Oh, yeah, so the meeting..

One of my readers, who will remain nameless, sent me an email violating the cardinal rule of conversation with dissertation graduate students–Never ask about the dissertation. If you are looking for a conversational opener with a grad student ask them what they are reading right now or if they’ve been to any conferences lately–do not, I repeat, do not ask about the dissertation.

That said, this person wanted to know how my meeting with my advisor went. It went very well. My advisor is still confident that there is not all that much work to do and that my biggest problem is my own mind, which tends to go off on tangents and create arguments where none are needed. he thinks it’s just a matter of some small tweaks to rewrite it and that I’m making moutains out of molehills.

So that’s that. I’m trying to take his advice and do baby steps on the dissertation and I wrote a little bit on my new historiographical framework today.

Which means we might finally finish up with Season 1 of Buffy soon. Yippee! An accomplishment.

My Advisor came for dinner

Words to strike fear into the heart of any dissertating student.

My advisor came over for dinner tonight — being in the area he wanted to visit and see if I had any questions about the dissertation. he was very nice and supportive which makes it all worse somehow.

So, because I’m not going to talk about that, I’ll tell you what I made for dinner.

A green salad with sweet balsamic vinaigrette
Chicken with 40-cloves of garlic and french bread to mop up all the yummy garlic sauce
Asparagus with Warm Tarragon dressing

We went out for ice cream for dessert, but if I had made dessert I would have done a strawberry shortcake or maybe just some strawberries and cream or else lemon mouse.

Don’t you wish you were eating dinner at my house?

uh…say what?

I just read an article for my dissertation in which the word “semiotics” was used several times. It was about the need for historians to move from a framework that examines culture through “signs” and “symbols” (meant in a specific Geertzian way, I guess) and that instead looks at “practices” as the locus of the creation of cultural meaning (I think–it was a literature review).

So, if anyone can give me the 2 to 3 paragraph explanation of what “semiotics” means–just for refresher–I’m all ears.

Update

So, I’m lame, I haven’t been working as hard as I should be on the dissertation (although I did actually start writing! on it yesterday instead of just reading) so I have been slow with the Buffy’s.

Tomorrow I have to replant my entire front garden plot so not much writing will be done then. However, the next day, Wednesday I will not be doing much writing either b/c that is the last day my mom will be in town. However, on Thursday, I promise to buckle down, work like mad on my dissertation and my work work and give you a blog post on buffy.

I promise. And frankly, my promises to you are the only thing keeping me going on a steady pace on this other work Because I do feel sufficiently guilty about wasting time on a blog post when I haven’t done real work that I won’t do it unless I have done enough. so there. It’s not procrastination.

really.

Gathering thoughts…

So, we’re about halfway through the first season of Buffy. The rest of the episodes are

Episode 8 — I Robot, You Jane
Episode 9 — The Puppet Show
Episode 10 — Nightmares
Episode 11 — Out of Mind, Out of Sight
Episdoe 12 — Prophecy Girl

I’ll be writing these up over the next two weeks. In the meantime, refresh your memory of these episodes by checking out this website. I particularly like the body count per episode feature.

Buffyworld: Season 1

Random thought about dissertation: If you want to go to graduate school, think a lot about how well you take criticism and whether you are self-motivated or motivated by outside feedback. Self-motivation is key in graduate school and a really thick skin.

Last night I made some lamb for dinner. It was just some on-the-bone blade chops (which were surprisingly inexpensive), sauteed. But the key component was a really yummy pistachio nut sauce.

Reading list

The Enlightenment in America, Henry May
Cato’s tears, Julie Ellis
Civil Tongues, Polite Letters, David Shields

I have these three books next on my list of things to read and take notes on. I have also taken on a small part time job, which I am not going to talk about, that crunches my time. I’ll have to work on that job about an hour a day. So it’s 2 hours of dissertation, 1 hour of work, then blog. Ugh.

But I’m mostly writing to mention that I am right now enjoying a Lake Champlain dark Chocolate bar. Lake Camplain makes the best filled chocolate bars. I particularly like the Java Truffle.

broad frame, narrow claims

That about sums up the advice I got from Intimidating Reader, whom I spoke to on Friday morning. That and the titles of 10 or so books and articles that I should read to start figuring out how to frame my dissertation so that the readers will find it acceptable.

