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September 23rd, 2008
 | 03:00 pm
The dissertation grows. (In fact, having achieved digitality, it's damned near infinite.)
Chapter 2: Biohazard Bodies
5945 words
draft complete
Chapter 3: Girls on Film
7731 words
draft complete
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September 16th, 2008
| 06:18 pm
Kicked chapter 2 of diss. into 4500 words. Annoyingly, I still have a whole second novel to address here. But at least it'll be, you know, long.
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September 11th, 2008
| 04:35 pm
Taking another run at the second chapter of my dissertation. This beast has been my demon since May. I've promised myself that I'll finish it in the next week to ten days, even if it means a total re-write. And in fact, I am having to re-write it. What a mess. Never attempt to go on vacation and move house in the middle of an essay.
That said, it's still like pulling teeth. It doesn't help that I've never liked The Handmaid's Tale, and that so far I can't escape it. If I can just generate ten clean pages on the subject, I can finally leave it be, and go on to The Blind Assassin.
The next chapter's on some of my favourite Gibson novels (Mona Lisa Overdrive and Idoru), so at least that's something to look forward to. I'm so thoroughly sick of mentioning that I'm working on Gibson (to faculty members) have having them say, "Oh yes, I taught Neuromancer once." I suppose that's fine, but they haven't read any of his other books, which are frankly better, and they're simply not interested in hearing about them. Must we really be stuck in 1983 for another ten years?
The cat is snuffling my toes. Yes he is.
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May 16th, 2008
| 03:45 pm
Guess who finished a draft of her first dissertation chapter!!!
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January 25th, 2008
| 02:22 am - let the debates begin: saddest movie ever
So, the grad students were standing around packaging noodles for the food bank (like ya do), and in the aftermath of Heath Ledger being dead, we were discussing his film works. Many people agree that Brokeback Mountain is very sad. To this, I would add that Monster's Ball is also very, very sad.
The question remains, though: what movie is saddest?
Could it be Imitation of Life (either version)? Is it Dancer in the Dark? Something I've yet to hear of?
Go on. Make a case for the saddest movie ever.
ETA: It occurs to me that Schindler's List was also very sad, but I often think that anything involving the Holocaust belongs in a separate, horrifying-shit-that-really-happened category.
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January 20th, 2008
| 10:30 pm
I've sent a draft of my dissertation proposal to my advisor!
And now: a bath. With candles and salts and a boooooooooook.
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January 15th, 2008
| 02:46 am
My dissertation proposal is supposed to be 7-8 pages long, with a 1-2 page bibliography.
The still-unfinished draft of the proposal is 9 pages long, with a 4 page bibliography. I'm not getting it handed in at any great rate, but no one can say I'm not (sort of) productive.
I need a new icon to represent academic writing instead of academic reading.
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January 9th, 2008
| 03:56 pm - the internet is really, really great...
*flails happily*
As the drafting of my dissertation proposal continues, I just realized that I'm proposing an entire chapter on the nature and evolving understanding of internet porn.
How good is it to be me?
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January 5th, 2008
| 09:33 pm - you laugh at my system, but it works!
After several weeks of paralysis, I was struck by clarity while doing laundry and banged out two quite good pages of dissertation proposal.
Really, this just reinforces my rather lackadaisical policy of sitting around until something comes to me, then writing like mad. It hasn't failed me yet (heck, I can even make deadlines), but it looks absolutely terrible if anyone's watching me. I look like a bad and idle woman, who will burn in academic hell.
But, I'm a woman who's just clearly defined the issues of nation which she plans to examine. Yeah!
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October 24th, 2007
| 06:46 pm
Most of what I got out of a two-hour meeting/roundtable with the head of our funding agency:
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September 28th, 2007
| 11:07 am - gonna be a doc-tor
I passed my exam/defense. As it happens, it wasn't even difficult/awful. I had about two weeks longer to prep than I desperately needed, so I wasn't battling a deadline, I had more than enough time to finish writing, and apparently my responses pleased my committee, each of whom told me in the defense that they'd been very impressed with the written exam.
So, that finished, I'm now an official PhD Candidate. Only (only!) the dissertation left.
So now I need a dissertation/smartypants icon.
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September 24th, 2007
| 09:39 pm
It's written. Finished.
*blinks and looks around*
Now what?
