Blogging the M.A.

true story

2010-03-04T19:46:00.000-08:00

I needed to print a 50-page document last night, and my printer ran out of ink. It was too late to go to the office supply store, but Kinko's is open 24, so I put the document on a USB drive and went to get it printed.

At Kinko's, I was helped by an employee who was simultaneously holding a conversation with a couple of customers who seemed to also be his friends. I had no problem with this, since he was perfectly capable of printing my document and talking to them at the same time, but I couldn't help overhearing their conversation. The friends were female, and looked to be about nineteen or twenty years old. The conversation went something like this, beginning at the point when I became aware of it:

Employee: Was she Hispanic?

Friend 1: Yeah. And she had this HUGE wad of gum in her mouth.

Employee: That's Circe.

Friend 1: She didn't help me at all. Can I complain?

Employee: Not to me. You can complain to my manager.

Friend 1: Can I write a complaint?

Employee: You want to make a written complaint?

Friend 1: [responding to a question from Friend 2] Her name's CeeCee.

Friend 2: Who's CeeCee?

Employee: No, her name's Circe.

Friend 1: What?

At this point I (foolishly) thought I could help clear up the misunderstanding, even though I knew none of the people involved.

Me: Circe. Like the witch.

Employee: ...

Friends: ...

Me: From Greek mythology? Ancient Greece?

Employee: ...

Friends: ...

Me: From the Odyssey, Circe, she's the witch who turns Odysseus' men into pigs.

Employee: Oh, yeah. She's the one on the island. The witch.

Me: Yes, exactly.

Friend 1: Is that on Lost?

I took my document and went home.

Dear Microsoft: please DIAF

2009-12-28T16:29:00.002-08:00

I will start this post by admitting up front that I do not like unnecessary changes. I am obsessive-compulsive, and I like things to be a certain way, and I don't like it when things that I'm used to change for no good reason. My reaction to such changes varies from annoyance to anger to distress, depending on what has changed and how much. The time it takes for my annoyance/anger/distress to abate varies likewise. For example, when a website I frequently visit changed the way it looks, it took maybe a week for the annoyance to subside. The site didn't really work any differently; it just looked different, and after a few days, I got used to it. On the other hand, I still haven't gotten over the changes in my university's periodicals search. The functionality has changed so much that almost a year later, I still hate it, and I'm angry at it every time I have to use it. I realize that my reaction to change is not always reasonable. I know this, OK? But this time I think I have a legitimate gripe.

The laptop I've had for about five years is starting to get a little worn, in a physical sense. It's got some alarmingly large cracks in the case, all kinds of cruft under the keyboard, and the DVD drive puts a circular scratch on any disc I try to play in it. The machine is essentially sound (or was until very recently) and it's more powerful than the box the kids use, so Glen proposed that I get a new laptop, and relegate the old one to the kitchen for the kids. I agreed, and sometime around the beginning of December, a new laptop arrived. Glen opened the box and set up the new machine for me, after which time I studiously ignored it until this morning.

The old laptop still has malware lurking in it, so today I'm using the new one. The new one is running Windows 7. Based on my previously mentioned disdain for unnecessary changes, you can guess how much I like W7 (hint: not at all). They've changed the way everything looks, right down to the graphics on the solitaire cards, for absolutely no reason that I can ascertain. Also, what the heck happened to my Control Panel? It now has an "Action Center" (what?) as well as various other crap that does not look familiar, and they've changed the names of some of the things I'm used to using. For example, the printer utility used to be called something like "Printers and Faxes," so I could find it in the Control Panel by looking for stuff that starts with the letter P. Now it's called "Devices and Printers," which means that when I went to look for it in the Control Panel, I couldn't find it, because it no longer starts with P.

So I was somewhat annoyed by that, but not completely freaking out by any means. Apparently they've chosen to reorganize the things that belong in the Control Panel, and decided that "devices" and printers (which are apparently two different things) belong together. Fair enough. Possibly they have a good reason for putting those things together. I really don't see why they need something called "Device Manager" AND something called "Devices and Printers," but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. And really, this is more of an annoyance than anything else: the functionality is still there, in approximately the same place; it's just called something slightly different.

And then I encountered the abomination that is Microsoft Word in Office 2007 and oh my gosh I hate this thing with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. They have apparently taken every single function this program performs, assigned each one to a random category which would previously have been called a menu, and then hidden these sets of functions in the most counterintuitive places possible. I spent so long looking for some of these functions that by the time I found them, I couldn't remember what I had wanted to do with them. Frequently when I searched the help file, it wanted me to go through some sort of tutorial (possibly with video?) to learn how to use Word. Each time, I declined to use the tutorial, because I didn't need to know everything about the program, just the particular thing I wanted to use at the moment. At the point when I had had to search the help file so often that I was seriously considering walking through the tutorial before doing anything else, I realized the true extent of the travesty that is Word 2007.

I have been using Windows, in its various iterations, for approximately fifteen years. I have been using Microsoft Word for about the same length of time. I never needed a tutorial to figure out how to use it. It seemed pretty intuitive, and if I wanted to do something complicated or out of the ordinary, the help file usually sufficed. Over the years I've gotten fairly proficient with Word, in the sense that when I want to do something with it, I know how to make it happen. And now, after I've spent fifteen years learning the ins and outs and ups and downs of this software, Microsoft has $%#&ed it up SO BADLY that I need a tutorial before I can perform even the most basic functions. Nice going, Microsoft. I hope you die in a fire.

For those of you who would say that I should quit my whining, learn how to use the new version, and get on with my life, I say to you very sincerely, "Shut up." Obviously this is not the kind of issue over which the entire world grinds to a halt. My point is that the stupid thing worked JUST FINE the way it was, and they have changed it for NO GOOD REASON. To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park, "Your software engineers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

Well. This is embarrassing.

2009-12-27T21:50:00.000-08:00

I'm writing this at the clunky old desktop computer in my kitchen, because my beloved laptop appears to have picked some malware. I'm not exactly an internet naïf: I know better than to click on attachments, even if they're from people I know; I don't download "free" stuff like smileys or fun animated cursors or toolbars or Zwinkys or other software; I don't click on links in emails. I have an antivirus program and a firewall, and I don't hang out in shady parts of the internet. And yet my machine is undeniably afflicted with Antivirus 2008. I have no idea where it came from. Glen already tried to remove it once, and Symantec also found it and supposedly took it out yesterday, but it just ... won't ... die. It's annoying, disconcerting, and also a little embarrassing.

Why yes, that is a Yersinia pestis on my keyboard.

another excellent sports quote

2009-10-07T17:13:00.000-07:00

Michael Crabtree, picked 10th in the NFL draft by San Francisco, has finally ended his months-long holdout and signed a contract with the 49ers. He was the last draft pick from this year to do so. During his holdout, everyone from journalists to athletes from other sports to random celebrities seemed to have an opinion on the situation, and Sports Illustrated reports that "even rapper MC Hammer got involved to finally make [the contract] happen." After all that sound and fury, what did Crabtree have to say about having finally signed a contract?

"It's a lot of relief off my shoulders."

scoreboard

2009-09-19T23:15:00.000-07:00

That is all.

books objectified

2009-08-08T22:01:00.001-07:00

I'm a fan of the concept of books as objects. I like the way books feel and the way they look and the way they smell. I'm a sucker for Victorian books that are pretty for no good reason. (Say what you will about the Victorians, but they made some very pretty books.) That being said, I don't buy books just because they're pretty; I buy them because -- prepare to be astonished -- I want to read them. So I was strangely fascinated, and yet kind of shocked and appalled, by a post about decorating with books that I came across at an interior design blog.

I should explain that interior design is not exactly my thing. The closest I've come to "decorating" anything in my house in the three years I've lived here was to make some curtains for Peach's room, and even then I only did it because we were hoping to get her to sleep in longer by blocking the light from her window more effectively. Every wall on the inside of my house is beige, because that's what color it was when I moved in. I have not hung one single thing other than a clock on the walls -- no art, not even pictures of the kids. So it's unlikely that I would get much out of an interior decorating site; clearly I do not have the vision, as they say.

Anyway, the post started innocently enough, with a picture of a very tall built-in bookshelf with a step-ladder in front of it. The blogger comments that it's one of her favorite images of bookshelves. Fair enough; I like built-ins myself. Then there's an image from an interior designer/personal shopper named Phoebe Howard:At this point I'm starting to get a little suspicious. Is this a bookshelf, or a china hutch, or what? By the way, this item sells for about $14,000 and change for a pair of them. The website does not indicate whether it is possible to buy one of them for $7000.

Several other pictures followed, with the blogger continually referring to the books as "displays." This, for example, she described as a "color blocked book display" by Joe Nye:I still hadn't quite caught on. My response was, "Who organizes their books by color? And why would you put big glass vases like that in front of your books? You'd knock the vase over every time you tried to get a book out."

Then there was this image, which the blogger took from French Country Living magazine: She comments that the "randomness of the stacked books has a romantic quality to it," and that she likes the effect of "light neutral colored books mixed with other vintage treasures." OK, but I could not have a "display" like that in my house -- it would drive me slowly but surely insane, until one day I would break down and unstack it and derandomize it and organize it by genre and then by author's last name, alphabetically.

I thought the concept of books chosen and displayed solely for their aesthetic qualities was hard to wrap my head around, but I was really unprepared for this:The designer, Annie Brahler, has hung the painting directly on the bookshelf, thus physically preventing anyone from using the books behind it.

As the inimitable Adam Horovitz once remarked, "Something's going on and I'll prob'ly never get it."

sheep in da house

2009-08-07T14:04:00.000-07:00

The sheep has arrived, looking surprisingly cheerful for someone who just got shipped across the Atlantic in a box.

And here he is with his ovine brethren (or sistren? We've never been entirely sure) in his new duds. The new sheep is the one on the right -- I made him a green sweater so we wouldn't have two that are the same color.
He fits right in.

unbelievable

2009-07-31T22:11:00.001-07:00

Against all odds, Sara informs me that she is in receipt of the sheep. Awaiting further developments.

the continuing saga of Larry the Lamb

2009-07-25T19:23:00.000-07:00

In my continuing quest to procure a Larry the Lamb toy, I enlisted the help of Sara, my Swiss friend from grad school. First I went to the website where Larry is sold and tried to purchase him. Sara will be in Grasmere this coming week, and she agreed to let me ship the sheep to her hotel, after which she would mail him to me, for considerably less than £35. So I put the sheep in my virtual shopping basket, and gave Sara's name and the address of her hotel as the shipping information. So far so good.

Then I tried to put in my billing information. This did not go well. "Country" and "county" were both required, but the drop-down list of countries only included countries they ship to, and needless to say my U.S. county wasn't on their list either. However, they offered the option of paying via PayPal "without sharing your financial information." Great, I'll take that option, please. Unfortunately they still wanted my billing address and my phone number. I gave up and just checked the box to make the billing information the same as the shipping information. Incidentally, I did give them a phone number, but it's a U.S. cell phone number. I didn't give them a country code (because I don't know it) so good luck trying to contact me that way. I'm puzzled as to why their web page even accepted a phone number with a different number of digits than a U.K. number, since the shipping address is in England.

Next they sent me to PayPal's website to enter my username and password. I actually ended up using Glen's account, because I usually keep mine empty, and it would take at least three days to transfer money from my bank account to my PayPal account. Add that to the 3-4 days estimated shipping time, starting from Monday, and I was worried that Sara would leave before the sheep could get to Cumbria. Anyway, I put in Glen's username and password, and PayPal showed a shipping address ... which is our home address. It was entirely unclear whether PayPal thought that anything purchased through them needed to be shipped to that address, nor was it clear what exactly PayPal would need a shipping address for in the first place. I puzzled over this for a minute, then shrugged and clicked.

Another annoying aspect of the website functionality at the place that sells the sheep: it goes forward in the order process, but not backward. It helpfully walks you through four steps to place an order: 1) put items in your shopping cart; 2) log in/register; 3) enter shipping and billing information; 4) confirm. When I got to part four, I decided I wanted to change a line in the shipping information. There didn't seem to be any way to do that. There was the information for me to review, and there was a button at the bottom of the page that said "confirm," but there was no button that would let me go back to step three. Eventually I ended up clicking the "back" button on my browser so I could back up to the previous page. It's not a lot more work to do it that way, but how badly designed is your web page if users can only go forward but not back using the buttons you've provided? And what is the point of reviewing the information if you can't change it? Anyway, eventually I completed the order, in spite of their best efforts to prevent me from doing so.

Moments later an email appeared in my in box. "Thanks for your order, Sara!" it said. It showed the correct shipping address in Cumbria, so at this point all I can do is hope that they're competent enough to ship it correctly. After using their website, I'm not particularly sanguine about that.

whither the blog?

2009-07-24T23:56:00.000-07:00

If you've been following this blog for any length of time, you will have noticed that I graduated with my M.A. in April. You will also have noticed - even if you haven't been following this blog for any length of time - that the blog's title is "Blogging the M.A." So what do I do with a blog called "Blogging the M.A." when I've finished getting the M.A.? I'm loathe to just call it quits and start a new blog with a different title at a different URL. Yet there will be very little to be said about my M.A. in the future, other than "Yes, I still have it."

I do plan on starting a PhD program in about five years' time, when Daisy is old enough to start kindergarten. Since I see the current phase of my life not so much as the end of school, but more of a prolonged pause between programs, I guess I'm now blogging the hiatus ... hence the new title. Sorry about the ugly graphic; I'm still trying to figure out how to make my image work with their template.

The content here will be about my professional development, if I ever get around to doing any, and whatever else I'm doing that doesn't involve my children. I've started a new blog that primarily documents the kids' lives. It involves a lot of cute pictures and the occasional video of Daisy doing something entirely expected. It is utterly mundane, and will be of no interest to you unless you find my children fascinating. I use the kids' real names there, and post pictures of them, so I prefer not to post links to it anywhere. It also doesn't appear in the blogger lists, and it doesn't get crawled or indexed. Essentially, it's a blog that cannot be found except by those who already know where it is. If you'd like to be one of those who know where it is, email me and I'll send you a link. I was originally going to make it invitation-only, but that would mean you couldn't add it to an RSS feed, so I've tried to make it invisible instead.

miracle on 6.4th street

2009-07-23T22:44:00.000-07:00

See this?

This is Daisy, sleeping. Note that I am not holding her.

