Calling All the King's Horses; the Men, I Expect Not to Be Around

What dissertation?

The last few weeks, this has been looking like a valid question around Chez Poetrix. I finished my Eliot chapter (or finished drafting it; we'll return to that distinction shortly), took a few days off, wrote my intro up, took a few days off, started plowing through books and articles to rewrite my Crane chapter. . . and then I met with my advisor, and I've barely done a single scholarly thing since.

Some of the slowdown can no doubt be attributed to my having hit a perfectly ordinary crash point -- I wrote 120-some new pages in the space of about 8 weeks, and thoroughly reworked about 30-40 more, and the brain is entitled to some recuperation after that, whether it fits one's defense schedule or not. Some probably comes from a nasty combination of high heat and having my car stolen, then in the shop for two weeks. Yes, my car got stolen; yes, again. Twice in about four years. Same car. I moved from my former borderline-nice, borderline-less-nice street to a much better one, where I live directly across from a fancy Catholic high school and around the corner from sushi, an all-organic cafe, and a deli ("deli") where you can get artisan potato chips to go with your prime-rib-apple-and-brie sandwich -- and my car got stolen right off my street, again. Next time they tow me for tickets I'll be very damn tempted to go to city hall & claim I'm not going to pay because I'm obviously not getting any police protection for my no-driveway tax. Anyway, I was on foot at what turned out to be the height of our summer (July was a roaster; August's been unseasonably cool and rainy), and that would have kept me too beat to do much after work or even on weekends, with or without any other factors.

But it's been a month now, maybe more, even, and: not a single new word written. Couple articles read. I did take my intro and reshape about half of it for an article, and I sent that off to a journal that, supposedly, wants to publish it. But I had planned to finish rewriting the Crane chapter, which is in scant and shabby shape, by the end of August, now ten days away. I could quit my job at this point and be nowhere near finished by then. At the same time, everywhere I go lately, people ask if I'm all right and comment on how tired I look -- and I really do. Zombie eyes. Losing weight again. The day job makes my sleep schedule a serious problem, but I didn't look (or feel) this run-down a couple months ago when I was working almost daily and really well.

When I sit down to write, I have this dread and kind of wimpy, helpless panic, and this deep, keening sadness, and I recognize it well. It's what hides beneath the flittery inability to work at home, which keeps me at (expensive) coffee places if I want to accomplish anything, but I had gotten to where it didn't bother me if I was out. It plagued me, heavily, during the very bad years I had during this degree, and the only times I got any relief (and could therefore get anything done quickly) were when I worked around someone else. I graded papers at a friend's house a few times, and that went fine. I showed up in St. Louis for the Eliot conference one year, paper barely started after weeks of frantically accomplishing nothing; stayed with a friend, and after we got me settled, he went in the next room to do email and suddenly, magically, I sat down and transformed into my capable self and wrote a really good paper in a matter of a few hours. It's an extreme, paralyzing anxiety, a deep lack of confidence in my abilities that, for whatever reason, is linked to loneliness.

So, last month, I met with my advisor to talk about my Eliot chapter. It was messy, and I'd told him so up front, and I'd asked for help, which he'd agreed to provide. Writing it, I kept feeling like it was going to topple over, way too many big pieces balanced on too small and fragile a base. I told him that there were sections where I wasn't even sure whether they belonged to the chapter and I hadn't quite articulated the connections, or whether they needed to be lifted out and turned into separate things, of whatever form. (Crumpled-up wads of paper currently come to mind.) I was too deep in the minutiae of Eliot and Eliot criticism to figure any of that out on my own, at least not without serious time away from the project, and I told him that, too; forest for the trees, he said, he could do.

I sent it to one of my other committee members, too, who works in modernism, and by the time my advisor and I met, he'd written me a thoughtful, attentive, useful and very positive email. I reread the chapter two or three days before I got this email, and with the break of a couple weeks, it felt like it held together much better than I feared; my other committee member agreed, which was great confirmation all over the place. He had some great and extremely specific recommendations for a few more texts I might bring to bear on the piece, pointed out several statements that were buried down in paragraphs that would make great signposting/thesis material if I relocated them, and, wonderfully, told me that he wasn't an expert on late Eliot and he felt like he was learning a lot reading my chapter. Not an expert on late Eliot, but he's very well-versed and well-published in the period.

Thank goodness for that email, it turned out, because boy did my advisor respond differently. He turned all my requests for help around to berate me. It's messy. It doesn't have clear signposting. There might be pieces that don't fit and he couldn't even tell whether they did or not. Oh, and it needed page numbers. Yes. Page numbers. I need a senior scholar in my field to tell me that finished essays should have page numbers on them, but I don't need one to help me navigate very complex bodies of work like Eliot's or very complex bodies of criticism like Eliot studies or very difficult, dodgy theory like Jean-Luc Nancy's. I don't do formatting things until I have a piece well in line, and he and I had even gone around about that before, but he was really irritated with me about it this time. I went along and was pretty nice -- "yeah, exactly, that's what I was seeing, that's what I was hoping you'd be able to help me with" -- until he told me that he was on sabbatical and as such he wasn't really expected to have to deal with student work. I got a little testy then and asked what students were supposed to do if their advisors went on sabbatical; are we supposed to wait a year to graduate while you're on vacation? "Students have to be able to work around these things," he said. "That's even in that book."

