"24-hour revise"

That's what the Advisor is calling it--to distinguish from an actual good revision that will lead to an actual good proposal. This one is just to get something into the hands of the committee, members of which have been warned that the proposal is "drafty." Nice adjective. Almost as good as "bored with itself."

I reported in an earlier post that the weak part of my proposal is the "Objective" and still weak but better is the "State of the Question." The stronger part is the "Procedure." Exactly wrong. Reverse those. That is the reality.

Mad "24-hour revise" commences. I will report back tomorrow. Unless I'm drunk. Then I will report Friday. Or I could report drunk. That might be fun.

I thought I was okay

Throwing myself into work has been mostly effective, and I don't feel like I'm really avoiding the fact of my miscarriage, but the sadness is hitting me now at unexpected times. I guess that my grief was delayed for a while, and I thought I was handling things very well. Then suddenly I am just sad. Very sad.

okay, so I'm not taking leave

So I was wrong. I am still blogging. I think I have a problem. But it's not as bad as a lot of people--I know several people who blog three or four times a day. I know this because I read their blogs three or four times a day. Okay, so maybe it is a problem.

I've been been working under the assumption that I had shown my director enough of a draft of the diss proposal that I could just submit the revised draft on the day of the written exam in a couple of weeks. So I get back from San Francisco--amazing BTW--and have a message to call. The Absent Advisor is back! And I call and he wants the diss proposal right now. Right this minute. He wants the whole committee to have the proposal before they MAKE the exam. Aack!

So last night I'm up at midnight working on it (after spending an hour on MySpace attempting to diffuse the imminent freak-out) and RB wakes up, sees the light on, and decides it must be party time. She wanders in my room with a huge smile and two big stuffed animals in her hands--she can barely walk because they are too big for her to carry easily--and says, "Mommy! Toys!" I say, "RB, aren't you supposed to be in bed asleep?" Pauses, cocks her head, rolls her eyes--she's really pondering this. Then she shakes her head and says, confidently and matter-of-factly, "No. Toys." Happy interruption of frantic work.

And the diss proposal is safely in Advisor's mailbox. We'll see what happens tomorrow.

taking leave

I'm taking leave from the blog for a while, but I will return, probably after my prelims are over in a few weeks. Wish me luck.

miscarriage

I am no longer pregnant.

religious studies discussion continues

Anastasia and Anonymous continue a discussion on religious studies that began as comments to this post and to a lesser extent this post.

saw the heartbeat

I went to the doctor today and saw the little heartbeat inside me. I am very pleased.

This week I'm off to the big city to talk about some poetry. I shall return.

Today I am studying poetry

Today I am studying poetry. At the big conference I am presenting a paper on Anne Sexton--one who is beloved by angsty teenagers and sorely neglected by critics. I have just read all of William Carlos Williams's Spring and All again in preparation for exams. It energizes me. And makes me sad that my dissertation is not on poetry. I know that I will spend the next two years (?) on the big project and have no time for poetry.

a home and a school

We have a place to live! It only has two bedrooms, but they're large. We have enormous antique furniture, so two large bedrooms works better for us than three small ones. I am giving up my office, but that's not a big deal. It's not like I can shut the door to keep the kids out, anyway. A room of my own hasn't really happened since RB was born. It's a small town, and my new big worry is the availability of high speed internet. That's way up there on my priorities list--I don't think I could handle dial-up again.

I also found RB a preschool that looks really good. It reminded me of the one I went to when I was little. I've been reading several other bloggers dealing with preschool issues, and it is such a tough decision. Even though I liked what I saw, especially the opportunities for her to interact with older children as well as small same-age groups, I will be nervous for the next two months before she moves, and probably for a while after that. I don't know how she's going to take the changes coming her way in the next year--new house, new school, new sibling.

So I pretty much lost two days of work dealing with this stuff, but I will actually be able to work more efficiently now because two big worries are off my mind.

