11 posts tagged “academia”

The biggest excitement of late is that I finally broke down and got a new computer. It was way past time, and doing anything-- anything, including turning it on-- had become a nightmare on the old one. The new one is muuuuuuch faster, and has more storage space, but moving computers it almost as traumatic as moving house... I can't get the contents of my iTunes to move over except for the things that I'd burned from CDs. I can't afford to buy a computer and upgrade to CS3, so I'm still working with Photoshop two versions ago, which is now refusing to open RAW files. I've downloaded the plug in. Twice. No luck. I can't get my website pages to open up in the application I'd been using to make and modify it, and I have things to add to it. And I don't like Vista. All of which is knocking the excitement of a new machine down about fifty notches.

I was on travel for work this week, which isn't so bad, except that I had to go out to the Eastern Shore (also not so bad-- though, am I wrong in thinking that name redundant? Does VA had a Western shore?), which required driving through Norfolk and VA Beach. Which ended up being a six hour traffic back up odyssey. It took almost three hours to go three miles and made me very glad that we don't live in Norfolk.

Eastern Shore was neat. The work part went fine, and I got up early one morning in search of a place to take a jog on the beach, failed miserably at that, and shot some pictures instead. Sadly, the trip ended with a four hour, traffic-laden return. On the upside, while I was gone a few seeds in an herb container I'd planted sprouted. Yeay! Not that this makes up for having lost my entire herb garden in the deluge last weekend, but it's good none the less.

In the meantime, I got an email from a friend at old job, two jobs back, who said my dissertation had arrived. Pardon? I had no idea what he was talking about. He sent them on to me, and while they were en route, I remembered that when I'd initially completed, had signed off, and submitted my diss manuscript to the library at erstwhile uni, there had been a form where you could request (at an outrageous price for what it is) photocopies of your dissertation from UMI, which is the org that does all the copying and microfiching/microfilming of dissertations in the U.S., if you wanted extra copies. I ordered three-- one for my parents, one for my beloved adviser/second committee member, Prof. DKW, and one for my third committee member. They arrived from two jobs ago old job the other day:

how slow can you go

And yeah. It has been two and a half years. It has been so long that dear Prof. DKW has passed away since I ordered the frigging things (making me feel sad that he may have thought I'd forgotten him). His widow was deaccessioning his library (which was enormous and amazing), as was he in the last bit of his life, so there is nowhere to send the thing. It's been so long that it's kind of uncomfortable sending it to third committee member-- sort of highlighting that we haven't spoken since the paperwork was finally signed, as well as the oogie-ness of getting all of it done, which was not an easy process, even by doctoral dissertation insanity norms. Obviously, my parents will get their copy. But two and a half years? jeeeeeeez. And I opened it up to find that it is not the print out with nice pictures that the copy I got from my Uni library is-- it's a photocopy. No, really, a photocopy. Two and a half yeas for a photocopy? It's bound in hideous plastic covered cardboard in a shade of blue I can only think if institutional elementary school bathroom tile. Perhaps UMI stands for Unbelievably, Mindbogglingly, Inefficient.

Other than that, I read this article, and was depressed and sad, missing my erstwhile home in PP, and just disgusted to see the way these things fall out....

In response to an earlier post, my friend Anita sent me a link to a Dance Your PhD Contest. It appears that this involved mostly scientists and some social scientists. And while I like scientists (and I think it would be hilarious to watch a performance of techne's PhD... I can actually picture some bits of choreography.... though I suppose the main question is whether or not she would perform the rat beheadings?), it makes me sad to think that there weren't really many humanities folks involved. Since mine is in the humanities. Which is clearly why I didn't get an invitation to perform.

