Grad School

I'm reading James Dickey a lot lately (for chapter 2 of the dissertation), and so tonight I was reading an interview he did with Playboy in 1973.

I really was reading Playboy just for the articles.

So Dickey is a ridiculous liar for the most part, but the interview is pretty great and about midway he gets to talking about graduate school. This is what he says:

"In my little bit of graduate work in American literature twenty years ago at Vanderbilt, I was a kind of two-bit Melville scholar. That was my only claim to fame after a year or so of working in graduate school, in those dark satanic mills."

Graduate school has been good to me, sure, but I do often think of graduate school as a dark, satanic mill. Strong work, JD, strong work.

One More Thought on Academia

...and then I'll shut up about it. For a while.

I have been reading Michael Eric Dyson (who I find simultaneously irritating and illuminating), and he says the following in an essay called "It's Not What You Know It's How You Show It: Black Public Intellectuals":

Many conservatives believe the university is a den of politically correct educational thieves, robbing our kids of their moral futures with all sorts of strange theories.

Well the university isn't all it's cracked down to be: an artificial environment removed from the lives of real people. Last time I checked at my university, there were actual bodies in the classroom, real people running the place, and life-and-death issues being fought over by people who will one day run businesses, defend clients, make millions, enrich lives, ruin government, and become politicians (sorry for the repetition) in the Real World.

Preach it, brother.

When Something Little Can Mean Something Very Big

As a teacher, a post like the one below can really make my day:

This is the kind of impact I hope to make on the world, and when I (only occasionally) receive a note like this, I can hope to believe that I am making the kind of impact that I wish to make.

An acquaintance of mine this week referred to the work I do as "working in an ivory tower" or words to that effect. A relative of mine several months ago similarly referred to my writing as "batting theories around" or some equivalently flippant dismissal. It is easy to take criticisms like these very seriously. It is very hard, in addition, not to take them personally (they are, after all, meant personally).

In a world where one's sphere of impact can oftentimes be very small – even for people who are allegedly very powerful – a note like this from a former student is a great reason to keep teaching, keep theorizing, keep criticizing, keep writing, keep thinking. We're talking about people's lives.

The Simpsons Are Making Fun of Me

Hahahahaha!

Destroying Lives

Since all I do is teach and write, I might as well post about teaching and writing...

Last week, I sent my students an email to extend their paper deadline in one of the classes I teach. Now, usually, I would just tell them their deadline was extended and move on, but I must've been feeling a little punchy because I asked them to email me back responses. I have nineteen people in the class and I got ten responses in three and a half hours! Here is the email, followed by their ridiculous responses.

Would it destroy anyone's life if I extended the deadline for this paper a week? Email me back with thoughts.
And let's remember to discuss this tomorrow morning.

1. My life would not be destroyed.

2. I just want to make sure I am reading this correctly. This would make the due date Sunday Nov. 29th at noon, right? That would be really great. Can you please email me after it is decided.

3. If you extended it a week I think I would be a happy child and not go bald....

4. Destroy?! It would make my life because I would actually have the time to thoroughly work on it this weekend! And I am already running into a million questions about my topic.

5. It would not destroy my life and I think it would be a great idea!!!

6. i would be eternally grateful.

7. It would destroy my life if you DID NOT extend the deadline. I will bring in homemade cookies Monday morning if you extend it :)

8. Dear Aaron,
From the bottom of my heart, I am beseeching you to please please extend this paper deadline. I will bake you so many brownies and cookies and whatevers if you do this. Since I won't be there tomorrow, I'm telling you now I will hug you a thousand times over if this goes down!

9. I encourage this extension!!! =D

10. Oh my "god" I'll make a shrine in your honor and sacrifice virgins to you... if I'm going to find any in this town I better start looking now.
Thank you Thank you Thank you....

Oh, the Internet.

Today, I was tagged in a facebook note in which José Esteban Muñoz, Ramón Rivera-Servera, and Jill Dolan were also tagged. Pretty nice company, I feel.



I recognize that this might not mean a lot to many people, but I am starstruck by important scholars like teenage girls who love Jesus are starstruck by the Jonas Brothers.

A How-to Question

For me, I think the experiment boils down to this:

How can I attend grad school (admittedly an act of bodily cruelty directed at myself (whatever that is)) and still retain the part(s?) of my [self] (I shall put it in brackets because I am rather sure I do not believe in such a thing as that which this word represents) that I like. There are, after all, parts of [me] for which I care, which bring [me] and my friends pleasure. How can I endeavor to keep these aspects, these reflections of my[self]? For I do wish to keep them. But attending school means killing so much of what I have at some time thought that [self] was/is.

