(I realized, upon rereading and reflection, that this is a companion post to an earlier entry, “In Which I Don’t Understand What I’m Reading, At All, And the Footnote Is Useless.” This was certainly planned and has nothing at all to do with my terrible memory and tendency to repeat stories like some cliché cartoon […]
I’m bored. I’m bored with my writing and research, and I feel like I shouldn’t be. After all, I’m meant to treasure the time I can find for research, a professional activity both necessary for my survival in academia and, if I take the words we use to describe it seriously, a rare commodity I […]
I have a terrible memory. Sometimes my forgetfulness is an inconvenience, resulting in a missed credit card payment or a forgotten birthday. Sometimes it’s a professional embarrassment, because I really can’t remember the plot to any Dickens novel. (They all involve some sort of impoverished street urchin, right? And a blowhard middle-aged man with a […]
When I was in elementary school I attended Girl Scout camp one summer and completely hated it. I was an introverted homebody as a kid and not designed for the instant kumbaya-style friendships that Hayley Mills movies train camp-goers to expect. The end of the summer found me not crying and swapping homemade lanyards with […]
I taught two courses as a graduate student: Global Modernism and Its Successors: An Introduction and Children’s Literature. Both were full of useful screw-ups, but let’s focus on the louder failure. Global Modernism and Its Successors, a course not of my choosing or design, was assigned to all aspiring English PhDs at my university. That […]
Back in the days when Pluto was a planet and skinny jeans were not yet a diabolical spark in some sadist’s eye, I was a literature major at American University, and I had a great advisor. I remember visiting his office hours a lot, toting along a tear-stained draft of some paper I had absolutely no […]
Come here often? Because I don’t. My absence is, in part, a consequence of moving into a Brand New House. This is all very exciting. I’m comfortable with literally building a foundation here in Connecticut since I am officially a Difficult-To-Get-Rid-Of Tenured Person now. So Danny and I became the proud owners of a lot […]
When I was an undergraduate at American University, I wrote my honors capstone on nineteenth-century women’s poetry and the specter of infanticide. I had not yet learned to use words like “specter” to signal, aggressively, that I AM A SERIOUS ACADEMIC, so I probably communicated that idea with much less snobbery. I also hadn’t developed […]
My mom died unexpectedly in 2006, when I was in graduate school. I’d just finished up my second year as a PhD student at Rice, and I’d submitted my seminar papers: one on Rochester and syphilis and another on deferral and serialization in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. I was a TA for a section of […]
Why hello there! It’s been awhile. I could list the many reasons I haven’t been blogging, but (a) I am a staunch opponent of busy porn, and (b) we all know I had plenty of time to watch all of Season 1 of Queer Eye AND to consider the many think-pieces about whether or not Antoni […]
Failing Loudly 