It's a good tired

It's been an exhausting couple of weeks (I know, I know, it's only Thursday!) This new job is simultaneously invigorating and completely draining. It's great to meet so many other like-minded - and smart! - people, but meeting so many new people at one time can be mentally tiring.

I'm in a term teaching gig, which means I have only been offered work for the next ten months. While that kind of temporariness is no different than working as a sessional (or part-timer), the full-time aspect means that I am expected to perform all the job responsibilities that a tenure-track member of the faculty is expected to do. I will also be evaluated in the same manner, and should I get a job at a university that recognizes my work here, I could apply to have my year here count toward tenure elsewhere.

What that really means is that I am essentially starting an assistant professor job, without the title (or the job permanence).

Of course, since I'm on a short term, and would love to be on a longer term, I also feel the pressure to outperform the actual assistant professors hired in the department, because they are assured of work next year. I'm not. But that's another worry I don't need to think of right now.

I knew from others that the first year is hard. But I knew it in a cognitive way, not the way that my body now knows it. I've been feeling exhausted every day, even though my college activities have usually lasted less than a full 8-hour day. The combination of wanting to make a good impression, taking in a lot of information, making a lot of decisions (e.g. benefits to sign up for), and trying to finish off the writing I wanted to do this summer has meant that I've been sleeping 8-9 hours a night and still feeling not-quite rested.

I don't doubt that things will get easier as the semester and year progress, and I'm relatively confident that even next week, when the meetings trail off and the teaching ramps up I'll feel more like I'm in my element. But right now, I'm feeling old as I toddle off to bed at least an hour earlier than usual...!

New research in epidemiology

Taking zombies seriously.

To think about

In discussing teaching philosophy statements with new colleagues today, one talked about the importance of inspiring non-majors by getting them to understand and value literature for the things it allows us do. Getting students from other disciplines to see the value in looking at things from a different perspective is one of those powerful things that literature can do.

Although I know that, and I figure that English majors know that, I guess I hadn't really thought about how the classroom is an opportunity to get non-majors to see it in the same way. Not necessarily to convert them to English majors, but so that they can use that knowledge to their benefit in their own discipline.

Interesting food for thought.

Library Clues

You know you've been writing in graduate school for a long time when the library has changed the formatting of its homepage twice in the time you've been using it.

You know you're not finding that book when the four libraries (and consortia) you belong to do not carry the book.

The allure of research

One of the things I've learned about myself over the last several years is that I have a mistaken, but nonetheless healthy, conviction that if I just do enough research, my work will write itself. Even though I know it's a fallacy, there is a small part of me that really believes that with enough research, everything will just come together effortlessly and voila! the paper will be written.

I suppose it's not so much a belief as a fervent case of wishing it were so, but it's the reason for every act of writing procrastination that I've succumbed to over the last several years.

I do know that it's false, and so the procrastination never lasts for too long, but it's a potent procrastination force nonetheless. Even now, with a good conference paper that's been invited to be turned into a longer journal article, I find myself tempted to go to the databases, to find the perfect resource that when magically applied to my paper, will turn it into solid gold!

(I'm thinking in magical metaphors because the paper is about magic, though not really about alchemy... hey, wait... No! I must resist the desire to research alchemy as an angle for the paper...)

See what I mean?

Quote of the week

I don't believe any of you have ever read PARADISE LOST, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic -- something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
- Mark Twain, "The Disappearance of Literature" speech, 20 November 1900

Timeless space

Having spent the last two weeks on a few airplanes, I've come to realize that flying for more than about four hours has a very unreal quality about it, especially if you travel over more than four time zones.

You enter the aircraft, sit down, and patiently wait until allowed to leave again. You try to amuse yourself with movies, or books, or games, but you're in this strange place that has no real reference to the outside world. At 35,000 feet, the world is another place that you're no longer connected to.

And even though your body insists that it is the time that you just left, your mind knows that it must begin to abide by the rules of the time zone you'll be entering, which is sometimes a big enough gap to make you feel terribly confused. And tired. And when you're in the plane, you're not sure if you should be paying attention to your head, which says the time is what is coming up, or your body, that insists on the time that you are leaving.

It's a bit like suspended animation, only you're awake and usually bored.

