The World According to J.

This has been an insane semester so far.  I’m teaching Western World Lit from 1700-1900 and auditing French in the afternoons MWF.  TR I have Poetry, 19th Century Lit, and Literature & Sociology. W afternoons I have a class on teaching methods. And in the evenings I run. This doesn’t leave me a lot of time to do things like grocery shop or remember to get my glasses fixed.  Also I kinda need to take the cat to the vet but I can never seem to find the time. Poor D doesn’t get to see a lot of me and I’m glad I live with my friends otherwise I’d never see them.

The world according to J is this: I can’t wait until I can just have a normal job, live in one place for more than 10 months at a time, grow some tomatoes, have time to go to the grocery store, and remember what it’s like to have a life.  I yearn for the day when I can do something crazy like take a vacation, read a book for fun, or sit through an entire movie without remembering 1,000 things I should be doing instead.  I never thought I’d say it but the real world is kinda looking good. Being an adult is easier than being an adult and a student.

Currently reading:

• Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen
• Selected Poems, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• From Mandeville to Marx, by Louis Dumont
• Platero y yo, by Juan Ramon Jimenez
• The Complete Book of Running for Women, by Claire Kowalchick
• Mise en Scene, by Cheryl Krueger
• Pause-Cafe, by Nora Megharbi
• What to Eat, by Marion Nestle
• Ahead of All Parting, by Ranier Maria Rilke
• The Red and the Black, by Stendhal
• Lyrical Ballads, by William Wordsworth

I think you can guess which ones of those are for my classes.

An Education.

I fell in love with learning because it was just that: learning.  And I’m still just as much in love with books and everything as I always have been.  But my school has ripped the learning out of it and made it about numbers, and to be honest I think that’s what most grad schools do.  And I know that now, after nearly 12 solid months of school.  I know that I’m not cut out for this place because it will never be about that for me, because what I want is something that no university will ever give me: an education.   I want to read books because I love them, not because I need to get an A in a class or because getting into a conference will make my department look better.  I want to pick up books and look at them the way I did before grad school started making me sick to my stomach.  To hold them and feel the weight of their words, to smell their bindings and be in awe that paper and glue can make my stomach jump and my eyes water.  I want to read things and feel as though little bits of me become better for it.  That is something I never thought I’d lose, and I need it back.

This is not to say that grad school is all bad.  I’ve learned a lot here.  But most of what I’ve learned is far from academic.  I’ve learned that friends can be people you never thought you’d have anything to do with, and that people you thought you’d know forever can suddenly disappear from your life.  I’ve grown up a lot in the past year.  I’ve learned French, I’ve learned Spanish, I’ve learned how to teach things and how not to teach things.  I’ve learned that advisers don’t actually advise you, most of them just criticize your decisions.  But more than anything I’ve remembered how to be me again after everything that happened last year.  And none of this is anything that I’d trade.  All these things make me who I am.  What I’m beginning to learn is that who I am is not who I thought I’d be.  In fact, its anything but.

I got a Spanish test back this evening, with a grade that did not reflect the painful hours of studying that I put in.  I sat in my seat, though a movie, through a presentation, filed with the knowledge that I’d never get into a PhD program.  And then, in the middle of the midterm it hit me: I don’t want to be in a PhD program right now.  This life that I’ve wanted since I was 15 is suddenly seriously unappealing to me.  Not because I don’t want to be a professor or because I’m not willing to work hard in school but for one simple, indisputable reason: I’m not in love with it.

My classmates get tests back and study them to see what they’ve done wrong.  They check out supplimental reading materials from the library.  They find authors and websites that pertain to our courses and bring them up in class.  They get genuinely excited about what we’re studying.  And you know what?  Never once has it even occurred to me to do any of these things.  Not once.  I leave class and I’m gone, I don’t think about it until I break out my homework, and then I do what’s on the syllabus and not a thing more.  I’m simply not in love with schoolwork the way that they are.

And that’s ok.

What’s not ok is for me to continue on in the academic world acting like I am.