"That book" is Joan Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, which is pretty excellent. My advisor gave me a copy during my third year here and I recommend it very highly. She does talk about things that can happen to derail your progress, and she mentions the specific possibility of your advisor going on sabbatical and being so unreachable as to have essentially abandoned you, but it's presented as one of these uncontrollable crisis-level tragedies that you may have to deal with. It's not like she (or any reasonable person) thinks it's ok for a professor to delay a student's career by an extra year because s/he isn't "expected" to deal with student work. The only reason professors aren't expected to deal with student work, under any circumstances, is that we expect them not particularly to care about their students. In no other professional field would a parallel situation be considered normal or even permissible. For that matter, in other professional fields, you don't get sabbaticals. You don't get research leave, either, or every summer and winter and spring break off. You also aren't expected to be kind of working all the time, even on vacation, but let's not lose track of the level of privilege tenured university professors enjoy.

He said he felt like I was asking him to do my work; he suggested that I might not be ready to defend when we ("we"; he was the one who scheduled me for October in the first place!) had agreed I would; he said he probably ought to approve the dissertation before we go ahead with the defense. To the last point, fine on its own, but in the context, it was demeaning and dismissive. And he was flat-out unpleasant all along, without a word for the good material that I know is in there. I'm saying things about Eliot that no one's said, that are innovative and perceptive, based on incisive readings of some hitherto-unilluminated points in his work -- I actually am -- and this warranted not a syllable of commentary, let alone praise. He's been my one ally through all this, the person I relied on to read my work and act like it was smart and like I was smart. Gone. Only one meeting -- but it was a hard burn.

Everybody has these horror stories about their advisors leaving them trembling, useless shells of themselves, and I never had, but I do now. He's always been better at talking about interviewing, conference strategies, the job market -- professionalization -- than about my writing; usually all I really get back is a handful of books I ought to read, most of which don't turn out to be deeply relevant, though they're always interesting, and "well, keep working on it." This was the first time I gave him something where I needed his help, both with the time pressure and the piece itself, and, wow, have I learned just how bad an idea that is. I think some of his nastiness may be that he doesn't actually know how to work with someone else on revisions, and instead of dealing with that inadequacy, he struck out at the thing that was trying to make him confront it, i.e., my dissertation, and by only a short extension, me. He used to be famous for his dedication to and availability for graduate students, and over the last couple years that's been waning distinctly, so our meeting may be a symptom of that larger shift, too. I can tell myself these things, and they seem reasonable, and they've helped mitigate some of the worst of it -- but even blunted, this was a blow. I tried to go across the street right afterward to work (car was still in the shop), and ended up sitting in the bathroom, crying, so I went home. Have barely done a thing since.

Barely a scholarly thing, anyway. Most of two crochet projects down and my orchids are in great shape. Wrote a couple poems. Did Poetry Band performances. Started doing yoga again a couple weeks ago after more than a year out. For the most part, though, I've been shell-shocked and angry and hurt and accordingly unproductive. I wrote an email to my advisor, the department chair, and the secretary who'd have to do the paperwork in which I withdrew from the program; didn't send it. Sat on it for a couple days, but didn't send it. After the time I've had at this university, with its associated people, trying to get this degree, I'm ready to be done with it and a lot of me wants to say, fine, I'm done. No one's going to read this thing. I'm not going to get a job on it. I don't have enough respect for institutions that having an official stamp on me claiming I'm smart/accomplished will mean very much to me. Like: guess what I don't care about? Graduating. Guess what else I don't care about? Kind of everything. Fuck you, indicating the widest, most generic, expansive "you" possible.

I don't think this is an unusual state for a graduate student to enter, but here's where people who have involved, reliable families, partners, and/or friends have a huge edge: they can take care of you. Even if they have no connection to the academy, they'll listen to your freaking-out, they'll sympathize and take your side, they'll let you hang out at their houses and work, they'll distract you from your pain long enough for you to start doing things again and get some confidence built back up. They'll listen to your ideas even if they don't have the background to say much back, and they'll be interested and that interest reflects back to build your confidence that your degree is worth the effort it takes. I don't have any of that. It's me taking care of me, here, or at least me and the internet and a few nice conversations with coworkers -- which I appreciate, but it's not the same as sitting down next to someone who knows me pretty well, respects and likes me, and who'll give me enough time around him/her to calm down and get to where I can work.

So here I am, only finally feeling together enough even to talk to the internet, a month later. Kind of a desperate effort, because I've emailed a couple people about it already and talked about it a bit with people at work & Poetry Band bandmate, to no resolution yet. Joan Bolker advises writing about why you can't write, and says that often, before you know it you'll end up doing the writing you just said you couldn't. I've had that work (seriously, her book is great), where I'd start out talking about not being able to figure something out or even about interpersonal things like this, and then I figure the thing out in writing about it, or I see a parallel between my life and the ideas I'm handling, and I'm off. A couple hours on this post, and it has yet to happen, but I do feel slightly clearer and better put-together.

A week or two ago, I decided to go through revising the other pieces before I started the more muscular work on Crane; it all needs to be done, after all, and that might give me momentum, on the project specifically and also on myself, remembering that I'm actually good at this stuff. So I'm here at Coffee Place with my printouts of three versions of my H.D. chapter, and maybe, maybe once I call this long-winded post finished I'll get back on drawing the first two of them together.

By the time you read this, I hope I have.