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September 22nd, 2007
| 08:23 pm - exam countdown
This is one of the last times I'll use this icon (named "Readin' for Comps"). I write my second comprehensive doctoral exam (special area: gender and technology) on Monday (10-2) and defend on Thursday (1-2).
I have read 59 works by 47 authors, working from the time I wrote my period exam in January until this week. This is the last major exam I'll ever write.
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August 30th, 2007
| 12:26 am - 10 things to know about Jane
1. A date's been set for my second comprehensive exam. (Well, a week. The last week in September, I shall bravely attempt to display adequate knowledge of my special subject.) Number of books left to read: 5. Number of movies left to watch: 3. But there's only one book I haven't read before (Eve of the Future), and one movie I haven't previously seen (Metropolis).
2. Re-watched Cronenberg's Crash today. Took me ages to find a copy. I tried without success to get one from amazon, HMV, Blockbuster, and Movie Village. (Movie Village theoretically has a copy, but it ain't never comin' back.) Finally remembered that the Internet can provide. Downloaded.
Movie is still just flat-affect, sex, and car crashes. Also, this version had all the same-sex bits cut out and a big black blob blocking the naughty bits during one sex scene. I'm not sure whether the blob detracted from or added to my viewing experience.
3. My dad is developing a tattoo design for me. I wanted a line-drawing of a tree and root system. I forgot, when I asked Dad, that he's spent the last couple of years rendering specific trees in minute detail. I was sent to the library to get R.C. Hosie's Native Trees of Canada, and was then instructed to study the silhouettes identifying each species to get just the right aesthetic, with a suggestion that I also consider the resonance of that species in my own life.
I remember having this conversation once where Dad mused about becoming a tattoo artist and I pointed out to him that the designs most people would want would make him crazy, and he'd spend half his time talking people out of them or re-designing them after long, spiritual conversations.
My tree, incidentally, is the willow. Dad figures about two months to get a drawing ready for me (since, you know, he's also doing construction on the new house and odd bits of his own work).
4. My ability to get up before noon is gone. Even if I go to bed at a semi-reasonable hour. I have no explanation for this.
5. The Ball was on Saturday. My makeup garnered compliments, including one from a professional. Wound up lounging in the bathroom with her comparing MAC addictions. Also, I got to do terrible things to a pretty boy. Clothespins may have been involved.
6. Have I mentioned my newfound taste for MAC cosmetics? They are evil, expensive fun. Less like makeup and more like a personal paintbox. Just a small paintbox so far, but every so often I look in my box and realize I now own more than $100 worth of makeup, and I'm (not actually) ashamed.
7. Tomorrow, I shall go to the optometrist, and then order some new glasses. I have had my current glasses since 2002, or possibly January of 2003, so I hereby declare it to be time. Also, the opticians are having a sale.
8. The CAA have reimbursed my travel expenses to the Ottawa conference in July, so I can afford to have glasses!
9. The prof who was the grad chair during my M.A. is going to teach Stolen to her first-year class this fall. *does the dance of joy*
10. Scary-sounding re-arrangement of the MS proposed by the agent was done by the agent, bless her heart. She is now officially the person who doesn't make more work for me. Also, her version is better. (Same novel. Different narrative order.)
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August 29th, 2007
| 10:10 pm - comics search: Transmetropolitan
I included Transmetropolitan: Lonely City on my comps list, and it was accepted. Now it's come time to get the material to my supervising profs so they can read it too. I have a print copy, but at least one prof has indicated she'd prefer an electronic one (harder to lose, less anxiety about damage, etc), which means .cbr form. I have a torrent for Transmet issues 25-30 (which is the "Lonely City" arc) going, but it's not actually downloading.
So.
Does anybody have e-copies (preferably .cbr) of Transmet 25-30 that they'd be willing to share with me? It's for a legitimate academic purpose, even.
ETA: Done! Thanks so much, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) zing_och!
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August 9th, 2007
| 10:13 pm - IBARW (too briefly): anti-racism and the academic white girl
I had a medieval studies professor once who remarked that our best way of understanding the process of self-examination and confession in the middle ages was to compare it to the self-examination of the contemporary liberal/socialist intellectual. The medieval idea of confession involved a life-long self-examination of motives, and a rigorous, constant questioning of a specific set of beliefs, in this case involving an individual's righteousness. The individual who held herself (frequently herself, as it happens) righteous and stopped the discussion was leaving herself open to the forces she believed she'd vanquished, precisely because she stopped paying attention.
