My Sister's Keeper

Vickie announced on her blog today that she's moving to Maryland after she graduates!  I have been beside myself with excitement since she told us this was her plan.  I have been encouraging her to move in with us post-graduation for some time now, but since I've never before convinced this little firecracker to do anything she didn't want to, I knew she would make the decision on her own.

I'm not operating under any delusion of grandeur. I don't think she's hitching her wagon to mine for the rest of her life, but I'll enjoy her company as long as she's here.  I'm pleased that our house is near so many hospitals that could offer her some great opportunities for career development, and I hope she won't have too much trouble finding a job.  I'm pleased that she knew Billy and I were serious about hoping we could help her make her transition from "Valpo student" to "working adult" a little easier.

As I was looking through my photos to include on this post, I decided I should have known this would come to pass!  How many other non-residents of Charm City have posed for photos in front of so many local landmarks?

Byrd Stadium, University of Maryland, 2006

With Kenz atop Federal Hill and in front of the Inner Harbor, 2007

Oriole Park at Camden Yards, 2007

In front of the Domino Sugars sign, 2009

And I know someone else who will be excited to have her move in!!

(My Sister's Keeper is a novel by Jodi Picoult.  The thing I liked about the book is the way in which it explores the bond shared between sisters and demonstrates that no one can really know which sister is "keeping" which at any given point in time.  The thing I didn't like about the book is that right after Picoult develops a compelling set of circumstances involving the two sisters, she kills one of them off to avoid dealing with these circumstances.  And that's what I don't like about Picoult.  She doesn't know how to finish what she starts.)

Can't get enough Liz and Vickie?  Here are a few more from the archives:

Five Apples

We're just plugging along here in Millersville.  I'm trying to get as much work done as I can each week so I can finish up my semester successfully.  I'm ready for a real break!

Today, I went with Billy, Anne-Marie, and Katie to see the Cezanne and American Modernism exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art.  In honor of Five Apples, the only painting from the exhibit that came from Gertrude and Leo Stein's collection of Cezanne paintings, I'll recount for you the five memorable moments from my week.

Cezanne, Five Apples

1) Cezanne and American Modernism
Attending art exhibits usually just makes me feel insecure about how little I know about art and the artistic movements that coincide with the literary movements I know so well.  I was hoping to learn something about the connections between artistic modernism and literary modernism, but I was still interested to see how American painters were influenced by Cezanne's work.  It was exciting to see a painting that used to belong to Gertrude Stein and which used to hang in her house in Paris.  Even if she did tell her brother she'd keep the Picasos and he could have all the Cezannes when they decided to part ways.  Plus, it was fun to get lunch and have a chance to spend some time with Anne-Marie and Katie away from campus.

2) Navy/Hopkins Lacrosse Game
I've been to precisely two lacrosse games in my life-- both of them between high school teams-- but I'm glad Billy and I decided to check out this matchup yesterday.  It turned out to be a nice day, and the game was really exciting!  I always enjoy watching sports I don't understand.  It's fun to try to figure out what's going on.  Navy fell behind 0-5, but they ended up winning 9-8 in overtime, so that kept things interesting.  Afterwards, the announcer said that Navy had previously lost to Johns Hopkins 30+ times in a row, so then it made a lot more sense that the players and fans stormed the field after Navy scored the sudden death goal.  We got to the game a bit early for the "closeout sale" of Navy merchandise, so Billy got a few new items and also this cool picture of the empty stadium.

You can read Billy's recap of the game here.

3) Happy Birthday Nana!

On Wednesday, we went over to Nana and Mr. Dick's to celebrate Billy's grandmother's 79th birthday.  She has been pretty sick lately, and spent a bit of time in the hospital, so it was good to see that she seemed to be feeling much better.  We tried out some new pizza that I liked and Mr. Dick's lemon cake was as delicious as always!

