Sample the Web

Actually, I’m now a double-master: A Master of Arts and a Master of Philosophy. That is to say, that I gave up on the Dissertation, the dream of becoming Dr. Sample, Ph.D., and settled for two Masters degrees. Someday, I may turn my eye to that elusive Masters of Science to get a triple Masters, but I seriously doubt it.

Also, Fordham, after you failed for so many years to provide me with the type of moral support one would want from a Doctoral Program, couldn’t you have done me the common decency of getting my name right on your silly Latin diploma? I sent in a card specifying my full name, complete with the III at the end. Thanks for nothing!

// slams door shut on the world of Academentia, once and for all.

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Boing Boing: Life of a writer as a Zork adventure:

> work on dissertation
You go to the kitchen and eat cheese.

This is much too much like the progress I seem to have made on my dissertation over the past several years.

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Well, title to this post, because I’ve been super duper busy. That has not changed, but I’m still waiting for the coffee to take effect this morning, so I thought I’d jump start my synapses by getting a little blogging time in with STW.

As you may recall, I have a new job. I’m loving it. (Actually, while looking for that post on Jason’s site, I tripped across this video that I somehow missed the first time around; It’s great seeing someone other than myself—someone that I know and work with on a daily basis—get really angry about how stupid DRM is in all its forms).

Last weekend, we went to dinner with Marian and Curt to celebrate Marian’s 87th birthday (lol, just kidding, Marian!) and a good time was had by all.

Everything else that is new is mostly stuff: I got a Mac mini that’s hooked up to my TV. I also got a DVD+RW set top player recorder by Cyberhome that I spotted at Best Buy for under $100. I just ordered a new cellphone from Cingular and paid nosebleed prices for the thing, b/c I had just upgraded back in August. It couldn’t be helped though. With my new job, I need a better smarter phone with better handling of email and chat, and the Razr, while I enjoy it as a phone, just isn’t smart enough. I thought about going for the new hot Nokia Symbian phone that Matt Croydon was telling me about a while back, but ultimately, I need a little laptop type thing with a manageable keyboard. I had been thinking the Sidekick 2, but that would have meant switching over to T-Mobile, and would have cost more b/c of the Cingular cancellation fees + cost of getting set up. Ultimately, at dinner one night, Ryan Block of Engadget fame let me fiddle around with a Cingular 8125 he had on hand. The keyboard was manageable and it had all the features I need, so that’s what I ordered. Should be here on Monday, which will be good, as I have to travel to Santa Monica soon and could use something more connected than my Razr by then.

I ended up upgrading to an Aeron for my home office, and it is much better than the Chadwick, which I sent back after both of the ones sent to me proved to be defective. I have been meaning to say this, however: the people at Home Office Solutions are great. I highly recommend them if you are looking for some furniture and/or nice chairs for your home office. I called with problems and they fixed them nicely with no complaints or no unwarranted questions. They shipped both replacement chairs to me quickly, and they even gave me a slight discount on the Aeron for all my trouble. That’s the way customer service should be handled everywhere. Nice accommodating people.

The headache with the chairs, however, had nothing to do with them, but with FedEx. I love FedEx for deliveries, but FedEx picking up packages has been a nightmare for me over the past month and their customer service has been completely and totally incompetent. When we scheduled the first pick up to return the first chair, I was here all day on a Friday, waiting for them to come pick it up; I called several times. “Yes, they’re coming, be patient, ground pickups can come anytime during the day.” As evening creeped on, I called again, and was told that they had my zip code as 10108 instead of 10708 and the pickup had been rescheduled for the following Monday. That was bad enough, because it meant I had a large box sitting in my smallish apartment all weekend, but…

