Nihilism and Dissertation Writing

I have eight weeks to finish a draft of my whole dissertation.

For you non-academic types out there, that is the equivalent of having 24 minutes to do your taxes from beginning to end. (Did I mention I am filing for an extension this year?).

It would say that it is overwhelming, but that would be an insult to "overwhelming."

I am faced with an age-old problem that afflicts all dissertation-writers, especially towards the end: To read or to write?

I have written drafts of 4 out of 5 chapters of my dissertation, and I just started drafting the fifth chapter. I also have to write an introduction and conclusion. On the one hand, that is not very much, but on the other, it is massive and life-consuming. I could write the whole thing without reading more than 10 books (reading doesn't really mean reading--it's more like consulting or skimming), and then it would be done, but it would kind of suck. Or I could go to the library and take out the 30 books on the list I spent the morning compiling, consult those, make another list, consult those, and never finish. Obviously, I will do neither. I am leaning towards taking out only the most important books and reading as little as I can until I have a draft of both the fifth chapter and the introduction. Then I will beef up my autobiography.

On another level, though, who cares? I don't know for sure, but it looks increasingly likely that I will not have any kind of academic job next year, unless I can scrounge up some adjuncting. TF and I won't starve (to supplement his income, I can tutor snotty rich kinds in a panoply of snotty subjects), but it's pretty humiliating for me. The job market has crashed, and who knows when it will recover? On one level it's not my fault, but I never hold myself up to those kinds of standards if I can hold myself up to higher ones.

I hear that people who get jobs just finish their dissertations in a rush and worry about them later, since the dissertation is meant to get you a job, not the other way around. But now I see it is really not that different for those who probably won't have jobs. This is especially the case if the job drought has the potential to be long-term. Who will ever read my dissertation if there are no jobs? I may publish some articles, but I won't try to publish a book if I don't make it in academia. So a few people who work on the same abstruse sh*t I do may look at it on an internet dissertation database. I doubt they care whether I have 2 or 4 sources in footnote 17. (Can you tell that I was up for a ritzy postdoc and didn't get it and am now bitter? Then you are very observant).

You also might say, "But, Katrina, this is just a defense mechanism. You are worried about finishing, so you get all nihilistic and convince yourself that how you finish doesn't matter. In doing so, you free yourself from your perfectionism enough to finish, march in the funny hat and robe, get married, move in with TF, make him dinner, have babies, etc." To which I say: "Duh."

But this wasn't what I had imagined for my life.

Score -24,876 for Jewish-Catholic Relations

I can't say it any better than this guy:

http://religionblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/01/pope-may-be-close-to-reinstati.html

Thoughts

I have not been blogging too much lately, and neither have many of the bloggers I read. I chalk this up to the overwhelming nature of the Gaza campaign and the difficulty of saying anything cogent about it. Blogging patterns are weird, though, so the drought could just be a fluke. In case anyone is interested in what I think about this and a few other issues, or is just bored by the overall lack of posts and wants a quick read, here are some thoughts:

Operation "Cast Lead": A stupid name, but a justified campaign. Israel can't just be expected to let Hamas fire rockets into its cities. I am worried, though. Even though the Israelis planned this out pretty thoroughly (a lesson learned from the Second Lebanon War), it's not clear what the endgame is. I doubt a satisfactory ceasefire can be reached, since that would require Hamas to abide by it. My guess is that the Israelis will continue until the Obama administration tells them to cut it out. I hope that they can do enough damage in that time seriously to undermine the rocket attacks. Of course, this will be seen as a loss for Israel by the majority of the world. It makes me sick how gleefully The New York Times and others report that, despite the carnage in Gaza, Hamas is still managing to get rockets off. Oh, what a knee-slapper! The Israelis are engaged in ground warfare, which is killing civilians, largely because Hamas is using them as human shields, and Hamas is still managing to terrorize northern Israel. That will show Israel . . . what, exactly?

On a related note. . . Israel's decision not to allow most foreign reporters into Gaza: I have mixed feelings. The Times and others keep running whiny stories about how much they want to go into Gaza, but then if someone gets hurt, that of course will be Israel's fault. (Remember that idiot BBC reporter who got kidnapped by Hamas and was still sympathetic to them? I will charitably diagnose him with Stockholm Syndrome). I don't really understand why reporters want to go into those kinds of war zones. These opinions compete with my (and TF's) conviction that reporters should be able to report on the news, even if it's really unpleasant. What do you guys think?