4) Priscilla Wald Visits UMd
Our department is currently recruiting Duke University professor Priscilla Wald.  She came to campus on Wednesday to give a lecture and talk to graduate students.  I found her enthusiasm for her work and teaching really inspiring.  Her current project works on the intersections between science and narrative, so I was pretty interested in her suggestions about why the sciences and the humanities need each other.  I am hoping I get a chance to read her most recent book, Contagious, over the summer, even though it doesn't relate to my own work.  And I am really hoping she decides to join our faculty!

5) O and the O's
Last night, after the Orioles lost another lead and fell to 2-16, Billy snapped this photo of Oscar's dejected expression.

Luckily, the Orioles finally won their third game today, so he is feeling like himself again.  He's currently walking around the back of the couch as if he were a cat.

Goodbye to All That

There's not a lot going on around here.

Danielle and I caught up over brunch on Sunday.  Billy is exasperated with the Orioles.  I'm glad to have my Cather project behind me, at least for a few months.  I've begun working on the only seminar paper I have to write this semester, which feels refreshing.  Last spring I had to write three.  We're looking forward to some plans for the weekend.  In a month, we'll get to see my family for Vickie's graduation.

Mostly it feels like there's more air to breathe.  Now that my MA project is completed and both Katie and I have been admitted to the PhD program, it feels like I've finally been able to leave behind the heavy burden I've been carrying for the past 18 months.  I am excited to see what graduate school will be like now that I can focus on doing the work that interests me rather than worrying that everything could go awry at any moment.  It's not like I won't try as hard, so I'm not quite sure why it feels so different, but it does.

Maybe it feels different because it's finally sinking in that I've proven to myself that I could do it.  The doubt is gone.  And that's a great feeling.

(Goodbye to All That is Robert Graves's autobiography, which focuses mostly on his service in the Great War.  If you've been following the thread of my fascination with autobiographies, you'll be interested to know that this one is particularly noteworthy because Graves wrote it with the intention of making it a profitable bestseller.  Evidently he knew what his audience wanted from his "life story" because it sold like crazy.  Incidentally, "Goodbye to All That" is also the final essay in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem collection, which I'll be discussing in class later today.  I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I was pretty sure I would like this one ever since I saw the awesome 60s photo of her on said cover.)

Dreamers of the Golden Dream

I cried again today.  This time, happy tears!

My friend Katie, whom I've written about before, found out today that she has also been admitted to our PhD program!!!!!

I don't believe anyone really understands what Katie has been through these past two months.  She and I both know how hard we each worked to make ourselves competent PhD applicants.  We both know that we applied during an unbelievably competitive year for UMd English PhD admissions.  (So our professors keep telling us.)  We both know what it was like to get an email that said we were on the waitlist.  But only Katie knows what it was like to congratulate me when I found out that I had been admitted... and then to have to wait another month before the decision was made about her application.  Thankfully, they made the right decision.

Two weeks ago, she listened to me grumble and moan for several days about trying to get through the final stretches of my Cather writing project and never once said to me "Stop all this complaining: at least you know you get to continue next year."  Instead, she encouraged me to stick with it.  Yesterday, when she saw me falling apart after my defense, she didn't say, "Get over it, Liz.  You'll have other opportunities to prove yourself."  She sat me down, listened to me vent, and assured me she understood my emotional investment in the project and told me my professors did, too.

Katie's not just a very good English graduate student, though she is certainly that.  She's also a very good friend.  I'm excited and fortunate to have her on this journey with me for the next four years-- on both accounts.

("Dreamers of the Golden Dream" is the first essay in Joan Didion's 1960s collection, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, which I'm reading for class this week.  It's about people who buy into the "California Dream" but find it to be not quite what they expected.  I hope our dream is not quite so delusional as that, but sometimes I'm not so sure.)

Having a Good Cry

I am trying to decide between two beginnings for this blog entry.  The choices are:

I cried during my Master's Capstone Defense today.  There, I said it.
-or-
Hello.  My name is Liz, and I cannot handle positive responses to my work in a professional manner.