Nirvana vs Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give Your Teen Spirit up

This is both delightful and disturbing at the same time.

The necessity of writing

For years as a writing teacher I've told reluctant students - usually engineers - that they need to learn to write to be successful. They don't need to do it wonderfully, but they do need to do it adequately.

This necessity has been driven home several times over the last few months. Just the other day, I read about paper written by physicists about magic (it's for an article on technology and magic in medieval literature, and in all fairness, it was about quantum physics). Now, granted, all the primary researchers were located in Spain, so English may not have been a language they could use comfortably. But even with that in mind, there were so many hyperbolic lines of the "since the dawn of time" kind, that I cringed over and over again.

In addition, several months ago I was working with a document created by engineering professionals, designed to act as a training manual. We were to convert the content of the paper version to an elearning program.

Usually, when I work with material from an SME (subject matter expert), my biggest concern is translating written text into the visual and audible forms that perform better on the web. But this time, I spent a huge amount of time rewriting the content. There were problems in the document that were so fundamental that I despaired of repairing them even.

Some sentences were so garbled that I had no idea what it was meant to convey. There were lots of sentence fragments, and some sentences that just left off mid-sentence, as if it was cut-off (though it wasn't!) Faulty parallelisms were rampant, and the document showed little evidence of editing since the topics seemed to be arranged in the order that they occurred to the writer rather than any logical arrangement.

I've always believed that comma use was highly individualistic and variable, but this document used commas in ways that were utterly baffling, as if the writer knew there were rules to using commas and they needed to be followed, but had forgotten the rules and just made them up as he/she went along.

All in all, developing the content for this elearning program was one of the most painful tasks I'd ever undertaken for this company.

In all the time I stood in front of classrooms of engineers, lecturing on the importance of good writing, my motivation was primarily to get them producing things by the end of the term that I could read without cringing. But now that I've seen the result of poor writing skills, I've got even more motivation to teach them (and other writers) how to write clearly, because after reading this training manual, I feel sorry for all the people who tried to learn from it!

The Future of the Professoriate - Extinction?

The Chronicle forum, Faculty of the Future: Leaner, Meaner, More Collaborative, Less Secure is a depressing read. Don't let the title fool you - the positive element "more collaborative" isn't a good thing - it's a survival tactic. Overall, most of the writers take a very bleak vision of the future. It's telling that the only positive view of the academy 20 years from now comes from an administrator, not faculty.

Sometimes it feels like a room of one's own can be a prison when you've got a deadline hanging over your head.

The worst part of writing?

I hate writing plot summaries.

It's a strange but true observation. I get nailed every time a reader comments on my writing that I don't provide enough plot summary of primary sources before diving into the analysis.

Gee, that's probably because I hate writing plot summaries.

Which is really bizarre, considering they really are so terribly simple. While they might not be as simple as I'm suggesting, they really are just a catalogue of important events in the narrative of the novel. And yet, I detest writing them. My drafts always have these little starred lines in them with a note to "insert plot summary here" scattered throughout them.

Why do I detest writing them? I don't know.

Sometimes I suspect it's because they seem so easy. And then I think if they're so easy, they're not very sophisticated. And perhaps I don't want to do them because I don't want to admit I can write so simply? Bizarre logic, but there you go. I just hate writing them.

Starting over... again

I really don't understand why it is so terribly hard to get a handle on each new chapter when I start it. Even in revision, I'm having trouble concentrating on the new chapter that I'm starting to edit today.

Perhaps it just has something to do with the holiday and BBQ yesterday?

Happy Canada Day!

Wa-acko!

Last week, I was in a major tizzy trying to find a book that I've quoted from extensively in my dissertation: How we Became Posthuman by N. Katherine Hayles.

I had come across a reference to it in another article, and wanted to check up on the context since my database of notes didn't have anything down for that particular page. So I started searching my shelves.

I have a lot of shelves.

LibraryThing lists 1199 books in our collection. So, yeah, lots of shelves.

But I couldn't find it.

I looked again.

I asked everyone in the family if they'd seen it. They hadn't.

I looked some more.

I started wondering if I'd lost it. As I thought about it, I realized I had been relying on my notes for the last few years. Perhaps I'd lost it before we'd even moved.

