Joining the Conversation

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.” – Richard Feynman

With this quote, Anthropology professor Jerry Moore concluded his keynote speech at the 17th annual Southern California Conference on Undergraduate Research (SCCUR), held this year at CSU Dominguez Hills. Moore’s point, in an address titled “Undergraduate Research in Difficult Times,” is that there is something wonderfully satisfying and pleasurable about university research that cannot be replaced by trade schools and technical training programs. People may see academic pursuits as a luxury in this slumping economy, but Moore argues that there must always be a place where people can learn, wonder, and discover. Research, as Moore puts it, is the best way to learn.

This weekend, Lillian (of Scientific Lillian) and I joined 400+ participants at SCCUR 2009 in embracing and celebrating the necessity and beauty of research, particularly at the undergraduate level. I got to sit in on two oral presentation sessions (including my own) as well as spend some time looking at posters during a poster session. I was impressed by the seriousness and dedication of the presenters as well as the creativity and range of the questions and approaches that they took. From 1950s Hollywood censorship to vanity sizing in women’s jeans, the presentations definitely ran a gamut of research topics.

During my own panel, the presenters spoke on Islamophobia in the US media and Renaissance rhetorical practices in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Presenting last, I talked about collaborative authorship in Renaissance theatre, particularly focusing on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. I wasn’t especially nervous as I had already given a preliminary version of this presentation at a previous conference. But at the same time, there is always a certain amount of insecurity about how your ideas will be received.

I think academic conferences are important for this very reason. Research can be lonely, but it is so so important to find your own tribe to share your ideas with and get feedback from. In my honors research colloquia, we’re always talking about inserting ourselves into the scholarly conversation and showing our awareness of previous scholarship. Oftentimes in undergraduate literary research, this means responding to journal articles and critical theories. But at some point, we hopefully begin to engage in real life debates with the people we used to cite in our papers. We will struggle to meet their challenges and questions and eventually we will emerge the better for it. Fancy ideas are just fancy ideas until you test them against an audience and persuade them to see things your way.

Personally, I also find conferences to be a great source of motivation to get cracking on my own research project in the same way that Googling grad school CVs already makes me worry about getting published. You’re filled with a nervous energy, but its the good kind that inspires your ambition and excites the spirit. Going to a conference with 400+ presenters really hits home the fact that a lot of people are doing exactly what you’re doing so you better work harder than ever if you want a shot at the whole professor thing.

Mental Pep Talk

Exciting news! I finally turned in my letter of recommendation packets on Monday! Which means I can stop fiddling around with my list of schools. I had a list of about 15 places that I liked, but finally narrowed it down to 12, which is the same number of schools I applied to for college (lucky number?). See if you recognize any of these places:

Surprisingly, applying for grad school has actually made me feel more confident about my qualifications for each program. I can be a bit of a perfectionist (especially about English) and I tend to beat myself up and generally have a bad day if I oversleep for class or don’t finish annotating the reading. There have been many many moments in my undergraduate career where I’ve felt like I wasn’t good enough for graduate school.  But looking at the responses I’ve gotten over my statement of purpose and CV, I think I’m starting to realise that no one is harder on me than myself and that I need to be more confident about my abilities. If I work really hard, I can get into a top tier PhD program and the only thing stopping me is that silly part of me that says that I’m not good enough.

However, I also know that being a grad student means more responsibility, maturity, and accountability. It means doing what you promise to do and taking initiative to do even more. It means being excellent and engaging even on your off-days. Especially in a new city, it means being independent, taking care of yourself, and learning to endure a lot of lonely nights with a cup of tea and a book. But I firmly believe that life will force you to grow up and take responsibility. A lot of these things are just part of becoming an adult and I will be ready to cross that bridge when I come to it.

Remember to Breathe

This week I focused on finishing up my letter of recommendation packets, which meant that I had to finish writing my statement of purpose, updating my curriculum vitae, and opening online applications for each school. This process ended up taking way longer than expected. Even with Veteran’s Day holiday in the middle of the week, I am still not done. My goal now is to finish everything and get the packets out by Monday because it’s getting perilously close to crunch time.

The only problem is I can’t decide on which introduction to use of the four that I’ve written. I worry that one is too controversial, the other too naive. I don’t know if I should bring up a favorite childhood novel or mention this-and-that theorist. I want to sound intelligent, passionate about literary research, hardworking, and capable. I want to send out a piece of writing that I will be proud of, something that accurately represents me as an English enthusiast and budding scholar and as an awesome possum human being.  All in 500-1000 words. Piece of cake, right?

