On tap

I have been officially finished with all tasks pertaining the second year of doctoral study for over a month now. Which means I’ve started preparing, with a few existential hiccups and hang-ups along the way, for the primary task pertaining to the third year: the preliminary exam, or prelims as we call them.

Prelims in my discipline means a two hour oral examination covering two reading lists that are meant propose two fields of study. I get to pick the fields and make the lists–there’s no required texts, but my committee does have to approve whatever I pick. My fields are: Multiethnic US Literatures Post-1850 and Life Writing. No one has ever accused me of being too focused! The combined total for my two lists is currently running around 240 books (roughly 60% primary and 40% critical) with the goal to chop it to no more than 200 by the end and preferably more like 150. How that is going to happen, I’m not entirely sure, as I am an unrepentant comparatist (comparativist?) and that means having a chunk of foundational knowledge in a lot of different areas. But, the basic roadmap is in front of me.

I’m hoping to blog on a regular basis both about what I’m reading and how I’m fitting it into the jigsawed horizon I call my intellectual framework. And if I’m doing that, I’ll probably also be reflecting on just where all this work I’m doing fits in to the work of being a citizen and human being–another way of saying, fresh off a contract year of union volunteering, I’m feeling like the words “political” and “activism” need to be used to describe ways of being, not side projects that must inevitably detract from my professional work. And while I’m doing that, I’m also hoping to have a summer of consummate Michigander-ness, replete with Oberon, long runs in ungodly humidity, and tornado watches.

Hopefully, I’ll be back quite soon for a report on how all that’s going.

Transitionless

I looked out the kitchen window this morning as I was stirring milk and sugar into my tea and realized that the neighbor’s tree has no leaves on it. The last time I looked, it had a few bright yellow holdouts, which caught the sun and made it seem like fall was still here and might stay here indefinitely.

That feeling of not knowing exactly when changes that, in hindsight, are quite momentous happened has characterized these first few weeks of my second year in the PhD program. One day I was a grad student, wearing shorts and t-shirts with holes in them as I organized my day around reading books in my overstuffed office chair. Then a Tuesday came, and I was a teacher, wearing hose and black shoes and blocking my day into slots of reading for class, preparing for discussion, holding office hours. It was summer. I looked again and it was fall.

A little further into fall, a day came when I went into a room and explained what I had been doing my whole first year of grad school and walked out of it explaining what I was going to write my dissertation about. (Still very much up in the air, but for the first time, I felt like the word “project” was a word that might apply to my work.) I was incoherent, and then I was coherent. Well, more coherent. And coherent because I’d started to find a way to explain to other people why the connections I saw might be important, not just because I’d decided to agree with them that what they saw was more important.

A month after that, I went from being 28 years old to 29. I was reading an oral history of a Chinese feminist recently, and she spoke about a scheme of life where you spend the first 29 years of your life learning, the next 29 years working, and the last 29 teaching. Overnight, I’m in the second phase. I don’t feel like I’ve learned nearly enough or accomplished nearly enough. I also don’t feel like that anything I’ve tried to begin could have been finished in a short decade of young adulthood, and at certain times on certain days I do feel like I have work to do, and that the return of grey skies and grey trees isn’t the sign of a wasted year, but the sign of a year that is on its way to becoming the next one.