Given that it’s been about two years since I posted anything of significance on this blog, I’ve decided it’s time to officially declare it done. I’m leaving the blog up, and I want to thank all of the readers and commenters who helped make my first foray into internet writing such an interesting and awarding experience. Somehow, this blog continues to get several thousand pageviews per month in spite of the neglect, which is sort of astounding to me.
The simple truth is that as I’ve become more productive in my academic life (dissertation defended, Ph.D. acquired, three peer-reviewed articles set to appear in the next year, invited talks lining up, postdoc starting soon), I just haven’t had the creative juice to expend on long-form blogging about super-serious topics.
I am, however, noodling around on Tumblr under my real name–not that it was really a secret (thanks, Google!)–and you are welcome to follow me there. I blog about whatever the hell I want. Right now, it’s mostly Infinite Jest and Breaking Bad. If you’re a Tumblr user and into that sort of thing, come hang out with me there.
So, grading papers was a little bit of a bummer this weekend. While one student who struggled with the last assignment worked extraordinarily hard to produce an A paper this time around (after one of the most productive workshop sessions I’ve ever moderated, meetings during office hours, and three complete overhauls of his rough draft), a few of my students who had previously done well took a few steps back, committing some of the same errors that I had previously thought were limited to three or four individuals. Namely, they are using their chosen texts as excuses to talk about their personal views on a subject rather than producing an analytical argument based on clear evidence from that chosen text.
A few of these students came after me after class to say that they recognized the mistakes that they had made, that they didn’t like the papers that they had written either (which is encouraging) and that they would spend more time on the assignment going forward. But I do think that a number of my students are laboring under that common misconception that the study of literature is essentially a free for all, that the “subjectivity” of interpretation means that interpretation is essentially personal, that there are no wrong answers, that anything can mean anything. So, I brought in Vladimir Nabokov’s essay “Good Readers and Good Writers” today in order to talk about what the first task of any reader or observer of a work of art is: to fully understand what the creator of a work was trying to communicate. This means setting preconceptions aside and allowing oneself to be transported into a particular world with particular protocols, particular rules and causes and effects that may or may not have direct correlaries in the real world:
If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or ore unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so the first thing we should do is study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied , then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.
For Nobokov and for philosophers like Martha Nussbaum, this is a moral and pedagogical imperative: art and the effort to faithfully understand what the author is trying to communicate is how we learn to come into sympathy with other perspectives. Upon re-reading this essay, I was surprised at how much I resist this way of reading, how suspicious I am, in fact, of looking at a work of art as a contained body of meaning, hermetically sealed off from its context. The good postmodernist in me believes that meaning are unstable, that artists, in many ways, do not control what their works mean for each individual who encounters it. The feminist in me is inherently suspicious of author’s motives and of the way in which the realities contained in texts are both socially constructed and participate in the construction of contingent knowledge as historically transcendent. In other words, in my own work, I reflexively attend to everything that comes after “then and only then” in that paragraph and perhaps do a poor job of helping my students master everything that comes before it. Because while I still hold that meaning is unstable and contingent and that artists are not infallible, I have to get my students to a place where they can see that while there are multiple available interpretations for any given work of art, the number of interpretations is, in fact, limited. Otherwise, I get papers on why the Will Smith character in I Am Legend is a Christ figure based on a criteria so loose that it could apply to almost any protagonist in any narrative in Western literature. I also wind up getting papers that tend to read, say, sections of Paradise Lost as an object lesson or a sermon–no matter which character is speaking at any given time–rather than a Milton’s particular entry point into theological and political debates about the nature of freedom and its relationship to both divine and civil law.
Thus, at the moment, I am trying to summon up the good little Formalist in me and disciplining myself to ensure that my students understand, first and foremost, what the author means before moving on to any historicist or postmodernist critique, though this is the first class in six years where I’ve really felt the necessity of doing so. Either I’m becoming more aware, or I’ve just been dealt a class that is particularly in need of work at the level of reading comprehension. It’s probably a little of both.
So, this post. Commenters (mostly Anna) have raised some important concerns about the Natalie Munroe case, which despite 3 hours of assiduous Googling on the issue, did not cross my radar. Namely, Munroe did, I believe overstep some boundaries in making fun of students with disabilities and students with other forms of non-privilege. We might have a whole new discussion about why the most egregious item from her blog was absent from every mainstream report on the story. Furthermore, it would appear that she was negligent in not ensuring that her very private thoughts were not accessible to anyone who might be hurt by them. Finally, it occurs to me a bit more fully that public awareness of her blog posts will make it pretty much impossible for her to do her job, and that is, to a very great degree, her own fault. I’ll defend anyone’s right to free speech, but free speech has consequences.
