Fixing a Hole Where the Rain Gets In, or A Day in the Life

In lieu of discussing why I appear to accomplish so much in a given day, I've decided to provide you with a log of my activities so that you might see the illusion for what it is:

7:05  Awake to cats wrestling on head.  Throw cats off bed.  Return to sleep.

7:06  Awake to cats wrestling on head.  Throw cats off bed.  Throw self off bed.  Stumble into kitchen.  Prepare mug of green tea.

7:15  Grab magazine from pile near chair.  Read articles and note which are 1) of general interest and 2) of pedagogical value.

7:55  Shower.  Rebel against rinse repeat.

8:00  Greet wife.  Eat breakfast while watching Tivo of previous evening's Daily Show.  Laugh.  Feel powerless to alter the course of history.  Laugh again. 

8:25  Inform wife it is "time to get to work."  Walk into bedroom/study.  Make bed while computer boots.  Douse room in lavender-scented Febreze fabric refresher.

8:26  Read email.  Answer urgent missives.

8:27  Curse dearth of urgent missives.  Question own self-importance.

8:28  Open 192 windows in Mozilla.  Read news of Mets' latest late-inning collapse.  Observe that 412 strangers read blog while I slept.  Begin rebuilding sense of self-importance.

8:35  Decide today will not be the day every newspaper in America will be read.  Close 191 windows.  Leave "stats" page of blog open in case sense of self-importance flags.

8:36  Time to dissertate!  Stare at piles of books.  Read through last four or five pages written yesterday.  Despair at own stupidity.  Stare at piles of books.

9:41  Work up nerve to select books from piles.  Choose this one and, um, that one.  Open selected books.  Attempt to decipher own marginalia.  Curse self for poor penmanship. 

10:14  Retype final four paragraphs written day before in failed attempt to remind self what self had in mind when self spent 12 hours writing gibberish.  Begin to compose this entry.  Wonder why "gibberish" spelled with "g" instead of "j" when "jibber-jabber" spelled with "j."  Feel annoyed at trivial turn of mind.  Return to retyping final four paragraphs written previous day.

10:37  Finish "the retype."  Understand what was written.  Understand what was written to be stupid.  Despair! 

10:39  Cease hyperventilation.  Open new window in Mozilla.  Read the Valve.

10:40  Read response to recent article mentioning Y.T.  Consider potential post about being known by full name.  Think of mother yelling "Scott Eric Kaufman" to alter deviant behavior.  Wonder if people who read this entry will be reminded of Ben Marcus.  Wonder if readers familiar with work of Ben Marcus.  Decide to inform readers that excerpt from The Age of Wire and String available below fold.[1]

10:59  Return to dissertation.  Remember general bearings of train-of-thought.  Ride the rails.

1:13  Eat lunch.  Converse with wife.  Commiserate with wife about current conditions in sinuses.  Remind wife of recent bout of cancer in order to diminish wife's suffering.  Evoke pity from the ill.  Feel like horrible person.

1:21  Finish lunch.  Apologize for 19,482 time for lording cancer over wife.  Acknowledge that past suffering does not diminish present suffering.  Feel like horrible person.  Return to dissertation.

1:41  Bang head on desk with manly vigor.  Experience wooziness and anger at both cause of pain and pain itself.  Declare moritorium on head-banging.

1:42  Bang head on desk in defiance of moritorium.  Abandon dissertation for Literary Wittgenstein. 

1:49  Curse God for own intellectual shortcomings.  Cannot fathom point of essay in Literary Wittgenstein.  Read New Yorker article by Noah Baumbach.  Think fond thoughts of Baumbach's masterpiece Kicking and Screaming.  Recall with fondness best line.  Wonder why Internet Movie Database's "memorable quotations" fails to include best line.  Decide not to reveal best line.  Decide it best for readers to watch movie and hear best line in original context.

1:54  Finish Noah Baumbach article.  Consider it impressive but mourn fish killed in barrel.  Return to dissertation.

1:55  Realize "problem" of 11:41 not real problem.  Awash in invigoration.

2:15  Mourn loss of "steam."  Wonder as to avenues of reacquisition.  In vain!  Pick up Literary Wittgenstein again.

2:16  Curse own stupidity!  Toss aside Literary Wittgenstein.  Pick up Iron Council.  Feel cover.  Recognize that Del Ray/Ballantine paperbacks possess same sublimely textured covers and floppy pages as Vintage and Vintage International paperbacks.

3:45  Realize entire day cannot be devoted to China Mieville.  Return to dissertation.

