Nice, encouraging piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education today, by a historian turned freelance writer turned professor. As I’m trying to figure out what comes post-dissertation, I’m trying hard not to see things as black and white (i.e. “Choice A will rule out your ability to do B or C for the rest of your life”), and stories like this one make me feel a little more at ease…
E-mailed a draft of my first dissertation chapter off to my advisors earlier today, and now I’m fighting off a low, gut-level fear that it’s no good, that I’ve wasted the past two weeks of writing. Of course, I know that’s not true, not one bit, but I feel it nonetheless.
Interestingly, this feeling is in the same family as the feeling of having written a bit of computer code, and then leaving it for others to use…I know it works for me when I use it and I know how I think it should be used, but I’m concerned that the other people using it will come across bugs that I didn’t anticipate. Of course, I know that in the end the user testing process results in a better product, but I still feel nervous whenever other people first start playing with it.
So I guess I could think of this as user testing, except the product in question is the argument in my dissertation…if Ron, Bruce or Trevor find anything wrong, then I’ll just start debugging.
[Yeah, can’t you just tell that I’m more confident coding than writing these days?]
Funniest thing of the weekend: Digger and I signed the Ketubah (the Jewish marriage contract) as witnesses, in Hebrew and English. I spend way too much time practicing my signature in Hebrew, so I’d make sure I wrote it well. So the time comes, I step up to sign this simply gorgeous piece of art, and I’m so concerned about the pen slipping, leaving a jagged line across the contract of Ken and Lauren’s love, that I wind up signing really small. Really small.
During the ceremony, maybe fifteen minutes later, the rabbi reads the Ketubah. He gets to the end, and reads “This document was signed by two witnesses, Baruch ben Aryeh [Digger] and…”
There’s maybe a two second pause as he tries to resolve my scrawls into either a hebrew or an english name, failing on both counts.
“…a second witness.”
Apparently, I’m going to be known as “Second Witness” to Ken and Lauren for the rest of my life. sigh
Heading out of town for the weekend for the last wedding of the summer – this time, it’s my friends Ken and Lauren. I’ve known Ken since freshman year at Hopkins, and he, Dave, Digger, Liz and I used to hang out late at night lamenting the single life and the plight of the “nice guy.” These days, Digger is married to Liz (with a kid on the way!), Ken’s wedding is this weekend – as for Dave and I, apparently there’s a pool as to which of us is going to be next, and it’s even money either way.
I can’t wait to spend the weekend with the bunch of them.
…I was sleeping when my housemate Livia knocked on my door and told me to turn on the TV. I remember seeing one of the towers already in flame, then the airplane hit the second. After that, I can’t distinguish what I saw life from the newscasts later. It’s all a blur of images and panic.
I remember the ticker at the bottom of CNN, that damned ticker, telling me in short, terse sentences that a bomb had gone off in DC, that all manner of disasters were happening. I think they were printing any rumor they could get their hands on, and I was hungrily drinking them up.
I remember sitting at my computer, hitting “reload” over and over, trying to get the Washington Post or NY Times up on my screen, that scary as hell minimalist front page they put up that essentially just said “Terrorist Attacks.” I remember reaching desperately, compulsively, for any news I could get my hands on, my own way of trying to feel in control of events that were so clearly uncontrollable. Eric, Livia, Sarah and I, entrenched on the sofa, eating food from Sticky Rice and watching the news until we couldn’t keep our eyes open any longer.
Most of all, I remember going on to campus, to the lecture that was supposed to be happening in a large auditorium in Kennedy Hall. I remember the silence on campus, the huddled knots of students listening at radios, the frightened looks. There was little fear for ourselves at that moment, feeling safe and protected in our isolated corner of upstate NY, but fear for family and friends in New York and DC, fear for anybody who lived somewhere big enough to be a target.
I remember the stunned feeling, realizing that whatever happened next, it was going to be different from anything we’d lived through before.
I so want to teach this class…c’mon somebody, hire me so I can teach this class.
Well, I actually finished it Sunday. Started Saturday night, finished Sunday night. I’d forgotten how good it feels to just sit down and get sucked into the world of a book, letting it pull you along.
I need to read more.
As for the book itself, it was a great read, in the vein of In Cold Blood if a little more expansive (necessarily, due to the subject matter). As a work of popular history, it’s decent, but as a piece of narrative, Erik Larson hits the ball out of the park. My only complaint was that I already knew the history of the Fair, so when Larson would try to create suspense by withholding someone’s name, I would just think, “Come on, man!” (case in point: referring to Ferris for three chapters as an unnamed engineer from Pittsburgh so as to not give away the kicker that the first Ferris wheel was build for the Columbian Exposition).
On a related note, I’d forgotten how malleable my writing style is, and how susceptible I am to influence by whatever I’m currently reading. Today, I very distinctly felt my prose pick up the pace and become more lively, and it’s got to be at least in part due to the fact that I’m reading a lot of non-academic writing lately. Lesson: it’s good to keep reading stuff that doesn’t directly bear on one’s dissertation, because it’s in the cross-pollination of ideas and styles that really interesting work is done.
Favorite bit written so far today:
Due to this real-time editing, the very placement of the VCR in the viewing room wasn’t obvious. Because the VCR was usually located by the television set and remote controls were still years away, this often meant sitting within arm’s reach of the television, not the most comfortable way to watch a program. One of the early concerns of videophiles, in fact, was how far the VCR could be from the television set and thus how long a cable could be used to connect the two without signal degradation, explicitly so that “you [could] put the unit next to your chair and facilitate editing out commercials.” Several videophiles configured their homes in this way, with the VCR controls easily accessible from an armchair across the room from the television set.
When’s the last time you thought of putting a VCR anywhere but near a TV?
So, Jenny and I are walking back after a massive walk (more on that, with pictures, in another post), and we stop off to pick up the Sunday Times and some milk at the corner newsstand.
Now, also on that corner is an italian ice stand called Uncle Louie G’s (say it out loud, it’s funnier), and there are always, always at least three people standing in line in front of this place. Middle of summer, dead of winter, no matter. There’s always a line. It’s that good.
So, we’re walking past Uncle Louie G’s, and we hear that telltale song that anybody in the Outer Boroughs knows viscerally – da-da-da-da-da-da-dum-da-dum, da-dum-da-dum-da-dummm-dum. Yep, that’s right, a Mr. Softee truck, which had the cojones to pull up right in front of Uncle Louie G’s. Jenny and I are wondering if we’re gonna see a frozen dessert throw-down, when the Mr. Softee driver, a twenty-something guy who’s laughing his ass off, waves at everyone in line and pulls away. I’m laughing, the people in line are unfazed, and an elderly man on the corner looks at me and shrugs with a playful smile in his eye.