It did, however, occur to me that this whole kerfuffle is acting as a kind of Rorshack inkblot for many people, revealing some of our deepest points of sensitivity (many of which ought to provoke lively debate) about issues in education. I, as you can probably tell, was most struck by the very nature of the public outcry, that so many people seemed to be shocked, shocked that a teacher, given the environment in which they work, might have these thoughts. It hit that part of him that does resent the fact that teachers, particularly female teachers, are expected to be endlessly tolerant and forbearing. I also find the resentment toward teachers who try to get their students to meet minimum standards for graduation perplexing, because that is, after all, their job. They are evaluated based on how well their students are doing, though again, we can debate the wisdom of that another time. Naturally, venting one’s frustrations in this manner was not wise, but the adversarial relationship that teachers sometimes feel toward their students is not altogether uncommon and not altogether a sign of a bad teacher.
Finally, it hit that part of me that is tired of seeing teachers being used as a very easy punching bag for frustrations with a broken education system, as if going after teachers unions and pensions and tenure and collective bargaining rights were going to solve anything. The perception that government employees–particularly teachers–are incompetents simply living off the federal dole–is disturbingly alive right now.
So, just in closing, Natalie Munroe is not my test case for anything. My initial assessment of her culpability was wrong, but the public reaction to her blog is, in my opinion, almost as troublesome as the blog itself.
I hear that James Franco was attending his graduate seminar on Byron, Keats, and Shelley at Yale when it was announced that he is currently nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. Good for James Franco. Perhaps he is going to make having a PhD in English seem sexy and relevant again. Or something.
I have questions, though.
Do the other graduate students in that seminar take pride in the fact that they have never seen a James Franco movie and try to work that fact into pre-seminar small talk whenever possible?
How will James Franco complete a dissertation what with all the acting and directing and appearing on talk shows and all that stuff seeing as it will probably wind up taking me a total of three years at this point with very little else to do?
Who is going to be James Franco’s dissertation director and will that disseration director take months to get chapter drafts back to him?
Is James Franco going to be showing up at Marriotts and Hyatt Regencies around the nation delivering fifteen minute papers on the British Romantics? If so, will he stay at the conference hotel or commute from The Four Seasons?
Assuming, as this Daily Show clip tells me, that James Franco decides to pursue a tenure track career, is he going to quit all of that other stuff in order to work for $60,000 a year (at best) churning out articles and books that exactly six people will read? Is he going to have to adjunct for a couple of years with the prospect of a full time position tantalizingly dangled in front of him until it becomes clear that no such position is ever going to be created? If the latter, will James Franco return to acting?
Will James Franco put his Oscar nom on his curriculum vitae? And if so, will the cynical sneers of hiring committees be visible from space?
Will James Franco be attending MLA in order to give interviews in a crappy hotel room with faculty from regional colleges in Pennsylvania? If so, will his bodyguards be allowed in the interview room with him? Will he be wearing a Prada suit?
Has Yale English been getting applications from people who say they want to study the British Romantics but really just want to study James Franco?
Until I get answers to these questions (and more), I won’t go see James Franco’s movie 127 Hours.
Ok. I lied. I won’t be seeing it anyway, because the whole cutting off one’s crushed and probably necrotic arm squicks me out so bad that I can’t even watch the previews. Also, the more I think about James Franco’s possible academic career the more I suspect that the answers to the above questions might make me hate James Franco a little bit.
James Franco.
Image Credit: c. sexowski, Flickr Creative Commons
When I was seven years old, my notoriously conservative state elected a Democratic, pro-choice governor. The child of conservative evangelical parents in a conservative evangelical community, I recall bursting into tears when I heard on the radio that this candidate had won the election. When my parents asked why, I said that I was afraid she was going to force my mother to abort the baby sister my mother was carrying at the time. That was basically my understanding of the abortion debate: Democrats wanted to kill babies. A few years later, I would write a letter to President Bill Clinton along with a (painful to recall) poem about how babies were people and therefore didn’t deserve to die because adults made mistakes, etc.
