13 posts tagged “diffidence”

Every academic probably has his or her own inner Pierre Bourdieu.  Mine also talks like Céline.  Often I think, "Getting a Ph.D. in comparative literature isn't such a bad deal," and then the ghost of Pierre-Louis-Ferdinand rears up and says, "It's all shit!... a crock, a real carrion-flambé!... mon dieu!"  This usually happens when someone talks about comparative literature in the age of World/Global/Planetary Consciousness, as in this recent book:

Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization

Not that I recommend reading it per se, but it's one of several on this theme.  I think it's fair to say that its authors support making comparative literature more inclusive (or less exclusive), more wide-ranging, more in step with an internationalized, globalized world.  So here is the story:

If you apply to a comparative literature program in the U.S., you need to demonstrate proficiency in at least one, and usually two, languages other than English.  The status of English is uncertain: this is the U.S. and any grad student here has to know English to study, but you don't technically have to study English literature along with your other literatures.  If you are going to study English literature, this is a perfectly good place to do it.  If you are going to study literature in another language, the U.S. can be a good place for it, but you'll probably also need to go abroad.  There is no formal arrangement or expectation for this; there is usually some money, but you'll likely also need to get money from another source to support yourself.  Essentially, then, the field in the U.S. (and, I think, in other countries) isn't formally international: the major professional credential is tied to a particular university in a particular country, and all arrangements to travel must be made by individual students with individually chosen institutions, funding sources, NGOs, whatever.  I have been told that, as a native English-only speaker, you can't get a job in a non-English literature without going abroad, ideally often.  So who should study comparative literature in the U.S.?

- People fluent in several languages
- People with ties to more than one country
- People looking for jobs in English
- People looking for jobs in languages for which there's a scarcity of teachers
- People willing and able to travel like maniacs

Now, what does space have to do with books?  Books, after all, are portable and translatable.  Literature courses take place in seminar rooms in universities; the texts can be purchased at the local bookstore.  Films can be ordered and screened in university buildings.  Art is mechanically reproducible.  How much of these travels make it into a course?  Probably very little.  How much into scholarly work?  The fruits of conversations with scholars abroad; archival research; acquaintance with the physical layout of cities and towns; better knowledge of language; acquisition of telling anecdotes; intellectual deracination....  class markers...  names for dropping... mon dieu!!

You love to travel.  You love to read books.  You subscribe to the New Yorker.  You live in New York.  You are a student of comparative literature.  You sleep on your notebook on the train.  You are beverage-conscious.  This is still the game; we just don't write nearly as well as Erich Auerbach anymore.

What I'm getting at is not an attack on real people (all I've provided here are caricatures) but an expression of my own inner conflict: on the one hand are my intellectual interests; and on the other a quiet, creative life of social and communal commitment which comes quite naturally to me, but isn't really compatible with all that moving around.  Everything I've learned, literally, I have learned in seven weeks outside the U.S. and nearly 28 years within a pretty small area inside it.  That's not The Official Best Life, but it is who I am.   I love travel, but I can't fake extensive experience with it, and I am starting to fear that I'll never translate very well out of my rarefied— if still perforce "global"— milieu.  And the habitual stasis has probably made me too exacting: I want to see the world, and read its books, but I want the real world, the true!  Good luck, right?

The "academia" tag is as large as the "berlin" tag these days, I see.  That's abominable.

I'm falling asleep.  Got up to say good-bye to P. when he left for the airport, thought I reset the alarm, fell slowly asleep again, woke up twelve-or-so minutes before I had to leave to catch my train.  I blinked helplessly at the ceiling for three minutes, then hauled myself up, brushed my teeth & hair, threw some clothes on and had just enough time to stop at the "Raw Energy" smoothie window and buy two raw-fruit-and-nut bars for breakfast and lunch: 160 calories, 150 calories, enough to get you through a morning raw.  I finished reading this book on the train:

Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (boundary 2 b

To be honest, I totally bought this one for the cover.  I have also bought strange classics monographs for their covers.   I understand other women do this with shoes.  I think if someone offered me a pair of reasonably comfortable shoes with Xu Bing's artwork on them in a red-and-chiaroscuro pattern, in fact, I'd be delighted.  Fake Chinese script!  Fake leather!   No lie!  I also have a writer/aesthete's sneering disdain for cultural studies, in my (many) intemperate moments, so this wasn't exactly an intuitive choice.  Oh, and...  I don't study Chinese literature... but more on that below.  I circled around this book for a month or so at Moe's, anyway, and finally it became clear that no one was going to buy it but me.  For Good Or Ill.