Five days until the big conference, 25 days until written exam (minus 4 days out of town and one day recouperating from being away from RB for so long), 32 days until oral exam, 42 days until the move, 46 days until my class starts.

marginalized fields

I am extracting a discussion from a previous post because it brings up a separate topic that is important to me.

An astute anonymous commenter said this in response this post:
"Mentioning going to hell may be potentially professionally damaging; writing the article may have been also if it was that dangerous mixture of pop culture and religion--both fairly marginalized. You are likely "getting away with" the religious topic in the first place because you are so firmly grounded in literature that has its own uncontested place in the current non-canonical canon."

And my response was:
"It is easier to address religion in Southern literature because regionalism implies otherness and if religion can be examined as the culture of an "other" it is easier for academics to take."

I am going to have to think about this and about my place in religious/cultural studies. In response to my diss proposal, my advisor asked me whether my project was about Southern women or about religion. Good question. (yes, I am dodging the discussion of othering the South and religion for now)

Am I marginalizing myself by studying religion and culture or is the growing interest in religion among some respected scholars enough to "legitimize" my work? For that matter, is it risky to work on "contemporary" writers--combining the problem of the fluid definition of "contemporary" and the task of deciding for myself which writers deserve critical attention (Alice Walker--safe, but what about Sheri Reynolds?). On the job market I have several options for identifying my field--the most useful being 20th c. American literature, but also including gender studies, cultural studies, religion and literature, and Southern literature. My advisor believes that using my dissertation to define myself as a scholar of Southern literature will be beneficial. All of these are major concerns and I don't know what the answers are--or even how to usefully articulate the questions.

Would an essay on Bobble Head Jesus actually damage my career? I am planning an essay in the next semester that serves a dual purpose--fulfilling a women's studies requirement outside of my discipline and contributing to my diss research--about how Evangelical religion shapes our notions of motherhood and the political ramifications of that ideal. I would like it to be a publishable article. Surely that topic is safe and demonstrates my commitment to interdisciplinarity?

It's bad enough to have to deal with the pressure to publish without the added stress of wondering if those publications send the wrong (wrong to "them" not to me) messages about my work. Or should I just be true to myself and write what I think is important and trust that everything will work out?

A nonexistent essay that I will not be publishing

I just turned down a publication opportunity because I have too much on my plate that is more important, the paper is not written, the due date is early August, it's a collection of essays and not a major journal, and the topic--the religious and social implications of Bobble Head Jesus, which I saw on the local news being sold at the local major league baseball team's Christian Day--so much to work with there!--is at best tangential to what I'm working on. I think that I can find a home for Bobble Head Jesus later. Or maybe the blog is the best home for him. The editor was interested enough based on our correspondence to include my essay in the proposal for the book without confirming with me that I actually would write the essay and to create a title for my project without telling me. Incidentally, the title was decidedly not what the essay would have been about had the essay come into existence. And the proposed cover image for the book made me sicker to my stomach than--well, than Bobble Head Jesus made me. I may go to hell just for having seen it. But I think that was the point.

Hey--I think I just wrote my first potentially professionally dangerous post. But I highly doubt that the editor will see it or that he will have any sort of impact on my professional life. But I would like to add that I have the utmost respect for him and his project and that my only real complaint is a drastic difference in taste. And to be perfectly fair, he offered me the chance to read the proposal and, I assume, approve or change the title. I was just surprised that it had a title!

So this leads me to the topic of grad student publishing. I am certainly not being snobbish here in declining this opportunity. If the timing were better, I would jump on it. I know that a collection of essays is better than nothing and that if the publisher is reputable, then a collection of essays is great. I don't know if I should have turned it down or just sucked it up and churned the thing out--it's another issue of prioritizing, and I don't know what is more important--focusing on my dissertation or publishing an article so I might get a job later. I do have an article not on my diss topic that I hope to submit this fall and then I hope to have another one in good shape by the end of the fall before the baby comes (BTW, due date is Christmas Day). I really am not sure where publication should fit into my priorities--which is a question for the Absent Advisor who will soon be present again.

