defensiveness; on failure; backdated

I have been busy for the past few weeks preparing for my first year oral exam, which was on Thursday. The exam is the one that I think I may have mentioned to some of you, whereby I submit a list of texts broadly representative of British and American literary history and a panel of three (plus one observer) quiz me on it for twenty minutes each, so that the three time periods that they represent occupy an hour. I failed all three sections of this exam. When I got feedback from the examiners, (and all that follows is a melange of direct quotes) I was told that I came across as being very witty, charming, urbane, intelligent and glib. That I was all style and no substance - that in many cases they simply didn't believe that I had read the texts that we were talking about. Of course, because I am not stupid enough to believe that my examiners are stupid, I had read every text on my list. I got the DGS to admit that the impression that I gave to the committee was that I thought that I was a clever Oxford boy who could slide through this exam on his charm. That I was so charming that I had never really been pushed on anything before. Everything had simply fallen into my lap and I'd not had to really work for anything before. Frankly, said the DGS, they just wanted to see me sweat a little. But it is important that I understand that this isn't political, it really isn't, and everyone thinks I'm fabulous and golden and noone is out to get me, and it really isn't political, but they just want me to do it again. Discursive, bluffing, bullshitting, throwing questions back with modifications rather than just answering them: my style is parrying, apparently, and superficial - and evaluative rather than analytical. I seem to have been trained, they say, in a softer, more pastoral tradition.

On this last remark, which is, perhaps, the only substantive criticism that was levelled, I have been thinking a bit. And it occurs to me that I think that in general discussion, rather than in a context in which you actually have the text in front of you and are talking about what a sentence means and why, or what a particular piece of punctatuation is doing, I believe that a simple aesthetic judgment is almost always more defensible on the spot and therefore a more rigorous mode of discussing a text than to make some assertion about a text or body of texts without the ability to provide textual substantiation for that assertion. By which I mean: without recourse to textual empiricism for an evidential debate, I think that aestheticism coupled with a very flexible relativism and circumspect openness to other, differing aesthetic judgment, will always be the most valid, interesting, useful way of talking about a work.

So - I will be retaking the exam in the next month. I will knuckle under, suck it up, kiss the ring. I am not going to leave Stanford over this, and nor will it go on my record. But it is an instantiation of hierarchy that serves no end other than itself. No other student in my cohort failed this exam, and I hope that I do not flatter myself that I am not so distinctly the worst of my peer group that such a clear, nay, qualitative line can be drawn between my knowledge, manner, and intelligence and theirs. So I do, I confess, wonder: to what extent did I fail this exam because I have two degrees from Oxford? To say that I am unhappy, crushed and disappointed would be litotic. But there is nothing I can do about that. It might be a hoop to jump through, but if I don't jump through it I will not be able to jump through other, more meaningful hoops down the line, to whit passing my orals proper in two years, getting a PhD, or getting a job.

The irony of it all is that I was not trained in anything remotely resembling a softer, more pastoral tradition. I was trained in a way that, despite its flaws, attempted to imitate the Socratic tradition. And perhaps on top of that I simply ingested Blindness and Insight too deeply - took its epistemological lessons too very much to heart, and have attached too much importance to de Man's exhortion not to "confuse the rigour of the analytic procedure with the epistemelogical authority of the ensuing results." But soft it wasn't, and pastoral it wasn't. By which I mean, intellectually lazy it wasn't. And intellectually lazy I am not.

savage self-involvement; backdated

I haven’t written anything here for a while of any real substance, for explanations of which see every other life-gets-in-the-way post on the internet. I’m spending this Christmas in St. Louis with XXX and her parents, which is truly wonderful. Her parents are kind, genial, funny people, but spending Christmas with XXX has been the best present I could have asked for. I don’t care if it sounds cheesy.

[...]

I suppose part of the reason that I don’t write much here is that I don’t do much of my emotional thinking in writing any more – I do it by talking with XXX . When I do sit down to write something that isn’t a tedious email, or a piece of work, I’m more likely to struggle with some half-formed idea of a lyric poem than I am to update this. It’s loathsomely pop-psychologistic to say that, then, writing poetry is my outlet, (outlet for what? Narcissism? Self-promotion? Dimly-glimpsed fantasies of art? Who knows.) but it’ll do.

