Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me

 I IS DOCTOR CAIT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 So I guess this is happening.

I sent my dissertation revisions to my chair on Sunday afternoon. She is pleased and off on a research trip, so she won't get actual comments to me until the end of the month. In the mean time I need to write some emails to my committee to start organizing my defense. This is like a ten minute thing I need to do that I haven't done because of a combination of anxiety and exhaustion. 

I am ridiculous and I know it and yet also helpless to do otherwise.

But HEY at least I get Thursday off! 

Where I am cranky and anxious for no reason. Or rather, I have reasons that overflow into one massive BLAH:

1) It's the end of the term, or rather, just past it, and yesterday I skyped with my advisor for our annual checklist/meeting I have to do to discuss my progress and whatnot. Which, I've had a good term; I've done a chapter and gotten a paper proposal accepted for a big conference next year which will fold into the next chapter. My advisor was happy and had good and useful thoughts on things, and I have a plan forward. And I also wrote several other essays this term for other forthcoming publications and sent in two sets of revisions. I am a good puppy. BUT I AM ALWAYS ANXIOUS because this is my default setting.

1a) A friend of mine has straight-up had two mini breakdowns in the last three days, the first about her diss because she has extreme burnout from writing and the other because she starts teaching two summer courses on Tuesday and the PTB raised the attendance cap without telling her. So while she has printouts and assignments and whatnot for a class of 35, she now has a class of 40, which doesn't seem like a big deal except it totally changes group assignments and the ability to read and return papers. And I'm kind of limited in helpful things I can say. Like, yeah, this sucks, but...welcome to academia? Where shit always gets piled on and fucked with?

2) I might have to deal with a IRL Troll tomorrow and am inwardly prepping. On the one hand, this person isn't as bad as others in the extended social circle, but they are still the kind of person who will go to a potluck without bringing anything or without helping in anyway, and who will purposefully try to redirect/distract conversations to themselves and their interests, and...I don't have the energy for mitigating that right now. So, wish me luck, I guess.

2a) I also tend to dislike holiday weekends, and today I braved the crowds to go grocery shopping, which was managable, but still. I just want to hunker down and do as little as possible, but I still have chores to do. *sigh*

I AM SO TIRED. Remember when I thought I was gonna have some down-time after those back-to-back conferences last month?

Ha.

Ha ha.

No.

I've gotten maybe 1800 words on my STBB/NaNo project? I'll probably have to drop out.

What I DO have are applications for a Bibliographic Society of America fellowship (which I can send off as soon as a second person confirms they are gonna do a rec letter for me) and an application for an Emerging Scholar Prize (which I can send off as soon as my diss chair says she likes it). I have a diss chapter my chair is pleased with, I have a set of essay edits due in January, and I have an outline with bits for a collaborative article. Also, I got some good feedback from my writing group on my fannish literary history project, so it's just to keep adding to that, bit by bit.

But in the meantime there's all of the attendant stress of holidays plus seasonal depression (it's dark! it's cold! DISLIKE!) plus getting roped into other things ongoing, and yeah. YEAH.

Did I mention I'm tired?

I haven't had time to do much more than organize my pressroom so far, and with this month being busy like it is (Tuesday I leave for a conference, followed by a week of vacation, followed by going to New York for a class on typecasting) it's going to be ages before I get to actually do some printing. Sigh.

I've made some progress on the diss--I have a few pages of chapter 1 that are going to be tooled into a talk for a conference in October and then retooled again for an article. I just need to sit down and do it.

Speaking of articles, my essay on Star Trek reboot fandom is FINALLY out after over four years in publishing delays. The citation is here, but I suggest requesting it through your local library than ponying up $18, that's just highway intellectual robbery.

I can't believe half of summer is already gone--time flies when it is sunny and warm. I'm planning on hitting two conferences in October before I have to settle down for winter.

I need to update here more often, but I always seem to be running around or flailing rather than getting writing--any writing, fic (I have so many scraps and bits of WIPs that I should give up and have a ridiculous fic amnesty multi-post), diss, etc. Reviews I am able to keep abreast of, and notes on papers and on my book, but oy. OY.

So first off, I had a chat with my dissertation chair today that basically consisted of me going

"FLAILFLAILFLAIL IfeellikeIdon'tknowwhatI'mdoing but I have this VAGUE PLAN and here's THIS THING I've done and I'm waiting to hear on this conference and I'd like to apply to take these classes in the summer at these places FLAILFLAIL"

and her going

"LOL relax you're at the beginning, try to have some fun while you think about what directions for your research to take, those all sound like great ideas, you're fine"

and now I'm all

*^*.