Prioritizing

What do I do now?

• Continue my project of outlining patterns in my reading lists?
• Actually finish reading the things I have left?
• Revise my dissertation proposal?
• Turn my 25-page seminar paper into an 8-page conference paper? (wow--that's going to be tough)
• Create an excuse to go somewhere to be seen in my new haircut?

As for the diss proposal, my advisor posed some very hard questions about a particular that would require some serious intellectual history before he will even let me submit the proposal and I am now doubting whether such work will even produce an outcome that is worth the effort. It might just lead to a fairly obvious conclusion--specifically that religious passion and sexual passion are often conflated. Duh. So now I'm thinking that I will eliminate that chapter, address the issue as it appears in relation to issues in other chapters, and split two topics that I had combined in another chapter. I had proposed a chapter on mothers and children together under the theme of family, but now I think that I should have two chapters, one on children and coming of age and another on motherhood, which will also touch on marriage.

observation

Isn't it great how the people who were not the most popular in high school turn out to be the most interesting adults? (yes, MySpace strikes again)

Response to Google searches

I am always tempted to comment on the Google searches that bring people to my blog, and I have enjoyed Anastasia's comments to her Googlers. So I'm going to take her lead.

So for today, I want to say, If the person who asked, "What is Southern literture?" gets an answer, let me know.

I have not read Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo but I'm sure it's great. The only comments I have on Cisneros are star-struck gushing.

I have nothing to say about Barry Hannah's Airships, except gross.

And someone found me through the search terms "extreme deviance." The phrase as used in my blog turned out to be innocent, but still a bit disturbing that those words brought them here.

A Christ-haunted scholar

Flannery O’Connor said that if the South is not Christ-centered, it is certainly Christ-haunted (several of those words should have been in quotation marks, but I am quoting from memory so I don’t know which ones). I started this academic year with the notion of a dissertation on religion in contemporary Southern literature—after O’Connor and Percy. I had imagined it as a broad cultural studies project that would take into account the prominence of Evangelicalism in politics right now and the sway of the Bible Belt on the governance of this country. I had imagined also looking into the works of Southerners who do not claim to be religious, or who overtly reject religion, for traces of the ghost of Christ that haunts the South. In A Turn in the South V. S. Naipaul observes that in the South faith is almost universal and religion is something in the air, always available for people to draw from according to their needs.

As my project has taken shape, it has become something much less about culture at large and much more about individuals contending with their religious cultural heritage. And mostly about individual women and girls—writers and their characters—trying to understand what their inherited religion means to them as women, daughters, and mothers. How they find, or cannot find, spiritual fulfillment in a religion that demands their physical and spiritual submission to men. And how they cope when religious obligation goes against their sense of what is right. How they, out of necessity it seems, change their understanding of religion and of God into something that is useful to them when the God of their fathers and husbands seems distant if not irrelevant.

A lot of these questions are a way of contending with my own religious heritage. I grew up in Evangelical religion and was a very religious child, even more so as a teenager. I was at church every time the doors were open, and sometimes when they were not. No one made me go—I would go to church without my parents. Some of my favorite times were at revivals and youth rallies, and my best friends were the ones there beside me.

I won’t go specifically into my current spiritual crises or discuss the presence of religion in my life right now. But I will say that I am drawn to the topic of my dissertation because if my life now is not Christ-centered, it is certainly Christ-haunted.

The fantasy of an author

I had a conversation with a colleague today about readers identifying with writers, gaining a sense that you somehow know the writer and understand her in a profound way. I remember as a teenager being enamored of Anne Sexton, reading her biography and all of her poetry and feeling like she was really saying something to me, helping me understand myself, like I understood her and she me. As an undergrad I did a major research project on Sexton and got frighteningly consumed in that world—and got pretty depressed in the process. As an adult I understand Sexton much differently and my fantasy version of her is a little more grounded and little less dangerous.

