On Returning

For those of you who have been following this blog from the beginning -- hello friends and family who know me in 'real life'! -- you know that a lot has changed for me in the past year or so. Incidentally, this is approximately the amount of time that has passed since I posted in this blog.

In the past year I have chosen to leave my graduate program with my MA, been underemployed in the retail sector, and moved to Nova Scotia. In the process of all of this, I completely ceased to write. I don't just mean in this blog; over at least the past six months I have ceased to write anything at all.

I've tried of course. There are about seven incomplete drafts -- some only sentences long -- sitting in my "to be posted folder" waiting for me to come back to them and try to remember what exactly it was that I had to say. A few might reappear for me in the next few weeks. Most are lost to a pop cultural or academic moment that has passed and will spend the rest of their mostly-blank lives in the draft graveyard. Every time I sat down to write, I drew a blank or turned on the television, or switch to Tumblr, or opened a book instead.

Today, in the grand tradition of attempting to fulfill an anxiety-ridden New Years resolution before the month is out and all hope is lost, I came up with a plan to start writing again. I would read articles that were interesting online, then write about them in my brand-new Evernote/Moleskine notebook, digitally transfer the pages into Evernote and then...try to do something with my thoughts, I guess. My partner, watching me go through this process after a year of watching me say I was going to write and then subsequently not write decided enough is enough and put my feet to the fire and demanded that I explain what exactly was my problem.

What it comes down to, in the end, is that leaving grad school left me with the feeling that my work lost any authority it was imbued with. Which wasn't much in the first place, I suppose, but having long felt at least a vague sense of "I know what I'm talking about" reinforced by "and someday I'll have the degree to prove it", it was disheartening to see the later sentiment changed to "but I work in retail at the age of 26 so really what do I know".

I left grad school because the work I was doing didn't quite fit the discipline I was studying in, and I was more committed to the work than I was to the field. I still am. But over the course of months of coming home from work at the mall, the sense that I have a voice that could make a contribution to the conversation receded into a morass of insecurity that I gave up my place in the conversation when I gave up the profession in which it takes place.

Ultimately, I am not one for the confessional (see my upcoming post on why Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall was my favourite book of the year, and Sheila Heti's How Should A Person Be? was my least), but getting back to writing means, in part, letting go the notion that my position in academia conferred on me a unique perspective from which to write. Strangely, my academic work and my personal politics were and are deeply invested in the idea that the academic position does not provide any particularly revelatory leverage over knowing the world. And yet the sensation remains that in abandoning academia I have abandoned the analytical essay for the lyric confession, and in preferring the former to the latter, should essentially cease to write at all.

In the end, fuck that? Much of the interesting and compelling work on subjects that fascinate, compel, and incite me has never been published by academics (or if it has, it appears in non- or lesser academic spaces) and will continue along the same path. I may as well add my voice to that chorus and see what comes of it.

Quick Hits: I have no internet edition

• The New Yorker has an interesting piece up on Dropbox and early adoption as a form of venture consumption. I like articles that take up ideas that have proliferated in the internet era and apply them in retrospect to previous technologies. This is one of those articles.
• Josh Fischman at the Chronicle of Higher Education asks if the Internet will destroy academic freedom. A popular subject since the CUNY-Tony Kushner fallout, Stanley Fish also has a piece up on his NYT blog on the subject.
• On PopMatters, a review of Frank Rose's The Art of Immersion: 

What about the people or organizations who have trouble with this concept—such as what happened with Warner Brothers when it started sending cease-and-desist letters to kids who posted Harry Potter fan fiction online? "For entertainment corporations, the lesson should be obvious: don’t threaten a bunch of Web-savvy teens who’ve done nothing wrong. The bigger lesson is, don’t attack the audience for trying to connect with a story you hold the rights to."

• N+1, fast becoming one of my favourite reviews, has a piece on the devaluing of the humanities in the American university's push toward a neoliberal model of higher education. I'm a fan of Nussbaum and Menand's writing (although not always their conclusions), and this article makes me want to pick up all three books it reviews:

The budding graduate student has no Paper Chase, no ER, no thrilling fantasy of the intellectual rigors and erotic enticements of professional initiation that would mitigate the shame involved in gaining entry (or re-entry) to middle-classness. Even the few official bureaucratic hoops of a doctoral student — the oral exams, the reading lists — are anticlimactic, presented with a dully comforting reassurance that they’re not really all that frightening. And of course the stories of unpaid rent, half-employment, and the neo-Victorian social struggles of men and women past their first youth have no glamour about them. What is left is a culture of defensive shame: shame about so many things, but mostly about the tremendous gap between exalted goals and humble everyday routines.

I've been in transit the last week or so -- moving into a new apartment -- and have been without internet. This has left me with lots of time to blog and no medium to blog with. Lengthier updates returning soon!

Gone Grading

Sorry for the lack of posts in the past few weeks. It's the most wonderful time of the year -- grading season. So enjoy the comic and come back in a week for more thoughts on sociology, bibliophilia, feminism, etc!