Raining Cats and Dogma

I promised many that I would try to post the notes i took during the defense. I did really well for the first half hour or forty-five minutes, but then it stopped being a q&a sort of thing, and turned into more of a conversational free-for-all. This I perceived as a good thing for the defense itself, but it made my notes a little bit muddy.

So, without further adieu.

After everyone entered the defense space(with a fair amount of collegial joking around), I was asked to leave the room. I waited outside SUSQ 3119D for about 5 minutes while they figured out who was going to say what and which person got to take which role (I speculate here), I was called back in.

Brian Richardson (the director) asked me to explain a bit about the genesis and evolution of the project.

He then told me that that seemed all well and good, although there was no conclusion to the project (oops!). It's the one formal alteration I need to make to the manuscript.

Susan Leonardi (English) then asked me to put feminist life-writing into the context of other versions of staged life writing, something that didn't appear in my intro, but most everyone agreed should appear in a book intro. There was some discussion here about how feminist life writing on stage is different from what we might call straight white male staged life writing, and then a general call from Catherine Schuler (Theatre) and Jackson Bryer (English) to put this into an even broader context of avant-garde theatre and other relevant theatrical traditions. Catherine suggested that I revisit an article by Roberta Sklar on why she left the Open theatre (one of the groundbreaking avant garde troupes of the late 60s, and very much in touch with the ethos of that age).

Laura Rosenthal (English) also suggested that I spend a little more time with the context of women's life-writing, and also suggested that perhaps I question critically the narrative that suggests the degree to which women have really been historically left out of thise genre, both in the ample female production of life writing (which few people dispute) and the canonicity of women's life-writing (which is much less stable).

We then got into a discussion, initiated by Brian, that returned to highlighting feminist life-writing against male counterpoints. He suggested that we look to the imperative to recover lost voices (which I discuss a lot in the biography chapter particularly), and the extra pressure on historicity. This is where the fromat really started to break down, and so the conversation meandered for a bit.

We ended up here: that there is something more exciting than I acknowledge lurking in many places in the diss, but niowhere near a thesis statement that involves the material presence of the body of the "real person" that plays out differently in different genres, which is imperative for autobiographical performance (why, for example, Holly Hughes must perform her own autobiographical pieces), impossible for biography plays (which is theorized more overtly in a revised version of the chapter that I'm submitting to Modern Drama) and highly complex and varied in the communal performance of staged oral history. Thi conversation took a long time, and alothough it nailed the issue, was sort of hard to hear. For the record, I walked out thinking I neede to rewrite the entire autobiography chapter if it ever becomes a book, which I am told is an overestimation of the situation.

My notes from this section look like this:
*greater suspension of disbelief (p.66)
*Also compare against fictional feminist drama (realism???)
-perhaps also feminist stand-up comedy

*Anne Bogart's Room (based on Woolf)
*About what the performing body does
-->in live space of audience

**THE CLAIM THAT IT'S ABOUT A REAL LIFE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE FACTICTY OF THE NARRATIVE ITSELF (??)

I'm not sure what that all means precisely, and it's missing a lot, but there it is.

Catherine Schuler asked me to talk about how political and rhetorical choices by playwrights (and performers) intersect with the concerns of making good art, with the concerns of craft. I didn't address this much in the diss, and not sure what I really have to say about it at this point.

There was a suggestion that I over-relied on Butler and should do more to stand on my own, esp. in the autobiography chapter.

I was asked what I planned to do to ramp this up into a book manuscript, at which point I produced a complete proposed Table of Contents, which breaks down the three big chapters into smaller ones, and adding sections to these smaller ones.

Brian then asked me which publishers I was thinking about to submit this as a book ms. Among the publishers discussed were: Routledge (as if) Michigan, Minnesota, NYU and Johns Hopkins. let's cross that bridge when we get there.

Oh wait. We're there.

