asteroid B612

With my Latin paper pretty much done, life suddenly looks brighter. I don't think there is a humanly possible way to research and write my paper for my medieval music survey, so I'll ask the prof on Monday if I can take an incomplete. I think it'll be okay. I'm a little worried about the three *gasp* finals I have to take. They will all be challenging. I'm especially worried about Latin. I beginning to doubt the possibility of making an A in the class, having made an 85.3 on all my tests (he is the most...detailed grader I've every had) wh. will be an unwelcome taint to my otherwise perfect GPA. *sigh*

So anyway. Today I'm feeling relaxed. The lull before the storm perhaps? Except that it has been storming all day. In light of the general drippiness, I felt rather like a cat and less like a grad student. Erica has basically finished for her sem...at least the majorly stressful parts. Lucky her. It is her bday tomorrow, and it was raining this afternoon. Two very good reasons to ditch paper revisions and go to the coffeeshop, where we spent an extremely pleasant overanhour, splitting a piece of cheesecake and sipping hot beverages while the world dripped on the other side of the windows. I'm so glad I have a girl pal.

The New Yorker has an article about grad student teaching assistants on strike at Columbia. That's right. On strike. I don't really know the details. What is interesting about the article is that it doesn't really go into the issue, highlighting the grad students' perspective, the administration's perspective, etc, like a newspaper would. Rather it is a snapshot of a classroom without their teacher and all the tension and different reactions involved. A much more visceral approach than the scientific news report. I don't really know enough about the issue to really weigh in with an opinion. I do know, though, that often grad students get called upon to do a lot of the department's work for even less money than an adjunct. And then expected to do all the preprofessional and student responsibilities on top of it. Thankfully, I'm not really in that situation. The prof I work for isn't very good about knowing how to delegate so ends up doing most of the work herself, and I haven't been able to teach because I have a class during one of the sections (just another way the School of Music brilliantly schedules things). I do know that "poor grad student" is not as romantic as it sounds. I do know that colleagues of mine at other schools with as much responsibility as I have get paid over twice what I do. I also know, that as opposed to students in law school and med school, the promise of a good salary when all is said and done is not held forth as an option. In fact, the promise of a job is somewhat clouded. But I digress. Anyway. I'm very interested the "grad student issue" since that is where I am at the moment, and it's nice to know how others are faring.

So the New Yorker just reviewed Prince's new album "Musicology". To those of us who are actually musicologists, the fact that he named his album and the subsequent tour thus is old news. We've all gone through the shock of seeing the name of our esoteric discipline plastered in newspapers and billboards. And discussion has ensued about whether or not he thought he made up the word, with my opinion leaning towards the affirmative.

At first I was upset that the New Yorker didn't address this in their review, but on the other hand, it's not reallly relevant. The critic (Ben Greenman) reviewed the music, and that is what it's about. The name of the album is something that only startles and fascinates the very few of us who belong to this discipline that is so small that Prince probably hasn't heard of it.

In other news. I made the mistake of looking at the schedule for JazzFest. Arguably as big an event as Mardi Gras, we are in JazzFest season. I haven't gone, because unlike mardi gras, it costs money and comes in the final weeks of a semester. So it's better just to not know what you're missing. However, I looked, and now I'm sorry. On Saturday, I could go here the Dave Brubeck Quartet one hour and the next go hear Santana. Oh cruel fate! Okay...back to these papers.

In other culture news. The New Yorker also has a review/discussion of a couple of art exhibits featuring Minimalist art. Since I'm really intrigued with minimalism in music, I'm putting this link here, because I don't have time to read the article at the moment.

All right the Movie list from Evan:

Same rules apply, though I won't count "anthologized parts" in this instance since not a context exists in the movie world (too bad they don't have foreign films on the list):

I was going to ignore this because it's humiliating and arbitrary. But I thought Erica would get a kick out of it, too. I found it here. So here goes:

The rules: highlight (or bold) everything in the list that you have read.

Beowulf (well, parts of it)
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice I seen the movie a bazillion times, and I've listened to Mansfield Park and Sense & Sensibility on tape. That's gotta count for something
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre movie
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop This is the most ridiculous thing of Cather's to think representative. My Antonia is one my favorite books of all time
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales (parts)
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans, movie
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno (parts)
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote (parts)
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers (I began it)
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss I've read Silas Marner
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter (parts)
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey (though both in English, anthologized editions)
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago movie
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales (okay, just a few)
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac movie
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion (I was even IN this play once)
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone movie
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex (again in English, anthologized version)
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels (parts)
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray (i'm going to go ahead and count this because I'm in process, and plan to finish it within the month)
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Well, I owe a lot to CHOW and anthologies. That's all I can say. But I think this list is VERY arbitrary, and doesn't accurately reflect my cultural literacy (no pun intended).

Because I have a very nice friend and colleague who welcomes me to crash at her house, I've been camping out up in BR during this week to try and finish this semester in a sane manner. And being the thrifty person that keeps our bank account in a sane manner, I packed all my meals for the week. I made 5 sandwiches, packed 5 apples, and a box of crackers for my lunches. I brought 2 jars of soup and 2 containers of spaghetti for my suppers (i'll be home Friday evening). I put the 5 sandwiches into their own plastic bag. I put all the bags and containers into a paper grocery bag. I put the paper grocery bag into the refrigerator in the student lounge in the School of Music. My system should work out nicely.

