A shawl like a Christmas-rose.

I think I'm going to start making shawls in honor of all my favorite women writers. I have most of an idea for one for Edna St. Vincent Millay but it's going to take enough thinking that I won't be starting it tonight. However, tonight, after the school gears wound down, I figured out enough of one for H.D. that I could get through at least the first two skeins of yarn (out of four):

* round shawl
* center medallion from Feather and Fan Shawl / A Gathering of Lace
* spiral spider motif from the body of Cobweb Doily / same book
* shape that into points with a contrasting pattern coming out as a back ground, as in the Cap Shawl / Victorian Lace Today
* not sure what contrasting pattern to use, but thinking a twig pattern of one sort or another
* finish with a border that uses the Harebell pattern with either the Striped Border or Clarence Border pattern added on to the outside, all from Victorian Lace Today

This would use some Araucania Ranco Multy I ordered recently for another project. As is so often the case, the yarn I got was way different from the seller's picture, and not suited for the shawl I wanted to do with it -- it was really cute yarn, though, and I decided not to send it back because I got a good deal and knew I'd find something to do with it. I think the colors are good for H.D., very feminine and also very cool and natural: pink, wine, grey, green.

Fairly certain the answer is "no one."

If one more person asks me, half-excitedly, whether I have swine flu, I'm intentionally sneezing all over him or her. No. I do not have swine flu, or any type of flu; I have yet to have even a mild fever. And swine flu isn't even as deadly as regular flu, anyway. If it weren't for the evening news, no one would care. I much prefer when we're being made paranoid about more abstract things like global temperature change, or more gruesome things like vCJD.

So anyway, I don't have swine flu but I'm still damned sick and the timing is less than ideal. The fellowship app I want to get in so badly is due on the 15th of this month and I have some major work to do before that can go off. Plus I got a set of student papers on Monday which I've barely glanced at -- and I am very tempted to cancel class tomorrow for illness. Felt better Wednesday morning, had a really fun day accomplishing errandy things, and then late in the afternoon suddenly went back to zero, hard and fast. Seriously considered napping in my car before driving home (I was out in the suburbs), and when I did get here, I went to sleep and stayed in bed for nearly 24 hours.

The worst of this isn't the watery eyes or the cough or the congested head that feels like it's in a vise; the main symptom this cold is hitting me with is stupidity. I send someone a text message, and by the time s/he replies, I've forgotten I sent it. I write a paragraph and when I go back to read it, I have no idea what I was talking about. I go to the store, as I did this evening, and come home with the most random bag of food imaginable -- although I did remember high-octane fancy vitaminned-up juice, which was my main goal. It's like even my neuronal pathways are clogged with snot, I swear. I think I taught pretty well Monday and Wednesday, too, though heaven knows how I pulled it off. I definitely feel more sluggish, physically and mentally, right now than I did Sunday or Tuesday night, and I'm not confident about how much good I can do the kiddies tomorrow. Actually, I'll probably give it another hour and if I'm still this out of it (and I'm not on any medicine at all!), I think I'll have to email them my regrets.

I had a delightful dream today about my dissertation advisor and I stealing a plane, though. I did most the flying and talked to him at some length about how they really shouldn't make these things so easy to fly because it actually made them easier to steal -- if I were ever to steal a plane, and be able to fly it, I'm pretty sure that's what I'd actually say, too. Our destination seemed to be not-America; at first we were going to Ireland, then to Canada, then to Madagascar. Somehow we'd stolen only the outside of the plane; the other passengers and crew were on a smaller plane, headed to safety, that had been inside the one we stole. At some point, a swarthy-looking man came up from nowhere and accosted me, and I overpowered him (hey! it's my dream, these things can happen) and threw him out the door. My advisor and I then had the grand idea to claim that the plane had been hijacked by terrorists all along, and we'd fought them off, with the one guy I actually threw out of the plane taking the blame as the last of them. This way we could go home as heroes; settling on this plan, we did a high-five and I said, "Here's to not going to federal prison!" The control tower got ahold of us, and I handed the mic to my advisor because they seemed suspicious of me. They believed him immediately, though, and so all ended well.

Who else do you know who'd dream about stealing airplanes with her dissertation advisor?