I spent the previous fortnight in England, with a week at my father’s and a week at my mother’s. The best part was seeing my sister and a few dear and much-missed friends from university. The parents were both rather depressed in their different ways. I’m trying to learn not to take that personally, or to imagine that it is up to me to solve their problems for them. It is a hard lesson to learn.

Really, I feel oddly suspended between studenthood and ‘real-life.’ I was nominated for membership at my father’s club – which is full of unspeakable cunts, needless to say – and they waggishly put my occupation down as ‘dilettante.’ I work very hard, but it isn’t work with tangible outcomes, or work that fits into any particular sector. Really, I suppose am serving what used to be called an apprenticeship. I am weirdly hostile to suggestions that what I do isn’t hard work, or that I am a ‘perpetual student.’ I think that these are pretty usual insecurities and that I probably don’t need to worry about them.

I had a ridiculous encounter in a cafeteria last month and have been since wondering what poise is – because poise seems to me to be an affected self-sufficiency that you learn to internalise. Someone blew up at me and I didn’t blow up back, although I did feel sick for half an hour afterwards.

I’ve had a pretty materialistic year. I’ve bought boots, shoes, jumpers, t-shirts, and jeans. I crashed my car twice (the second time reasonably seriously) but I’m ok. I keep forgetting to go to an osteopath. I steal a lot of music from the internet and keep in touch with my friends only sporadically. After September-October-November, I started a higher dosage of anti-depressants, and they continue to help me live like a functional human being. I drink an awful lot of coffee. XXX and I cook for each other most nights and watch a film, or the X-Files, or Buffy. We usually work until one or two in the morning. We take a lot of care of each other. I think we are hollowing out a space for ourselves. It takes a long time, and it feels like we have to push against a lot of stuff to make it happen, and I like it.

Be clear, I tell my students. Clarify. Rephrase this to make it active. The main verb is buried here - bring it out. There no main verb in this sentence. Take this out of the conditional. If this is what you mean, says so - don't couch it. But really, what good will it do them? I am just teaching them to condemn themselves faster and faster

I have limitations. That makes me sad.

So tired in the car today that I kept swerving onto line dividers coming up the 280. Efforts to find abrasive music on iPod only exacerbated matters.

Patriarchy / Marxism

When my mother started reading Foucault she began trumpeting 'There is nothing outside of discourse!' and this troubled me very much for some months because I didn't like the idea that everything was always already subsumed into a construction of power, and I eventually hit on the idea that to engage in discourse was itself a choice of modality - I thought for a while that this was a way out of the bind that Foucault set up. I was going to say that this might point a way out of these binaries - simply to refuse to engage in binary choosing - but now that I sit down to write this I'm not so sure.

Anyway, I had to look up Danger, Will Robinson, and - ouch. But I don't agree that the patriarchy invites you to try to love your way out of it - or at least that this is the patriarchy's only trick. I think that the patriarchy aims to be invisible, or, better, a joke: certainly that is the treatment that other men give it to me. (Also, I don't think that loving your way out of the patriarchy would work - you have to act against it and still know that it'll probably always contain you.) (I worry about the patriarchy a lot (like the Johnny Cash song, The Beast in Me.)) But what I meant to say here is that setting up these binaries (patriarchal-not patriarchal) is always a doomed endeavour because, as you say, it is systemic - the context in which you make those choices is a patriarchal one. So there is no set of choices or actions that will produce a consistent "not-patriarchal" life because in between all those choices and actions are all the things that you overlook to chose - and those gaps are where you (I) are (am) patriarchal. So it's asymptotic, I guess I am saying. Is this why it breaks you? Explain to me the gap between this and despair.

So should I resign myself to a wrong life, enmeshed in systemic wrongs, nonetheless aiming to be as unwrong as I can? This is such a hopeless prospect that I don't think it is glib to be uninterested by the possible - the possible offers such a small view. And sure - the main danger is a good way to look at this. But my main dangers are all (I think, at least) so personal - I'm so afraid of things about me - that I don't know how determining my But I still think that the main dangers are systemic - ecological damage, global mechanisms of economic and social injustice - that addressing myself to them would mean making sacrifices in uprooting my life that I am too self-absorbed to want to make. (This is my question from before, really - doesn't admitting these problems mean admitting their priority?)