But I have not entirely outgrown the tendency to get swept up in the fantasy of an author. I have such a relationship with Flannery O’Connor. I first read O’Connor’s “Good Country People” as an undergrad and immediately loved it because of the Southern grotesqueness of it. It was like she took the things that I had seen growing up in the rural South and turned them up a notch in a shocking and darkly hilarious way. A couple of years later I started to really study her work for my master’s thesis. I read her biography and her letters along with all her stories in chronological order.

Through that process I constructed an image of O’Connor as a writer, a woman, a Southerner, and a Christian on a very specific mission to communicate the highest truth to the world. She wanted to make everyone in the non-believing world understand that the Devil is real and that we are all wretched and that the path to Grace can be painful. The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent bear it away. That mission was so important to her that she constantly wrote letters and gave speeches about how everyone was going to miss the point because in the modern world no one reads the Bible and no one believes in the Devil or anything else for that matter. And so in her final collection of stories, knowing that she was dying, she drove the point home over and over, finally showing in “Revelation” the masses marching up to heaven, all the classes and races mixed together.

I can’t say that I’m on board with O’Connor’s theology, but when I’m reading her work and what she wrote about her work I believe her and I want to let her show me her truth. And I’m so certain that I understand what that truth is.

So I think that I can’t write about her anymore. I don’t think that I can be an O’Connor scholar by profession. The fantasy is too big. I’m teaching a class this summer on O’Connor, and I think that I can do that well. I hope I can communicate my enthusiasm in a way that will promote enthusiasm in my students, and I think that I can present the material and relevant criticism and biographical facts in a way that promotes multiple interpretations and interesting discussion.

But I don’t think I can write about her anymore. Maybe on Wikipedia.

blog slacker

I'm letting the blog down. I'm sorry. I feel sufficiently guilty. Not that I need more guilt, but that's my general response to a lot of things. As I said in a previous post, with the combination of preparing for exams and making a placenta, I'm rather tired.

I just want to say, don't give up on me. I'm still here and I have things to say. Soon I'll get to them before I fall asleep.

And I'm dying to try Audioblogger. Maybe I can get motivated in that direction.

my nomadic life

Here's something that is distracting me from my work: I don't know where I'm going to live in three months. Ever since I started college I have had to think of my dwelling places as temporary. I even lived in the same dorm room for three years (with a wonderful roommate who I miss and who reads this blog and who also doesn't know where she is going to live in the near future, so here's a ton of sympathy and love going out!) but every summer we had to move out. All of our stuff. And then I moved into a new dorm with a new roommate and hated it. So then I moved off campus. And then I went to grad school. And got married. And went to grad school some more. I'm getting to the end of my third year here and I've lived in three places. And now I have to move. And I don't even know what town I'm moving to. It sucks.

Of course, some people manage to be in school and occupy the same domicile for an extended period of time, but I think that's the minority. When we rented the house we are in now, we went in knowing it was only for a year--didn't even try to pretend otherwise. We will look for a new place with the hope of staying there for a while, but my husband's job may change--actually, we hope it will change because he is bored and unhappy--and that may necessitate yet another move.

It seems like this moving every year will have to stop eventually, if for nothing else but our own psychological well-being. I am ready to settle, but at this point I can't feel totally settled anywhere because I know that school will end at some point--terminal degree, and all--and there will be another move. I am really prepared to feel supremely satisfied with my first job out of the gate and to just stay there until I die. But how often does that happen, really?

upon reconsidering MySpace

After initial distaste for the MySpace "enivronment" (that word is for Bluegoose, if he reads this) I have decided I like it. And not only for the pedagogical possibilities although those are exciting. In the past two weeks many old friends have found me, and it has been nice reading about their lives. I still don't think I'm using it in the same way that younger, hipper people are using it. For me it's functioning like a big alumni newsletter.

Something about it still scares the hell out of me, though. I'm ambivalent.

I have nothing of substance to offer because I am tired. The meeting of pregnancy and preparing for exams is getting the best of me.