Everything was going fine.  I talked about the course the project has taken over the past year, which parts of the current draft I am most pleased with, and which elements still feel inadequate.  I talked about how I see this Cather project as the perfect point of entry for the larger project I imagine as my dissertation.  Everyone seemed pleased.

Then my reader wanted to explain his criticism of the paper, but fearing I would take his criticism too hard, he launched into an explanation about how proud he is of the work I've done before eventually getting to the criticism.

This was the problem.  I believe I could have reacted to an eviscerating line of criticism with composure, but I couldn't manage this "you should be proud of yourself" montage.  I am proud of myself.  I just don't quite yet know how to handle other people being impressed with my accomplishments and vocalizing that feeling so definitively.  I started tearing up during the "let's celebrate Liz's hard work" narrative, I started wiping tears during the explanation of what's missing from my argument, and I could not keep it together when it was my own turn to respond, either.

Afterward, I felt like I had to explain.  I wanted them to know that I wasn't crying because I can't handle criticism.  My (female) director told me she thinks it is a gendered problem, and that for a multitude of reasons, women in academia often find it much more difficult to handle praise than criticism.  Then she told me to "stop crying or people will think we didn't like your project."  The first words out of my (male) reader's mouth were: "I was too nice to you at the beginning, wasn't I?  I realized that after the fact."  So I think they both understand.  I'm mostly embarrassed because there has to be a third person in the defense, and since my project's director is also the current director of graduate studies, she asked the professor who will replace her in that capacity next year to attend.  So now I feel like the woman who will be my new graduate studies director is going to forever think of me as "the cryer."

I've been thinking about this all afternoon, despite my best attempts to put it out of my mind.  I can't let it go.  Just yesterday in class we were discussing the feminist work of Adrienne Rich, and I was appreciative that we've come so far in the past 30 years that we can actually offer criticisms about the limited scope of some of her essays.  But maybe we haven't come quite as far as I thought.

The other day, I watched my recording of the cast of Glee on Oprah.  While the show's creator, Ryan Murphy, explained why he had described Lea Michele's voice as a "once in a generation voice," the camera panned to Ms. Michele, whose gaze was firmly directed straight down at her Louboutins.  Before starring in Glee, she appeared on Broadway in Les Miserables, Fiddler on the Roof, Ragtime, and originated her role in Spring Awakening.  Sure, she's only 23, by why the inability to appreciate recognition for her vocal prowess?

And just yesterday, I attended a lecture given by my project's director.  She was visibly uncomfortable when the (male) professor who introduced her ran through some of the highlights of her lengthy list of professional accomplishments.  She began by thanking us for coming and then said she couldn't help but feel like we graduate students should be reading or writing instead.  And she apologized that her talk was going to take 45 minutes, even though I was expecting it to run 60 and would have gladly listened to the additional 15.  What gives?

I guess it should make me feel better that this anxiety puts me in the company of other women whose accomplishments I respect and admire.  But I don't like that we feel so uncomfortable with this kind of recognition.  And I'm the only one who cried.  Perhaps I should have adopted the stare-straight-at-my-shoes approach.  Or, at the very least, I should have brought some tissues.

Tomorrow, when my embarrassment about being reduced to tears is less fresh, I hope I will feel relieved about reaching the end of such an exhausting project.  Except that it's never really the end.  I already know what revisions I'll be making on the paper over the summer so I can try to get it published in a major peer-edited journal (which my reader assures me is a reasonable expectation).  I guess the fact that I look forward to tackling that revision, after I've had some time to decompress, is a sign that I've chosen the right career path.

(I read Robyn Warhol's Having a Good Cry for my narrative theory class last spring.  I remember recognizing it at Warhol's attempt to reclaim effeminate reactions to pop-culture texts as legitimate and meaningful.  I can't help feeling like I now need to read it again.)

A Worn Path

I completed my first race of the year this morning- the Cherry Pit Ten Miler!  It felt great to be out on the pavement again, and the weather was perfect.  It was sunny, clear, and about 60 degrees.