Actually, I wonder if it isn't because sooooo many of the humanities people I've encountered have so little humor about their PhD. I guess because it's not really taken all that seriously. I mean, don't get me wrong, people are impressed and all, but they're not nearly as impressed as they are when you say that you have a doctorate in genetics or biochemistry. I think because that's seen as closer to being a "doctor doctor," as I've been told (once at a party, where someone said, ooooooh, so you're not, like, a doctor doctor or anything. Me: Uhm, you mean I'm not a medical doctor? No. I'm a doctor of art history. Her: blank stare. Me: You know, if your art is sick or broken I might be able to heal it. Her: blank stare. Of course, "doctor doctors" do four years of med school and then residencies and stuff that last three to seven years or something along those lines [sidebar question-- were residencies always this long? My grandfather did his in Manhattan, but he and my grandmother definitely were not there for years. I think maybe two.]. So, something in the seven to eleven year range. I spent eight and a half years working on that PhD. So, you know, I may not be able to deliver your baby [or at least not any better than your average cab driver], but I put 25% of my life into that damned degree. Shouldn't that count for something? Sadly, mostly not.) But, see, I think that the not as impressive as an MD or Dr. Scientist degree makes a lot of humanities people squigy. And then they feel like they have to spend a lot of time and effort trumpeting the deep, deep, massive, wide-reaching importance of the work that they do. One might say, at times, rather outsized thoughts and feelings about how far the impact of their study might be. Which I think they do because if they don't then they lose funding and things like that. But then I wonder whether or not part of the reason why the funding may be in peril is because of how silly it sounds when you are talking about how important your study on the impact of the changes in the style of the mickey mouse ears that the mousekateers have worn through the ages. It's a vicious cycle, clearly.

Also, I suppose there is less irony in watching someone in the humanities perform their PhD as an avant garde dance, since I think this is the sort of things that many people suspect we do for fun. "What do I do for fun? Oh, well, lots of things... let me see... Well, I make my own tofu-- that's fun! And I keep an aviary in the back yard, so every Sunday afternoon I commune with the bees. On Tuesday mornings I work on weaving tweed fabric from the hair of my seven cats. I plan to make myself a new tweed jacket with faux suede elbow patches. Hmmm... what else? Oh yes, I grow and dry my own organic tobacco to put in my pipe, which I smoke once a week, on Thursday mornings, which is the day I dedicate to Marx, and think only about the Worker, from rising till bed. Oh yes, and every Saturday I spend six hours practicing my avant garde dance routines, including the one that represents the life of Wittgenstein, another that is a battle in the collective imaginary between Michel Foucault and Ronald Reagan, and, of course, an interpretation on the topic of my dissertation."

So... with that in mind, I think we, those who have written dissertations or theses or even just a really long paper, whether in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, whatever, should all start getting together on Saturday mornings to choreograph not just individual performances, but a full length musical! Who's in?

Geez louise... celebrity party hopping is now the subject of an academic study. One wonders both what applications and implications this might have. How would one use such a study? If it has applications elsewhere, then the implication is that celebrities are "just like us." Which, you know, I'm not going to completely pan the idea, though I have to say that I'm pretty sure that very few of them spend 40+ hours a week sitting at a desk in an office. Alternatively, I have been to very few galas in the last year (quick tally: none), and thus far have never been chased by paparazzi.*

But now that such things are being studied academically, does this mean that celebrobsession is on the wane? Is the pendulum going to swing back towards having news about... well, news, rather than "news" about Britney? (Okay, maybe Britney is a bad example, since her parents finally stepping in seems to have lowered the number of weekly car chase/British accent inflected midnight drug store runs/crotch flashes. But you get what I mean-- par example, I know that there have been incidents of all of the above, despite the fact that I 1) have only ever heard three Britney songs, and all at the gym; 2) don't watch television, don't have cable, and haven't for many, many years). Isn't academic study the death knell of various phenomena?

Also, isn't this just an academic study of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? Sometimes, I am happy I am no longer in the academy, where the professor of postpostmodern Marxist popular culture who writes about the impact of the Mao suit on worldwide fashion keeps trying to trip the professor of celebrity social networking in the hall.

