thevillagecharlatan

I wonder about the future sometimes. With the benefit of hindsight, will I disparage my interests, calling them “phases”? “God, remember my risotto phase? I was so into making new risotto recipes. That creamy tomato one really was a triumph, but how silly it was of me to concentrate on such a narrow and geographically restricted branch of cookery? I certainly mastered it, though.” As an aspiring academic, it’s important to establish interests that have some staying power. The year I spent mastering zombie film discourse doesn’t feel like such a good investment anymore, but it does still come up at parties and interdisciplinary  clusters. (Another benefit to that year is all the Primo Levi and abjection theory I got to read.) And what about this year? Cracks, ruins, immanence, rogue public architecture? I think I like these things but will they be tired and boring later on, like an old lover whose presence is an intolerable discomfort? Come to think of it, I don’t have any old lovers like that. I either talk to my old lovers or I don’t. At any rate, I hope to be Facebook friends with my old paper and conference topics in a few years. 

If you are attempting to excel in a competitive field, it’s difficult not to compare yourself to your friends in that same field. My two buds and I have been exchanging personal statements for editing, the clincher here being that we’re all applying (for different temporal and regional specializations) to the same department of the same school. I wonder who will win? We are all pretty good. Professors like us. We have outside lives that indicate that we are young scholars of considerable promise. One of us is a demon at online Scrabble. Another of us reads Latin and Anglo-Norman French. Another of us was nominated to sit on an important search committee in our department. Who will it be? Will we all get in? Will we all get generous funding packages? Will one or more of us go home with a broken heart at the end of the day? Perhaps I don’t really want to know.

Tonight I seek to pull myself up, up, up and out of the gaping chasm of self-doubt and into the realm of Intelligent and Productive Movers and Shakers. I am psyching myself out for good. I am finishing my personal statement for these PhD programs. Why are these statements so contrived, sycophantic, and generally magrissimo? Why can I not make my personality and interests into a natural conduit for What Professors Want? I am very relaxed about this until I start working on the damn statement and realize, “You’re going to mislead all the faculty of ____’s Art History department into thinking that you are a misdirected, drooling ignoramus who wears ceramic scarab beetle brooches.” What I really want the personal statement to say is, “Dear Faculty, I am adorable and not too ass-kissy, just ass-kissy enough. Academia is a personality game and I have the charm, charisma, and attention problems to get me through dumb lectures and faculty meetings for thirty years or until tenure, whichever comes first. And seriously, I have Ideas! Ideas which will turn into Books! Books which will have both scholarly AND prurient appeal! Seriously seriously, don’t waste your time on any of the other applicants, those milquetoast caucasian ladies of leisure. You want THIS lady of leisure! Me! Me! Meeeeeee!” I think this, plus a bulleted list of new interpretive terms I’ve invented (”seismic viewing”, anyone?) should suffice. 

Someone gave me a specific blog writing assignment for today, but I’m going to put that off because it’s not a good day for me to be punchy. It can happen tomorrow or the next day. Right now I am thinking about the utility of putting things off. Three or four important things are hanging over my head today (including said blog entry assignment) and I am Full of Emotions about Impending End of Marriage. Are there places on the Internet that talk about the Emotions commonly experienced during a period such as this? Is it common knowledge that you feel like a failure? Like a sad Divorced Daddy who eats lean Cuisine and takes the kids to Busch Gardens? Is it common knowledge that, no matter how great your friends and loved ones are when Christmas comes, you’ll probably want to throw yourself off a bridge with tinsel tied to your legs? Suicide Christmas Tinsel Fish. Ugh.

Are you spending the Christmas or other holidays with someone you love? Are you excited about this? Is your house clean? Will you celebrate the season with some hot appetizers at Chili’s? I have some suggestions for you. If you’re on the prowl for hot chicks, the Chix Crispers with honey-tang mustard dippin’ sauce should fix you up right. The zesty Onion Fuck Burger, sizzled by our sizzliest topless chefs, contains the right mix of savory-juicy and sweet-slicky-onion-y liquid tastes to make your mouth totally explode. Want to put something saltier in your warm, slack holiday maw? We recommend the Awesome Blossom, whose fried fingers spiral out from its florid center like the thrusting stamen of a steaming jungle plant. Try it with creamy ranch dressing. To extend the cream all the way to the end of your meal, choose the Bourbon Butter Brown-Sugar Blondie as your final thrust. Buttering your tongue with its sizzling blondness will rocket you so hard into the stratosphere that you’ll be glad we’re here to do the dishes. Because you’ll be fucked. Here’s to the goodness of eating out.