It's funny, but you know how you're a little ball of stress and then you can relax a bit, and you go, MAN, I was a ball of stress, and now I don't feel it so much? 'Cause that's been me for the last two months, basically, stressing about applications and stuff. I mean, I'm STILL doing that, but I feel more positive about it. Basically my plan for the next couple weeks is to send in my applications to take a course on Digital Bibliography at Rare Book School and then get some funding from Liberal Arts for it. There's also a typecasting workshop at the Wells Center for Book I want to take, and I'm applying for both a scholarship and an internship out of optimism. It may be tough because those things are aimed at book arts students, but I want to make an argument about being a book historian who wants book arts experience so I can better understand how things are made. That makes sense, right? Anyway I need to collect letters for those. And I also want to apply for a fellowship to Chawton House, but I swear their online catalogs are nonsensical, so I've written the librarians a query hoping for some help.

All of this basically happens to happen before mid-February, btw.

I have some other writing deadlines, but that's a whole other kettle of fish I'm working on.

OH. Other good news! Todd's going to help move my press to CO this summer, so I can finally start working on some of my other art projects. I have two bookbinding projects I need to get onto, but I've been distracted thinking about how to actually DO them (one is for a friend's wedding album and I want to make it pretty and she basically gave me a box of photos and such, and it's like, um, actually preserving someone else's memories is fucking TERRIFYING when it comes down to it. Like what if I paste in a picture of Person Y when she actually much prefers Person X?! Oy. Oy oy oy.)

Anyway, that's me. That's all.

by watching Gilmore Girls and pretending it's all somehow an epic Guardians of the Galaxy AU because I am ridiculous.

I have things I need to do, like finish a paper for next week and also do a couple of book reviews. But nope, eating ice cream and watching Gilmore Girls.

I apparently did very well on my written exams and am proceeding to the orals on Tuesday. So, yay.

So I'm making my way through Harold Love's The Culture and Commerce of Texts, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, which goes something like this: BORING BORING BORING DUH KNEW THAT BORING FASCINATING ANALYSIS OF SHAKESPEARE THEN WOMEN'S WRITING BORING BORING. Um, yeah. And I'm only halfway through.
But!! That section on Shakespeare!

So it's from a chapter on reading and Love pulls out a discussion by John Thompson on the number of dialogues from Shakespeare where women are literally read/to be read by men. Eg. Leonato of Hero, "The story that is printed in her blood," Othello on Desdemona, "Was this fair paper / this most goodly book / made to write 'whore' upon?" There's a number of other examples, by Shakespeare and others, including Fuller's "Indeed the Press, at first a Virgin, then a Chast Wife, is since turned Common, as to prostitute her self to all Scurrilous Pamphlets." Basically there's a direct tie of women and sex, eg. women to be "read" (passive), and the sexualization of objects of production.

Even John Donne does this in his Latin Poem to Dr. Andrewes, the translation of which is typically obfuscated: "What presses give birth to with sodden pangs is acceptable, but manuscripts are more venerated. A book dyed with the blood of the press departs to an open shelf where it is exposed to moths and ashes,; but one written by the pen is held in reverence and flies to the privileged shelf reserved for the ancient fathers." This is of course fascinating too because women helped preserve scribal culture--for a number of reasons, including authorial control and "the stigma of print" women from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries circulated their writings among their small circles of friends. (Women who published during this time were open to attack not unlike women today.) So Donne is here feminizing a masculine culture of production, and masculinizing what was becoming feminine culture--which, fascinating.

For reference, couple weeks ago I posted briefly about how women and writing are also sexualized in our terminology--eg, a "hack" was a term for a prostitute that became the code word for a cheap/bad writer, and "streetwalker" which still exists as a term for prostitute now originally referenced women who published and sold pamphlets. In short, the second you leave those private spheres allocated to you, you are open to sexual attack real and metaphorical.

Anyways, back to "reading women." What this really makes me think of is how men like to assign identities and roles to women and women writers. There are actual narratives, eg. in movies/television you have the usual contrast of the predatory woman/femme fatale (maybe best articulated currently by Julian Fellowes in Downton Abbey with what Todd likes to call the "maid fatales"--because we all just *know* those poor men of rank were constantly being seduced by their women emplyees *coff*bullshit*coff*) and the damsel/saintly mother/what have you. (This is also why we always get excited about genuine strong women, because we've had to deal with SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS OF THE SAME ROLES.) And then you have the narratives of our culture, best discussed by Chimamanda Ngozi in "The Danger of the Single Story":



This also reminds me of the problems of when you're critiquing writing in class with friends and you can see so much internalized misogyny on the pages and you have to weigh between giving an honest opinion and saying "Can we take a break for some social justice and consciousness raising?" and just saying "Well this is technically well-written but everyone seems rather rather flat--what's going on here?" (I tended to say the latter because I am often that Awful Nice Person and I really wish I wasn't.)

Anyways, the point of this ramble is really just considering how odd/horrible it is that we've had five hundred years to work on this and not much has changed. Over the weekend, a friend of mine posted on Facebook about how she hates when she posts about her daughter or feminism and whatnot and then men have to comment about how she was "wrong"--so of course a bunch of men posted about how she was wrong. *snort* I of course just left this link.

Really I need to reread Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing, because it doesn't matter if you write fanfic, romance novels, poetry, and anything else--we're still going to be sidelined, we're going to create our own communities of our own--and then be denigrated for those same activities.

In short : AUGH.