(no subject)

[truepenny]

Today's mail brought:


* my contributor's copy of The Magazine of Speculative Poetry vol. 7, no. 2.

* a certificate of registration of copyright for my dissertation.

Yes. That dissertation.

heres_luck and I had just been talking about this a few days ago, about dissertations and copyrights and whether one should bother with the extra fee to get the copyright in one's own name. I did, because I am a beady-eyed goblin about that sort of thing, and I remember saying to h.l. that I hadn't heard thing one about it since I deposited back in May of 2004.

Well, now I have, and the official copyright date of my dissertation is April 19, 2005.

This just feels really freaking weird. Because, I mean, I had closure, and now I have more of it, and an excess of closure doesn't seem to result in enhanced feelings of closure and security, but instead a sort of wtf do I do now? It's like when you slam the lid of something extra hard to be sure it latches, and instead of latching, it rebounds into your face.

I'm not quite sure what to do with myself now.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Maybe you should write a book. *g*

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I second that. Books.

[larryhammer]

Nah -- poetry. Perfect follow-on to a dissertation, I say.

---L, yeah that's the ticket.

[raqs.livejournal.com]

i remember when i was telling a faculty member about how i felt at such loose ends and a little down since i finished my dissertation, and she said, "oh yes, the postpartum depression after finishing such a large project is well known." and i thought, well, no one told ME, you useless bitch.

so now i'm telling you and i am the useless bitch. :-)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, but I did that already. I did it last May when I deposited.

This is like getting chicken pox a second time.

[enevarim]

Write a scathing satire of academe and all its failings to remind yourself how glad you are that you aren't trammelled in that world any more? I went through the doctorate and the revising the doctorate for publication and the galleys and all the rest, and it's all neatly tied in a memory-box about three years old. And last weekend I read Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's The Rule of Four, and the old close familiar odour of academic corruption and plagiarism (not that the Cambridge variety had such dramatic results) was released once more, and my main feeling was one of intimate familiarity and a great relief that I wasn't there any more.

Of course, although I've been reading along this lj for a long time now (and not commenting mostly because it still seems somehow impolite to comment before being formally introduced), I have no idea whether this is applicable or helpful or not. But, yes, for what it might be worth, been somewhere similar to there, and feel the pain.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

I don't do satire--but my wizards tend to arrange themselves very much along the academic model, with all the squabbling, back-biting, and petty in-fighting that suggests. So, um, yeah.