Anyway, then I went and talked to Leslie Jansen outside the room while they deliberated (for about 5 minutes) and Jack Bryer (oddly, not my director) came out and shook my hand and ushered me back into the room, at which point everyone else shook my hand.

and there it is. the defense. whew!

Posted by at 1:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I wonder if linebackers feel like this before a goal line stand? At least they get to knock the snot out of someone to purge the nerves.

T-minus 4 hours. Anxiety set in during sleep last night. Woke up with acid taste in back of throat, a feeling I haven't had to contend with since MLA. Am drinking mint tea to compensate. Ann is doing pre-natal yoga in the other room. Will start scrubbing bathtub soon if nervous energy doesn't subside.

I'm gonna try to take good notes so I can share acurately with everyone. See you on the other side!!!!

Posted by at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Seven years ago, I walked into Susquehanna Hall as a graduate student for the first time. My first class with Orrin Wang (as I mentioned in an earlier entry) left me feeling unprepared for the task ahead of me. I dropped that class the next day, the first in a long line of experiences that reinforced that nagging feeling that I was secretly a fraud--that someday, everyone would discover that I was just faking my way through this, that I didn't really belong here, a feeling I've heard that we almost all share.

In the Book of Genesis, Joseph (or multi-colored coat fame) interpreted a dream for the Pharaoh--seven years of feast, seven of famine. From this vantage point, I can only interpret these last seven years as the feast years. I have met scores of amazingly intelligent people, learned more than I could have ever have dreamed, and burned through a veritable forest of computer paper. I never did take another class with Orrin, something I actually quite regret. But beyond that . . .

Tomorrow, I defend my dissertation, and if I am not mistaken about the tradition, can reliably call myself Dr. Claycomb (even though the hooding ceremony happens in December). I will start teaching at a new institution on Tuesday. I will be faculty.

So today, I'd like to raise a quiet toast to the really-not-so-bad life of being a grad student. The pay wasn't great, but I really have had a great time.

Tomorrow will surely be a milestone in my life. But today ain't so bad either.

Posted by at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The most recent McSweeney's project, a lit mag called The Believer has gotten a fair amount of press recently, what with co-editor Heidi Julavits' diatribe about the state of book reviewing these days.

I was interested to see what their website looked like, and, like so many other things McSweeney, it vacillates between the whimsical and the meaty, in ways that annoy, intrigue, and very often delight me.

My favorite section is the one called "Idea Share", where Eggers, Julavits, or Eggers' fiancee Vendela Vida, and a host of other nameless contributors have compiled a bunch of quirky projects, intellectual, artistic, and/or obsessive compulsive, that they just don't have the time for right now.

Some highlights: A court-intrigue novel from the perspective of the court midget. A push to stock airport newstands with literary fiction instead of mass-market fiction in an effort to change American reading habits. An update of Antonin Artaud's radio play, To Have Done with the Judgment of God.

Posted by at 10:29 PM | Permalink

There's been a lot of great stuff going on elsewhere in the Wordherders community, including dave's post , george's and others about performed selves, constructed identities and mediated pictures of who we "really" are.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this recently, having just finished a chapter on feminist autobiographical performance, and the dueling appeals of on the one handconfounding stereotypes by constructing transgressive selves, and on the other the political potency of speaking as a present, real person. I will continue to think about this until about 3:00pm on August 28th, when I will drown many many of these thoughts in top shelf bourbon, at least temporarily.

This dovetails interestingly with two other things going on in my life:
1) The composition class I'm teaching this semester is themed "Performing identity, writing identity, performing writing" where we will be talking about, among other things, the political implications of the notion of ethos, and how writers (freshmen and beyond) can consciously try to craft an ethos for their audience for rhetorical purposes.
2) I've also spent a lot of time recently thinking about showing those around me(with whom I am very close except for matter of politics and religion, topics that I avoid like the landmines) certain intellectual aspects of the "real me" before graduation arrives, so when my advisor mentions casually that my topic is not just about life writing in contemporary drama, but rather contemporary feminist drama, people don't keel over in the aisles.

