4 posts tagged “procrastination”

Application for Grant for Books Unnecessary for my Research
P.P. Nuttalli (http://simultan.vox.com)

I am applying for a monetary grant for the purchase of books unnecessary for my research in German- and Spanish-language literature and literary criticism.  As a graduate student at [a California] University, I receive limited support from my department for my living expenses and teaching duties, which leaves me with an even more limited budget for books necessary for my scholarly work, some of which are difficult to find in libraries to begin with; my budget can hardly be stretched to encompass the many books which are fairly undeniably not necessary for my scholarship, but which I want to read anyway.  Your organization has a history of supporting the unnecessary expenses of young scholars, which would not be covered under a more conventional funding arrangement.

Which books are necessary for my research?
I work primarily on literature of the 20th century from Spain and the Southern Cone, Austria, Germany, and other German-speaking areas, including many expatriate and/or stateless writers, but I am also interested in earlier works in these languages.  I also study philosophy and a fairly limited set of theoretical schools.  Anything falling under these rubrics, including titles about comparative literature in general, is potentially useful for my studies.

Which books are unnecessary for my research?
Everything else, basically: books on other literary traditions; books in French, Italian, minor European languages, dead European languages, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, or languages I can't identify but which look cool; books on the natural sciences, the history of the natural sciences, current trends in the natural sciences, advanced equations for quantum field theory; field guides to birds, trees, rocks and minerals, or any other ecological phenomena in areas to which I am too poor to travel, up to and including a large full-color guide to woodpeckers and flickers full of photographs of same; cultural studies, comparative religion, anthropology, sociology, urban studies, art history, musicology; economic history, cultural history, military history; Islam in global context; Tang dynasty China; 20th-century sub-Saharan Africa; Japanese imperial/colonial history and its aftermath in the Pacific Rim; New-Agey books on how to quit buying so many books; Franco Moretti's 5-volume study of the novel, Il romanzo, untranslated from the Italian; all those books by Leonora Carrington; all those books in French by Philippe Jaccottet; anything I believe would be interesting because I've never really thought about it before.

Is a partial bibliography included with this application?
Please see attached pages 4-24.

Are other sources of funding for unnecessary books available to me?
In the past, I have subsidized my ancillary, unnecessary reading by selling old books and CDs for store credit, reducing my grocery budget, going into debt, and making big puppy-dog eyes at family members who don't regularly see me.  I may be able to rely on these sources in the future, but none of them is particularly reliable or sustainable.

Please say a few words about the advantages of purchasing books over lower-cost alternatives like library borrowing.
While I certainly have access to some of the best libraries on the west coast, I have found through experience that library books are insufficiently shiny, new and appealing to provoke full-scale, obsessive, unnecessary-reading lockdown episodes of the kind that have been most unproductive for my research.  I have also been known to incur fines and to hurt myself at the end of the semester carrying all those books back to the library.  My attached bibliography should reflect the extent to which I intend to use my library card.  However, I also bear in mind that books unnecessary to my research may be necessary for the research of, potentially, 40 or 50 actual other people with legitimate scholarly interests and deadlines and so forth, who also use the library.

If applying for support for language learning aids: have I considered the FLAS grant program?
Oh Jesus no.  They'd expect results.

What results do I anticipate from the unnecessary reading?
The main result is that I'll stay sane in graduate school.  If all else fails, I can start an Interdisciplinary Institute for Less Commonly Combined Disciplines, such as Literature and Statistics, Macroeconomics and Avian Ethology, Creative Writing and Computational Neuroscience, or Materials Science and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics.  You may hear from me again.

Institutional Affiliation: _____________________
I plead the 5th.

Results to be published in the first-ever issue of the Journal of Negative Results in the Humanities, an idea I apparently stole from Tim Burke.

Name a work of art that is not transgressive.

I'll start: Rilke's Duino Elegies. 

If this gets too boring, you can change the game!

Well, maybe only for me.  (You stop giggling, metameat.)  Very open-ended question: what were the most significant changes in the history of ideas— let us say "in the U.S. and/or Europe" by default, but feel free to cast your net wider— during the following three periods:

• 1905-1940
• 1940-1970
• 1970-2005

You may protest that you can't possibly answer this question.  Of course you can't.  The reason I ask, though, is that I think people on the street, myself included, don't have a good sense of the chronology of 20th century intellectual history.  They put innovations and popular ideas from the teens somewhere in the sixties, and popular ideas from the sixties sometime in the 90s.  There have been a lot of repetitions.  Has it all been repetition?  Has there been forward, or backward, motion?

This is meant to be a "fun" "discussion," so have fun with it.  I will try to finish my thesis before you tell me anything useful, so I don't have to figure out how on earth to credit this blog.  I'm having a devil of a time structuring my discussion of Sebald and geography at the moment— when the going gets tough, apparently I find other things to do.  (The silk discussion is important.  But he never mentions parachutes.  A significant omission!  Aha!)