Yes, I was a child who had internalized the values and prejudices of the adults surrounding me, but it wasn’t until midway through college that I finally turned around on the abortion issue as well as gay marriage, abstinence only education and a host of other socially conservative positions. That was also the point when I decided–three months before the 2004 election–to do the unthinkable: vote for John Kerry. I was terrified that my parents would find out.
I am not proud of the positions I held when I was younger, and it makes me cringe with shame to remember some of the things I said about rape victims, gay and lesbian people, trans people, single mothers, and unemployed people back when I still thought Dr. Laura was a reasonable human being. I often feel distinctly under-qualified to comment on social justice issues due to the fact that I am still learning. I find it is helpful, however, to remember that person whenever I find myself wishing that certain conservatives might be consigned to some god-forsaken portion of Hell for coming up with shit like HR 3.
HR 3, the bill that would restrict the federal “funding” of abortion to draconian new levels, preventing even rape victims from using Medicaid to pay for abortions unless they can prove that their rape was “forcible” (whatever that means), is a human rights fiasco. Yet I am reminded that once upon a time, I thought abortion was a human rights fiasco for one simple reason: it killed babies. From my perspective at the time, it had nothing to do with the desire to curtail the rights of women or run roughshod on the rights of rape survivors or participate in slut shaming. It was just that the plights of even unborn babies seemed immediately, palpably, even if only symbolically “real” to me at the time, whereas the plights of the women for whom pregnancy meant economic, social, psychological, and even physical death were not. Babies were visible. Rape survivors were not. I was incapable of imagining circumstances in which abortion might be the lesser of two evils because those circumstances were so far beyond my experience and the experiences of anyone I knew.
That’s privilege for you: the ability to walk blithely through life without having to bear witness to the sheer extent of human suffering that exists in the world and the ability to allow the limits of your own experience to define the options available to everyone else. Because here’s the thing, as a conservative religious person, I was only capable of articulating the freedoms of others according to the terms in which I understood my own freedoms. I was not allowed to have sex before or outside of marriage, and I fully expected to be punished if I did. For me, the fact that I was struggling to “remain pure” with my boyfriend was not (at least initially) a story about how my values had become untenable and needed to be reconsidered. It was a story about how I was a sinner who had to overcome this particular struggle. And in order to rationalize the pains I was going to, those standards had to be universal, otherwise what was the fucking point? Because I could not imagine circumstances in which it would be ok for me to get an abortion, therefore it was not ok for anyone to get an abortion.
This is why I so frequently vacillate between hope and despair when it comes to convincing people like the ones who support this bill that they are so deeply, unimaginably, and inhumanly wrong. When she talks about the stases of argument in rhetoric class, a professor of mine frequently uses the abortion debate to demonstrate just how difficult it is to overcome disagreements that occur at the level of definitions, of what things actually are. For pro-lifers, abortion is murder. For pro-choicers, abortion is health care. It is difficult to imagine a rhetoric that would be able to overcome that monumental difference. It is difficult to imagine methods of mass persuasion that might make those who think they are saving the lives of babies realize that the lives of millions of women are at stake as well.
There were two essential factors in my “conversion.” First, I finally realized that the whole abstinence thing just wasn’t going to work out for me. Once I had removed the limits on my own expression of sexuality, it became easier to imagine a broader range of options for other people. The second thing that happened was that a member of my family came out of the closet, and the humanity of a group I had previously been taught to fear therefore became immediately relevant and sympathetic to me. Other factors were at work: attending a feminist and politically liberal college, spending a summer internship in a notoriously liberal major city, a crisis of faith that made me question the whole foundation of my morality, etc. But the biggest factor was that the invisible became visible to me. Suddenly, I was capable of sympathizing with, respecting, and validating the experiences and choices of people who were vastly different from me.
And I have seen other members of my once very conservative family turn around on these same issues for very similar reasons. People we grew up with and love and respect turned out to be gay, and we found we still loved and respected them. People who once seemed righteous in our eyes now appear to be hate-filled human nightmares. Marriages we once thought were invulnerable turned out to be living horrors. The invisible became visible.
The anti-choice right has been very successful in convincing their followers that unborn babies represent an invisible class of people whose rights must be recognized, a class of people that pro-choice advocates wish to exterminate. As I said, aside from the deeply personal transformations, the re-evaluations of possibilities and moral priorities that I underwent, it is difficult to imagine a rhetoric that would change their minds. That is why I fervently hope that the organized left is able to make the plights of people who would effectively be consigned to the darkness by HR 3 visible.
