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?

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. )

A Brief Break in the Storm

Wow. I did not expect Junior year to be this hectic. Especially in the first half of this quarter. Unfortunately, my expectations have been direly compromised. In the span of the last 23 days (in which I have sadly not had the time to post), I’ve written 2 English papers, taken 1 Philosophy midterm, done about 80 pages of GRE work, completed 386 Logic2k problems, and read (or am in the process of reading) 11 works of literature. Seeing as this is only Week Four, I’m probably not crazy in thinking that it can only get worse.

 

No, I do not supply this laundry list to brag. I, Sophia Literaria, am overworked, sleep-deprived, and seriously contemplating whether I really want to be this tired for the rest of my life (Oh, academia! Why must you make me feel so wretched and pathetic?). Nevertheless, I apologize for not posting lately… I’m just a little tired…

So, in order to cheer myself up on this wonderful post-midterm Friday, I’ve decided to compile a happy list of pick-me-ups that keep me going through a long day.

1. POWER NAPS - I am not a healthy girl. I sleep around 3 to 4 AM regularly, and my tired mind seems to think it’s hit the jackpot whenever I get in bed before 2. I’ve resorted to using three alarms to get my silly self to class in the morning and lately I’ve taken to napping in the library (Actually, I’ve noticed about half of the people at the library seem to be sleeping). On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have a 2-3 hour gap between classes in which I like to find a comfy chair in Powell and power nap. Its a double-plus-good gold star day if I find an entire unoccupied couch. Naps are beautiful. Everyone should take naps. 

2. Buying new/rare/pretty books (among other guilty pleasures) - I try not to be materialistic, but sometimes spending money really makes a person feel better. Whether its new clothes or lip gloss or nicely bound novels (all three of which seem to be a part of my stress-coping mechanism), I am a firm believer that purchasing material goods is a perfectly good form of therapy. Just this week, I bought myself a copy of selected poetry by T.S. Eliot and I keep a secret stash of unworn clothes in the closet for an especially rainy day. Sometimes I think it makes life easer to place a portion of your happiness on concrete objects; it makes for such an easier quick fix.

3. My current television obsession Pushing Daisies – Perhaps I should dedicate an entire post to this show someday, but for now, I shall simply summarize what I love about this show. It is CUTE. Sappy even. Quirky and strange. And in my opinion, one of the most original and fresh shows on television at the moment. I love the outrageous murder mysteries and how hilariously clean the show is and the awesome funny ways that all the characters’ names seem to reflect who they are.

4. The new and very much improved season 5 of Grey’s Anatomy – I like to think of Grey’s Anatomy as a televised allegory for my life – so I was pretty disappointed at the ungloriousness of Season Four (save for the finale). But I really think the show is rediscovering its sense of humor this season and the season so far has been absolutely fantastic (“We’d be happier people if only we loved lotion!” – Ah yes, I wish I loved “lotion” more too…).

5. Fun and happy reading assignments – I’ve developed a preference for comedy lately and it’s always so much more fun when English reading is absurd and hilarious. I owe much to Anthony Trollope and George Bernard Shaw for getting me through the past few weeks. (On a side note: the word “guttersnipe” really tickles me to pieces.)

6. Making colorful notes/cards/study materials – Perhaps this is just a girly thing, but I really like COLORS. I carry six different highlighter colors with me (although I scorn the yellow one) and probably own more than 10 shades of post-it notes/tabs/index cards. My logic binder is currently covered in multi-colored flashcards titled “Inference Rules”, “Derivation Strategies”, and “Enabled Theorems” in red, purple, and blue. The inside of my closet door has my quarterly goals written out in colored markers and accompanied by strange doodles. I like to decorate. Maybe I just can’t stand blank spaces (definitely won’t find a Minimalist enthusiast in me), but filling in the emptiness never fails to cheer me up a little.

7. Good skipping music – I just think its a super way to start off the day walking to class to a favorite song. Current recommendations:

• Chairlift – “Bruises”
• Christina Aguilera – “Love Will Find a Way”
• Counting Crows – “Einstein on the Beach (For an Eggman)”
• Foy Vance – “Homebird”
• Guster – “Center of Attention”
• Hairspray – “Without Love”
• Kate Voegele – “It’s Only Life”
• Leigh Nash – “Ocean Size Love”
• Moonbabies – “War on Sound”
• Nena – “99 Red Balloons”
• Robert Randolph & the Family Band – “Ain’t Nothing Wrong with That”
• Sara Bareilles – “Bottle It Up”
• Snow Patrol – “You’re All I Have”
• 林俊杰 - “豆浆油条”

8. Strange but loveable BEST FRIENDS – Sometimes I think I don’t show enough appreciation of my bestest friend, but hopefully she knows it anyways. We’ve been late-night homework buddies since we first learned to pull all-nighters (darn those AP classes) and whether it’s griping over some assignment or randomly discussing nice names for our future children, it’s nice having a kindred spirit to talk to late at night (and be sleep-deprived with).