My head cold didn't bother me, but all the hills and my iPod's refusal to power on did.  I guess those things didn't slow me down too much, though, because I finished in 1:37:14.  This is a slight improvement over my Army Ten Miler time of 1:37:54, which surprised me.  I trained for that race four days a week for eight weeks, and this time, I only ran on Saturdays for six weeks to prepare.  I think it's fair to say I overtrained last time.

Billy came to cheer me along as he always does.  He snapped this photo as I approached the finish.  I caught this woman right before the finish line, but she sped up for a few steps, and I think she finished about one step ahead of me.

Today is also Nate's 31st Birthday!  In honor of his birth, I've put together a collage of the photos I took last time I saw him, for Vickie's 21st Birthday:

That feels like it was a long time ago.  I am glad we will get to see him again in just about a month for Vickie's graduation.

Hope you are all enjoying your Sunday!

(A Worn Path is probably Eudora Welty's most famous and widely anthologized short story.  It's not about running, but it is about the lengths we go to for the ones we love.)

The C[leveland] Introduction to Narrative

I'm at the airport in Cleveland waiting for my flight back to Baltimore (but I'll have to post this later, when I have internet access).

I enjoyed the Narrative Conference a lot more than I anticipated that I would.  Though I worked on the paper I presented in last semester's publications workshop, I haven't really studied Narrative Theory actively since last spring.  That class made me want to engage the subject matter, but since my professor works in what they call "unnatural" narratology, I didn't know whether I'd find "regular" narratology particularly interesting or not.  As a whole, I found the lectures I attended very compelling, and they encouraged me to continue studying within this division of literary studies. And the people I met there were equal parts friendly and engaged in the work they do.

I think my presentation was fine.  I was nervous beforehand because my paper argues that the ways narrative theorists have traditionally defined "narration" and "description" are not adequate, and I make suggestions for how we could re-consider them.  I was a little nervous about taking on the role of the graduate student who suggests a significant change to the field despite having only one class in narrative theory under my belt.  As the conference continued, I started to worry that I was going to get skewered during the Q & A.  But it was fine.  I should have trusted my professor enough to realize that he wouldn't have put me in a position where I was presenting a paper that would lead to the sort of baptism-of-fire I was imagining.

Gerald Prince, who wrote A Dictionary of Narratology, was at my talk... I think.  I didn't see him come in, so he may have missed my paper.  He addressed it vaguely in a general comment about all 4 papers in the Q & A.  H. Porter Abbott, who wrote The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, walked into the room after I had already given my talk, listened to the next presenter for approximately 1 minute, looked down at his program, and walked back out.  I will henceforth continue to convince myself that he was interested in my paper and left after he realized I was done speaking... because sometimes those of us who work in a perpetual state of self-doubt need to cling to any sense of accomplishment we can find (even if it's only imagined).

My professor had already read several versions of the paper, but he popped in for the Q & A section to help me feel less anxious.  I appreciated it.  At one point, a member of the audience posed a complicated question to the whole panel, and the only professor on the panel said "I'll let my co-panelists address that, since I've already been talking a lot."  So we sat there in silence until I offered my best shot at an answer to the question.  My professor told me afterward that it was "bold" of me to be the one to take that question on, and that he thought I did a great job answering the questions I got.  (This is a total overstatement, but I appreciated it nonetheless.)  He encouraged me to submit my paper to be considered for the "Best Graduate Student Paper" award, so I will do that and probably never hear about it again.

In general, the conference has left me feeling really positively about the conversation in which my work participates.  The conference also brought up a perpetual feeling of guilt, though, that I'm always grappling with.  One can never do enough.  The presence of all these "big names" in the field left me wishing I had read more, researched more, and studied more beforehand so I could have talked to them about their projects, or asked them intelligent questions about how their work might relate to mine.  It felt, in some ways, like a huge missed opportunity.  But realistically, this kind of pre-planning would have been impossible.  I had to devote so much time and energy to my Master's Writing Project before this conference that there's no way I could have managed to "freshen up" on my narratology before I went.  I, again, devoted so much energy and momentum to the writing project that I got sick upon its completion.  This also limited the degree to which I was willing to "network" with others at the conference; I wanted to sleep and I didn't want to shake a bunch of hands and spread my germs.