* Which, incidentally, was given to the English language by Fellini, who nicknamed a photographer in La Dolce Vita "Paparazzo"-- "mosquito." I love that this word comes from Fellini. But I digress. 

-

So at the end of October I signed up for National Novel Writing Month. Because, hey, when your plate is stupid full, why not add a little something extra to spice it up? And since I have been having rather distressing bouts of insomnia and didn't go anywhere for Thanksgiving, I managed to "win," hence the logo thingy. Mind you, winning doesn't mean that I wrote anything worth while, or enjoyable, or good, or that is even ever going to see the light of day (because I didn't), it just means that I wrote a little over 50,000 words over the last twenty-six days (I got started a little late). And before you ask, I'm not kidding, it will never see the light of day. Besides, it isn't finished. The story part of it anyway. I think I'm finished with it, story completed or no.

Really, it was more about setting a goal and sticking to it. I'm hoping it will be the start of doing more of that. I think I've been feeling a bit scattered since finishing the Ph.D. in January, which was all one long-ass goal-sticking journey. I think it takes a really long time to readjust to normal, bite-sized goals afterwards. I mean, I had the same goal for eight and a half years, and then all of a sudden, I don't have a goal anymore. It's a little unmooring. Especially when I think that completing the dissertation was very similar to completing a NaNoWriMo novel-- I'm not really convinced that it was worth while, it certainly wasn't enjoyable, not my best writing, and has gone into the university library black hole and will likely never be seen by human eyes again, which is just fine with me. Good to know that I can achieve the same thing in a little under a month.

Onward and ever upward! I'm glad I did it, because I think it has reminded me that setting goals and reaching them on a reasonable timeline is actually something I can do.... grad school was kind of demoralizing, and it's been a slow year of remembering that I actually do know how to do stuff. Useful stuff, even. So on to setting goals that I actually want to reach, and which might have a positive impact on my life and others', rather than simply passing by, to be forgotten and buried.

I saw my friend Cindy last night for the first time in almost two years, which was pretty awesome. She lives back in Edmonton now, which isn't exactly on the way to anywhere that I've been going lately, Alaska not currently on my regular itineraries. The last time I was up there was for New Years 2000-- yes, I spent the millenium drinking way too much at the Black Dog in a place that I think is closer to the North Pole than it is to New York. We had a rockin' time, went down to Banff and to Lake Louise for a whole lotta x-country skiing in the Canadian Rockies, which I highly recommend. I miss seeing her at least a couple of times a year-- I used to drive out to Illinois or to Wisconsin a couple of times a year, and as she reminded me last night, we used to be on the Southeast Asian studies conference circuit, along with a lot of other people whom I haven't seen for many years, so we were pretty much guaranteed to be in the same place and up for a romp through San Diego or Chicago or wherever that year's conference might be. It sort of made me realize that I've been missing the social aspect of the whole conference thing at least as much as I've missed the intellectual inquiry part of it.

Which is what pushed me back towards rereading Barthes in the first place. I'm now reminded as well of some of the issues that I took with it to begin with. I guess I never quite invested in Barthes' intertwining of photography and death. I find it interesting that in addition to connecting photography and death, he connects photography and theater (which I can really get behind), and then theater and death, and then theater, photography, and the tableau vivant. ("...Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.")

Maybe I'm just being easily distracted by the idea of the tableau vivant, which is something that has always fascinated me... where did this idea come from? The art form has been around for centuries, and has infused performances and parlor games, and particularly in the nineteenth century, photography. I'm fascinated by them, particularly the motivation for creating them... regardless, I see the idea of the photograph as an image of the tableau vivant... to an extent. I read that quote in the Barthes about a dozen times yesterday and I think maybe the thing that is bothering me about it is that I wish I'd talked about the tableau vivant aspect of the photographs I wrote about in my dissertation. This is a dumb thing to get annoyed about since the diss is filed and packed away, but I think it's part of what is nagging me about the quote.

