I am back in the blogosphere after another trip out of town, this one to Northampton to help the chosen fam out with their new home purchase. I spent a few days tearing out sub-flooring, which I have to say was amazingly therapeutic: I didn’t think about my dissertation or the job market even once. Problem is, now I am back, and apparently still not thinking about my dissertation or the job market. My brain is on a work slow-down in protest of long hours and insufficient rewards. So, in a classic pacification strategy, I’m going easy on the brain and making minor concessions (sure, take a break, have a beer), knowing full well it will only lull my brain back into unwary submission. Next week, I will be cracking the whip again: you had your beers, you had your fun playing wii, now back to work! We will see how that goes.
Meanwhile, I was just asked to review an article for a journal, and the piece looks quite interesting, and actually I’m looking forward to it. Maybe just because I haven’t done enough peer-reviewing to feel burdened by it yet, but it is one apect of professionalization I’ve really enjoyed. Whenever I’ve reviewed pieces I’ve learned something new and interesting, and also gotten the satisfaction of realizing I already know a thing or two about a thing or two, and that is a nice feeling indeed (and a pleasant counter to the constant panics of insecurity being a grad student usually entails).
On my bike, on my way to the Grad Center today, a Greenpeace canvasser shouted the above to me. I thought that was nice. I have an intense and conflicted relationship with canvassers. In the summer months, the streets around my apartment are swarming with young, white, idealistic kids on summer vacation from liberal arts colleges who want me to give money to (fill-in-the-blank) cause. Having done some canvassing work for tax-payer supported radicals ACORN during one of my summers off from being a white, idealistic liberal arts college student, I have some sympathy for the devil that is a fresh-faced but sweaty clipboard-wielding canvasser. I find myself unable to just rudely brush them off, which is nice enough of me I guess, except that what happens next is I force the canvasser into a conversation with me about what I think is wrong with (fill-in-the-blank) cause. I can’t just say, “No thanks,” I have to say, “Actually, HRC supports hate crimes legislation, which disproportionately impacts communities of color and only strengthens the U.S. prison system. When HRC develops an anti-racist critique of its own work, then I will consider giving you five dollars.” Last summer, it was Democratic Party fever in my neighborhood, and I seriously was late everywhere I had to be because, let me tell you, those DNC boys know their game, and I would get into thirty-minute debates about the efficacy of electoral politics every time I stepped out of my apartment. Lesson learned: Everyone is happier when I stay on my bike and just keep riding.
Had a great, wonderful time with Emily tonight. I made us pork chops and kale, she brought us a special beverage. Dinner conversation topics included: reading The Order of Things; abandoning The Order of Things; professional conferences; alienating professional colleagues by criticizing gay marriage movements; sociology journal rankings versus library science journal rankings; her new book contract; my new book from the library. Whereas my next profesh conference, ASA, is in Boston, Emily’s, ALA, is in Anaheim, aka Disneyland, so after dinner I gave her a haircut (fall-back career fall-back, if the cafe tanks) to make sure she is looking sharp when she hits the teacup-n-saucers ride. She is. Librarians, watch out.
And, btw, did you know Emily’s blog is inspiring a new sub-genre of minutae blogs? Introducing What I Saw Riding My Bike Around Today and Stuff I Saw and Did While Going About My Business Today and How I Felt About It.
Chris Caruso, whom I know through the Tech Fellow program of which we are both part, has put together an amazing web project. Chris coordinated a team of people to videotape the weekly lectures from David Harvey’s “Reading Marx’s Capital” course last fall. Now the 55 hours of tape are edited, and Chris is putting up one video lecture a week (podcasts coming soon). I took this course with Harvey a few years ago, and it was one of the highlights of my graduate student career. If you don’t know his work, he’s considered one of (the?) contemporary experts on Marx, and the course offers a close reading, chapter by chapter, of Volume One of Capital. He’s a great and patient lecturer, and he makes beautiful work of Marx’s methodology, which I think is as important as anything, as a tool for reading to understand. When I read Marx now, I hear the soothing sound of Harvey’s British lilt in my head. Now you can too — Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey.