I will be honest. I did not expect to like The King’s Speech nearly as much as I did when I saw it this weekend. The previews generally left me with the following impression: handsome, wealthy heterosexual white man has speech impediment, undergoes Eliza Doolittle transformation, becomes King of England, triumphs. Also, Geoffrey Rush acts outrageous. What I was surprised to discover (though perhaps I shouldn’t have been) is that while this was a film about a wealthy heterosexual white man with a speech impediment, its narrative arc–while borrowing many of the conventions of the “makeover” film–is hardly that simplistic. After all, this is really a film about disability and about abuse and about the permanent impact of both. And as such, it is a film that subtly deconstructs power without tell you it’s doing so. Fair warning: spoilers below.
By way of a brief summary, The King’s Speech , directed by Tom Hooper and written by David Seidler, depicts the life (with some deviations from actual history) of Prince Albert (Colin Firth), the man who eventually becomes King George VI. The film opens as he is set to deliver his first public address at Wembley. Afflicted since childhood with a debilitating stammer, he is shown in obvious agony as he prepares for the appearance, and indeed, his radio audience is met with near silence and brief spurts of unintelligible speech as he attempts to choke his way through the speech. The scene is positively excruciating.
As the film progresses, Albert’s wife Elizabeth (the fabulous Helena Bonham Carter) solicits the services of a–you guessed it–quirky and unorthodox speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian Pygmalion (rhyme both unfortunate and irresistible) who helps him prepare for public appearances whilst also acting as a kind of psychotherapist, gradually getting to the bottom of Albert’s intense emotional pain, brought on by a lifetime of what amounts to emotional and occasionally physical abuse at the hands of his parents, brother, and caregivers.
This would all still have a “poor little rich boy” feel to it if the story were not accompanied by a rich and emotional documentation of the British Empire in decline. Both the interior and exterior sets are marked by a palpable sense of decay. Everything–even the lavish fixtures in the royal palace–looks positively ancient and creaky, a monument to faded glory. I was hoping to find a better image of Logue’s office, but this will have to do. You can see the layers of paint coming off the walls and a corner of this sad old Victorian sofa, a piece of furniture on which the camera fixates–centering it in a particularly prolonged shot, when Albert first meets Logue. Upon entering the room, he sits down on one side of it and seems almost swallowed by it. The shot makes his diffident, snobbish attitude seem immediately ridiculous.
And, in fact, there are many scenes that make ridiculous the entire notion of royalty as the British monarchy is steadily moving toward a more ceremonial and indeed nearly irrelevant role. There is a scene where George V, Albert’s father– previously seen terrorizing his adult son by forcing him to read the speech the King has just delivered in hearty, stentorian tones, berating him for his cowardice and inability to even spit out one word (Colin Firth’s ability to telegraph repressed emotional pain is pretty astonishing)–is shown near death, demented. He is so weak and unaware of what’s going on that a servant has to hold his hand to help him sign an official document.
I was initially leery of the film’s portrayal of Wallis Simpson, the woman Albert’s brother, Edward VIII, abdicated the throne to marry. Twice-divorced and *gasp* American, she was the target of some pretty vicious gossip. Yet the film is really portraying the monarchy’s prejudices against Wallis and reveals their snobbery for what it is. Albert is, perhaps, justified in his concerns that his brother cannot get his head out of his own ass long enough to even think about this dude named Hitler who is proving to be a bit more of a problem than anyone had anticipated, but there is something almost pathetic about the way Elizabeth (the future Queen Mother) brushes past her at a party dressed in the frippery of the Victorian era while Wallis stands there statuesque and stylish and looking much more like the person I would like to have a drink with.
In other words, this is a film capable of creating sympathetic royal characters without necessarily celebrating or glamorizing the system they represent. It has its share of “prince imprisoned by his royal duties” moments, but most of these come from Albert’s insufferably self-involved brother and are played as a kind of laughable melodrama. Yes, the royals are constrained by tradition, but the film manages to make this revelations more profound than it usual is. We discover, for example, that Albert’s insistence that Logue respect royal traditions–even to the point of calling him a traitor to the crown at one point–this is largely because the Throne absolutely terrifies him. The Sceptre is both the destiny he is eventually forced to embrace and the rod that was used to beat him into submission as a little boy.