3:46  Realize entire life cannot be devoted to dissertation.  Return to China Mieville.

5:31  Try to express brilliance of China Mieville to wife.  Fail.  Return to dissertation.

7:01  Recognize that past two hours will without question constitute best work of the day.  Throw hands in air.  Yell "Blessed be holy Resignation!"  Explain outburst to wife.  Surf web.  Begin to compose blog entry on Pannapacker essay.

8:01  Edit entry on Pannapacker essay.  Compile final thoughts on current entry.  Inform reader that post is concluded.  Inform reader that day's intellectual activity is concluded.  That vodka tonic awaits.  That wife and author are currently under thrall of intellectually stimulating but in some respects (i.e. the acting, the dialogue, the special effects) too-embarassing-to-admit-thralldom-to science-fiction series of recent vintage.  Deny urge to reveal title of said series to readers, but decide it acceptable to inform readers that Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison served as creative consultants on it. 

8:12  Finish editing current post.  Feel happy with content.  Depart bedroom/office for den and prepare to watch Bruce Box...very foreign French film about important subjects such as the nature of being and the existence of God. 

[1]From Ben Marcus' The Age of Wire and String:

"Intercourse with Resuscitated Wife"

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.

"Snoring, Accidental Speech"

Snoring, language disturbance caused by accidental sleeping, in which a person speaks in compressed syllables and bulleted syntax, often stacking several words over one another in a distemporal deliverance of a sentence. The snoring person can be stuffed with cool air to slow the delivery of its language, but perspiration froths at key points on the hips and back when artificial air is introduced, and thus the sleep becomes sketchy and riddled with noise. It is often best to cull the sleeper forth with apneic barks-sounds produced without air. The effect of the barks is to isolate each aspect of the snore sound by slowing down the delivery-riding the sleeper until the snore breaks into separate words. Decoders should sit on the bed and jostle the sleeper’s stomach. This further dispatches the clusters that often form when the sleeper speaks all at once (snores). The decoder is then better able to decipher the word blocks. When analyzed, the messages are often simple. Pull me out, they say, the water has risen to the base of my neck.

Comments

[padmini]

Wonderful to know I'm not the only one - how far away are you from submission?

p.

[Jonathan Dresner]

I know which series, but not which line....

I don't usually read these kinds of posts, but the whole thing was worth it for "Bang head on desk with manly vigor."

[Mike S]

Scott, not sure what to make of these last two passages. Are you trying your hand at surrealistic short fiction? As for your day-in-the-life post, it pretty much confirms what I'd suspected. Your day consists of work, brief intellectual excursions, prosaic interactions with your significant other, and fleeting moments of introspection/self doubt. And by day's end it sounds as if you typically achieve some degree, however minimal, of progress on that curious dissertation.

Questions (of the formal variety): Do you frequent the library? Or are you pretty much set with what you have at home? Do you let your wife or anyone else read your dissertation?

Questions: (of the informal variety) Did you ever have a class with Derrida? Can you explain to me the metaphysics of presence fallacy?

[Mike S]

Almost forgot, are you a Beatles fan, or did their lyrics simply provide a suitable title for this post?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

padmini, I've a long, long way to go. I'd say at least another year, possibly longer. All this pesky "research" that must be done before writing slows me down.

Jonathan, thanks for not outing the wife and I. As to the line, it involves Chris Eigeman, his young Jersey girlfriend, a contested parking spot, and begins: "He'd already rather be..."

Mike, those last two passages are the Ben Marcus stories "below the fold." Of course, if you read the post directly there's no evidence of the fold; so I'll edit that to make it easier to understand. Now, as for your questions:

I don't frequent the library so much right now because I've already done the research for the chapter I'm working on. I've either purchased, copied or checked out all the work I need. The wife doesn't read my work right now, but will in the future. The person who reads endless drafts of my work is a fellow graduate student, Stephen Schryer. In fact, instead of commenting here I should finish commenting on the chapter on Mary McCarthy he sent me yesterday. (But I'm on holiday for half an hour.) I highly, highly recommend you acquire yourself a Schryer or two when you get to grad. school, as it will vastly improve the quality of your work. Knowing that you have actual readers means you have to consider audience; too often, as other's have recently noted, graduate student work reads like intellectual masturbation, i.e. work written solely to please its author and which never considers the possibility that it may be read. The knowledge that it will be read, immediately, by someone whose opinion you respect (but who isn't a professor, as that's a different story), puts demands on the prose that it would otherwise lack; namely, that it communicate.

