west of the moon

working to deadline.

When M and I got back home after our Christmas travels, I started thinking about my dissertation with a renewed sense of energy, but also a renewed sense of panic.  Because it's due really soon, you know?  I have a 19 May filing deadline.  That's not much time.  I made a kind of a promise to myself: I'll have the third chapter done by the end of January.  It seemed a little ambitious, but also necessary. 

And now, look!  It's the end of the January, and I'm turning this chapter over to my advisor on Wednesday.

What this means, of course, is that I'm working like mad to finish it by Wednesday.  The stupid thing is written, mostly.  I've got fifty-plus pages, and the bulk of the content is written.  What I'm doing now, and what I'll be doing right up until I hand this in, is cleaning up my notes, which are scattered throughout the manuscript and say things like "Analysis of this?" and "Ref to secondary lit?" and "Transition sentences" and "concluding section!!!"  This is by -far- the most annoying part of writing, ever.  It's giving me a headache.  But it'll get done.

Menand on James

The biography is made to lend authenticity to the philosophy: James, too, knew pessimism and despair, and this is how he willed himself to overcome them.

Except that he never overcame them.  Simon's biography emphasizes, more fully than any earlier one, the persistence of James's ill health.  For James was depressive all his life.  And this may be the diagnosis that explaines the insufficiency of all other diagnoses.  Commentators prefer to assume that James was despondent in the years after his graduation from medical school because of some problem--a family problem, a sexual problem, a career problem, an identity problem, a philosophical problem.  But depression is not a problem; it's a weather pattern.  Under its cloud, everything else is a problem.  When the weather changes, these problems disappear, or become "opportunities", or "challenges"--until dark skies return.

Throughout James's life, evidence in letters or diaries that he has recovered his health and spirits is always followed, sooner or later, by evidence that he has had a relapse.

-- Louis Menand, from "William James and the Case of the Epileptic Patient".

week in review.

On the plus side, I wrote a lot this week.  Like, a lot.  I have a preliminary first draft of my next chapter, and it's about fifty pages, and I've banished the last shadows of doubt about being done by May.  I sat down with my advisor the other day and came up with a schedule, what has to be written when, what should be revised when.  I'm in for a rough couple of months, but it's doable.

On the minus side, I'm sick.  I'm having sneezing fits and coughing fits, and I feel just tired all the time.   I feel like I've been sick for months, this same low-level cold that just won't quite go away, and I don't know why.  I eat well!  I take vitamins!  It's not fair.

AHA, Day Four: The Great Escape

Sunday morning, I woke up fairly early, but my roommate had already left.  On the last day of the conference, most of the vendors in the book exhibit sell their display wares at half-price, and some go even cheaper or give them away.  My roommate, she had made a list of books she wanted, and was up early enough to be at the book exhibit when the doors opened. 

I liked my roommate, I really did, but having the room to myself felt like an incredible luxury.  Especially in the morning.  Let me explain: when I'm sharing a hotel room with someone I don't know particularly well, I generally dress in the bathroom.  I take my clothes in there with me when I go in for a shower, and get dressed right after the shower.  This fact is paired with a second fact, which is that at a conference like this (all potential future colleagues and job-search anxiety) I wear pantyhose every day, and a third fact, which is that this particular hotel, despite being generally spiffy, did not have a fan in the bathroom.  Every single day of the conference, I was getting dressed in my nice suit and pretty dress shirts, pantyhose and all, in a muggy and damp just-post-shower hotel bathrooom.  The effect was kind of like, I don't know, being a kid at summer camp and trying to change into a bathing suit that hasn't quite dried from the day before, when it feels a little clammy and sticks to your skin?  That, except with pantyhose.  It was horrible.

I puttered around the room a little, enjoying the space, when suddenly it occurred to me that if I left soon, I could probably escape from Philadelphia without having to really talk to anyone.  I know that my stories all sound a little grim, but I actually had a great weekend, and I liked everyone I talked to.  By the end, though, I still had a huge case of conference fatigue.  It doesn't matter how much I liked the socializing, I just wanted to go home.  So I packed up the rest of my stuff in a bit of a rush and skipped out for the train station. 