Since she can now roll from back to front by herself, I put her down on her stomach instead of her back. And guess what? She stayed there for one hour and forty minutes. Sleeping. It may have taken me two hours to get her to go to sleep, and she may not do it again tomorrow, but for one hour and forty minutes, today was a Very Good Day.

more no sleeping

2009-07-21T20:04:00.001-07:00

Daisy is now a week shy of four months old, and there is still no napping unless someone holds her. I am getting a little frustrated, by which I mean I'm about ready to throw myself in front of a train.

you're killing me, CNN

2009-07-17T20:37:00.000-07:00

There's an article on cnn.com today about "the only 12 people to have ever stepped foot on the moon."

The correct expression is to SET foot, not to STEP foot. Fixed expressions don't always make sense, but this one actually does: step is an intransitive verb, while set is a transitive verb. Therefore, you cannot "step" your foot; you must SET your foot on whatever it is that you are stepping on, whether the moon or some other, more mundane object.

Thanks a lot, CNN, for giving a faint air of legitimacy to this common mistake.

Yes, I realize there's a certain irony in putting a lolcat in a post where I'm complaining about someone else's grammar. The difference here is that I'm doing it on purpose, and they're not.

everyone wave!

2009-07-07T21:50:00.000-07:00

The International Space Station is visible over the U.S. this month. We let the kids stay up a little late tonight, and we all went out and looked at it together. It was visible for about five minutes, and was bright enough and fast enough to be easily discernible.

Peach wanted to know if she could go in a spaceship too. She asks this a lot. She also wants to go to the moon. I kind of don't know what to tell her. Realistically, the odds are not very good, but then again, they're not zero. And I don't want to discourage her from trying to do things she really wants to do, even if they're difficult. So I tell her, "Maybe, if you major in Astronomy." Good luck, Peach. I'd love for you to be the first woman on the moon.

thanks, but no

2009-07-02T23:31:00.000-07:00

I've seen my share of teeny sauce packets from fast food places, and they usually have nothing more personal printed on them than "high fructose corn syrup." However, the ones we got from Taco Bell tonight were a little ... spicier.

Apparently Taco Bell has been printing brief messages on their sauce packets for the past ten years or so. I had no idea.

holla if ya feel me

2009-06-26T19:29:00.000-07:00

Peach has no inkling of the insult implied in the question "Do you want me to get you past this part?" (Click to see larger version at PVP.)
That last panel, however, perfectly captures the feeling of watching a four-year-old learn to play a video game.

shipping the sheep

2009-06-18T15:46:00.000-07:00

Both times I've been to England, I spent the majority of my time in Cumbria, a very beautiful and sheep-intensive region in the northwest part of the country. You can hardly walk a tenth of a mile in the Lake District without tripping over a sheep. They add to the picturesque quality of the place, and have a long cultural history there. So when I was looking for gifts to bring home for the kids and came across some little toy sheep -- in sweaters, no less -- they seemed perfect. There were three in the shop, each with a different color sweater, but I only had two children, so I only bought two sheep.

Now I have three children, and Daisy is quite taken with the sheep. If we put her down on her blanket with a sheep to keep her company, she will smile at it and talk to it and try vainly to grasp it with a view to putting it in her mouth. The sheep each have a tag with the name of the manufacturer printed on them, including a web address, so I thought I'd look them up online and see if there were any more sheep to be had. It would probably be expensive to have one shipped overseas, but I could at least find out exactly how expensive and then decide if I wanted another sheep that badly.

A little searching at the company's website, and lo, I have found "Larry the Lamb," complete with sweater (or "jumper" if you're British). Just £5! Now, about the shipping. Their international shipping page gives a list of countries they ship to, all of which are European or Europe-adjacent. In other words, no shipping to the US. They give no indication of why they don't ship to other countries; the page just says, "Below, you will find a list of countries outside of the United Kingdom that we can deliver directly to. At the present time, If [sic] the country you would like us to deliver to does not feature, then I'm afraid that we cannot deliver there under any circumstances. Apologies for any inconvenience caused."

Well then. Maybe I could have them ship it to Sara, and she could mail it to me. How much could it cost to ship a toy sheep to Switzerland? ... Sweet fancy Moses on a Segway, they want £35 to ship stuff to Switzerland. That's almost $60 USD. To ship a toy that costs, like, eight bucks. Yeah, that's not gonna work for me.

The funny thing is, I also wanted to buy a Magical Trevor plush toy for my cousin, because her husband's name is Trevor and he has red hair. Weebl and Skoo appear to be based in the UK. They have a US version of their online shop, but it only sells T-shirts. After all the difficulty with the sheep-shipping process, I assumed that W&S either wouldn't ship products from the UK to the US, or would do so only for an exorbitant amount of money. Nope. Not only did they sell me a Magical Trevor, they had their site all set up to ship to just about anywhere, and they only charged about $10 USD to ship it to me. Huh.

made it

2009-06-02T22:39:00.000-07:00

Daisy and I have returned from Oregon in one piece. She actually behaved about as well as I could have asked for on the trip: screamed like a banshee while we were in the car, but hardly made a sound on the plane.

I was only there for a couple of days, and I thought it would be kind of stressful to be away from home with a baby that small (two months) but it was actually not too bad. True, Glen wasn't there to help with the baby, but on the other hand I didn't have any other kids to take care of. Nor did I have laundry or dishes or cooking or anything else that I needed to do. So when I spent a whole day just sitting and holding Daisy while she either ate or napped, at least I wasn't feeling bad about all the other stuff that wasn't getting done at my house.

pray for me

2009-05-29T12:07:00.000-07:00

I will be making a solo trip to Oregon this weekend with Daisy. Please petition your deity of choice on my behalf.

the month of no sleeping

2009-05-27T22:16:00.000-07:00

Daisy is almost two months old now, and she has entered a fun stage of life wherein she tends not to ever sleep during the day unless someone is holding her. If we try to put her in her crib, she wakes up in ten minutes or less, and is not happy about it. Link and Peach went through this too when they were babies, and with each of them it lasted about a month; we're going on three or four weeks of this with Daisy, so I hope she'll be over it soon. I shouldn't complain too much, since she sleeps for three or four or sometimes even six hour stretches at night, but I get tired of sitting down all the time. Our day pretty much goes like this:

Daisy wakes up hungry. I sit down and feed her. This may take up to an hour. (Yes, really.)

We have happy time for 20 minutes or so. During this time, I may be able to put her down on a blanket on the floor for up to ten minutes.

Daisy gets cranky. If I pick her up and carry her around with me, she's not too vocal about it. Unfortunately this precludes me doing anything useful, since my hands are full of baby.

Daisy gets tired, cries loudly for ten minutes or so, then falls asleep.

I sit down and hold her while she sleeps for anywhere between 20 minutes and two hours. This means that I pretty much can't move unless I want to wake her up. It also means that I can't get anything done or even take a nap while she's sleeping. Yay.

Lather, rinse, repeat. I'll be honest: this is not the most exciting month I've ever had.

convocated

2009-05-26T12:54:00.000-07:00

So, yeah, I graduated. I skipped Commencement this time, but went to the Convocation for the College of Humanities. The regalia was much more complicated than when I got my bachelor's degree. The hood gets attached in both the front and the middle of your back, so I wasn't able to get into or out of this outfit on my own. The hood didn't come with very good instructions, and the ones on the university's website were only slightly better:

1. Inspect the hood from the side, as in Fig. 1. The long side (A) is to be next to the back.
2. Place small end of the hood over head, with side A (Fig. 1) next to the back.
3.Fold over side B (now the center of the hood) to expose its satin lining. The hood will then appear as in Fig. 2.
4. Attach looped end of cord (A) to shirt or blouse button. Blouse or shirt collar and tie should be covered by velvet, but not rub uncomfortably on the neck (Fig. 3).
5.Wrap cord (B) around button on center of gown (number of wraps adjusts hood opening width). Now attach looped end to button on opposite side of hood.

Yeah. Anyway, the convocation itself was kind of fun, though very long. The English MA students were the first ones to walk, so we were in the front row and had a lot of time to just sit and watch all the other graduates. We gave imaginary awards for best footwear, since everybody looked about the same from the shins up. All the guys wore pretty much the same kind of shoes, but the Best Footwear Award (male) went to a guy who was showing a good two or three inches of chartreuse sock between his pant legs and his shoes. The competition was much stiffer in the women's division; there were a few floral entries, and a couple of pairs of hot-pink patent-leather high heels which, unfortunately, canceled each other out. The Best Footwear Award (female) ultimately went to the woman in the shiny silver snakeskin ankle-strap sandals with what looked to be about a four-inch heel. They were a lot like these (which are listed at five inches) but shinier.We gave her extra credit for making it up the ramp onto the stage without falling.

So anyway, I walked across the stage in my turn, and the announcer said my name -- correctly! -- and I got my lovely, empty diploma-size folder from the Dean of the college. I was, surprisingly, less excited than when I got my bachelor's degree, but still more excited than I thought I would be when it came down to it.

another excellent sports quote

2009-04-28T17:16:00.000-07:00

Washington Redskins receiver Antwaan Randle El, commenting on pre-draft rumors about the team's quarterback situation and the effect the rumors had on current quarterback Jason Campbell:

"It's just been a little bit of a tough battle, more so for Jason, but he's been one of those guys who can go to the fire and come out as gold. We're just glad it's all swept under the rug, or spilled milk, at this point."

Well said, Antwaan. I think you really stepped up to the plate and covered all your bases there.

anniversary fail (again)

2009-04-19T15:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a polite, well-dressed Haitian man asked me to pee in a cup. It was not his fault this was the most interesting thing that happened on my 11th wedding anniversary; Monsieur Leblanc was just doing his job. Glen and I recently decided to increase the amount on my life insurance policy, so the insurance company sent someone to give me an ersatz physical and ask a lot of impertinent questions about my health history. Incidentally, some of those questions are almost impossible to answer. Have I ever undergone a diagnostic procedure such as MRI, CT scan, etc.? Well, sure, I've had at least one ultrasound every time I've been pregnant. Also I'm pretty sure they X-rayed my wrist when I broke it in 5th grade. And what were the dates of those diagnostic procedures? Uh ... maybe I should have studied for this.

Anyway, at the end of the exam/questionnaire session, I had to sign and date a document stating that I had answered the questions truthfully. As I wrote "4-18-09" on the line, I realized that it was my anniversary. As unlikely as it seems, we've managed to lower the bar for anniversary celebrations once again. At this rate, I almost expect that one of us will spend our anniversary in the hospital next time.

After M. Leblanc had departed with my vital stats and bodily fluids, I asked Glen if the date was indeed the 18th. He checked his watch and said yes. Just for fun, I waited another eight hours or so before I reminded him why the date should be of interest to him. We're both so tired from staying up with the baby at night that I doubt we'd have done anything to celebrate anyway, even if we had remembered sooner.

(Read about last year's anniversary fail here.)

yet another reason

2009-04-15T20:39:00.000-07:00

Tonight around 7:00 p.m. I had the following conversation with Glen:

Me: Remember that Far Side panel where there are some guys standing around looking at a diagram of a dinosaur, and one of them is pointing to the tail and saying "We call this end the thagomizer, after the late Thag Simmons"?

Glen: Yeah.

Me: Is the dinosaur a stegosaurus or an ankylosaurus?

Glen: [without hesitating] Stegosaurus.

Yet another reason why Glen is pretty much my favorite person ever.

Here's the cartoon, for those of you who haven't seen it or don't remember it:

Hi! I'm Daisy!

2009-04-02T15:35:00.000-07:00

Everyone, please welcome "Daisy" to the blog.

born: March 29th, 6:05 a.m.
length: 18"
weight: 6 lbs, 12 oz

No, Daisy is not her real name. It seemed like a good pseudonym in light of the fact that our other kids go by Link and Peach.

so I have years of this to look forward to?

2009-03-28T00:06:00.000-07:00

I had an anxiety dream last night. Details aren't really important; it had to do with packing up a ridiculous amount of stuff in time to catch a plane, a task that was clearly impossible to complete in the available time. Dreams like that were not uncommon when I was in school, for obvious reasons, but I woke up from this one feeling a little irritated because I already met all the deadlines for graduation. There is nothing else school-related for me to do. Note to my subconscious: I'm finished. There is no need for me to keep having these dreams, OK?

Apparently my experience is not unusual:Original version complete with swears at http://xkcd.com/557/

letting go

2009-03-27T21:49:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that I do not want to have to haul all 43 of my library books back to campus at once, so I decided to start taking a few of them back at a time. This was harder than I expected, psychologically. It's not that I have such a deep emotional attachment to most of the books; it's more that even though I am really, truly, officially done with school, I can't shake the nagging feeling that I might need one of those books later.

I understand that I cannot logically have a legitimate scholarly need to keep these books any longer. Even if I wanted to add something or make changes to my thesis, it's too late. It's been filed with ETD. The paper copies have gone to the printer for binding. The ship has sailed, the bridges have burned, the Assistant Dean has signed the paperwork. But at some deep, visceral, almost wordless emotional level, I fear that if I take back Brissenden's Virtue in Distress or Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism or, heaven forbid, Butler's Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography, I will somehow discover within a week or two that I need to look up a page number or verify some obscure fact or reference, and the book I need will be gone.

So, baby steps. Tonight I took a deep breath and started by returning the easy ones: the critical editions of Edgeworth's novels and Practical Education, all of which have searchable full versions available online anyway, and Kowaleski-Wallace's Their Fathers' Daughters, which turned out to be less relevant to my project than I had hoped, in spite of the fact that she is one of the few modern critics who have anything at all to say about Helen.

Baby steps.

expensive but useful friends

2009-03-23T00:03:00.000-07:00

I've expressed my feelings about my university's library resources on previous occasions, but this bears repeating: I love my university library with a deep and abiding passion. Granted, I'm still a little bitter about the changes they've made to the periodicals database user interface, but the library is still one of my favorite things ever. Critical editions and other academic works can be really expensive, so having access to the library allows me to do research that I could never afford to do on my own, simply because I couldn't afford the research materials.