I may not be recognizable when I emerge. Perhaps I am already unrecognizable, my friends and family staring at me quizzically as though someone else has taken over the body they recognize. Or so much of what they thought was me has been removed that they decide that the remainder and its new clothes and shoes and haircut are no longer something with which they wish to associate.

If I don't believe in the soul why am I even asking these questions?

Or rather, what is the difference?

I recognize that this post invites comment. But I am kinda serious.

Graduate School...

... has re-taken over my life. Remember last semester when I was bored and had nothing to do.
Well, the four classes I am currently taking, the two classes I am teaching, and the show I am working on, are all conspiring together to make sure that there is nothing like a repeat of last semester. I don't think I can get all of this stuff done!

I mean, I want to watch a movie or something.

Interview

They interviewed me for the school newspaper. It is kind of a cute little document.

New Conference News

I sent in an abstract for a panel at the American Society for Eighteenth-century Studies annual conference and I heard back from them a couple weeks ago:

Hello Laura, Liz, and Aaron,

I am impressed with your proposals for my ASECS panel, "Too Exquisite for Laughter," and would like to include your papers in the session. The papers appear to fit rather neatly together, which is quite the bonus.

Aaron C. Thomas, Florida State University, "'Perish the Baubles': the Conspicuous Unimportance of Wealth in Sentimental Comedy"
Liz Harbaugh, Florida State University, "(Re)historicizing Richard Cumberland's The West Indian"
Laura J. Rosenthal, University of Maryland, College Park, "The Sentimental Gesture in The West Indian"

I'm looking forward to a provocative discussion. If your plans (or working titles) have changed since submitting your proposals, please let me know as soon as possible.

So it appears that I will presenting at a conference this Spring. Here is the conference website.

And here is the abstract I submitted:

Though the traditional theatre history narrative commits to a linear development of the sentimental comedy from Cibber to Steele on through to Cumberland, more recent scholarship has aimed at the destruction of a strict division of genres for eighteenth century comedy. Many scholars (Robert Hume and others) have explicitly attacked the notion that Goldsmith and R.B. Sheridan formed a united front against the sentimental comedy, returning laughter to comedy and recalling its glory days.

But even if we are free to explode the notion of the sentimental comedy as a genre that is useful to us now, it is important to explore what all the fuss was about simply because the eighteenth century Britons thought it such an important topic. To Steele, Dennis, Sheridan, Goldsmith, and Garrick, debates and discussions about sentimentalism were real, serious, and had material consequences.

My paper explores the material consequences of the debates about comedy by looking at eighteenth century characters’ sentimental ideas about money. In particular, I plan to investigate how wealth in sentimental comedies—from Steele to Sheridan—is both disavowed by the characters and central to the characters’ successes.

My title is taken from Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, where the fashionable Hastings professes his love for Miss Neville whether or not she comes to him with her dowry of jewels. Hastings does not (he says) need money to be happy; he needs only his beloved. But the secondary plot of the play hinges completely on whether or not Hastings and Miss Neville will be wealthy in addition to being happily in love. The characters in these comedies say that money is unimportant to their happiness, while the entirety of the play’s action is consumed with the question of whether or not the main (male) characters will get both the girl and the money. It is this denial that I find most fascinating about British comedy during the eighteenth century.

Moving beyond attempts at a generic taxonomy for eighteenth century comedies, this paper sees the sentimental as a shift in the bourgeois moral ideology of the dramatists and audiences of the eighteenth century rather than a shift in genre. This shift is evident most tellingly in the comedies’ (sentimental) attitudes about money. From Farquhar and Steele to Cumberland and Sheridan, the playwrights romanticize the impoverished and censure the affluent, while simultaneously the plays reject poverty and celebrate wealth.

Wow, upon re-reading it, that sounds really smart. I hope I am smart enough to write it.

Back to la Escuela

Today will be the first day of my third year of graduate school, the first day of my PhD program. And I hope to be posting on here more often.

I may even (finally) post a review of Woody Allen's new feature Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

It's been raining here seemingly forever. The heavens began to empty on Friday morning, and the deluge lets up here only periodically, for an hour or so, and then it begins again. The power has stayed on at my house, though, at least for now. (I heard others in the Hassiest of Tallys lost theirs for several hours.) And now I've heard that the rain wil not stop until next Sunday: next Sunday. We are to have an entire week filled with lots of rain.
But it is the first day back to school and I suppose this is better than sweltering heat...

The Lord

If you know me well at all you know I am very particular about the phrases "with the Lord" (which means that whatever you're describing is religious in some way) and "from the Lord" (which basically means "Heavenly").
If I bake a cheesecake and it tastes good, that is from the Lord.
If we're--for example--talking about a boy who says he's straight but we all know he'll come out of the closet soon, and we wonder aloud why he's still in the closet even though he loves musical theatre and always wants to go shoe shopping, someone or other might say "oh, it's 'cause he's with the Lord" and then we would all nod understandingly.

