" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

I spent the last two weeks grad­ing papers, meet­ing with stu­dents, and wrap­ping up my teach­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties for the year. There’s an amaz­ing amount of work that eats into your day when you’re teach­ing so now that my sched­ule has freed up, I can focus only on my dis­ser­ta­tion. So I should be psy­ched right? Wrong. I’m terrified.

Come to think of it, my feel­ings aren’t com­pli­cated. Rather, I feel ter­ri­fied. I set a goal this year to have a com­plete dis­ser­ta­tion draft by the end of the sum­mer and that goal is look­ing not only opti­mistic, but about as prob­a­ble as tomorrow’s sched­uled Armaged­don.

I have expe­ri­ence in this ter­ror. I’ve felt the pull of the sum­mer void and resisted it in the past. This leads to a sum­mer filled with karaoke and mani-pedis all in the name of “decom­press­ing” from the semes­ter. Then July 4th hits, I scream “oh shit! Summer’s over!!” over drinks and bar­be­cue, and then spend the rest of the sum­mer fran­ti­cally work­ing on var­i­ous writ­ing projects. This is always hor­ri­ble. I did this with a series of incom­pletes, I did this with my dis­ser­ta­tion pro­posal, but I’ll be damned if I do it with my dissertation.

I spent the first two days of this week, freak­ing the hell out. I was spin­ning my wheels and using any and all excuses to not get my work done. I obsessed over the jerk-wad stu­dent who wanted to mag­i­cally bring his A– to an A. I obsessed over that racist Psy­chol­ogy Today arti­cle from Mon­day (more on that later). Basi­cally, I did every­thing I could to put a bunch of bull­shit between me and my dissertation.

Then I read the fol­low­ing series on sum­mer writ­ing from Inside Higher Ed. Most of it is stuff I already know, but some­times it helps me to re-read advice about writ­ing to get me excited and focused on the task at hand. All of my anx­i­ety comes from fear (as I sus­pect yours does too). So if you’re like me and flail­ing about and not writ­ing your dis­ser­ta­tion, check out Kerry Ann Rockquemore’s Sum­mer Writ­ing Series, in the mean­time, I’m get­ting back to work.

It’s so easy to fid­dle with design when there’s real writ­ing to do. After spend­ing the past two days grad­ing papers and clean­ing my house, I decided to revamp my month-old blog. The pre­vi­ous theme, The Colum­nist, is a fan­tas­tic theme but is sim­ply not suited for my needs. The pri­mary pur­pose of this blog is to write about my dis­ser­ta­tion, research, and teach­ing expe­ri­ences and The Colum­nist theme is really suited for a newspaper-style blog with fea­tures and images ded­i­cated to each story.

Because the tem­plate demands an image ded­i­cated to each post, my writ­ing lagged because I couldn’t come up with the right image. I mean, I can only post so many pic­tures of stacks of papers and book­shelves, right? Then I tried to tweak the theme to elim­i­nate all that white-space left in text-only posts, but The Colum­nist isn’t designed for that and I lack the supreme CSS exper­tise to make it work. Plus why fix what wasn’t bro­ken in the first place?

After a quick Google search for “best word­press themes writ­ers,” I found this gem: The Eru­dite. It’s clean, great typo­graphic ele­ments, and is eas­ily cus­tomiz­able for theme tin­ker­ers like me.

Now I just need to write.

This is the first in a series of posts from my dis­ser­ta­tion. I set a goal of 1,000 words per day for the month of May and here is a sam­ple from this week. After a day of research, I spend an hour or so writ­ing up my thoughts from the day. This sam­ple includes top­ics you’re prob­a­bly not famil­iar with, but it includes con­cep­tual, dis­ci­pli­nary, and top­i­cal ques­tions. It’s help­ful to write this way because it allows me to think about specifics and big pic­ture at the same time. What isn’t clear is if this is use­ful for the long run — I hope time will tell.*

I went to the New York His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety today intend­ing to score some archival mate­r­ial on one John Almon. Almon was a polit­i­cal jour­nal­ist whose career spanned roughly 1758 to 1804. This reporter has archival papers and is con­sid­ered an his­toric fig­ure because he was arrested for libel in 1770 when he refused to reveal his source “Junius” who gave him numer­ous inside scoops and scan­dal on pro­ceed­ings in the House of Com­mons. What isn’t clear is what rela­tion this has with my work. Right now I’m focused on “The Pre­sen­ta­tion” and the arrest of its engraver and printseller so my trip to the NYHS was a bit pointless.

