in Life's name and for Life's sake

There have been a lot of times in my life lately where I've worried that what I do for fun and what I want to do seriously with the rest of my life don't mach up. I spend a lot of "fun time" reading books written for teenagers, with magic and/or crossdressing and/or teenaged royalty and/or flying whales. I spend a lot of the same funtime not only analyzing those books, but turning that analysis into a lens for understanding and critiquing social inequalities and broad societal misconceptions and problematic assumptions about Big Issues like race and gender and religion and sexuality. 

And then what do I do with my "serious work"? I read things people were writing before flying whales were even on literature's imaginative horizon. (At least to my knowledge! If you or someone you know has encountered a flying whale in the eighteenth century, please direct me!) I read works by women, and I find myself drawn to works written specifically by those women to whom the traditional English canon tends to deny a voice, but my major subjects of analysis have themselves been rather canonical thus far -- I am somehow the white girl who got into grad school with a writing sample on Jane Austen -- and while I know this will shift as I read more under the direction of some awesome professors (male and female) who understand that the eighteenth century is a time when "literature" as a category is only just coming into existence, allowing for a great deal of space in the literary imagination that gets restricted as things like canonization and genre solidification begin to happen, I do occasionally wish that it was easier to connect the two halves of my life to each other.

But the thing is, they are connected. Intimately. Even when (especially when) I don't see it. Prime example of this being that I'm currently in a course on eighteenth century oriental tales which has got me reading lots of stories by and about women, and also stories with magic! That elusive combination which, before this semester, I would not have thought constituted a portion of the canon that was available for my analysis, or that I could speak about as a way of gaining any kind of scholarly authority. 

And I realized as I submitted the paper proposal for this class that without fandom-related conversations about the importance of representing women who are friends with other women, I would never have come to this paper topic. I am essentially writing a paper about how the collapse of society in one particularly violent early-ish gothic novel could have been averted if it wasn't in the interest of men and masculine organizations of power to pit women against each other, or if women realized that their animosity against each other only existed because routed through masculinist assumptions of women's social roles and decided to counteract this by being friends with each other anyway.

Seriously, I keep looking at my paper and thinking about fandom and smiling, because the wonderful female commentators of fandom have taught me just as much as the wonderful female writers of the eighteenth century. Ladies who are friends with other ladies and do not judge them for their way of being a lady are the happiest best ladies. That is all.

I'd forgotten, a little, what it means to spend so much of one's day absorbed in reading. Not that I haven't had a few days of lengthy reading over the summer, because I have, but there is a sizeable gap between what "reading" means in a summer context and in a school context. (As always, I will reference my English department graduation address as a measure of what "reading like an English major" means.)

The reading I'm doing now is different from (though by no means lesser than!) the reading I did over the summer. I'm reading things now because I "have" to, not entirely because I want to -- though of course I did sign up for the classes, so of course I did have some say in the matter. And I'm reading things with deadlines imposed. Over the summer, if I started a book and it wasn't doing it for me, I'd put it down. I'd go do something else for a while. Then I'd come back. If it still wasn't doing it, I'd leave it a little longer. But that's no longer really an option. Only three of my four English classes have met so far, and I already have about 800 pages of reading...in which, thus far, the most engaging bits have been modern critical writing, not the 19th-century novel or the 18th-century Arabian tales I've also been reading.

I feel like my brain is very, very tired. And yet, there are miles to go before I sleep! I'm sure I'll get back into the habit of this kind of intense reading, with enough practice, but for now it's just a little more difficult than I remembered...

God, on days like these, Wheeler is my safe place. When I'm on the fourth floor, flitting from office to office and having deep and meaningful conversations with professors and fellow students about the nature of life as seen through literature, all of the rest of it just seems to go away, and I just stop worrying and start belonging. I'm tense and nervous and worried a lot more than I should be right now, what with so many things proverbially up in the air, but when I'm talking to people about English (or when I'm in Professor Puckett's lectures) I feel like the world makes sense for once. I feel like this, at least, is something I understand, and perhaps more importantly, something of which I am a (possibly even integral) part.

I don't think I have words to explain the kind of "busy" that I've been feeling for the last few weeks. I think part of it stems from the fact that school requires so much more structured, scheduled time out of me here than it did in London and I'm readjusting to that fact. I had 8 hours of class per week in London, and only spent maybe 30 mins per week in office hours. Here, I have 14 hours of class per week and spend at least an hour, usually more like an hour and a half, in office hours every week because it's the best way for me to really engage with the material (and because my professors are kickass).

Also, I'm taking three upper division Berkeley English classes at once -- which is apparently lots harder than taking four second-and-third-year Queen Mary English classes at once. And that's not even mentioning the fact that I'm also taking French here, which is just a constant time drain (though by the end of this all I know it'll be worth it).