This was, at first, a good plan.  There was a Dunkin' Donuts near the train station, hoorah hooray, and I had a good book to read and the train came quickly and I didn't even have to fight with the train-ticket machine.  Sure, I was at the airport two and a half hours before my flight, but I was able to just sit somewhere alone and decompress a little.  But lo, it all balances out in the end.  My flight home connected through Denver, and the Denver airport was just all chaos and misery, delayed and cancelled flights, frustrated passengers shuffling through a series of gate changes, and I sat in the Denver airport through a three-hour delay for my outgoing flight.  I finished my very good book, and resorted to buying trashy novels in the airport, and was just exhausted by the time I got home.

But I did get home.  Overall, I had a good time at the conference, but I'm still so glad to be home.

AHA, Day Three: The Break Room

For all that I've been known to complain about my university and my department, they really are very good to us from time to time.  At this conference, for instance, they set up a graduate student break room / lounge.  What that means, in practice, is that the department paid for a hotel room that grad students could use as a place to hang out.  One of the junior faculty members is staffing the break room; he gets to sleep there too, so he gets a free hotel room out of the deal, but he has to stay there all day as well and make sure the little plates of pretzels and M&Ms are kept filled. 

Saturday afternoon, I stopped by the break room, to see who was around and to say hello.  I had to sit through another few rounds of the "no, no interviews, but I already had the plane ticket and figured I'd come anyway, see what else was going on" conversation.  One guy came by after an interview that, in his estimation, hadn't gone particularly well, but when people tried to ask what happened, he deflected the conversation.  "Nah, who cares, because look!  I learned this great trick from the shoeshine guy downstairs."  Having shown up at the hotel fifteen minutes early for his interview, this guy had decided to spend the time getting  shoeshine, and the shoeshine guy showed him a new way to tie his shoes.  "Here, look, you can do this--" he showed us how the whole bow untied just when he tugged one end of the lace.  (Trying to tell this story to Matt later, I ran into some trouble; "I've been doing this the same way since I was four," he said, "and my shoes always untie when I pull on one end of the lace."  The next morning, putting on my own shoes, I remembered the key detail.  This was a double-knot that could untie with one tug.  That makes it a little more impressive.)

The best part, though, was apparently what the shoeshine guy had taught my colleague about the Three Ls.  "First you look me in the eye when I'm talking to you," the shoeshine guy was reported to have said, "and then you listen to what I'm saying, and that's how you learn.  Look, listen, and learn."  This is a superior alternative to the three Rs, in the shoeshine guy's estimation, because "writing" doesn't even start with R, and neither does arithmetic, so people lose faith in the three Rs.  The guy who was telling the story said that he'd just laughed at the time, but now, in the wake of his disastrous interview, wondered if he should have pulled out that bit of folk wisdom during a difficult moment.

One popular topic of conversation, in the break room, was the address given by one of our faculty members on the first night of the conference.  I meant to go, because I like this professor quite a lot, but I didn't want to miss my only chance for dinner with Dawn.  It sounds like I missed a great talk, though; she was talking about using family stories and children's memories to reconstruct historical narratives, which sounds like an interesting methodological approach.  I was a little surprised by the way so many of the other grad students just dismissed the whole idea.  They all seemed to agree that personal narratives have no place in the work of the historian, even to the point of saying that (for instance) using oral histories of war survivors has at best a marginal utility for reconstructing the history of the war.  And I honestly have to wonder if I just misunderstood the conversation, because I remember it having this overlay of assuming that the documentary record has some real valid claim to objectivtity, which sounds kind of daft to me, since the documentary record is as much a personal record as anything else.  You always have to take bias and context into account.  These were smart guys, and presumably good at what they do, so if I think I heard them implying that documentary evidence can be read as an unbiased source, then I must have just misunderstood what they were saying.

