The Potential Doctor Is In


Posting has been nonexistent here for a bit because not only is it the start of a new school year (a time when posting is always light here), but, as I've mentioned before, I'm also now beginning the PhD in Literature program at the University of New Hampshire. This not only involves lots of time in classes, time teaching First-Year Writing, and time doing homework and class prep, but I'm also driving over 300 miles a week commuting to and from campus. And of course there are also the inevitable writing projects — currently, I'm writing an introduction for a new translation from the Japanese of a very interesting novel (more on that later, I'm sure), a couple of book reviews and review-essays and essay-essays, a couple of short stories, and the always very slowly progressing book manuscript on 1980s action movies. And I've got a couple video essays I want to make in the next month or so. And I'm editing a short film I shot this summer. And, well, naturally, blogging is not really at the forefront of my mind right now. But it is there, somewhere, in amidst everything else in that rattletrap of a mind.


Me & my pal Jacques
I've been wondering, too, what exactly to write about the whole PhD thing. For instance, the first question that occurs to people when I say I'm doing this thing at my advanced age: For god's sake WHY? My answer is simple and honest: They're giving me health insurance and a teaching stipend, which is actually a step up for me, since the stipend is a few hundred dollars more than I made teaching as an adjunct, and now I won't have to pay for my own health insurance. So I actually make more money now as a graduate student than I did as a college teacher. (Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of higher ed!) And I only have to teach one class per term and I get to take classes where I get to read a lot and write a lot and talk about, you know, litritcher. What's not to like? Of course, I know as well as anybody that the last thing the world wants is another lit PhD, and there are no jobs, and even if there are jobs the tenure track is disappearing rapidly and adjunctification is the name of the game in higher ed, and all that jazz. I know. Boy, do I know! It's entirely possible and even likely that I will never get a full-time job on the tenure track. But I honestly don't even know if I want a full-time job on the tenure track, or if I want to stay in college teaching at all. I'm very conflicted about that. But I'm not conflicted about the stuff I really do love: I love the research, I love academic conversations, I love reading complex and difficult stuff. And for a little while, that's what I'll get to do. I'm not going into any financial debt to do it, so I figure it's about as good a plan as anything else. I'm still open to marrying a successful investment banker, winning the lottery, and/or discovering I'm the lost heir of a billionaire. But this will do for now.

The other thing I wonder about is how much I should write about the progress of my classes and research. For now, I'm not really going to write a lot about it. This term, I'm only able to take one literature class because I also have to take a course on teaching college composition. I can't pretend to enjoy that part of this. All the Composition & Rhetoric people are lovely and brilliant, but I am very much not a Comp/Rhet person. Really, I think I've got more affinity for mechanical engineering than I do Comp/Rhet. I'm glad there are people out there doing it, because it can really be noble work, but I don't know of another field in the discipline of English about which I am less interested, so surviving 30+ hours of it during orientation and now 3 hours/week of it for class, plus teaching the First Year Writing course, is nearly enough to make me rush home and do math problems for fun.

The literature class I have this term is on trauma theory, which I didn't even know was a thing until fairly recently. I've generally avoided psychological approaches to literature, and so this is an interesting foray outside my comfort zone. I would be deeply, deeply surprised if it makes me more fond of psychological approaches to literature than I have been in the past, but it's a provocative class and I think I will at least get a good paper on Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country out of it. We'll see. First, I have to survive reading Freud, a writer I sometimes find really quite hilarious, but other people apparently take him seriously and therefore don't appreciate my giggles. (Pause for a passage from Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, as translated by Brian Massumi: "That day, the Wolf-Man rose from the couch particularly tired. He knew that Freud had a genius for brushing up against the truth and passing it by, then filling the void with associations. He knew that Freud knew nothing about wolves, or anuses for that matter. The only thing Freud understood was what a dog is, and a dog's tail. It wasn't enough. It wouldn't be enough.")

What I'm most enjoying, honestly, is having access to a nice big library every day. I love Plymouth State's Lamson Library beyond all others, because it was my savior as a child and then over the last five years I've been able to cajole and harangue the librarians into buying lots of books and movies that were of vital interest to me, so the collection now bears quite a bit of my imprint. But Plymouth doesn't have the resources of UNH, and so I already have piles of books on all sorts of different subjects checked out, because I easily get bibliographic whims — for instance, a sudden desire to read all of Donna Haraway. Many of my happiest hours working on my master's at Dartmouth were spent in the library there, a library I still return to at least a few times a year.

Is it any surprise, then, that I'm doing a PhD? The only surprise is that it took me this long to get organized enough to do it. After all, I'm really not fit for any other sort of endeavor!

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, for a writer to shape a li
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes from being an apparently gentle and unassuming t
Read more