Far Out

I was realizing this past week that for most folks in the academic world, early December is a big push time. And I just took a week off to look for a new rental.

After a break for Thanksgiving and househunting, I'm back to my 15 minutes a day of writing and whatever reading I can squeeze in.

How are you all doing?

waah

First post here from the department's newest ABD (I've supplanted Tim as the baby of this little academic family). I passed my area exam on Nov 19th, and I've spent the last 10 days trying to get the muscles in my neck to relax (without much luck, by the way - apparently several consecutive months of stress will do that to you).

My primary area was about performance issues in Renaissance Drama in general. I used information from the plays to describe what it might have been like to go to the theater, but I'm actually more interested in what it was like to be on the production side - e.g. Shakespeare vs Jonson and their attendant problems (indoor vs outdoor venue, adult vs boy company). My second area was on manners, using various courtesy books / manuals and manners in the plays to talk about ideas of etiquette and virtue (or lack thereof). For me, acting styles (which is one of my greater passions) and social etiquette are intimately linked (not so much for my examiners).

Here's where my head is, currently, on an idea for my diss: at this moment in England, we have for the first time the rise of a profession theater and thus professional actors. At the same time, we have the rise of a strong courtly culture. It seems to me that both of these cultures are based around performance and perhaps that is one of the reasons that so many plays are about the court (and flattery and disguise) - actors and courtiers are essentially the same kind of animal, and actors can speak to the issues of performance at court, perhaps better than courtiers would want to admit. I think that, in fact, actors are offering an alternate system of behavior. So, for example, courtiers want to conceal how hard they are working while actors want to show it. And I think there's an argument to be made that theater professionals were often more successful than courtiers (compare, for example, Shakespeare's end - wealthy, given a coat of arms - to poor John Lyly's - poverty-stricken and begging for any kind of preferment to no avail.)

For me, this all connects to one of the fundamental rifts in performance studies - what does performance actually mean? For courtiers, it's what they do all the time; for actors, it's what they do onstage. (Full disclosure: As a person coming from a theater / performer background, I find the desire to think about what we do in everyday life as "performance" to be a little insane.) I think my biggest theoretical touchstone will be Joseph Roach (he wrote "The Player's Passion").

And I think my biggest dissertation hurdle is going to be getting someone to agree to head up my committee. I spoke to Jenny Spencer the other day (she was on my areas committee) and she basically told me that I'm going to have to write a chapter before anyone will even agree that the argument works. And if I could get it published, that would be even better. Oy.

So that's that for now. I'm enjoying eveyone's posts and am already getting tips to help me rethink my methods. It's greatly appreciated!

Your Turn!

Okay, I've made the last three posts (four, counting this one). Someone else's turn!

Here's my latest fun internet find: the memorial Anne Clifford had installed for Edmund Spenser in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.


“HEARE LYES (EXPECTING THE SECOND COMMINGE OF OUR SAVIOVR CHRIST JESUS) THE BODY OF EDMOND SPENCER THE PRINCE OF POETS IN HIS TYME WHOSE DIVINE SPIRRIT NEEDS NOE OTHIR WITNESSE THEN THE WORKS WHICH HE LEFT BEHINDE HIM. HE WAS BORNE IN LONDON IN THE YEARE 1553 AND DIED IN THE YEARE 1598. Restored by private subscription 1778”.

Weekly Update

Here's my first official weekly update. I didn't quite reach any of my goals, I don't think, though I did make progress in every area. But I'm content to settle for less this week and get ready for good progress next week. My big accomplishment was writing two brief paper topic proposals and sending them with my monthly check-in email to JB.

For next week: continue reading ER collection, secondary sources on motherhood, and start doing some actual notetaking and giving DevonThink a whirl.

Right now, though, I have a stinky diaper to change. It's quite a shift from the academic to daily life.

PC Users?

In light of all the talk of DevonThink, Bookends, etc., do any of you have recommendations for PC users? Another dissertation-writing friend is looking for ways to manage sources on her PC. I said she should just get a Mac . . .

Here, Here/Hear, Hear

Thanks for the prodding, Kevin. It’s good to know that everyone else thinks of quitting, too. In my case, I have a great advisor, but not enough time to study, and not enough interaction with other scholars to even get in the mindset to write anything that sounds remotely like intelligible scholar-speak. Hear, hear for camaraderie. My big motivation right now is that I can’t afford to pay my students loans until after our car is paid off, so I have to stick it out and make some progress for at least the next three years.

