The workshop satisfied all of those expectations. It left me with plenty to think about in terms of my own writing habits. I was reminded of it again this morning while listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition – there was an interview with Frieda Lee Mock who just made the documentary about Tony Kushner, Wrestling with Angels. There’s a clip in the trailer of Kushner talking with high school students, one of them asks him if ever gets bored with writing. He answers, no, he doesn’t get bored, but he does hate writing: “my hand hurts, my back hurts, I get a headache…” and yet there he is in the next clip “The Playwright”, bent over a notebook scribbling his next play/screenplay across pages and pages. A crazy-lookin’ mug on one side and an artist’s roll filled with pens on the other. Writing, writing, writing.

And I thought to myself, Tony Kushner must follow all those guidelines that workshop guy told us about… he must keep a writing schedule, must have that desk set aside solely for writing, must ignore all phone calls, emails, etc. while he’s in his writing hours. That must be how he does it. (But, of course, I haven’t seen the movie. I have no idea how he does it.)

Then I start to examine my writing habits… again. You see, I keep re-examining them, because I haven’t really developed any, so every week I have a different writing place/time/method. I need some writing habits – good ones – I’m sure that would help. This weekend I was going to try the “reward yourself” tactic. After getting a few hours of work done, I would reward myself with a walk down to a great little organic cafe downtown where I would still be productive, technically, because I would be bringing articles with me to read there.

But is that really wise? It would take me over half an hour to walk there, so over an hour round trip. Then there’d be the time to get settled, get a drink, get focused. Wouldn’t it be better if I just stayed here in the office at home where my stuff is already set up and ready to go, I just have to do the focusing part?

And that’s the hard part. I tell myself that home is where the distractions are – the cookbooks to browse through for dinner, the photos to organize, the CDs to burn, the papers to file, blah, blah. I tell myself that getting away from home and home’s distractions will make everything better, make writing easier. My inner gagged-and-bound common sense tells me that distractions can be found anywhere when you’re looking for them. And yes, I’ve been looking for them. I’m not happy with my seminar paper’s topic anymore, but we’re halfway through the semester so I don’t feel like I can change it. And I think the biggest reason I’m unhappy with it is simply that I don’t know how to structure the paper, otherwise it would be fine. There isn’t really a literature review of previous studies for this topic, and I’m so used to using that kind of thing as the opening foundation that I don’t know where to start without it. I’m such a Westerner. Get creative, Scholar, jeesh. Just write a paper already.

And I know this paper will be accepted and read because it was assigned, therefore, invited in a way.  As opposed to the paper that was rejected this weekend for a wholly different venue.  A conference in Prague (Prague! sigh.) about international libraries (international!) full of students from other library universities (students!).  It sounded so perfect.  So full of ideas to hear and share.  I guess I have the consolation of knowing that, of my fellow students who also submitted papers to this conference, I’m not the only one who was turned down.  But our professor is saying we’re not technically “turned down” — we could still participate as “poster presenters”… posters?  Pay for a round-trip flight to Prague and stand next to a poster? C’mon.  And where do posters stand in academia anyway?  Does that even really count as participation to most people?

Academia, schdemia.  Maybe I really belong in special libraries… ie business libraries, weird independent unclassified libraries.  All the fun and creativity of academia without the tenure pressure or (hopefully) the petty department politics.  There are other things to worry about in special libraries… grant funding, bankruptcy, lay-offs…

I’m also thinking of an article I read in the recent American Scholar, called “The Man Who Loved Languages” about a Russian linguist who died last year without the slightest bit of attention in this country.  His field was historical linguistics, specifically – trying to find the protolanguage, and I mean THE protolanguage, which is apparently very taboo and shunned in American linguistics studies.  Nobody wants anybody to study this.  It’s considered an embarrassment to the field when someone does.  Thus, the Russian linguist was ignored.

I look at that and I have all sorts of doubts about my future in academia.  I actually thought the Russian linguist’s project was incredibly fascinating.  Interesting.  Wonderful.  But he was studying something no one else (or hardly anyone else) was interested in.   Bad timing.

Languages and libraries.  I’ve encountered two different aspects of the marriage between my passions – languages and libraries. On the one hand, I research the two for the conference paper I’m working on.  I read the literature, dig for more, compare findings, and just generally get lost in all the wonderful connections and directions. On the other hand, I work in a languages library.  This is also an opportunity to get lost in connections and directions.  I go into work and I’m surrounded by books in other languages on other cultures, or books about linguistics in all its many manifestations.  Although this connection – a library of languages – would seem to be the stronger marriage of these two interests, it actually feels like the most distant connection of the two.  The library simply houses information about these languages, but the languages don’t really seem to be a part of the library’s structure or operation… if that makes sense.  Whereas my research looks at how libraries can cater to multilingual speakers, and how these multilingual speakers are finding information.  In fact, now that I think about it, I realize that our library’s home page is only offered in English even though we link to resources in French, German, Italian and many other languages.  Across this little reference desk I see before me books on German syntax, French literature, Japanese fiction, and Spanish fables, but it all seems kept at arm’s length.  Here in front of me I have an opportunity to do exactly what I talk about in my research – make our website multilingual, give the patrons options beyond English.  This reminds me of the Sociolinguistics professor yesterday talking about how we need to be “socially active linguistics, not just sociolinguists.”  He quoted William Labov’s attack on linguists who just sit in their offices and produce theories… and I winced because that’s exactly what I was looking forward to – sitting in an office and studying theory.  I know there’s no excuse for any of us to simply do nothing.  I know there are more than enough worthy causes to go around.  Hopefully this will become one more aspect of my development here in graduate school – to not be so socially lazy.