SCCUR 2009 at CSU Dominguez Hills

I think the pressure is really starting to get to me now that eighth week of Fall quarter is approaching. Next Saturday, I’m presenting my 199 research project at the Southern California Conference for Undergraduate Research (SCCUR) so my presentation has to be revised. I need to publish the latest issue for the research journal; my thesis advisor wants to see a good chunk of my senior thesis written up. And there’s quizzes, finals and grad school applications. Responsibilities are piling up. I just hope I’m not in over my head.

Its days (or weeks) like this when I need a nice pick-me-up. So here’s my happy list for today:

• Taking a lovely stroll through campus (instead of the usual NYC power walk to class)
• Eating spicy grilled cheese sandwiches
• Getting a fast response from Yale about my fee waiver (brownie points from promptness!)
• Having the whole weekend ahead of me to work on applications
• Receiving a very nice kiss-and-make-up email from my Milton TA after everyone got mad at him for grading the midterm really hard
• Reading Madame Bovary on my new Amazon Kindle
• Being featured on the UCLA University Librarian’s blog (my thesis project is also the third one listed here!)

I was really excited about the last thing in a nerdy nerdy way. As an undergraduate, one sometimes worries about being seen as inexperienced, unreliable, or unprepared. You worry that people don’t take you seriously or respect your ideas. So it totally makes my day when I feel like I’m slowly being accepted into that shiny magical realm of scholarship.

Six Months Later…

Wow, so I haven’t posted here in a long while. It’s been a hectic few months since I last posted.

Back in May, I presented my 199 research project on collaborative authorship at my first academic conference, the 2009 Westwind/Aleph Conference for Undergraduate Research & Writing. I stayed up the entire night before perfecting my speech and was assigned to moderate for the morning session. All the presenters in my session, “Texts and Contexts,” were seniors presenting their honors thesis papers. It was nerve-wrecking, scary, and exhilarating all at the same time. Hearing each presenter’s research and talking about my own, I felt like I had finally joined the kind of intellectual discourse that I had read about, envied, and desired. And I knew that this was the kind of community that I wanted to be a part of for the rest of my life. I ended up winning a Dean’s Prize for my presentation. Afterwards, exhausted, I collapsed on my bed and slept the next 16 hours away.

The next morning, I woke up feeling tired, sore, and feverish. My lymph nodes were swollen and my throat felt scratchy. It was eighth week of Spring quarter, I was taking a 22-unit course load, and somehow, I had the bad luck of developing mononucleosis. The good news was that I only had a fairly minor case; after two weeks of nothing but sleeping, eating, and dragging my butt to lecture when I could muster up the energy, I was well enough to finish out the quarter, turning in final papers and taking my finals. However, my energy level (and more importantly, my motivation for work) took awhile to get back to normal.

I had originally planned on studying hard for the GRE Literature in English test and working on my senior thesis over the summer. I also wanted to get a head-start on the graduate school applications that were due in December. My parents, however, recognized that I was burnt out so when I moved back home for the summer, they really pushed me to get my health back to par. Over the next two months, I went running, hiking, backpacking, and camping. We took a week-long trip to Alaska, conquered our first “fourteener” (14,000 ft above sea level) – White Mountain Peak, and backpacked Mt. Whitney. I also got to hike my first class II mountain, Mt. Dana in Yosemite. I spent a great deal of my summer in the wilderness, rediscovering my love for nature and adventure. While I love the cultural opportunities that LA provides, sometimes I miss the Henry David Thoreau part of me that looks for the poetry in Nature and delights in walks by “Walden pond.”

In September, I moved into the apartments right off-campus with my two roommates from last year and we’ve been having a lot of fun cooking and going on midnight grocery runs to Ralph’s. My boyfriend and his friends live next door so we do a lot of spontaneous potlucks where each person cooks one dish and we roll the boys’ dining table down the hall to our apartment so we can all eat together. (For example, last night’s barbeque chicken! Yum.)