I've been feeling homesick for Madison for the last few days, in ways I can't explain.  We're accustomed to this idea that outside forces shape us, that identity is a history of transactions with the world, and we recall mostly those transactions and collisions: but we remember not only things, but our own history of being as well; we remember our identities, as it were.  It's not describable places or situations I recall, or even odors or colors, but a self in the world.  And that world now has changed— I'm in a different environment— so the gestalt, figured in memory and consciousness, changes too.  I remembered being myself, as though it were distant, as though something harmless but ineluctable had intervened to translate me from one spot to another.  A pane of glass; a glass-bottomed boat.

You may laugh.  Moving around in the U.S. is nothing; moving from one hippy college town to another is no great shakes.  Not like moving from Tanzania to Canada, or Siberia to Spain.

But observe the form of these sentences.  That is not as much as this.  This is not to be underestimated.  Focusing on this risks marginalizing that, that there, and that other thing, all of which cry out for attention.  We need a robust theory.  We cannot have a robust theory, so we must practice an operational wariness.  We need to talk to one another.  We need to talk.  We can't talk just now.  I can't talk about this.  I don't know why it's hard.  I should just be able to speak.  This dislocation is nothing.  I can walk on it.  This isn't a good place to talk.  The rents are going up.  I smell burning leaves here; I smell an open sewer there (smells like Thailand!, she said, twelve years ago); I am on a train, the train-talk, the secret language of trains, the fact that I experience an earthquake as the conversion of house into swiftly-stopping train—

At the library.  I have been lying fallow for too long: a week and a day.  This week could have been a century; I pricked my finger, swooned, and blurred my view of the future.  Now we start anew.  Five books like five bright birds, spines and songs.  Which to read?

Nabokov's Onegin is good, by the way, I think.  Amusing in his efforts to wring every last Newton of syntactic force from the few vestiges of a case system in English: him, them, us— sometimes clunky, sometimes astounding, it surely has no equal.  All of Pushkin in Russian is online, ten volumes.  I studied Russian for a year, almost ten years ago now; I remember almost nothing, and my motives for the study were bleak.  But for years afterwards the owner of my favorite café in Madison would ask me how the Russian was going, even when I had a pile of German books in front of me.  I never want to lose anything (other than linguistics, which I mostly hated; even now I shudder when I encounter certain themes in analytic philosophy, remembering hours of uncomprehended Gricean implicature and government and binding theory); I want to redeem the lost hours etc. etc.  This desire has not proved to have any bearing on the job market for slavicists, or on my irrational fear of Russia and, um, its food.  (Is it any scarier than German food?  Unlikely.  I... like... beets...  I don't know.)

As if on cue, the one woman I know who studies Russian at Berkeley scampered past me en route to the stacks; I whispered her name, but she didn't hear me, unsurprisingly.  I should email her.  I should talk to some human being in town before I snap.  The 24-hour Cammie Show at the house (special guest star Not-Having-A-Job!) is making me squirrelly...

Like everything else that reminds me of the bankruptcy of a bizarrely persistent adolescent fantasy, this article made me briefly, horribly sad.  Those of you who know me know it would take an act of God for me to make art as part of a scene, that the thought of anyone looking to me and my work for guidance or inspiration is purely nauseating, and that I have even more trouble "talking to" indeterminate, diffuse collective entities than I have communicating one-on-one with people.  So being part of a vanguard: bah.  My own habits of mind and production are totally sufficient to exclude me, no matter what "the culture" is doing, so any sense of nostalgia is totally misplaced.

So why would I care otherwise?  I'm not a consumer or patron, really.  What's Hecuba to me?  Why can't I write off the idea of a vital artistic community and forget about it?

On reflection, this seems like a pretty stupid series of comments, so caveat lector.  This post may last only fifteen seconds itself.

- Missed flight
- Booked flight on FedEx plane (itinerary said: "board in middle of highway") with layover in Huntsville, Alabama
- Mugged on way to airport
- Taxi driver also mugged (later), said this was a lot of trouble to make sure I got to Belgium
- Broke up with P over conference-related stress
- Was somehow responsible for U.S. failure in Iraq
- Forgot to pack underwear

All right, everyone, I'm off to Brussels!  See you Monday!

P.S. The above were all in a single night, by the way.  "Tea before bedtime... there'll be trouble to-night..."

Cheney's on the news telling everyone the insurgents want us to vote Democratic!  Paul points out that I'll be in Belgium by the time the election results come in—"so you could just not come back."  It's true.  It's going to hurt, as usual.

Author, at library: I have a lot of work to do, gee, don't I though!
Chat program: Meeee!
Author, one hour later: [hungry] [leaving library]
Book of Modern Urdu Poetry on Shelf: Meeee!
Author, trudging towards food: I still have a lot of work to do, don't I.
Chat program, book: [guilty silence]

As usual.