To review:
Chik-fil-A is with the Lord (they're closed on Sundays).
Good espresso is from the Lord (it tastes good and it wakes you up).
In N Out Burger is both with the Lord (religious) and from the Lord (delicious).

Got it?

I have been using these phrases around school, of course, and my colleagues are slowly but surely picking it up. To wit: The following is an email I got from a colleague this evening from one of the MFA technical directors:

I visited Dxxx at Glimmerglass this weekend. Last night, as we were sitting around the campfire, we got to talking about women we found attractive. One particular name came up, and I said, "Too bad she's with the Lord." And then Dxxx said, "Yeah, but her body is from the Lord." And then we toasted your name.

Miss you. Hope your summer's going well.

Rxxx

That's what I'm here for, people.

P.S. In case you didn't know: I'm an atheist.

Tiny Update

Rehearsal still going very well. Slight hiccup today with one of the actors (who decided not to pay attention to his call time). But still a very good rehearsal. I am having a blast. And it isn't even that good of a play.

The class is going well too. All of the students passed the quiz on Hedda, which means all of them read it. My only problem here is: what on earth am I going to teach them tomorrow? I honestly don't know. Some of the days on my calendar we have nothing to talk about. I guess that means I let them go super-early.

I Received This Email Today:

The final clearance of your manuscript has been approved!



Congrats!

Jack Tyndall
Manuscript Clearance Advisor
Academic Program Specialist
Florida State University
Office of Graduate Studies

**
But I am in a bad mood nevertheless. We had convocation today in the School of Theatre, where they recognize the graduates for the year. I just couldn't get into it. I spent the whole time wanting to escape. I felt awkward and silly.

So much

I haven't posted in a while and I apologize. I was in New York and when I got back to Tallahassee I returned to a whole ton of work that needs to be done by Monday morning at 9:00a.

First things first: New York was fabulous. I had never been and I completely loved it. I visited with my friend Joe and my old friend Kristen who I hadn't seen in four years. The conference was really fun too. I don't know much about musical theatre that is older than 1980 and the conversation was mostly situateed in the time period before that so I learned a lot. It made me want to commit much more to investigating musical theatre as I continue to write. My paper was very well received. It probably won't be published or anything, but it was cool to give a paper and get as much positive response as I did.

Theatre I saw while in New York: The Adding Machine, a musical version of the play by Elmer Rice. It was absolutely superb. I also saw Passing Strange, which is a kind of rock-concert/musical narrative about a black man's coming of age in Culver City, Amsterdam and then Berlin. It totally rocked and I loved it. And last but certainly not least, I saw a concert version of Paul Simon's musical The Capeman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The music from The Capeman is sensational, heavily influenced by Puerto Rican music and was performed by nineteen singers and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra. Paul Simon himself even came out to do a song and then again for the encore. It was awesome.

Now that I am back I am busy writing a paper that interrogates the notion of Latino "identity." It has to be standard length (15-20 pages), and it is due Monday morning. But there are lots of other things to do here, too. Our new play festival at FSU, New Horizons, is going up this weekend and I want to attend the various nights of that, and the Technical Directors have a huge party in the woods tonight which they call Meatfest. It's basically an enormous barbecue in the middle of the fucking forest. So I am trying to finish my paper, but I am a little more interested in having fun. Graduation is April 25th and I will be done with most of my work on the 15th. I want this semester to be over!

One more thing: I may be directing a Shakespeare show in Tallahassee this summer. A bunch of the students are getting together and planning it and I am meeting with them about it later today. So we shall see...

The Subject

I said before how one of the revisions I was asked to make in my thesis was to add a description of how I was using the concept of the "subject." I was initially quite irritated with having to do this, but I've finished that portion of my revisions, and what I wrote kind of made me happy. So it appears that this complaint was a blessing in disguise. To wit:

As mentioned above, popular discourse often conflates gay, lesbian, bisexual, transvestite, transgendered, and other queer persons into a single identity. Images and representations of queer people are constantly being produced in various media and come from numerous sources, leading the philosopher Didier Eribon to state that “As Barry D. Adam comments, a gay man finds himself confronted with a ‘composite portrait’ of himself, proposed by a set of images, representations, and discourses, all providing him with a degrading or inferiorizing image of himself.” In Eribon’s narrative, Barry D. Adam is hailed by the representations of gay men in public discourse. Throughout this document, I refer to the “composite portrait” that interpellates Adam as “the queer subject.” The subject is created by discourse and exists as a discursive representation of an actual queer body. Characters in plays represent and stand in for actual queer lives, and these representations both exist within and shape discourse about queer people. The queer subject, then, is what Eribon calls a “contested space, a space of political and cultural conflict” (75). The queer subject is an object of discourse that has the power to shape popular (heteronormative) conceptions of actual queer lives, and the production of these images is, therefore, a crucially important site for exploration.