I’m going to finish this degree, but at this point I’m finishing simply because I started.  Yes, I know there are things about this last year in school that will be good, but I’m now filled with the knowledge that this is in fact my last year in school.  I’m not going to go on.  So now I just have to figure out what the heck I can do with an MA in Comparative Literature…

71 Degrees of Happiness

Today was the last day of class before Spring Break, and it turned out to be a pretty perfect day.  I woke up in a darn good mood and it was one of those amazing morning where the birds are chirping and its sunny and there’s this breeze that brings goosebumps to your arms in just the right way. After classes Stephanie and I ate hot dogs in the North Campus quad and watched people play frisbee and yell at each other about their Spring Break plans. I spent so long sitting outside drinking tea in this perfect mixture of sun on my hair and show under my Chacos even though it waupwards of 70 degrees.  It somehow felt like I was in a book that I’d never read before.  Today my life is better than books.  And it takes a lot for me to say that.

P.S. I also had craft time and hung out with some of my favorite people and of course, Spring Break is here!

…great day. :)

Diary (In the True Sense of the Word)

I’m reading Bronislaw Malinowski’s diary for my Cultural Anthropology class, and it’s completely weird.My favorite parts so far are when he admits to watching people bathe, and how he says he didn’t bother reading his wife’s letter.  I see now why his family fought against these being published; he was weird!

December Reading List

Things I absolutely have to read before spring term starts:

One Hundred Years of Soitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges

Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo

The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela

Here’s to You, Jesusa, by Elena Poniatowska

Deep Rivers, by Jose Maria Arguedas

All of those are the English translations of books I’m reading in a Modern Spanish Lit course in the Spring.  I’m not exactly confident in my ability to jump in, so I’m reading them all in English first.  Plus, I figure it can’t hurt…

Things I need to read in get working on my Master Reading List:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, but Haruki Murakami

Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Thank God one of these books counts twice!  It turns out it’s harder than I thought to compile a MRL with books from every area (Africa, Asia, Western and Eastern Europe, the Americas) that deal with magical realism.

Things I just want to read:

The Gift, by Richard Paul Evans (I’m a sucker for his Christmas books)

Do Hard Things, by Alex and Brett Harris

The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

Kate Brian’s Private series

Yeah, guess which books are getting cut?

Currently Reading

Currently, I’m working on a few things in magical realism and some junk for fun.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabrel Garcia Marquez

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, by Haruki Murakami

Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal, by J.K. Rowling

Private, by Kate Brian

Reads

In no particular order, here’s what I’ve been reading lately:

Half-Life/Die Already, by Mark Steele

The Truth About Forever, by Sarah Dessen

Closely Watched Trains, by Bohumil Hrabal

Death Sentence, by Mauricce Blanchot

Shroud, by John Banville

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee

The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, by Maurice Blanchot

This Lullaby, by Sarah Dessen

Lock and Key, by Sarah Dessen

Deconstruction and Criticism, by Bloom, de Man, Hartman, Miller

The Adventures of Sindbad, by Gyula Krudy

Embers, by Sandor Marai

Jewish War, by Henryk Grynberg

The Victory, by Henryk Grynberg

Poems New and Selected, by Wislawa Szymborska

The Queen of Babble, by Meg Cabot

The Queen of Babble in the Big City, by Meg Cabot

The Queen of Babble Gets Hitched, by Meg Cabot

The Space of Literature, by Maurice Blanchot

I think you can pretty much figure out what was and wasn’t for class.  I pretty much slacked off in my personal reading this semester, but that’s going to change since I realized that I haven’t made much progress compiling my Master Reading List for magical realism.  (I’m going to do my thesis on magical realism, although I’ve not yet gotten into specifics…if you know of anything that could be added to a list, please let me know!).

I See the Light

My lit. theory paper is in!!! It’s over! Last night I finally got to go to sleep, it felt so amazing!

The end is in sight: I have 2 papers due for my Eastern/Central European Lit class on Wednesday and an abstract that I want to turn in for this conference where I’d like to get accepted. And then it’s just me and my December Reading List until classes resume on 8 January!

It’s 11:30, I just got up and I’m headed to the gymnastics preview meet with Emily and then out.  It feels so wonderful to have that paper behind me!

Now is the time to panic

I’m in the home stretch of this theory paper.  N is still here crash out in my living room, and all I have to do is conclude something.  I’ve had 7 hours of sleep since Wednesday night and am still not entirely sure I’ve written anything worth concluding in these dozen pages.

This is not why I’m panicking.