I've mentioned before that I did, in fact, participate in one of Derrida's seminars (and two of Hillis Miller's); that said, it would be difficult for me put the metaphysics of presence in its proper nutshell. I could make some breathtakingly vague statements, but they'd be as useless to you and reveal me for the fraud that I am. So I won't.

And I'm a Beatles fan the way of lots of people are Beatles fans: I have a favorite Beatle, own pretty much all the albums and know all the words on them, but for some reason haven't listened to them in years.

[Mike S]

Sorry, Scott, not gonna let you off the hook that easily. However breathtakingly vague your gloss may be, I need The Kaufman to reduce the metaphysics of presence to an intelligble (and probably oversimplified) soundbyte. The only reason I'm keeping on you about this is because a couple semesters back I wrote a brief (3-4 pages) essay on the m.o.p.'s implications for the study of rhetoric. Now, you're likely wondering why I feel the need to pester you with this when I've already come to some of my own conclusions about this slightly arcane concept/theory/metaphysical hogwash. The reason I'm interested in your thoughts is because in your posts, blogs, and banter you've proven yourself to be a logical, scrupulous, and articulate fellow. Pardon the unseemly number of complements I've given you this past week, but...well...I like you, Scott. You're honest and good-humored, and it's refreshing to know we've chosen the same profession. Okay, now get to work on that m.o.p. post! Perhaps it ties in with some of those Wittgenstein pieces you've been perusing.

[Mike S]

On a scale of 1-10, Scott, a 10 being someone who has attended several Beatle impersonator concerts, spent a considerable amount of dough on Beatles memorabilia, and named a pet after a Beatle, you fall somewhere in the 5-6 range.

I'm a solid 7-7.5.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

The idea of transforming complicated theoretical paradigms into sound bytes actually has some appeal. What Theorists really need is an ad campaign. Flash a picture of Nietzsche with "Just do it" pounded underneath in a most manly font...or, alright, that's the best and only I can come up with. But as I've told others already today, my brain is shot from all this stuff currently cluttering it up. Expect more later. I may have ideas. (Also, you're more than welcome to keep up the stream of compliments, but you do so at your own risk: given the bottomless pit into which my self-esteem mutely plummets, I'm liable to think less of you the more you think more of me.)

[Adric]

One of my favourite movies, although I haven't seen it in several years and so am a bit rusty on specific lines. (It can be a bit hard to find, obviously.) Would it Eric Stoltz describing the book during the book club? Or the ending "I wish we were old", knowing how bittersweet and forlorn that memory would be? But more likely it is something Chris Eigeman said...I'm just drawing a blank on specfics.

Will you tell?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Adric, it begins: "He'd already rather be..."

I just don't want to spoil the punchline for those who haven't seen it.

[Knemon]

Yeah, that line's okay, but there are better ones.

"All you guys talk the same" is up there. Funny cuz it's true.

How about "And we all know how old Mozart was when he did all of that ... *stuff* ..."

In fact, pretty much anything Carlos Jacott says in that movie is comedy gold.

[Kristen]

Is it possible to have 192 windows open on Mozilla without your computer crashing?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Funny you should ask, Kristen. Just today the wife of a friend of mine wrote this. Take a look at that screenshot down there. It's frankly insane.

[Mike S]

Scott, in revisiting this thread, it occurred to me that this "day in the life" snapshot (or feature length film, depending on you look at it) takes place in the very recent past (ie: during the final phase of your academic training). When convenient, and provided you feel generous and nostalgic enough to do it, how about a prequel to this post entitled, "A Day in the Life: Year One?" My interest in peeking in on a young S E Kaufman during those first few quarters of coursework at UCI has only to do with the fact that, in a few more fortnights, I will start my own graduate program. A typical day's tasks/responsibilities in September will differ considerably from my current ones. So take a break from psychoanalysis, Scott, and dust off your memories of 1999 or 2000 or whenever you started.

[Spam]

[I once was spam, now am I dead.]

[Spam]

[Spam was here.]

[tomemos]

Odd that your overzealous spam filter wouldn't catch these two, Scott…

[SEK]

It's because they don't contain links in the body of the HTML. That's why it's flagged all of mine.

For the record, TypePad really needs a better system for alerting bloggers why spam's being flagged. All I get when I comment is a little message on a white page telling me that TypePad's marked my comment as spam and that it won't be posted. But TypePad doesn't send me an email indicating why some spam's been blocked, so I can't even white-list people like, say, myself.