I’m still here! I survived my semester of exams and defending and general evaluation. Now I just need to survive the dissertation-writing process for, oh, say the next two years or so. In order to nudge me in that direction, I proposed a short paper to the International Society for the Study of Narrative conference this year, and, much to my delight and healthy sense of public-speaking terror, I was accepted. I’m planning to use this paper as a jumpstart to chapter five of my dissertation, focusing on visual, Flash-based narratives like Donna Leishman’s Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw.
If you will be in Cleveland April 8-11, please stop by my session and say hi. I’m nervous and excited to be presenting with all these big-name narratologists, so my palms might be a little sweaty (fair warning, I say). But that also means that I’ll be nerding out, all googly-eye star struck, and certainly ready to share a few drinks with friends afterwards.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
"When you can't write your dissertation, just write."
You find yourself wandering the halls in your house, afraid the draw the blinds. The sun is shining, and, after three solid weeks of snow, it is hard to believe that you’ll be able to turn away from the day. So you don’t risk it. Instead, at eye-level, there is a small crack in the continuity of the slats, marking the place where you slide in your finger to peer out and check on the world of the living. This crack runs across the living room, into the bedroom, the kitchen. Even the bathroom window suffers this disfigurement. So goes the life of a PhD candidate, unable to write the first sentence of her book-length work.
“I’m too stupid to write a dissertation. I’m too stupid to write a ten-page conference paper. I’m even too stupid to write a coherent sentence.” These are the thoughts that will come to the front of your mind, every day, as you sit in front of the flickering white screen and try to find your brilliance. It will take a while. You won’t find your genius, not just yet. Instead, you’ll find an extra glass of wine, all the buttons that need darning in your closet, and the secret corner of your home in which a village of dust bunnies long-ago moved in, back in the year when you were living a real(ish) life, going to class and work and social events like a real(ish) person. But now you wander the halls, avoiding your computer and your dissertation advisor (Hi LH!) and your boyfriend’s well-meant but ill-received questions about how much progress you made in the day. You’ll languish in this in-between period, wondering what happened to the grand ideas you had about your prospectus-completing party and your academic motivation. Both will be specters, now.
Eventually, though, you’ll re-emerge. You’ll talk to faculty, those who have come before you, and realize that they’ve said these same things to themselves, they too were once too stupid to write (at least in their own minds), and then they recovered! They wrote! They graduated!
So you’ll return to the flickering screen, again, not quite as desolate but pretty much in the same position. You’ll realize that it might not be overnight that you find your genius, or your ability to write. But it will be okay, you think. Others tell you it will, and that is all that you have. So you have to believe them.
“I’m too stupid to write a dissertation. I’m too stupid to write a ten-page conference paper. I’m even too stupid to write a coherent sentence.” These are the thoughts that will come to the front of your mind, every day, as you sit in front of the flickering white screen and try to find your brilliance. It will take a while. You won’t find your genius, not just yet. Instead, you’ll find an extra glass of wine, all the buttons that need darning in your closet, and the secret corner of your home in which a village of dust bunnies long-ago moved in, back in the year when you were living a real(ish) life, going to class and work and social events like a real(ish) person. But now you wander the halls, avoiding your computer and your dissertation advisor (Hi LH!) and your boyfriend’s well-meant but ill-received questions about how much progress you made in the day. You’ll languish in this in-between period, wondering what happened to the grand ideas you had about your prospectus-completing party and your academic motivation. Both will be specters, now.
Eventually, though, you’ll re-emerge. You’ll talk to faculty, those who have come before you, and realize that they’ve said these same things to themselves, they too were once too stupid to write (at least in their own minds), and then they recovered! They wrote! They graduated!
So you’ll return to the flickering screen, again, not quite as desolate but pretty much in the same position. You’ll realize that it might not be overnight that you find your genius, or your ability to write. But it will be okay, you think. Others tell you it will, and that is all that you have. So you have to believe them.
Friday, November 13, 2009
MATX Gallery Show
If you happen to be in Richmond and want to see work from me and my Ph.D. colleagues, stop by the MATX Gallery opening Monday afternoon. For some reason, the only image I can find of the announcement flyer is tiny, but the details are reposted below:
The Media Art and Text Inaugural Exhibition
November 16, 2009
4:00-6:00PM
MATX Studios & Gallery, 109 N. Harrison Street, Richmond, Virginia
Nathan Atlice
Basar Buyukkusoglu
Amy Colombo
Jennie Fleming
Norberto Gomez
Leejin Kim
Jennifer Smith
Sean Stewart
Melinda White
Selected by Rhys Himsworth
To celebrate the opening of the Media Art and Text (MATX) Gallery the program hosts an exhibition to introduce viewers to the breadth and variety of work being made within it.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
ELO Call Up
I know that it has been a long time since we last met, Internet. But today I come to you bearing good news - the ELO has posted their new conference call! My friend Melinda just passed the link along to me.
