Category: HBlog

Comp Exams Day 1 – the OS update

  • August 14, 2023

Thanks to the advocacy of previous graduate students, our school changed the structure of the English Ph.D. comprehensive exams from a 5-hour, in-person essay test to a take-home, multiday writing test. We still have questions that test the breadth and depth of our knowledge, but now we’ll be answering them in a way that more closely reflects how we actually do scholarly work.

Today I received my questions via email at 7 am. I was ready, so ready I forgot to take my pills. (I didn’t notice a difference aside from my disappointment, but I will not forget tomorrow). I took some time to read over all the options, made a few early selections, then grabbed a few relevant books (yes, I had to take the heavy one) and left.

I have a long commute, so it gave me the chance to let the back of my brain stew while I focused on my breathing. By the time I got to my office, I was ready to go. I took some time to create my draft documents, copy the selected question into the file, then do a preliminary–more like prepreprepreliminary–outline and listed out the texts/authors I would be using. Some of the questions were really interesting and I felt myself being pulled into working on them. Others I’d already written a thousand or more words about the topic. I chose the latter where I could.

That all done, I spent the next thirty minutes just going through papers and taking notes while my MacBook updated…

…

…then I was ready to go! The writing was sluggish at first. I felt myself tripping over how to phrase ideas and wrote too floridly and sometimes too simply, then convinced myself to get SOMETHING down because you can’t edit an empty page. I was aiming for 2400 words and I left at 1911. That’s not a failure.

I still had to finish grading the work in my summer class and needed to get the final papers out. But after getting that finished, I still ended up working on one of the other questions and getting more words in. Since this is a different format, the word count doesn’t really matter, but the hard work of selecting texts is done.

I think tomorrow will be a more productive day. I’ll be able to start writing right away, knowing I have minimaps in every draft document. I plan to come back to my DAY 1 answer tomorrow night, after I’ve allowed it to stew while I work on DAY 2’s answer. NIGHT 1’s answer has the bones to it, and I have a book here that can help me make sure I put them in the right spots.

Feeling optimistic and ready to keep rolling!

my task management app can’t cure my ennui

  • January 3, 2023

I would like all semester breaks to just be a break in the work, but not necessarily a break of being on campus. Perhaps I don’t want a faculty job, but something in support or admin so I no longer have to be in this holding pattern until I can be myself again.

I hate it here today, but I can’t say that because she always says she hates it here, too…first…worse. She’ll express a camaraderie that doesn’t exist. We hate different things. Or maybe we both just hate her. I don’t know, I’ve never been allowed an isolated feeling in my life. I’m always derivative.

I am having a low motivation day and am desperate for it not to turn into depression.

twenty more days

Twitter doesn’t deserve my hot takes anymore…

  • December 19, 2022

Twitter post by @011scenes: “there’s no stranger things without her sorry”

Well, yes and no. While 11 is the catalyst for much of the overall plot – the writers can’t seem to have the character do anything besides scowl, stretch out an arm, and grimace until her nose bleeds black.

Sure, Stranger Things doesn’t exist without her (narratively and well, literally, I suppose) but Stranger Things doesn’t know what to do with her either.

It wasn’t snow at all!

  • December 17, 2022

It’s been a while since I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and I was reminded of it when I just watched A Trip to the Moon the 1902 silent film by Georges Méliès.

The wizard/scientists fall asleep on the surface of the moon (as you do) and are awakened by snow, created by what appears to be Saturn, a whole other crescent moon, and friends. My mind immediately connected this with the poppy field in Wizard and how they are awakened by snow flurries created by Glinda the good witch. Had any one made the connection before?

I started looking then thought, wait, am I remembering the film or the book. In the book, Scarecrow and Tinman get a sleeping Dorothy away from the poppies but leave Lion behind to “sleep forever” until some grateful mice heave-ho him into the grassy field, safe from his opium dreams.

OK then, moving on.

Maybe it’s the better alternative?

  • December 16, 2022

www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/14/fortnite-epic-games-lawsuit-addictive

As someone who gets time-blindness playing a game, watching a film, reading a book or manga, these kids are escaping reality and I don’t think that’s quite the same as addiction.

Games, especially those with micro-transactions, are built to keep the player playing and paying. Anybody been to Las Vegas? Though I can spend hours and hours playing a video game, I got bored after five minutes playing the slots. Casinos are set up to keep you playing. They are logistically set up to keep you inside, but it never felt like a place where I wanted to stay.

It’s immersion, that’s the draw. Why do we want to be distracted from the rest of the world? What is it (the world) offering these kids right now?

I agree these kids are dealing with something; I don’t know if the video game is problem or just a distraction from the real problem.

Obviously, no account of someone under 18 should have any kind of credit card attached to it. If a player can’t be in a legal contract with a bank, they shouldn’t be in a financial contract with a gaming company.

Name a thriller where a woman isn’t the one in peril…

  • December 8, 2022

There’s got to be a few, right? I’m not saying there’s not, but anything?

