Turning tables

Wow. This is a sign that things have changed:

I regard my PhD supervisor, as I've noted before, as a major Force of Good in my life. We have an excellent relationship, which is by now a friendship - I'm pleased to be one of the large network of friends she likes to get tipsy with at conferences and on Home City patios in the summer. But it is largely about me calling upon her as a mentor, of course - I've hoped and assumed that it would always be that way. I call upon her for advice, often. She is godlike in this regard.

So that is why, when I got an email from her two nights ago, requesting my advice about something, I was floored. Granted, this was because I know the person in question. But still - it was my advice she was seeking on a question of professional and quasi-diplomatic importance! How can this be? Wow - times have changed. I don't know what to think of that...I suppose I need to adjust myself to the fact that I have a real position in this little world...I think that adjustment will take years.

*

We are leaving Paris tomorrow morning - for Lyon, for three short days. I was lucky to finish with my research yesterday, so could take this day as a free one - I worked really hard this week in an effort to do that. We went for a run - as I have done almost every morning since I've been here (miracle of miracles - it is the world's biggest struggle to get me to go for runs first thing in the morning, at home), and ate pastries (food of angels) and I went to see Goya's etchings. Wow, people. Wow. That's all I can say about that. If any of you happen to be in Paris in the next few weeks, get thee to the Petit Palais to see them.

Hello

Library research hasn't been going as beautifully as it did last week, but I am chugging along...we're in needle-in-haystack territory here, but I feel productive, still - so that's nice. I continue to be enchanted by the library, as well. Even the cafe, where they give you tea in a china pot when you order it - at the cafeteria!

R and I had a GREAT weekend with S. S and I - we are such friend soulmates...Though we never see each other anymore now that he lives in London, there's that ineffable something between us that we've had for 20+ years, and that makes our relationship different from any other. This weekend went a long way to repairing some of the weirdness that came of our last time in Paris, in February of last year. It was pure fun to be together, and THRILLING to be in the company of this person who gets my sense of humour so fundamentally...so psychically. And the three of us were a good little group, with S keeping R and I very, very amused.

There has been some yummy food, too (of course) - we've stuck really close to the little apartment in Montmartre for meals out, and there are some great restaurants here off the tourist track. Yum!

Off to the library I go, soon...then R and I will meet up for good, cheap Middle Eastern food and a drink...

So I've been working away, very hard, and leaving the museum and library exhausted, my brain a muddle. Which is great! I'm finding all kinds of great stuff. I've finished with my appointments at the museum - there was enough time, in the end, to look at everything I needed in three mornings. Can I just say - thank the gods for digital cameras in research!!!! What would I do without them...there's no way I could have gotten through even a third of what I did, without being able to take photos. Though 1 euro per photo does add up...

In the afternoons and into the evenings, I've been at the Bibliothèque nationale. I haven't worked there before. I must say that I'm pretty entranced by its incredible size and scope, and its technological efficiency, compared to the only other big research library I've really worked at (New York Public Library). It kind of blows my mind, the incredibly sophisticated system they have in place there. Good lord. Though I also recognize that there's something sinister about it - what surveillance! Thus I shouldn't be so in love with it, but I am. I spend a lot of my time there pondering its coolness while I transcribe text, which only requires half-attention.

In the evenings I've just been stopping on my way home for a drink, and then coming home and making a wee dinner of salad and bread and cheese. I'm conserving my going-out energy - and money - for the rest of the trip...R arrives tomorrow morning! We will be here in Paris together for eight days - I'll be working during the days while she explores - and then going to Lyon for three days before we leave. I lived in Lyon in 2000-01, and haven't been back since. It's full of fraught emotions for me - much as I adore it - so this will be an interesting trip...

This weekend my best friend, S, also comes here from London. Some of you may remember our time together in Paris last year, which was really hard in many ways. We have stayed more distant than we ever were before he moved to London...I never expected this kind of distance between us, never. But these three years have changed things. Anyway, though, he's coming for the weekend, which is grand...there will be lots of fun to be had. But I do worry a little about putting his very lax approaches together with both R and I. You remember, this was a bit of an issue last year...And R is that much more together than I am, and has even less patience for people who don't have their shit together. Historically, as much as they like each other, R and S have clashed in this regard. And of course it is my nature to take on this shit, to try and manage it. I don't want to spend my weekend feeling as if I have to mediate...But already, S hasn't replied to my email asking him to confirm where I'm meeting him when he arrives tomorrow...this is exactly what I'm afraid of. Oh well, we'll have a LOVELY time, I am sure.