Lament for a maker.

Spicer's poetry is so god damned hard. We really lost something with him drinking himself to death.

I'm going through My Vocabulary Did This To Me, and working through the poems again is tiring my brain out as though it were scrawny little me bucking bales of hay at age eight, and at the same time creeping me out in the Dickinson top-of-my-head-being-taken-off kind of way. Not like Yeats but like his inverse; as the poems go on, they excavate everything out from under me, and then excavate the air, and then space, and then God, and so on, and it's no small amount reminiscent of sex that's taken both (or all) people completely out of control. Probably similarities to the use of or in this case by hard drugs. Or angels or etc.

"Both of us were object" looks tame after you get through the later work. Not to mention that I continue to have a blazing envy for his ability to title a poem.

Hang it all, Jack. (I guess you did; card zero, real pasteboard.) There was only one of you.

In this case, "the other side" is something like 1 + 1 = 2.

From BBC news:

The memoirs of one of Adolf Hitler's closest aides could shed new light on the Nazi leader's personal involvement in the Holocaust, media reports say.

Fritz Darges, who has died aged 96, was a member of Hitler's inner circle for four years of the war.

As Hitler's last SS adjutant, he was present for all major conferences, the UK's Daily Telegraph reported.

Historians believe his manuscript could provide key evidence that Hitler ordered the deaths of six million Jews.

If so, it would debunk claims by revisionist historians that the Nazi dictator knew nothing of the Holocaust, the newspaper reported.

Who is giving Holocaust deniers enough credit these days to think their patently wrong views need debunking? Are they the same people scheduling airtime on major news programs for birthers?

Your school should fly me in to do my thing while I'm still cheap.

Had lunch with a friend the other day who said she had been having allergy troubles. It sounds more like a cold, I kept telling her, and she kept saying she'd been like this before and it was definitely allergies. The next day I woke up with a sore throat, went in to teach, came home, laid down for a nap -- and slept for just about twelve hours. Am now sick as a proverbial dog. Honestly, someone with a cold can drive by me on the street and look at me from behind their rolled-up windows, and I'll somehow get whatever they have. Anyway, I'd pay someone Good American Dollars to go to Wegman's and obtain for me 1.) gallon of Super Skim rGBH-free milk, 2.) a few packets of instant chicken noodle soup (they're no worse than the canned kind!), 3.) a box of kleenex, and 4.) a mini Ultimate Chocolate Cake. I actually only want half the cake, but boy do I want it. The frosting on those things is basically fudge.

Some happier and longer-term news, the Tools of the Sacred conference organizer asked about my book and poetry awards, and asked also if I'd like to be in one of the poetry readings they're apparently putting together as part of the schedule. Holy COW. This will be the first reading from the book that's been unsolicited, i.e. where I didn't have a big hand in setting it up myself, or set it up entirely on my own. And it will be at a major European university, at a scene packed with people who do the same things I do. When did this become the way my days go?

Giving me poetry classes is pretty much like giving Mario a fire flower.

Autumn foliage this year is out of control. I don't think I've ever seen such brilliant yellows, especially -- even on our gray days, they manage to glow. One of the trees near my apartment is dropping unearthly-looking leaves that are bright yellow to orange, sometimes with a little green left, in the center, and heavily edged with a dark blackish color, as though they've been singed. Some incredible reds around, too. What makes the trees get so colorful some years and not others? Last year, I think, was really drab -- last year or the year before. Everything went gray and brown without showing off anything in between. Making up for it this year, anyway.

NASA is going to launch a new vehicle to replace the space shuttle this week! I had no idea they were so far along in that project as to be doing test flights. It's a freakishly long, slender thing, and I spent a good chunk of my morning hitting F5 on the mission's launch blog to see if it was going to take off, but the weather never got quite clear enough. It sounds like there are a lot of critics of this particular design, the Ares-I, but in anything as 1.) flashy, 2.) experimental, and 3.) actually important as rocket design, I'd expect people to have strong opinions all over the place. I'm by no means qualified to guess whether the proposed vehicle is workable, practical, near-ideal, etc., but I find the fact that it's built and ready to shoot up into the sky to see how it does in practice cause for elation.