I left for a while, to check out the book exhibit (free books!), and when I went back to the break room, it was empty except for that one professor (who, you'll remember, couldn't leave).  I stayed and talked to him for a while, about the job market and the whole process.  He's got a degree from a good school, praise from his advisors, and a book deal for publication of his dissertation.  And it took him five years to get a tenure-track job.  He had some ideas for what I can do with myself if I don't get a job this year, and while it was a little touch-and-go in terms of being a depressing conversation, by the end of it I really did feel better.  It's looking increasingly likely that I'm just not going to get a job this cycle, but it's also increasingly clear that this cycle isn't the end of the story.  Things will work out, one way or another.  So that's good to know.

AHA Day Three: The Smoker

As it turns out, I do know a bunch of people here.  Tonight was the Berkeley "smoker", a big party for all of our affiliates, faculty and students and alumni and whatnot.  (I gather that these parties used to involve cigars, and while the smoke is gone, tradition dictates that we keep the name.)

I know a lot of people here, mostly other graduate students.  Some of them I've seen around the graduate lounge but never really talked to before, and some of them I've had classes with, or taught with.  A couple of them are people I'm friendly with, and by this point in the weekend I'm disproportionately grateful to run into someone who looks happy to see me and gives me a hug to say hello.

Not long after I arrived at the party, I went over to a group of students, and one of them got all happy-looking when she saw me, greeted me by name, came around to give me a hug, and for a minute I wasn't sure who she was.  Well, no, that's not true.  I knew her name, and I remembered what she was studying, and I remembered that her hair used to be longer and blonder.  But I also knew that we never had any classes together, we never worked together--I couldn't remember what our connection was, but I knew we had one.  While we were talking, it all clicked back in to place.  One summer, a while before I started grad school, I was dating this guy who was renting a house in Somerville with a bunch of friends, and she was dating one of the other guys in the house.  We ran into each other at the house once or twice, most notably on the night when her boyfriend and my boyfriend decided to throw a dinner party, fourteen guests and a seven-course French meal straight out of Julia Child.   (And they did a fabulous job of it, too, much to our collective surprise.)  But I didn't date that particular guy for very long, and I pretty quickly fell out of touch with that whole group of people.  Then, several years later, during my first week in graduate school, I saw this woman at one of the new-student orientation functions, and we spent the better part of an hour furtively staring at each other before just sitting down together to figure out why we each thought the other one looked familiar.

She asked me the same question everyone asks: "how are your interviews going?"  I'm so tired of talking about the fact that I don't have interviews. I'm starting to feel like a bad-luck charm; I swear that I've seen people start looking for ways out of talking to me once they find out.  But she doesn't have any either.  She graduated last year, filed and walked and everything, and she's been doing some lecturing in the department.  She's actually going to be teaching one of the major large-scale departmental survey courses this spring, and her advisor has set up some meetings for her with publishers who are interested in her dissertation manuscript, but she says she found the job process kind of overwhelming.  "I only applied for two jobs this year," she says, and names two high-profile schools that I've also applied to.  Asking around a little, we discover that nearly every graduate student in our department who's on the market this year applied for these same two jobs.  The schools in question are top-notch, both in terms of reputation and location, and the job descriptions were open-ended enough that almost everyone could find a way to justify it.  I haven't been asked to interview, though, and neither had she, and neither had anyone else.  No one was interviewing for those jobs, no one had even heard of anyone they knew interviewing for those jobs, and yet we're all assuming that interviews for those jobs are taking place this weekend.  This is how information flows, or doesn't flow, in this process.  This is what I mean about the black hole and the event horizon.

AHA Day Three: Starbucks

You know how when you get a fancy coffee drink at Starbucks, and they take the order and write things on a paper cup and send you to another part of the counter to wait?  And you stand there with all the other people waiting for drinks, and then when your drink is ready, they call out the name of the thing you ordered, so that you can pick it up?  I'm in a Starbucks, and I ordered a fancy coffee drink, and I went and waited with everyone else, and when they called out my drink and I picked it up, I swear to you this other woman there glared at me.  One of those unmistakable dagger-death-eyes I-hate-you glares.  I have to assume it's because of my drink, and that she's thinking that anyone who orders a no-whip soy-milk mocha is some kind of inconsistently-calorie-counting prat.  It's days like this that make me wish I had a little badge I could wear, a pin on my lapel that says "I'm lactose intolerant, stop looking at me like that."

