2 posts tagged “oxford”

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.