That got me thinking.

So I checked LibraryThing. It wasn't actually listed there. Not a big surprise. I only activated by LibraryThing account in 2006, and I'm pretty sure I read it in 2005.

So then I checked my amazon buying history, since I would've purchased it from them, given it wouldn't exactly be a given that I could find it at my local bookstore.

There was no history of purchasing.

Gradually it dawned on me. This book? The one that plays a pretty major role in my dissertation?

I don't own it. Never have.

But I was convinced for a week that I had. Wa-acko!

Question is: Do I buy it now, or say to hell with looking up this reference? (The local academic library has it out till September, and I want to finish this draft before then)

Decision time.

Up and down and up and down... again

One of the most frustrating things I'm finding in this dissertation editing is the precariousness of my productivity. The littlest thing knocks me off my game into a struggle with frustration.

One day, I have a great writing day, work out part of an argument in what I can honestly say is a beautiful piece of writing, and feel confident that I will finish these revisions and they will be (mostly) acceptable and I will be able to look forward to the defence.

The next day, I flounder around, trying to get a handle on the ideas that seem too large for my head, and so they squeeze out of it, bouncing across the office floor and I have to scramble around trying to pick them back up. But they're slippery, and I can't seem to hold more than one at a time. Which I do. But even then, sometimes I pick one up, turning it this way and that, puzzled at what it means and why I thought it was a good idea in the first place. Sometimes I set it aside, hoping that it will become clearer as time goes on. Sometimes I toss it out the window.

This back and forth between confidence that I'm making satisfactory progress and despair at ever crafting an argument that makes sense is taking its toll.

Today, I'm distracted again. Thoughts of non-work-related troubles keep crowding in my brain, and no matter how hard I try, they break my concentration and I feel frustrated.

Here's hoping tomorrow's a more balanced day.

Best horror movies

A while ago, a daughter asked hubby what were the top 10 horror movies of all time. So we brainstormed. This is what we came up with (in no particular order).

Top Ten

The Thing
Alien
The Exorcist
Nightmare on Elm Street
Halloween
The Shining
Ravenous
American Werewolf in London
28 Days Later
The Fly

The rationale for some of these might not be readily apparent since we used a wide range of criteria, including innovation, scare factor, uniqueness, cinematography, and plot among others (as you can probably tell, we leaned heavily toward innovation).

Honorable Mentions go to

Poltergeist
The Others
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The Sixth Sense
Amytyville Horror (remake)
Dreamcatcher
The Mist
Se7en
1408
Hellraiser
High Tension

Again, an eclectic mix of criteria went into deciding the honorable mentions as well. We didn't include any spoofs, since that's a whole other category requiring different criteria, but if we had, I'm sure some Evil Dead and Shaun of the Dead would've made it in.

Happy Father's Day - both to those who love and hate these kinds of movies!

It's a beautiful thing

There's a moment that's absolutely beautiful in writing. It usually comes after you've been struggling for days, knowing exactly what you want to say, but not being able to make it work. Usually, you've been working at it, but it's not happening - type, erase, type, erase, type, erase...

Then on one of those go-throughs, you stop to read the paragraph you just wrote, and it slowly dawns on you that you've got it. It might still be a little rough around the edges, but you've found the structure you needed to make that argument stand out in the way that it deserves.

It's an awe-inspiring moment, and for me, it's always accompanied by a bit of wonder: "I did that?" Wow.

Stuck

I am stuck. Stuck. Stuck. Stuck.

I know what I want to say in this chapter, but I just can't seem to get it arranged right. Too many things struggle for supremacy and all of them seem to be the first idea I should introduce.

But of course they can't all be first.

Short of eenie-meenie-minie-mo, how does one choose?!

Anything to procrastinate?

How much of a lit-geek does it mark me that I've suspended work on the part of the second chapter of the dissertation on The Island of Doctor Moreau because I've just found out that Broadview Press is issuing an edition of it at the end of the month and I want to use it for the edits to the chapter?

One of my only regrets in not becoming a Victorianist is the fewer opportunities I will have to teach Broadview editions of texts (Broadview specializes in literature already in the public domain). I'm absolutely tickled that they are coming out with an edition of The Island of Doctor Moreau just in time for me to use it!