The Randoms

So, in the ever increasing randomness of the narrative of my life, I received a phone call yesterday evening about 9 pm. From a young woman who was acting as a broker for an UES studio available for a 1-year sublet. She was eager to see if she could find me something else in case the studio didn't come through. It turns out , quite bizarrely, that she's a graduate student at Ivy U in 20th C non-English Literature. And thus we have much in common. The phone conversation stretched on for 2 hours or so as we talked shop, academia more generally, the infantilization question, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, literature, and occasionally housing. Very peculiar, but a wonderful conversation. We're meeting for drinks sometime this week. Craig's List, oh Craig's List, how thou dost appeal to my desire for the improbable. Plus, from the other places I've been looking at for share situations, there's been a rather ridiuclous number of UK-educated individuals. Perhaps I only respond to correctly spelled and well-punctuated adverts? The odds can't possibly be reasonable for the small-world intersections I've encountered. But hell, I'm not complaining. Rather, as always, I'm enchanted. But I should really be working. If only I weren't couch-surfing....

On The Strange Infantilization of Academics

I relocated to NY figuring the odds were at least not against me. Of the interviews I had for tenure-track positions, 2 were in NY. I was moving from London, had never lived here...hell, why not move to the next most expensive city in the world? Plus I had friends here, and thus a place to stay. Which brings me to my next point. I've been subletting for the last 8 months now, in 3 different places, each taken up with the hope/prayer that I'd be moving to a capital-D Destination, a job. Even after it was clear I hadn't landed either NY job, the listings and the possibilities dribbled on and on until late July.

So the last sublet came to an end last week, I'm staying on the couch of one friend, frantically looking for a new place, and eyeing the couch of another friend. Partly this is connected to the staggering mountains of debt acquired in the process of becoming overeducated. Add one part true love and two parts criminal irresponsibility , and the mixture ain't pretty. But I'm too old for this shit. But just not....quite....there yet. And having to resist the whole 'get the job, it'll all be OK' mentality. Because it will never be a panacea. But it's not uncommon enough. I look around at other recently post-graduate students I know who are not employed in academia, and it seems the mid-20s extend a bit longer than necessary.

There were coherent thoughts that went unused in the writing of this. In addition to the many distractions of my job job. And the fact I'm being stymied by 1980s technology sitting in another room, making my headache. Oh well, so much for intelligent posting.

hmmm

You know, the new improved me, arrived at in a satori-like moment about three weeks ago, and then clawed back to last weekend whilst a friend was visiting from the West Coast, well, leaves a bit to be desired. As in the solemn self-oath 'I will not go out 7 nights a week anymore'. Monday, Tuesday - father; Wednesday - break-up; Thursday - patch rocky friendship; Friday....well....Shabbat Shalom, I'm off to a co-worker's birthday party at some bar. New York is pernicious.

Benjamin

I got in a discussion a few weeks ago with a woman I was dating at the time, a fairly dark conversation on her part, though more memories of things dark on mine than actually dark. But I was using Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lautreamont, etc. as examples of the very peculiarly French celebration of the rational irrational, exuberant desolation, despondent elation, etc. The phantasmagorical, as Benjamin calls it in The Arcades Project, my just commenced post-Proust read. She didn't understand what I was trying to get at (thus the 'at the time' modifier), and recited the craziest text book of that period of French poetry I've ever heard, "It was all about the outpouring of an excess of emotion." Huh? An MFA in poetry from a respectable small urban college, a decent poet herself (if _very_ much a workshopped and MFA'd poet) and that? I was horrified. For it seems to miss _perfectly_ the essence of that poetry for me, and quite gratifyingly for Benjamin as well. I had a far longer, and more interesting, series of thoughts on the matter this morning. But a long busy day of the tedious and the useless, the use value-less, and I'm afraid they've all gone away.

La vida peripatetic recommences tomorrow. I'm curious to see if I can maintain my attempts to achieve productive stasis whilst stuck in the midst of my all-too-typical transience.

Upon Finishing Proust

Upon finishing Proust, I inscribed in the cover the date. And then my mobile phone rang, and due to the complex emotional and social circumstances, and a question of timing, I answered it and spent a few minutes on the phone making plans for later this evening. I was thus deprived, in some ways, of that moment of reflection, of pause, of pondering that follows finishing a book. But how perfect, how poignantly Proustian, the entanglements of desire and social obligations with the need to work, to find a flat, to attend to needs mundane and more substantial. Capital-'h' Habit, the power of the Will, time extended and time condensed, Time lost and found, and as Michel Bernstein would put it, the "Star-Making" machine of desire thwarted, of the moment of almost comically inconsequential rejection.