Also, here’s a brief list of things for me to look forward to the rest of this quarter!

1. Two-year Anniversary con el novio
2. Lang Lang concert avec ma meilleure amie (& company)
3. Daylight Savings!!! (More sleep! Woot!)
4. Ushering for a John Updike reading
5. Ushering for a performance of Robert Lepage’s “The Blue Dragon”
6. Ushering for a concert featuring the Guarneri String Quartet & Johannes String Quartet
7. Going home for Thanksgiving (Mmm.. Chinese food.)
8. Winter break trip to China

So cheer up, Sophia. Life isn’t so bad after all.

Besides, I suppose it’s always daunting looking at all the great things that still need to be accomplished. I came across this quote in Pygmalion today and it seems most appropriate advice for me to start taking:

“It is these little things that matter, Pickering. Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves is as true of personal habits as of money.” -Higgins

Don’t Cut the Small Talk

A bright orange tab flashes at the bottom of my screen: Instant Message from So-and-so. Hey what’s up? Typically, I’ll type back a nonchalant nothing really or the ever short nm for “nothing much”; when I’m feeling particularly gregarious, the occasional description of what I’m actually doing at the moment will appear - eating, reading, studying, playing Spin Blox. However, as fascinating as these things may seem to the person who just IMed me (not really), all of this pretty much amounts to idle small talk.

So why do we waste so much time on AIM, engaging in unnecessary chit-chat? Why do we insist on perpetuating pointless social rituals like shaking hands or asking about the weather? At its best, small talk is silly and harmless, at its worst, glaringly fake.

Yet, there appears to be a method to the madness.

In Laurence Wylie’s Foreword to the textbook French in Action, he illuminates the purpose of “What’s up?”:

In this ordered universe, no human being can live in isolation. We must be bound together in order to participate in an organized effort to accomplish the necessary activities of existence. This relationship is so vital to us that we must constantly be reassured of it. We test this connection each time we have contact with each other.

However, to carry out this kind of test literally each time we see each other would be too tedious. Each culture has developed the custom of greeting, which requires that we pause at least briefly with each other. All cultures I know require that a verbal exchange take place in which we talk about health  or the state of the weather or our destination. This exchange takes only a few seconds and the words have no significance in themselves; nonetheless, it is long enough for our amazingly rapid and complex nervous systems to record and process thousands, perhaps millions, of messages about each other that permit us to draw conclusions about one another and about our relationship.

From an anthropological standpoint, small talk gives us a minute opportunity to reassess where we stand within the social hierarchy. We check in with each other to reassure ourselves about our friendships and other social connections. Despite this take on the issue, however, I can’t help but think: where does the Internet and instant messaging fit into all of this?

If all the words within this ordinary exchange “have no significance in themselves” and yet, text on a screen is all you get to see from the other person, how are we really supposed to “draw conclusions about one another and about our relationship”? And what kind of meaning can we really gather from the friendly messages we are sent online? Even with thirty different smiley faces to choose from and a superfluous usage of onomatopoeias, can we really tell how someone is actually doing if all they have to do is type a simple pretty good to appease our curiosity?

Maybe we shouldn’t cut the small talk, but let’s make the effort to get off the computer and actually do it in person.

Sophia Reveals Her Sciencey Side

Fact or Fiction? (Answers revealed at end.)

1. Waking Sleepwalkers May Kill Them.

2. Living People Outnumber the Dead.

3. Vodka Keeps Cut Flowers Fresh.

 

The war between science and the liberal arts, physics and philosophy, mathematics and religion, seems like a centuries-old feud between two apparently irreconciliable opposites. I constantly hear humanities majors complain about the rigidity and cold methodology of science while science/engineering majors rant about the futility and subjectivity involved in essay-writing.

My own beloved university, UCLA, has its battle lines physically drawn across campus via Bruin Walk. North Campus or South Campus? That is the question. Sometimes it feels like we’re all picking sides and after we finish GE requirements, there’s no reason to enter the other side of campus at all. Perhaps this geographic division fosters the psychological mentality that we must pick one or the other. We are either suited to write or calculate, to theorize or experiment.

