Down to the Wire
01:27 on Friday, May 07, 2004 • Responses off
Things have been quiet here, I know, but there’s really not much I can do about it. I’ve been devoting most of my waking hours towards preparing for my doctoral qualifying exams, a grotesquely medieval academic hazing ritual if ever there was one. I will spend a total of seven hours on May 18 and 19 sacrificing brain cells writing essays to appease the Great God Literature, then on the 24th of May I’ll sit at the end of a long table, opposite 4.5 of the Great God Literature’s henchmen, doing my very best to keep a straight face as they scrape metal claws along a chalkboard ask me what the hell I was thinking when I wrote said essays.
Do I feel prepared? Am I nervous? I think these questions are irrelevant at this point. Regardless of whether I’m prepared or whether I’m nervous, this is a hoop I have to jump through. With any luck, it’ll be a rite of passage and not a ritual evisceration. The exam will close a very long and arduous chapter in my intellectual career. I’m very much looking forward to moving on to the dissertation, as I think my psychology is much more compatible with large projects that I can call my own than it is with small, perfunctory exercises.
I realize I don’t write much about my academic work here at etherfarm. I have my reasons; I think at heart I’m genuinely anti-academic, and have only grown more so since being incarcerated becoming a graduate student. Working in the field of Literature has been less productive than I thought it would be, partially because I feel that most of the time I have to justify my research and interests in new media in literary terms, which to me seems like working sideways or backwards instead of forwards. In other words, I don’t write about my academic work because quite frankly, until very recently, I haven’t considered my academic work “mine”, so to speak.
Most of the blogs I’ve been reading lately, though, are academic in nature, and it’s clear to me that there are a number of people working within academia—within the humanties, in particular, who realize that the liberal rhetoric of the academic humanities is growing more and more irreconcilable with the increasingly corporate policies and historically elitist structure of the academy. Thankfully, these people have found an outlet for their frustrations in collaborative new media such as blogs, and the concerns about and connections within the academic humanities can be made public in ways that weren’t possible before, and some of them are finding ways to exercise their ideals and ethics outside The Institution. These things, coupled with some recent and extremely fortuitous introductions to very charismatic and intelligent scholars and writers, give me a kind of hope I haven’t had in a long time. I’ll call it Hope 2.0b. It’s still in beta, of course.
I haven’t yet decided whether there’s a career in academia for me. Frankly, I don’t think the academy has decided if there’s a career for interdisciplinary people like me—the very structure of the institution collapses when intellectual borders are violated, it would seem. And that’s fine, because luckily, I wasn’t one of those people who got a degree in English because I couldn’t do math or science. I’ve got the skills to pay the bills, as they say, and the monumental task ahead of me is to find a way to use those skills in service of my ideals and ethics.
From this vantage point, though, that task starts on the other side of the exams I take in less than two weeks. Things will be quiet here until then, though whispers of “good luck” will most certainly be heard in my office, above the frenetic rustle of pages and the sporadic murmuring of “Fuck you, Heidegger!” Thanks again to those of you who have written to inquire about my offline status. More soon.