August 30, 2004
A Revelation
Grad school entails a lot of reading. I mean, I knew it was going to be much more than I had read in the past, but it's almost overwhelming. Not quite, but close.
Hmm... that seems too slight for my first post in a couple of days.
Ah well. I don't have anything else to say right now. Thankfully, I know you all eagerly await even my most asinine posts so this should suffice. I am still alive and enjoying school, but I have almost entirely lost track of current events as well as what day it is.
When I was in grad school in political science, many moons ago, I complained about the volume of reading to a professor who replied, "you are a graduate student now, sleep less". Not helpful, but I guess it is just a part of what we signed up for. Good luck!
Oh, I know. Unfortunately, I can't sleep less. If I did, my reading would be worthless. It's ok though. I'm enjoying all the reading. It's what I've been wanting to do for quite a while, but didn't have the time or self-discipline to do. Now I have no choice. It's sort of fun to reach the end of the day unable to think, too.
Might I also recommend getting some regular physical activity to balance out the mental exhaustion? I'm glad you are enjoying it, though.
Oh, no worries there. My Riverside Chaucer book probably weighs 6 pounds on its own. Combine that with my other books and papers and multiply by the number of steps I take around campus and I've already lost about 4 pounds. :)
My wife and I are also taking walks around our charming new neighborhood, which is nice.
It's actually good to hear you're struggling - not that it's good that you're struggling, just in that it's good you're trying. I, on the other hand, am having a great deal of trouble getting my ass back in gear after a mere two years in the lackadaisical world of the state-employed working man. I really hope I get my head on straight within the next few days, right now I'm having real trouble with my work ethic.
As for the physical activity, I think RP may have in mind something more like the fucking brutal games of Ultimate that are a seeming mainstay of department culture here. The first couple, I needed a full week to recover from. But my refraction time has apparently shrunk, since I played yesterday, and am not sore today. Yay for the human body!
I think that since the stakes for returning to school are a bit higher for me than you, my work ethic has come a little more easily. I've stayed ahead on the reading for all of my classes except my poetry course. That one is nearly impossible to get ahead on for now due to the sheer volume of poems assigned. However, we don't cover them all (or even a significant fraction) in class, so I can catch up at my leisure later when the load lessens. Right now we're reading Elizabeth Bishop (a wonderful poet whom I've just discovered and plan to post something about, perhaps this weekend) who seems to be one of the professor's favorite poets. As a result, we're reading almost everything she ever wrote in the course of two weeks. Combined with my other classes and the necessity of reading at least some of the critical literature related to her poetry, it's practically impossible to read all the poems assigned, particularly if I were to read them well. Maybe that's just an excuse for not working hard enough so far, but even if true, I don't think it will have any practical affect on either my grade or my appreciation of her writing. As for your own work ethic problem, I wish you luck. Are you already behind or just not working as hard as you should or could?
Ding ding ding, we have an answer - the gap in our dedication may have something to do with the fact that while you're reading Elizabeth Bishop, I'm reading M. M. Bakhtin, Jurgen Habermas, and the biggest teutonic fuckstick of them all, Karl Marx (the hairy bastard).
Seriously though, my bullshit decoder is completely out of alignment, so plowing through these jargon- and catchphrase-laden, philosophically oriented sorts of works is really bumming me out. I'm sure once I get back up to speed (which reminds me, I need to go look up "ontology" in the dictionary real quick . . .)
Ahem, anyway, once I get back up to speed, I'll be fine. Marx, in fact, succeeded in repeatedly pissing me off with his half-baked economics, so I was relatively prepared for the discussion we had today. I can already tell I'll be dominating through sheer volume in a matter of weeks, just as I did in my undergraduate classes.
I'm sure you're reading your share of asinine intellectual twaddle, I don't mean to monopolize the bitching priveleges so thoroughly.
Actually, no. So far the vast majority of my reading has been poetry: Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, Bishop, etc. I am taking a literary theory seminar, but it only meets once a week. Since we've only had two meetings, we're not that far into it. For last time we read Plato, Wordsworth, and only one chapter of Eagleton. Later on we'll be getting to more jargon-laden, modern theory though, so maybe then I'll be better able to commiserate. In the meantime, I'm sure Scott can. Of course, he actually enjoys Marx.
Oh, just because I disagree with so much of what he says doesn't mean I don't enjoy him - it's the people you disagree with who are usually the most fun.
And I should point out pre-emptively to any other social science scholars who swing through that it's Kapital that got me so worked up - early Marx is good stuff.
Btw, are you also up late studying?
Gee, I had forgotten how much fun graduate school can be. Thanks for bringing the good memories back, as opposed to some of the less good ones.