It does make me wonder about some of the implications in that for the role of the photographer, particularly when he's pointing directly not to tableau vivant photographs (which often recreated or reinterpreted well known paintings), but street photography. Should the photographer be understood then to be directing the scenes? I've always been interested in the role of the photographer in creating images, and how easily forgotten his or her presence is, particularly in reportage, the photographer is so often elided, folded within the action. What impact does the photographer's presence have on creating the scene that is ultimately captured? What would the scene have been without that presence?

Certainly not new questions... but I don't think any less important for having been asked before. Maybe I'm just bothered by my own presence in the photographs that I make. Barthes' list of photographer's alibis struck home for me ( the "functions" of the photograph, "which are, for the Photographer, so many alibis. These functions are: to inform, to represent, to surprise, to cause to signify, to provoke desire.") When I was an undergraduate back in Brooklyn I had a painting teacher who asked me why I painted. He was a cranky and bitter old man who hadn't been the painting sensation he'd seen himself as becoming when he'd been younger; he'd spent many years leaping around the edges of artistic greatness, knowing people who'd achieved what he'd aspired to... but in the end he just wasn't there. He'd retired from teaching, but kept coming back every semester, haunting the halls and forcing everyone to paint fruit and vegetables (which is what he painted). I hated him. He hated me. Halfway through the semester we declared open war on each other. One day, as he stood looking at a painting I'd made to fulfill and assignment, adhering to the letter of the law, but not the spirit of it, so to speak, he turned to me and said, "Why do you paint?"

He'd said it in order to wound me. He'd said it with disgust, and a student nearby gasped. There was silence in the room. Realizing that he'd overstepped his bounds he tried to pull it back into real inquiry instead of just the barb he'd meant. "What is your motivation? What do you get out of painting?" The room exhaled; people went back to what they were doing. The initial question had pissed me off, and I was surgically focused on it in my anger. But the follow up questions have vexed me ever since (and he didn't even mean to ask them). Less so in thinking about painting (which I haven't really done much of over the last decade) than in thinking about photography. Why do I feel compelled to make images? What is my motivation? Perhaps what I am most keyed into in Barthes' list of alibis is that they are, in fact, alibis; that an alibi includes, by definition, an implication of guilt... that perhaps contained in the guilt is the recognition that photography is both a violent and a selfish activity. I steal souls with my mechanical eye... and enjoy it. And for this, I need an alibi.

The last few days have been insane. First I finally got this email:

Wed, Jan 4 2006

Your submission has been accepted and archived in DSpace.

Wheeeee!! So I call the thesis office to make sure that I'm now done and find out that I'm really really not done. The signature page is printed on non-archival paper and will not be accepted until it is printed on archival paper and re-signed by all of my committee members. It's winter break. I'm in DC and everything that needs to get done is in Ithaca. I've spent the last two days calling every office at the university and sending emails to everyone trying to hunt people down. Found one. The admin from my department found the chair. Then I get an email from the third member: he's in Taiwan about to get on a plane to Burma. shitshitshitshit. He says it's fine to have a proxy sign for him. Another prof proxied for the defense, so there is already paperwork on file for him as a proxy. Spend several hours trying to get in touch with that person.... only to find that he is in Cambodia. So, here it is, 19 hours before the deadline, and I am about to have my degree put off again because of archival paper. I feel like I'm in a Kafka novel.

Fuck.

I made a few more phone calls and tried to come to terms with the fact that I wasn't going to get my degree until May because of something supremely trivial. I mean, I've been waiting eight and a half years for this-- what's another five months? Okay, in the grand scheme of things, not much. But I still want to cry until I throw up.

So I got up at six this morning and started writing emails and then making phone calls. Administrators from three departments were sending things around campus and my friend Myra ran all over the university-- and drove all over town-- to get signatures and drop everything off for me (she gets the five gold star super friend of a lifetime prize). Found a proxy. Signatures done. Dropped off at the office at 10:57-- an hour and three minutes before the deadline.