AND I don't really have to fix my citation method at all. I had to add a couple of words and delete some commas and that's it!

I Guess Microsoft Word Must Have Hyphenated "Reichian The-rapist"

I defended my thesis this afternoon for my committee.

The document is entitled Violence and the Queer Subject in the Plays of David Rudkin and Mark Ravenhill, and I passed my defense.

The committee talked to me for about two hours, and I talked back. We discussed the choices I made: the reasons I did certain things, omitted certain referents, ways in which I could improve, words I could define better, etc. They gave me seven notes that I need to address before they will sign off on the thesis. Well, actually, everyone but my advisor has signed off on it. After I address the notes then she will sign it and it can be approved by the university.

Some of the notes are big deals: one of my readers would like me to clarify my use of the term "subject." In fact, during my defense she asked me to define the term as I was using it in my thesis. I don't know why the term needs a definition, but she thought it was unclear. "A subject is an object," is what I told her. And then I quoted Althusser. While she was reading, I guess she kept thinking I was speaking about the characters in the plays as though they were Lacanian subjects. So now I need to define it in the thesis. No small task. How am I going to work something that clunky into my argument? "Let us pause for a moment and address what I mean by 'subject.'" Yikes.

Some of the notes are very minor: the committee, for instance, unanimously agreed that they want me to turn off Microsoft Word's automatic hyphenation function. Hahaha!

The committee also dislikes my citation method and they asked me what format I was using. Now, I knew from the start that this was going to be a problem but I like the way I am citing things and so I wanted to argue about it. "I got the format from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet," I said. "I copied the format directly from there."
We argued about this for a bit. Everyone still dislikes it, although I can't figure out why. I think it's very clear. And then came my most brilliant moment of the day:
Someone asked "Well, who published Epistemology of the Closet? What press was that?"
"I believe it was the University of California Press out of Berkeley," I said.
"I think it was Routledge," one of the guests offered.
"I'll look it up," another of the guests said. (She had her computer out during the entire defense. It was actually quite distracting.)

Now, there is no earthly reason for me to know who published Epistemology of the Closet, or for anyone else to know that information for that matter. But, sure enough: UC Press, Berkeley. I grinned to myself. Totally meaningless trivia, but I knew it anyway.

NYC?

Still... working... on thesis...

Hope to be done by Monday afternoon. I want this to be over so badly I can taste it.
When you write 90 pages of scholarly work that you have to read and re-read and read again to make sure that you are being precise and clear and intelligent, you get kinda sick of your own voice. I am tired of reading my own words. I am sick of myself! It's gotten so bad that I have to take constant breaks from staring at this document. I mean, the thing is almost done, I just need to keep tweaking it. Oh yeah, and I have to write a conclusion, still. Not sure how that's gonna turn out.

And I'm going to New York soon. I said before how I got a paper accepted to a conference. The conference is in NY and it is April 2nd through the 5th, so I am staying in NY for 5 nights. It's going to cost me a bundle, but it should be fun. I've never been there before, if you can believe it. The conference link is here.

Some fun stuff from my thesis:

I mention Ecstasy a lot in the rape chapter, so I felt the need to explain what the drug actually is. So I included the following in a footonote: "In case you are unfamiliar, Ecstasy is the drug Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, also known as MDMA, or simply by the letters E or X. Ecstasy is frequently taken at dance parties called raves. The drug heightens sensation and increases heart rate, sociability, and the user’s sense of well-being." My advisor writes "Any downsides?!?"

But He Isn't Arguing Anything!

I keep writing chapter three (I am on page twelve), but I have yet to really argue anything.

Grrr.

No More Tamer

So the Tamer Tamed symposium is officially over, thank Jesus. Now I can get back to writing my thesis and actually doing the homework for the class I'm taking. (I'm taking a class called U.S. Latino/a Theatre & Performance, by the way. It's a blast.)

So tonight after the Oscars I plan to start writing Chapter Three. I have decided to write about Mark Ravenhill's plays Handbag, Mother Clap's Molly House, and Some Explicit Polaroids. I was going to tell you what my angle is, but it has no real theoretical basis and so it may end up changing as I start to write. I don't know yet. As of now, my thesis defense date is March 26th, which means the whole thing (i.e. chapter three and the conclusion) needs to be finished and to my committee two weeks prior to that, or March 12th. This date, you might have noticed, is less than three weeks away. I don't know how this is going to happen, but it needs to.

Grad school is totally kicking my ass right now.

Is everyone excited for the Oscars tonight? Should be fun. This is the happiest I have been with the Academy in quite a long time.