Writing into the Morning
It is early January. Does life feel flat, or is it filled with fresh promise, like a juicy filled donut? It really depends on the beholder. I am in the process of reconciling myself to the fact that Big Uni is not calling me back to offer an interview to the Big Scholarship. Sigh. But my proposal was so good! I really think it was. We are back to “I believe in me”, which is a good thing, and I only feel stronger, somehow. Taking 2 weeks to compile that application package and write RIDICULOUSLY POSITIVE things about one’s self has only galvanized me. I will write those articles and books someday, because they need to be written. I need to write them. That’s not the question.
It is wonderful, how it all progressed, this sense of self: when I started my PhD I didn’t think I would really see it through. It was something to do because the job market was so bad. For the next two years, I doubted myself terribly. Then I spoke at a conference, flinging my ideas out there, and it went ok. The whole point anyway, is not to be universally loved but to discuss topics, that’s scholarship. But it felt amazing. And then, I still had setbacks, doubts, impostor syndrome. Perhaps I have just stayed doing it long enough. Over the course of 2019, my fourth year plugging away at my topic (while working) I began to…not relax, because I am often a bundle of nerves, but to accept this: this is my path, whether it works or not. This is my job even if I have to do it alongside another job (although another full-time job would be quite hard to manage). But it must be done. I feel I was born to do these topics. And I’ve grown into this precept so much it seems to be true. Only time will tell, and anything can happen in life, but like the early Canadian pioneer lady who landed on PEI after a rough sea voyage, and refused to continue further inland, Here I Stay.
I do have the idea that “cream will rise”–once you actually start publishing good stuff they cannot ignore you—and they cannot stop you publishing good stuff, if it really is good. But if cream never does rise in my case, and there have been plenty of forgotten thinkers and artists appreciated only after their deaths, I will at least have challenged myself to the end of my abilities, in the process extending them, and reaching, reaching.
So, in December and a bit of January, I read Schadenfreude: A Love Story by Rebecca Schuman. I will not bother to type out the subtitle here. It’s about a woman who tries to be an academic for about 15 years, and then gives it up and has a baby, a blog post of hers goes viral, and then she lands a book deal (those were the days!) so everything is fine.
It IS very much a memoir, and there is a lot about academia in it, which is why I wanted to read it, but there is also a LOT about it about the loves and hookups she has had, filtered through the lens of time of a very specific ocular strength: the one that makes you look a lot cooler than you were. Usually this is because you forgot the embarrassing parts of life (thank god brains edit), although Schuman does make a lot of fun of herself for being weird or uncool, these usually help (though too much self-deprecation never does), but I am sorry to say this, even though I sort of enjoyed reading the book, I found the narrator equal parts annoying and refreshingly honest.
I do apologize, because she is a real person, its just, somehow, the tone of the book. And she says motherf***ing about 200 times. I’m no prude, but it was just like, I GET IT. You’re not meant to be an academic. Because you are so rad and cool and loud and not a prude! She even reports at one point, that she was told after an interview that she “had a personality” which was considered a negative, and the reason she didn’t get the job. I get it. You are cool. But, I digress. I was just listening to a brilliant youtube video of Leena Norms last night where she said “don’t make your thing about hating on other people’s art.” That is good advice. So I am not going to keep describing in what ways this author ticked me off. In the end she decided it was healthiest to stop trying for academic jobs when nothing was happening after 2 years, and it was ruining her relationship (ok, that’s fair) but then it’s just a bit grating that she is able to fall onto the support of a loving husband, produce a child (she did it! she is a Woman and worthy!) and maybe there are a lot of other people for whom it is not wrapped up so neatly. I do think, however, that the author does a good job of never implying to us that it was ‘always supposed to work out this way, ‘ she’s quite honest that it is just what happened.