Phew. Got the worst of my delight and dismay out of the way there. My (nominally re-)reading of Proust over the last year has followed, a bit too nicely, the course of my own life. From desire to renunciation. But is academic work, particularly sans institutional context, necessarily a renunciation? Requiring a withdrawal from the social world, the dinner parties without starched collars and feathered plumes that were my milieu before being replaced by rather ordinary bars on rather ordinary evenings? To some extent, yes. But my work is neither behind me (although hardbound in blue with gold lettering proclaiming my name and degree and the year 2004, looking down at me and reading over my shoulder from a shelf) nor only ahead of me, ungrasped and un-started. Instead the despair- or joy-filled realisation that it is always ongoing, always the present. That for my work to be bigger than me, bigger than my physical life in space and time, but to be formed of my mental life, that it must always be here, be now, and be on the horizon. I've already started working again, and the follow through is no different than the beginning. It's just a moment.

Errr.how do I ask this

A friend of mine accused me of being self-obsessed. How am I supposed to ask for second opinions on this? Do you think I'm self-obsessed? Enough about me, what about my clothes? Sigh.

Critical Proximity

So, continuing the previous post, how does one create an academic social community whilst detached from academia? Alternately, how to insinuate myself into an existing academic social community? My in-betweeness doesn't help, to some extent - on the cusp between senior graduate student (though done) and junior faculty (though job-less). Both camps, it strikes me, view me with some suspicion, though I may be radically over-projecting and over-analysing. So I'm contemplating geographical proximity is the first step - move up by Columbia, acquire library privileges, and as I reduce the drinking and socialising attempt to spend more time working on my academic work at least in academic environs. But that's purely passive, and no more than a first, symbolic step, though necessary to get my proverbial ass in proverbial gear. But beyond that? Part of me wants what I chose against - an American-style graduate student community. But I won't be taking seminars with these people, and wont be similarly afflicted by the strange infantalised adulthood that graduate school offers to its coterie. Something out of my field, perhaps? A critical theory reading group, advertised on Craig's List? God knows who and what that might turn up. I'll be attending a tea party thrown by academics, but precisely the sort who don't need any more academics in their lives, and downplay shop-talk and work-community precisely because they exist in its very core. These are all rhetorical, as I don't really expect suggestions on an all-but-defunct blog, but I'm wondering (best sex and the city voice) how to be an academic without an institution?

invisible (not even adjunct)

Hello, me! As no one else will be reading this long-defunct site. Or perhaps not so long. I switched employment days after the last post, from the hell of temp-ing to the hell of a permanent full time position in a technical field at a rather dodgy company. C'est la vie. But today's episode, brought to you by the letter 'V' and the number '1', is a question of what happens when you strand an academic outside the academy.

I'm at work now, even, having just said goodbye to a good friend who is flying home this morning. She's starting her second year at a Big Research U, having already done a masters at a UK institution. Which is where our friendship formed. But even though we somehow mysteriously didn't 'talk shop' until the third day of her visit, when it arrived it arrived with much enthusiasm and pulling out of books and gesticulating and volume and smiles and excitement.

I didn't use to find this remarkable. Because, even in the very different academic community/ies that constituted my experiences in the UK, there was still a community. Whereas this past weekend I took my friend to see the public library - which is a beautiful building, as she agreed. But I insisted on showing her the reading room as if it were something of note, and she was rather nonplussed. Because it's just another reading room, and such things remain a part of her life, even while they seem impossibly distant from mine.

I'm an academic without an academy. Not living in the city (or country) of my degree-granting institution, my academic community here is rather non-existent. I have one friend, a tenured professor at a top school in town, who is in the process of becoming a friend. But we don't talk shop, and seem precisely to enjoy each other's company for that very reason. Which for her is fab, but leaves me with _nobody_ on a day to day basis who truly understands where I'm coming from or where I'm trying to go.

I've sort of lost my way as far as my work goes, though I'm working on working, and preparing for the re-commencement of a job cycle that ended with a final rejection in late July and begins with the first deadlines in late September. But it all feels so out of context. My friends here have no 'great cause' that occupies their after-work-hours existence, no secret identity requiring phone booths to change modes and minds and priorities.

OK, I've been horribly interrupted by the obligations of my job job here whilst trying to write this. A follow up, planned, as I try to return to the habit of writing, of producing prose both personal, professional, and something in between. But I miss my friend already.