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.

I have limitations. That makes me sad.

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.

Networking

Dear XXX,
I realise that I'd already agreed to meet XXX this thursday morning for a long RA meeting (splicing together videos of british comedy for her to give as a lecture on a XXX Alums British Isles cruise... enough said). Would next thursday, or any day that week except fri, be any possible? Sorry for this mix-up - I overlooked my meeting withXXX .

XXX had some fascinating things to say about potential hires. I don't know where he gets his information from. How are you doing?

Best
XXX

stanford email

I'm sorry to write a mass email about something as important as this, but I thought that it would be dishonest of me to pretend that you were all getting an individual email, and you would all see through it pretty quickly anyway. (Although in saying that it is 'important' I effortlessly elide importance to me with importance to you, which might not be valid...) So there follows a rather disorganised set of impressions about my visit to Stanford last weekend.

With much love to all of you,
xxx


On Thursday and Friday I went to visit Stanford. From the visit, I liked what I saw a lot. The campus is very big indeed, and built in a sort of faux-antique hispanic style. The library is enormous and has around 8 million holdings, including a lot of early printed books in the eighteenth-century. On Thursday we were greeted with breakfast and talks from the Director if Grad Admissions, who congratulated us on making the 4% admission rate, and the Director of Grad Studies and the head of the department, both of whom evangelised about the programme. We were encouraged to mingle with other admitted candidates, many of whom are, or were still making decisions, largely between and Stanford and one of NYU, Columbia, Virginia and Yale. The other candidates are between 22 and 36, though mostly around 25/6, so I'm at the younger end of students. They are specialising across literary history, but clustered mainly in Medieval, C18th, and modern literatures. It reflects the strength of C18th lit at Stanford that though it is a more marginal area than most, 4 of the admitted students had chosen it as their focus.

We were taken to lunch at the faculty club, with current grad students and faculty members. I then had office hours meetings with professors in my area (Professor Blakey Vermeule, C18th Lit, Prof Ursula Heise, Theory and Urban Lit). There was then a class on Romantic poetics with other grad students, who were really impressive. We were taken out for dinner in the evening by the grad students at the faculty's expense. They seem genuinely happy with the programme - extremely well-funded, intellectually stimulated and fulfilled people who were content with the choice that they'd made. No-one pretended, of course, that the workload was anything other than very strenuous, but they did say that Stanford did absolutely everything in its power to make sure that nothing got in the way of students doing their work.

The next day we had breakfast and another class, this one on the history and theory of the novel with Professor Franco Moretti, who is one of stanford's biggest names and a truly inspirational theory. I haven't even really studied the novel and it found it very exciting; I'd love to take classes with him. Then there were more office hours, in which I met with two more professors in C18th Lit, Prof John Bender and Prof Terry Castle, both of whom had a lot of upbeat things to say about Stanford (as you would expect) and who were very positive about my admission. After lunch there was a tour of the library for a few hours and then tours of the enormous campus. After that we were driven into San Francisco by the grad students, which was a 35-40 minute drive, and taken out for dinner (so much eating!) at a Tapas restaurant. she came along and got to meet my fellow prospectives. At about 10.30 or so I was absolutely exhausted and we went home.

All of this is just to say that I really enjoyed my visit there, and found the graduate students at Stanford to be very, very smart and just as friendly. They have said, also, that they will look into seeing whether they can reimburse me for any of my air fares - so we'll see about that. The atmosphere there was so un-English-ly content as to be almost jarring; the faculty, staff and students all seem uncomplicatedly pleased to be in their huge red sandstone buildings, surrounded by their Rodin sculpture garden. The university's wealth is sort of staggering - I think that their endowment is in the region of $20bn. Which is, presumably, why they can afford to pay their english grad students so well.

I did ask some grad students, once the shine has come off your experience at Stanford, maybe after a few years, and the inevitable jading and cynicism has begun to set in as it does at any institution, what criticisms are typically levelled, and what complaints made? The response was that the dissatisfactions that people feel owe more to the actual process of writing a doctorate ("It's hard! And can be lonely!") rather than inhering in the institution itself, which, more than anything else, made me look forward to started classes there in September.