And always this feeling as when talking to the religious - mostly clergy, really, of one stripe or another - of empathy and also despair born of my inertia. Can you forgive my incalcitrance? - I am saying that yes, you are probably right, but I don't have the courage to be that right.

on prepreprofessionalisation

This is long and disorganised and the things I want to say don’t really follow in any especially cogent way.

I don't really know how to contribute to this in a sensitive way, because I feel like I still don't really have any idea of what works and what doesn't. My status as an international student is complicated and so engaging in comparing metrics etc is, I think at least in my case, a largely futile exercise. The principle things I did differently this time around were to network with professors as much as I could and to work on my sample. I tailored my sample quite closely to my schools and very closely to myself. I've said all this before elsewhere.

A quick note on publications: a friend of mine who has a publication forthcoming in Tulsa Women's Studies (so ... kind of a big deal) and conference papers accepted at two major international conferences, with an excellent set of undergraduate and graduate transcripts (in fact, some of the best graduate results achieved at Oxford since the inception of the course) and good GREs still only got into one graduate school. She tailored her apps, and basically did everything that you should do, and still was rejected almost everywhere.

I guess my morals from this are that:

a) despite what some posters on here have been saying, luck *is* an element: yes, you will deserve the place that you get, certainly, but so also will someone else whose place you have taken. You were lucky; they were unlucky;

b) Having a publication in one of the most prestigious journals in her field still didn't get her into some of the schools she wanted the most.

Because really, this whole 'publishable' thing is slightly wrong-ended: it's one thing to demonstrate your commitment to the professional aspect of graduate school, and goodness knows that that is something that we're all alert to, but in truth we're going to graduate school so that we can publish in the future, not the other way around. Some faculty I spoke to explicitly said that they preferred less professionalised applicants, for which I guess there could be all sorts of good and bad reasons, amongst which would be, I'd expect, that a graduate programme is invested in your formation as a scholar, and that if you come already formed they'll say 'Ok well that's great, but what do you want from us?'. All the websites that we've read, in which programmes say just what it is that they are looking for in an applicant, don't say that they want evidence of high-octane scholarship right off the bat. They want *potential*. Acceptance letters seem to say 'in recognition of your potential'.

What I'm getting at here is that you need to defer to programmes, I think, to say 'Here I am and I'm yours to mould'. Even coming from an MA I don't think it's reasonable to expect something publishable. 'Publishable' is, by the way, a really unfair stick for us applicants to beat ourselves with: how can we have peer review from people who aren't even our peers? An MA is a one or two year course and I don't see how it's reasonable to expect a student to achieve in that period that scholarly development that is in fact that goal of the Ph.D. programme itself; the 'ability to participate in the profession'.

I don't have anything substantive to offer in place of this, and in that sense I'm guilty of offering only destructive criticism. I think that the anxieties that we have about showing ad comms our work are really manifestations of anxieties that riddle literary academia in general: what is work, and when are we doing it? (This is a line of thought I'm cribbing from an amazing article I read, called Fasting at the Feast of Literature, by Brenda Marchovsky, and if I had an athens account I'd quote it here.) Is work comprised to some extent in our ability to marginalise and co-opt an area of study? I mean: does being 'professional' inhere in producing work that amateurs or lay people by definition wouldn't read or write themselves? (Am I just trying to demonstrate professional competency here? Probably, yes.)

So from this it follows that bandying around the criteria that a sample be 'publishable' that the graduate application is necessarily not an enjoyable process. It is a process that requires, in fact, that we subject ourselves to a set of entailments. We can't submit samples that say 'I love this' or 'I need this' or 'This piece of literature is integral to my sense of self' because those sentiments are deemed to be amateur. And yet those sentiments or ones like them are precisely what make have made us go through this whole thing: it's an irritating and useless paradox that to demonstrate readiness for a process we are required to show that we've already undergone it, that we've already viably transformed our undergraduate, passionate essays into invested but professional work.