AHA Day Two: The Hotel Bar

Last night was quiet, and strange.  I'm used to different types of conferences and conventions, ones full of evening parties.  Even at the last academic conference I went to, there were receptions every night, big social events.  Here, not so much.  It's possible that they're happening all over the place and I've just missed it, but it doesn't feel that way.  I had dinner with a couple of other graduate students, Malaysian curries and clay pots, and then spent a while talking with my roommate.  By the time she was ready to go to sleep, though, I was just feeling restless, so I grabbed a book and headed down to the hotel bar. 

I'd explained this dilemma to my roommate.  What I really wanted to do was have a glass of wine and read for a while, but I was worried that I'd look sad and pathetic, reading and drinking alone.  Normally that wouldn't trouble me, but I can't shake the sense of being under scrutiny.  If someone notices me sitting alone with my glass of wine and my book, won't they remember that if they're ever in a position to deal with me professionally?  But there was absolutely nothing else to do, so I decided to just take the risk.

As it turned out, I should have been less concerned with the possibility of looking pathetic and more concerned with the fact that I'd be paying exorbitant prices for a glass of wine.  But it was okay; the wine was good, the ritual was soothing, and the book is amazing.  It's American Studies by Louis Menand.  He's one of my favorite New Yorker contributors, his review of Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate was a masterpiece of both book criticism and social science commentary, and The Metaphysical Club (which I shamefully only got around to reading a few months ago) is a brilliant treatment of a set of ideas that I cover in my dissertation.  Except, of course, that Menand covers them better, and from an entirely different perspective.

I picked up American Studies at the bookstore the other day, part of my last-minute pre-conference shopping trip (total haul: three dress shirts, two pairs of stockings, two books).  I meant to read it on the plane, but mostly I slept on the plane, and I've been reading it during other downtimes this weekend.  It's a collection of biographical essays about major figures in American intellectual and cultural development, looking at individuals in their social context, examining particular aspects of both their lives and their previous biographies.  The two essays that open the book may as well have been written for the express purpose of drawing out my affections. 

The first deals with William James's history of depressive episodes.  First of all, I love William James beyond all reason.  Second, Menand shares many of my impressions and interpretations of James.  (People say all sorts of things about James, and have all sorts of ways of understanding his life and work.  I can't claim that mine has any particular priority, but sometimes I read books or articles about James and it's as though they're written in a foreign language, or written about someone else entirely.  Both in this essay and in The Metaphysical Club, I get the sense that Menand sees James the same way I do.)  Third, a lot of the essay revolves around critiques of the existing James historiography; Menand looks at some major scholarly interpretations of some incidents in James's life and disagrees with those interpretations, and he does it in the way that I love best, which is to say that he checks things against common sense, he evaluates documents in their full context, and he looks for an evidentiary record rather than accepting other historians' statements as fact. 

The second essay in the book looks at Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. , and I'm not sure how much I can praise it without basically just recapping it, so I'll let it go.  For now.  But it's brilliant, and full of ideas that I find really engaging and exciting, and and and.  And it's a great book, okay?

So that was how my night ended, drinking overpriced wine in a hotel bar and reading Louis Menand's essays about Pauline Kael and William S Paley and "the old New Yorker".  At one point, an older man (with one of those well-trimmed professorial beards I mentioned earlier) came up to the bar with an empty glass in his hand and gestured to get the bartender's attention.  He smiled at me and commented that a person can sure go through a lot of money quickly when they're buying drinks at a place like this.  I laughed and agreed with him.  While the bartender was pouring a new glass of Jameson's on the rocks, the man told me that he was having such a good time he didn't mind spending so much money.

"The first reason," he said, "is that my wife isn't here."

"No one to look disapproving and ask exactly how many of those--" [nod to the Jameson's] "--you've had already?"

"Exactly!  In general I'd rather she were here, but this in this particular case it's okay.  But the second reason is the good reason.  That man over there--" and he waved vaguely in the direction of his table, where an even older man was waiting "--was my dissertation advisor.  Thirty years ago!  And he's here, and I'm here, and we're drinking together."  He picked up his drink, put his money down on the bar, started to turn away.  "And this time he can't grade me on anything.  It's a good weekend, that we both get to be here."  He patted my shoulder, said goodnight, and went back to his table.