Fast forward two weeks… I set up the pickup for the 2nd chair being returned. Knowing what had gone wrong before, I double check with the woman I spoke with on the phone to make sure all the address details are correct, including the zip code. Yes, they’ll be there tomorrow (another Friday; this was a week ago). So Friday comes and I cannot go out and run any errands, because I am waiting for the FedEx person to come pick up my package. When it hits early afternoon, I start to become concerned again. I call at 3pm. It’s on it’s way. Yes, the zip is correct, it is coming. I call at 4ish. Same thing. If it doesn’t come by 5, I am told, I should call again. I call at 5ish, Oh, no sir, they can pick it up as late as 6, call back after then if it hasn’t come. Yes, the address is correct. After 6, I called again, Oh, no sir, they can come anytime as late as 8pm tonight since it is a ground pickup. Yep, the address is right. Around 7:30, I called again, and this time, I was told, it’s still on it’s way sir. It says here delivery to New York, New York 10108. I absolutely hit the fan. 6 people flat out lied to me and told me that they double-checked the zip. They didn’t. It was still wrong. I asked to speak with a manager. I was passed off to someone who apologized for all this, who gave me the names of every person I had spoken with and who assured me that I would receive a call from dispatch on Monday morning telling me exactly what time they would come for pickup. Monday rolled around. No one called. So I called FedEx. They told me they had no record to call me about anything and that they didn’t do that sort of thing anyway. The man I spoke with said, let me contact the dispatcher and try to get a timeframe for you. He told me they should be coming around noon. No one came at noon. I called back early afternoon around 2 or 3, the person I spoke with said there is no way to tell what time the pickup will happen and the person I spoke with had clearly lied. What the hell is wrong with the phone support for this company? I lost it again, was escalated to a customer service representative, who apologized for everything and all the lies. I listed off the names of all the people who had lied to me and told her they should all be fired, and she sent me a $20 FedEx gift certificate for my troubles.

The guy finally came to pick up the chair at about 4pm that day. Unbelievable…

In other, non-ranting news, I’m also working on my dissertation proposal again with a new advisor. Evidently, there’s a format for dissertation proposals that I’m supposed to be following that no one bothered to tell me about in the two + years before I switched advisors. Isn’t that wonderful?! (Okay, so I still managed to slightly rant). Anyway, I’m happy that things are finally progressing again with that, and I am not nearly as stressed about it all, as it is really, at this point, more of a hobby than anything else.

I’m not going to be Professor Sample. I’m not going to be stuck in Academia making less starting out than I’ve been making over the past 5 years, feeling that I’m earning less than my worth, and I’m not going to have to climb the tenure-track ladder. I’m in a new writing-oriented career that nicely meshes my business, technical, and writing and blogging skills and interests, and I’m happy, as are 99% of the people with which I am working.

It’s very, very refreshing.

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EIMI_Page_001.jpg

Originally uploaded by C.K. Sample, III.

I received an email back from Liveright (via W.W. Norton) today advising me that they will be re-releasing EIMI (yay!), although a publication date has not been set as of yet (boo!). The email was also accompanied by a very polite, yet concise and firm note that I should by no means publish the book online. However, should I secure a publisher for any critical edition I should write, they encouraged me to have the publisher contact them for permissions.

All in all it was a good email, and I was impressed with how quickly they responded and their openness toward my critical treatment and attention toward the book.

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… I hope. All my other convoluted dissertation projects (there have been two of them) have failed.

So now, I am returning to a topic I’ve done before, and examining E.E. Cummings. This should be a much more manageable project, which means that I may actually succeed in becoming Dr. C.K. one of these days.

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Jason waxes poetic in a recent entry about what the blog-life is like: Walden 3 (or “Utopia as business model”). This is definitely the ideal that we’re all shooting for and would like to see happen, but it’s not the reality yet. There is a buzz in the Weblogs, Inc. camp, however, and we’re all very excited to see things actually heading strongly in this direction.

My lifelong dream has been to work as a writer full-time, working out of my home at my own schedule, and perhaps teach a class here and there along the way. If Weblogs, Inc. keeps growing exponentially, I could see this dream becoming a reality sooner than later.