However, when I went to retrieve my 3rd sandwich today, I discovered to my dismay that my sandwiches had been stolen! Only the bag with the sandwiches in it was gone. They didn't take any more of my food. I was rather shocked, because they were packed tightly into this paper bag, wh. was a little awkward to get in and out of the fridge, so it wasn't like they were flopping around in a flimsy plastic bag.

So I ate spaghetti for lunch. Erica and I mused that perhaps this person was hungrier than me anyway. I wouldn't begrudge him/her food on that account. Maybe a homeless person knows that there's food kept in the fridge in a fairly easily accessible student lounge. At least they didn't take my containers. And I'm not so destitute that I can't buy a bagel for supper to replace my pilfered sandwich.

But it is a little disconcerting to find one's sandwiches stolen!

We all know Psalm 23 "the Lord is my shepherd, etc..." Well, I'm sitting here perusing through the Vulgate looking up something for my paper, and I cruise on over to Psalm 22 (the numbering system is a little diff in the Vulgate). At first I thought I was in the wrong spot but then I realized I wasn't. I expected to see "Dominus meum pastorem est" or something to that effect, but what I found was "Dominus regit me". It's a perfectly legitimate translation. "Guide" and "lead" are meanings for the verb regere, though I usually associate with what a rex does rather heavy-handedly. The mental picture evoked all my life from the words of the Lord as my shepherd nurturing I His feeble sheep conjure up a slightly different image from I, humble servant submitting to my King and Ruler, though that is also a very appropriate image. In fact, it sort of makes me ponder how I read this Psalm. See, Latina est gaudium et utilis.

Okay. Since my last post, I've perused the internet and the Chronicle to see what other people are doing. The blog of the Invisible Adjunct is a good example of how comforting the internet has become for an aspiring academic. Four key words for after you've erased the "Don't go to graduate school" from your vocabularly because you're already there: You are not alone.

Also, I think that a good graduate school and preparing for your academic career experience is in part defined by your advising. I have an excellent advisor. Who is incredibly accessible, will let me spill my frustrations, will offer a realistic view on life, and not put pressure on me to do all that pre-professional crap (another bone I have to pick). Without a good advisor or advising experience, grad school could really suck. It's already stressful enough without unrealistic egos breathing down your neck, and I feel incredibly blessed not to be in that situation. I am also reminded that this ideal situation is one of the reasons I persist at this university in the middle of a bayou.

Also, I have a fantastic husband who I love more than all the Middle Ages combined. :) The fact that he is proud of me and my work is very uplifting for getting through these papers. I can't wait for summer when I get to hang out with him more.

I enjoyed the supreme academic blog Invisible Adjunct but found it as the IA was closing up. Now her contribution to academic blogosphere is featured in the Chronicle.

After reading this article, wherein she still seriously warns people to avoid the academic career, warding off grad school dreams...with two simple words "don't go." It's frankly depressing. I've read her stuff for a while, but her words haven't me quite so squarely in the gut as they do today. Any frequenter of this blog knows that this semester has not been a picnic. I'm in a rut trying to scale a wall. I hear every PhD student goes through this, so I figure if I keep working it will pass.

I think I can nail a lot of my frustration to the 85 miles between NOLA and BR. It's not only time in the car and exhaustion in driving it. It's a barrier between two lives, which are currently coming to a head in an inevitable tension. On the BR side, for the most part I'm doing good work and enjoy doing it, despite wordy protestations. I've gotten a lot of travel grants to do the things I've wanted to do, and I may the mother of all travel grants so far and get to go to Italy this summer. My profs are encouraging and are writing good recommendations for me. I gave a paper in Feb. Things are shaping up nicely.

Okay. Cross the barrier, now we're in New Orleans. See that guy there? that's my husband. Except for a lucky hour before I go to bed, if I go home, I only see him on weekends. We have no money, because he works for a "ministry" which is code for "we don't want to have to pay you much". Our cars are breaking. Our landlord is basically a slumlord. And we've got student loans out of this world. In other words, it's "real life".

Many times people have noted that the "academic world" is a very separate entity. In my life, it is an 85 mile reality. And right now, the two Worlds just don't want to look at each other at all. AT ALL. It's a hellish life. I don't like the tension. And it only promises more of the hell the Invisible Adjunct described.

But I don't want to give up either. I just can't. Many women in my position and from my circles, would let their maternal instincts kick in about now and happily leave it behind and have some cute kids and enjoy a rewarding life teaching them their colors and numbers. A year ago I may have been tempted. But any desire to have kids at the moment dried up in me about 6 months ago. I can't bear that thought either.

I love what I'm doing. I really do. I can't imagine my life without it. Nor can I imagine my other life without the things that make my other life. Besides, it's not like I'm looking at a major time committment to live in this present state. It's just one more year of course work...of crossing the Great Divide every day. Of the utter frustration of the two sides not looking at each other and wondering why I'm not wholly consumed with them, just them. Only one more year of the Balance, which right now is flip-flopping in alarming vectors as all the weights keep moving back and forth from being only on one side to being only on the other. I don't know what more to say. This game is frustrating. And I just want to be left alone so that I finish this paper in peace and quiet.

Oh my evening jar of soup, so complex, so simple.
Faithfully prepared the night before for nourishment to an exiled graduate student.
The one jar sought out both bay leaves and seemingly all the renegade bones.
A pungent morsel of carrot mingles with the soft subtlety of zucchini.
The comfortable predictability of broth on my palate.
The herbs massaging my tired mind and leeks swimming their assent.
A contrapuntal cracker.
A sip of Dr. Pepper.
Attention drawn back to things esoteric.