At some point while I was working on my thesis and my coffee table was covered with stacks of library books, I wondered just how much money I actually had sitting there in my living room. So one night when I was up late and couldn't sleep but was too tired to make sense of my thesis any more, I decided to find out. Here's what I have:

number of books currently checked out: 43, or 86% of my limit as a grad student
total number of pages, not including prefaces, tables of contents, indices, bibliographies, or other front or back matter: 12, 835
total value: $3,670.61*
shortest book: Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel, by Ann Jessie Van Sant, 125 pages
longest book: Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Nicholas Roe, 717 pages
oldest: Rosamond, by Maria Edgeworth, 1856 edition
newest: (tie) Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850, by Devoney Looser, and The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period, eds. Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener, 2008
most expensive: Byron's Poetical Works, Volume 1, published in 1980 by Oxford UP: $290.00
least expensive: Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Volume 1, published in 1907 by Oxford UP: $9.98

* This is an approximate value based on what it would cost to replace each of the books with the exact same edition. When possible, I based the replacement cost on a new or like-new edition; otherwise I used the lowest price listed for the highest-quality used copy available. Two of the books I have were not available at all, either new or used, on Amazon, ABE, or Labyrinth, so I was unable to determine a replacement price for them. Surprisingly, most of the older books are still available; the ones that I couldn't find for sale are Marilyn Butler's 1972 literary biography of Maria Edgeworth, and Chris Jones' Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s, published in 1993.

do androids dream of technical difficulties?

2009-03-21T01:16:00.000-07:00

Trying to submit my thesis electronically was one of the more exasperating technological experiences I have had in the course of my college career. I am not so ignorant as to expect that all technology should function correctly all the time, but I feel it is not unreasonable to expect a system used by so many students to work correctly at a time when students are most likely to be using it (i.e., when they are trying to meet deadlines for graduation).

In order to submit electronically, I had to convert my thesis document to a pdf. I don't own a copy of Acrobat, so I was instructed to use the library's multimedia lab to do the conversion. After converting my document, I went to the ETD website to submit it, but was unable to log in to the system - it refused to recognize my username/password combination. (Incidentally, I had the same problem on February 2nd, when I took the class on how to convert Word documents to pdfs. At the time I assumed it was a temporary hangup somewhere in the system.) Tech support told me to call Grad Studies. Grad Studies told me that many students were having this problem, and some of them had been able to work around it by changing their password and trying again. This didn't work for me, so I called back to Grad Studies and asked them whether I would still be graduating in April if the problem didn't get cleared up and I was unable to submit. They said someone would call me back and let me know.

On a whim, I tried to log in again when I got home. This time it worked. Great! I submitted the pdf with no problems. Shortly thereafter I got a call from Grad Studies. They were very interested in the details of what did and didn't work for me, which led me to believe they were still trying to figure out what was causing the problem. It's good that they're trying, but if they've been working on it for over a month and still haven't even figured out exactly what the problem is, maybe it's time to seek outside help.

After several days of constantly checking and re-checking the status of my submission, I found that it had been disapproved by my department. However, the status page gave no indication of why it had been disapproved, or how I could find out. I wasted several hours vainly searching the ETD page and the university website for information. Finally I ended up on the phone with Grad Studies again. They patiently explained that the email I had received included the details of why the submission was disapproved. Funny, I never got that email. Grad Studies apparently got a copy of it, but I didn't. Would I like them to forward their copy to me? Yes, yes I would.

Back to the lab at the library to correct the pdf. This time I was able to log in to the system, but when I tried to submit my information, I kept getting an error page. I didn't even bother to call anyone for help. I dumped the pdf onto my jump drive, went home, and was able to resubmit without any more glitches.

My electronic submission was eventually approved, and I met all the deadlines - barely - for April graduation. At some point in the process, one of the Grad Studies people gave me a little lecture on "leaving ourselves extra time to meet our deadlines." This did not make me happy. Yes, it's wise to plan extra time into one's schedule in case unexpected difficulties should arise, but all the difficulties that arose in this instance were caused by a system that she and/or her office were responsible for maintaining. I felt like I had showed up late for an appointment because the buses were running behind schedule, only to have the bus driver lecture me for not planning ahead better.

what the henge?

2009-03-14T00:05:00.000-07:00

I currently live in the American southwest. This area of the world has many fascinating natural and cultural features, such as

the cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde, Colorado
photo: National Park Service

Arches National Park, Utah
photo: Flicka

Chaco Canyon ruins, New Mexico
photo: Dr. Tyler Nordgren

Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico
NPS photo by Peter Jones

But you know what we just don't have a lot of in the southwestern United States? Henges. We are significantly lacking in stone henges, stone circles, stone rings, and the like. So if I were going to build, say, a nursing/rehab facility in this area, "henge" is probably not a theme I would consider. It just seems like it would look out of place, not to mention being a difficult concept to design around. What kind of building looks like it belongs with a henge, anyway? Hint: not this one.This building does not say "Salisbury Plain" to me, or even "nursing facility," necessarily. If anything, it says "ski lodge," or, I don't know, "Best Western." Compare, for example, these condos in Park City, Utah (l) and the "Yellowstone Lodge" (r):

See? Would either of those buildings be aesthetically improved if someone plonked a wee little fake Stonehenge down in front of them? No, they would not. And neither is the other one.

what do you want from me?

2009-03-13T13:59:00.000-07:00

Someone at the university is very, very picky about thesis formats. This person has terribly strict ideas about what needs to be included with a thesis, and in what order, and how the pages should be numbered, and even what weight of paper it should be printed on. Unfortunately, The Picky One has not done a good job documenting these requirements, and no one else at the university seems to know whose requirements these are. The library says they are departmental requirements; the department says they are university requirements; graduate studies says they are the library's requirements ... and no one seems able to answer questions about the requirements. Fun!

For example, the library web page says I need a table of contents in my print copy. However, it says the ToC should come after all the front matter (title page, abstract, acknowledgements). Since my thesis doesn't have chapters, I wonder whether I still need a Toc, since all it would do is list the front matter that the reader would have had to page through anyway to get to the ToC, then list the page number where the thesis starts, which the reader would already be looking at if the ToC weren't there. I posed this question to the person in the library administration office, and she said she didn't know, because that was a departmental requirement, not a library requirement. Funny, since I got that information from the library's web page that lists the requirements for binding. The good news is, I have a week to get my questions about the print copy sorted out. The bad news is, the electronic submission process is more difficult and more poorly documented than the print submission process, by about an order of magnitude, and that has to be done today.

***UPDATE***

I ended up submitting it without a Table of Contents. No one seemed to care.

the paperwork that wouldn't die

2009-03-12T22:42:00.001-07:00

I had naïvely thought that once I passed my defense, I would quickly make whatever edits my committee wanted, and all I would then have left to do was show up to Convocation in my funny hat. Ha. Two days after my defense, I received the following email from the graduate secretary:

"Congratulations! If you get a chance on Friday, please stop by my office and pick up a few forms needed for completing the process."

I went to her office on Friday. She had a bewildering array of forms on her desk, but it turned out most of them were really her responsibility. I left with some instructions for submitting my thesis electronically, and another copy of the abbreviated MLA style guide.

The following Wednesday (yesterday) I got another email. "I have your signed signature pages for your thesis in my office. You can pick them up when you get a chance."

I went to her office again. She had two signature pages for me, printed by a lousy printer but on very nice paper. They were signed by each member of my committee*, the Graduate Advisor, the Graduate Coordinator, the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies, and the Associate Dean of the College of Humanities. Hooray, all my paperwork was signed.

Oh, by the way, did I have my completed Form 8d? I would need that by Friday if I wanted to submit my thesis electronically.

At that point I honestly had no idea whether I had it or not. She showed me someone else's Form 8d. It did not look familiar. "It should look like this, and it should have your committee's signatures on it ..." I thought I might have something at home with some signatures on it. "... and then it needs signatures from the department saying they're going to waive the print copy." Oh.

It turned out I did have the form at home. My committee had signed it, but it appeared that I needed additional signatures from the Graduate Coordinator and the Associate Dean. I had a prenatal appointment this morning (everything looks fine, come back next week) after which I headed back to campus with Peach in tow and Form 8d in hand. The Associate Dean was not in his office, but a very nice student employee at the front desk of the Humanities office took my form and promised to have him sign it when he came back. She said she would call me when it was signed if I would leave my cell phone number with her. I most certainly would.

I had about an hour before the Graduate Coordinator would be in his office, so I decided to go out to lunch with Peach. We ran into Blackwood near the elevator, and I explained that I was still collecting signatures on Form 8d. "Ah, the all-important Form 8d," he commiserated. "But you have all the signatures you need from me, right?" I was pretty sure I did, and told him so. That last sentence is what your literature teacher would call "foreshadowing."

When Peach and I came back to campus, a different but equally nice student employee was working the front desk in the Humanities office. I explained that even if my form was not signed, I needed to borrow it for a few minutes so the Graduate Coordinator could sign it. He looked around the desk but didn't see the form. The Associate Dean was in a meeting, which the secretary was understandably reluctant to interrupt, but he looked in the AD's office to see if the form was there. It wasn't. He looked around on the front desk again. I looked around on the front desk again. He looked in the AD's office again, while I peered nervously through the door. Form 8d had apparently vanished into the ether.

Finally the secretary decided there was nothing else for it, went into the meeting, and fetched forth the Associate Dean of the College of Humanities. The AD went into his office, looked around on his desk, and came back out empty-handed. Even he looked a little puzzled at that point. As I began to contemplate the awful possibility that my form was truly lost, the AD suddenly had a thought. "This was for your thesis?" Yes. "Are you an English person?" Yes. "Oh - I signed it. I sent it back to the English Graduate Secretary."

I apologized profusely to the Associate Dean for having bothered him. He smiled benevolently and went back to his meeting. I thanked the secretary profusely for his help, and he smiled kindly and went back to his desk. Peach and I went to the grad secretary's office. By that time I fully expected to find that she had left for the day, or sent Form 8d to Geneva via carrier pigeon, or accidentally burned it. But lo, she was in her office and she had the form. She showed me the line where the GC needed to sign, saying that the department waived the print copy requirement. It was right next to the conspicuously blank line where I needed Blackwood to sign, saying that he waived his print copy. Funny, that.

Anyway, mirabile dictu, Blackwood and the GC were both in their offices. They graced Form 8d with their signatures, and I verified with the grad secretary that those were really, truly, seriously all the signatures I needed, ever. I'm still not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with 8d now that it's signed. To be honest, I'm a little conflicted: I don't know whether I want to save it for posterity after all we've been through together, or whether I'd rather turn it in to someone for their files and never see it again.

*Descartes gave the secretary permission to ~~forge his signature~~ sign on his behalf, since he won't be back from Prague and/or Harvard until after the submission deadline.

cleanup

2009-03-10T21:18:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to looking at the written comments my committee gave on my thesis.

Blackwood's comments were mostly editing marks. He noted that I overuse colons and semi-colons (true) and wanted me to take out all the Oxford commas. Easily done.

Victoria's comments were a tad more complex, and some of them I just won't have time to address before Friday, which is the deadline to turn in the ETD version to the department. She also said my over-all conclusion needs work (true) and that the conclusion to the Helen section is underdeveloped as well. I hadn't noticed it before, but she's right. OK, that I can probably fix, or at least improve, before Friday.

I have no idea what Descartes's written comments were, because a) he assured me that they were substantive rather than grammatical, which means I probably don't have time to address them before the deadline, and b) frankly, I'm just scared to look at them. As I mentioned in a previous post, he told me before my defense that there was no question about whether I would pass; however, he made it clear at the defense that while the thesis was adequate for an MA, it would need significant revision before it was ready to "see the light of day," as he put it. In other words, don't even think about submitting this thing to a journal or using it as a writing sample for a PhD application in its current form. Well. I appreciate his candor, but I'm not particularly anxious to read his comments.

One thing that both Blackwood and Victoria had issues with was my comment that in Helen, Edgeworth is "still worrying at the same themes that are found in her other tales." Blackwood suggested "worrying over," while Victoria simply circled the phrase and put a question mark over it. OK, it's a bit fanciful and perhaps not flattering to Edgeworth, but the image I meant to invoke was that of a dog gnawing an old bone. I'm not making it up -- it's in the OED: "worry, v. Definition 3.d. intr. To pull or tear at (an object) with the teeth." The example: "There was Floss, worrying at the parcel, which had only thin paper wrapped round it." Granted, the example is from 1882, which means that the usage is by now archaic if not obsolete, but I am writing about someone who died 160 years ago. I'm still debating whether to take it out.

I'm also now recalling the questions that I could have answered better at my defense. Not that it matters; I passed, without qualifications even. But still ... "Was Edgeworth aware of the Romantic movement?" I said something about her use of the word "romantic" in Helen, but a much better answer would have been "She must have been, since she was very well-read, and also acquainted with some of the key figures associated with Romanticism, like Wordsworth and Coleridge." You'd think that for once I could just be satisfied with my accomplishment, instead of nit-picking something that I can't change.

so that's pretty much it

2009-03-03T20:11:00.000-08:00

I passed my defense. And I'm not even scarred for life or anything. Predictably, Descartes asked the toughest questions, and there were moments when I felt like I was bluffing to some degree. I knew, for example, that some of Edgeworth's ideas were influenced by Adam Smith, because I'm pretty sure she name-drops him in Practical Education, but I couldn't have gotten any more specific than that ... so I didn't.

Victoria's comments and questions had more to do with the structure and nature of my argument. Her specialty is actually Victorian lit, so while Edgeworth technically overlaps her time period, she's not overly familiar with her work. She also brought up the paper I had written for her class about Rosina Bulwer Lytton, and asked me to compare Lytton's writing to Edgeworth's. I was really glad I had reread the paper last night.

Blackwood had already overseen several revisions of the essay, so his questions were of the "big picture" variety - how does Edgeworth fit into the development of the novel as a genre? If sentimental novels are still being published in the mid-nineteenth century, can we really say that the genre has advanced? That kind of question doesn't bother me too much; there's not really a right or wrong answer, as long as I'm able to speak knowledgeably about the answer I give.

Although the committee agreed that my project would need revision before I try to publish it - if nothing else, it's way too long for most journals - they also agreed that it would not need major revisions before they would pass it. So unless there's some sort of unthinkable clerical snafu, or the entire university burns to the ground, I will definitely graduate in April.

nervous?

2009-03-02T21:15:00.000-08:00

Yes.

influenza and gratitude

2009-02-27T19:20:00.000-08:00

My sister-in-law, Suzanne, has been helpful beyond expression over the past three years. She babysat Peach when I was in class, and when I was teaching class, and when I had conferences with my students, and when I had meetings with professors. Then I finished my coursework, and quit teaching so I could concentrate on my thesis, and Suzanne offered to keep babysitting Peach a couple of times a week so I could have some time to myself to work. Not only is Suzanne an extremely good mother whose parenting philosophy and skills made me very comfortable leaving Peach with her, but if anything, she is overqualified as a child-care provider, because she has a Master's degree in speech pathology and plenty of clinical experience working with children.