Ok I'm done pontificating. I just think that the way that even this thread is a long and subtle investigation into how better to tailor an application or set of applications is fairly indicative of the way that this profession worries over intellectual value and self-worth: when is our work acceptable, and to whom? How can we produce work that will make us both professionally successful and personally satisfied? I don’t think we’re even sure that these two things aren’t mutually exclusive. Hence the anxiety, and the feeling rubbish, and the double vulnerability that the process engenders. Ok and now I really am done. Thanks for bearing with this. Thoughts?

snippet #10

The more invested in something I am, the more retrospectively ashamed of it I will be.

on depression

XXX finally joined FB, so I messaged him your post to get his highly qualified opinion (he's currently chief resident of psychiatry at XXX General Hospital).

Here goes:

Out of the erudite arguments of the post, I emphasise two things:
1) "we don't know what depression is..."

Depression is an overdetermined, multifactorial illness. There are probably a hundred different pathophysiologic conditions that are lumped together under the name depression. Kind of like how for what we call snow, the Eskimos have many more words. So it makes sense that any treatment for "depression" will treat only a limited percentage of users, and that the data for its efficacy will be controversial and mixed. I have seen antidepressants fail miserably. I've also seen them, and other related meds, literally wake people from the dead. I understand that human beings, and their biopsychosocial illnesses, defy any simple explanation or treatment.

2) Treating a psychological condition with medication is also one way of ascribing "meaning" to the condition. It medicalizes the condition; it pharmacologizes it. As you mentioned, it quantifies it on a scale of milligrams of drug. For many, having a medication validates that they are truly suffering--and that seems to be a response to a societal indifference to suffering we are all occasionally guilty of, whether you attribute it to the breakdown of the extended family, or breakdown of the tight-knit local community, or our generation of "narcissism combined with nihilism" as Al Gore put it. Depression is at its base a loss of hope--and meaning is the antidote to hopelessness. Sometimes a pill is both meaningful, and efficacious...

the still sad music of humanity

The whole point of crying is to stop before you corny it up.
(Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road)

The publication in 1994 of Listening to Prozac by Peter Kramer, in which he suggested anyone with too little "joy juice" might give themselves a dose of the "mood brightener" Prozac , lifted sales into the stratosphere. (Independent, 26/2/08)

Today, a major new study shows that Prozac, taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar types of drugs. For a profession normally diplomatic, the words today of one of study's authors are damning. "Given these results", Professor Kirsch of Hull University says, "there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients." (Guardian, 26/2/08)

The problem with depression is that people are generally disinclined to believe that it exists. Not that people disbelieve melancholy. Chaucer believed in it, and so did Durer. But they disbelieve, instead, that depression could be a condition worthy of medical attention. Never mind that an excess of melancholy was treated by emetics and blood-letting, before they got the circulatory system was figured out. The problem is that, having stopped treating it because the grounds for treatment were found to be faulty, which is fair enough, the treatment itself resurged because the condition was still endemic. Whether it's electroshock therapy, or some kind of analysis, or cognitive behavioural therapy, or anti-depressants, the past hundred years have (I guess) a pretty consistent theme of reworking and treating the Black Knight's complaint, assuaging his unhappiness as the dream is unable to do.

What I'm getting at is this: irrespective of whether anti-depressants work, or of whether blood-letting and leeches worked; we have been turning to doctors, asking for treatment for a pain we can't place but which saps the very life out of us for as long as there have been doctors.

Maybe anti-depressants don't 'work', however that functionality is calibrated. Maybe no anti-depressant treatment has truly 'worked' - for example, exercise is just a stimulated deferral - but perhaps it's more telling that we feel compelled to be treated. So what if the pills are placebos? To all intents and purposes I find it impossible to distinguish between a psychological medicine that works because it works, and one that works because you think it works. Any takers for that one?

I don't really mind if my antidepressants are placebos. And I am as hostile to Big Pharma as anyone else. It seems to me that antidepressants are just a heavily industrialised extension of an old solution to an old, old phenomenon: that we need institutions (and the very institution in particular that is the guardian and guarantor of our health) to recognise that we have interiority. Paradoxically, maybe we need an institutional recognition that there is something about consciousness that is indivisible?