D-O-N-E

That's right, people, the Doctor is in. WHOOOOOOO--HOOOO!!!

So I get back from San Francisco late this morning, and I'm totally beat and jetlagged. I check my email with the plan to take a nap right afterwards and here is what I find in my mailbox:
Dspace submission rejected: January 3, 2006

To collection: Theses and Dissertations (CLOSED)

Your submission has been rejected with the following explanation:

Jennifer, Great job, just one page that needs correction. Fix the
spacing on the last line on pg 39 and then resubmit.

I don't think this is ever going to end. Is it possible I've enterd some circle of hell? WTF???

Here's what my week has looked like:

DSpace: Submission Rejected Fri Dec 23, 2005

To collection: Theses and Dissertations (CLOSED)

Your submission has been rejected with the following explanation:

I have reviewed your documents and you need to make the
following changes. 1. All margins must be set at 1.6 for the left and 1.1
for all others. The preliminary section is currently at 2.25" and the
main text is about 1.75". 2. Change the heading on the List of
Illistrations to LIST OF FIGURES 3. Fix the widow on pg xxv 4. remove the
page break on pg 222 continue the archival documents cites directly
after the end of the bibliography section. Make the above corrections and
resubmit.

DSpace: Submission Rejected Fri Dec 23, 2005

To collection: Theses and Dissertations (CLOSED)

Your submission has been rejected with the following explanation:

I have reviewed your lateest draft and you need to correct
the following: 1. 24 pt space the title on the title page. 2. In the
preliminary section you have 2 pg xxii's. 3. In the main text you
missing pg 39 and 216 and you have two pg 78's. Also the page #'s don't
correspond to the Table of Contents, check page #'s on the List of figures
also to make sure they are on the correct page. Make these changes and
resubmit.

DSpace: Submission Rejected Thu Dec 29, 2005

To collection: Theses and Dissertations (CLOSED)

Your submission has been rejected with the following explanation:

Just one page that needs correction. Fix the widow on pg
xiii. Move at least one line over from pg xii. Then resubmit.

The first of these took SIX HOURS OF WORK. The second took another two hours. I'm sure the last won't be more than a few minutes. But I feel that I should take this moment to note that I used the template, available online on the Graduate School website under instructions for submitting your dissertation, in order to format this thing. Yes, I had many hours of extra work tacked on to this process because I, stupidly, thought that I could use the template provided by the graduate school without having to correct it. I'm not sure what possessed me to think that the graduate school would provide a correct template. Obviously, I wasn't thinking clearly.

Okay, so it's taking longer than I'd planned to write up those blog posts about the trip. It's taken me a bit to catch up with all the stuff I wasn't doing at work while I was away, and then I went to Chicago to see a friend I haven't seen in ages, and more work when I got back, follwed by a work trip to Pittsburgh, catching up with work I missed when I got back, and then it was Thanksgiving with the cooking and the cleaning and the cooking and the cleaning, and I finally got a response from my advisor on my nearly-all-rewritten dissertation. (Drum roll). Passed.

Finally.

The upside of passing is that I can now forget those eight hellish years and bury my dissertation somewhere in the back of the closet and wait for my future children to dig it out and ask about it. The downside is that it needs to get formatted in such a way that it can be microfilmed or microfiched or whatever archaic form of filing they are now doing. And whatever way that is, it is not the way in which is it now being. Which means a large number of hours must now be dedicated to things like pagination. All of this has to be done to the satisfaction of the Thesis Queen, who Reigns Over Theses and Dissertations At The Library, and needs to be done by January 6th if I'd like to get my degree in January rather than in May. (and I would). Which is all well and good, but for the fact that I am going out of town to a wedding the week before Christmas, and another the week after Christmas (in Florida and California, respectively), and also going home for Christmas itself which, I might add, falls inconveniently on a weekend this year, so that my effective deadline for filing is really December 15th.

Jesus. What am I doing? I gotta go.