A couple of months ago, when I applied for graduation, I talked to Suzanne about my deadlines, and she mentioned that she and her family were planning to be in California on February 20th. No problem - I had to have my defense scheduled by then, but I didn't have to actually hold the defense until March 6th, and they were definitely planning to be back from their trip by then.

Fast forward to February 18th: Suzanne's three-year-old daughter had to be taken to the ER because she was in respiratory distress. They ran some tests and discovered that she had the flu ... the real flu. As in, actual influenza. At first Suzanne thought they would have to cancel their trip, because her husband, Kendall, can't always get time off from work. But by the time the three-year-old was healthy, they had managed to get his time off shifted, and were able to make the trip after all. I was very happy for them.

Unfortunately, this meant that Suzanne would be in California on March 3rd. Usually Glen would be my emergency back-up babysitter - his employer has been surprisingly flexible about things like that - but he wants to be at the defense, and clearly bringing Peach with him is not an option.

In desperation, I called a friend who lives in the neighborhood and is at home with her own two children during the day. I hate beginning conversations with "I have a huge favor to ask you," but I really didn't have a lot of options. Amanda was really nice about it. She said she'd be happy to do it, and insisted it wasn't a big deal for her.

The only remaining question is, What's the best way to express my undying gratitude?

waiting

2009-02-27T17:43:00.000-08:00

Just for fun, while I'm waiting for my defense date, here's my reading list:

from British Novel:
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (excerpted)
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (excerpted)
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (excerpted)
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Ian McEwan, Atonement

from Modernism:
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

from Victorian Lit:
Rosina Bulwer-Lytton, Cheveley, or, The Man of Honour

from Scottish Novel:
Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps
Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time
Iain Banks, Complicity

from Theoretical Discourse:
J. Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations

from Contemporary Drama:
Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
Michael Frayn, Copenhagen
Tom Murphy, Famine
Marina Carr, Portia Coughlin
Caryll Churchill, The Skriker

reading list: finished

2009-02-26T16:22:00.000-08:00

Between old class notes, syllabi, and conversations with classmates, I managed to put together a reading list. For some of my classes, the challenge wasn't so much finding works to put on the list as trying to remember what the books were about. I have a vague recollection of liking a lot of the texts we studied in Modernism, but when I looked at the syllabus I had very little recollection of reading them. We probably did read something by Beckett, for example, but I have no idea what.

Blackwood looked over the list and noted that I needed a few more theory readings. Um, yeah, I left those off on purpose, because I'm even less likely to remember the content from those. But OK, whatever. I put Heidegger on the list with extreme reluctance, because I never felt like I had a good grasp of what he was on about. Ian Watt and Northrop Frye, no problem. Nancy Armstrong ... I should probably review that.

I also had a chat with Blackwood today about what to expect at the defense. He said there would be some general questions, along the lines of "How has your graduate education improved your critical thinking skills," and "What would you do differently if you were starting the program again." I hate questions like that. They feel like job interview questions - things they ask you not because they actually want to know the answer, but because they want you to show them something about your thought process or your general knowledge. Other than that, it doesn't sound too bad. I probably need to review a couple of things on the reading list, maybe go over my class notes. As for the thesis itself, I feel like I'm at least adequately prepared to respond to questions about it. This, of course, means that they will inevitably ask me something I am not at all prepared to answer -- Descartes will probably ask something about Scotland. At least that will be better than asking about Heidegger.

yeah, that'll work

2009-02-25T20:12:00.000-08:00

I had a brief conversation with Blackwood today, and mentioned that I was having a hard time remembering what I'd read for my classes. He suggested that I look at my books and see what I had.

Ha. Of course he's never seen my bookshelves. I have, literally, hundreds of books. I have so many that I've run out of bookshelves to hold them all, meaning that some of them are still in boxes somewhere in my basement. Granted that some of them are obviously not titles that would have been required reading for my classes - Over Sea, Under Stone, for example, or Domain-Driven Design, whatever that is ... that one must be Glen's. On the other hand, I have critical editions of all Austen's novels except Sanditon and Lady Susan, but not all of them were required reading for my classes; some of them I bought for research I was working on, so I could mark the books as I read. I suppose looking through my books is a better option than hoping I'll just magically remember all the stuff I read in the Regency Lit class I took four years ago, but I am on a tight schedule here.

I was supposed to keep that?

2009-02-24T21:27:00.000-08:00

Blackwood says the reading list doesn't have to be centered around my thesis. Apparently it's more of a list for my committee to use as the basis for my oral exam: "30 or so works from your seminars that best reflect your graduate education," selected from works that were on the syllabi from my seminars.

Wait, I was supposed to keep all the syllabi from my seminars? Mmmkay, it turns out I actually didn't do that. For some of the classes, I doubt that I ever had a hard copy of the syllabus; several of the professors put their syllabi up on Blackboard, so when I wanted to look up the reading assignments for class I just looked at the online copy. In the meantime, the university has moved to a new version of the Blackboard software, and any old courses that were in the system have vanished, as far as I can tell. So far I have managed to dig up two actual, physical syllabi from my grad classes, and one electronic copy of a syllabus that was languishing in my computer. And since I need to get the reading list to my committee as soon as possible, I probably have about 36 hours to come up with the rest of them.

chaos and order

2009-02-21T20:53:00.000-08:00

Link (almost 9) and Peach (almost 4) have very, very, very different personalities and approaches to life. Peach is interested in how things are supposed to be put together; Link is more interested in what will happen if he takes things apart. Link's idea of a good time is to take a box full of toys, turn it upside down, and shake it until everything falls out. Peach's idea of a good time is to take all the toys out of the box, sort them into groups, and arrange them in straight lines. If you give Peach a jigsaw puzzle, she will put it together so the picture matches the one on the box. If you give Link a jigsaw puzzle, he's just as likely to take the pieces and use them to build a three-dimensional robot sculpture. Both of the kids are very active and full of energy, but Link is a walking, talking wad of entropy, while Peach is his equal and opposite reaction.

I will let you guess which of these art projects was created by which child.

A hint, if you needed one: Link says his design was inspired by the idea of "fireworks." Which, come to think of it, seems wildly appropriate.

reading list? what?

2009-02-20T12:17:00.001-08:00

I ran into Blackwood in the English Department office when I went to file my paperwork yesterday. We said our hellos and confirmed that the defense was on for the third. As I was about to leave, he said, "Did we talk about a reading list?" Not that I recall. What's that about? He said something about "twenty-five or thirty books," but suggested that I talk to the graduate coordinator to see if they've got specific guidelines written down somewhere - they may have changed when the department revised the thesis requirement.

So I talk to the graduate coordinator. He's in the middle of eating lunch in his office, but mumbles something about texts I read in my seminars. Twenty-five of them? Yes, and they should represent some sort of coherent ... something ... that will provide a basis for discussion at my defense. Huh. I kind of thought my thesis would provide a basis for discussion at my defense. But hey, whatever. On my way out, the coordinator mentions that my prospectus needs to be revised to reflect the new thesis guidelines. Again: whatever. That part at least should be easy, since the thesis is already written.

The reading list, though. I sat down to make a list of 25-30 texts I had read in my seminars, and realized that at this point I can't even remember what classes I took for my program of study, let alone what I read for those classes. I looked up my transcript, but all the classes are listed as course numbers with generic titles - they either say "seminar in the novel" or "seminar in British Literature 1660-1830." Yeah, that narrows it down. I ended up going through my past blog posts to remind myself what my seminars were about. That was helpful, but I still don't have a list of texts. I'll have to see if I still have old syllabi lying around somewhere.

all better

2009-02-19T10:44:00.000-08:00

It's on! We've worked out a time for my defense, and the graduate coordinator has agreed to let me go ahead with the scheduling. I'll have the paperwork filed by this afternoon. Tuesday, March 3rd, 11:00 a.m.

you have got to be kidding me

2009-02-18T15:33:00.000-08:00

I have now heard back from Descartes. He is also on board with defending in the next two weeks, although he notes ominously that he "will have some questions for [me] come the defense." Miraculously, all three of my committee members were on campus today (although not at the same time) so I was able to get all of their signatures on the scheduling form as well. So there's just one little thing left to do - a mere formality - we just have to pick a time for the defense, so the department can schedule a room for us. Obviously I'm available at whatever time will work for them, so I sent an email to everyone asking for scheduling information.

Blackwood replied that afternoons are bad for him. Descartes says that in that case, early in the morning would work - maybe 8:00? Victoria responds that she can't commit to that time without making arrangements with "several people" and getting back to us. While the emails were going back and forth, I went up to campus to get Descartes's signature on the form, at which point he explained that he was up against some deadlines of his own - in addition to teaching three classes plus a series of workshops this semester, he's scheduled to give a lecture at Harvard and a paper in Prague within the next three weeks, he hasn't finished writing either of them, and one of them he hasn't even started. On one hand, it always makes me feel better when I see professors doing things like that at the last minute, but on the other hand, it's going to make it difficult to find a time when all three of them are available. Descartes actually mooted the possibility of having the defense without one or the other of the readers, or else scheduling it for an evening. Of the two, he seemed to think the evening option more unorthodox.

The only really encouraging thing he had to say was that I was definitely going to pass, it was just a question of getting the details worked out. Hey, great. That makes me a lot less nervous about the defense itself. Now, about those details ...

one down

2009-02-17T20:50:00.000-08:00

I've heard back from Victoria. She hasn't had time to read the draft thoroughly enough to give feedback yet, but she's fine with scheduling the defense in time for April graduation. Yay! She also mentioned that she had several theses come in over the weekend, so apparently I'm not the only one who's doing this at the last minute.

circulating

2009-02-17T10:45:00.001-08:00

The current draft has been sent to Descartes and Victoria - 39 pages plus Works Cited. Blackwood says he thinks it can be ready in two and a half weeks, and has sent an email to the other readers to that effect. Hopefully they agree. I feel bad dropping it on them with so little time to review it, and the department really frowns on that kind of thing as well, but of course they always have the option to just not sign the form to schedule the defense.

I really hope they don't exercise that option.

even more fun ... by which I mean stress

2009-02-16T03:26:00.000-08:00

Yet another draft. Hopefully this time it will be good enough to circulate, which would be a big step forward and would at least make me feel a little better about the whole situation. However, in looking at the calendar and trying to determine whether there's any chance that I'm going to meet the deadlines and graduate in April, I realized that in my previous calculations I had neglected to consider that Monday the 16th is a holiday. None of the professors will be working; most of the buildings on campus won't even be open. I can't recall the last time I felt this much anxiety, and I don't think I have ever felt so resentful toward a day off.

looming deadlines

2009-02-13T23:39:00.000-08:00

I've heard back from Blackwood on the latest revision. He says that "in all honesty" he is "really encouraged" at my progress ... but it still needs one more "minor" revision before I send it out to Descartes and Victoria. His suggestions are indeed minor compared to the last round, and I'll be able to get a revised version to him by Monday. However, I'm starting to get nervous about the deadlines for graduation. I have to schedule my defense by February 20th, which means that on or before that date, I need to convince my chair, my readers, and the graduate coordinator that I will be ready to defend by March 6th. Monday is the 16th. Assuming that Blackwood tears through the draft and responds on Monday - and assuming that his response is "go ahead and circulate it" - that leaves about three days for the other committee members to read it. This makes me very nervous. It's not like these people have nothing else to do.

And then there's the issue of getting the graduate coordinator to consent to the schedule. Presumably if my committee thinks I'm ready to defend, he shouldn't have a whole lot of objections, but I have to get him (as well as the other committee members) to sign the form - he can't just send an email or make a phone call and say "OK." His office hours are Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1:30 to 2:30, which raises the possibility that if I don't get him to sign on Thursday, I could miss the deadline on Friday. I don't think I really need to explain how badly that would suck.

I'm not sure what to think about this.

2009-02-13T19:09:00.000-08:00

At Link's school, everyone in the third grade or higher is required to participate in the science fair. Link is in the third grade this year, so he had to come up with a science project. The school gave some helpful, specific instructions for the projects:

Come up with a question. This should be a question that can be answered with an experiment. For example: Do cookies taste better with or without salt?
Plan an experiment to answer your question. The above question would be easily answered by making the same recipe with and without salt and then having several people "taste-test" them without knowing which ones are which.
State your hypothesis. We’ve talked about how a hypothesis is an educated guess. "I think that the cookies will taste better without salt."
Do your experiment. It's best to do an experiment where only ONE thing is changed, so that there is a "control" for the student to compare with.
While doing the experiment take data. There needs to be something that can be measured.
Come up with a conclusion based on the results of your experiment.

Of course I very much want Link to do well in school, but I am not one of those parents who wants so badly for her child to succeed that she plans an elaborate project for him and ends up assembling an entire Volkswagen Beetle from its component parts so that her child will look like a genius. In fact, Link came up with his project all on his own. He already knew that although a balloon filled with air will pop if you hold a flame under it, a balloon filled with water will not. So his question was which would pop sooner when exposed to heat - a balloon filled with water or a balloon filled with ice?

He also planned the experiment himself. His idea was to use string to suspend an ice-filled balloon and a water-filled balloon over a pair of candles, and wait to see which one popped first. Glen helped build the, uh, suspension device, but the idea was all Link.

Link's hypothesis was that the water balloon would pop first, which it sort of did - after a while it sprang a leak at the bottom and put out the candle. The ice balloon lasted another eight minutes before breaking. We printed some pictures of the experiment, and Link wrote some text to go with the pictures, based on the guidelines supplied by the school. Then we had to make a display for him to put up at the science fair.

So here's the thing: Link is a fairly bright child, and he did the work for the project himself, but graphic design is maybe a tad beyond his abilities, and I felt like it was reasonable for us to help him create the display. (Admittedly, I may also have been influenced by the fact that by the time he had done the experiment and finished his write-up, it was 10:00 p.m. and he really needed to go to bed.) So we printed his text, mounted it on some colored paper, and glued it to the display board along with some clip art drawings of balloons and water.

OK, no, this is not what Link would have come up with on his own if you handed him five pictures and five pieces of text and said, "Glue this stuff on this cardboard and make it look nice." For one thing, he's a very non-linear thinker; he probably would have ended up with his conclusion in the middle, his hypothesis at the end, and the description of his experiment on the back of the display board. For another thing, he's in the third grade. He would have somehow managed to get glue in his hair and, like, pancake syrup on the display. Anyway, long story short, I did the layout. I didn't feel like I was doing anything unethical. It's not like I'm a graphic designer; in fact, I kind of suck at visual arts, and I didn't think the finished product was anything amazing.