The conference is going to be held June 3-6 (2010) at Brown University. I very much recommend you submitting a proposal if this sort of thing is up your ally, because the ELO people in general have been quite nice to me in the past and are very friendly to everyone, but especially so to young scholars and non-academics interested in the field. I attended and presented at the 2008 conference and had a great time where I met many elit artists and learned a ton from the other scholars and presentations. If you are new to the field, this is a great place to start learning. If you've already dabbled a bit in the topic, this is a great place to get your inner-geek paparazzi on, because I'll guarantee you that there will be a plethora of names you know milling about at the treat tables between presentations.
The conference is going to be held June 3-6 (2010) at Brown University. I very much recommend you submitting a proposal if this sort of thing is up your ally, because the ELO people in general have been quite nice to me in the past and are very friendly to everyone, but especially so to young scholars and non-academics interested in the field. I attended and presented at the 2008 conference and had a great time where I met many elit artists and learned a ton from the other scholars and presentations. If you are new to the field, this is a great place to start learning. If you've already dabbled a bit in the topic, this is a great place to get your inner-geek paparazzi on, because I'll guarantee you that there will be a plethora of names you know milling about at the treat tables between presentations.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
The web's area-code should be 404
Issues of permanence come up again and again for even the casual user of web spaces. Today, though, I ran across an illustrative instance in which the problem (and its seriousness) seems aptly demonstrated.
Earlier, while checking in with the ELO and reading some of N. Katherine Hayles' work, I decided to go visit her webpage that accompanies her most recent publication, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. I clicked through to the site that is linked from the ELO homepage, and double-checked the site address with the one published in the hard-copy text.
Sadly, this is what I got:
The "Site Temporarily Unavailable" page.
This is, probably, just a fluke. I visited Hayles' page a couple of weeks ago without any problems. But the fact that the ubiquitous "try again" page shows up even among the work of the most diligent digital scholars is disconcerting to say the least. There are problems with digital scholarship, as we all know. I think that sometimes it is easy to get into a hopeful mindset about these problems, thinking that they will "be fixed" soon enough. But I don't know that that is the case with this particular problem of location and fixability. There are tons of people out there writing on the issue now, so I'll leave it up to you to go seek them out. I certainly don't have a solution.
Earlier, while checking in with the ELO and reading some of N. Katherine Hayles' work, I decided to go visit her webpage that accompanies her most recent publication, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. I clicked through to the site that is linked from the ELO homepage, and double-checked the site address with the one published in the hard-copy text.
Sadly, this is what I got:
The "Site Temporarily Unavailable" page.
This is, probably, just a fluke. I visited Hayles' page a couple of weeks ago without any problems. But the fact that the ubiquitous "try again" page shows up even among the work of the most diligent digital scholars is disconcerting to say the least. There are problems with digital scholarship, as we all know. I think that sometimes it is easy to get into a hopeful mindset about these problems, thinking that they will "be fixed" soon enough. But I don't know that that is the case with this particular problem of location and fixability. There are tons of people out there writing on the issue now, so I'll leave it up to you to go seek them out. I certainly don't have a solution.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
New Media and Narrative
Looking back over the posts I've made in the last couple of months, I realized that I never linked to the my New Media and Narrative website I'm submitting as part of an ongoing process to legitimate myself as a Ph.D. scholar.
I created the site as a resource for people who are looking to begin investigation into the field of narratology (with a leaning towards new media)- here they can learn a wee bit about a smorgasbord of narrative concepts and see them in action as they apply to digital and electronic narratives. The print work I investigate here, "Roman Fever" is a classic short story by Edith Wharton (but don't read my analysis until you've read to the end of her text). The second short story I look into, "My Body: A Wunderkammer" is also a great piece to read if you are looking for a way to fill about an hour of free time or if you are interested in the role of bodies in narratives, and comes from the enormously talented Shelley Jackson. While the third piece, Afternoon, isn't a freely-accesbile work, I also highly recommend people who are interesting in postmodern or non-linear narratives to consider ponying up the $25 for the Eastgate work - it is a foundational piece in electronic literature and can open up some interesting theoretical doors for scholars. Plus, about 99% of people writing in the field will make more than a passing reference to Joyce's work, so it can be helpful to have some first-hand knowledge of it.
I created the site as a resource for people who are looking to begin investigation into the field of narratology (with a leaning towards new media)- here they can learn a wee bit about a smorgasbord of narrative concepts and see them in action as they apply to digital and electronic narratives. The print work I investigate here, "Roman Fever" is a classic short story by Edith Wharton (but don't read my analysis until you've read to the end of her text). The second short story I look into, "My Body: A Wunderkammer" is also a great piece to read if you are looking for a way to fill about an hour of free time or if you are interested in the role of bodies in narratives, and comes from the enormously talented Shelley Jackson. While the third piece, Afternoon, isn't a freely-accesbile work, I also highly recommend people who are interesting in postmodern or non-linear narratives to consider ponying up the $25 for the Eastgate work - it is a foundational piece in electronic literature and can open up some interesting theoretical doors for scholars. Plus, about 99% of people writing in the field will make more than a passing reference to Joyce's work, so it can be helpful to have some first-hand knowledge of it.
Planting a Tree
I found this link to the short history of Twitter (so far) today while browsing through a bunch of saved links I'd been meaning to get to. It is a visually beautiful piece and it gets brownie points for making a reference to Britney Spears' lady-parts. Err... that's twitter for you.
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