I did it!

I submitted (well, re-submitted, technically) my dissertation by emailing it to my committee on May 30. It feels really weird now to be done with it. Of course, I have the next few weeks to prepare, which will take some doing. Then, I defend at 10 a.m. on June 23.

If anyone still reads this thing, I'll keep you posted.

No defense

So the day before my defense was scheduled, my advisor called me to say that I wouldn't be able to defend, even though he's been reading my work the whole time. He suggested that the committee meet as a group anyway, which we did. It was pretty awful to have 4 people tell me what's bad about my work for 2 hours.

So now I have 4 more months and another 150 pages in which to get this thing into the shape they want it in. I'm so tired of writing, but I'm determined to see this through. I just don't know how I'm going to do it.

The situations this puts me in are terrible. Now I have to find a job (fast) that will give me benefits so that I can continue to take my meds. As you may know, Sam has been laid off, so I can't go on his insurance anymore.

Plus, now I don't have that lectureship for the fall that I was planning on. No teaching for me for a while. And I love teaching. Wish me luck in writing and job-finding.

Revision stage and some whining

I mean, massive revision stage. I have less than a month to rewrite several parts of my dissertation. My advisor said that at this point the diss is undefensible, which is pretty scary news, and we're going into triage mode. I mean, I've been working on my introduction revision for the past week, and that's only a start. I haven't even begun the conclusion.

so my timeline for the next three months is:

May: massive revisions

June: waiting with baited breath until my June 23rd defense

July: more revisions with a deadline of July 20 to get everything in to the graduate school. Provided that I pass the defense.

I really though that Paul wouldn't let me schedule a defense date if he didn't think I could pass, but I guess I was wrong.

finished another rough draft

So I've finished another rough draft. I'm up to 3 chapters now, with two revisions yet to do on 2 of them. But I finished another rough draft, so that's something.

update on the diss

Here's the deal. I'm writing my chapters out of order, purposely. Chapter 2 needs some revision work, but apparently, as Paul told me on Friday, Chapter 1 just needs a quick spin around the block to get some kinks worked out. Now I'm drafting Chapter 3. Well, not right now. It's due at the end of January, but I'm pretty sure I can bang it out by the end of this month.

He also thinks that this thing could be 150–200 pages (rather than the 250–300 pages he mentioned in the past), and he suggested that I address only works in the silent period. So we're looking at about a total of 6 chapters with an afterword to sum everything up. The goal now is for me to defend (i.e., to answer lots of hard questions during a 2-hour period, which I dread) in July and graduate in August. These are goals I can meet.

Weird

It's weird that I haven't posted since July. I bet these words are just floating around without any readers.

Anyway, it's late for reading other people's lousy essays about genre, so I thought I'd update a little before bed. Sam and I have been thinking about the upcoming holidays, and people in my group therapy have been talking about their plans with families. I have to say, it gets me down. If it weren't for my alienation from my parents and Sam's fissure with his brother, if it weren't for the fact that we have no money to travel, if I had the time to take a break in my work, maybe we'd get some plans together that don't involve just the two of us having dinner at home. Who will eat the two pies I make each year? We have such great memories of recent Thanksgivings, and the true sharing among families and friends. Although last Thanksgiving could have gone a little more smoothly, I admit. Maybe the two of us, the turkey and a couple of pies will warm our home just fine.

Also, Sam got this kick-ass tattoo. Maybe he'll show it to you.

Also, I'm working on Chapter 2. Maybe I'll get this damn thing done after all.

{sigh}

There are days when I think that writing a dissertation is beyond my ability. This is one of them.

More news

So it turns out that I only need two signatures for my proposal, which means they can approve it next week, fucking finally. So that's great. Also great is that my DGS and my committee got together to scrape together some funding for me for the fall!!! It warms my cockles to think that they just went and did it. Also, I turned in a draft of my introduction.

So now, the writing must really begin. 

Also, kudos to Sam for being so supportive by watching some Stan Laurel with me. Thanks, baby.

New Outside Reader

On a dissertation committee in my department, you must have 3 departmental readers and 1 reader outside the department. My current outside reader is a poor soul in the Art Department, but my project has evolved to the extent that it is well afield of what this woman knows.

So what's a person to do? Reach out. I wrote an email to the author of my currently favorite scholarly text and asked him to be my reader. And, folks, he said yes!

I'm not especially good at this sort of thing, so I'm pretty excited that Dr. Singer agreed to participate. He said that my project "looks very interesting," and he thinks that it'll possibly help him prepare for a course he wants to teach. All to the good. 

A little back patting

Today I was thinking about what I've done during the past three months since I've been out of the hospital. It's not a long list, and it's not in order of importance or date, but it means something to me, and I thought I'd share it with you. [I know that's totally a run-on sentence.]

• I found a psychiatrist and a psychologist. They make up my international mental health team.
• I renewed my commitment to Sam in front of our families and closest friends. It was awesome.
  