Imagine my surprise when Link came home from school with an award for "best display" in the first-through-third-grade division. Awkward! I can only assume that everyone else showed up with pancake syrup on their displays. I feel bad, but I don't know what I should have done differently - turn him loose with the glue and wish him good luck? Make him hand-write the text instead of printing it? I didn't even know they were giving an award for the display.

weird

2009-02-09T02:29:00.000-08:00

Blogspot allows me to alter the apparent date and time of a particular post at will. The default option is the actual date and time at which I started composing each post, but I can reset it to show any date and time I want, either past or future. If I tell it that the time of the post is in the past, it inserts the post into the blog chronologically, at the point where it would have appeared had it actually been composed at the time indicated. If I tell it that the time of the post is in the future, then the post won't appear on my blog until the time I've indicated. I'm pretty sure I can even alter the date of a post that's already been published, although I haven't tried.
Weirdly, though, the default time as indicated by blogspot is off by an hour. I sent my latest revision to Blackwood around 2:00 a.m. local time, and posted about it shortly after that. I noticed that the default time was just after 1:00 a.m., so I fixed it and clicked "publish post" ... at which point I was informed that my post was "scheduled" but had not yet been posted. Huh. I should definitely look into that, some other time when it's not 2:30 a.m.

still in revision

2009-02-09T02:21:00.000-08:00

I've just sent off another revision to Blackwood. Hopefully it will resolve some of the more substantive concerns he had about presenting my argument, and why I chose the novels I did. The bad news is that this draft is still way, way, way too long. I made some significant cuts (well, they felt significant to me) but then had to add new material to make the connections more explicit between my argument and the stuff that was left. End result: better argument, but still at 40+ pages. Ironically, because I went to a lot of trouble in this revision to show exactly how the remaining material supports my argument, it's now more difficult for me to discern which parts of the text could be cut with the least effect on the argument. I can always tighten up the writing somewhat, but I don't think I can knock 15 pages off just with stylistic editing.

once more into the breach

2009-02-03T11:46:00.001-08:00

I heard back from Blackwood today about my draft. Nothing terribly surprising. His comments were more or less as follows:

- It needs to be shorter. Definitely. It's much easier to cut material out than to draft more material, so I went with the shotgun approach for this draft, i.e., here's everything I could possibly think of to say on this topic, sprayed onto the pages like buckshot, in the hope that some of it is on-target.

- The argument needs to be made even more explicitly; right now it feels more like a catalog of the novels' features, rather than an in-depth analysis. I felt like I was still refining my argument as I was writing, so there are definitely places where I need to either make clear how a particular point fits into my argument, or remove material where things no longer fit into my argument.

- There should be some indication of why I chose the three novels I did. This is a bit awkward, actually. I chose Belinda because it was Edgeworth's first novel*, and Helen because it was her last; I wanted to see whether her attitude toward sensibility changed from one end of her career to the other. The Absentee I chose because I'd already read it for a class, but I think I'm going to have to come up with a better justification than that. Its publication falls more or less in the middle of her career, which makes it a good checkpoint chronologically. It is to some extent a national tale as well as a society novel, and the Irish national tale is not only a large part of her career, but one of the things that makes her an important author, so I kind of feel like I needed to have at least one national tale in there. However, I could just as easily have used Ennui or Ormond; I don't know that there's necessarily anything so compelling or representative about Absentee that I absolutely had to use that and nothing else. I'll have to think about that.

- It needs a stronger conclusion. Ha. It needs a conclusion. Again, because my argument was evolving as I wrote, I came to the end of the draft and wasn't entirely sure where I had ended up. This should be a lot easier to deal with once I get the whole thing cut down to a realistic size and tighten up my argument.

The good news is that he thinks it needs "one major revision" to be ready for Descartes and Victoria to look at it. [sigh] Back to work.

*I realize Castle Rackrent is often listed as Edgeworth's first novel, but it's so short I would classify it as more of a novella.

round 2

2009-01-29T09:43:00.000-08:00

I finally got another full draft sent off to Blackwood at 3:00 this morning. It clocked in at 43 pages, sans bibliography. The structural revision ended up being a lot more time-consuming and labor-intensive than I thought. Rearranging everything meant new transitions, and adding some new material to make the content in different sections more parallel. Blackwood's right about the argument, though; it's more coherent in this format.

best excuse ever?

2009-01-24T09:04:00.000-08:00

I told Blackwood I'd have the rest of my draft to him before Friday, but then I had to check into the hospital for a few hours on Thursday night. 30 weeks' gestation is not a time when you want to be having contractions every 5 minutes for 2 hours, so my doctor told me to go in to Labor and Delivery and have them keep an eye on me for a while. They gave me some medication that made me feel very nasty but stopped the contractions, and eventually sent me home on Pretend Bed Rest for a few days. This is not to be confused with Actual Bed Rest, which means you have to literally stay in bed all the time and can only get up to go to the bathroom. Pretend Bed Rest is more like "take it easy, don't lift anything heavy, sit or lie down when you can."

Blackwood was very understanding about the delay, especially when I told him that I had taken a book with me so I could work on my research while I was in the hospital (true story).

OK, it may not be the absolute BEST excuse ever; one of my friends once had a student miss class because his wife was getting a kidney transplant. But I still think "potential preterm labor" is at least a decent reason for taking an extra day on my draft. And, hey, I'm on Pretend Bed Rest for the weekend, which should give me plenty of time to work on my writing.

lace up your iceskates ...

2009-01-22T14:52:00.000-08:00

... because hell just froze over. Today I turned in my application to graduate in April.

more progress

2009-01-17T01:37:00.000-08:00

I've finished reorganizing the Absentee section. It took somewhere between seven and eight hours, and at this point I have no idea if it even makes any sense. I'll re-read it tomorrow and find out.

back on track

2009-01-15T21:09:00.000-08:00

It took me a day longer than I had planned because of the periodicals debacle, but I got the first third of my revised draft (the Belinda section) sent off to Blackwood this morning at about 11:00. It took him so long to get back to me that I thought maybe my email hadn't gone through, so I sent him a second one to ask if he'd received the first one. I hated to be obnoxious, but I was kind of looking for a "yes, this is what I meant" or "no, you've completely misunderstood" before I put in any more work on it. Finally, around 8:30, he replied, and as it turned out, his answer was well worth the wait:

"I just read this through rather quickly, and it strikes me as spot on in its organization and focus. Definitely headed in the right direction. Well done."

Hurray!

I guess I'd better get started on the other two-thirds of it.

I'm not crazy; you're the one who's crazy.

2009-01-14T14:53:00.000-08:00

I spent most of this morning freaking out about the periodicals situation. The coming of day had shed no new light on the problem; I was still getting the same results, or lack thereof. Glen took a whack at it, but had the same problems, which means that whatever is going on, it's probably not my fault. Glen was also gracious enough to stay home with Peach for a while so I could go to the library and plead for help.

You don't actually have to plead very hard to get help at the university library; there are plenty of people whose whole job is to help students figure out how to use the library, and they are without exception lovely people who really want to help. Unfortunately, the first person I approached wasn't able to help all that much. I explained what had happened - "it used to do this, but now it doesn't!" - and she said, no, it doesn't; maybe you should try using the Ulrichs database instead of the English Literature subject search. She showed me the front page of Ulrichsweb, and its search function seemed to have the features I was looking for, so I thanked her and went on my way.

Just to be safe, I thought I'd better take Ulrichsweb for a test drive on one of the library computers before going home. This turned out to be a good idea, because Ulrich, whoever he is, clearly did not design his database with my needs in mind. No matter how I tweaked things, I got zero search results. This time I decided to ask for help at the Humanities reference desk, since they would at least be familiar with the kinds of things I tend to search for.

Indeed, the Humanities folk understood what I needed, what I was used to doing, and why it wasn't working. It turns out that the university, in its (their?) infinite wisdom, has replaced the previous aggregated search system with a newer, simpler system. And by "simpler," I mean "significantly less powerful and less flexible, and also kind of confusing even for the people who work with it." The reason I can't find the advanced search functions in MetaLib is that they don't exist. The reason I was getting so few results is that MetaLib wasn't searching all the databases I had selected. Why not? It just doesn't.

So, long story short: I now need to search each database separately, rather than use the aggregated search function to search several at once. It's not such a terribly big deal; I only really use three or four of them on a regular basis. It is, however, mildly annoying, since it means learning to use the unique search interface at each of the databases, and searching four times in four different places every time I tweak my search terms, and getting a lot of duplicate results. I guess the good news is I'm not crazy.

and now it's time for the breakdown

2009-01-14T00:48:00.000-08:00

The online periodicals catalog at the library is kind of complicated. It has, after all, a lot of information, which is distributed over many different databases, and it takes a while to get used to using it. You can search for a particular database by name, or you can start with a subject area and see what databases are available for that topic, or you can search for a particular journal; there are a lot of ways to approach your search. So tonight I'm working on the Belinda section of my thesis, and I thought, you know, Blackwood said I need more secondary sources, and Belinda is a pretty popular novel*; maybe I'll just take a quick look at recent periodicals and see what scholars have said about Clarence Hervey in the past five years or so. I know my way around the periodicals system pretty well by now, so the task should have been, as PG Wodehouse would say, the work of a moment.

Ha.

I went through my usual process, but at the end of it, instead of showing me a gazillion results and an advanced search box that would help me narrow them down, it showed me ... nothing. I had landed at a weird page I'd never seen before, which informed me, "You have not performed a search." Which was funny, because I had in fact clicked on the button that said "search," just like I always do. I backed up and tried again, carefully selecting the databases I wanted to search, entering my search term, clicking "search."

"You have not performed a search."

A flurry of frustrated clicking and searching (or not searching, if MetaLib was to be believed) followed. I was starting to think I might be crazy. I'm not computer illiterate, and I'm generally fairly competent at figuring out how user interfaces work, but this one completely defeated me. I finally figured out that I needed to log in to ... something ... and the something was willing to take the username and password I use for my university's network, but even then I felt like I was trying to use the Playskool periodicals catalog. It seemed to think that an "advanced search" meant I wanted to add ONE boolean term to the process. What happened to all the features I actually use?? Where are the options for publication date, refereed sources only, multiple boolean operators, online access, etc.? I can't find them anywhere.

I gave up. The library is closed, so there's no one I can ask for help. I'm going to have to go to campus tomorrow, wander up to the library's information desk like a hapless freshman, and ask someone what the heck I'm doing wrong.

*In academic terms, Belinda is a very popular novel. It just hasn't been on the best-seller list any time in the past 200 years.

good news: we can fix it

2009-01-12T17:06:00.000-08:00

There's a scene in Sleepless in Seattle where one of the characters describes a client he's working with:

"When she wants something done, she says, 'You know best, but couldn't we flip the house so the back is in front? And put the front on a hinge so I can get in with a garage door opener.'"

Yeah, Blackwood suggested some revisions. The good news is, he thinks my argument is OK. But he thinks it might work better if I organized it by novel instead of by concept. In other words, right now I have sections on how Edgeworth uses stock characters, sentimental rhetoric, conventional sentimental episodes, etc. in all three of the novels; he thinks it would make more sense if I addressed the novels one at a time instead. He has some compelling reasons for thinking that. It would resolve some of the concerns about why I'm using the three novels I've chosen, rather than doing a comprehensive study of Edgeworth's work; it would demonstrate the supporting evidence for my argument more clearly; it would give me an opportunity to bring in more secondary sources. Also, he's my thesis chair, so it's not like I'm going to argue with him.

He also says he still thinks we're looking good for April graduation, so, yay. And now if you'll excuse me, I need to go turn my draft inside out and put some hinges on it.

quick update

2009-01-06T12:01:00.000-08:00

I dropped off a printed copy of my draft at Blackwood's office this morning. He has the electronic copy, obviously, but I prefer to work from a hard copy when I edit something this long, and it seemed discourteous to ask him to print the whole document with his own resources. Anyway, he said he'd get it back to me in a few days.

I also ran into Victoria while I was on campus. I told her I had just turned in my draft; she was pleased to hear that I was making progress, and expressed optimism at the possibility of meeting the deadlines for April graduation. I mentioned that I was really anxious to not let this drag on for another term if I could help it, since my due date is April 2nd, and she seemed a little surprised - she said she'd forgotten that I was pregnant. I was unduly flattered by the fact that she hadn't noticed when she looked at me. I've just finished my second trimester, and I'm starting to feel really obvious. Apparently the right coat covers a multitude of sins ... and also legitimate children.

drafted

2009-01-06T03:39:00.000-08:00

Today I sent a full draft of my thesis to Blackwood. I have no idea if it's any good. I kind of suspect that it's not. I think I do actually have a good argument in there somewhere, and I have a smashing introduction, but it turns out that it's harder than I thought to sustain a coherent argument over 30 pages of text. In other words, even though I have a lot to say, it may not be clear to the reader why I'm saying it. And it probably doesn't help that this particular draft is particularly rough.

I rarely write rough drafts at all. Even for a paper that's up to 25 pages, I will usually take lots of time as I write my first draft to choose each word with precision, construct each sentence for maximum clarity and stylistic impact, and craft each transition to subtly yet clearly lead the reader from topic to topic. This time ... not so much. I needed to get it done, and I knew there would be endless rounds of revision anyway, so I just cranked it out as fast as I could. There are places where I have bracketed notes that basically say things like, "insert transition here" or "wow, this sentence sucks, I will definitely want to fix it later."

Whatever. It's done. I have a draft. I feel very, very good about having accomplished even this much. The deadline to defend is February 20th, and we've planned about a month for revisions, so if Blackwood thinks it's even good enough to be salvageable, I should still be able to graduate in April. That's all I'm hoping for, really: that he looks at it and says, "Good news - we can fix this." If not ... yikes. I am really not interested in starting from scratch at this point.

Christmas creep

2008-11-12T18:46:00.000-08:00

Enough said.

politics

2008-10-31T23:45:00.001-07:00

Generally, I decline to discuss politics with my friends. This is because I want to stay friends with them. Since I joined Facebook, however, I've been getting some insight into where some of them fall on the political spectrum, and it's been interesting. Especially as election day approaches, a lot of them have expressed their political views by posting videos, giving virtual campaign paraphernalia to other friends, updating their status with political messages, etc.