This for me a curoius confluence of several applications of the notion of identity performance--a semiotic one here in blogspace, a gender-politics one in my dissertation, a straight rhetorical one in my composition class, and the psychotherapeutic one in my family discussion. They aren't all aligned, though. While most of these discussions come back to a notion of performative identities, there is a very real need to talk about the "real me" since all my parents know is a depoliticized self presented to them on holidays, vacations, and long-distance phone calls.

So does it matter that Elouise has a skewed picture of George? I'm guessing the middle-aged comment made George uncomfortable (it would for me). It comes back not as much to authenticity (although we sure like to talk about that), but rather agency. Which is to say as long as we can control the perceptions others have, it matters less if they seem authentic or not, even though those situations that we might identify as being more authentic are those in which we have less ability to control how we our performances of selves are crafted and received.

Maybe blogs are apealling because we seem to have a lot of control over the selves we construct, even though they feel really dangerous when we start talking about things like the secrets we keep from our parents. But they are certainly no more dangerous than actually visiting those parents. We just have less practice at it.

Posted by at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ann and I just got back from our final installment of the condensed Childbirth Education series at Holy Cross Hospital where our babies (Collin Francis and Lilah Paige, FYI) will be delivered.

We learned things like (Dave, skip ahead):
-->How to breathe in ways that make you hyperventilate unless you're actually giving birth.
-->What an amniohook really looks like (not as scary as it sounds, but still scary!).
-->The three E's: epidurals, episiotomies and effacement.
-->How little feminism has actually accomplished in changing mass attitudes about gender roles in new-family training.
-->How much better C-sections are than they used to be.
-->the truly huge variety of pillow-and-blanket styles in the DC metro area.
and
-->BURPP: Breathing, Urination, Relaxation, Praise and Positioning (I am not making this up).

But even though we really did pick up a lot of useful information, it only drove home how very little control either of us will have over not only the way our children will enter the world (although the soundtrack will probably sound something like heh-heh-heh-hooooo) but ultimately how little control we really do have over their ultimate well-being.

Surely this is part of the discourse of expectant parenthood in this country, but there are a million ways your child might die that you may or may not be able to do anything about. And 99% of those impinging baby-killers are only held at bay by the instincts and natural mechanisms that our little creatues already have. Half of the remaining percentage is handled by medical science (one hopes) and it will be up to Ann and I to try to ward off the remaining half-percent of potential infanticides.

And we will run ourselves ragged to do so. Happily, of course.

It is easy, certainly to be flippant about things like Lamaze classes, and it is equally simple to be helpless, weepy, sentimental, or saccharine about two babies coming.

What is harder (for me at least) is to look at the thing head on, and try to be honest about it all. It's excruciating, both for what it might mean about me and because of social pressure, to be really honest about attitudes about becoming a parent. It's hard for me to look at statistics that say that married couples without children generally rate themselves as happier than those with children, It's hard to kiss goodbye a lot of elegant dinners, weekends in central Virginia tasting wine, saturdays sleeping 'til noon and a paycheck-to-paycheck atittude about money.

But those luxuries are going away, just as inexorably as those two little heartbeats get stronger, just as inevitably as those four lungs will strengthen and inflate in a matter of weeks, just as certainly as Ann's body prepares to bear them into the world.

The Lamaze folks work very hard to make childbirth into a mystical experience, what with the new-age relaxation music at the end of every session. And for good reason: human life may be the last sacred thing. But can we be realists about the sacred? Is it even all that desireable?

Posted by at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

(That's Poe duh Cremm to you non-francophiles out there)

Besides writing up a passable abstract for this Spring's Narrative Conference, changing the documentation style from MLA to CMS for an article on parodic spectatorship that I'm trying to figure out where to send, and getting used to this blogging thing, one of the things Ann and I have been doing is baking (which is why so many expectant fathers gain "sympathy weight"). So right now, I am trying to concentrate on drawing up compassionate-yet-firm course policies with the fairly potent smell of a chocolate-orange custard wafting about my head.