(Oh, and XXX, I met that girl that you didn't like at the NYU w/e. Stanford has just lost Seth Lerer, so it is more likely that she'll be in your cohort than mine. Ha!)

xxxx

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?

conversation #4

XXX: morning
me: morning
XXX: (um, right?)
me: yup
how's XXX?
XXX: yea
XXX is pretty good
felt much better today
me: I'm glad
XXX: and there were no surprise visits from my somewhat bosses
me: phew
that's always a plus
XXX: also the magical flying pirate ship i'm working on in the modeling tutorial
me: !!!
XXX: is starting to look more like a pirate ship
and less like a bad modern art sculpture
me: hahaha
oh, dude
mad modern art is the best
was it all post-cubist?
XXX: heh
oh very
me: awesome
XXX: all kinds of geometric shapes popping out where they aren't wanted
me: hehe
if you were having an especially picasso evening there'd be the odd stray horse-head
XXX: mm
yes
me: which would be wholly undesirable
XXX: rather
though this program does have an amusing feature
whereby, if i wished, i could have random teapots
all over the ship
perhaps the ship is crewed by teapots
and sails on their steam
ha ha ha
me: (I just got an email that begins:

Those gloaming hours again in which I wonder what, given its virulence and ubiquity,the plague was doing around 1400 when it could have been cutting shorter John Lydgate's infinite flow.)
Wow -- is there a teapot button?
XXX: hah wow
me: that's amazing!
XXX: yes
quite literally
a teapot button
me: I
Love
Whimsy
XXX: or even a teapot paint brush, actually
and also that is a fantastic start to an email
wow
hah
me: haha - he is reading lydgate
and not liking him much
as you can probably guess
XXX: i imagined not
heh
me: How come your status is breaking?
XXX: oh
on break
break-ing
sorry
better?
heh
me: got you
sorry I just got paid
XXX: or wait did they do those commercials in the uk?
me: and was taking a moment to be happy
yup
XXX: ooooooh
YEA for getting paid!!
me: man I love it
money is great
oh! have you read quicksilver?
XXX: nope
that's neal stephenson, right?
me: yeah
XXX: i've just started the, um, cryptonomicron
it's my first of his stuff
me: or did I already tell you about it?
ah
XXX: nope
go right ahead!
me: cryptonomicon is amazing
XXX: greatly enjoying it so far
though i wish i had bought an edition with bigger pages and font
me: quicksilver is the prequel to Cypto. It take place between 1660 and 1715
XXX: but that is neither here nor there
ooh hmm
me: or rather the trilogy of books does
XXX: (nods)
24 me: um... it's a cast, operatic, brainy, sexy, swashbuckling, incredibly researched monster ofa piece of work
*vast
XXX: wow
that sounds, um, incredibly cool
me: It includes lots of liebniz and newton
and pirates
XXX: !
so cool!!
me: and about 5 seperate heists
and Louis XIV
XXX: ...hah though i admit i had some unkind thoughts about mr. isaac newton when i started calculus
similar to your friend's in that email
whoa
....i must read this book
me: monarchs coercively having sex with other monarchs' subjects
XXX: !
as proxy or by design?
or wait
don't want to know
me: haha, calculus, oh my
No, it's not graphically unplesant
XXX: oh oh not that
me: also... pepys, and the foundation of the royal society, and of MIT
XXX: was just interested in motivation
oh!
wait
mit?1
geeesh
this guy is rapidly becoming my idol
and i haven't even finished one of his books
me: haha
I will put quicksilver in the package.
XXX: yea!!!!! (does little happy dance)
me: woop woop
I will try to include short stories and maybe poetry too if there's room in the box
XXX: hah no poetry ;-) :-p
me: do you not like poetry?
XXX: though i, um, appreciate the thought
mm
me: you lose, dude
XXX: (bows deeply)
mah
other than (weirdly) a few authors/poems who stick with me
i am not a fan of poems
me: wow - that's a sentence I could never type
XXX: hah i know
me: mind you, that's cause poems are my thing
XXX: you like the dunciad :-p
heh yes
me: and how!
XXX: i have great respect for poems and people who like them
just not my thing
me: :-)
XXX: that's actually how i encountered claude rawson
me: fair enough
XXX: trying to dodge my poetry requirement
me: oh?
ha
XXX: i had to take something with poetry more modern than milton
me: oh noes!
XXX: and ended up winning an arguement to the effect that his seminar on satire counted
as it included pope and etc.
me: that seems reasonable
XXX: it was
...i'm glad they didn't check what i wrote my papers on ;-)
me: but .... but, what about all the great 20thC american poets?
XXX: .... (sigh)
me: Lowell? Frost?Bishop? Moore? Berryman? Ashberry? Roethke? Crane?
XXX: i like some frost
out of that list
me: (author's note: I am smiling)
XXX: i also like some atwood
hah hah i thought that might be the case
also i like eliott
for whatever sadistic reason
but i think this is because he writes long poems
me: yeah, whoops that was a fairly substantial oversight on my part
XXX: i need my narrative
(laughs)
and ironically enough
my first real literary paper (pre-college, but it was the first one i everwent to crit for) was on zukofsky
me: I know zukovsky not
XXX: mmm
likely better off
very modernist
me: ha
XXX: very "ooooh eliot makes cool allusions that are impossible to understand I must do this to but make it EVEN HARDER"
but i seized on the bits that i liked
like the idea of having an image that is tied to an idea
but is not a metaphor for the idea
my poem was about a grasshopper
me: Ok, this is interesting