However, the reality of the situation is that it’s not there yet. Last Spring, I was effectively working 5 jobs: my full-time job, my new blog job at TUAW, my article writing for Apple Matters, the class I was teaching at Iona, and attempting to keep my dissertation afloat. Only one of these jobs was a full-time thing, but they all cumulatively amount to a lot of work and stress.

Now, things have shifted, but I’d say I’m even busier. I’m going through a major transition at my day job, which unfortunately means that I am having to give up teaching the class at Iona. I’ve flourished at TUAW and started writing for other in-network blogs, but alongside that an entirely new writing project that I’ve been working on for a while has come up, and I’ve had to put my work over at Apple Matters on hold. I’ve also had to put my dissertation on hold for the summer for this project. Lots of work and stress, even now.

I’m excited about Weblogs, Inc., and what’s going on in that space, but until it reaches a level of profitability beyond where it is now, it’s not the mainstay. It’s a nice extra paycheck to help ease everything, but it’s not the mainstay. Blogging is the labor of love that I’m doing in hopes that it may someday evolve into the mainstay.

I can see the Utopia, I think we will get there, but right now, I’m still working hard in other areas so that I can stay afloat while waiting for that Utopia to arrive.

I’m tugging on the rope with all my team mates, so hopefully we’ll be able to dock on that island soon.

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I think I want to change the topic of my dissertation to a treatise on This Spartan Life. Not really. But, it is interesting. It reminds me of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, as it too re-appropriates the “live” talk show within a virtual world of sorts. I wonder if it these thoughts could be worked into a publishable paper, though…

I think so…

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I wasn’t happy with my last piece for AppleMatters, so I talked to Hadley today and I am taking a sabbatical from the site. I may do a few guest spots on a podcast or two if the opportunity arises, but I’m taking a break from the writing.

I’m writing like a madman everywhere else and starting to feel the stress of it all. I just need to buckle down and work through this month and then in the beginning of July I get a nice Club Med vacation.

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Man. I am tired.

I’m starting to feel that my class is over. I still have to average out their grades, but it is done. No more getting up super early to teach until the Fall. On the other hand, I do have a pre-1800 Lit class to prepare for in the Fall. I want to make a new website for the class with links to all the out-of-copyright versions of the texts we’ll be using. Any recommendations?

There is also other stress. Dissertation proposal and writing. Writing, writing, and writing. All of this is good. But it is all work and stressful.

I don’t know if it is that the season is changing so late this year, but my allergies are kicking my butt this week too. Scratchy eyes and drowsy / sort of out of it in the afternoons.

Also, negative people are draining. Sorry for the downer post.

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I received a phone call from my Dissertation Director yesterday. She likes the track things are currently on and wants me to add a chapter on Dos Passos (which makes perfect sense considering the media issues involved in my topic) and do some slight restructuring. I’m to have a new revised copy of the proposal to her by June 15th.

I’m feeling very stretched to my limit right now, but I think that will change dramatically once I am finished with the Iona class I’ve been teaching. The last class was today and the final is on Monday. This weekend I will largely be preoccupied with grading portfolios. Wish me luck.

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I think I’ve finally broken through the block where I’ve been stuck. I now have a solid eight pages of discussion laying down the critical framework for my study. I just read through this introductory bit with Kristin, we discussed it, and from her response, it seems that I am finally managing to get all the little bits that have been hiding, ensconced in the folds of my brain out onto the paper. Meaning is being communicated. I have about 5 more rough pages written, where I begin discussing how I will go about applying this critical study to the examination of the different authors and texts which I have chosen. I just need to flesh out those pages and will soon (hopefully) have something approximating the 20 to 30 page draft I need of the proposal so that I can submit it to my mentor and begin moving ahead with the project. I would like to accomplish this in the next week. Wish me luck.

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The key to writing is to write. Today, I put all my notes aside. I stopped reading through all the stacks of papers and books about the authors I am writing about. I stopped thinking about the theory behind my discussion, which has been spinning around in my head for months upon months. I sat down and started writing about the texts I will be examining. I just started loosely writing about the authors. I just finished two solid pages on Virginia Woolf, and started working on Ellison.