I comforted myself by remembering that I could always attend the conference again next year, or perhaps the year after that.  These scholars have been attending this conference every year for the past twenty-five, so given that I'm still interested in this subject this field at this time next year, I can return with a little more knowledge in the bank.

----

and, now that I'm home, I am so glad to be back!  I'm looking forward to my race in the morning and glad I'll have a full day at home before I head back to campus Monday.

Aesthetic Memorialization: Willa Cather's Representation of Soldiers of the Great War

That's the title I gave my Willa Cather writing project.  Others I considered include:

• 10,000 Words About Willa Cather Cut Down From Approximately 50,000
• 10,000 Words That Explain Why My Husband Has Been Doing the Laundry
• I Hope You Like This One Better
• I'd Like to Get This Published
• It Took Me One Year to Research and Write This
• Please Let Me Graduate
• Willa Cather Said the World Split in Two After Writing This Book, Now I Know Why

Call it whatever you want, I'm just calling it finished.  And I'm not waiting to hear whether they like it to feel relieved.  I learned my lesson last time, so I'm doing my pole pumps now.

Today is also Billy's birthday.  I'm celebrating by helping to pick up the house before he gets home, which I haven't done in weeks.  Also, I believe the fact that he will not have to give me a motivational pep talk today will put him in a somewhat celebratory mood.  Back to work!

The Time Bind

I have a super busy week ahead and no time to write.

Wednesday I submit the "final draft" of my Cather paper whether it's finished or not.  That's also Billy's birthday.
Thursday I leave for the Narrative Conference in Cleveland.
Friday I present my paper at the conference.
Sunday I have my first race of the year-- the Cherry Pit 10 Miler.

I wanted to leave you all with a few things to keep you entertained in my absence:

Today, Andy Roddick won his second title of the year in Key Biscayne, and it's his first Master's level tournament title since 2006 (the Master's level tournaments are the next biggest ones beneath the Slams).  He's got the best record on tour so far this year.  In case you're not an Andy fan yet, you might want to check out this article that I think does a good job of illuminating all the reasons I love to cheer for him.

The weather here has been beautiful for the past several days.  Oscar and I have been soaking up the sun... Billy has been sneezing like crazy.

And yesterday, I took a much-appreciated break from all the work that's weighing me down to spend the afternoon at Billy's aunt's house with the family.  Billy helped his cousin Jacelyn's baby, Cash, get started with his easter egg hunt.

Cash is walking now, and he has mastered the use of the term "uh oh!"  He also gifted me with a whole lap full of stone coasters.  Thanks, bud!

(The Time Bind is a book we read in Freshman Core at Valpo.  I don't remember anything about it, but it sits on my shelf, and lately I find myself relating to its subtitle, "When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work.")

Tell Me

This semester, I'm taking a class about "the color line" in 19th century American fiction with one of the pre-eminent scholars in the field.  I don't think this is an overstatement.  He helps edit the Norton Anthologies of American Literature. 

Last night, before we started talking about Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred (the follow-up to Uncle Tom's Cabin), we were talking about plans for next year, and he made the following comments:

"The best students always come off the wait list.  They think they have to work harder."
"I got into my PhD program off the wait list."
"Who could do their best work after being offered a $50,000 fellowship?"

We'll pretend for a minute that his wait list was not at Stanford University (currently the #2 program in the country, according to the rankings).  Last night, this might be the thing I needed most to hear someone tell me.  I most certainly do have to work harder than many of my classmates, so it was really nice to know that this sort of dedication doesn't go unnoticed.

Especially since I still have so much work to do before I finish up with Willa.

("Tell Me" is a Shel Silverstein poem.  It reads:
Tell me I'm clever,
Tell me I'm kind,
Tell me I'm talented,
Tell me I'm cute,
Tell me I'm sensitive,
Graceful and wise,
Tell me I'm perfect-
But tell me the truth.)