I’ll commit to posting a weekly update with goals, accomplishments, and failures. Anyone else up for it? (our SAGgy list)

My last week was awful in terms of studying. I felt like I got nothing done, even in the small amount of time I have dedicated to working. I think I froze up because I have a check-in coming up with JB, and I’m nervous I’ll have little if anything to report. I have been avoiding the main thing I need to read (ER’s collected works) because it seems so important and I want to read it carefully (which is hard to do at 11pm). I’ve decided that I need to treat reading just as I would reading for a class: I need to finish by a deadline, and I can return to it later if I need to. So my goals for the next week: write every day, read at least the second section of the ER collection, finish The Countess of Lincoln’s Nursery, read the Maternity section in Mendelson and Crawford’s Women in Early Modern England, and write a paper proposal on ER to turn in to JB next week.

As far as work-flow goes, I’m considering what to do when I need to handle larger amounts of data than I have now. I managed to do the post-it-note-in-the-book method for my areas, though I did type up summary notes of my primary texts and typed annotations of secondary works. Right now they’re all in MacJournal. Currently, I freewrite in MacJournal, and I’ve been marking up books instead of taking official notes. (I need to read Booth et al in Turabian on note taking.)

My plan is to try out DevonThink, and I’m trying out a version of Sente (a Bookends-like bibliography program for the Mac). I tend to believe anything D. Swain tells me about finishing a dissertation, and anything Kevin says about what technology to use. Since both recommended DevonThink, I haven’t really bothered to look at anything else.

Right now, I’m needing to get my marked up texts into the computer somehow, and I feel like I have so little time to work that typing it out now would take too much time. I know it will pay off later, so I’m planning to have do some typing of notes at least once a week to see how that goes. I find that it helps me to have a little bit of time between when I read a text and when I type up notes--much of what I marked in the text seems less relevant after a few days.

Questions:
Do any of you have advice on how to decide what to include in your notes? Do you err on the “too much” side? How do you gauge the right amount?

Kevin, any other tips on how to approach DevonThink? I’d rather just get started importing info into it before I go through all the tutorials. Are there things you wish you’d known before you started?

Also, I need to hunt down a reference and thought your sharp memories might help. I think the story is in something classical or in The Book of the City of Ladies. It’s where a warrior runs away from the battle, and his mother meets him, pulls up her dress, and shouts that she wishes he could just climb back into her womb, his cowardly actions are so shaming. Any ideas?

Lastly, because I’m looking at many non-literary texts, I’m struggling (yet again) with how to ask literary questions of those texts. In examining the concepts of motherhood (at least for now), it seems easy to get sucked in to just figuring out what motherhood meant in the Renaissance, or how it was presented, or how it really worked (as much as we can tell). Any tricks to keeping a literary focus?

a new tool

Check out this funny but helpful web application "Write or Die."

You can enter in the target number of words you'd like to write and the amount of time you want to spend, and then start typing away. If you spent too much time staring without moving those keys, dreaded consequences follow. You can set the program to how wicked you'd like those consequences to be (on evil mode it begins erasing what you've written), but I found the program to be in good fun. And when I tried it on a whim, I ended up typing over 250 words in just six minutes. Sure most of that was garbage, but if I did that several times a day, six days a week...

As a simple creature, I need all the tricks I can find.

Come on now

It has been too long since any of us have written, so I'm here to cattle-prod us away from apathy. In all honesty, I'm only one step away from leaving the program - a horrible advisor, an impossible teaching schedule, no real place to work - and I need all the camaraderie I can get. And I'd like to see everyone avoid the many pitfalls I've encountered. That means a little every day. That means small, achievable goals with a larger plan. Part of the reason I didn't finish last year was that I was without a plan. I hadn't made the decision to finish by date X, and breakdown all of the many tasks on the calendar. So let's rally.

Furthermore, it took me a while to develop (and actually still am developing in my new habitat) my workflow. So I offer you the "sweet suite" of programs that have been helping me manage the large amounts of information I've accumulated and put it to good use. I'd love to hear what you think and how you work.

My Way:

First off, you need some way to capture, organize, and search out the research you encounter. After years of marking margins and even writing quotes and reflections in notebooks, which were often lost or piled in a forgotten corner of the closet, I decided to commit to electronic form. I purchased the mac program DevonThink. It essentially is a database program that can easily massive amounts of information. You can dump into it word or text files, pdf's, image files, pictures, graphs, sounds, etc. Most importantly, it has a sophisticated search engine (they call it Artificial Intelligence) that automatically finds similar documents and can group them together for you (see their tutorials). So after you begin dumping info into it, you can pull up a JSTOR pdf or some of your own notes, hit find similar items, and suddenly the program pulls up notes on books you forgot you read or quotes that have long since been buried. I have mine organized by authors, and I also replicate these files to go into corresponding chapter headings and subheadings. Steven Berlin has a useful post on how to use the program and why small chunks of text work better than dumping entire articles into the program.