In other news, I’ve resumed my ushering duties with UCLALive, went to a Snow Patrol/Plain White T’s concert at the Wiltern, and made a visit to the Clark Library with Sigma Tau Delta. Academically, I finally started Latin 1 this quarter (yay) and just took my GRE Lit yesterday morning! Now that I’m halfway through Fall quarter and in the middle of application season, I figured I’ve neglected my blog enough. I don’t usually talk about my personal life on this blog (that’s not what it’s for), but applying for graduate school, deciding that its right for you and showing an admissions committee that you belong at X university, is a deeply personal process. And I’ve been thinking it might be worthwhile to share this experience with you, dear reader.

So prepare to hear a lot more about statements of purpose and nervous anxieties, apartment life and secret nerdy dreams about meeting Slavoj Zizek. I also plan to post a GRE guide (general and literature) for those of you looking to take the test within the next year so check back soon!

Pursuing the Life of the Mind

I’ve been taking an Information Studies seminar on “The University Professor and its Critics,” which is basically an easy way for me to do some job market research. We read about and discuss topics like peer review, tenure, and academic freedom. While I am getting a clearer sense of what I’m getting myself into with graduate school looming ahead, I am finding a lot of what we’re learning pretty depressing. 

The state of our current education system and people’s perceptions of the “ivory tower” threaten the viability of the professoriat as it is today. Adjunct professors, who are typically employed part-time on a year-to-year basis without the job security (and academic freedom) provided by tenure, now make up almost 70% of university faculty (see Chronicle of Higher Education article). The advent of the for-profit university has triggered a move towards the university as corporation, where what we learn and teach is left in the hands of the market (look how well that turned out for Wall Street). Most tragic is the lack of respect for the life of the mind as a profession. Academics engage in the production and dissemination of knowledge; they preserve our cultural history and advance human intellect. It baffles me how such a noble pursuit has become so stigmatized in the anti-intellectual culture of modern society. 

As much as I am in love with academia, it is obvious that the obstacles that stand in my way are very real. The treatment of academics, especially in the humanities, from adjunct-status to research funding cuts to teaching lower division remedial courses, inevitably affects my chances of pursuing the career path that I have chosen. 

I was reading John Guillory’s article “The System of Graduate Education” today (as a way of procrastinating on homework) and was struck by this observation about students aspiring to become professors: 

their chances of success in situations where the

odds are stacked heavily against them. (State lotteries

depend on this fact.) Those who labor intellectually

may be even more susceptible to

such hope, because they already possess some

measure of faith in their own abilities. These

persons are the least inclined to accept that mere

chance can determine their fate. We all know

this, because our students persist in pursuing an

academic career even after they have heard the

worst from us. In fact, they are often right about

their abilities, even if they are wrong about the

probability of success. Intellectual labor markets

can draw large numbers of very talented people

into what is essentially a kind of lottery, where

minimal differences in abilities will determine

very large differences in career outcomes.

“Human beings in general overestimate their chances of success in situations where the odds are stacked heavily against them. (State lotteries depend on this fact.) Those who labor intellectually may be even more susceptible to such hope, because they already possess some measure of faith in their own abilities. These persons are the least inclined to accept that mere chance can determine their fate. We all know this, because our students persist in pursuing an academic career even after they have heard the worst from us. In fact, they are often right about their abilities, even if they are wrong about the probability of success. Intellectual labor markets can draw large numbers of very talented people into what is essentially a kind of lottery, where minimal differences in abilities will determine very large differences in career outcomes.”

Like I said, depressing, right? But alas, it turns out that I am an optimist, hopeless romantic, naive undergrad, whatever. Maybe I should be running for the hills (i.e. law school). Maybe I should be changing my major to something more “practical” or participating in activities that will give me “real world experience.” Maybe I should just admit that I’m crazy and in way over my head. But my favorite Jack Kerouac quote always comes to mind:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a common place thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…”

I’d rather explode across the stars than never have made it up to space at all. Besides, if we don’t risk while we’re young, when are we ever going to?

Burn the House Down

On Wednesday, I ushered for a talk given by David Sedaris (author of Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and most recently When You are Engulfed in Flames) in which he detailed his hilarious personal experiences, primarily in France and Australia. Unfortunately I missed quite a bit of the show because it was a full house (the ushers were dismissed later than usual and my friend and I had to leave the show early in order to get a good spot in line for the book signing afterwards). However, Sedaris was outrageously funny yet also insightful during the part of the talk that I was able to see.

A memorable moment for me was when Sedaris talked about stove tops as a metaphor for life. He recalled a conversation with a friend in which the friend tells him that each person has four burners on their stove top: Family, Friends, Work, and Health. In order to be successful, a person will usually have to turn off one burner. The really successful turn off two. For Sedaris, those two burners were Health and Family. 