Valkyrie: I can't believe I have to say this, but movie reviews, both from the popular press and from academic sources, seem to necessitate it: 1) This is not just an ordinary suspense movie! It has a strong polemical message, so stop devoting the entire review to Tom Cruise's acting ability and the effectiveness of the climactic scene; 2) Some professor of German literature referred to Claus von Stauffenberg, the guy Cruise plays, as a "German officer." Give me a break. He was a Nazi. In what army was he an "officer?" Oh, right. The Wehrmacht. He and his co-conspirators did not try to kill the yemach shemo because they were humanitarian Jew-lovers. They did it because they thought he was a bad military commander which, fortunately for the non-genocidal-maniac-world, he was. I can't believe how desperate even educated (and over-educated) people are to find a serious German resistance to Nazism. If this is the best you guys can do . . .

Academic conferences: Don't agree to deliver two completely different papers in three weeks. That's just dumb.

Satmar: Blech. Double blech. I just discovered, through Frum Satire's blogroll, a new blog called Hasidic Feminist. It is the story of a woman who grew up Satmar in Williamsburg, educated herself by sneaking off to the public library, got married at 17, and, at some point, took her kids and ran. It is beautifully written, but the subject-matter is kind of horrifying, I have to warn you.

And, on a lighter note, I am reading a great book called The Northern Clemency. Check it out.

Two, Two, Two Memes in One!

I've been tagged! Yay! This makes me feel like a real part of the J-blogosphere. This may mean that someone occasionally reads my blog.

Anyway, according to Frum Single Female, who tagged me, here is the first meme:

Pick up the nearest book (physically) to you, turn to page 56, and write down the 2nd to 5th sentences.

Lucky for you guys, I am sitting on my bed, so the nearest book is the one I am reading now, David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System. A blurb says this is metafiction (although I think Foster Wallace himself, may he rest in peace, may have hated that term) at its finest:

"Mr. Lunberg: The Great Ohio Desert.
"Governor: The Great Ohio Desert.
"Mr. Lunberg: Yes.
"Governor: Joe, a super name. I take my hat off to you."

Here is the second meme: "next state 7 facts about [yourself] and then tag others and link [to] them . . . and . . . leave a comment on their blog saying they've been tagged."

I read on another blog that some of the seven facts are supposed to be weird facts and/or details of your neuroses (oh, where do I start?), while others are supposed to be not-so-weird (ok, honestly, where do I start?). Here goes:

1. As you can tell from my punctuation and brackets in this post, I am a grammar freak (what David Foster Wallace called a SNOOT). If you think you are a bigger grammar freak than I, you are incorrect.

2. I schedule my life around the TV show House. Unless I have to be somewhere for grad school (ha!), I insist on watching it when it first airs. My parents, BFF, and TF know not to call me, and if they do by accident, or if someone else calls, I do not answer the phone.

3. My favorite sport to watch is American football.

4. I can recite the American presidents in order, and if you give me the number of a president (e.g., 23), I can tell you the president with a less than 5-second delay (e.g., Benjamin Harrison).

5. I don't like shopping for clothes.

6. My favorite food is chili.

7. I am a shameless punster and deliverer of one-liners.

Most of the people I am thinking of tagging have already been tagged. But I will tag: Knitter of Shiny Things, Miryam (Mama o' the Matrices), Apikorsus, Alg, Shira (On the Fringe), Michelle, and Sunkist Miss .

Well, That Sucked

By "that," I mean my academic job search for 2008-2009. (I can't think of anything nicer to call it than "that." Nor can I figure out why a bunch of hyper-educated graduate students in the humanities refer to anything relating to the job market as "job stuff." Maybe the stress just obliterates any articulateness that we might have had).

Anyway, I just heard my last "no, thanks," so it seems that my first season on the job market has ended without my getting even one preliminary interview. To be fair, I did get long-listed (in the final 6) at a school that does not do preliminary interviews, so that is perhaps the equivalent of getting one preliminary interview, but that was it. And I did not get short-listed (in the final 3, who get on-campus interviews) for that job.

Some background on the academic job market in the humanities for the unitiated: The fall before a humanities Ph.D. student will get his or her dissertation, he or she typically goes on the job market. He or she doesn't typically get anything, since schools don't like to hire people without completed dissertations. Instead, he or she generally gets a preliminary interview or two at the annual meeting of his/her discipline's major conference and emerges, dignity more or less intact, with some materials to use next year when no longer A.B.D. (All But Dissertation). Meanwhile, students who have graduated from the same prgram in past years get jobs, thus preserving faith in the overall viability of the job market, while at the same time taking the new job-finders off the list of the colleagues the A.B.D. will have to compete against next year. A.B.D.'s often get postdocs.

That was before the market fell through the floor.