I’m torn between wanting to say “but she just gave up!” and the fact that really, it is everyone’s right to give up. But in my marrow I can’t avoid saying “she must not have wanted it badly enough” which is a terrible thing to say, and unfair . By the end of the he job search, the author was quite honest about the fact she wanted the affirmation of getting a job. She said (I’m paraphrasing) that “by the end of several years of turning of her PhD into a book and travelling all over for interviews, she wasn’t sure what she wanted any more. She wanted to be told that she was good enough for a job by getting it,” but the point of this path beyond getting the job had become more murky. I can understand.
I personally have never been about landing the job, and that may account for some of the struggles I have had. I know jobs are necessary (how will those student loans pay themselves?) but I am just concentrating on the PhD, and seeing what comes of it, not what it leads to. In my tiny niche subject, jobs are quite rare, and sometimes I think: why would it be me? But I also don’t think that it couldn’t be me. In terms of the really plum roles, you just have to catch one. And you never know.
Schuman captures perfectly something that I hope is never part of my own life, the struggle to think of something to write about from a new angle, suitably buzz-worthy angle, with lots of jargon in the title. That definitely does exist in academia, as it becomes ever more like a factory, in many places academics must produce a particular quota of papers and books within a particular time frame, just in order to keep their jobs. Not that academics need to live totally unrestricted, but when we try and quantify scholarship in terms of page count, we are going to get worse quality works in the long run.
This book was good. Definitely worth the read, and well-paced, for the story it told. I take issue with the fact that somehow her “great love of Kafka” is wound up in her highschool crush—-that does kind of make women look like idiots—and the highschool chapters were a bit hard to get through for me. That is going way back—too far back for my taste. Also—and this is just personal, there were like 3 times the author praised herself for her physical beauty—it seemed a bit…pointless…and Schuman writes with what some might call an outrageous zest for life—which I felt was rather “look how much craaaazy sh*t I did, I was so cool and carefree”—and that’s a choice, personally I would draw a veil over those parts of the past for my sake and that of others. In general I hope to forget stupid stuff, not drudge it up again.
But of course that desire is antithetical to memoir….and memoir must also be an art form. Because there is no way that she could remember that when she left the Prague railway station in 1996 that there was a loud American in a cordoroy skirt telling the train service personnel off. Not after all the things you do in life can your remember an ugly skirt from 25 years ago. And therefore, a lot of this stuff has to be invented. Not the larger events, but the details, which are what made the book come alive. This isn’t really a criticism, it’s more me realizing what is going on here. I have a few comments, for one thing, the author did land several teaching jobs and a fellowship, whereas some people who finish PhDs never actually use them; I think she was already pretty successful. Also, she often implies she was “poor” but…her parents were both professors (not super well paid, but more so than many other jobs) and at one time she is living in New York city with no discernible job… she’s “volunteering” staging a Broadway play….anyway. Unless my kindle-app skipped, she covered the period of her Master’s in about 2 pages. But the Germany parts were ok. She was too hard on her first host family but she admits she was an awful guest for them. I did feel for her in various exchanges she had with Germans, especially on the way to fluency.
I did not come away from this book with a profound interest in German literature as I had hoped (it seems nothing can impart that to me, except for maybe actually trying to read it) but the ways in which snippets from literature were worked in to this book were very interesting, and I liked the practice of captioning the chapters with various German words, of the type that seem to contain a world in a word. All the romantic relationships could have been cut in my eyes, or summarized, except for the last one (what a prude I’ve become! But nothing IS less interesting than other people’s relationships!) because it shows how TWO people pursuing academic careers interact. Apparently the men have infinite patience and achieve early success (i.e., they land a job) and pay all the bills (this is also the way I currently have it so I REALLY need to get off my judgy-train).
Obviously I have had a lot of conflicting feelings while reading this book, as it describes a clever woman giving up and letting a man save her…when I am currently being supported and will never reach my goals without this period of support…that’s dissonance for you. Pursuing your dreams can be peinlich.
(embarassing)