One Down, Two To Go

So, I got an A on that paper I was writing last time I updated.  Yay!  I haven’t seen the teacher’s comments, but I know that to get in A in the class we were required to get an A both for our participation and our paper. I didn’t think my paper was very good at all, but I’ll take it! An A in my first grad class! 

Today I finish my second paper, the research-based seminar paper, and then pack up to fly home.  That’s right – tomorrow I’m going back to Georgia for TWO WEEKS!!!  I’m so exciting. I’m so pathetically Southern, and I didn’t even realize until until I was relegated to Jersey for grad school. I’m going to eat me some good barbeque, fried chicken, collard greens, grits, WAFFLE HOUSE (oh god, how I miss hash browns), and sweet tea. I’m definitely visiting Athens, my college town and favorite town ever, and of course I’m pumped to see my family. 

I mean, I do have that one paper due Christmas Eve (ugh), but at least I’ll be at home with people I love. I can’t wait. I’m so excited I can’t even put it into words!   

ps – there has been knitting, but I have to finish this paper before I can show it to you. pray i finish soon!  

Today’s Bloggy Goodness

Yup, I’m supposed to be writing a paper. No, I don’t want to. So, hi!

I’ve been doing some thinking about grad school while writing this paper. What I’ve decided is that I love being a grad student – who doesn’t love a job description that says: read, think deep thoughts, write them down, repeat?

What I HATE is writing historiography. I want to do my OWN work, not analyze the shit out of others’. I want to visit archives, dig through documents, and write up what I find. For example: my seminar paper? I love it. LOVE IT. My historiography papers? Well, I’m supposed to be writing one right now. There ya go. I know, I know – historiography is important. I use it in my research-based work so other people know where what I’m writing fits in. Being able to analyse others’ work is a valuable and necessary skill. It’s just that I don’t like it. I like research, I don’t like historiography.

You better not smirk at me when I say that, either, or suggest that I chose it for myself and need to suck it up and get it done. Look at what happened to this guy when he made that mistake.

Ahhhh…

Ok, freakout over – for now, at least. I spent a good portion of the weekend – at least 12 hours – at the NYPL and found the magic documents which will make writing my seminar paper possible! I also had a presentation in class today about it that I think went well…other than the fact that I was so nervous/hyped up on coffee that I kept stumbling over my words. Whatever – I have a paper! I wrote 5 pages of the 15 already, so now it’s a matter of adding 10 more pages, slapping an intro and conclusion on, and I’m done! I can’t start finishing it until Saturday, though – my Technology, Culture, and History historiography paper is due Friday and I haven’t written a word. I’ll be working on it pretty solidly from tommorrow until it’s due. If I’m lucky, I might even have a good draft by Wednesday night!

Anyway, enough of the school talk. I know it bores y’all. Unfortunately I don’t have any knitting pictures to offer as pittance, but I can hopefully placate you with the NYC pictures I got. Looky:

The NYPL decorated their main hallway for me!

And Patience (or is it Fortitude?) is getting into the Christmas spirit, too.

Macy’s also had some pretty spectacular lights in Herald Square.

I’m afraid that our tree and our lights display pale in comparison.

Ah, well. We’re grad students. What are ya gonna do?

We like our setup ok, or at least we do until we get a decently sized apartment and can have a normal sized tree. Gotta say, though, I do enjoy making the runty tree look as ricidulous and over decorated as possible.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got. I’m sitting here, Bailey’s-spiked egg nogg in hand, Xmas music playing (anyone here like South Park? Ever heard Merry Fucking Christmas? Just sayin’.), and thinking of school – even Christmas spirit can’t make that guilt melt away. I’m going back to work, y’all. Happy Xmas season!

Modern Rumplestiltskin

I feel like that chick in Rumplestiltskin. You know, the one who has to sit in a room with piles of hay and spin them into gold? Same thing – replace “hay” with “books” and the situations are practically identical. Ugh. I don’t know whether I’ve had too much coffee or too little, but it’s one of the two and I’m having a hard time with my spinning today.

Femiknits and the Papers of DOOM

Ok, so I’m totally going to be blogging about school with appalling frequency between now and Christmas. Forgive me. I’m a grad student and the end of the semester is disturbingly close. If you’re lucky I’ll have some knitting to sneak in from time to time (hello, perfect procrastinating activity!), but it’s mostly going to be boring details about my progress on three papers. Starting now.

I’ll start by giving you the basics. I’m taking three classes this semester, and each of them has a final paper of roughly 15-20 pages due in mid-to-late December. Two of the papers are historiographies, which basically amount to writing some argument about the history of history. I’ll take a few books, find the strong and weak points of each, pick out the arguments, and write a paper where I make the books argue with each other or make some kind of observation about the work that remains to be done to give a full picture of the particular thing I’m studying. The third paper is not a historiography; it’s the one I’ve been nattering away about and visiting the NYPL for. This one is a seminar paper, and requires lots of primary source research to make an independant argument. I can’t rely exclusively on other scholars’ works for this.