Despite the dead end with Almon, I did write a bit on the scope of my project. I’ve been read­ing a book, The Prac­tice of Cul­tural Stud­ies that describes research meth­ods for cul­tural stud­ies. What I real­ized in read­ing this book, is that my drive toward prac­tice as process comes out of my cul­tural stud­ies train­ing. I think writ­ing a his­tor­i­cal dis­ser­ta­tion gave me dis­ci­pli­nary amne­sia — I for­got how to think like a cul­tural stud­ies scholar because I’ve spent con­sid­er­able time try­ing to become an his­to­rian. I’m still not sure how to honor my cul­tural stud­ies side while writ­ing this his­tory diss.

Any­way, what I did real­ize today is that the Fores arrest demon­strates that print is a big deal. Libel is taken very seri­ously in British Law [I’m not sure why], and it’s because of these fierce libel laws that Gill­ray and Fores were arrested. How­ever, despite the strength of libel, why weren’t there more arrests? This was the “golden age of car­i­ca­ture,” how did car­i­ca­ture pros­per with libel laws on the books. Even the mag­is­trate who arrested Fores was appar­ently act­ing overzeal­ous, the case against Gill­ray and Fores was even­tu­ally dis­missed. How­ever, what this arrest tells us is that libel shows us that prints could pro­duce truth. Why would the king or his rep­re­sen­ta­tives be con­cerned with libel if there wasn’t a dan­ger that it could be under­stood by the reader as evi­dence to a person’s character.

Because of the power of prints to cre­ate truth, it bears look­ing at the dif­fer­ence between libelous images and text — if there is a dif­fer­ence. One hypoth­e­sis for why more car­i­ca­ture artists were not arrested is sim­ply because images are so clearly satire (was satire ok?) that it could never be mis­taken for truth. The analy­sis for this hypoth­e­sis demands more images from the Fores arrest era.

A few other obser­va­tions: * Despite car­i­ca­ture pres­ence, there is a pro­found lack of African pres­ence in prints (a few come to mind: the Cruik­shank Negro Ques­tion, the slave boiled alive, the Wedg­wood prints, “A New Union Club”) * Despite this absence, aspects of oth­er­ness are evi­dence in car­i­ca­ture * How does car­i­ca­ture pro­vide clues about big­ger pic­ture and show dis­tor­tions in the for­ma­tion of the citizen?

A few months back I started a blog about get­ting the dis­ser­ta­tion done called Fuck Yeah Dis­ser­ta­tion!. Rather than leav­ing it to mum­mify on the inter-webs, I’m going to repost some entries here from time to time.

When faced with the pres­sures of dead­lines it’s easy to slip into the warm, jit­tery embrace of panic. For me, it’s about time and fail­ure. I panic when I haven’t done enough work: “I should have 50 pages by now.” I panic when I think about how much work I have left to do: “I have no idea how much more work there is left, but I know it’s too much to get done.” And then I panic that I’m pan­ick­ing and not actu­ally working.

These panic moments man­i­fest when I feel like I’m los­ing con­trol of my project. Con­trol is an ass­hole: it makes you think that life has order, but you just haven’t fig­ured out how that order oper­ates. And Con­trol lies: it makes you think that if you dwell on the past or the future, that your present will equi­li­brate to a nat­ural order. But Con­trol is an illu­sion: we actu­ally have no con­trol over any­thing that hap­pens in our lives, ever. That doesn’t mean we don’t have agency, it sim­ply means that at any moment you might hear good news about a fel­low­ship, or get a paper­cut, or the sun could go supernova.

So, I remind myself that right now, in this moment, I’m actu­ally okay. To do that, I write it all out, usu­ally in the form of a con­ver­sa­tion. If I put all my crazy fears on paper, I can actu­ally address them and calm them down. And if I type them up, I some­times go back and read other con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had with myself.

Crazy? Sure, but I’m a grad­u­ate stu­dent in a shitty econ­omy within a pri­va­tiz­ing cor­po­rate edu­ca­tion sys­tem — we’re all fuck­ing crazy.