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I feel trapped by my dissertation right now. I’m not enjoying it at this point. Early on, I was enjoying it and feeling like it was going some where, but after revision after revision and repositioning after repositioning, I find myself now writing about something entirely different from what I had originally envisioned and I have no passion for it anymore. The only reason I want to work on my dissertation anymore is so that I can get it done and move on to being Dr. C.K.. There’s something wrong with that I think. I still want to teach. I still enjoy literature: reading it, discussing it, and writing about it. I enjoy being a student and learning new things. However, I am loathing my current place in the academic process. Much of this process feels antithetical to the processes I go through when I am doing all the things I just listed above.

When I read a book—it may sound romanticized—but when I read a really good book, I feel like I’ve learned something more about the soul of humanity, more about what this whole life thing is all about. When I write articles about literature, I feel like I am an explorer uncovering some secret in the text that we’ve all overlooked until now, and that feeling is exciting. When I am teaching, and teaching well, I feel the energy and knowledge clicking in the room. I can tell when the students get it and when they want to get it, and I can see the part I play in that process, and it makes me feel good about life and sure that I am meant to be an educator and that my chosen path is the right one for me.

Whenever I work on my dissertation now, though, I feel despair; I feel defeated, stunted, and un-energized; I feel like I should have remained in Art and done away with all this schooling years ago. When I look at everything else in my life, how joyous and blessed my life is in every other area, I feel like I should just quit and abandon this one energy-draining life goal.

What I need to do is figure out a way to ignore these thoughts and feelings, and just get it done.

Update: Kristin came home. I told her about this post, and she reminded me that I bought myself a copy of Worlds of Warcraft the other day, which she has hidden and I do not get until my proposal is approved. So, there’s one good reason to continue plugging onward…

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This post over at Boing Boing by Cory might prove useful for a class discussion, focused around how we write in a technological age. Here’s Cory’s bits:

Steven Johnson (author of the fantastic Mind Wide Open and other books) has written a fascinating essay about his new creative process, which involves a suite of tools that store his notes and works in unstructured databases, and tease out and suggest subtly connected ideas, so that as he writes, his computer jams with him, suggesting neat tangents to his subjects. It’s a great example of good computer-human interaction, where computers are used to programatically count and compare quantifiable elements (word and phrase frequencies) and human beings are used to pass judgement on the output of the computers. People are good at understanding and crap at counting; computers are just the reverse.

Cory then links to the New York Times Essay by Steven, which includes this interesting section touching upon the “next step” of computer and human collaborative writing:

The other day I ran a search that included the word ‘’sewage” several times. Because the software knows the word ”waste” is often used alongside ‘’sewage” it directed me to a quote that explained the way bones evolved in vertebrate bodies: by repurposing the calcium waste products created by the metabolism of cells.

That might seem like an errant result, but it sent me off on a long and fruitful tangent into the way complex systems — whether cities or bodies — find productive uses for the waste they create. . . .

Now, strictly speaking, who is responsible for that initial idea? Was it me or the software? It sounds like a facetious question, but I mean it seriously. Obviously, the computer wasn’t conscious of the idea taking shape, and I supplied the conceptual glue that linked the London sewers to cell metabolism. But I’m not at all confident I would have made the initial connection without the help of the software. The idea was a true collaboration, two very different kinds of intelligence playing off each other, one carbon-based, the other silicon.

I wonder how this whole equation would change if you took it off the desktop and reoriented it towards the blog. How many bloggers use their sites as a sort of notebook of bits and pieces they find interesting and think they may use at a latter time? I know I use this blog in that fashion, often riffing in the rough on ideas I will write in a more polished manner for AppleMatters, an article, or perhaps my dissertation. Not only that, but I also actively use this website as a note-taking database. This very post is an example of me riffing on some ideas that I’ve read that I am considering repurposing and presenting to my class. I also probably search my own website more than anyone else who reads it. I remember some half thought that I may have blogged about and I run a quick search to find either a specific post, or a series of inter-related posts on the same topic.