Since that night, I have been thinking a lot about my stove burners. What will I have to give up in order to achieve my goals? Although I continue to hope, I don’t really believe in having it all. There are too many examples to the contrary. So I guess the question becomes an impossible one: “What can I learn to live without?” Maybe the smartest people are the ones who answer, “Success,” but I don’t know many people who would actually go through with cutting that ambition out of their lives. I know that I tend to ignore Health until I get sick. Friends and Family also flicker occasionally when life gets too hectic. I worry that one day I’ll turn around and realise that I have nothing but Work to keep me warm at night.

The best humor tells us something true about ourselves. Even through the laughter, we learn to ask questions previously unthought of and start to think about our lives in more meaningful ways.

 Which stove burner have you neglected lately?

Bookaholics Anonymous

I have a confession to make. I am inexplicably obsessed with the musty smell of old papers bound up in leather covers. I love holding a book in my hand, flipping through its creamy pages, and feeling history beneath my fingertips. However environmentally unfriendly it is, the physicality of owning a book is an experience that cannot be replaced by e-books or the Kindle.

But then again, I am a bookaholic. My desk in my dorm room is covered with tall stacks of books and my book shelf is completely filled with anthologies, reference texts, poetry, plays, and fiction (and a DVD collection). I also have two bookcases at home that contain the rest of my growing book collection. And yet I keep buying more and more books like an addiction. 

This weekend, I went to the LA Times Festival of Books and bought The World According to Garp (John Irving), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon), About a Boy (Nick Hornby), and I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Bill Bryson). 

I also bought a very nice copy of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court from a booth that sold rare and fine books. It’s really nicely bound with gold lettering and beautiful script on each page. I was also looking at a leatherbound copy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but it was unfortunately out of my price range. 

(Perhaps even more exciting though was the fact that I got to see Kristin Chenoweth from Wicked in person!)

Inspired by Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, as a child I dreamed of having an enormous grand library with the books piled up to the ceiling. I will probably never own a house big enough to house such an ambitious library, but I still dream of having bookshelves line every wall of my future home (which I imagine to be cottage-like and cosy with the rooms painted gold like in Bridge to Terabithia). To this dream, I have added the desire to own tasteful artwork and fine wine. 

My research (and thesis) advisor is a fellow bookaholic. He has five or six book shelves in his (tiny) office filled with books about Shakespeare, Renaissance culture, and other topics related to his research. One meeting while we were talking about purchasing books out of print, he told me that whenever he goes to England, he would peruse the bookshops there and sometimes he would find really rare books for only £20 or so. He is currently registered at the British Museum as the owner of the earliest edition of this one 16th century book and owns some very nice editions of rarely printed plays such as John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize. My professor has so many books that he can’t put them all in bookshelves at his house (his American literature collection lies in sad little stacks in his garage – sorry AmLit majors ). Shelves and shelves of books, rare book collections, books categorized by genre and author (I’m an organization freak). This could be me in thirty years!

In addition to my new Mark Twain acquisition, my fledgling special books collection includes autographed copies of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and most recently Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia. Next week, I plan to get another book autographed by David Sedaris. 

I have caught the book bug (worm?) and I’m loving it. 

It's nice to see that reading isn't dead at all.

Also, happy belated 445th birthday (April 23) to Mr. William Shakespeare! Even though that might not be your real birthday… But I’m sure you don’t mind that we think of you as the literary St. George.

A Five-Star Diatribe

“Such-and-such movie got 57% on Rotten Tomatoes!“

“Really? It got a 7.1 on Metacritic.“ 

One of my biggest pet peeves about reading entertainment reviews is the employment of the five-star rating system (and its many cousins such as the score out of 100, and A-B-C grade). Some argue that such a system allows readers to quickly gauge if a movie is worth their time without having to read through the entire article. Other times, the individual opinions by critics are averaged so that the reader can get an idea of the general consensus. 

Unfortunately, the fact that a movie is rated 23% or 2.3 or C- tells the potential movie-goer absolutely nothing about whether or not they will like the movie. (Thus producing a crowd of angry consumers commenting that the critics must be crazy or stupid because such-and-such movie was completely awesome/horrible). 