I think the hardest part is that some people (not pointing fingers!) don't understand what I mean when I say I don't have free time. They expect me to be there to hang out with them, and honestly, I can't always. In addition to 14 hours of class time per week, I spend 8 hours tutoring or attending tutor-related meetings and 6 hours interning at the Office of Letters and Light (which, if you add in transportation time, probably is actually more like 7-8 hours). And this isn't even including my homework or my sleep! Or, god forbid, time for me to do reading independent of my schoolwork!

I always knew that this semester was going to be hard. I just didn't think that the hard part would be explaining to friends and family why I don't have the time to be with them. But although this semester is hard, it's also utterly necessary to my eventual goals -- and that isn't going to change. So I guess ultimately I just have to get better at saying, "Actually, sorry, I really am up to my ears in work between now and December 31, can we reschedule for next year?"

I suppose the last thing to mention is that, despite how hectic this all sounds, I really do enjoy what I'm doing! My classes are amazing and challenging and nonsensical (that's what happens when you study too much literary theory) and brilliant and I love every minute of (some of) them. Likewise, I'm really excited about the work I do as a tutor and as an OLL intern, and I'm looking forward to once again being an East Bay Municipal Liaison. And I'm also looking forward to reinstating/renovating what was once the Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Story Workshop class and is now a club that will still workshop sci-fi and fantasy stories but can be far more flexible than a class since I don't have to determine a syllabus in advance.

How mean am I being if I tell people that I'm only really going to have time for them if I see them through school/work/interning already? (Probably pretty mean. But I'm an English major. I won't say it in those words...at least, not until mid-November when I'm starting to get really fed up.)

In the meantime, tea will solve all my problems. That is all.

There is something about reading Austen that I can't describe. I hate it sometimes that I'm doing my senior thesis on Austen and that I can't increase my English geek cred by writing about some obscure someone-or-other that no one but me has ever heard of and therefore no one but me will ever even think themselves capable of understanding -- but then I sit down with nothing but me and Northanger Abbey and stop feeling like I need to write on something obscure. I will still get a little annoyed occasionally when people who know nothing of English as an academic discipline think they understand what I'm writing simply because they've seen a few BBC miniseries, or when professors or fellow students indulge in momentary condescension because I couldn't think of anything more creative to write about, but when this happens, I will take a few deep breaths and remind myself of two important facts.

1. I am having so much fun with this. I honestly love Austen, and not just because of that one guy Colin Firth plays in some movie. I fell in love with her way with words the first time I met them and this summer I get to immerse myself in them. AND GET PAID FOR IT.

2. What I'm thinking and writing about Austen will be creative and different and new. It'll make people see her in a whole new way (she says modestly). At the very least, it'll make me see her in a whole new way, and that way will be mine.

And did I mention I'm having fun with this? I don't even know what it is about Austen that makes me feel like this, and it's difficult to describe, because it's not terribly showy. Compared to many of my other favorite authors her prose and subject matter seem very quiet. But then someone will make a snarky comment and I'll burst out laughing and realize that maybe she's not so quiet after all. She's wily without being disingenuous, always ready for a good laugh, and behind that reserved facade there's both an observing wisewoman and a giggling teenager, working in tandem to write some of the most fantastic and understated prose I keep coming back to.

Agh, I hate when school starts to interfere with real life (or really, with the rest of real life, because school is, and will probably forever be, a part of my real life). I really want to go to lazyclaire and jenepel 's party tonight and see them along with other awesome people, but I told myself all along that if I didn't have a draft of this essay done before the party, I couldn't go. And while I have an outline and a good idea of where I'm headed, I certainly don't have a draft. If I finish eating my lunch now and go close myself in the library until about 10pm, I will almost definitely emerge with a draft. This would be a good (and in all honesty probably necessary) thing. Yes, I could go to the party after, but it would take me an hour to get there, and after that kind of hard work (and in this weather, which, for those of you not in London, is cold and rainy), I'm not going to want to do more than put on pajamas and sleep -- since, after all, I have to wake up and do it all over again...

I am Candace, so I will do  the "right" thing. I will finish my lunch (and this sullen LJ entry) and pack my things and migrate over to the library and write this paper (and maybe if I'm good I'll even let myself take a coffee break). But that doesn't mean I have to like it. Well, I guess this is the price I pay for spending 16 days running around Europe instead of working on school stuff...and in that view, it's not a choice I'd make differently. But it still kinda sucks.

I don't have the time to do this justice, but better something short than nothing at all.

When I got back from Paris, I heard from a friend that one of my old Berkeley professors had passed away. Her name was Janet Adelman, and she was amazing. I took 45A with her, and spent a semester finding new literary love in strange places, from Chaucer to Spenser to -- wait for it -- Milton. Yes, this is the woman who first introduced me to Paradise Lost and started me off on something so much larger than her, or me, or probably even Milton himself.