I also have been a long-time user of DEVONthink PE, which is mentioned by Steven in his Times essay, and I have a good percentage of the research and notes for my dissertation plugged into that database for exactly the same sort of functionality that Steven and Cory are talking about. Nevertheless, I think blogging is changing the way I write more than any of these other forms of human computer interaction, simply because whatever I bounce around here has the potential of being bounced around the entire blogosphere. This means, I’m not only working with computers, but with other people with their other computers, and then we get into the very interesting field of writing as a social act. If you’re interested in exactly how interesting such a process can be, I recommend that you read Invention as a Social Act by Karen Burke LeFevre, which happens to be one of the few books on rhetoric from my studies at Illinois State University to which I continually find myself returning (in fact, I think it is the only one of those books which I still possess). This all, in turn, ties in nicely with Bakhtinian ideas of discourse. There are more voices in each word I use than my own, so that the computer’s response with a loose connection that I had not previously seen is actually a reverberation of the discourse of others within my own words.

Okay, that’s enough ranting about this. My head cold is seriously impeding my ability to think coherently on this any longer.

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Keeping this blog closed Friday-Sunday is proving to be very productive in terms of my dissertation. I have the rough makings of a passable proposal with four clearly written pages establishing the critical groundwork and structure for the project and enough notes to flesh out the rest by next week.

The proposal still needs work, but it’s more progress than I’ve made in a while towards becoming Dr. C.K. Sample, III.

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For the foreseeable future, I’m taking a partial blog-sabbatical so I can focus more attention on my dissertation. Posts will only be appearing Monday through Thursday.

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So, I took a vacation day today. Tomorrow, the official Christmas break begins and no more work until January 3rd. This is one of the best features of working in Academia.

I was supposed to be working on my dissertation today, but last night I came home to Kristin sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor picking up utensils that had fallen out of one of the drawers. Our cabinets are pretty old and the back of the drawer had come loose, causing the bottom to fall out. Much too much of today entailed a trip to Home Depot and drilling and screwing. However, the end result is a fully repaired drawer. I always enjoy fixing things too. I should have been a carpenter…

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I saw this on exhibit when I first visited New York, before moving here. I purchased a print poster of the piece (and I was reading Berger’s Way’s of Seeing at the time). The text is from the beginning of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I just woke up and frantically had to search for this image on-line, because it is an image that may prove quite useful in my dissertation’s discussion of text (in a post-structuralist sense; everything is a text) and of art, the simultaneous intertextuality and inter-connected narratives of books, paintings, pictures, films, and music as texts alongside the insurmountable differences in form between these various types of texts. They cannot exist in the same way as any of the other forms. In any case, I found it.

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I’m currently reading the introduction to Robert Stam’s Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Parallax : Re-Visions of Culture and Society) for my dissertation. Stam does a good job of contextualizing Bakhtin’s writing in light of other major critics of the twentieth century, highlighting their similarities and differences. Here’s an interesting bit:

…Bakhtin foregrounds the human capacity to mutually “author” one another, the ability to dialogically intersect on the frontiers between selves. One becomes “oneself” not by shedding others to disinter an originary essence, but rather by revealing oneself to another, through another, with another’s help. (6)

And here is another:

Human beings are not simply born into language as a master code; they grow into it, and help shape it, as woman or man, worker or boss, peasant or landowner. Every apparently unified linguistic or social community is characterized by heteroglossia, whereby language becomes the space of confrontation of differently oriented social accents, as diverse “sociolinguistic consciousnesses” fight it out on the terrain of language. (8)

This second thought leads into the following, which reminds me of our current administration and the divided politics of contemporary America:

While the dominant class strives to make the sign “uniaccentual” and to endow it with an eternal, supraclass character, the oppressed, especially when they are conscious of their oppression, strive to deploy language for their own liberation. To speak of dialogue without speaking of power, in a Bakhtinian perspective, is to speak meaninglessly, in a void. (8)

This has me thinking about something that I haven’t figured out how to, as of yet, fully articulate. Something having to do with the blogosphere’s politics and blogging as subversive language.