In exchange for its simplified convenience, the number scale sacrifices meaning by obscuring the subjectivity of the ratings. Movie reviews are completely useless unless you know the theoretical stance of the critic (Do they care about… the acting? how realistic it is? representations of women? What is their own social/religious/political background?). No writer or critic is objective or innocent in this respect. If the critic is judging the movie with standards that are not in line with your own, then their numeric rating says nothing about how much you will appreciate said film. By turning an expression of taste into numbers, language is undermined and meaning subverted. 

The five-star rating system makes the faulty assumption that a person’s perspectives on a book or movie can be characterized as  an objective degree of excellence. Most importantly, it assumes that taste is the same for any audience. It fails to consider either sociohistorical context or individual response. 

But numeric rating systems are only the tip of the problematic iceberg of reviews. The truth is our society places too much value on emotional appreciation, reader response, the pleasure principle, or whatever else you want to call it. People assume that their emotional reaction to a literary work is equivalent to how “good” the work is (i.e. its literary value). Too often I hear students talk about how much they dislike the novels they read in lit class, wondering “Why are we reading this? It’s so boring/bad/lame/hard.” Unfortunately, their aesthetic “judgment” of a text is based on a visceral reaction rather than intellectual analysis.

Perhaps my beef with those silly stars is that they are a gauge of society’s Id-driven pleasure principle rather than an actual examination of aesthetics. Anyone and everyone can write an amateur review and talk about what they liked or disliked, but I am wholly uninterested in that kind of instinctual subjectivity. Reviews push prescriptive agendas of taste; criticism, on the other hand, speaks of technique and device, interpretation and meaning. 

(This is not to say that I hate all reviewers. Some are actually able to get past individual response (or assumed audience response) and I’m quite fond of New Yorker reviews – which happen to be sans stars. )

Permission to Go Insane? Granted.

The smell of brand-new books waiting to be opened and annotated. The fresh pages of notebook paper. The bright-eyed students eager to bury their heads in books, neglecting the beautiful sunny day outside. Spring quarter has arrived! After a difficult but rewarding winter quarter, Sophia Literaria is ready to… go through the torture all over again. With the GRE out of the way, I decided to take on extra (22) units this quarter, resulting in the following reading list:

• Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Shakespeare, As You Like It
• Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
• Shakespeare, Sonnets
• Shakespeare, Richard II
• Shakespeare, Henry IV, part I
• Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus
• Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
• Shakespeare, Hamlet
• Dryden, All for Love
• Inchbald, The Mogul Tale
• Colman the Younger, Blue-Beard
• Southerne, Oroonoko
• Bickerstaff, The Padlock
• Rowson, Slaves in Algiers
• Gay, Polly
• Colman the Younger, Inkle and Yarico
• Sheridan, Pizarro
• Steele, Conscious Lovers
• Lillo, London Merchant
• Williams, Craft of Argument
• Booth, Craft of Research
• Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction

Not to mention secondary works, the books I’m reading for my independent research project, submissions for Aleph, and articles for my Information Studies seminar. Lovely. No wonder I indulge in television and comic books/manga in my spare time (the less words the better!).

But the truth is I love being crazy busy. I love the challenge of making sense of a hard passage, the adrenaline of filling up a bluebook during a midterm, the sense of achievement when all those late nights pay off, and the satisfaction of turning in a paper that you’re actually proud of. Maybe I drive myself crazy with work because I like the affirmation at the end of the quarter that, despite all the pain and frustration, I still adore English. Even after struggling (and complaining) through The Faerie Queene all winter quarter, I can still say that there’s nothing else I’d rather be studying. Literature is my soulmate.

Brownie points if anyone can guess what three classes I’m taking based on this list (One of them is really easy, but let’s see how specific you can get)! AND extra brownie points if you know where the last picture is from!

It’s the Hard Knock Life for Us!

This is why  I am up at 5 am, poring over Alfred Harbage’s Annals of English Drama, 975-1700: An Analytical Record of All Plays, Extant or Lost, Chronologically Arranged and Indexed by Authors, Titles, Dramatic Companies, &c. (among the 21 other texts stacked on my desk). 

I love research, I really do. I love wandering into deserted sections of the library and cracking open dusty books that probably haven’t been checked out for decades (or at least years). Sometimes I even like just reading off different titles and visualizing how much knowledge and insight exists in just that one library.  I find it really exciting that I get to learn so much stuff that we never even touch in class.

But no matter how you spin it, deadlines suck. Especially deadlines imposed by arbitrary school schedules. *Brain explodes.*