But I think this type of isolation and the rejection of the “other” is unnecessary and even harmful. In the end, no matter what we learn, we are essentially all in pursuit of that Holy Grail that is knowledge, albeit in different ways.

Anyways, I mention this because sometimes I get the feeling that people think I am uninterested in science or simply do not have the brain power to understand, but I can assure you that this is a vast misunderstanding. There are things that I find boring, unbelievable, or difficult to comprehend, but these limitations are not representative of my scientific curiosity or interest. My biggest regret in life will probably be not getting a chance to learn/know everything. I want to know things, as long as someone will bother to tell me.

It may sound strange, but I think my relationship to science is very much like that of many people’s relationship to literature. The casual reader shies away from Pope, Coleridge, and the ever-so-daunting Milton, but enjoys the occasional Harry Potter series or Stephen King novel. In my case, I find that I love learning random, strange, probably unuseful sciencey facts (about gomphothere turd, human decay, and what not), but find it hard to swallow that unique concoction of labs, calculations, and scantron tests that an actual major would require.

Given the fact that I deal with fiction, poetry, and language all day long every single quarter, recently I find myself turning to science as my leisurely refuge. I’ve developed quite a taste for science non-fiction as my before-bedtime-casual-reading-companion. Whereas I can barely pick up a novel without itching for a pencil to annotate, my relationship with science non-fiction is easy and simple. There are no rings, wedding bells or children in the future for the two of us. He is my fling, my temporary relief when that dear old husband of mine gets on my nerves, as any loved one will from time to time. There is a sort of exoticism associated with meddling in a field that is not your own and this intrigues me. Besides, there is something exciting about surprising people who think you only know stuff about iambic pentameter.

Anyhow, I would love any science non-fiction book recommendations that you guys have! I do tend to lean towards biology/ecology although I can probably read anything that’s witty/funny and doesn’t have too much jargon. My personal favorite so far is Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. I’m currently tearing through Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (excellent, very funny book by the way – although it does make me cringe sometimes), which I shall attempt to finish and review by the end of next week. :]

 

Answers: 1.) Fiction (Waking a sleepwalker is more likely to save his or her life), 2.) Fiction (The number of people alive today is dwarfed by the number of people who have ever lived whether we begin counting from the first Homo Sapiens 50,000 years ago, the Egyptian agricultural revolution in 9000 BC, or the Roman rule in 1 AD), 3.) Fact (If small amounts are added, vodka works as a flower preservative by interfering with the plant’s ripening process.) 

– Courtesy of Scientific American

 

Coming soon: movie review for Wanted, common misconceptions about English majors, and more so… stay tuned!

Good Morning “Baltimore”!

I think every writer, whether of fiction or editorial opinion, suffers from that old philosophical cliche about hearing sounds in a vacant forest. Does your writing matter if no one is there to read it? Do your thoughts? Even if you have the greatest manuscript, if no one will publish you, do you matter?

I thought going to college and majoring in English literature meant that I would be constantly writing, voicing my opinions and perfecting my manner of expression. But that hasn’t really been the case. The truth is, six or seven papers a quarter and writing essays for only one professor or TA to read is simply not enough for me. When I read something emotionally inspiring or technically brilliant, sometimes I just want to shout it from the roof tops and tell everyone I see. I want everyone to know about the Houyhnhnms and zeugmas and Wordsworth’s ”egotistical sublime.” I want somebody to care because this is what I care about. With all of my friends flying in different directions in terms of fields of study and career paths, I still want to connect to them and have them understand this part of my life.  

Perhaps equally important is the simple fact that I just need a place to wax literary. I know some people see such a passion for literature as impractical, even delusional. Others simply don’t understand how one silly rhyme about “cabbages and kings” can make a girl so insanely giddy. Sometimes, at the end of the day, it helps to be able to rant about those things that tickle your toes to the world (wide web).

While this blog will have a primarily literary focus, I will most probably touch on some of my other social, cultural, and humanities interests, and occasionally dish out some of my pseudo-philosophy. However, I’m definitely hoping to maintain a separation between my personal and academic personas because I think what the two have to say are vastly different.

And so today, I launch my first semi-”professional” blog with a Tracy-Turnblad-esque naivete that this will be something witty, important, and fun.

“some day when I take to the floor,/ the world’s gonna wake up and see/ Baltimore and me!”