One of these is a book by the mammoth J.G.A. Pocock. I do not understand this man at all. If you are not a historian (an historian?) of Anglo-American Intellectual history then thank the Lord that you do not ever have to read anything by J.G.A. Pocock. All his books are at least 800 pages long and make claims that cover about 500 years of intellectual history. Dense. But, he is erudite and important and you actually learn things if you can pay attention while reading him. Luckily, I only need to look at the first couple of chapters or so out of the first volume of his 4 or 5 volume recent work on Gibbon, but really, that’s like three books written by anyone else.

So, my next couple of tasks–5 and 6–will be to read the comments and talk to reader # 3; aka Mean-and-Scary reader. This man is so scary that I have not actually ever spoken to him. I’ve emailed him a few times; all of my emails resulted in replies from him which boiled down to “don’t bother me, I will read your writing when you are done.” and then when said writing was done, he shredded it in the most unkind way. As opposed to the other readers who shredded it in only slightly unkind ways. This guy is harsh. I am about 50% sure (hoping) that he won’t even agree to speak to me at all.

In the meantime, a new post is coming on the 4th episode of Buffy, “Teacher’s Pet.” Yay giant-man-eating-bug-teachers. Maybe I should try playing some bat sonar around Mean-and-Scary Reader; maybe his spinal cord will go all wonky and he will be unable to rend me limb from limb. Or maybe I will just go and look up his latest book on Amazon and read all of the crappy reviews he got.

Tasks 3 and 4

My next two tasks are to read the comments of reader #2 and talk to him on the phone about them. Reader #2 is enormously intimidating. He is not only mind-numbingly brilliant but he is also witty. I feel outclassed when I am speaking to him. Luckily, he is pleasant and has the rare professorial ability to be clear when communicating with his students. He also knows considerably more about my topic than reader #1 did and so has that much more potential for raking me over the coals for my stupidity and ineptness as a writer.

Speaking of writing, he once told me he was a bear about grammar. I am not so great at keeping on with the grammar. I am happy to critique other people’s grammar, just not so much into bothering with my own.

Task number 4 will be completed sometime next week.

Task #1

The first dissertation task I have is to read all of the comments that reader #1 made and compile a list of questions for her. The goal is to address all of the concerns of the readers so that this draft is the last or pretty darn close to the last draft. So, tomorrow I’m going to read the comments twice.

If you’ve ever read comments on a paper or exam you’ve written, you know how harrowing this can be. As this task doesn’t count towards a Buffy, I think I’m going to have to have a drink or maybe some chocolate afterwards. It’s about 10 pages of comments. Maybe I’ll have both.

256 days and counting.

There are 256 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. In the time honored tradition of bribing oneself to complete an unpleasant task, I plan to watch one episode after each 2 hour session of dissertation work.

Unstructured writing about my dissertation has provern to be helpful to me, as has discussing in a general way what is going on in the process. This blog is a place I can do both of those things. As an added bonus, I will have a new way to end the following conversation:

Random person I know: “So, how is your dissertation going?”

Me: “It’s going okay, I guess. My advisor liked it, but my readers thought that my historiography was underdeveloped and that I needed to be more focused on the cultural aspects of science in the early republic rather than the politics of Republicanism like I have done.”

Random person I know (eyes glazed over): “oh. so, when are you going to be done.”

Me: “Uh….”

Random person I know: “So, what are you going to do with that when you are finished?”

Me: “Uh….”

Now, the conversation will go like this:

Random person I know: “So, how’s the dissertation going?”

Me: “You know, I have a blog where I post my progress as well as other reflections on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and my cute baby and cooking. Why don’t you check it out? It’s easier than me explaining.”

Random person I know: “Cool! I didn’t know you liked Blogs/cooking/buffy?”

(much more interesting conversation follows).

So, why Buffy? why pick for my motivation a series that went out with a small splash 5 years ago? That’s a topic for the next post.