I was going to head out to do work someplace besides the single room that constitutes my office/bedroom/living room/kitchen, and then I heard that the (unfortunately re-named) Hopscotch Cafe (formerly Alt Coffee) has closed! Though I sort of missed the anarchist decor of the Alt Coffee days (couches with no springs, piles of broken computer monitors in the bathroom), I have appreciated the relative calm and reliable wifi of Hopscotch. Why are there no good coffeeshops in this stupid city? Unless you want to spend 20 bucks at a fake french bistro, there is nowhere to go in this godforsaken place, I swear. This is why Greg and I have decided that, if academia doesn’t work out, we are going to open your dream coffeeshop. It will be called Secret Amazing Cafe, but the regulars will just call it Secret Amazing. They will come for the good lighting, friendly staff, fresh baked scones and music selections that strike the perfect balance between interesting but not distracting or pretentious. They will say “Hi Craig” or “Hi Greg” when they come in, and they will know which of us is which. They will think, “I always knew there must be some secret amazing cafe I just hadn’t discovered yet, and I am so glad that I finally did.” Everyone will get work done, and they will all be happy. On the weekends, when their parents are in town visiting, they will come for the unlimited mimosa brunch, and take a needed and deserved respite from their work.
The temperature seems to have returned to something resembling a habitat suitable for human life, which I’m happy about, as I’m planning to be out and around on my bike later. Though first I need to fix a flat — the second in one week! Defying everything I know about having (and keeping) a bike in NYC, I leave my bike locked up downstairs in front of my building, and no trouble has ever come my way. But if I wind up with a third flat I’m going to begin to suspect sabotage. Yesterday, a long but fun day doing manny duty with Greg for the twins (by the end of the day we were all covered in popsicle juice; sharing a popsicle with a one-year old in 90something degree weather is not a neat affair.) I am no longer so tired after our Tuesday babysitting gig that I can’t do anything but get in bed with Pringles and my laptop tuned to Hulu, so I actually got some satisfying work done last night. A flurry of re-visiting some old favorite readings — Rajan’s Biocapital, Chow’s Protestant Ethnic, some pieces in Global Assemblages — plus some time with Aihwa Ong’s recent book on neoliberalism, which I’m finding quite helpful. Something I’m sorting out right now: the limits of ephochal readings of Foucault (such as “disciplinary society”) and some reasons we might want to concentrate instead on descriptions of technologies that (as Ong characterizes neoliberalism) can be deployed within any sort of political regime. This seems consonant with a Deleuzeun understanding of “diagrams” (abstract, mobile), despite some of the responsibility Deleuze bears for encouraging epochal readings (his “society of control.”) Meanwhile, the soc blogosphere is rife with advice these days for the would-be job candidate — Newsocprof, Scatterplot, Rethinking Markets — which I’m really appreciating. “Going on the market” seems sort of terrifying, but completing a set of discrete tasks feels do-able.
I’m not totally ready for it to be Monday. I think I achieved a good balance this weekend between doing work and having fun, but does this every get easy? Does any academic ever hit an automatic stride in which you’ve figured out how to get enough work done, how to feel like you’ve gotten enough work done (not necessarily in a direct or obvious relationship with the first goal), and how to have time to unwind and just, you know, eat hot dogs outside while melting into a puddle or whatever? Between bike rides, barbecues, and housewarming parties this weekend, made good progress on the Foucault article, starting to sort out some coherent thoughts on the relationships between Foucault’s state racism and what Dean and I have been calling “racism racism.” Last night, reading Jeff Manza’s excellent review article on sociology of the New Deal, a great moment of clarification when he writes that a strict (or “strong” as they say in sociology) historical institutionalism comes to odds with what I’d call a critical race view insofar as the latter says that the institutions of U.S. government themselves get produced by structures of racism. This gels with what I’m trying to say through a biopolitical framework, and helped me understand my own resistance to some of the new institutionalism. But for now: I have to grade papers to turn back to the students tonight. On the upside, only half the students did the assignment, so I don’t have too much to grade. On the downside, only half the students did the assignment. Any thoughts on how to overcome overwhelming summer-inertia and motivate students?