I’ve been trained to take assigned readings only as seriously as the assessments that will test my familiarity with those readings.  If I know there will be no assessment, I probably won’t read the articles / chapters at all.

But this is not the intention of those assigned readings.  As I look ahead to a thesis, a dissertation, conference papers and what-not, I realize that all these readings are meant to build up as our own customized literature review, of sorts.  There is not an assessment, per se, but a purpose.  We were trained to approach school as “jumping through hoops” ie. passing the assessments.  But true learning is not about tricking our short-term memories into doing well on a one-hour exam, rather it’s meant to be an accumulation of knowledge.

You might say, “Well, duh!” and I might even have said that if I read this, too.  What I realized today was that I had *not* been believing this idea of accumulated knowledge.  It didn’t dawn on me until now that I’ve been operating strictly under the expectation of being graded for what I do.  We don’t even get grades in my classes now (not on daily and weekly stuff, anyway).

If someone had spelled this out for me while I was an undergrad or even a high schooler… would I have gotten it?  Would this idea have made any sense back then?  Because I really wish someone *had* spelled it out for me much, much earlier except for that doubt about how receptive a younger me would have been.

This lightbulb brings with it a lot of regret for missed and forgotten knowledge of the past, but also a shift in thinking so strong, I can almost physically feel my brain changing course like a ship making a sharp left turn in water.  And I have to chart a completely different course now in a completely different hemisphere using completely different stars.  It’s an opening up.  Knowing that it’s not assessments I’m working for, but pure and simple knowledge also brings a great sense of being set free.

A lot has happened since that last time I posted here – months and months ago. I have moved across the country and started graduate school. The move wasn’t the smoothest of transitions, and I have not been the most organized student, thus… I have not been reading Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day or Well-Educated Mind. I am feeling some sort of muscle going into atrophy without the exercise of free-writing every day so I’d like to start that again. I’ve actually been in grad school for almost three weeks now and telling myself the whole time, “I should really do something on Reading Chair again.” So here I am.

Today’s post has been made possible by the “lab discussion” session I am currently sitting in for a required introduction class. We are covering bibliographic instruction today, which I’ve already done at two different jobs. I’m sitting in the back, gazing around the screens of the other students and I see that pretty much everyone is on a completely different website than the instructor. Poor instructor. I feel sorry for her — she’s required to do this, and I think she knows no one is interested but she’s doing her best nevertheless. Good courage that.

The good news is, I’m already developing some great ideas for a thesis focus. I’m submitting a paper for a conference in January. I have two different assistantship jobs, teaching me very different things. Outside of this required introduction class, I’m in two wonderful classes… one about linguistics and one about global issues. Very complementary. Very nice. I think there will be some great possibilities in merging the research for both classes.

Anyway… I’ll be using this blog as a sounding board for this thesis process. For research frustrations and eurekas. For recording the experience and, hopefully, tracking my own development.

My problem is – the whole library science program only requires 40 credits, easily accomplished in 2 years or less. But I’ve found at least 60 credits of classes that I want to take. I don’t want to / can’t afford to drag out this degree process, so part of me is entertaining the idea of taking more credits than the average graduate bear in order to cram more classes into each semester. But then I’d be taking 16 credits a term, which – from what I hear – is a heck of a lot for a graduate student, especially a graduate student working 20 hours a week. Could I really handle that? I’d feel so bad about my Honey… when would we spend time together? I don’t want to do that to her, even for two years.

“Okay, then,” I said to myself, “what about summers?” From what I’ve seen, there aren’t a whole lot of options offered over the summer. And more importantly, that takes away financial aid from your regular semesters. And there’s this thing called “rent”…

And actually, I might turn the focus of this blog more onto The Well-Educated Mind once I do get rolling with it (let’s expect that to be sometime in June, when we get to Gradville safe and sound).

But I do want a space where I can focus specifically on the research/reading/writing process. Now… this might actually be premature of me since I haven’t even started graduate classes, nevertheless I want to get in the habit of regularly thinking about research. I know that’s one of the intentions behind the whole “15 minutes a day” idea. Bear with me.

How to find the patterns of your interests –
- look at your academic work; what did you do best, enjoy best?
some of the papers I had the most fun with included
- writing a skit that meshed Waiting for Godot, Hamlet, and Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
- comparing two editions of Mrs Dalloway for printing discrepancies
- comparing three translations of Plato’s Phaedrus for their effect on meaning
- writing an “auteur analysis” of the films of Linda Wertmueller

- what kind of research writing do you find most interesting? most readable?
what kind of structure or style did these writings use?
I don’t think I’ve read enough yet to have a good answer to this question. Right now I’ve been looking through Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murray and in line with that I have the article “Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the end of print culture” by Dana Gioia. The idea that our technologies could change our writing is very interesting to me. Research that I’ve been looking for but haven’t found yet is a comparison of Nabokov and Calvino that proposes a genre name to cover the similarities of both styles. Whatever genre that is, I want to read more of it.

- ask advisor for model thesis to use as example
don’t have an advisor yet, but definitely interested in examples

- think of outlandish titles for your future thesis; work toward that
This reminds me of a little exercise about working toward the last word of your dissertation. Both exercises sound like good self-tests for the beginning thesis writer. Off the top of my head… I want my last word to be “fabric” and the title could be “Keeping it all in the family: the incestual intertextual style of modern fiction.”

The other thing about these themes that drives me crazy – only half of them have the "time stamp" show up on posts.  It seems Regulus only shows the time stamp on the most recent post.  But part of the reason I'm leaving this one is to test that theory.

Onwards and Upwards.  What theme will I land on?  Don't know yet.