Whenever I read something I take notes in the program. That way I can easily find it later and the program links it to other related notes or material. For each reference I also try to make sure I also put it into my bibliographic manager Bookends. I prefer this program over Endnotes, and it has the advantage of keeping all of my references together; it also attaches electronic versions to the reference if it's available. So, if you find an article on JSTOR you can download the bibliographic info and attach the actual document to the citation. This helps me quickly cite in chapters and easily generate a works cited page. It also organizes all the electronic research on my computer.

Next I have been experimenting with the drafting program Scrivener. Booth, Colomb, Williams' revision of Turabain's Manual for Dissertation Writers emphasizes the helpfulness of the storyboard when you are organizing a large, complex argument. Scrivener is of that mind and allows you to set up a virtual outline/storyboard and to see the argument visually (something I need). I usually set up a chapter's broad parameters, its major sections, and then begin to cull info from my DevonThink database and paste it into the growing outline. After I fill it out a bit, I then print out a draft of all the basic subheadings, my comments on their purposes, and any quotes/notes that correspond. It's just a step in refining my information and clarifying how I think it goes together. See their tutorial for more on how to use this drafting program.

The time spent up front in marrying a word processing program to a bibliographic manager will save you in the end. Word is the most popular program, but I've been using the alternative Mellel. I've found that Mellel and Bookends work very well together and I save time not having to worry about typing in the citations as I'm writing. The programs do it for you, and since the grad school requires a Works Cited page, it makes compiling that list automatic. Mellel is a bit strange and requires learning an unfamiliar platform; but the control you have over the program outweighs the initial discomfort.

It may sound a bit convoluted or having the effect of making more steps than required, and I'd be interested to hear from everyone on how you go about gathering and composing, but the habit of each step helps me refine and clarify what the point of the material is and how it's useful. I'm finding I'm much more of a process guy than I ever knew - I need those many steps to get at anything interesting or intelligent - and having these programs keeps me from going crazy with piles of folders. I still like having paper in front of me when I actually writing paragraphs, yet it is the programs that have helped me at first compile and organize notes into a rough, rough draft (what Bolker calls the "zero draft").

What works for you?

Greenblatt on Colbert Report

Did you guys see Greenblatt on the Colbert Report? I just found the video here at a blog that posts info on happenings in the Renaissance Literature world (of today).

Upstart Crow

This post is coming from the department's newest minted PhD candidate; I passed my area exams one week ago.  So I'm an 'abd' in diapers, really.  Just beginning to negotiate the diss prospectus, forming a committee, and so forth.  

In terms of where I'm coming from: my first area, drawing on my primary interest in early modern drama, consisted of a bunch of plays and secondary work on theater as a socially and economically engaged art form (a marathon beginning with L.C. Knights's Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson and ending with Jean Howard's recent Theater of a City).  I ended up with a rationale focusing on the social function of stage props.  Adam was my advisor (which put me on AFK's shit list for awhile, until I explained my reasons, which I won't rehearse here.  We're doing fine now.  He only nodded off a few times during the exam).  My second area pertained to non-dramatic lit & early modern social life, theories of consumption, and consumer culture.  Joe had me reading diverse kinds of primary texts--anything from a year in Pepys's diary to cookery books to temperance tracts to Jonson's "Inviting a Friend to Supper."  When constructing the lists, I suspected that I ultimately wanted to do a project on dramatic representations of food and drink, so I used the second area to look at food history, food studies, and cultural materialist methodologies to see if they were indeed of interest.  And they are.  