As much as I love space science, I never particularly wanted to be an astronaut. Of course, I never wanted to be a writer, either.

Midterms and Halloween partying have my students silent and glassy-eyed, if generally pleasant. A couple people who've never spoken in class did so yesterday, actually, so maybe they'll continue to take up some of the work of discussion -- that'd be ideal. So begins the long, tiring slide toward the latter half of the semester. . . I'm usually ok through the fall, since we get a couple breaks, but even I get pretty wiped out halfway through spring every year. Fortunately, they're about to turn in the paper I've planned to be the most intellectually demanding; the one after it is longer, but more expository than analytical, and the last one will be an expansion of one of their first two, so they should have a chunk of the thinking out of the way. I try to front-load comp classes, because it's such a bummer, for all of us, to try to have students do more difficult papers when they're worn out. This is a new school, with its own rhythms, but my instinct is that I timed it pretty well anyway.

I'm loving the teaching, too, so much. Even on the days when the students have no energy and nothing to say and may likely not even have read the two poems I asked them to read, I come out feeling great about the job. Such a change from generic current-eventsy comp teaching. First, I'm 100% certain that the students are stretching their thinking more, and more usefully; they're learning to close-read, to think symbolically, to question beyond immediately apparent, surface-level meanings, and to pay attention to the differences even miniscule-seeming choices in language make. The papers have been right on what I'd expect from students in composition classes, but even mediocre writers are able to take on more ambitious projects than what previous classes I've taught have been able to encourage them to do. There are days when I know I'm challenging them, and I only even expect them to get a small part of what I'm exposing them to, and they leave class looking slightly stunned -- but I've always been a serious believer in putting difficult material in front of students, because mostly, they will rise to about 70-80% of whatever you ask them to do. 70-80% of finely-tuned, serious, difficult thinking about their own language is a hell of a lot more useful than 70-80% of articles about racism or poverty or vegetarianism which the class and I all approach through newspaper-level common knowledge.

The benefits for me are huge, too. I was on UB's campus last week to do some library work and ran into a couple people who talked to me about what sounds like the possibility of a rhet-comp track in the English department there. They've bought this line that there are so few good jobs out there that you should do a degree to appeal to potential employing departments. NO! If employability is your top concern, get out of the PhD program, out of the humanities, and do an MBA. Anyone who got into this gig thinking it offered career security was wrong from go; it's not an appropriate standard by which to make choices about what you study, if studying is what you want to do. And if it's not, then, yes, get out of academia. The tower is a nightmare being guided by misanthropic, anti-realistic, hypersensitive lunatics. Moreover, a comp PhD doesn't guarantee you a good job! I've seen this happen with so many people and several departments; they get the idea that what they do -- literature -- is of no value, but that composition is, and they do these long, miserable, vocational, anti-intellectual degrees. . . and they get the same shitty comp jobs at the same nowhere schools the rest of us get. There aren't any more Director of Comp positions in a given department than there are 20th century poetry positions, and any PhD in English or comp lit will give you the same shot at the soul-destroying 4/4 and 5/5 comp lines at nowhere schools. The story on which rhet-comp PhDs justify themselves is a lie. Grad school is a meat grinder, and the professorial job market is another one, and there's so much chance and so many arbitrary factors (do we like this person? does s/he have friends in our department already? what mood am I in when I watch his/her job talk, or when I vote on the hire?) in whether you get hired or not, that I see no good reason to put anyone's nose to that particular grindstone. Do something you can love, because that you can count on. There aren't ways to make any of the rest of it reliable.