Blogging may be quite light until the end of this trip, as I suspect R won't have much tolerance for me spending time on the Internet while we're here together...

Research update

I had my research appointment today...you know, the one I had been able to secure with the formerly very lovely person who suggested i look at these special resources...and then was quite rude to me when I requested some time to do so. She was as lovely as I remember her to be. And she gave me two more blocks of time - the next two mornings. I sensed that she is harried. There have obviously been cuts and changes at the place. They have gone down to seeing people for six hours a month! When I was there last year they had a much more open schedule. There were about ten people crammed in there today, whereas last time, there was nobody else at either appointment. So she's obviously under some stress about this. I'm very grateful to her for giving me these appointments outside of the usual researcher hours.

I managed to get through about a quarter of the things I need to look at there. I'll hope to be able to speed up a bit so I can get through all of it in my two remaining appointments. I have some strategies!

I also got myself set up at the Bibliotheque Nationale today, and will spend the rest of my time there. I have learned of a resource they have there that I didn't know existed - I've never seen a mention anywhere - and am very excited to see it...it sounds as if it could prove VERY germane to my project.

I love doing this kind of work...I wish I could do it more often. I need to think hard about framing the project, this summer...I can build in more of this kind of work, but would need to have money for it. I need to think about whether I should apply for the SSHRC again - with a low success rate - or for a more easily obtainable (from what I understand) internal grant that would be enough to fund another trip, of greater length if I wanted...Sorting out these thoughts will be on the agenda for the next few months. Should I do it because I like it? I mean, it takes me in another direction. The jury's out on whether that will be a very successful direction!

Away

I am in Paris...I arrived yesterday. It is really hot here...full-on summer. Quite gorgeous - though I wish I'd brought more playing-in-the-sun clothes...

My tiny studio in Montmartre is perfectly lovely and functional...very basic, but it'll do just fine...and gets lots of light and has a mini-kitchen so that I can eat in sometimes, thank god. It is also somehow incredibly close to the Sacré-Coeur - like, a two-minute walk - and yet pretty quiet (except, as I learned last night when I tried to sleep with the window open, when it's 1:30 on a Saturday night and the invisible bars are letting out dozens of drunk, shouting patrons). Some things that make me happy about where I'm situated: all the stairs, which enchant me; the fact that the nearest tiny little corner greengrocer is one of the best I've ever seen in France; the fact that I'm on another side of the hill from the awful over-the-top tourist aspects of this area; the rues Lamarck and Caulaincourt, which have captured my heart, the latter for its trees.

My feet have swelled with the heat (and the travel, probably), and I have the most god-awful blisters. It did not help that I wore a pair of sandals for the first time since last summer, or have been wearing a very comfortable new pair of shoes that I thought would never hurt my feet - guess I was wrong. The blisters are so bad right now that walking is a painful chore...but I'm hoping some blister band-aids will clear that up first thing tomorrow...

I wish I could say that I was heading into the library tomorrow...but alas, I am not because it's a holiday (Pentecost). I didn't, of course, even think of this when I booked this trip. I should know better, having lived in France, than to book work trips without checking into holidays. Oh well - it gives me an extra day...not that I want an extra day, considering that this is a relatively short trip.

So, with the bonus day of tomorrow, I shall go on some excursion outside the city (IF I can get my blisters under control) - maybe to Versailles - er, no, the palace is closed. Well, maybe somewhere else...Fontainebleau? And then, come Tuesday, I shall get to work finally, including at the Locale of Disappointment, since the one appointment I could get there was for Tuesday afternoon. Fingers crossed that I will be able to secure a couple more!

Telemarketing

I have been doing a hellish, hellish task.

The recruitment office here gets faculty members to call admitted students to try to sell them on the place and encourage them to come here. In a soft-sell kind of way. There was a fair amount of pressure to do this, so I signed on. Gawddddddd. It is the worst thing ever. If I'd wanted to be a telemarketer, I wouldn't have done a PhD. Every person on my list has been admitted here by default...it is nobody's first choice. It is fucking gross to be calling these kids and positively breathing desperation. The worst is when I leave messages with parents or on the answering machine so that parents might hear...because twelfth-graders might not know that this is desperation, but it must seem positively pathetic to parents.