Now for details about individual papers:

Technology, Culture, and History paper: Ugh, it’s due too soon! December 14th, to be exact. I haven’t started it yet, though I’ve had some idea of the topic since the beginning of the semester. It’s one of the historiographies, and I want to make an argument about the different authors’ perceptions of modernity. How did they define modernity? What were the markers of a modern society? Was modernity desirable? Etc. I’m going to use Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization, Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space, and David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old. Now that I think about it, I should start rereading those books soon so I can get started writing. It’ll probably take me a week to assemble quotes and think of my argument, and another week to write it. It’s the only assignment due all semester – 50% discussion, 50% paper for the final grade – so I feel I need to get at least a B+ to get an A in the class.

The Making of Race in Latin America: Don’t know exactly when this one is due, but it’s due relatively late. Like, around Xmas day late. Yay! Thus, it will be the last paper I worry about. It is also a historiography, and I want to look at the transformation of race relations in Cuba between The War of Independence and the beginning of Fidel Castro’s regime. I’m interested to see what, if anything, changed in the ways that different races were defined, and how these different races interacted with each other. Did the ways in which people identified themselves change? Were perceptions of racial categories reflected in social or political structures, and did these structures undergo any significance changes? Particularly interesting to me are Castro’s assertions that race did not exist, and that Cuba was a racism-free society. In this regard, I’d like to draw parallels between Brazil and Cuba, and see if the scholarship for each country poses similar questions or draws similar conclusions about the realities of these race-free claims. I think I’ll find that both nations made these claims and in both cases the claims are widely regarded as myths. If my suspicion is correct, I want to investigate why these claims were made: what purpose did they serve? Who made the claims and why? How have they shaped race relations? I haven’t gotten all my books in yet, but once I do figuring out where I want to go from here will be much easier. For now, though, I just know that changing race relations in Cuba in the twentieth century and a comparison between the way historians have written about the similar claims of Castro’s regime and Brazil’s racial democracy are things I want to address in the final paper. It’s a big topic, and I may cut it back to the Castro’s Cuba v. Brazil comparison. We’ll see….after I’ve finished everything else.

The last paper, for my seminar class, is a MONSTER. Seriously, my bibliography has about 15 books on it and I’ve also done a lot of primary source research at the NYPL for it. This paper is all about how women’s relationships to technology affected their involvement in world government, disarmament, and peace movements. It’s really complex – I’m starting to think it’s too complex – and I don’t yet know if I can write the awesome paper I proposed to my prof before Thanksgiving. Yikes! I really just need to keep my nose in my books, think think think, and write write write. I should also go back for some archiving soon. I never did make it to the NYPL this weekend. I decided instead to spend Friday fixing my car (which broke down the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, ugh) and to spend Saturday reading. When I looked at the finding aids on Thursday night, I realized that I didn’t have a clear enough idea of what I wanted to look for so a trip to the library would have been a waste of time. All the reading today helped immeasurably, though, so I should be able to spend this weekend at the NYPL. I have a much better idea of what I’m writing and what the structure of the paper will be, so my archival time will hopefully be productive. I’m glad that this paper isn’t due until 12/18. I know that sounds like a lot of time, but trust me when I say I’m going to need all of it to do a good job.

Ugh. Ok. All that writing made me remember that I need to go do more academic writing – namely, on the 17 books I’m surrounded by. Seriously. I counted them. See?

I wasn’t lying. Oh! And for those (crazy? bored? stalkerish?) few who have made it to this point: CONTEST in honor of my female activism and technology paper! To enter, simply post a comment on this blog telling me what feminism means to you. I suppose I can toss an extra entry your way if you post these views about feminism on your own blog, too, and pass the contest along in the blogosphere. I haven’t chosen a prize: instead, I’ll blog-stalk the (random) winner and choose something that he or she would really like.

Enter my contest, and have fun for me tonight, y’all, because I’ll be here reading books for most of it.

SNOW!!!

Yes, again. No, I’m not going to stop reporting the fact of it in capital letters every time. I’m from Georgia. Snow is cool and weird and fucking AWESOME and I’m going to enjoy it like a little kid does. Like, for example, this morning when after looking out the window I woke my huband by jumping on him and saying “It snowed! It snowed! It snowed!” in my hyper voice.

So, I say to you: It snowed! (It snowed! It snowed!)

I had fun.

Can you see the snowflake on my tongue?

What about the Clapotis and Irish Hiking Wrist Warmers? Hint: These are not on my tongue.

The husband patiently put up with me.

Yay! Now, for coffee time and work…