All this to say more about why teaching comp through literature is a great idea, and why I'm now thinking it is, in fact, the best option for English departments. Contrary to the received opinion that students will be bored/unmotivated, mine seem to be as interested in working through poetry as they ever have been in any topic I've taught in comp. More so than a lot of them, in fact. Ever try to teach environmental issues or class issues in a red state? Don't. Give that one a wide miss. Anyway, on top of that, I am a thousand times happier with the job I'm able to do for these kids -- it's material I really know, enjoy, and in which I really believe, and on our most slack days, I can still come out feeling like I did some smart, interesting work with them. You can only take intellectual engagement so far with freshman-accessible essays from The NYT. Plus, although I haven't been writing poems so far this semester, I can tell that my eye for poetry is getting tremendously sharper because I'm going in three days a week and talking about it. It's really, really good for limbering up those elements of my mind, and when I do get back to producing lines of my own, they're going to be a level up compared to previous work. This might be what I've been looking for to help get me into the main body of book #2, in fact. Years ago, I first conceived of the book as somehow about my family, and I never could write those poems; instead, I've ended up writing about diseases, circus freaks, and mythical/monstrous animals -- so, basically, Freud was right and sublimation works. But yesterday, I got some lines for a poem that would take up those themes, sort of, and be about my brother, sort of, which is the kind of thing I most want to do with The Magpie. Or whatever it ends up being called.

Other hideous knots are getting untangled, too. One of UB's wonderful, astonishingly competent loan people met with me late last week to forcibly resolve my default, and also found out that UB had made an error of its own last year in the way they disbursed my loans that would have tied me up by itself if she hadn't caught it. Apparently they allocated me more subsidized loans than I could technically take out, so they had to convert those to unsubsidized ones before we could go the last step and get me packaged for this year. Because UB is put together like a grown-up organization with a reasonable amount of common sense and compassion, this was an easy fix, but it did take a few days for the necessary sequence of transactions to go through. However -- we did that, I got approved for the year, and sometime between tomorrow and Friday everything should, at long last, be direct-deposited to my bank account. Hal-le-freakin-leu-jah.

And, in the spirit of hallelujah, I just got an email from the director of the Tools of the Sacred, Techniques of the Secular conference next May in Brussels that they took my paper proposal! This will dovetail perfectly with my London trip, so I won't have additional expenses to get across the ocean, and I will be Ms. International Bright Young Thing. People! I'm going to the most heavily conspiracized nonexistent country in the history of wicked Illuminati-inflected conspiracies. I shall have to be on guard against Belgian assimilative plots. And I'm going to get to deliver a short version of the only really cool thing in my whole dissertation, a reconceptualization of the operations of myth in terms of chaos math theory. Everything else is like, oh, here are some poems and here are some things to say about them. This chapter is sparkletastic, though. It's like the champagne toast and international megaconcert and star-birthing nova of my dissertation.

Other fabled European experiences of which I can avail myself once I'm there: Rowan yarns without duties or shipping fees. B Never, who sells pots of lip tint with gold leaf layered on top of the makeup and fragrances called Cocktail (which is wonderful) and Breath of God (which comes in a couple variants that I'd love to test) and Ladyboy (which is trying a little too hard to be hip IMO, but still definitely individual). Chocolate without a dream of corn syrup anywhere in its vicinity. Ales made from Celtic recipies flavored with elder flowers. An entire country that, like my apartment, is small and full of trinkets, and full also of people who think that's fine. Reliable, yet endearingly quirky, public transit. British humo(u)r as a norm. Hills, in which the Great Lakes region is sadly lacking. The streets that kept Virginia Woolf from killing herself, for a while, and that held, more or less, through the Reformation and the Blitz. What else? Scrawny, pasty, low-key people? I like those and I think there are a lot of them in England and Europe generally, although that may just be wishful thinking reinforced by cinematic stereotypes. Socialized medicine! I definitely like that. Interesting iron railings and highly ornamented buildings of all sorts, which are more things I like. Lots of writers' graves, though I'm not much of a visit-people's-graves tourist. Accents known to me only via PBS.

And the conference itself, as I think I wrote here, is point-for-point a whole conference about my dissertation. It's on the manifestations of sacred/mythic discourse in innovative 20th-century poetry. Swear to god! Someone reached into the ether, grabbed hold of my topic, and set up an international conference on it, and then they set it up for a time when I could actually go without impossible expense. My guardian angel, whom I suspect to be a suicided or shamefully-killed poet (Jack Spicer, Christopher Marlowe, someone like that) is pulling strings for me -- only explanation.

Speaking of Spicer, I need to get back on that project. Things to do. Such luck to be in a position where the things work demands of me are so often things I love.

Unfortunately, I run out of steam before I get to the good stuff.