Ultimately, the film argues, the King of England is a man who has never been able to get past the age of five, when his caregiver deliberately starved him without his parents even noticing, when his father encouraged his brother to verbally abuse him for his stammer, when his knock-knees were placed in excruciatingly painful metal braces, and when he was forced to use his right hand instead his left. The Throne, which Logue in a more brilliant-than-it-seems-on-the-surface scene shows to be a just a chair in which people have irreverently carved their names, represents a power so monolithic and impenetrable, so layered in arcane traditions and pieties that it eclipses the subjectivity of everyone in its shadow–even that of the man who sits in it.
The film opens with text that talks about the fact that King George V ruled a quarter of the world’s people, and the film visually telegraphs the fact that this is about to come to an end, that the dominance of the British monarchy is pretty much over, but that it’s ability to terrify, to abuse and oppress remains very much alive. Ultimately, Firth’s character says, he only has power because the people believe that he speaks for them, and he cannot even do that much. But as Logue eventually gets him to say, he deserves to be heard not because he is royal but because he is a man with a voice just like every other man.
Insofar as this is a Pygmalion narrative, we get plenty of conventional “makeover” tropes, including a montage in which Firth, Rush, and sometimes Carter go through vocalization exercises and moments of intense personal revelation (still tear-jerking even though we’re conditioned to expect them). What I did appreciate, however, is that though this is a Pygmalion narrative, there was no Eliza Doolittle “Rain in Spain” moment, no sudden or permanent transformations. Albert continues to struggle with his stammer throughout the film despite moments of progress and frequently reverts back to square one in times of intense emotional stress. The climax of the film hinges on whether or not he will be able to successfully deliver a radio address about the newly declared war with Germany, an address that is meant to comfort and encourage its listeners. And even though convention and history dictate that the speech must be delivered successfully, that success qualified and incomplete. It is a reminder that the King is living with an essentially permanent disability, that the scars of his childhood will never completely be healed but that ultimately the demystification of the monarchy and even the British Empire would wind up being a pretty good thing for everyone concerned.
That soundtrack for that scene is the Second Movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, easily one of my favorite pieces of music. While its drama probably seems overwrought and heavy-handed, there is a poignancy to the juxtaposition of Albert’s haltingly delivered speech with the music of Beethoven, also an abused child, a piece of music composed while he was almost completely deaf. It would be easy to say something very trite about the power of the human spirit or something here, but ultimately I actually think it is a statement about human frailty and damage and the moments of grace that emerge from the wreckage.
I won’t claim for a second that this is a perfect film, either as a film itself or as a commentary on the dynamics of power. The moment when Logue’s lack of formal credentials emerges the day before his coronation feels slightly contrived, though to Seidler’s credit this is played off as a momentary tension between the King and his therapist rather than a cataclysmic rupture.
And of course, this is a film about the royal family that centers the royal family’s experiences, and as such we see little of the people they supposedly rule. The scene in which Albert delivers his climactic speech shows the faces of all those listening–middle class, military, servants, factory workers–which serves as the film’s only real commentary on the vast structural inequalities in Britain. Lionel Logue, an Australian, is our only representative from the wider British Empire, though we are repeatedly reminded that the British snobs think he is a backwoods rube not good enough to play the role of Richard III for a local amateur theatre society (though the scene in which he auditions sets him up as an interesting foil, a man who is capable of delivering the lines of a king though not with the right accent/breeding). This was, of course, the time in history when British imperial authorities in Australia were rounding up indigenous children and taking them from their parents and native cultures in order to be educated (indoctrinated) as Europeans.
But then again, the film isn’t trying to comment on that, so it’s hard to criticize it for not doing something it never claimed to be attempting in the first place. It is, all in all, a very small story about personal problems and personal relationships that serve as metonymy for the larger dynamics of power and abuse. I won’t argue that this is a subversive or even a liberatory film, but it is much more than it appears on the surface, and it richly rewards a careful viewer.