This year, two of the nine jobs I applied to had hiring freezes before they even thought about interviewing anyone. Two were not exactly in my field (I would have had to interview at a different conference altogether) and came under the "cast a wide net" just in case they have no other candidates they want and would hire a Jew to teach a subject that Jews don't normally teach). So, that left five. That's not very many, considering that the top five programs in the country (mine included) will be graduating about 15 Ph.D.'s this year. That does not account for people who went on the market last year and now have postdocs. One long-listed me, and the others . . . nothing. Well, I got a fairly nice rejection e-mail from one. The others didn't get in touch, but I learned from other people that those schools have been in touch with THEM, which is as close as prospective academics get to rejection. That's a post for another day. Many in my field, including some who are a year out, are not even getting preliminary interviews because they are competing against Ph.D.'s who have been on the market for a few years and may even already have book contracts. That increases competition for postdocs and for jobs next year.

You might be thinking, "Katrina, if the market is so bad, and everyone is getting slammed, why are you so upset? Also, didn't you know this might happen when you started grad school?" I have this to say:

1. It's very hard not to take this personally. I had to write letters to schools telling them about my work--often giving samples of my work--and my approach to teaching, and my next project. Note all the "my"s. I have been working on my dissertation for 3.5 years. If no one even wants to talk to me about any of this at a conference they will be attending anyway, it's personal. Of course there are other factors--maybe they want to hire a specialist in a different country than the one I study--but clearly my work has failed to wow.

2. I'm embarrassed. I have a bit of a reputation in my department as a superstar. I'm not 100% sure where this comes from. Part of it is the confidence I exude, because I believe one should exude confidence about one's work, even if one doesn't feel it. And I do think that I am erudite and do fine work.

3. Relates to 2: I don't like to seem vulnerable or uncertain about my work, even to friends in my department. People aren't going to know the extent of my sucking--people only find out if you got an on-campus interview or not. But I will, and now I have to fake it. Also, my advisor knows, and I think this must diminish her view of me, even if she would never admit it.

4. I go to a top-five program in my field. Depending on who you ask, it might be a top-three program. That's supposed to be worth something at job-searching time. It doesn't get you a job in a top-flight program, but, again, it should be good for something, a small, second- or third-tier liberal arts college looking for academic polish. Maybe a preliminary interview there? (To be fair, only one liberal arts college had a job and no hiring freeze, and it wasn't in my subfield, but I applied anyway. So it's not a representative sample). If I seem obsessed, I kind of am, but this is much worse than I expected to do.

All this is made worse by the situation with TF. He is looking for a job, and now it looks that my only postdoc-ing options may be at my current university. That puts a lot of pressure on him to find a job in my city, where he doesn't currently live, in another difficult market (he's not an academic, but all job markets are bad right now). He is looking for a job anyway, but my city isn't a natural choice.

So I am sad and mad and feel bad and don't feel like I can really talk about it, except to my parents and TF and BFF. And you guys, since you don't know me. If you do know me, please don't mention this, since it's pretty painful right now.

Is It Just Me?

The attacks in Mumbai and the news reports about them, plus the reactions in the blogosphere, have gotten me thinking about a number of issues. Some of these really concern me, and I was wondering if I am the only one. If they concern you, too, please let me know. If you know the answers to Question 1, I would love to hear from you as well.

Questions:

1. Why don't Chabadniks (or some members of Chabad, anyway) get tested for Tay-Sachs? Since they will not do pre-natal testing or get abortions, why not do the testing and tell two carriers they can't get married? My cousin died of Tay-Sachs due to a faulty genetic test, and it really, really sucked.

2. How can I learn mishnah for every dead Jewish person, or even every murdered Jewish person? When a friend died last year, that was one thing, but I just received an e-mail from someone in my community proposing we learn mishnah for Rabbi and Mrs. Holzberg z"l. This is the sort of thing that can easily get out of control, in my opinion.

3. What is with anti-Zionist Jews living in Israel, anyway? Let's not try to claim they don't benefit from the State (who, for example, pays to pick up their garbage? Whose military protects their children?). I hear there are lovely anti-Zionist enclaves in New York, Virginia, London, and Vienna, just to name a few.

I am not trying to besmirch anyone's memory. All who died because they were Jews deserve to be mourned by us, and may their families be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. I just have all these questions . . .

Read Any Good Blogs Lately?

With all due respect to my blogroll and secret blogroll, I have been bored lately by the blogs I am reading. I think I have just gotten used to them. So I'm looking to add new blogs to my blogroll. Any suggestions? I'm pretty open as long as the blog is clean, not Republican, and not about a particular hobby, such as computing or cooking, since if I don't share the hobby, it's not that interesting to me.

So, read any good blogs lately?