I have one friend who is "amazed" at Sarah Palin's intelligence and strength, while another wonders, "How can anyone take Sarah Palin seriously?" Two of my friends (who are not acquainted with each other) have joined a group called "Excuse me, but has anyone else noticed that Sarah Palin is insane?" I have at least one friend who has joined a group in favor of California's Proposition 8, and at least one friend who has joined a group opposing it. Some have sent each other virtual campaign buttons for McCain, others for Obama. A few have said they are afraid of what will happen if one candidate or the other gets elected president. One posted a video attacking Palin's feminist credentials; another posted a video questioning Obama's legal eligibility for the office of President of the United States. One writes that she voted for Obama, while another says simply, "I voted." My AP US History teacher from high school weighs in, giving a prediction on how the electoral college numbers will work out.

I'm glad my friends are passionate about politics, and I'd like to think that they'd be able to discuss the issues with their opponents in a reasonable way. But when it comes down to it, I'm not willing to put that assumption to the test. I'm not sure if that says more about me, or them.

sidetracked

2008-10-23T23:41:00.000-07:00

I am, in fact, working steadily at my thesis; I just don't feel like I'm making any progress. I've written and re-written the introduction five or six times, producing a total of probably fifteen pages of material, of which I've been able to keep five pages. It's a nice, tight, well-written five pages, but still - five pages. At this rate I should be finished just in time to attend Link's high school graduation.

And then last time I talked to Blackwood, I mentioned that some of the things Edgeworth has to say about sensationism reminded me of Wordsworth, and then Blackwood brought up Joanna Baillie, because she also says things that sound like Wordsworth, except Baillie says them earlier than Wordsworth ... and the next thing I knew, I was agreeing to read Baillie's fifty-page manifesto on drama and passions and morals. So I've spent the past couple of days reading up on current criticism of Joanna Baillie, and I'm now writing this post as a means of avoiding her actual essay. Baillie is interesting enough, I suppose, but I have a feeling that she will end up being, at most, one part of one paragraph in my thesis, and likely no more than a footnote. At this point in my career, three days worth of research feels like a lot for footnote.

who knew?

2008-10-21T01:06:00.000-07:00

Apparently the Shortpacked! character Faz majored in English. No, it doesn't say that on his character page. So how can I tell? Glad you asked.
Come on, who else talks like that?

insomnia

2008-10-14T22:22:00.000-07:00

I've had some insomnia lately. I always do when I'm pregnant. Antihistamines usually take care of it, and Dramamine has the added advantage of helping with the nausea. All of which is a roundabout way of explaining why I love Shakespeare. (Really.) I had occasion to look up the phrase "heavy is the head that wears the crown," and came upon this passage from Henry IV Part II:

How many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee
And hush'd with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lull'd with sound of sweetest melody?
O thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile
In loathsome beds, and leavest the kingly couch
A watch-case or a common 'larum-bell?
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge
And in the visitation of the winds,
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them
With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds,
That, with the hurly, death itself awakes?
Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude,
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

I love the imagery, especially the personification of sleep. When you're lying awake at 3:00 in the morning, it really does start to feel like sleep is a thing that you've somehow offended or frightened away. You try all kinds of tricks to lure it back, but nothing works. And of course, in my case, the part of the ship-boy is played by Glen, who takes about 0.68 seconds to fall asleep every night, and can easily sleep through the deafening clamour of a thunderstorm that would wake death itself.

under way

2008-09-22T23:26:00.000-07:00

Having completely started over so many times that I've lost track, I feel a little sheepish announcing that I've started drafting (again). Hopefully this time I will actually finish drafting and move on to revising. As the project now stands, here's the general idea:

Maria Edgeworth is now more or less part of the Romantic-era canon, at least from a pedagogical standpoint. Her novels are taught in numerous undergrad courses because of her importance to various aspects of the development of the novel in English. Yet there are still pieces missing in the bigger picture of Edgeworth scholarship. The 1980s and 90s saw a surge of scholarly interest in the notion of sensibility and its importance in eighteenth-century British culture and literature, and several influential book-length studies and numerous articles were published on the subject. However, Edgeworth has, for the most part, been omitted from that discussion.

Edgeworth's attitude toward sensibility varied widely at different points in her career. In her non-fiction writing, she was skeptical of its importance and perhaps even its existence. This quote comes from Edgeworth's Practical Education, which she wrote with her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth:

On sympathy we cannot depend, either for the correctness of a man’s moral sentiments, or for the steadiness of his moral conduct. It is very common to talk of the excellence of a person’s heart, of the natural goodness of his disposition; when these expressions distinctly mean any thing, they must refer to natural sympathy, or a superior degree of sensibility. Experience, however, does not teach us, that sensibility and virtue have any certain connection with each other.

In her novels, on the other hand, the signs of sensibility are often the markers she uses to designate her characters as exemplary or superior or virtuous. Conversely, a character lacking in sensibility cannot be the hero or heroine of the story. As an example, here's a quote from her novel Helen, in which the narrator comments on a shallow and vicious character:

There are things which no man of real generosity could say or do, or think, put him in ever so great a passion. He would not be harsh to an inferior – a woman – a protégée on whom he had conferred obligations; but Mr Churchill was harsh – he showed neither generosity nor feeling; and Helen’s good opinion of him sank to rise no more.

Of this, however, he had not enough of the sympathy or penetration of feeling to be aware.

In spite of Edgeworth's assertions in her non-fiction works that education trumps every inclination of nature, it is in fact Mr. Churchill's nature that marks him as inferior. His behavior is merely an expression of that nature.

Why the discrepancy? Edgeworth's declared purpose in writing novels was didactic, so the facile explanation that the novel is simply fiction and does not reflect the author's views can reasonably be dismissed. It could be that she changed her mind over time - Practical Education was written before any of the novels I'm examining. However, I suspect that the answer is more complex. I think that part of Edgeworth's project was to reclaim sensibility from the realm of the sentimental, and return it to a more Shaftesburian notion of "moral sense" mediated by education or self-refinement.

I think I finally have an argument.

we've had a change of plans, Data.

2008-09-07T21:21:00.000-07:00

The English department has changed the requirements for the MA thesis, and I have languished in the program long enough to be the beneficiary of this change. Backstory: the requirements for an MA in English vary from university to university. Here are three random examples: the University of South Carolina requires an MA thesis of 50-80 pages; the University of Utah requires MA candidates to pass a six-hour comprehensive exam, but no thesis is required; and the University of Washington requires a "master's essay" for students continuing to the doctoral program, but students may substitute 10 additional credits of graduate seminars if the MA is their terminal degree. The thesis requirement in my program was previously in the neighborhood of 60-70 pages.

Recently, however, the department noticed that students were taking an awfully long time to finish the program, and that a lot of the thesis projects were longer than 70 pages. Theorizing that these two facts might have a causal relationship, and wanting to get people graduated faster, the department decided to change the thesis requirement to "an article-length essay prepared with a particular scholarly journal or other publication in mind." In other words, about 40 pages, and probably a maximum of 50.

Well. That sounds a lot easier than what I planned on doing before.

a message from the ether

2008-09-02T23:54:00.000-07:00

I got an email from my superego today. (Subject line: "Thesis superego checking in.") My understanding of Freudian psychology is superficial at best, but I'm pretty sure that's unusual. Anyway, he informed me that he had looked into his crystal ball and foreseen that I would defend my thesis this semester. We've set up a meeting for Friday so we can talk about the specifics of how we can make that happen.

So if my thesis advisor is my superego, what does that make the other members of my committee? Or is the committee as a whole the superego, with Blackwood in this case acting as its representative? Or is the committee in turn merely a microcosm of the larger superego that is the university, or the academy? Is the superego even supposed to have representatives? I probably should have paid better attention to that part of Theory of Lit, but honestly I just thought Freud was kind of a loon.

Whatever. What I really wish is that my subconscious would send me an email and tell me what the main argument of my thesis is.

vacation

2008-07-30T10:46:00.000-07:00

We spent a few days in Oregon over the weekend. We didn't have a particular reason for going; I just like it there. It was fabulous, as always.

We stayed in the Willamette* Valley, at my aunt's house, which was full of good food and lovely people. On Friday we drove out to Newport, on the coast, and spent the day at the ocean. Oregon State University has a marine science center there, complete with petting tank. Really. Here's me, petting a baby skate:

Peach wasn't so sure about the whole fish-petting idea. She petted the anemones, but declined touching the starfish - "It looks pokey." Everything else in the tank was moving, and she was not OK with that.

The aquarium gift shop had a poster on display which, in retrospect, I probably should have bought. How often do I find a poster with my actual name on it?

The kids loved the beach, and would fain have played in the ocean all day and all night.
But since the water temperature is around 38°, we made them come out after an hour or so.

The cousins I played with as a child now have children of their own, who are about the same ages as my children. Peach is still figuring out how extended family relationships work, and hasn't quite wrapped her head around the fact that her aunts and uncles are her parents' sisters and brothers. Under the circumstances, I didn't think it would be useful or efficient to try to explain how the various people she met were related to her, so I just told her the kids were her "cousins." Although it doesn't look like it in this picture, she is having quite a good time.

Link and Peach traveled surprisingly well, and we made the trip there and back without incident. (OK, there was one little incident. Words you never want to hear from the back seat of the rental car as you're heading up I-5 on your way to the airport: "I'm throwing up now.") Link is big enough now to carry his own clothes in his backpack and tote his booster seat as well. Peach's backpack wasn't big enough for all her clothes, so she carried a toy duck in it instead. Here we are buying tickets for the train in Portland:

It was a really nice trip. We had no internet access for five days, and we didn't even bring our computers with us. There was nothing I could do about my thesis, so I just didn't think about it. I read cheap detective novels and watched "Jeopardy" and ate as much as I wanted and never had to cook. I really didn't want to come back.

* It's pronounced will-AM-it, if you were wondering.

OT (but I couldn't resist)

2008-07-23T00:26:00.000-07:00

With college football season fast approaching, all sorts of media outlets are ramping up their coverage of the sport. [Query: why doesn't my spell check like the word "ramping"?] The various NCAA FBS leagues are currently holding "media days," wherein they make their coaches, and some players, available to the media for interviews and questions. All of this brings great joy to my heart, not only because I'm a fan of college football, but also because it leads to some truly fabulous quotes like the following ones, which I swear I am not making up:

- During Big 12 media days on Tuesday, Kansas State Coach Ron Prince had this to say about his starting quarterback, Josh Freeman: "The future is in front of him." Good place for it, if you ask me.

- Also during Big 12 media days, Colorado defensive tackle George Hypolite (go ahead, click the link to see his picture) explained to the media that the topic of his honors thesis is "the interrogation of African-American masculinity through a social constructionist, decolonial, feminist gaze." If you understood that, you are probably an English major, although he, astonishingly, is not. Bonus points if you figured out that his paper is about himself.

For the record, I found both quotes at The Quad, the NYT's college sports blog.

excellent headline of the day

2008-07-18T16:24:00.000-07:00

In the college football section of the si.com website, there is currently a headline which reads, "Player's Death Worsened by Stress."

I have questions. Did the stress somehow make him even deader? Or was the quality of the death experience worsened by the stress? Did the stress downgrade his death from merely tragic to horrible? I read the article, but it did not satisfactorily answer my questions.

Yes, I'm working on my thesis. Quit bugging me.

today is the first day of the rest of my thesis

2008-06-25T15:35:00.000-07:00

Today I am officially out of excuses. I've finished grading the finals from my Comp section. I've added up all my students' grades. I don't have any more classes to take. I'm not teaching any classes during Summer term. There is absolutely nothing left for me to do but to write my &@#% thesis.

Dang.

and speaking of coincidence ...

2008-06-18T15:28:00.000-07:00

The final exam for my section of Composition was scheduled for this morning, from 9-11 a.m. Accordingly I went and hung out in my classroom, and waited for my students to come and turn in their finals. Sometime around 10:30 or so, the power went out. Hm. Probably not a scheduled outage, being in the middle of Finals. I called Information and asked if they knew why the power was out in my building. They didn't, but they would be happy to connect me to Campus Security so I could ask them.

After a few seconds, the information person came back on the line to tell me that Security's line was busy. I thought I could guess why.

The computer in my classroom was down because of the power outage, but I had my laptop with me, so I went to the University's web page to see if I could find a phone number for Facilities Management in my building. Searching the website, I found a link to "Facilities Management." That looked promising. Clicking the link, however, brought me here:

Yikes. All your facilities management are belong to us? The funny thing is, the FM page hack was completely unrelated to the power outage. I later found out that somebody, presumably in the physical plant, basically flipped a switch somewhere that cut the power to the entire campus (query: why do they have a switch like that?), but it was just an accident.

The hacked page has since been replaced with an "account suspended" message. I'm not a big fan of hackers, generally speaking, but I will admit that in this particular case they made a final exam period incrementally more interesting for me.

I'm ... famous?

2008-06-18T11:59:00.000-07:00

I don't read many webcomics. I like Shortpacked! and xkcd, although I don't always get the jokes. I read UserFriendly, although I don't know why; I get the jokes, but they're usually not that funny. I used to read Sluggy Freelance, but at some point I realized that it was no longer making me laugh, so I quit.

And then there's Dinosaur Comics, by Ryan North. The gag is that it's the exact same six panels, with the exact same six pictures, every day; only the dialog changes. It is perhaps a bit of an acquired taste, as it seems to get funnier the more I read it, and when I want to explain to someone else why a particular strip is funny, I often can't without giving them a lot of backstory. Sometimes a strip is funny enough on its own that I'll send it to a friend, but a lot of times I feel like the humor comes, at least in part, from the knowledge I have of the characters involved.

I don't know much about the guy who writes it, other than that he's Canadian and taller than average, but some of the comics hinge on somewhat esoteric concepts, especially involving science and technology, or linguistics and literature. This has always seemed like an odd combination to me - most people I know tend to specialize in either hard sciences or social sciences, but not both. The really funny thing, though, is that there have been several times that the comic has been about something having to do with linguistics or literature that has recently come up in one of my classes or my research. It doesn't happen often, but it has happened enough times for me to remark on it to Glen.

Eventually the coincidences between Dinosaur Comics and my life became kind of a running joke between Glen and me. I speculated that Ryan was perhaps my alter-ego, or that I was perhaps his evil twin. Glen, of course, pointed out that I was neither Canadian, nor taller than average, nor male. I responded that either Ryan or I might be in disguise, and further noted that, like Clark Kent and Superman, no one had ever seen Ryan and me in the same place at the same time. Glen was still skeptical, so recently, I proposed an experiment to settle the question.