Do I say, It's great, or do I say, I like it...?  Or do I simply say: it it it it it

That recurring line from The Adventures of Augie March: We all have bitterness in our chosen thing.  Said of Christ, initially, I think.  If you've chosen to live, you know, it's trivial.  But how do I write in a desiccated trance like this one about poetry?  This is my job, and my current level of incompetency.  I could, over time, peel every layer off until I've gotten to the core of it, and who would vouch for my speeches then?  For my scripts?  My divinations?  My lousy trilingual alingual grammar?  Pfft.

Everything before Poeta en Nueva York is performance — much after that as well — but in those poems he begs for an interlocutor.  Yo lo digo.  There is prophecy, mad laughter, long shuddering intakes of breath.  It's fucking exhausting to read: after those 50 pages I am spent, I tell you, os lo digo yo.  You hit a point of crisis at home and go abroad, with a post at a foreign university, and two months after you arrive the stock market crashes. 1929.  Who among you would not flip out?  So there's an explanation for this madness — not a method, however, wrong Aristotelian cause.  The form the poems take, their denseness, is almost certainly the result of information overload, resulting not in ennui but mania.  (So Simmel may be obliquely right, and I may have disproved my own theory: I can still say it's not Baudelairean, however.  Or can I?  Plenty of spleen... phantasmagoria... et ideal...  but no odes to Walt Whitman in Les Fleurs du Mal, certainly.)

All right.  Up-to-7-page precis due tomorrow, FYI.  If it's an up-till-7-a.m. precis, I am not responsible for the consequences.

Two new engineers collared me, or corraled me.  "So you're a reader," said one.  "Who do you think is the best contemporary American novelist?"

I figured that whatever argument ensued would not leave me crying on the floor, and said Pynchon.  He was overjoyed.  He'd read all of Pynchon's books!  ... Did I like David Foster Wallace?  I said, truthfully, that I thought his best asset was his sense of humor and I preferred it to his attempts at profundity, which other people do better.  That might have been more than he wanted to know.  Slowly, slowly, though, I think I am learning to make small talk with people.

It's a nice distraction from the increasingly maddening efforts to write a Personal Statement.  They all come out like Ezra's, only more negative, to the point at which I wonder if I'd better just write "what I really think" and then negate every sentence, one by one.  Here is the problem: the personal statement is neither a cover letter nor an essay, but a peculiar hybrid of the two.  It may end up being sterile.  I can write an essay; I can write a cover letter; I can't imagine how to combine them.

Dear Admissions Committee:

I am interested in your position as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Comparative Literature.  I am currently completing a master's degree in this field at Thinly Veiled University, specializing in German and Spanish prose fiction of the 20th century.  I am also interested in poetry, philosophy, the relationship between literature and history/ historiography, and narrative theory, and I have some familiarity with deconstruction, the Frankfurt School, and the work of Bakhtin.  In terms of languages, I have studied Spanish since I was 11 and took a literature course in Berlin this past summer, where I received a grade of * for work done entirely in German; I can read French and Italian and intend to learn Latin soon.

Your department seems like a good match for my interests for several reasons.  Several of your full professors' research combines philosophy with literary study in compelling and novel ways, for instance Professor X (not his real name)'s book on Parcel Mroust or Professor Y's recent study of Plato.*  These works have directly helped me in my own literary investigations**, but they evince a flexibility and clarity of thought which would surely be an asset to students in the program as well.  From my perspective, then, your department has much to offer.  As a student in your firm program, I would hope to reciprocate by lending my exacting skills with language, fidelity to argumentative logic, creative problem-solving and patience as a teacher and mentor to the varied tasks of a graduate student.

My references, writing sample, transcripts, GRE scores and application fee are included with this letter. If you have any other questions or require other documentation, please contact me at your convenience.  I am grateful for the opportunity to apply and look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
the author

* Come on, that could be anyone.
** Blue stockings, brown nose

You know?  That's so much easier than knocking their socks off with fluent, lofty prose.  Which way did the socks go on first?  What if I just kick their feet out from under them instead?  Raaaah.

First panic attack of the school year.  Lay in bed thinking about life and narrative.

Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night: much less a detective story than a campus novel—there's a bit of intrigue, but it's attenuated enough to allow her some speculation about the nature of detective-novel-writing, the ethics of crime and punishment, the creative process, youth and old age, etc.  I don't want to hear about how rosy a picture she paints of Oxford: sometimes one needs it.  Anyway I followed it up by reading the Invisible Adjunct, that guaranteed spirit-slayer.  I guess that was where I got the idea to apply only to highly competitive schools—I'm trying to follow this man's advice, insofar as it all seems sound.  No Oxford this time, though.  I'm not crazy.

