bookkeeping

[truepenny]

yesterday
new short story: 465 words

other work accomplished: Read some more of The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois; started trying to integrate Victor Turner into my introduction, whereupon he proved remarkably slippery and eel-like. *snarl* Made bread. Did laundry. All v. v. exciting, of course.

Had email exchange with my dissertation director, who still doesn't believe, way deep down in her heart of hearts, that I mean it when I say I don't want to teach and I don't want to stay in academia and for the fifth fucking time, NO, I'm not going on the job market, and I'm not going to change my mind about it either.

Exchange otherwise notable for demonstrating just how much work I still have to do. *sigh*sob*snarl*

I like George Chapman, though. He comes up with fab lines like this:

Looke out for fresh life, rather than witch-like,
Learne to kisse horror, and with death engender.

Saith Montsurry, the murderer of Bussy D'Ambois, to his wife Tamyra, who was Bussy's lover and whom Montsurry tortured into betraying Bussy. And their exchange takes place at Bussy's grave, no less.

Only the Jacobeans could make this shit up.

Comments

[libskrat]

Gee. Could it possibly be that your diss director has buried doubts about her own survival outside academia, and your intransigence unearths same?

Especially for an English degree, your diss director's attitude is outright irresponsible. She ought to be *rejoicing*, for your sake and everyone else's, that you aren't going to mess with the abyss that is the English tenure-track job market.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I think, really, that her motives are less base than that.

She's an excellent director--organized, perceptive, supportive--but she is not terribly firmly connected to the real world. I think (and this is sheer wild, making-shit-up speculation, although I have a certain amount of nebulous evidence to support it) that she had overinvested in me as Academia's Young Dream. Because I'm first-rate as a student. Not because of brains or innate superiority, but because my particular Pavlovian reactions to authority and assignments and the like means that my intelligence channels beautifully into writing term papers and participating in classroom discussions and all the assorted baggage that makes up grad school.

What my director has not grasped--and at this point I don't think she's going to grasp--is that none of this translates into being a good professor. Or a good researcher. For one, she doesn't understand that when I say, I hate teaching, that is exactly what I mean. She herself is passionately devoted to teaching--and she is an extremely good teacher--and she can't make the empathetic leap necessary.

The other sticking point, which I haven't brought up with her because she's my dissertation director and I haven't deposited yet, is that academically I'm not even remotely self-motivating. If I have an assignment, I'll complete it. But if I don't have an assignment, academic work will not happen. I'll write fiction instead. This is how I know, on a gut level, that fiction-writing is what I ought to be doing. But she won't understand that either, since she seems to be equally self-motivating on all fronts, which frankly boggles the fuck out of me.

Also, and another reason I like her and like working with her, my director is extremely feminist and is a passionate advocate of women in the academy. So, because she doesn't understand the ways in which I don't match, she wants me to carry the torch. She has mentioned, more than once, a completely wild fantasy that I might someday be a college or university president, a fate which I would gnaw my own leg off in order to escape. I think she feels (although she has never said, and I know won't say) that I'm wasting my potential, but the potential she sees me wasting is potential I don't actually have.

Boy. That got long. I'll sit down now.

[libskrat]

Sigh. Sometimes the really good ones are the worst for you, know what I mean?

There's a balance between what's-good-for-the-student and what's-good-for-the-profession that a responsible adviser ought to try really hard to keep. Your director -- she's tilted too far in the direction of what she thinks of as the profession.

It's understandable, but it's still wrong.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh I totally agree with you. She's wrong, and I wish she could understand that, but I've accepted the fact that she can't.

Happily, I know my own mind well enough not to be persuaded by her.

words words words

[oracne.livejournal.com]

New short story! Cool!