In a way, that the latest treatment for depression is unmasked as a kind of quackery isn't a victory for the scientist who've produced this report, or the anti-Pharma activists, or for the people who say that depression is a self-constructing, self-perpetuating phenomenon. This is because we don't really know what depression is, beyond an ever more minute catalogue of its symptoms. We don't really know how to cure it, either. And we certainly don't know why it is that we keep taking cures that, though they work, demonstrably don't work. (Phrenology, anyone?)

it seems that there's a blind-leading-the-blind element here. Scientists devise fake treatments that work for a non-existent condition that is described by one analyst and philosopher as 'like death-in-life'. Other scientists then expose these treatments as bogus (although they too are wrong). New treatments are designed simply to meet demand. Lather, rinse, repeat.

We don't know what our antic disposition is (or why so many accounts of depression sound a lot like Hamlet's 'seeming' rather than 'being') but soon there'll be another cure for it. People will re-engineer SSRIs, perhaps, but there'll be something else, something new. It'll be wonderfully effective, too - it'll be the new wonder treatment for depression, until we figure out that in fact, it doesn't work at all. All this makes me think of that wonderful Simon Armitage poem, To his Lost Lover;

Now they are no longer
any trouble to each other

he can turn things over, get down to that list
of things that never happened, all of the lost

unfinishable business.
For instance… for instance,

how he never clipped and kept her hair, or drew a hairbrush
through that style of hers, and never knew how not to blush

at the fall of her name in close company.
How they never slept like buried cutlery –

two spoons or forks cupped perfectly together,
or made the most of some heavy weather –

walked out into hard rain under sheet lightning,
or did the gears while the other was driving.

How he never raised his fingertips
to stop the segments of her lips

from breaking the news,
or tasted the fruit

or picked for himself the pear of her heart,
or lifted her hand to where his own heart

was a small, dark, terrified bird
in her grip. Where it hurt.

Or said the right thing,
or put it in writing.

And never fled the black mile back to his house
before midnight, or coaxed another button of her blouse,

the another,
or knew her

favourite colour,
her taste, her flavour,

and never ran a bath or held a towel for her,
or soft-soaped her, or whipped her hair

into an ice-cream cornet or a beehive
of lather, or acted out of turn, or misbehaved

when he might have, or worked a comb
where no comb had been, or walked back home

through a black mile hugging a punctured heart,
where it hurt, where it hurt, or helped her hand

to his butterfly heart
in its two blue halves.

And never almost cried,
and never once described

an attack of the heart,
or under a silk shirt

nursed in his hand her breast,
her left, like a tear of flesh

wept by the heart,
where it hurts,

or brushed with his thumb the nut of her nipple,
or drank intoxicating liquors from her navel.

Or christened the Pole Star in her name,
or shielded the mask of her face like a flame,

a pilot light,
or stayed the night,

or steered her back to that house of his,
or said “Don’t ask me how it is

I like you.
I just might do.”

How he never figured out a fireproof plan,
or unravelled her hand, as if her hand

were a solid ball
of silver foil

and discovered a lifeline hiding inside it,
and measured the trace of his own alongside it.

But said some things and never meant them –
sweet nothings anybody could have mentioned.

And left unsaid some things he should have spoken,
about the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often.

nighttime habits.

Apparently, I wake her up - but not myself - crying about one night in three. I have no idea what about. The last time I shared a room with my dad I woke him up - but not myself - saying over and again "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry".

tagging

At work we've been given these little radio-magnetic tags that have each been assigned to us, and which we have been expressly forbidden to loan to oneanother. They're subtle, discreet little things; they're stylishly designed. We need to use them to access our offices on either floor - and this after a seperate tag lets us into the building.

This new tag is, we're told, for office security. After, the secret services don't come in here at all to meet with our head of security who isn't alleged by some to work for the CIA. I don't mind, in a way, the blatancy of this tracking - we're hired because we're clever, so I don't imagine that they even expect what's going on to have escaped us.

And yet - do you know how these tags are meant to be worn? Around our necks.