AHA, Day Two: Overheard in the hallways

"...because what you're talking about is curriculum reform..."

"...does he really like Van Morrison that much?  For eighty bucks you'd think it was, like, Springsteen or something..."

"...and it wasn't even a real job interview, he called it an informal conversation about options..."

"...great discount on petite sizes..."

"...try Sesame Street?  He usually calms right down..."

"...that's where you start talking about salary negotiations..."

"...just tell them that you're accepting an offer from a different institution..."

"...because I've cited your work extensively in my new book..."

"...don't care what he told you, that's not a diamond..."

AHA Day One: Insomnia, Disorientation, Margaritas.

I had a six am flight.  Six in the morning!  That's ridiculous!  I had to be up at, like, three-thirty.  And I couldn't sleep anyway, so what does it matter?  Possibly the only good thing about that setup is knowing that I'll really need to sleep on the plane, thus bolstering my resolve to not buy coffee at the airport.  Buying coffee at the airport is the doorway to heartache: you spend over two dollars for a large cup of completely undrinkable garbage, all the while wishing you could just go home.  Every time I go to the airport, I make myself two promises: one, I will not buy their evil coffee, and two, I will not buy trashy novels so bad that I will later leave them in the seat-back pocket just to get rid of them.  I think this is the first trip in years where I've kept both of those promises. 

I will spare you the air-travel stories.  I will refrain from trying to wring some narrative out of the strange old man who first insisted that I was in his seat and then later stole my airplane pretzels while I was sleeping.  I will not pretend that there is anything interesting about my very close connection in Chicago, or my adventures with the train-ticket vending machines at the Philadelphia airport.  (Although, for the love of god, how hard would it be to make those a little more comprehensible?  They've got, like, thirty buttons, only three of which do anything.)   It all comes to the same end anyway, which is that I'm here, at this conference. 

On the jetway, boarding the flight to Philadelphia, the two women behind me were talking about problems they'd had with their connecting flights, and then one said "so are you here for the AHA?"  And yes, she was, they both were.  As was the man in front of me, and the woman in front of him, and we all laughed about how this flight was the AHA shuttle.  But I'd already guessed that they were going to the same place I was, because they all had that look.  I've been seeing it all around the hotel and conference center--even if these people weren't wearing namebadges, I think I would know they were here for the conference.  And I'm not sure what it is.  It isn't any of the easy stereotyped things you'd guess; it's not like everyone looks absent-minded and has poorly-fitted suitjackets or anything.  (Although there is a particular type of beard that you see on a lot of older male professors that I don't think I've ever seen out in the civilian (as it were) population.)  Stylish, but not like hipsters.  Dressed up, but not like businessfolk.  I can't quite pin it down.

I feel a little lost here.  At the last conference I went to, my overwhelming impression was that I was part of a community.  I knew people, and even when I didn't know people, I recognized a lot of them.   I don't know anyone here.  The last conference I went to was the History of Science Society annual meeting, people who share my sub-field and speciality; this is the American Historical Association annual meeting, the huge umbrella group.  The scale is very different, and while I have to assume that someone feels a sense of community here, it's not one that's apparent to me.  I don't see any familiar faces when I walk through the meeting areas.  There's pretty much nothing in the scheduled programming that interests me.  But that's the point, right?  That's why I came here, because I want to meet people, I want to become a part of this larger community.  No matter how comfortable I feel in my sub-field, I won't be doing my job right if I just hang out there and ignore the broader dialogue. 

Last night, though, I punted on the question of large-scale socializing and just had some fun.  I met up with Dawn, a woman I've known for years from an online community but never actually met in person.  We spent a while walking around the downtown area, finally ending up at this great little restaurant that specializes in french fries and margaritas.  We had some french fries and a some mango margaritas, and a lot of really wonderful conversation.  -And- I found out that what she's doing in graduate school is not only incredibly smart and fascinating, but connected (admittedly in an oblique way that's only visible to me) to what I'm doing in graduate school, so that was awesome.  And it went a long way towards balancing out that lost feeling that I'm getting at the conference.