And I just don't have the personality for this. Basically, I do what I'm told, i.e. call and say "Congratulations, Katie, on your admission to Scary City U. Do you have any questions for me?" Only one of the dozen students I've talked to so far has any questions at all. Which is incredibly awkward!! The info packet says that while that students might not have questions, they might enjoy hearing about research I or my departmental colleagues do. What????? Can you imagine? That is precisely telemarketing - foisting your self-interest on uninterested people in the pre-dinner hour!! And, on a more practical level, how do you seque into that??:

Me: I'm Prof. Hilaire from Faculty of X at Scary City U., and I'm calling to congratulate you on your admission and see if you have any questions.
Kid: No, I'm good/No, I'm hoping to get into Y/No, it's not my first choice.)
Me: Well, let me tell you all about ME!!!!!

So needless to say, because I won't do this, I am getting absolutely nowhere, and it's just a big fat bloody waste of time. Next year, no way. I just don't have the personality for this. Nor do I believe in the "brand" of Scary City U, which I think you need to do if you want to do this convincingly.

Imprint

Do you feel marked by your own training? I do.

What I mean is that I feel so intensely as if I am a product of the period in which I took my BA. The early-mid '90s. I can't escape it. I'm imprinted. I just wrote this conference paper and I kept wanting to move into another discourse/register. Because I just started writing and waited to see what unfolded - always my writing style, for better or (more probably) worse - it felt as if I was watching myself be carried, against my will, back into this framework I was trying to move away from. I know I am making it sound as if I have no agency in the process, and of course I don't mean to suggest that. But I must say that I do find it fascinating, the way my "knowledge," or more accurately, my academic socialization, trump my wishes to turn my scholarship from X into Y. I have a strongly conditioned way of knowing, and working outside of that proves to be very difficult. I think I'm going to have to just live with that. Especially since my attempts to move into another register fail. I suspect I shall forever be defined by a kind of wispy abstraction that I both semi-deplore and am also seduced by. Ah, well.

Writing as cure

I'm writing a conference paper right now.

All I can say is, I should be writing every day. Even for fifteen minutes, brainstorming. This is what I've been telling myself since 2008 began, bringing with it an enormous amount of new reading in relation to my book project. I kept thinking, "I should sit down and process this glut of reading by writing about it - just writing random notes, just generating thoughts, since I think through writing and not through reading or talking or anything else." I never got myself to do it, though - which is bad. I just kept on ingesting, without ever working through.

But now I'm writing again - the first time I've written something new in about six months, and I see how much comes of it. I should be doing it all the time. Because, a) it brings me pleasure, and b) it seriously lessens my anxiety about productivity, tenure, etc., etc., by showing me I do have thoughts and I belong in this place and that, oh yeah, actually there is enough in my brain (and the material I'm working with ) to write a book.

I must remember this. Writing as tranquilizer.

Post-SSHRC reflections

I just got in the mail the external evaluators' assessments of my SSHRC application. I didn't receive one, I found out a month ago. I wasn't surprised, knowing that the rate of success is about 34% overall, and it is about 22% for those in the "new scholars" category, like me. I was disappointed, though - knowing that I shouldn't be - because the four people who had read it had all been extremely enthusiastic about it, and two had said they felt certain that it would be funded. (Not to self: Don't say such things to people!)

The thing is - and I was aware of this, even as I let myself get my hopes about it - that none of these people who reviewed it have expertise in the field in which I was proposing my project. The proposal was sent to three external evaluators who are all, of course, expert in a field I was ostensibly treating. Some of their comments were pretty harsh, which doesn't surprise me - they picked up on what I knew were inconsistencies in my application, on issues I myself had identified. The thing was, I was under pressure to submit a grant application, and so I conjured up my project very quickly...I mean, I had the project going 'in name,' and had presented papers on tiny bits of it, but only wrote about it in detail for the first time, for the application. It was very newly formulated. It has matured a lot in the 8 months or so of additional research and some writing I've done since I first wrote that application (thankfully!).

