A couple of years ago I took a year off from grad school. I returned to my home state of Minnesota and worked as an AmeriCorps volunteer in central Minneapolis, helping poor adults improve their computer skills so that they had a better chance of getting jobs. I lived at my mother and stepfather’s house, my badass New York cat terrorized my mother’s two cats, I read some books, and I did some small good in the world.
When I moved back to Minnesota, I registered to vote as soon as I could. I had previously only voted in New York. But one of the ways you could meet AmeriCorps’ “civic engagement” requirements was to vote. So one night in November, I bundled up, walked about a mile to my polling place, and cast my votes for school board. I’d read up on their positions in the local paper, and then made my final decisions when I was in the booth. I was initially a little confused because Minnesota uses optical scan balloting, not the big old lever-based machines, but otherwise, all went well.
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Posted in Rants September 30, 2009
When I teach, one of the things I try to instill in my students is an ability to reflect critically on their own processes—how they write, how they read, how they think, how they learn. I try to learn about and think through my own processes, too. Turning an eye (or both) back onto the self is never wasted effort.
I spent some time over the past week trying to photograph the places where I work—and to photograph them in such a way that the resulting images reflected the kind of work I do there, or the energy I feel. This was a far more difficult process for me than photography usually is. I felt like I was trying too hard, that my color sense was off, that the shots I took weren’t doing what I usually want my photos to do—namely, reflect how I, personally, see the world around me. That in and of itself was an interesting experience. I don’t regret the time spent in this exercise at all—my dissertation prospectus is still under review, I had to go out and do something to stave off the fear of stalling out—but I find it worrisome that actively trying to capture a very particular set of sensory experiences fell flat in the face of my own internal hype. (Perhaps my high expectations were to blame.)
That said. This is how I work:
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Posted in Dissertation ,Macaulay ,Pedagogy September 21, 2009
Very broadly speaking, my dissertation examines the effect of Cold War-era sexual politics on the composition and publication of the long poems written by American poets of the twentieth century. Before I go into how I got here, a few explanations:
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Posted in Dissertation September 3, 2009
The Class of 2013 plays with photobooth during our “How To Get The Most Out Of Your Mac” Game Show session, 25 August 2009.
Team Awesome (Hunter College)
Team Sandwiches (Queens College, Brooklyn College, and CCNY)
Team Student (Baruch College, CSI)
Posted in Macaulay August 31, 2009
After isolating the questions that have driven and continue to drive my research (hey, I’m in the humanities, figuring out the point of something after the fact is part of the fun! *wink*), this past week I set about compiling an effective starting bibliography for my dissertation. There are any number of ways to go about this, I’m sure, but here’s how I went about determining what sources are relevant to my research.
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Posted in Dissertation August 31, 2009
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