It's clear that a lot of people aren't cut out for academia; I don't know if I'm one of them.  I think I'm certainly cut out for a certain kind of academia; the question is how much of it still exists, how useful it is to any of its students or funding sources, what will happen to it in 20 years—well, that's three questions, but you see.  Gaudy Night's 1930s Oxford is slowly growing into its 19th-century legacy of social reform, with its fictitious women's college torn apart by debates about the proper life for women and proper conduct for scholars— it seems universities today are as far from the reforms and the economics of the 1960s as that decade was from the mid-1930s, but what's going on now is mostly corporatization, and there won't likely be much debate about that on the ground.  There never is.  Johns Hopkins Press just released a compendium of papers on "Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization," the latest attempt to assess the relevance of comparative literature to anything.  Gayatri Spivak's idea of combining deconstruction with Area Studies might be the most honestly, if somewhat cynically, global proposal, but the implementation needs work: I ain't paying for a year at Columbia out of pocket.  Even the Peace Corps is a better deal than that.

There are plenty of unknowns here, as I sit and contemplate all of this, and because it's quite possible that all of it will be a moot point by April I suppose the Adjunct and her friends can be rather consoling: instead of counting myself a failure, I can say I dodged a bullet.  But the idea that there's any way out without taking more responsibility for the outcome than is absolutely, formally required is absurd.

First, here are two photographs I took in the vicinity of the Bodleian Library at Oxford.  I'm not sure this building is itself the library or part of it, but if it's not, it's something reasonably congenial.  The Humboldt Universität campus on Unter den Linden has a similar set of rooftop statues.  I'm really taken with them: it's as though the buildings were much further along in the generative process than the sort you see here, which can only conjure up gargoyles or embedded human faces at best.  Enough thinking and rash, hubristic imagination has gone on in these buildings that the fetal statues drink it all up, mature, grow feet, and walk to the edge of the building to look down, with a mixture of haughtiness and envy, on passersby.  Oh highest hand-wrought register!  They wouldn't all fit in a frame; so, two pictures.

Now, now that I've been pronounced free of jet lag and travel-instigated illness, of course, I can't sleep for anything and I'm sniffly.  Paul & I went out to Cha Am last night not because there was nothing to eat at home but because the walk up to Cedar and back would force us to stay awake.  By the time I sat down at Black Oak Books briefly to read, my head was swimming: I felt utterly drunk.  The state in which the idea of the action precedes, and improves upon, the action itself; you see everything, but somehow you're still blind.  I made it back, crashed at 9:30, woke up at 4:30.  This is a new experience!  New and rotten.

Side note on German vocabulary: the word Bürgerkrieg.  Every time I see it, I become briefly convinced that I'm reading some insane, doctrinaire Marxist ravings about the bourgeois wars that will usher in the proletarian revolution, and then I remember that it just means "civil war."  It can generate a lot of short-lived and interesting alternate histories.  Speaking of the Humboldt, actually, the enormous sculpture on its campus of a stack of books representing the German canon includes Marx and omits Nietzsche.  Paul got an earful of my apoplexy over this during the trip ("would the best parts of this postwar society be conceivable without Nietzsche?!"), but I'm calm enough now merely to note it in passing.  But hey, here's another memorial, from Charlottenburg:

DSCF0074

On the other side of the square is a monument to the victims of National Socialism.  They are roughly symmetrical.  I was glad to see this one, though, even if the story about East Germany that made the strongest impression on me is humorous: a man who had his phone tapped by the Stasi spent hours at night talking to his girlfriend in a different country.  Finally, towards the end of one conversation, he heard a series of clicks and a weary voice broke in: "Hallo, this is the Stasi.  We were wondering if you could wrap this up, because we all would like to go to sleep."  It sounds apocryphal, but it's a cheery piece of apocrypha and I like to retell it.

I've cheered myself up a bit writing all this, in fact, and the sun has come out.  Earlier, though, I was going to whine and carry on about how little I want to apply to Ph.D. programs.  (Much earlier, while I was unable to sleep this morning, the personal statement I was composing in my head began: "Dear Admissions Committee: -- Actually, why are you admitting anyone to this program?  It really seems like a dead letter.")  I understand that universities need to screen applicants, and I can't quarrel too bitterly with their methods, but sometimes I don't see how I can possibly convince any good school to let me in on the basis of those methods.  But, unfortunately, the idea of "getting in" as a goal just seems ridiculous.  I just want to continue doing my work.  I don't know how to orient myself towards admission-as-such.  Honestly.  I don't know.  I've mentioned this before, but the day of reckoning is inching closer, and I just looked at the short list: eight schools that probably won't accept me, two that might.  Oh, and what about the U.K.?

Am I exaggerating?  I don't know.  I'm not exaggerating my irritation with the bind I'm in, anyway.  I guess above and beyond everything else I need good guidance, and I don't know how exactly to look for that.  It seems like the sort of thing -- like nearly all human relationships -- that either falls into your lap, or does not. 

Advice here is both impossible and welcome.