Work Cited

Stam, Robert. “Introduction.” Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. (Parallax : Re-Visions of Culture and Society). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins U P, 1989. 1-25.

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There are several moments in time that made me start thinking about the issues that eventually became the raw ideas behind my dissertation. The first occurred when I read James Joyce’s Ulysses in college (and I might add that it was casual summer reading; I was never required to read it until I was well into my Master’s program at ISU). In “Cyclops,” the narrator, thinking about Dignam’s death, the funeral, contemplating life and death, et-cetera, so-forth, and so-on, imagines a séance to call forth Dignam, and in this imagined-séance the following occurs:

It was then queried whether there were any special desires on the part of the defunct and the reply was: We greet you, friends of earth, who are still in the body. Mind C.K. doesn’t pile it on. It was ascertained that the reference was to Mr Cornelius Kelleher, manager of Messrs H. J. O’Neill’s popular funeral establishment, a personal friend of the defunct, who had been responsible for the carrying out of the interum arrangements. (12.360-66)

Now, I am sure if your name is John, Mary, Michael, or some other regular incantation of this world, the appearance of your name in a novel or article is a semi-regular occurrence and you, most likely, give it very little thought, if any. I, on the other hand, was very strongly affected by this first sighting of “C.K.” in literature. My name is not Cornelius Kelleher. It is actually Clinton Kennedy Sample, III, but I have always been called and answered to C.K. That is my name. The other longer version is only for special documents like those involving taxes, lawsuits, and weddings.

Reading my name in Ulysses removed me totally from the text, from my process of reading, for a moment, but then it pulled me more forcibly back into the experience of reading, as I suddenly had a point of identification with the text. I wrote about this experience in a paper, entitled “Selfish Readers: Mrs. ‘The 20th Century Reader’ Dalloway-Bloom,” which I presented as part of the Names and Naming Society Special Session of the South Central Modern Language Association Conference held in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on November 2, 2001. In that paper, I wrote:

At once I think, “There I am,” and with a smile I remark to myself that it is a just comment about me, that I do tend to pile it on at times. Simultaneously, I realize that this “C.K.” mentioned by Dignam’s ghost in an imagined séance in Ulysses is not me at all and was never meant to be me, that what is said by this fictional ghost has nothing whatsoever to do with real-life me. Perhaps, this in turn leads to a pondering over my name itself, how my name, the signifier for me, the signified, has nothing whatsoever to do with real-life me, how ultimately a “real-life me” is unknowable. Yet, these contending reactions are doubled in my current action of writing this paper, where I realize that this act of writing connects me and this “C.K.” in a way parallel to my original response upon first reading myself into Joyce’s text, and now in spending so much of this text discussing myself, I self-reprimandingly remind myself not to pile it on, again mirroring and doubling my connections with the text.

Cute, and it played well to my audience, but not as critically sharp as it should be. In the paper, I go on to examine how the characters of Leopold Bloom and Mrs. Dalloway model this type of identification for the reader, by actively looking for points of identification between their surroundings and their inner-thought-processes. These characters actively read their surroundings and the occurrences of their lives as part of an ongoing process of self-examination. I then look at how I participate in this reading-as-self-examination in my criticism. I also examine how both Harold Bloom and Jacques Derrida use similar personal points of identification as their critical entryways to the text. The problem with the way I formed my argument in this paper was that it risked the pretension of placing myself on the same plane as Bloom and Derrida.

What I was really trying to examine, and what I am currently aiming my dissertation towards, is the ways that writing, reading, and criticism as twentieth century discourses become part of a larger process of self-examination on the part of the individuals participating in these discourses. This is the first and primary point of my dissertation, but there are other issues involved that make this self-examination more prevalent, I believe, in the twentieth than in the previous centuries…

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