And Sunday afternoon, I'm whipping up a porcini-and-sundried-tomato risotto for dinner out.

We really go high-tech when olfactory computing hits the market.

Posted by at 6:58 PM | Permalink

I submitted a complete, revised draft of my dissertation to my committee on August 4, and I defend in just under two weeks. Where this leaves me, ultimately, is in the strangest August on record.

Some background: August has traditionally been by far my least favorite time of the year. The summer is at this stage not unlike a casserole that has beeen baked in the oven just too long: it's too hot, and any good that may have come out of the heat has worn out its welcome.

Add to this the fact that I am that rarest of academics, the kind who has really never wanted to bail. I still look forward to the first day of school like a crazy third-grader who can't wait to show off his new clothes to the friends he's seen little of in the last three months. Top it all off with the fact that my summer jobs have been serviceable, but ultimately were only boring at best and soul-sucking at worst, which was exacerbated over the last couple of years by the fact that these jobs came at the expense of time spent on the dissertation. Short answer: August blows.

And yet: At the beginning of the summer I left the job at Northern Gunman, so no crappy job to trade on my personal integrity. The weather has been much better than usual, so the casserole metaphor thing isn't quite accurate. I've been going to faculty development meetings at GW all summer, so the suspense of the first day of school hasn't been quite so palpably delayed. And, as I mentioned above, the diss is done. No more writing to do (at least not on that 800-pound gorilla).

So you say: "You should be having a grand ol' time! Kick back, read some books, drink some lemonade, snuggle with your wife, and enjoy yourself! You earned it!"

So why have I spent hours in August at my computer, juggling 8 MS Word documents at a time, managing a to-do list as long as any early December? waiting, dreading, nursing a little acid pit in my belly, expecting the other shoe to drop, and imagining it to be a steel-toed, spike-heeled boot-made-for-walkin'?

I am so going to party after the defense, as long as that spike heel hasn't punctured a major artery.

Posted by at 12:48 PM | Permalink

For those who don't know (and most readers do at this stage), here's a little story about me. A memoir, if you will.

I was born, like most, at a young age, grew up feeling more like a social pariah than I really was, and hated my hometown--Milford, Delaware. I got out when I was 18, and came to the big city for school. After three years at American University as a Literature major and a theatre freak, I graduated with some honors, and a strange sense that I wasn't done with school yet. I then went to work for a year as a jack-of-all-trades at a collection agency (although I never actually did any collections), I realized that while the job was offering great material for fiction, it wasn't my cup of tea.

I started graduate school at Maryland in 1996. On my first day of classes, I sat in a class with Orrin Wang, realized there were words on the syllabus I didn't even understand, and went home and cried. Then later that week, I walked into a modern drama seminar, sat down next to my future wife, and across the table from my future advisor, Brian Richardson. Seven years later, (almost to the day) from that day in Susquehanna Hall, I will defend my dissertation on life writing in contemporary feminist drama, while at home, Ann, my wife of almost four years, best editor and best friend, is holding in her belly what will soon be our first two children.

So, yeah, it's gonna be a big fall: I'll be a newly minted PhD, a new father, and first-year Assistant Professor of Writing at George Washigton University. Not much going on, really.

So in this blog I will write about:
Good, bad and punny album titles for records I'll never record (see last entry)
What the last few weeks of graduate studentdom is like
What being a first year composition professor is like
What being a first-time father of twins is like
The usual political screeds.

Since I'm generally unfamiliar with the conventions of the weblog, I'll surely be learning new tricks, and am generally looking forward to being a part of a wordherding community.

Posted by at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

When I was sixteen, I swore I'd have a rock band. And while I didn't have a name for this rock band (or any discernible rock-n-roll talent) I knew I had a knack for album titles.

Posted by at 8:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)