Sometimes research takes you in weird places. Honestly, I’m taking notes on Stephen Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds and in disagreeing with a scholar’s opinion — well, part of the opinion, or actually the way the opinion was stated, fine, I didn’t like the tone of the opinion, okay??– I came across an abstract about Nocturnal Animals the 2017 Tom Ford film that I only know from TikTok.

I think it’s TikTok, or Instagram, the meme where you go to Netflix and watch the first few minutes of the movie and record your reaction because there’s nothing more shocking than fat bodies moving. Oh, wait, naked fat bodies. Eww!

Fuck you.

Anyhooos, I read the plot in the Wikipedias because I’m never spending money on that film and in the references list came across Victoria Coren Mitchell’s amaze-balls review: “I’m so glad to spoil this film for you” in The Guardian.

Director Tom Ford, a fashion designer by day and a film-maker with a gorgeous aesthetic touch, can make anything beautiful – and he really does it with these cadavers. The whole image could be hung in an art gallery, if it weren’t for the risk of flies. They look exactly how a pair of raped, murdered women wouldn’t look. But if you want to believe that a pair of raped, murdered women would be a lovely sight to behold, then Nocturnal Animals is the film for you.

Mitchell

And this, on that opening sequence of fat women existing:

On and on the dancing goes; we really get to have a good old goggle at the undulating folds of flesh. This is Ford’s David Lynch moment, but, in the darkest room of Tom Ford’s psyche, you don’t get dwarves speaking backwards, you get fat women dancing. Yeurggghhhhh, look at their rubbery tummies, their flabby thighs! Make it stop! Monsters! Fat fat fat fat fat!

And that’s what you get when you let a f***ing fashion designer make a film.

Mitchell

Hats off to you, for an unwavering review that says the quiet parts out loud. This movie sounds like shit. It reads like shit. It may have wonderful performances, but it’s probably shit.

Also, fuck Tom Ford too. Just all of it.

Always write your notes as if they’ll be found

  • December 7, 2022

While I was transcribing my notebook today, I came across this paragraph I wrote about the first chapter of Richard Miller’s Writing at the End of the World:

Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club is discussed in detail and while I’m pleased we found the time to discuss a female writer, I’m saddened that her story has to be about hope generated through the expression of her psychological and physical trauma and that her contribution is about forgiveness. Thank goodness for the lady nurturers. “It might seem that by organizing these readings in this way, I’ve been building up to a spirited defense of the social and therapeutic value of writing one’s memoirs” (24). Reader, he is not. Amis, Krakauer, Descartes all new that writing could exemplify, amplify their anxieties: “extend one’s sense of despair and one’s sense of superiority” (24) but they lacked the knowledge that Karr had, that writing could generate hope and forgiveness and an understanding of one’s own past and path. Miller forgets to point out that men often have the space, time, leisure to amplify their pain because the women compromise, cajole, and cooperate. Karr finds hope and optimism because she is not allowed the space to brood and sulk in the literary world. Her pain isn’t vented through literary doppelgangers or shooting sprees—it burns until it’s contained and only valued when her trauma is transformed into that most useful of all stolen artifacts—hope.

In which I get in my own way, again

  • November 30, 2022

Vague spoilers for Hunter X Hunter and Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, I think.

I don’t know if I’ve talked about this before, but when watching Hunter X Hunter, and the Demon Slayer movie, I found myself puzzle by the deaths of certain characters and the emotional toll that it placed on the protagonist. I felt that it didn’t work. The protagonist hadn’t spent enough time with the character to create a bond worthy of such pain.

Actually, I hadn’t spent enough time with the character to make me relate to the despair of the protagonist. ‘Yes, but,’ I think to myself, ‘you spent as much time as the story gives you. That should be enough to bond with the character through the protagonist, right? You have no other qualms about the writing in either story, right?’

Right. And as I was typing up my notes this morning, I found myself following a similar line of thinking concerning The Time Machine, George Pal’s 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells’s scientific romance.

The humorous bond the time traveler creates with a distant mannequin, the change in whose outfits represent the passage of time, is forced, an obvious point to…wait a minute.

It’s me, isn’t it? I’m the issue here. I’m the one that needs much more time with a character (or real life person, to be honest) for some sort of bond to form. Ah! I get it now.

Remember when you’re analyzing or critiquing a piece of art, search for signs of yourself that may be getting in the way. Your experience and existence are integral to your unique view, but make sure that what you’re seeing in the work isn’t just a mirror.

Enjoy your stuff.

Who gets to be a teenager?

  • November 29, 2022

An open letter to NPR:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/news-wrap-teenager-pleads-guilty-to-killing-ten-black-workers-and-shoppers-in-buffalo

Why purposefully use “teenager” in this headline to describe the adult male pleading guilty? His attack was racially motivated and since we have a long history of “aging up “ Black people in our media to make them seem more threatening, this is a bad editorial choice.

“Man pleads guilty to killing ten Black workers and shopper in Buffalo.”

There. You don’t even have to put “white” before his name if it makes you uncomfortable, because we know. Of course, we know.