After all this insanity, I’m still loving my paper topic, and I still want to read another of Banville’s novels over Christmas break.

Grad school is a sick, sick world.

Pretending/Legit

It’s the half-truths that kill you.
The ones you tell to those you love.
The ones you tell to yourself.
The ones that you believe without them ever being spoken.

The half-truths mold you—shape you into the worst version of them.
They slowly kick out the truth-half
and mold you into the half that began as deception.

It is the thin line crossed.
The variation so small that it becomes
difficult for you to see the truth yourself.

But eventually, so many half-truths
become a half-lie.

No more pretending.
No more fudging in the name of encouragement.
Smoothing over for the sake of optimism.

Dodging details so as not to disappoint.

No more pretending.

Its time to acknowledge the truth.
The whole truth.

Time to become legit.

And face whatever pain might come along with it.

This was in a book called Half-Life/Die Already (Mark Steele) that I’m reading between papers.  Check it out, it’s pretty awesome.

Shroud

“I ask what I have asked already: what did it benefit me to take on his identity?  It must be, simply, that it was not so much that I wanted to be him–although I did, I did want to be him–but that I wanted so much more not to be me.  That is to say, i desired to escape my own individuality, the hereness of my self, not the thereness of my world…Yet I have lived as him fo so long I can scarcely remember what it was like to be the one that I once was…I pause in uncertainty, losing my way in this welter of personal, impersonal, impersonating, pronouns.”

“If, as I believe, as I insist, there is no essential, singular self, what is it exactly I am supposed to have escaped by pretending to be [him]?”

“To be someone else is to be one thing, and one thing only.  I think of an actor in the ancient world…The crowd knows him but cannot remember his name…He has a mask, he has had it for years; it is his talisman…Increasingly, indeed, he thinks the mask is more like his face than his face is.  At the end of a performance when he takes it off he wonders if the other actors can see him at all, or if he is just a head with a blank front…”

John Banville.

There are times when our own words are simply not enough.  Finding the words of others  makes us feel less alone, reminds us we are not the only ones who struggle.  My words are jumbled, they have no coherent meaning.  They are a sporadic Scrabble game played with a dyslexic, a crossword puzzle in a foreign language.  Even I don’t know what I mean anymore.  I want a break from words, but they haunt me.  They follow me around, springing up in my head in the middle of the night, while I drive, in the shower; my words appear in others’ books, they spill into essays, show up on the sides of buildings and Coke cans.  They find me on sidewalks, crosswalks, overpasses, bridges, trains, parking lots, posters, textbooks, novels, films, stores.  They never leave.

No matter where I go, words find me.  And so I leave a breadcrumb trail of crumpled papers smeared with potentially incomprehensible haikus.

Someday, they will all come together and create something beautiful.  In this alone I have faith.

The Smallest Things

“But where would I go to, really?  Whatever plans I might have put in place, there was nowhere farther I could escape to beyond this tawny shore, last edge of what for me was the known world.”

“All my life I have lied.  I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie.  It was a way of living; lies are life’s almost-anagram.”

“How would one detect the encroachment of senility, when what is being attacked is the very faculty of detection itself?…probably I shall shuffle into senility all unaware…the once-sharp edges of my self are blurring.”

“The smallest things are always the surest warning, if one but heeded them.”

John Banville, Shroud

The Universal Snark

So, I’m reading The One Year Daily Grind by Sarah Arthur.  Good book, by the way, check it out.  I found her blog this morning (I’m not a stalker, just hungry for more good reads which seem to be in short supply these days).  Reading her most recent post makes me feel way less alone in my present state of snarkiness.

Although I do consider myself snarktastic, I’m not so sure that it’s a good thing…

Currently Reading

The Adventures of Sinbad, by Gyula Krudy

Deconstruction and Criticism, by Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman, Miller

Half Life/Die Already, by Mark Steele

September Reads

The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz

Farewell Summer, by Ray Bradbury

The Spellman Files, by Lisa Lutz

History & Spirit, by Henri de Lubac

The Mass Ornament, by Siegfried Kracauer

New Moon, by Stephenie Meyer

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, by Alexander McCall Smith

Portuguese Irregular Verbs, by Alexander McCall Smith

New Life, by Dante Alighieri

Tales of Old Sarajevo, by Isak Samokovija