Ascot

"Her Majesty’s Representative wishes to point out that only formal day dress with a hat or substantial fascinator will be acceptable.

Off the shoulder, halter neck, spaghetti straps and dresses with a strap of less than one inch and / or mini skirts are considered unsuitable. Midriffs must be covered and trouser suits must be full length and of matching material and colour.

Gentlemen are required to wear either black or grey morning dress, including a waistcoat, with a top hat"

Substantial fascinator? I like.

implicit rejection

Implicit rejection is a term of art in the graduate application community. It is the term for the suspicion you have that all the accepted students have been notified. You didn't hear; you're not an accepted student. Implicit rejection.

My implicit rejection count is, unhappily, soaring. It's an imprecise art, because grad admissions comms are human and do things irregularly, however much they try to systematise for efficiency's sake. But that considered, the count stands at:

• Berkeley
• Penn
• JHU
• UVa
• Chicago
• Michigan

Add in my acceptance at Duke and my rejection from UCLA, and that means that I have an idea of how eight of my fifteen schools stand. Suddenly, the season is more than half over - and I've only heard from two places! Thus the lure of implicit rejections.

Still to hear from and still to notify anyone: Columbia, NYU, Harvard, Yale, Rutgers, WashU Stl and Stanford.

fit

As far as fit goes, I can't think of anything more important. I submitted applications that showed me in different lights to different schools. I'm interested in a variety of things, and so some of my applications were literary-historical, some theoretical, and some a Polonius-like combination of the three, according to which of my interests would best serve and be served by the school in question.

What it comes down to is this: you will be spending at least 6 years in a school, and over that period what will count to you more than prestige or standing - so much more - is how congenial the school is to the kind of thing you want to study - and the way that you want to study it.

Forgive me if I seem rude. You have another year to sort all of this out. But talking as you do about "fit bullshit" implies that you don't care what you study, as long as you do it somewhere with a prestigious name. Professors everywhere but everywhere are likely to be smart, inspiring people to greater or lesser extents. You might as well apply based on what they do, not where they do it.

Imagine if you got into a big name school and went eager to study, say - I don't know - Paradise Lost and the civil war, but when you got there you were told that you had to study, say, historical and social circumstances of production of civil war pamphleteering and the modes of their consumption. Wouldn't you feel that your cynical opportunism had really screwed things over for you?

Finally - your comments on how to take failure are... interesting. Sure, be confident in your own quality. But if last year I had not sucked it up, but thought instead that the schools just hadn't recognised my calibre, I would have submitted the same app, and I'm sure I'd facing 15 rejections, instead of last year's seven. I wouldn't have gone on conferences and given papers, and submitted things to journals, and spent months rewriting my statements and sample.

This is the point of learning - people who know more than you tell you that you are wrong, and it hurts and you take it and then you get better. Entrenchment won't ever lead to progress.

Enid Roach

I have, however, found the time to read a novel. Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude. It is extraordinary bleak - reading it is like being broken over someone's knee like a tiny piece of kindling. Any novel in which the heroine's first name is not revealed until 160 pages in - and you don't even notice - is doing something right. It chronicles the relentless self-sabotage of a woman walling herself slowly into loneliness, spinsterhood, penury and, possibly death. I've never read such an utterly forceful account of the sheer insidious poison of self-doubt, and pessimism, and self-imposed victimhood.

anxiety

I'm so anxious and unproductive through grad school anxiety that I can't even procrastinate properly. I heard back from UCLA, which was a no.

a day consumed by anxiety

Work is reasonably easy, and so I can by and large do it and work it as a pleasant anaesthetic, but today I have lost a whole day to worry and the obsessive checking of the internet. I applied to, in alphabetical order:

• Berkeley
• Chicago
• Columbia
• Duke
• Harvard
• JHU
• Michigan
• NYU
• Penn
• Rutgers
• Stanford
• UCLA
• UVa
• Washington University STL
• Yale
  

As I said, I have been accepted to Duke. I haven't heard back from the other fourteen places. Last year I applied to Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Stanford, NYU and Princeton. Obviously, that didn't go especially well. I can't keep my eyes open and I keep falling asleep on the bus, which is how my wallet was stolen last December, and I'm just sick with nerves.