Left-wing academics currently engage in a fairly similar process, with racism substituted for medieval ideas of sin. And, uncomfortable comparisons to medieval thinking aside, there's an important point here: when one concludes that one is not racist, then one has merely stopped the dialogue.
I was raised by mostly anti-racist parents, who themselves were raised by anti-racist parents. I began my education in a multi-racial classroom. Over the years, I've had some phenomenally hard-working anti-racist teachers. I went overseas and lived for months at a time as a visible minority. And I work at it. But I'm also a middle-class white intellectual living in western Canada, and if I tell you I haven't got a racist bone in my body, you have permission to beat the living shit out of me, because I'm lying to your face.
This isn't to say that I consciously believe that race influences human value or abilities. But I'm an often-willing participant in a country & culture that have some of the most horrifically racist roots in the world. I live in one of the most racist cities in the country. In my home province, something like 80% of aboriginal people are unemployed, and you know how much I have to think about that on a day-to-day basis? Not at all. My housing's safe and secure, I'm enrolled in a high-status graduate program in a field that's profoundly founded on privilege, my research is funded by the state, my landlady loves me, and if I wanted to get drunk and walk down the street, nobody'd have much opinion about that at all. That's a fraction of what white privilege has brought me.
In the country where I live, and in most first-world (white, European-rooted) countries, immigration regulations and quotas are profoundly tied to race, even where it's not explicitly stated. Because immigration values certain kinds of educations more than others: first-world university degrees count for more. I can visit almost any country in the world without a visa, because it's presumed that I'm not a threat to that country's purity of culture or economy. When I worked in Korea, I was paid twice as much as the Korean women who worked beside me, and frankly, I had a good bit less work to do. I served as the white-western face of the school. Any day I want, I can drop what I'm doing and go back to that work: there are more openings than happy little university-educated, English-speaking white girls willing to fill them.
The wealth of the system in which I participate is founded on a history of racist immigration policies, white privilege, and a history of aboriginal relations that was -- never forget this -- the model for apartheid in South Africa.
Now, it's significant that I'm aware of all this. That I'm consciously anti-racist, that I work in a department that values anti-racist, post-colonial ideas, that consciously works to re-structure knowledge in a less racist way. But it's still an overwhelmingly white student body, and it's a space of enormous privilege.
Being anti-racist does not in the least ensure that one isn't racist. It merely suggests an awareness of one's position and a willingness to work at it, constantly. And the mere fact that one consents, that I consent to do this, that I'm not forced to do it, is itself a kind of massive condescension that I can't conceal simply by declaring myself "not racist".
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July 20th, 2007
| 12:01 pm - academic ofuck
Got an e-mail from my thesis adviser late last night, a bit snippy, asking why I hadn't informed him about my conflict with grad studies (something to do with Laval -- I just brought in records to use as my language credit), and asking for a copy of the letter I'd written in my defense.
I wrote back: conflict grad studies what? Because, seriously, I have heard nothing.
Thesis adviser writes today: yeah, apparently they sent the letter to a golf course (no joke) instead of to you, and I have asked them to change your deadline for response, since it's currently Monday.
So holy fuck what?
I mean, seriously, I can guess what this is about. I have university credits from Laval, which I got when I was 18 on a government language-exchange program. I never applied them to a university degree, and the transcripts were a bitch to get (since they had to be ordered in another language, and while my French is good, it's not bureaucratic-level), so I didn't include them in my grad school applications. My grades are basically good -- I think I have a B-, a B+, and an A-. They'd have been better if I'd actually been, you know, working at school instead of running wild in Quebec City.
So now, eleven years later, I have a language requirement for my PhD. I expect I could pass the translation exam if I had to, but I'm rusty, and it seems like a lot of work. So I ordered Laval transcripts. (The internet's come a long way in the last 11 years, and it's now a hell of a lot easier than it was in 1996.) I did this with my thesis committee's knowledge and tacit approval. I gave one set to my department and had them forward a set to grad studies.
I would imagine that grad studies is pissed because I didn't previously list these academic records. And I want to be able to say, "take them or reject them and I'll write the exam," but if grad studies is as pissed as my adviser sounds like they are . . . well, now I'm actively worried, because I have 2 years sunk into this program, and a lot of time and emotional energy (and, you know, a career to make), and I'm wondering what they might do to me.