• I presented some of my work before an audience of my colleagues, and I got thoughtful questions that showed they were listening. I was (this part is important) able to answer them. So there.
• I made out the checks for my hospital stay, the ambulance, and another mental health bill. Get this: there's a Vanderbilt Medical Group and a Vanderbilt Medical Hospital, and they both billed us. And riding in an ambulance is not nearly as cool as one might think but it's also less expensive.
• I applied for and got student loans, a labyrinthine process.
• I gained a little weight, but it's not meds weight, so I'll be able to slowly take it off.
• I got a new tattoo. 
• I started working on the diss again. Although I sometimes panic about my topic and its scope, it's good to be seriously working again. It's especially good to be working in a healthy way, without mania.

So that's my list. I don't feel that productive, but looking at the things I've done makes me realize that my therapist is right: I am getting stronger.

First, the voting; second, my self-centered celebration

Sam and I voted last Monday. Organizations that try to get out the vote offer a lot of reasons: doing your civic duty, taking advantage of a right that we cherish, changing the current regime, crack. (My thanks to John Oliver and Acorn for that last one.) They add up to the same basic tenet, that without individual action and participation in government, America ceases to exist. The U.S. as we know it ceases to exist. Representative democracy evaporates, without which our constitutional republic fails. Regardless of party, no one (I honestly believe) wants an oligarchy. 

Every time I watch one of those commercials for voting or for voting (like the one Tiffany has up on her blog right now) and Obama, I think about the one thing that ties U.S. citizens together. It's not culture, it's not region, it's not attitudes or values, it's not even geography. Why would I identify myself as connected with someone living hundreds of miles from me in one direction (Houston, TX: 856 mi) more than someone in a different distant direction (Toronto, ON: 774 mi) or another (soldiers in Iraq)? Because we all get to see who our next President will be on Tuesday. We all participate in the same government, the same political experiment.

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In other news, I got great feedback on my most recent draft. A wonderful feeling.

On the apparent multiplication of things I don't know

Lately, I've been feeling a little dull. Here is an instantiation meant to reproduce this feeling:  

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a little story called "The Garden of the Forking Paths." (You can probably find it online.) The key mystery, if you can call it a mystery, surrounds Dr. Yu Tsun's ancestor, Ts'ui Pen, who undertook a double task: to write an intricate novel and to construct an equally intricate labyrinth. In both, everyone would lose his way. Someone murdered Ts'ui Pen before he completed the novel, and the labyrinth was never found. Other stuff happens in the story, which is quite good, but my chief interest is in this kernel of narrative uncertainty. 

Conventional narrative depicts a character making a decision that eliminates all previously available options. Borges presents the possibility of a world in which every option continues to exist simultaneously, each leading to unlimited future possibilities, some of which converge but for different reasons.

I've been waiting for feedback from my committee on material I gave them a month ago. As days pass, I imagine increasingly elaborate reasons for their silence. I also increasingly think of the things I should have addressed in the draft I gave them: race and slapstick, the myth of the persistence of vision, and sources that my sources referred to, and their sources, and so forth.

"The Garden of the Forking Paths" helps me think about the internal and textual problems I'm encountering. My mind attempts to contain all courses and recourses, while I struggle with the ongoing textual impossibility of tracking down all sources connected to any given bibliography. (Each source I trace contains within it its own bibliography, which I feel compelled to track down as well.)

All things stem from this philosophical dilemma. Clearly, no one can get it all. But it still makes me feel dull. 

A hard slog

I'm still working on the piece of writing that will eventually become my dissertation introduction. It's a hard slog through the first parts: laying out the various arguments between scholars in my sub-sub-field and constructing working definitions of my terms. In other words, the theory parts. (Being a little hung-over from backyard "camping" doesn't help a lot.) It's almost over.

The rest of it should be a lot easier. Because the theory arises from the films I've been watching, conveying how the theory applies to the films is just the same thing but backwards.

I've been confident before in a piece of work, only to get it back with significant, heavy critique, but this time, I think it really will be good. Or it will be horrible. My committee will let me know either way.

At this point, though, (like so many things in life) it's just a matter of doing.

Writing and writing and writing

Gene Fowler: "Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."

yep. 

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: "Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."

yep even more.

My diamond shoes are too tight

Okay. I recognize that none of you is probably going to read the post that proceeds this one. Thinking about it, though, I realized that I could use that nifty website link for a number of other questions. Like: Am I working right now?

So, yeah, I'm not, and not just because it's lunch time. When I start working again, I'll probably go until around 12-1 at night. Maybe longer if I'm on a roll. It's kind of like working a second shift. My two responsibilities (work-wise) are teaching a TTh class and working on dissertation stuff. The class lasts for an hour and fifteen minutes, and I determine how to distribute the rest of my time. It may sound great to someone bound  by routine, and it pretty much is. I won't lie. But it also means that this weekend, I'll be working (at minimum) 12-hour days, outside of grading and teaching preparation.

Which means that today is like tomorrow will be (except, I hope, I'll muster enough discipline to get started earlier). It's a weird kind of disjunction from everyone else's work week, especially when I wake up on non-class days thinking it's Sunday when really it's Wednesday. (Then I get excited because Wednesday is a great prime-time tv day.) Conversely, the only advantage to weekends is that everyone else plans to do fun things, and I can make time for those things in my work schedule.

