Chex Mix and a Paean to Dr. Wildeman
The cumulative products of my first year of grad school can reasonably be compared to a bag of Chex Mix (the sweet ‘n’ salty caramel variety, to be precise). There are shorter, sweeter papers on an early twentieth century French poet and Baroque paintings of women painting. My paper on nineteenth century Native Hawaiian resistance through landscape painting is chock full of clustery goodness. The paper on Dorothea Lange’s photographs of the internment — and the agency of her subjects in actively limiting her choices as a documentarian — is a pretzel and the paper on Eva Leitolf’s post-wall photographs of marginal violence in middle class neighborhoods is surely a bagel chip. And the seminar-paper-turned-thesis-topic on Lynne Yamamoto? Caramel popcorn, I hope.
As written products, the papers are hardly spectacular. I was told I write “elegantly,” but I think that my mini collection of cool ballet flats may have influenced the professor’s word choice. What excites me, though, is that I’ve found the rhythm of making writing work for me. In the one-two whammy of Advanced Writing and Modern Literary Criticism — both with my favorite, lovable grump, Dr. Wildeman — I began to understand the attraction of writing to learn. My paper-writing has grown increasingly messy since then.
It starts with a couple of files heedlessly named things like “leitolf paper ideas.doc” and “leitolf ideas 2.doc.” Close descriptions of the images in question, mixed with spurts of inspired, ellipse cushioned musings, trickle down the page. I am loathe to delete anything, even when it becomes clear that the paper will not be going down this or that promising path. By the time “leitolf paper draft 2.doc” becomes a reality, I’ve cycled through several theses, despaired over ever writing an introduction, and started throwing in bold text notes like “Benjamin should go here” or “I think Bhabba says this.” Dr. Wildeman’s injunction to always write what you know first and then frame it in scholarship still strikes me as somewhat profound and eminently useful for preserving your own voice. Somewhere in there I may even cut up twenty pages worth of ideas and rearrange them on the living room rug.
In writing and reorganizing and self-contradicting I figure out what I wanted to say in the first place. And while I’ve finally learned to delimit a seminar paper and just turn the durn thing in, I’m nerd-ishly excited about the opportunity to go back and revise it later. For a lowercase type-a personality like myself, the ability to see graded papers as ‘idea investments’ rather than completed, self-contained products is a significant shift.
Also, let’s be frank. Thinking about seminar papers as Chex Mix rather than, say, perfectly crafted, enduring artworks helps relieve some of the pressure — real and imagined — that accompanies this academic moment. Is it a problem that grad school is teaching me to lower my expectations?