Now that I've come out on the other side (pause, sigh of relief), I'm trying to put together a project focusing on recreational consumption.  Such forms of consumption are happening conspicuously on the stage (1 and 2 Henry IV, The Fair Maid of the West,  The Honest Whore, The Dutch Courtesan, Bartholomew Fair are a few examples that I'm interested in),  just as drama is itself a new form of recreational consumption in London, and it's going on in the taverns and bawdyhouses around the theaters.   So far I can sort of locate specific kinds of consumption and spaces within which class and economic status are negotiated through alimentary terms and materials.  There are, for example, tensions around homosocial conviviality in the tavern in contrast to the domestic economy of the home.  And I keep wondering about the connection(s) between consuming theater and consuming other things.  I still have a lot of work to do when it comes to putting forth a big idea and dividing up the material in a way that will help me talk about that bigger issue.  I've only begun to think about an organizational scheme (if there's a chapter on taverns, which I know I want, do I write on other social spaces?  Author-based chapters?  Issues of genre?  Heaven help me, some kind of chronological study?)  I do know I need to move beyond arguing "these things were met with deep anxiety" or "there was an explosion in the availability of these kinds of consumable materials."  Those angles have been pursued to death.  Just a matter of finding out where else I can push the conversation...

GEMCS is coming up next month and I'm giving a paper on the materials of Jacobean drinking culture  in Middleton and Dekker's 1 Honest Whore.  (David Swain put together a panel on the politics of drink).  Hopefully by then I can at least be able to say something like "this brief reading of the play is an interesting iteration  of a broader concern involving X, Y, and Z..." where X, Y, and Z are clearer than what I've described above.  And I know sharing time--and drinks--with Dave will be really helpful for my thinking.

So that's where I'm at.  I'm already gaining a great deal from your posts, and I've read the first few chapters of Joan Bolker's book, which have been enlightening.  I look forward to the discussions!

Bibliographic style?

I was reminded tonight by Booth, Columb, and Williams that I need to cite my bibliographic info in the correct way for UMass. What style are we required to use? Is there a cheat sheet? Is it advisor dependent?

Follow-up to ‘writing spaces’

Congrats on getting the letters out, Kevin. I agree that writing about the dissertation is a big part of writing the dissertation. (You know, from my vast experience so far.) I’ve been re-reading Joan Bolker’s Writing your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day, and she champions starting to get in the writing habit early and writing about your process and work in an informal way.

The PhinisheD post was great, and when I described the guy’s strategy to T (husband who wrote a dissertation in Computer Science in 8 months), he said, “With that strategy, I could have written a dissertation in 4 months!” I think the trick to the poster’s strategy is that all the writing time is accomplishing something, rather than being wasted getting distracted or being unfocused. His 20 minute breaks sounded especially valuable, based on ideas about insight I read in a recent New Yorker article (abstract). The gist is that the best way to get to a point of insight is to switch from detail-oriented, linear, analytical left-brain activity to more global and connective right-brain thinking, and the best way to get your brain to switch is to relax. Staring at the problem won’t make it any better; taking a shower or a walk might.* I’m counting on this kind of writing strategy not taking 15 years--I’m pretty sure someone in charge would tell me I needed to graduate or quit--and my favorite advice-giver at UMass (David S.) said you can finish if you’ve got 20 hours of writing time a week.

I’ve taken to writing “snippets” every week: a list of what I’ve completed in the last week and what my goals are for the following week. I keep it all in one text file, so I have an easy way to assess my actual progress. So my goals for this week: finish reading Anne Clifford’s diary, start reading ER’s Collected Works, write my 15 minutes a day, and increase my evening reading time over the course of the week.

This past week, I’ve been writing to start developing my topic (Kevin, thanks for the Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations recommendation), and I think my first dig into the material will be about the representation of Elizabeth as mother to her country. I’m interested in how the metaphor plays out for various groups of people (and individuals, including ER herself), and how the representation expanded her role as monarch (if it did) while highlighting her potential limitations as a woman. I’m new to the topic and idea, so I’m sure it will get changed and refined as I go.

*A friend who’s a learning specialist also told me that some people benefit greatly from movements like running where the body has to move the left arm and right leg at the same time (and vice versa) because it increases the connections between the hemispheres of the brain. Can't hurt to try.

writing spaces

I just finished sending out a number of job letters to colleges all over the country (with many more to go) and oddly felt satisfied after the fact. Sure the hope that at least one of these strange letters will land me an interview was satisfying in itself; but what I mean is that having another space in which to write about my dissertation was helpful. Like this blog (I hope), other spaces to write about the diss, what it's hoping to do, how it works or does not offer opportunities to write through the frustration and find new ways to approach the topic. I recommend it heartily.

The job market has slowed me down but I'm still committed to writing at least a few hours a day. One recent graduate over at Phinished.com has a useful post on daily habits that helped him get through it all. The essence: he writes in 40 minute blocks, with 20 minute rests, and does this six times a day. It sounds like a recipe for a 15 year dissertation, but advocates like Robert Boice strongly argue for daily, short, repeated routines that create a habit. (See Boice's Advice for New Faculty. The writing style will annoy you, but the advice is sound and grows out of years of empircal research.)