O chilluns. I have. . . things to say. I keep ending up too wiped at the end of the day to post them, though. Let's see how many of them I can get through before I have to drop off int sleep tonight.

1.) Migraines continue to assail me every several days; either my head is becoming a more sensitive barometer, or something else is going that keeps me closer to fritzing out into one of them than I'm used to. I had a couple months like this in the middle of the winter a few years back and never figured out what set them off so badly, but it passed and I imagine this will too. Anyway, I got so irritated at the amount of time I was losing that I taught myself to crochet so I could be doing something during the long period after the worst is over but before my vision and well-being have returned to normal enough states to read or do things online or at least watch a movie. Crochet, it turns out, is so easy and so fast that it might be against the Bible. Everyone who gets xmas stuff from me this year gets something crocheted.

2.) However, apparently even the Bible is against the Bible now, so I shouldn't worry about my one-afternoon scarf sending me to hell. America is becoming a full-on parody of itself.

3.) That it took until I was in my thirties for a company to invent chocolate-cherry striped pop tarts is a tragedy on the Greek model. Not because I'm too old to eat them now -- never -- but because I've missed out on decades of enjoying them. Next up: apricot-white chocolate striped pop tarts. After that, bricks of solid platinum that come out of my toaster.

4.) My Vishuddha shawl came off the blocking pins tonight and I love it. It came out much bigger than I'd hoped for, and the wool seems to have taken the blocking well enough that it isn't going to shrink back significantly. Next lace project might be Laminaria. In that case, I'll have to keep up the smaller crochet patterns, too, because no way can I do the second lace pattern while in migraine recovery.

5.) My financial nightmare is apparently one of those where you keep thinking you've woken into your familiar bedroom, dirty laundry and all, but it turns out you're just waking up into another iteration of the same damn dream. I'm supposed to meet with someone in UB's financial aid center this week, hopefully to sort it for good.

6.) Got a couple major non-financial fires put out over the weekend, and I'm still not sleeping well. If the loans get straightened out and I still can't stay asleep for more than a couple hours at a time, I'm breaking out the NyQuil. I can nap in fine style; if there were competitive napping, I would qualify for a spot on the US Olympic team. I can't get myself to sleep through one night in my comfy, cozy bed to save my live, though.

7.) I really want to write about some ideas I've had for linking Crane to Plato in some new ways, and through that, surprisingly, linking Crane to Duncan, which would be a great move for my diss as a unified work; and, I want to write about how sold I'm getting on writing-about-literature composition classes, for me and for my students -- but alas. I'm on E here. Time to lay down my sleep-cycle-deprived head and dream my dreams about the mob who are also somehow psychic or magical, dangerous aliens who have something to do with snow out of season, animal-fighting operations that are training/abusing baby tigers instead of dogs, and waterlogged but serviceable boats.

Reprieve

O praise, o praise, to the spirits of modern finance -- my paycheck finally deposited this morning. I can get my winter coats out of the cleaner's, and none too soon because we had bits of SNOW this morning. Snow. Like that's a thing that's supposed to be falling on my car windshield in the middle of October. It melted as soon as it hit anywhere, but it was definitely coming down in granular flakes, not droplets. But -- I'm in the black for the first time since mid-August. I will bet you anything I start sleeping better as of tonight.

On the other hand, LSU has somehow managed to not yet fix my student loan issue. NSLDS claims they haven't received anything from them, even though they supposedly processed my deferment September 8. The woman at the loan office there said she'd "try and remember" to update my file "around the 13th" of October. I'm going to call the government people yet again in a bit, but I suspect the story will be the same. That entire university is so fraught with incompetence, laziness, and overt belligerence that it's impossible to tell which problem you're facing at any one moment, but you can always guarantee at least one of them will fuck you.

Today I have a British studies meeting where I'll get to tell people about my British Museum project and solicit some advice, and then I'm finishing up midterm grades and posting them, and then having some homemade minestrone at a friend's house.

Hopefully when I get home at night, my landlord will not have thrown me out for getting abominably behind on rent. If he does, I might have to move into the lobby at Thomas Boyd Hall in front of the Perkins Loan office at LSU. And bring my cats. Not that I want to go back to Louisiana, but it'd be worth it.