I'd been thinking about René Wellek lately, mostly because I don't know much about him. With most literary critics, I can at least associate a word or phrase with them that says something about them: Bakhtin - carnivalesque; Said - postcolonial; Greenblatt - New Historicism; and so on. I'm aware that that's a very limited description of their work; all I'm saying is that at least I have something conceptual to hang on the mental pegs that are labeled with their names. But for Wellek ... not so much. And so I'd been thinking that I ought to get around to looking him up and seeing what he's about. Since there was NO WAY that Ryan North should be thinking about René Wellek unless he is actually me - or I'm him, or whatever - I jokingly said to Glen that if Ryan mentioned René Wellek in his comic in the next couple of weeks, we could take that as definitive proof.

Behold the Dinosaur Comics for June 18th, 2008 (click on the image for a larger version):

When I was finished hyperventilating, I called Glen and asked if he remembered the Dinosaur Comics experiment. He did. I asked if he'd seen the comic today. He hadn't. He went and looked at it. And then he laughed, and fessed up that he had emailed Ryan North, told him the story, and asked him if he would help Glen prank me by name-dropping René Wellek in one of the strips. Ryan obliged.

Some women are impressed by material things, like flashy cars or expensive jewelry. Some women are impressed by men who exhibit extraordinary physical prowess. Some women like to get flowers or candy from their significant others. I've never really been excited about any of that stuff. But this ... wow. I'm really touched.

"honey roasted"

2008-06-10T20:23:00.001-07:00

Behold Blue Diamond's "honey roasted" almonds:

I suspect that "honey roasted" is actually some kind of code for "lightly dusted with crack cocaine," because I cannot stop eating these things.

editor needed, indeed

2008-05-27T15:57:00.001-07:00

Occasionally someone who wants cheap editing or tutoring labor will contact the English Department and ask them to pass along a job posting to the grad students. We got such an email today. I have no interest in this particular job; the most striking thing about it, to me, was that it was written by someone who is so obviously in need of the services they are requesting. It was like a subtle plea for help encoded within the text of the job description, which I have copied and pasted directly from the email:

Are you interested in editing and helping with a series of books? The first book is done, but needs to be edited and possibly have a second set of eyes on the book to try to improve it.

You would be paid for it and given some credit. It is a interesting 7 volume set called "[book title]" about adventures of country boys in Northern California.

If you are interested contact:

[redacted] W. [redacted] Esq.

[redacted] & Associates

Attorney's at Law

Yes, "attorney's." I don't think Mr. Redacted could have crafted a more striking advertisement if he had hired a PR firm. Nothing attracts the attention of English majors like a misplaced apostrophe.

... I'll let you find the other glaring error on your own. :)

was that it, then?

2008-05-25T21:13:00.000-07:00

The deadline to apply for August graduation was last Friday. Yeah, that didn't happen. I sort of went back and forth talking to Blackwood and Descartes for a couple of weeks, and in the meantime I didn't get anything written.

The problem is that when I talked to Descartes, he insisted that my argument was completely passé, and would be even more so in another five years when I want to apply for a PhD and use my thesis as a writing sample. In addition to being very smart, Descartes is, in his field, kind of like that kid in your high school who was always wearing the hot new trendy thing a couple of months before everyone else. This means that if anyone in my department is likely to know what's hot in Romanticism, it's René. On the other hand, he also tends to think stuff is no longer current long before everyone else is finished talking about it. The phrase "so five minutes ago" is, in his lexicon, not hyperbolic.

Blackwood and Descartes are good friends outside of work, and both are very professional, but they are very different kinds of scholars. And Blackwood is, after all, my chair. So I went back and talked to Blackwood again. "Descartes says my argument is completely irrelevant, because no one is having that conversation any more." Blackwood responded bluntly, "He's wrong." Maybe I should just have the two of them meet with each other, and get back to me when they get it figured out.

Anyway, Blackwood reassured me that I did not need to rethink my whole argument; rather, I need to keep drafting, and make changes if necessary as I go along. If Blackwood suspects that I've been using this situation as an excuse to avoid drafting another chapter, he's right. If he further suspects that I'm avoiding drafting because the task seems to large, and I'm afraid of failure ... no, he'd have to be psychic to have figured that out.

One thing that came out of my conversation with Descartes, however, was a realization that I really do need to be more aware of what current scholars are saying about my topic. I've looked for recent journal articles about Edgeworth and Sensibility - there aren't any. I've looked for books about Edgeworth and Sensibility - nope. What I haven't done, however, is look through current Romanticism journals to see what kinds of things scholars are saying in general about Edgeworth, and Sensibility, and the novels I'm writing about. Rookie mistake. Blackwood gave me a list of journals to look at, and strongly suggested that I might want to give him another chapter in the next week.

At this point we both know I'm not graduating in August, but we also both know that there's no reason to drag this out into next Fall semester. Having missed the August deadline, I won't be able to graduate until December, but neither of us wants to be repeating this conversation in October, so he's approaching it from the perspective of "there's really not a deadline in August, but let's pretend there is." OK. Let's pretend.

good news/bad news

2008-05-05T23:31:00.001-07:00

After several revisions, my outline - yes, just the outline - is good enough to circulate. I suppose I should count this as a victory of sorts. Blackwood says, "This is really good ... ready to circulate immediately." So I sent it off to Descartes and Victoria.

Descartes responds that he has "no doubt" that my thesis "will be plenty smart." (Notice the future tense there.) That's the good news. The bad news is that on the other hand, he thinks pretty much everything I've said in my outline is slightly wrong. He questions the idea that scholars are still reluctant to accept novels as Romantic - "Is anyone really making that argument in earnest these days?" He thinks that my topic "is actually really well-timed," but he's concerned that I may have "misread the nature of the moment in which it's appearing."

Daunted would be an apt description of how I feel. Also really dumb, because I accidentally put "Scottish Renaissance" in my outline instead of "Scottish Enlightenment." When he pointed that out in his email, I couldn't help but notice that he used the exact same phrasing that I used when I commented on a student's Final that he probably meant the "Early Modern" period, rather than the "Modern" period, when he was writing about Queen Elizabeth I.

I passed Descartes' comments on to Blackwood, and he was fairly nonchalant about the whole thing. I don't really understand why. If Descartes' assessment of Romantic studies is correct, then I have a lot of information, but no argument. I see that as a problem.

Can't wait to see what Victoria has to say.

things I did not know

2008-05-02T17:33:00.001-07:00

Allow me to recreate for you a portion of the conversation that occurred last night during dinner at our house:

Me: It's just so frustrating. Why is it that I can never remember the year of the Act of Union, but I still remember the birthdate of the kid I had a crush on in the third grade?

Link: You had a crush on someone in the third grade?

Me: Well, yeah, when I was in the third grade.

Link: I had a crush on Megan, but her mom said we had to break up.

Me: ...

Yeah, that's the first I'd heard of it.

why I love my university library ... and yours

2008-04-22T18:16:00.001-07:00

The library at my university is large. Published statistics say it has 665,000 square feet of floor space, covered with 98 miles of shelving, holding more than 6 million items including books, periodicals, and other resources. Better yet, it's part of the interlibrary loan program, so if it doesn't have an item that I need, the library will borrow it from some other university and have it shipped here so I can use it. So not only do I have millions of books on hand that I can use, I basically have access to all the other university libraries that are part of the ILiad program as well. Which is how I came to be in possession of a book from the University of Oklahoma library. The book has a chapter about sensibility and Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, and wasn't among the 6 million items available locally. Thanks, OU! I've never been a big fan of your football team, but I'm now a big fan of your library.

happy happy

2008-04-18T19:42:00.000-07:00

This, as nearly as I can recall, is the substance of a conversation I had with Glen this evening, around 6:30.

Me: Hey ... what's the date today?
Glen: The 18th.
Me: Are you sure?
Glen: [checking his watch] Yup. Today is Friday the 18th.
Me: Oh. Oops.
Glen: Why oops?
Me: The date "April 18th" doesn't ring any bells for you?
Glen: No, why?
Me: ...
Glen: Oh.
Me: Happy Anniversary, honey.

When we got married, Glen was working on his master's thesis (in Computer Science) and had already finished his coursework, and I was working full time, not going to school at all. We thought we'd be clever and get married during Finals, so there wouldn't be a gazillion students getting married at the same time.

Ten years later, I'm working on my master's thesis, and now our Anniversary falls in the middle of Finals week every time. Clever. This year, to celebrate my anniversary, I'll be grading exams and doing research for my thesis.

I still think marrying Glen was the smartest thing I ever did.

one down

2008-04-15T23:45:00.000-07:00

Among the many benefits of working for Sister Mary Clarence (fun! adventure! bullet points on my resumé!) is the added bonus of having permission to use her office on campus. In addition to being quiet, comfortable, and relatively close to the library, her office has a lousy wireless connection, which is very helpful when I'm trying not to get distracted. So I went up on campus tonight to work on my draft.

By 11:30 or so, I felt like I had enough of a chapter to send it off to Blackwood. He's expecting it tomorrow morning. I haven't been this nervous about turning in a paper since ... well, probably the last time I took a class from Descartes, so maybe a year. Whatever. I'm very nervous. Which is putting a serious damper on the excitement I should feel at having written an actual chapter of my actual thesis, regardless of how rough a draft it is.

what we learned this semester

2008-04-14T15:17:00.000-07:00

Today was the last day of class for the Brit Lit section I TA'd for this semester. We've given reading quizzes randomly during the semester to encourage the students to do the reading and be in class, and today we gave one final quiz: list five things that you didn't know about British literature when you started the class. Herewith, some of my favorite answers.

... that Chaucer is dirty-minded and that Beowulf is so long and never should have been turned into a movie.
Old English is, like, impossible to read.
That a lot of great writers had a second job spying on people.
How freaking awesome the Celts were.
That because I'm redheaded I'm related to Jesus. [Yes, he's kidding.]
Henry the VIII had a difficult time with his 5 [sic] wives.
Not everything I saw in the Beowulf movie is factual.
I learned about the Popish Plot, and also that I like how that sounds.
Daniel Defoe was a political genius of a writer. I think I have a new hero.
John Donne wrote poems that weren't about sex.
I didn't know about the two forms of satire, horatian and juvenile. [sic]
I learned a lot about the [assigned] readings and their significance in literature.
I learned that there was a lot of amoral literature before the 1960s.
Shakespeare had contemporaries.
I learned that life is pretty good now compared to England in times such as 1665-66 or the bubonic plague, or the Hundred Years' War, or the time after the Romans when they kept getting invaded, or the Wars of the Roses, or when it was deadly to be a Catholic, then a Protestant, then a Catholic again.

And there were a few that made me feel good:

... a new found love for Milton's Paradise Lost.
I learned about Milton! Surprising, but I never actually learned anything about him in the past. I am going to take a class about Paradise Lost and Hamlet in the fall.
Sensibility refers to affectation of emotion, delicacy, etc. from the 18th century. Now Sense and Sensibility makes sense!

peu a peu

2008-04-12T16:26:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I don't know how to produce diacritical marks in html. Anyway, I did some editing, and managed to grind out another page while Peach was napping this afternoon.

cautiously optimistic

2008-04-12T00:28:00.001-07:00

I talked to Blackwood on Friday. Of course Thursday's meeting was on my mind, but I wasn't really sure how accurate the grad secretary's representations were. It's her job to scare us, and she's good at it, and I understand her reasons for doing so, but she presumably is not aware of the status of our individual projects, so what she said may or may not apply to all of us. Blackwood was not encouraging. His first question for me was, "How important is it for you to graduate in August?"

Here's the thing: is it important for me to graduate in August the way it's important for someone who's committed to a PhD program that starts in September, or who's gotten a job offer contingent on their receiving their degree, or who simply can't afford any more time in school? No. In theory, I could take the full five years if I wanted to. But in a way, that's why I haven't gotten it done. There's not outside pressure, no deadline beyond the departmental five-year limit, which I am not yet approaching. If I give up on August graduation, it will certainly remove the pressure I feel. But knowing that I have until December to get it done, I will inevitably put it off again, and find myself in the same position when the next set of deadlines come up. For now, I have to act as if I'm going to graduate in August, because if I don't have those deadlines to contend with, I'm never going to get this done.

On the other hand, I don't want to put pressure on my committee; it's not their fault that I'm so close to the deadline. Not that they would pass me if I didn't deserve it, but I don't want to unduly burden them with a lot of drafts and revisions in a short amount of time.

Ultimately, Blackwood agreed to wait and see what I come up with in the next two or three weeks. He's obviously concerned that he hasn't seen any of my draft yet, but he's still open to the possibility that the first draft will be good enough that I would be able to make revisions in time to meet the defense deadline. He thinks it will be obvious within the first ten days of May whether it's going to happen or not; I'm still holding out for a later decision. So, assuming that the 23rd is my deadline, here's today's score:

unless it isn't

2008-04-11T01:00:00.000-07:00

There was a mandatory meeting today for everyone in the English MA program who is planning to graduate in August. The meeting was apparently held for the purpose of convincing us that we will NOT be graduating in August, because we are probably not ready, and won't be able to meet the department deadlines, and we shouldn't even THINK about asking for an exception, because the department DOES NOT CARE. Really, the message that I took away from the meeting was that we should all consider, very seriously, just putting it off for another semester. The graduate secretary even went so far as to estimate that of the 27 students who told her that they intend to graduate in August, only 12 of us actually will. Thanks! She did not indicate whether she already knew who the twelve would be, or if that was just a guess based on past averages.

The first deadline that looms in our path is coming up on May 23rd - that's the day we have to apply for graduation. That's 42 days from now. I haven't talked to Blackwood since the meeting, but I'm thinking that I should have a pretty good idea by then whether I'll be able to meet the rest of the deadlines or not.

In other news, I'll be teaching Boswell tomorrow ... I guess it's technically "today" at this point ... Friday the 11th. Sister Mary Clarence had hinted that she might go out of town this weekend, so I asked her on Wednesday if she would be here on Friday. She said she would. Then at about 4:30 Thursday afternoon, she called me up and said she wouldn't be here Friday, and would I go ahead and stand in for her. Well, yes, I had told her I would do it if she needed me to ... but then she told me she didn't need me to, so I didn't prepare. Silly me.

Don't get me wrong, I love to teach, and I really REALLY love teaching literature instead of writing and rhetoric for a change, but I kind of told Blackwood I'd have something for him to read tomorrow, and it's only halfway done. I tried working on it some more after my lesson plan was done, but my brain had already clocked out.

So, for those of you playing along at home, here's the score:

days till application deadline: 42
number of pages written: 8

I need to get a nifty graphic or something so I can post my score at the top of the blog every day. But I need to do that some other time. Right now I need to sleep.

it's fate

2008-04-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

I must be going to graduate this year. What else could this mean?

