johnson Family Papers Project. It is truly a wonderful site. From its about page:

My name is Sue Johnson and I run this web page, which is the on-line presence of the Johnson Family Papers Project. And what, you may ask, is the Johnson Family Papers Project? It’s something of a cross between a collection of memories, an act of mourning and a repository of social history. The custodian of stories and memorabilia in my family had, for many years, been my mother Joan. Shortly before she died in 1998, Joan said she wanted to put the family vacation journals into the computer to save them. When she died, my sisters and I inherited the journals and many other papers. Because we all lived in different parts of the country (and I had been meaning to learn html anyway) I started to put the Johnson family archive on the web. That way, we could all see and share the fragments of family history my mother had so carefully collected and saved.

Webbing the JFPP wasn’t easy for me. My mother died suddenly and at a young age (she was 65), and it was hard to go back and read about trips we took as I prepared these pages. On the other hand, my loss would have been unbearable were it not for those very times we had spent together. Mourning and celebration go hand in hand here.

Non-family members are welcome to peruse the JFPP. Some of what appears on this site is very clever, funny and / or interesting, and well-deserved of a read. Also, since I was trained as a social scientist the Johnson Family Papers fascinated me in their sheer quality as Data. How often do you get to look into the mundane details of someone’s everyday life and thought from twenty, thirty, fifty years ago? If you are an anthropologist or social historian, you will know what I mean. If you are not, you will probably think I am batty. At any rate, the JFPP is a resource for anyone who wishes to study the 20th century middle-class American Family, the Farber clan of Buffalo, or minor Northern Italian nobility.

Perverse

My living room has been invaded by giant blue snails. Because of the flood.

My books, for the first time in my life, were actually up off the floor. However, the dozens of crates of magazines and articles for my research sitting right in front of this weren’t. Major moving problem, to make room for the blue snails.

But the joy didn’t stop there. A phone call informed me that an old friend is dying of a brain tumor, and is only expected to live anywhere from two weeks to two months longer. I suppose it’s a relief of sorts. She’s suffered from breast cancer (including a double-mastectomy) for the last couple of years.

In grant writing class tonight, someone was looking for a problem statement for their cause (breast cancer). I suggested that hospice care might be a good problem. My friend has been living in her sister’s garage throughout most of this indignity. You see, if you’re terminal in the US, and you don’t have health insurance, they just send you home to die. Even if you don’t have one.

It’s been a really perverse day.

Story Telling — Old And New

From The Bookman, August 1909—a two page spread with photographs and captions, no credit given. Cropped slightly for clarity with the captions reproduced exactly as given.

Continue reading “Story Telling” →

Memento Mori

I was happy to see among my mothers photographs, a picture of my father in a place that I had been. This is a little parking lot, next to Wister Lake in Oklahoma. I had stopped there myself many times, just to take in the view. I had no idea that my father picked the same spot. It was an odd and happy coincidence. Though I was never at this place at the same time with him, we had both been there.

My brother asked my mother for a photograph of my father for his living room. Mom found one that I haven’t seen yet of dad holding a tomato, next to his gargantuan tomato plants. The woman at the photo place asked her if she wanted it cropped. The suggestion was normal, but, actually it would have negated the purpose of the picture. He was really proud of his tomatoes. After having an enlargement made, my mother noticed the date-stamp. It was taken on July 26, 2000, exactly three years before he died to the day.

This was a strange coincidence. But my mother took it in stride, hoping that the picture would help my brother cope. The day after she told me that story, I read this bit from “History Begins at Home” by Meir Wigoder:

The “transitional object” such as the blanket the child does not wish to part from because it confers security and comfort is an example. The infant recognizes the object as “not-me” during a period when he starts to realize that he is separate from his mother. Clinging to the blanket provides the infant with a symbolic representation of the mother, which enables her to exist in his mind even when she is not present. This is the beginning of the infant’s capacity to distinguish between reality and phantasy and it opens up an intermediate area of experience, which enables individuals later on to keep inner and outer experience, subjectivity and objectivity, illusion and reality both separate and yet interrelated. Thus we can speculate that the family portrait can serve as a transitional object during the process of mourning. The photograph of the deceased person, while serving to keep the memory alive, also, and particularly, helps the grieving person to understand that the dead will no longer return.

The occasion of the essay was the death of the author’s father. Yet another strange coincidence.

Kern(s)

Growing up in Bakersfield, the story of how it was named after Colonel Thomas Baker’s field is commonplace. However, I didn’t really know anything about how it came to be called Kern County. I stumbled on this in the course of my research today, and though it is a matter of little consequence, thought that I should write it down.

For anyone familiar with the terrain, there is of course the Kern River, Kern Island, etc., and all of them seem to stem from the same person. It’s a more interesting story than the Baker’s field story, though I suspect that the best story is of how the neighboring community of Taft, California, got its original name. I wish I knew that one, but I don’t. Taft began as a town named Moron. I’m not joking, but I digress.

There were three Kern brothers, originally from Philadelphia. All three were artists. Dr. Benjamin Jordan Kern was a member of Fremont’s fourth expedition on the Missouri River, and was slain by Ute Indians on March 14th, 1849. The youngest, Richard Kern, was the most talented and prolific sketch artist. However, on an expedition near the Colorado-Utah border in 1853:

The sun had not yet risen, most of the party being at breakfast, when the surrounding quietness and silence of this vast plain was broken by the discharge of a volley of rifles and a shower of arrows through that devoted camp, mingled with the savage yells of a large band of Pah-Utah Indians almost in the midst of the camp, for, under the cover of the thick bushes, they had approached undiscovered to within twenty-five yards of the campfires. The surprise was complete. At the first discharge, the call to ‘seize your arms’ had little effect. All was confusion. Captain Gunnison, stepping from his tent, called to his savage murderers that he was their friend; but this had no effect. Gunnison’s cry did have the effect of drawing the attention of the Indians, for he fell, his body pierced with fifteen arrows.

As soon as the news was received by the camp, relief was dispatched from the main camp, relief was dispatched in the hope that other survivors could be rescued but only eight bodies mutilated by Indians and wolves were found [including Richard Kern]. (Report of Richard Beckwith)

Interestingly, his sketchbooks were later recovered from the Indians and copied by other artists to sketch the terrain.

However, Richard wasn’t the Kern the geography in California was named for. Edward M. Kern, who traveled on Fremont’s third expedition, was the one. I don’t know much about him except that his diaries and such are in the Huntington museum. It was Richard Kern that I was researching. Who knew that I grew up in a county named after sketch artist, from a family of sketch artists? At least I thought it was interesting, anyhow.