Since I haven’t officially taught a class since last May, I had almost forgotten the simultaneous feelings of elation and horror that accompany a brand new semester–the wondrous sense of starting over with a clean slate accompanied by the nausea of confronting a room full of silent, groggy, impassive faces. The start-of-semester nightmares arrived right on time for me this year, and none of them came true. My session today was not held in an out-of-the-way building reachable only by a single bus that arrives 15 minutes after the start of class. I did remember to dress myself this morning. I did not speak in a stream of incomprehensible and uncontrollable babble. My mother was not in the classroom taking pictures of me while I lectured.
Even though the first day wasn’t the disaster I dream about at night, it wasn’t quite the triumph I fantasize about during the day, either. Here are the highlights (and, uh, lowlights):
I got all of the classroom technology working all by myself.
Said technology crashed in the middle of class.
The helpdesk person (who was sitting right next door, thankfully), reassured me that it was an ongoing problem and therefore not my fault.
When I asked students to introduce themselves and talk about why they were taking the class, even if it was just to get a Writing Flag credit for their major, the third student to introduce himself says, “I didn’t know this was a Writing Flag class. I might have to drop.”
Several students said they had enrolled in the class because they found the topic interesting. I don’t play favorites, but just between you and me, those students are rapidly becoming the front-runners.
As I laid out the broad themes of the course during my carefully planned-out opening speech, a student threw me off script by asking me to define “rhetoric,” something I was not expecting at all. Even though I taught an actual Rhetoric class for two years, I could not, for some reason, came up with a definition that completely satisfied him on the spot.
After class, this very same student looked me straight in the eye and said, “I need an A in this class to graduate, and I need you to tell me if that is going to be possible.”
An hour after that, I received an email from a student who said he had taken too many downers the night before and had overslept his alarm and wanted to know if he missed anything.
I tend to watch Glee with my hands over my face, peeking through my fingers. I hate it when shows I desperately want to like do something embarrassing, but Glee has so frequently proven itself capable of the transcendent, joyous moments that make musicals enjoyable that I keep watching in spite of my misgivings. I’ve had this song stuck in my head all day:
Ya’ll, I finished another chapter! It went to my diss directors at approximately 1:57 am Saturday morning following a week of extremely intense writing (one day, I produce over 15 pages, though a lot of that was cobbled together from notes and previous drafts). What’s more, I’m actually pretty proud of the draft I produced and think it may eventually be the best thing I’ve written in grad school once it’s been through a couple of round of revision.
After finishing, I was all like “Booyah! Next?!” I was ready to tackle the next chapter like an NFL linebacker and spent the next two days reading and taking notes, making a list of books to get from the library, pulling articles off online databases, etc. I was thrilled by the prospect of beginning the next segment of my project, going in with a sense of what I would be arguing but preparing to be surprised by the turns my research might take. It was a totally awesome feeling. Then life intervened, and the following things happened:
I got a flat tire, and Sears, where my tires are under warranty was very, very busy on the day that it happened, so I spent a whole day trapped in a terrible shopping mall and wound up taking a book to the section where the leftover clearance lawn furniture was kept, but I couldn’t absorb myself in what I was reading because I felt self-conscious and feared that the employees would ask me to leave, because I’m neurotic like that.
One of my guinea pigs started acting a little weird, and I spent an afternoon trying to figure out if he was sick (he’s not.) I am a hypochondriac on behalf of my pets.
In short, I got distracted, and my momentum has been temporarily derailed. Because my mental health is actually pretty solid today, I’m going to rest in the assurance that things will get better, hopefully this afternoon. We’ll see how long that lasts. But for now, here’s a chart illustrating how my morning was spent. Click to embiggen.
The JIL gets published, like, next week. Does this have anyone else feeling kinda shitty about the job market? Tenured Radical is making that point I was trying to make a few weeks ago but with actual scholarly street cred and a gracious sense of humor. Read it and be encouraged:
A great many graduate students are instructed that doing such work takes them off the fast-track, making them look unserious, unfocused and lacking in commitment to their scholarship. To this I say: Balls. Since when did the allegedly virtuous path of eking out a living on adjunct pay, moving around the country, and becoming increasingly bitter about what you have sacrificed prove to be a guarantee of tenure-track labor? Furthermore, while some narrow-minded person at Prestigious Ivy U. might look at your vita, overlook all your academic accomplishments and say, “Hmmm. Assistant to the Dean of the College? Yeccch!” someone at Zenith, or State U – Calabash might say happily, “Now here’s a person who won’t have to be taught how to walk, talk and find the chalk!” It is also true that you can send vitae to different schools that emphasize different things.
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