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April 23rd, 2007
| 12:30 am
I got a SSHRC grant. Yes I did. It's tenable for the next two years (the last two fundable years of my degree) at the four-year rate.
I am special. Also spiffy.
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April 14th, 2007
| 02:00 pm - ten more things about Jane
1. I have had my bike restored! It's twelve years old this summer: I bought it a few days before I started university, back in 1995. And in the intervening time it's lived outside, been neglected, been disassembled and reassembled by inexpert hands, been snowed out, banged around the universe, ridden by strangers, and I think maybe not professionally serviced once. Last year it wasn't ridden at all. It just sat in the basement. So this spring I considered the flat tires and the still-spiffy paint job and betook my bike to the very nice bike shop three blocks away for repairs.
It needed a new gear carriage (guess when the gears started rattling and making that grinding noise I shoulda had it looked at), new brake cables & housings (weather's been hard on them), and a going-over. I also purchased for it a very spiffy brass bell with a very fine ding! sound. Total cost: $134. But the bike cost me about $650 when I bought it, so it's still cheaper than replacing it, and it rides beautifully. I took it down to the Forks, where I could not ride on the trails by the Red River, because they're under water (floods!). But I was asked to take the picture of a guy who was driving from Toronto to Edmonton and who'd become entranced with Winnipeg on the way.
2. I'm alternating between reading Thomas Pynchon's V and Michel Foucault's The Birth of the Clinic. Nothing feels linear anymore. Also, I've given up all hope of ever reaching the end. How fucking long is this book? (Foucault is forgiven, because I only started him yesterday, but seriously, someone needs to hit Pynchon until he gets a fierce editor.)
3. Sooooo sleepy lately. Sleepy and thirsty. I'd think I was diabetic except that they checked my blood sugar pretty recently and it was normal. So I guess it's just spring, allergies (snow mold, blegh), anti-depressants working on my brain, boredom, and laziness. And my recently-developed taste for sparkling lemon-lime water.
4. I have learned to crochet basic beanie-hats! Very nice. It takes only one skein of yarn to make a hat (and often a little less), as opposed to 2-4 to make a scarf. Also, everyone I know has enough scarves. Hats for everyone!
5. So it turns out that I was wrong. Apparently I don't want a boyfriend. Not if I ever wanna finish this beastly PhD of mine without eating someone's head.
6. Spring is woohoo awesome all over the place. The park is no longer snowed under, the building's blue-box recycling bins emerged from under their snowdrift (we'd been missing those), and I don't have to wear a parka everywhere I go. In the bright spring, I miss my poor old docs, which I could just jam my feet into and go. Might need to look for a new pair on eBay or something. In the meantime, possibly it's time to bring my beloved purple holey-sole shoes (assholes call 'em crocs, but mine have holes in the soles and I call 'em holey-soles) out. So comfortable, so purple! Last year I hiked a trail near Canmore in them. Very useful for crossing mountain streams, in that the water all runs out, and they protect from sharp rocks. Still fucking cold in the water.
7. Am gradually catching up on Grey's Anatomy (early-mid season 2) and Heroes (seen up to ep 8). Grey's is the girliest show in the universe. Just saying.
8. I've recently developed a hatred for televised romance and romantic comedies of all stripes. Why must they always reunite in the end? Why not just go their own ways, interestingly and cordially? Why end a decent newer relationship to return to the old one that was making you crazy? When I find Nora Ephron I will kick her. From now on all romantic comedies must have Cary Grant in them.
9. Note to my Winnipeg folk: Clothesline collections will be swinging by my place on the morning of April 20th and taking away the stuff I no longer want (clothes, small household stuff). If you wanna spring cling by purging possessions, you can drop them on me sometime before that.
10. Who decided I was going to like baths? I blame the trip to Whistler, during which I collided with both Lush and a fabulously enormous bathtub. Can't afford a regular Lush habit (might bankrupt me within a week or two), but apparently reading in a bubble bath agrees with me. Who knew?
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March 9th, 2007
| 11:22 pm - what she's reading
I've finished the first draft of my special area (second comp exam) reading list. The topic is gender & technology. Instead of the usual 20-30 authors, I have 48; I'll have to explain why in my justification. But, in the meantime, if anyone's curious, this is what I'll be reading over the next six months.
( It's a whole new library! )
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