See? It's fate. And it probably doesn't hurt that I've started my draft. It's a wee little thing, just seven pages so far. But that's seven more pages than I had last week.

three questions

2008-04-04T22:12:00.000-07:00

Sister Mary Clarence asked if I would teach today, as she had a friend in town from England and wanted take the day off to be with her friend. I had about two days' notice, which seemed like enough time to prepare. Ha. The students had some really, uh, "fun" questions today. For the record, our topics today were eighteenth-century British monarchs, the Enlightenment, and Hogarth's "A Rake's Progress."

One student wanted to know whether Church of England doctrine taught that the monarchs of Britain were descended from King Arthur. Um ... I don't really know for sure one way or the other, but I'd say probably not. This isn't as wacky as it sounds; we've previously discussed the ways that various monarchs and other figures used the Arthur myth to their political advantage, including Henry VIII.

Another student wanted to know if Charles II and James II were Catholic (or, in Charles' case, Catholic-ish around the edges) because of the time they spent in France. Well. That sounds reasonable, but I don't really know. I had focused more on the political ramifications of the Stuart boys' religion, rather than the origins of their religious leanings. I looked it up when I got home; it turns out their Mum was Catholic. Should I have known that off the top of my head? Maybe. Why couldn't they have asked about the Hanovers? I could go on about George IV all day.

When we got around to looking at Hogarth's engravings, a student wanted to know how big the originals were. I was at a complete loss. Honestly, I don't think that's something that I could have been expected to know. Anyway, I looked that up when I got home as well. (Answer: about 12.5 X 15 inches.)

I have no respect for a teacher who can't admit that she doesn't know the answer to a student's question, and I'm obviously not going to make stuff up, but it's still embarrassing to have to say "I just don't know."

porn for English majors

2008-04-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

I ordered something from Labyrinth Books a while ago. At this point I don't even remember what I bought from them, but ever since then, they've been periodically sending me sale catalogs in the mail. Usually I hate getting junk mail, but I love the Labyrinth catalogs. When one showed up in my mailbox a few days ago, I flipped to the Literature section, and lo, they have a bunch of Cambridge Companions on sale - Chaucer, Milton, Crime Fiction, Shelley ... $14 to $17 each. I can't afford to buy them all. Maybe I'll just get one.

Or two. They're on sale, I should get two. *sigh* Here, look at the description of The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer:

"In this revised edition, new chapters cover the literary inheritance traceable in Chaucer's works to French and Italian sources, his style, as well as new approaches to his work. Other topics covered include the social and literary scene in England in Chaucer's time, and comedy, pathos and romance in the Canterbury Tales. 334 pgs."

Sexy, no? There's also a literary biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins ... it's pretty old (1992) but on sale for only $9.98, down from the original price of $45. Maybe I'll just get that, and one of the Cambridge Companions.

Books are such an expensive habit.

this is getting ridiculous

2008-03-21T18:42:00.001-07:00

I just got rickrolled by Sports Illustrated. Twice.

***UPDATE***
I did NOT get rickrolled by SI.com. In fact, Glen installed a firefox extension on my laptop so that no matter what youtube link I clicked on, it would always show me Rick Astley. He is in SO much trouble.

***CLARIFICATION***
Obviously I meant that Glen is in trouble, not that Rick Astley is in trouble. While I feel that Astley must take some responsibility for perpetrating his particular flavor of 80s pop music on the world at large, I'd like to think that rickrolling was not his idea.

***MORE***
Commenter elricky was kind enough to post a link to some audio clips of an LAT interview with Astley himself, but the link is too long for the whole thing to appear in the comments. Here's the link. Yeah, I could have linked to this, but I thought it would be too obvious.

ain't no party like a geeky corporate party

2008-03-21T16:20:00.000-07:00

We had free tickets to see Collective Soul last Wednesday at an arena about an hour from our house. I've been to rock concerts before, but this one was different. It was held as part of a tech conference, so I wasn't expecting masses of unkempt teenage children to show up, but it was still ... yeah, different is a good word.

I made Glen change out of his geek clothes before we went, because, you know, rock concert. I needn't have troubled him. As we drove past the venue, looking for a place to park, I could see the conference participants approaching in full geek regalia. White tennis shoes abounded, and everyone's shirt was carefully tucked into his high-wasted jeans or khaki pants. I say "his" because as far as I could tell, there were only about six other women in the whole crowd.

The first odd thing about the show itself was that security was a bit less enthusiastic than I'm used to. Tons of people got cameras into the venue, as we discovered when the concert started. These weren't wimpy little cell phone cameras, either - they were full-on recent-model Nikons with video capability. Someone posted some hi-res photos to a Flickr stream, so the pix are courtesy of, um ... someone named a4gpa.

Anyway, we went inside the venue, and that's when I realized that I really wasn't in Kansas anymore. Normally I would expect to pay $3 for a plastic cup full of tap water at a concert, and if I wanted something to eat I would probably just wait until I got home rather than get scalped by the vendors. Here, we were greeted by buffet tables full of free food and beverages. It was standard conference fare, nothing special, but - free. There were video games and even a slot machine on the concourse.

When they opened the doors to the arena, everyone filed in and down the stairs in a completely orderly, unhurried manner, even though it was general admission. This was a nice change, but I was beginning to feel that my fellow concert-goers weren't really entering into the spirit of the thing. Our all-access passes got us onto the floor, where we found ourselves in the ninth row (I counted). This is undoubtedly the closest I will ever be to the stage at a concert, because even if I could afford floor seats, they all get bought up online by scalpers in the first twenty seconds that the tickets are on sale anyway, so I was pretty excited.

The opening act was a stand-up comic, which was unusual, but not necessarily bad, I guess. By that time they had let in some extra people - Collective Soul fans, presumably - who weren't conference attendees. There are about 20,000 seats in the arena, and it was probably two-thirds full. Anyway, the comedian did his bit, and then the band was announced by some sort of uber-geek who appeared to be in charge of the conference. We could hear rock-concert-appropriate screaming from the back of the arena, but most of the geeks just clapped enthusiastically. As the show got started, there was a surreal moment when I looked around at the audience and realized that I was in the ninth row, on the floor, at a rock concert, and I was the only one dancing. There was even a wee little mosh pit in front of the stage, but no one was moshing. A couple of heads bobbed up and down here and there, and that was about it. Behold the participants in the wee "mosh" pit:

Collective Soul were very cool, and they played a good show. They were professional and comfortable onstage, which I love, and they put a lot of energy into the performance.

They sounded good live. Not studio-perfect, but that's not what live concerts are for anyway. There were some scorching guitar solos, and at one point Ed Roland played the iconic guitar riff from AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" during the bridge in "Hollywood." Even the geeks got excited about that.

CS's set was only about an hour plus a one-song encore, but some of the geeks still left early. I'm not sure if it was past their bedtime, or if they just couldn't live one more minute without their wireless connection, or if - heaven forbid - they just weren't that excited about the show. Toward the end, more non-conference people started to filter down to the floor and fill up the aisles, which was nice, because I was no longer the only one jumping up and down and screaming.

After the encore the lights came up, and everyone filed out. I heard someone remark that the show had been really loud, which made me smile. It was one of the least-amplified shows I'd ever seen - my ears were barely ringing when I walked out. The security guys thought it was funny too.

***DISCLAIMER***
I love geeks. I love their geeky clothes, their geeky jokes, and all their geeky ways. Yes, I'm mocking them, but it's Horatian mocking, not Juvenalian.

anomaly in the student-teacher continuum

2008-03-16T21:19:00.000-07:00

While I was in England, I graded the first written assignment from the Early Brit class. There was a predictable mixture of good, bad, mediocre, and even a few excellent assignments. The worst assignment of the lot was truly pathetic - instead of the required 4-6 pages, this one was barely 2 pages long; and instead of a book report, for which the student possessed detailed written instructions, she had written a book review. The student received a Very Bad Grade.

After I had handed all the assignments back, I got an email from the student with the Very Bad Grade. When I saw the sender's name and the subject line, I mentally prepared myself for something unpleasant. I've had emails from students with Very Bad Grades before, and even from students whose grades were not so bad, but still not what they wanted/needed/thought they deserved. Somehow, according to the students, it's always my fault that their grades are unsatisfactory. Such emails have never resulted in the sender receiving a revised, more satisfactory grade from me. Ultimately, the only results are that it probably makes the student feel better, and it usually makes me feel worse in some way. It's not as though I like giving them bad grades.

At any rate, this particular email was short and to the point: she thought the grade she had received was completely fair; she apologized for the poor quality (and quantity) of her work; she had had some personal problems at the time when she was working on the assignment and hadn't given it the effort it required; she would definitely do better next time.

Well. That's a first.

more lols

2008-03-15T14:45:00.000-07:00

excursions

2008-03-09T22:56:00.001-07:00

I only went on two excursions this time, but they were both wonderful, albeit in very different ways. The first was to Blackwell, the Arts and Crafts house. I don't think I have ever been in a place that gave me so much aesthetic pleasure. Everything about it was so simply yet perfectly designed, from the interior ornamentation to the placement of the trees on the grounds. The online tour really doesn't give an adequate idea of how truly attractive this house is. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures of the inside of the house for "copyright reasons." I have no idea what this means. Is the house somehow copyrighted? The designer is long since dead, so what exactly is under copyright, and who holds said copyright? I was irritated by this. In fact, I was tempted to take a couple of pictures anyway, but there were always so many people about that I didn't think I could do it without getting caught.

The other excursion I went on was "Molly's Mystery Tour," which apparently is a tradition at the Winter School. Here's how it works: everyone piles into a van, which Richard drives. Molly sits in the front seat, and tells Richard where to go. Everyone else hangs on for dear life. No one, including Richard, knows where the Tour is going to go until it gets there. This time it went up and down the fells, down various sketchy-looking lanes, and through several closed gates (which someone had to get out and open). Some of the terrain was very steep, very unpaved, and very lacking in guardrails. At one point, I remarked to the woman in the seat next to me that I supposed we were all going to die. I was sitting at the very back of the van, so I couldn't hear most of Molly's commentary, but she said something about "this is the route that Hartley Coleridge walked when he [something I didn't catch]."

Along the way, we stopped at St. John's in the Vale,

Castlerigg stone circle,

and a pub (not pictured). It was blowing a gale at Castlerigg, with lots of mist and rain on the fells - very Romantic.

When we finally came out somewhere in a village with paved roads, I looked back at the road we had just been on, and saw a sign next to it that proclaimed "unsuitable for motor vehicles."

the Winter School

2008-03-09T22:14:00.000-07:00

The Winter School at Grasmere is very different from the Summer Conference. Several notable scholars spoke, but most of the attendees were older hobbyists. There were a couple of times when I found myself in the very odd position of being both the youngest and, apparently, the most educated person in the room. I'm not saying that to brag; Wordsworth is not my specialty, and I make no claim to be a Wordsworth scholar. But many of the other people there were, for lack of a better word, fanbois/fangirls. They neither knew nor cared about other poets or authors from the time period (although some of them admitted Coleridge to the discussion by virtue of his relationship with WW); they had come to bask in the glory of all things Wordsworth, and anything else they deemed superfluous at best.

The lectures were mostly aimed at a less scholarly audience, which made it easier to relax and enjoy them. Seamus Perry's lecture on Coleridge and women was a personal favorite, and may even end up helping me with my thesis research. Nick Roe's lecture comparing the Lucy poems to the work of modern poets like Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon was, I think, intentionally provocative. Some of the hobbyists seemed ... offended might be too strong, but certainly a little shocked.

there and back again

2008-03-09T21:28:00.000-07:00

By the time I left England last summer, I had already decided that I wanted to go back to Grasmere this February. I knew I wouldn't be able to go to the next summer conference, but I wanted desperately to go back for something, which left the Winter School. It's shorter, and therefore slightly less expensive, and that seemed to me to be justification enough.

The trip over was much less bewildering this time. My flight into DFW was delayed a bit, which meant I had to hurry to catch my connecting flight to Gatwick, but that was as close as I came to having any kind of trouble. My luggage didn't even get lost.

I had a few hours to kill in London, so of course I went to the British Library again. Gawain and Chaucer were no longer on display, but they'd been replaced by the Beowulf manuscript (squee!). It was open to the part where Beowulf brings Grendel's head back to Heorot. I did notice a sign this time that said "no pictures," so ... no pictures. Sorry, Heidi. The Lindisfarne Gospels were also on display, open to one of the fabulous carpet pages.

Other stuff I was excited about: John Milton's "commonplace book," open to a page where he had made some notes about good and bad monarchies; one of Jane Austen's notebooks, with a dedication to her sister Cassandra; a manuscript copy of Jane Eyre, open to the page that says, "Reader - I married him"; a manuscript copy of Handel's Messiah, open to the Hallelujah Chorus; Lady Jane Grey's prayer book; manuscript copies of lyrics for the Beatles' "Yesterday" and "In My Life." It's overwhelming to walk through the exhibit and see so much history, literary and otherwise, in one place. You know you're not in Kansas any more when there's a whole section of the exhibit just for "Historical Documents: Tudors."

Old time is still a-flying

2008-03-09T21:03:00.000-07:00

Is it March already? Huh. Well, here's what's happened in the past month: I got a haircut. I went to England again, and made some new friends. I came home, and got a kidney infection. I wrote an outline for my thesis. I got a really anomalous email from a student. I went to the dentist. I taught Dryden in the Early Brit class.

I'll write separate posts for some of those things, shall I?

worst phish evar

2008-02-06T19:08:00.000-08:00

I got a phish at my hotmail account. This in itself is not unusual. What's unusual about this one is that it has to be the worst phishing letter I've ever seen. When I get a 419 letter, I expect the grammar and so on to be a little off, because the sender is Nigerian, or at least pretending to be Nigerian. But this is just lazy:

Dear Bank of Lancaster County client,

You have received this email because you or someone had used your account from different locations.

For security purpose, we are required to open an investigation into this matter.

In order to safeguard your account, we require that you confirm your banking details.

The help speeed up to this process, please access the following link so we ca complete the verification

of your Bank of Lancaster County Online Banking Account registration information.

[link redacted]

If we do no receive the appropriate account verification within 48 hours, then we will assume this Bank of Lancaster County

account is fraudulent and will be suspended.

The purpose of this verification is to ensure that your bank account has not been fraudulently used and to combat the fraud

from our community. We appreciate your support and understanding and thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

© Copyright 2007 Bank of Lancaster County is an affiliate of Sterling Financial Corporation.
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The link didn't even work. Amateurs.