XXX: zukovsky?
he is interesting
me: mhm
what you are saying is interesting
XXX: oh
hah
me: bozo, what else am I going to be talking about?
XXX: (laughs)
me: (except myself, of course to which I don't usually refer as 'this')
XXX: hah ha ha ha
well you could have gotten a bonus or something...
kidding
me: It's my first month on my new pay
for that is nice
XXX: yea!
but yeah
i've tried to explain my feelings about poems to people before
i can read them
but they don't really mean much to me
me: it ok if you need narrative
XXX: the way that stories do
me: it happens
it's sad
XXX: hah
me: but for some people
you know... that's all they have
XXX: (is laughing)
me: in seriousness, I get it
because I struggle with narratives
I'm like, you want to me to do what? Analyse it? What?
XXX: yes!
exactly!
me: but how!
it's so wishy-washy!
XXX: ha ha ha
you read it and are like "okay, that was nice. ....what? I have to write a whole paper on this?!"
i love how we are having the same conversation
me: see for me poetry is just the crunchiest, most economical, most beautiful words with none o the extraneous crap about people and stuff happening to other stuff and yadda yadda
XXX: or the same feelings at least
about the opposite things
me: yes!
XXX: mm and for me narratives allow you to meet real characters, people you can learn from and encounter like actual people, and provide a looking glass and a suggested pattern for what to do with your life
...i don't have the gift of being able to describe this well
you can carry ideas to their conclusions
without unneccessarily veiling them in allusions and cryptic language
gah
(gives up)
me: no, I think I see what you mean
I just think that there's more to life than narrative would have you believe
XXX: heh
me: take closure, for example
XXX: mm
me: and I'm sorry that I haven't finished your paper yet
the weekend got in the way
XXX: ha ha aww
's okay
i hear your thesis is quite brilliant
you have to send it to me sometime :-)
me: but what happens in closure is intensely interesting and reveals the fundementally problematic nature of narrative, which is that we actually have no idea how one thing causes another, only that one thing follows another
follows, even
I think poetry is interested in those gaps
XXX: oh ho ho.... that's not a problem of narrative
that's the point!
me: where the narrative isn't
XXX: to figure out how these things happen!
me: not where the narrative isn't interested - i was unclear - I mean, where it is absent
ok, that's a fair point
XXX: exactly! that's where we come in! that's where the engagement happens!
and not just in comics
more generally
me: and whoever has been talking to you about my thesis is telling porkies!
XXX: hah
now now i thought XXX was a nice person
me: she's lovely
XXX: who certainly knows what she's talking about
me: and ((((hugs)))) on your letter
XXX: thanks (sigh)
i kinda knew it was coming
and it spurred me into action in a sense
i actually emailed u mich and harvard
me: I still kinda hoped it wasn't
oh, good on you
XXX: to be like "yo. what's going on?"
(um, in that, "thank you so much for taking the time to read my email during this busy season" kind of way)
me: yeah, of course
XXX: yeah
i dunno
i'm almost relieved in a sense
because it would have torn me to shreds to be accepted without funding
and have to deal with that
me: yes
XXX: i also agree with what many people are saying about how funding difference poisons the atmosphere of a program
because i saw that happen when i was interning
about a quarter of us were paid
the rest of us were not
me: mmmm that's interesting, but not at all the atmosphere in Berkeley
XXX: and it created a lot of bad feelings and divisions
hmm
that's good!
wow
me: XXX is sufficiently sensitive to have picked up on that, as an unfunded person
XXX: ...maybe everyone there is supernaturally nice
(nods)
oh i certainly imagine so
me: actually, because she's unfunded she gets TAships and RAships
XXX: ooooh
me: and the funded people are anxious
!
XXX: i thought that the funding, um, was entailed upon taships
me: (anxious that they're not good enough)
XXX: and that if you weren't funded then you had no shot at such things
interesting
me: some people (eg XXX) get fellowships
XXX: (nods)
me: that is what being funded is
everyone has recourse to some funding
just unfunded folks have to work for it and don't get much
XXX: ahh
huh
interesting
me: ... and have to pay tuition in the first year
XXX: ....don't really want to think about it at the moment
ah
yes
me: no no I know
sorry
XXX: there is always that
me: sorry
XXX: 's okay (sigh)
my friend lectured me today
about how i appear to be "grasping for a scattershot of programs"
me: what about?
ouch
XXX: (sigh) that is not true
this all makes sense in my head
me: ouch
XXX: i am still angry
as you can tell
me: of course it does!
well, yeah
XXX: partly because i think he's just bitter as he did an english masters
and hated it
and is still not done with said thesis
me: they clearly have no idea of you, your interests, or your applications
XXX: (firm nod)
me: ((((hugs))))
XXX: (hugs) thanks :-(
i have to remind myself
me: people are occasionally rubbisyh; there appears not to be any way around this
XXX: that things other people say are not always true
just because other people are saying them
they are
me: no! absolutely not
of course not
brb
XXX: ok
me: I have fucked up at work
will be back
sorry
XXX: oh no!
you go!
good luck!!!
(hugs)