But my problem is my positioning, and the researchers to whom the application was sent for review. To invoke the terms with which I have metaphorized my research before, they are haiku experts. I also work on chemical engineering and agricultural history - and in fact, my work is about the intersections between those latter two fields - I simply use haiku as a means of thinking about these other two fields. I don't consider myself first and foremost a haiku expert, though I certainly know my way around the field. In fact, I've even thought about having the first line of my book be, "This is not a book about haiku" (even though it is, on the surface - but really, what it is, is a book about agricultural history and chemical engineering, using haiku as a lens).

But the app was sent to thorough haiku experts, and it does not surprise me in the least that they don't love the project. In fact, the SSHRC committee - which would be composed of chemical engineering and agricultural history experts - was quite generous with me considering the lack of enthusiasms of the haiku-ists for the project; they wrote quite lovely comments and gave me points in disproportion to what the evaluators' comments warranted. They "get it," they get what I want to do, I suspect. I don't think haiku-ists ever will; they're never going to like what I'm trying to do, in part because it will be seen as much too abstract for their material field. It is very telling that they didn't even comment on what, to me, is the major theoretical point of the project!! They don't even "see" it. (This is not me being a snob, suggesting that people who work in more materially oriented ways don't understand theory...I mean simply that it's not what they're trained to look for or emphasize or evaluate when they're doing something like this.)

So when I re-submit in the fall, I'm going to be really challenged in terms of how I present the project. What I could do is rejig the project, addressing all of the haiku-ists' complaints...it is really not hard to do. But I don't want to have a project that's like that. And yet, I will always be evaluated by haiku-ists, simply because the word haiku is in my work. But these aren't people, as I mention, who engage with the theoretical issues I'm dealing with, that I'm actually trying to bring new perspectives to.

At least I have a summer to think about it.

The other issue is, SSHRC places so much value on having "graduate student training" be part of the proposal. They don't distinguish between fields...graduate student training in psychology and some of the social sciences is very different from what it is in the Humanities, where we simply don't have the same kind of tradition of collaborative work between researchers and their grad students. So there's (to my mind) an over-emphasis, on the evaluators' assessment forms, of the question of how the proposed project will contribute to graduate student training. The assessors are really negative on this point, saying that my plans to have doctoral candidates do archival work and then literature reviews are totally unrewarding and no good. Well, that's all I ever did - or anyone I know ever did - when we were employed as research assistants. (Well, no, I drafted some translations and tracked down a whole bunch of quotations and dealt with permissions and the publisher, but that is of the same order of busy-work, that work). I'm not really sure what this excellent graduate student training is supposed to look like...I note that this is SSHRC rhetoric (i.e. government agency rhetoric) and it seemed to me that the actual committee of academics - the ones who were quite generous to me - didn't even factor it into their decisions to allocate points. This is good, because when I rejig the app for this year's competition, I may phase out most grad student training...simply because adding more and more of it is a nod in the haiku direction, but does nothing for the chemical engineering and agricultural history aspects of my work.

To whom am I teaching, and how?

Today, I was thinking about where I fall on the 'hard-ass' scale. This was because I was an examiner at the Honours thesis defense (since when are there Honours defenses set up like grad school defenses??). It was for an excellent student I had in my fourth-year class this term. She's written a thesis that is quite learned, but that I didn't find to be as spectacular as the others did - I wasn't in favour of giving it the A+ that they were, and was more hung up on a couple of issues.

I thought back to a month or so ago, when the student asked me if I'd be a reader of the thesis, and she said - very good-naturedly - that this was scary because I am "hard." I was kind of taken aback by this, but felt good about it, because sometimes I worry that my easygoing way with students means that I am not challenging them enough. And this sense that I am "hard" was borne out at the defense today, during which I was being more demanding of the student's work than the other two (both of whom I respect a great deal).

Then I thought about how I teach. I "teach to" the strongest students in a given class. I am sure that this would get me in trouble with learning specialist types - I am not trying hard enough to be inclusive - but I feel it is my "duty," for lack of a better word, to aim high, to meet the strongest students at their level. And then I am hard on them, apparently.

I don't know what to think about this question of who I am teaching to, and what I am expecting of them. Am I doing anyone any good if this is my approach - the "hard" approach? Well, sure, I can see that being "hard" for the strongest students is challenging for them - I'm not so worried about them. But what about the weaker students. Surely I must then be even "harder" for them. Is this good or bad? Am I any help at all for them?

Who do you teach to? Should we place a premium on 'hardness'? These are the questions I'm thinking about.