Now I'm going to eat the last half of yesterday's sandwich (turkey, avocado, and bacon!) and watch The People's Court. A sandwich that Sam wrapped up for me because he makes sure I'm fed and have everything I need to be productive. I can't say it enough: he's wonderful, and I love him.

On a more serious note, I send my condolences to J-P and his family and wish both him and Melissa safe travels.

Flight

**Disclaimer: This post is not about anything that happens on an actual plane. If you're have any fears about the act of flying, read with impunity.

Sam and I went to Albuquerque this past weekend. It was lovely to see Rory and Kim, and I look forward to seeing them when they come to visit. Or if we drive out there. But I'm never flying again if I can possibly help it.

Everyone has a terrible airflight story to relate, mostly because it's an incredibly painful experience. But this one threw me into all kinds of mental directions. I'll give just a quick description of the very worst part and bore you with the wretched details later.

We went to the airport, got tickets, made it to security. I put my computer into a bin, as you're supposed to do. I went through the screener without problems. As I was reshoeing myself, I looked up just in time to see a woman knock my computer bin off the conveyor, with enough force that it landed upside down. The TSA did their best to intervene, and I didn't actually do anything unreasonable, even though the woman was not the least bit contrite when she acknowledged that she had, in fact, knocked my computer onto the floor. I cried the whole way to New Mexico.

Tomorrow at some point, the computer will be ready for me to pick up at Mac Authority, and then I'll send my receipt to TSA, and they'll eventually send me some small amount of money not equal to what this all actually cost. It's not the money, though. It's feeling out of control, out of touch, and away from work I've put hundreds of hours into. And I feel like a total ass for even talking about this because Rory and Kim's reception was beautiful and should be the focus, not my crazy-ass, yelling at strangers, crying in public, generally embarrassing self.

Sam was wonderful about the whole thing and continues to be supportive and caring. I'm using his computer right now. So although I don't seem like it today, baby, you are the turtles all the way down.

Draft

I have one. I've read (or reread) about 90 books and articles, watched a number of silent slapstick comedies, which are so far still pretty funny to me, and most important: I've written about 20 good pages. Or maybe 17, after I realized that I was being kind of long-winded and started writing less for each subsequent section.

Which is why I've been awol mostly since the end of June.

It's late, and I'm a little addled. The cats are asleep around me, and stacks of books ring where I've been sitting during most of my recent waking hours. I may not be making very much sense.

But I have a draft.

I think I'm going to go to bed now. I can't believe I'm still typin

So, here's the deal

I think I might have a defensible thesis statement for my dissertation. Now I have some tasks in front of me. I need to:

• Define slapstick, modernity, modernism, and their relationship
• Discuss how people's bodies were affected by modernity
• Develop some ideas about slapstick and what it requires of the spectator
• Figure out how to incorporate new information into an existing theory of how we watch movies
• Determine how spectators can distance themselves enough from the screen action to laugh at violence
• Trace the ways that chance affects slapstick and its responses to technology, pace, immediacy, and gender
• Cobble this all together to make an overarching argument for a counter-history of slapstick, and thus call into question how film theorists think about film history
• Make a list of example films

I have about a year to a year and a half. It'll be fun, in its way. But I'd rather watch Chaplin's The Rink (1916) over and over.

Thank god I have Sam. Without him, it would be a year of eating only ice cream sandwiches and other ice cream-based foods, apples and peanut butter, and Sonic milkshakes, which I guess should count more as an ice cream-based food than its own special category. At any rate, hurrah for Sam!

Imagine, now, a clearing of the throat

I have nothing to say. That sentence is obviously not true and should signal to you that I'm going to whine now.

Everywhere I start to begin goes poorly. It's like trying to force your way into a scrum, or so I imagine. Three places to begin: the theory, the history, the (or a) film. I've already got my appropriate introductory quotation at least. (In critical writing, it's customary to put an interesting quotation at the beginning of an essay so that the reader can at least have a little fun.)

In any of the ten files I've created, after a page or so, the cursor just blinks. A blinking cursor may be the saddest thing in the world. Blink. Blink. k.

Productivity

The art of procrastination comes in many forms. One productive kind is doing something else that needs to be done instead of the dreaded task. I wouldn't call that my modus operandi. Instead I've frittered my way through June, with nothing really to show for it except a half-written sonnet, a bunch of blog entries, and a file named aack.docx. 

I've done a lot of thinking about what I need to write, researched, and gathered sources. That can count as work, but it doesn't get the job done. Today, Sunday, I'm going to write. I just have to remind myself that it doesn't have to be momentous or perfect. It just has to be a draft.

As I write this, I have the aak file open, and I'm in my study. I've got water and the support and comfort of two kitties and a dog. (I wish that dogs could purr. Not having the ability to purr is a serious design flaw.) A lot of the stuff I'm going to write ventures into new, scary territory, which is the point of doing it. 

So, I've got everything I need for right now. Wish me luck.