Dear XXX,

Thanks very much for your email. My number for your reference is xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. I've spent my day at work ignoring my deadline for this report on Danish vs. Canadian sub-regional financial autonomy, which is, somehow, even drier than it sounds, and reading up instead on the Ph.D. course at Stanford. I have a couple of questions which aren't urgent, and if you'd rather answer on the phone at yr convenience than having to type everything out that's fine.

The Ph.D. handbook on the English faculty website assumes that a five year course is normal; however there are six years of funding and looking online, estimated mean times to degree at Stanford seem to vary between seven and eight years. How does this time to degree change the structure of the program? Is the leeway for a longer dissertation-writing period? Or is the extra time factored in elsewhere?

Thank you very much also for your kind words about my sample - as you can see, whilst writing it I developed a strong interest in theories of urban space that I tried to suppress with limited success. Something I would be very interested in doing would be to pursue these interests and think about poetic formations//formulations of urban space more generally (or even for example look at Hart Crane vs GG Lorca in New York - there's probably some fantastic SF examples I'm overlooking). I know that this would take me wildly out of my specialised area in both literary and more generally disciplinary terms, and my heart isn't set on it, but I was wondering - could I get credit for taking a class in Stanford's Urban Studies department? And if not could I do it anyway? Also were I to commute my time in the first year by transferring credit from my Master's at Oxford, would my funding be docked? (The handbook implies this - I don't think I actually want to do it, but I wanted to ask in case.)