She was fiery. She was old, and it wasn't like she was trying to hide it: she wore her white hair long, and dressed with an eclectic fashion only allowed to those who are conscious of their own age and milking it for all its worth (when I picture her now, she's wearing crazy-awesome robelike garments that no one in the universe should be allowed to pull off, and yet she does).

She was old but she showed you that didn't really mean much. She wasn't that quivering Victorian grandmother who blushed at the slightest sign of indecency. She was a dyed-in-the-wool feminist and considering dates and ages she was probably a part of the second-wave feminism of the 60s and 70s, and also part of the resurgence of psychoanalytic theory in English departments/studies at the time. She gave a powerful reading of Satan's sense of indebtedness to God that shifted into anger and the desire to destroy, all based on (vaguely feminist) psychoanalysis. And she made a powerful argument for Milton as a feminist (though I'm not entirely sure how much modern critics would agree). In fact, rather than being angry with these old works by men who wrote in a time when pretty much only men wrote, she took them and combed them through for signs of understanding of women and an attempt to fairly portray them. She might have been a feminist but she never got righteously angry about it, at least not in the classroom.

But it wasn't just in the classroom where she mattered. I still remember the first time I went to visit her in office hours. I wasn't really liking Chaucer and not quite sure what to say, but I walked in, sat down, and said something lame like, "So. Chaucer." To which she responded, "Oh, not him yet, I still don't know you!" When I came back from spring break after Rick broke up with me and went to her office hours again she asked me how break had gone and I mumbled something before starting in on Spenser, which was greatly preferable to a discussion of my own emotional unrest. And yet a month or so later it came up in our office hours discussion and she told me she'd thought that something was wrong back then, but that she knew I was dealing with it and that I could always come to her with problems.

She wrote me one of the letters of recommendation that got me here, studying abroad in London. The last time I saw her -- at least, the last time I really remember -- was when I walked by her office and picked up that letter. She hadn't sealed it yet when I arrived -- she wanted me to read it over first -- and though I don't remember exactly what it said now, I just remember that it reinforced my feeling that she really somehow understood. She was such a gift.

Janet Adelman is not a woman that I, or anyone, will easily forget. But me especially. She continues to make it into my fiction, lending sometimes her name and sometimes her appearance to a series of benevolent grandmotherly figures who nonetheless know when to shove their children out into the world and help them face it. She is the kind witch of my Printer's Tale who gives Noelle shelter and asks no questions until the time is right -- with her robes and her long white hair and her kind and deep brown eyes. She is a figure of power. And though I'm sad to know that she's gone, I'm full of a certainty that "gone" isn't really too final, and that somewhere out there she's arguing feminism with Milton (and winning).

Not much to say, other than that I've returned to my third home (first being Mission Viejo, second being Berkeley) and class starts up tomorrow. I've actually got a Monday class this semester (last semester made me lazy without them) but still nothing on Fridays, so still weekend travel! I'm looking forward to resuming my two year-long classes and starting up my two new courses for this semester, but I wish that I had just a few more days before everything got going...my jet lag is worse than it usually is and I've been procrastinating for a while on a paper that's due on Thursday. I know that it will get done, I just can't bring myself to focus on it. Also, everyone is now back in my flat, which is great because I love hanging out with them, but also not so great because aforementioned hanging out takes up a lot of my free time, which is inconvenient when I have aforementioned essay to complete. I'm probably just going to go to sleep now (assuming this is possible, over the noise of my flatmates) and most likely wake up too early again in the morning to get to work on some of this stuff before my 10AM class.

This is what happens when I read A Room of One's Own.

( It is difficult, to be a woman and to write. )

Day one • a song
Day two • a picture
Day three • a book
Day four • a site
Day five • a youtube clip
Day six • a quote
Day seven • whatever tickles your fancy

All the websites that I visit on a regular basis are on my links toolbar. Most of them fall under communications/social networking (e-mail, facebook, LJ, etc.). But then some of them fall under English geekery. And perhaps the best of those is the following:

The Oxford English Dictionary

I'm spoiled rotten because every university I've been a part of (so basically Berkeley and Queen Mary) has paid for access for their students. This means that at any given moment I can look up any word that strikes my fancy and figure out exactly where it came from, how its meaning has changed, and what that means for the way I use it now. I've been known to get lost on www.oed.com just clicking through links to related words. I once spent an afternoon looking up the etymology of every swear/curse I could think of (the entry for "fuck" is rather impressive). You know you're an English geek when you don't just use the OED for scholarly research...

The downside is, if you're not affiliated with a university and want to share in the joy that is the definitive record of the English language, you've got to pay. But, as I intend to be affiliated with some university or another for the rest of my life, this doesn't seem like such a large hindrance.