The cookie count for this holiday is at an all-time high. My rich boss has such a caring banking team that they send him 3 dozen fresh-baked cookies every year. A half-dozen of those have already made it to my insides, and there’s no sign of abatement on that front. It’s probably quite Bridget Jones of me to complain about my holiday dessert consumption but I want the world to know that this happens to everyone, not just to zany British singletons whose weight is exaggerated for American female viewers. Do you know she weighed 119 pounds in the print version of Bridget Jones’ Diary and 140 pounds in the film version? Clearly someone freaking out about weighing 119 pounds would constitute an entirely different movie. 140 pounds is the mean weight of the average American woman, so they had to to balloon Renee Zelwegger’s body to be commensurate with at least MOST ladies. You know, because no one wants to watch a movie where some skinny bitch smokes all day and talks about how fat she is. How French is that?

Good afternoon, friends. Have you been thinking about life as an Art History graduate student today? Thinking about the ins and outs of processing all permutations of visual culture? About writing and its publics? About the incommensurability of art and discourse? Good for you. Today my life consists of something else: namely, the beginning stages of the termination of my marriage. Hence the over-use of “of” clauses. This is the end. This end was confirmed in therapy this very morning. Doesn’t this add another layer of my intrigue to my already unutterably complex, fascinating life? I wonder what the statistics are for graduate students ending their marriages as they begin stellar careers in academia. The tenure of most people’s mental health is inversely proportionate to the amount of time spent in the academy and I attribute part of the death of my marriage to this fact. There were other problems too. Marriage death will probably come up again in this blog, but for now I am ditching the afternoon’s work to sublimate these problems through obsessive cleaning.

I have an ambivalent relationship to winter. It gets equated with authenticity in my mind, because I grew up in Florida and we all know that nothing in Florida is real. When the sky turns that special gray and it becomes inhospitable outside, it feels so terrible that I think, “this must be what it’s like to have a Protestant work ethic, wear unfashionable yet practical clothing, put special snow things on and in your car, and speak with a mid-Atlantic accent.” All of these things are foreign to me. They are the objects of vacation. They are the accoutrements of a Climatic Other. They are what Kracauer is talking about when he says that modern persons are interested in travel because it provides “a new sensorial economy of modernity”. Something different. Bare trees. Brick buildings. Clothing lined with fur and filled with feathers. The un-ironic enjoyment of hot toddies. I’m not used to that stuff.

I’m about to go to a dinner at a friend’s place. She is a PhD student in my department and has no central heat. I hope to sit very close to the food, which promises to be hot and delicious. I must say that it takes some kind of animal-machine fusion cajones to make dinner for 8 people during grading and seminar paper week. Clearly there are things I can learn from this person, like how to not garret it out during this period - how to not rely on beautiful women bringing you dinner (separate occasion! Oh, yesterday, I miss you already) as you waste your evenings making sure all your footnotes are complete, listening to Glenn Gould on bad speakers. Anyway, I’m going to keep thinking about the food and this new 1980s flower-embroidered sweater that I can sport while fighting off the chill in my dinner friend’s ancient apartment. Will try and direct my attention away from the fact that my English fluency is down by two-thirds due to sleep deprivation and shut-in-related vitamin D deficiency. 

I’ve set up a litany of prizes with which I will be rewarded when I finish these papers. The  rewards include one or more of the following: Merleau-Ponty book, throw pillows for my couch (shut up), Mexican minivacation, a trip to the grocery store, a new mop, exercise, time to finish reading dyke novel, and time to look up different writings on “immanence” to prep for pregnancy symposium panel. I know - so hot. Right now I’m wasting time imagining how much I will enjoy these prizes rather than working on the paper whose content I have mapped out almost completely. Time to fill in the rest of that outline. The argument is good, it’s most of the way written, got the image citations, etc etc etc. Go to it! Stop looking up sex ad abbreviations on the internet and making plans for post-end-of-semester outings with friends! And def. stop putting peanut butter on Kashi bars and eating it that way b/c you think that hot food is too much of a distraction.