Sometimes when I can’t sleep, or am barely sleeping, I get a word or phrase running through my head over and over. The insomnia episode of a few nights ago featured just a few lyrics from an Alicia Keys song (”no one, no one, no one”) as I flipped uncomfortably around in bed. This morning, in that hazy thing between sleep and waking, it was “Theda Skocpol Theda Skocpol Theda Skocpol.” I have had a few good days of getting good work done and am feeling satisfied: I came up with a working title for the dissertation; I got most of my profesh website up and running; I figured out a game plan for getting the article for the Foucault book written over the next few weeks. (In fact, I was so busy working on Wednesday, that I didn’t find out Barack Obama had secured the democratic nom until I left my apartment at 4 pm and saw the neighbor’s newspaper lying outside her door. And I’d been on the computer all day. As Bridge said, “Maybe you were actually concentrating on your work.”) Last night, a great time at send-off drinks for Dean, except for the part with the gross guy who wouldn’t leave me alone (Him [leaning whole body into mine and drunkenly slurring]: “Can you help me??” Me [pushing with two hands]: “Are you gonna puke on me?!?”). Had a wonderful chat with Emily about job searches, writing, and blogs. It was nice to get some “live comments” from her. The conversation, and the work I’ve been doing the past few weeks—getting the diss in order, thinking about places I might like to live—made me realize all at once the obvious thing that I hadn’t fully thought out yet: This will be the last year I am a student.
I’m a little slow, so I just now caught the piece in the Inside Higher Ed on the Syracuse Professor who walked out of class when a student in the front row of his lecture blatantly texted from her cell phone. The story is complicated, so just go check it out, and the debate that follows the piece.
Like many others, I explain clearly at the beginning of the term that any cell phone use is not allowed in class (I actually had a student take a call in class once — like at his seat!), and that this is because it is definitely distracting to me, and probably to other students as well. I think giving this as a justification is important (rather than “because I’m in charge and I said so”) to make the rule meaningful, and also because given that in U.S. culture, constant cell phone use in any setting is totally socially acceptable, students may not think twice about using their phones in class, and certainly may not think the behavior is rude or disrespectful. While it’s hard to imagine any student not wanting to grab onto every genius pearl of wisdom that falls from your lips in class, I think assuming the best of students (they get tired and bored and distracted, just like the rest of us, and probably don’t mean to destroy your classroom from the inside out) is probably a best practice.
Also, I find that in Intro to Soc classes, a discussion of how communication technologies are transforming work and school and public settings is a good way to embed the rule in a larger analysis of relationships between technology and sociality.
Tonight, taught the first meeting of my summer class, Intro to Soc, Monday and Wednesday nights. I think it went well enough, except for the part where I broke the projector screen, so it wouldn’t retract and was covering up two-thirds of the chalkboard. I also think some of the students have found this blog, based on (1) the knowledge that students google instructors they are about to have and (2) the increase in hits to this blog from google searches for my name. If my hunch is correct, then hello, students.
I am pretty worn out after a long day of prep, computer problems (many hours scanning just three articles), and then talking in front of a room for over two hours. Hope to get some good sleep tonight, and then am looking forward to getting back to my own work after a lot of grading from last term, then some travel (Cape Cod, Vermont, Brooklyn), and then the start-of-teaching vortex.
Also, the soc blogosphere was me sort of freaking out about ASA. Should I really be preparing (mentally, scholastically) already? I signed up for the employment service today, which means I have two months to buy a suit.