PRAY FOR ME.

Truly. This is an open call to anyone who has religious convictions to put me on your prayer chains, hope circles, or other lists of recipients of divine intercession. A friend of mine's mother had her church praying for her while she was on the job market last year, and not only did she get a great job, but she said that she could feel a real energy when she went into interviews and I believe it entirely. This fall, I'm going to be applying for a Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship; this would be a $25,000 fellowship for the coming year to permit me to work on my dissertation and live in, for me, real comfort. It's specifically for individuals working on religious or ethical values, so my project legitimately falls squarely in its domain, and they give out twenty per year, so I ought to have a reasonable shot at it. You can find more information at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, which administers the Newcombe fellowship as well as several other such programs.

My committee members have all agreed to write letters for me, and I'll be preparing an application packet over the next month or so. The deadline is November 15 -- so if you are into praying for good things for people who deserve them, now is the time! If you're Christian and want also to pray that I find Jesus, that's actually more than fine. I have nothing against Jesus, and if I were to pray for you for anything I'd probably ask that you also become more environmentally, intuitively, or poetically aware along with whatever main thing I was asking for you, so I think that's very fair. I don't think I know anyone else who's religious at all for whom proselytization is a religious duty, but that is a real feature of a lot of varieties of Christianity and I wouldn't get in the way of practicing your faith when I'm begging your help for something.

I'm on a minor professional roll lately, so I feel like I ought to take advantage of that and if I could use my increased energy and inventiveness and articulacy to get a major fellowship ilke this -- that'd be beyond fantastic. So let's get me some good letters and some good luck! As many times as the ground has broken out from under me the past few years, this is time for some solid, reliable, paved road to stretch out in front of me for a mile or so. In January, I'll be applying for an NEA fellowship, too, and the chances of my actually getting that are miniscule -- but they aren't zero, so if you would rather I get back to writing poetry all the time, then feel free instead to wish me well there. I'll turn away no support! All good thoughts very much welcomed.

Crane chapter is beginning to take shape, mentally at least. The more Kierkegaard I read, the more I love him and the more perfect a match he seems to be for The Bridge. I also printed out several hundred pages of articles and dissertation chapters today, and went through almost my entire semester's printing allotment on campus. At UB, anyway. I can print at D'Youville, too, but don't know how much. It actually seems like the kind of place where they just wouldn't have a limit for people, but everyone there is so nice that I hate to take advantage of that. I'm going to look into it, though, and definitely do at least some printing there.

My bank account is still in the red, though; I've been doing delightful things like offering to work on friends' computers just so I can happen to be over around dinnertime. I know none of them begrudge me my poverty, but of course my friends are all as poor as I am, the only difference being that they don't have an asinine former university's loan office holding up their finances. So it feels pretty skeezy. I finally got a paycheck from the new teaching job and once that clears I can start repaying them all in kind, thank goodness, but it's not enough to sort out all my money issues immediately. If you aren't into praying, in fact, you could just PayPal me like $10 and that would be a hell of a mitzvah right now. Or send me a gift cert for eBay -- I have pasta to keep myself fed (protein-enriched pasta, even), and heaven knows that buying junk on eBay puts me in a stupidly good mood, which itself gets me working. I found out that fountain pens are big in China, and because of the way our economies are, nice Chinese fountain pens are basically free over here, so I could get myself a fancy new writing instrument or two. Or some yarn -- I taught myself to crochet the other weekend when I was down with a migraine and not good for much, and had a blast making myself a very pretty scarf out of some yarn a friend gave me last summer, in next to no time at all. Crochet, it turns out, is ridiculously fast. People had told me this, but I had no idea.

I'm serious about the praying thing, though. I can do my thing pretty well, but there's a lot of luck in these endeavors and my luck, even professionally, often runs to the ridiculously bad. The little edge your well-wishing might give me could be the difference between a year of happy, productive, focused work and another year of scrambling to cover bills and wishing mournfully that I could afford a ball of yarn to make myself a new hat in the hours when I'm too tired to write. Light a candle! Tie a prayer flag for me! Put me and my kooky, happy, outside-the-poetry-box little dissertation in your thoughts and give us a big, hopeful mental hug! You'll surely be rewarded seven times over, if not in this life, then in the next.