Another approach fellow writers and experts recommend: make it public. So here are my goals. I need to put together a draft of my first chapter, the one that has added new grey hair. I also need to get a working draft of my sonnet chapter since I'm presenting a short part of it at a conference in a month! By this Sunday, Nov. 2, I'd like to have 20 pages together on the first chapter. By the 20th of November, I need to have around 20 pages done for the sonnets. I'm aiming low so that the goals are not too lofty so as to encourage more frustration and procrastination. This is a little too vague now, but maybe tomorrow I'll have a more specific set of goals with details on which parts of which chapter I hope to fill.

slogging

Here's my status report:
I have one chapter finished, many more in draft, and I'm stuck on the first chapter, which is holding me up terribly. The goal in all of this is to write a little bit each day, but I've hit a serious wall these months and with the job market in full swing I'm having trouble getting any traction. The first chapter is essentially outlined, and most of the research is done; for some reason I'm just mired in it.

So here's the general breakdown. The dissertation at large argues that Queen Elizabeth's succession caused a tremendous amount of stress and frustration for the English because she forbade any discussion of the subject and she refused to name an heir. As the Virgin Queen aged beyond any possibility of marriage or producing an heir, the English wondered who would succeed and if that transition would be peaceful or would invite civil war and/or foreign invasion. Because the question was cloistered, it had the effect of stirring anxiety and initiating a reappraisal of the past to help predict the future. My dissertation largely focuses on the literary responses to this context and hopes to show how certain genres, like the sonnet, Ovidian epic, and satire, were particularly useful vehicles. The genres developed alternative historiographic models which emphasized the distance between past and present, or the present's independence from historical precedent or literary typology. It was a poetic invested in the material present where the construction of knowledge came with collaboration rather than recovery. It was a poetic that emphasized renewal and imagination rather than lineal progression or teleology.
(Apologies if this is still vague - now you know why I'm stuck in the mud.)

So the first chapter describes the sixteenth century's historiographic method of fusing royal genealogy to England's providential emergence. It centers on illustrations of the Tree of Jesse, a medieval illustration of Isaiah's prophecy of a flower emerging from Jesse's (King David's father) root. The iconography linked New and Old Testament offering a genealogy from David to Jesus, and suggested a lineal logic that organizes the biblical history, with the flower/Christ as the ultimate end.
The Tudor's appropriated this and instead of the recumbent Jesse at the bottom they placed both the Dukes of York and Lancaster. These adorned history books, beginning with Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrative Families (1550), and presented Henry VIII at the top as the flower from the union of the two previously warring factions. After Elizabeth's ascension, she was added to the top and the biblical allusion to the Virigin was even stronger. After the 1580s, however, these icons in many texts began to be removed, and it is this general turn away from providential history that I am documenting, and how it effected the English at the time. How, in other words, did the English grapple with the fact that their lineal connection to the past was about to be broken?

My goal is to have a substantial draft of this monster done by the end of the month so that I can get back to the good stuff: the poetry!
I need to have this monster done by the end of the school year. No other way.

Let's keep reporting on progress, thinking, tips, things to avoid, etc. This really helps curb the isolated misery endemic to writing a diss.

More soon, I hope.

Current Progress

Here’s where I am in this whole process:

I finished exams last December, on (1) Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Women Writers and Writing about Women, and (2) Female Communities in Spenser and Shakespeare. I took the spring off, eased through the summer with a bio of Elizabeth, and have started reading and writing for the dissertation this fall. Right now my topic is pretty nebulous, but I’m trying out ideas involving Spenser and women perhaps the concept of social networks (and perhaps some other writers--Shakespeare and Sidney maybe). My first “assignment” is to write on Elizabeth’s representations of herself and Spenser’s representations of her. I’m hoping it leads to something fruitful, but am open to the idea that it may reveal what I don’t want to pursue in the dissertation. My commitment this fall is to work Mon-Thurs evenings (and the occasional weekend day), and to write at least 15 minutes a day, just to get in the habit. (I’m also a full-time stay-at-home mom with two young kids, so I’m getting a slow start, but will ramp up when the kids start preschool and school.)

Where are you in the process?

An Invitation

Welcome disserters! Post about any dissertation related thing: comments, questions, goals, updates, problems. Perhaps start with a "state of the diss" report. Glad you have you on board.