Similarly at Berkeley I know that they stipulate that you have a member of another department on your dissertation committee. Looking through the handbook, that doesn't seem to be a requirement; but is it a possibility? I was also hoping to live in Berkeley with my partner and commute - candidly, is this possible (with a car, presumably)?

I've been talking to XXX XXX, who asked me to pass on her best wishes to you, and she's just hugely positive about the program - would it be ok for me to contact current grad students with questions? Otherwise I have spent my day looking at the course lists and getting extremely excited about them, and hoping that United's strength and depth will show against the Gunners in the last ten games of the season.

with all best wishes,

on stanford

Dear XXX (and XXX),

Thanks so much for your responses, which have been really helpful and which have made me feel pretty great about Stanford. My only anxiety (or at least one of them) is that I want to live in Berkeley with my gf and commute - looking at the reqs it seems that I'll be required to take two or three classes a term, sorry, semester, sorry, quarter, and so I'd only have to drive down a couple of days a week. It looks like I'd have borrowing rights at the Bancroft too - from your experience, do you think that a setup like this would be tenable. (And from this pov it's reassuring that I'd need a car anyway.)

As far as apps go, I'd be more than happy to share my statement and sample for what they're worth. As I was saying to Ryan earlier, when people have commented personally in emails to me they have commented on my sample, not my statement, for whatever that is or isn't worth. I confess that also, not being in the system in any sense as an international student whose recommenders knew no-one, I insidiated myself with the faculty at colleges I really liked. I'm in the incredibly lucky position of having supportive parents, and they helped me out with visiting colleges I liked and meeting up with professors I wanted to work with. I emailed them all two months in advance, give or take. I bound up copies of my Master's dissertation and distributed them liberally, which I just hated doing because self-promotion is for scummy right-wing politicians, but which I think was probably worthwhile. Certainly, I've had a better strike rate, if I can be crass about it, at schools where I met people then I have where I didn't. But I'd definitely be more than happy to offer any and all help you wanted, if I can offer it without sounding like an arse.

I'm also pumped by the awesome things you say about XXX XXX, who basically seems to be the Bomb in human form. One thing I was wondering, though – what are the possibilities for interdisciplinary study? I would love to take a couple classes in Urban Studies or in theories of space, for example – would I be able to do that, do you know? The interdisciplinarity is something that I actually preferred about Berkeley, where it is actually a requirement to have someone from another department on your doctoral committee. Also at Berk there are a couple of Stanford grad students who have cross-registered in Berk classes – is this something that's done much?

Thanks also for all the tips about where's good to go in Palo Alto – my question is also whether there are any shit-hot bookshops in PA?

I'm also at work, and also bored by it. My report on Danish sub-regional financial autonomy just isn't getting written…

xxx

fajitas

XXX: guac or no guac?
me: dude, I always make my own guac
how's the move?
XXX: blah
almost done...currently in irvine


(btw, i make my own guac too...with lime and cumin!)

me: are you visiting?

Oh!
Lime!
piss!
XXX: haha....
did i hit on a sensitive note? don't forget the cilantro and tomatoes :)
(yep...though currently writing/notwriting my paper)


me: of course not, honestlyno one forgets coriander and tomatoes

but I shouldn't distract
from your paper - I hope it goes really well and that you enjoy your visit!
XXX: coriander?
*grins *
did you say coriander?
me: yup
very definitely so
that's what it's called!
XXX: ....on one island
the rest of the world thinks differently
me: haha
I'm just opposing your linguistic hegemony by promoting marginality. betcha didn't realise that saying coriander was a political act

XXX wait a second
is the BRIT telling me that he's promoting marginality?
me: hahaha ouche
*touche
XXX: :)
me: and also ouch
XXX: ouche. combines both...perfect word for the lazy :)
me: should it be pronounced 'ooshe', as a neither-half-way house?
XXX: oh-shay!