3 posts tagged “priorities”
So during the first of my two campus visits, I went to a Q&A with current grad students in the program. The questions eventually slowed to a trickle. Suddenly I thought of a good one, and raised my hand. Yes? "Do you guys have enough time to read?" I asked. It sowed general confusion. Did I mean, time to do the class reading? I shook my head. Or, like, reading novels for pleasure? Light reading? I shook my head again, and gave up.
What I meant was this: suppose you are assigned a short essay by a late 20th-century theorist who refers extensively to, say, Brecht's Kleine Organon für das Theater, and you have no idea where he or she is coming from, so you go in search of the Brecht and discover that it is indeed klein and you can polish it off in an evening. Now, having read the Brecht, you think you understand a little more and it may be time to tackle Benjamin's essay, "What is Epic Theater?", which seemed gnomic and mysterious the last time you read it. Do you have time to do that reading? That is, do you have time to learn more than you're required to by others— because no professor can ever give you the complete story, unless it's a semester course on Hermann Hesse or something you do not want— and to learn enough to answer your own questions? Do you have time to read as much as you need?
My answer for this program, so far, is no. There is no time whatsoever to do outside reading. There is a little time to do the course reading. There is a tiny bit of time beyond that to eat dark chocolate chipotle almonds, and about 13.5 minutes left over for the blog each week. I think I'm over this week's limit here already.
I am not dead, but I am very, very busy and (more pertinently) very, very preoccupied. It is hard for me to follow a thought from one end of a sentence to the other. Consequently posting has been impossible for the last week, although there are a few drafted sentence fragments. This might be a good time to make a virtue of necessity and turn this blog into a game of Finish the Sentence, or it might be a good time to give up and work on the looming papers, the prospect of which has already, by the end of the first week of classes, made me panic. Nine weeks or so to go.
So I was thinking of writing a paper on...
But this raises irksome questions of...
And then there's the larger aspect of trends within the discipline: ...
And the narrower aspect of my command of...
Delicious salads can be procured at...
Delicious salads without a risk of passive construction will leap into your mouth at...
Thank goodness for that, anyway, and for...
And for...
And although I have been guilty of procrastinating on many occasions, reading Dante may be my best excuse yet.
The French press coffee pot is a delicate instrument, requiring old-fashioned care and vigilance. You must not grind the coffee too fine; you must stir the grounds into the water, before and after pressing down with the plunger, to obtain a proper and homogeneous suspension; you must rinse the pot and its plunger well. With what do you stir the coffee in the pot? With a spoon. And, while you wait for the coffee to brew before stirring it again, what do you do with the spoon?
The pot itself has no answer. The spoon ends up covered in coffee grounds and if you set it on the counter it will make a mess. Where can you set a spoon covered in coffee grounds? Where? In a bowl? On a napkin? Must you rinse the spoon twice in order to set it down?
A brain in need of coffee is not a brain that can easily solve problems with spoons. But at some point I located a little soy-sauce dish (I think) and I took to setting the coffee spoon in the dish. "Look, Paul," I said, "a dish. We can put the spoon in the dish." He glanced at the dish and, after determining that it had nothing to do with novels, dissertations, Chopin or money, most likely thought: "J. is pointing at a dish. Also, there might be coffee soon."
Some time after that I noticed a mess on the toaster. "Paul," I said, "can we schedule a time for me to train you with the coffee spoon?" Ho ho ho, great merriment, etc. I left the house and, when I came home three hours later, saw a familiar sight. I wondered if it would be polite to leave a note; then I saw the magnetic alphabet and the magnetic poetry set.
The lesson here is that Paul is able to stay focused on important tasks, whereas I get bizarrly distracted by the coffee spoon. I don't think there is any other lesson.