Amen.

Possibly related: I caught up on a lot of Daily Show and Colbert Report tonight.

I wrote my Congresspersons today! And the White House!

Dear [Each of them]:

I'm a PhD student at the University at Buffalo, three semesters short of completing my dissertation. Before this degree, I did a three-year MFA in poetry; I have a book out and am actively engaging research in my field, nationally and internationally. I'm not from a background that would have predicted me going this road, and along the way I've found, again and again, that despite all the rhetoric, education isn't really open to everyone in America. I've made it work, but I can assure you that if I didn't have to worry about money, I'd be at least two, possibly three years farther along in my career.

This semester, I've hit my lifetime cap for federal student loans, at $138,000. Today I discovered that this limit has not been raised since 1992, when I was a freshman in high school. The deeper problem, that education is incredibly expensive in America, would take some doing to solve -- but the federal government raised the annual disbursement limits for loans fairly easily only a few months ago, and I suspect, given that the percentage of people pursuing multiple graduate degrees or very extended courses of study has to represent a small section of the American population, that raising the overall lifetime limit would represent a very modest expenditure for the government -- but it would mean tremendous things to our most motivated, most talented, most dedicated thinkers and doers. In the past seventeen years, I'd hate to guess how many pay raises each house of Congress has voted for itself. Currently, the $174,000 each Senator and Representative makes annually is more than my entire education has cost. Scholars know how to stretch dollars a long, long way; we offer an impressive value, for a government that's needing to make huge things happen in tight times.

I have no idea what I'm going to do. I'm currently teaching two classes for $2750 each, before taxes. I'm making good progress on my dissertation, but that won't continue if I have to teach more in the spring, or take temp work (if I can even find it), which is my other likely option. Much of the recent emphasis on economic stimulus has been directed toward helping lower-income individuals participate in the economy, the Cash for Clunkers program being a particularly notable success in that department. I urge Congress to make raising borrowers' loan caps a priority, in a similar spirit. I'm not even saying, give people like me grants -- I doubt that's realistic at all, as lovely a thought as it is. But loan us just a little more money so we can buy books and groceries and serve our tiny parts in the economy while doing intellectual work.

Best regards,


[Me]

My loans, such as they are, still have yet to be disbursed to me, by the way. Although I sent LSU their paperwork a month ago, somehow they have not yet fixed my records with NSLDS. They've supposedly faxed UB a letter verifying that I'm in good standing; I got confirmation of that after our aid office had closed for the day, so I'll call tomorrow to check on that. I haven't had more than $25 in my bank account since about the middle of August. My father very, very, very generously sent me $500 via PayPal a couple weeks ago, which let me get cat food and groceries and a prescription, and even order a couple books, but lately I've been eating partly because charitable friends have invited me over for dinner. The last time I put gas in my car, it was with money from someone having bought a copy of my book. In fact, when I sent LSU the forms they needed, I sent them priority with delivery confirmation, since apparently nothing reaches their offices unless I do that -- and I could only pay for that because one of my fellow grad students bought a couple copies of a dove|tail book from me. It's not hyperbole that financial troubles have cost me at least two years' progress in school. At least. The fact that I couldn't afford to move immediately after doing my master's degree, so I had to hang around as an instructor for a year; the opportunities I've had to turn down, creative and critical, because they would have kept me from making money or would have cost, in tuition or travel or both; just the hours I spend every day worrying about these things -- it's awful. There aren't prettier words. It's just awful.

If you'd like to write your Senators, you can locate them here and if you'd like to write your Reps, they're linked here.

If you'd like to write them about how depressing it is that each of them makes more in one year than three college degrees costs, be my guest. (Of course, my degrees are all from state universities; if I were at Yale, that'd be another story, but it's still pretty disappointing. And they don't even make that much, in the scheme of some of this nation's really massive salaries.)

And of course, we should really be funding education so that economic background doesn't dictate your choice of schools, and so that students can pursue degrees at something better than bare subsistence -- but today, I'd find it a pretty meaningful thing just to help perpetuate our subsistence within the twisted system we have a little longer.