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Silver2195 posted:To be fair, the gravedigger scene does seem to indicate that Hamlet is around 30. Yeah, the Q2 version does and it’s hard to argue with. That makes Hamlet more of an Ignatius Reilly than a young Ignatius Reilly.
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Jun 9, 2021 13:46
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Silver2195 posted:To be fair, the gravedigger scene does seem to indicate that Hamlet is around 30. Silver2195 posted:I think people have some weird ideas about Hamlet sometimes. I think people sometimes refer to it in ways that emphasize the title character's more indecisive moments and forget how ruthless he is sometimes, in addition to errors like conflating the "Alas, poor Yorick" speech with the "To be or not to be" speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNcN5f3vwro&t=72s Hamlet, Last Action Man of Action  Hardin Craig posted:Hamlet's success, when it comes, is not finesse or idealism but unvarnished savagery.
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Jun 9, 2021 13:51
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Brainworm posted:So is Gatsby.
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Jun 11, 2021 00:37
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DirtyRobot posted:Hamlet, Last Action Man of Action I need to re-watch this movie.
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Jun 11, 2021 00:37
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FightingMongoose posted:Do go on... So there are two kinds of comedy in Gatsby. The first is straight-ahead: the characters are just ridiculous. Almost, but not quite, straight out of a farce. The second kind of comedy is character-driven, and basically involves (a) Nick's peculiar habit of withholding judgment (which endears him to terrible people) and (b) Nick's leaving big events out of his own story. Fitzgerald foregrounds this when he establishes Nick in the first few paragraphs: quote:In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. There are constant callbacks to both of these points in every episode of the story. In each episode, Nick (a) withholds judgement and consequently gets wrapped up in something really seedy, and then (b) "obviously suppresses" the seediest thing that happens. As a narrator, Nick constantly buries the lede. It's like the defining element of his character. The Mr. McKee episode is textbook. You get (1) your farcical character, (2) Nick's nonjudgemental involvement in shady situation, and (3) Nick's lede-burying. Here's how it goes: (1): Farcical character: Mr. McKee's a photographer with an comically inflated sense of his own importance: quote:
Tom, bastard that he is, plays the straight man in this episode and several others. Somebody else always has to, since Nick is chronically nonjudgemental. Then: (2): Shady situation: McKee spends most of the evening hitting on Nick. As the party keeps drinking, McKee gets increasingly direct. So you get moments like this: quote:"Come to lunch some day," he [McKee] suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator. These are all just bits, right? A pretentious artist and the classic "horned up character accidentally grabs the thing they think is a dick" gag. That takes us to: (3): Lede Burying: Nick sleeps with McKee but leaves the sex part out. And so you get this: quote:"All right," I agreed, "I'll be glad to." That's basically how the book goes. You get a bit with a ridiculous character, a bit with Nick in a situation that any right-thinking person would have avoided, and then a bit where Nick intentionally leaves out the sketchiest moment in the episode. That perpetually-optimistic censorship is part of what makes Nick such a neat character, since its wrapped up in his ability to see an inspiring human quality in a con man like Gatsby. And so he keeps it up until the end of the story, when he visits Gatsby's ruined mansion: quote:On the white steps steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Like, last page of the story and he's still prettying it up. You get the idea. Fitzgerald isn't great at comedy -- Gatsby is mostly stock bits. But they're in service of a perceptive and pretty well-articulated moral vision, so the bits all hang together.
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Jun 11, 2021 02:28
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Silver2195 posted:Also, people sometimes have odd impressions of Midsummer Night's Dream. Because it's a comedy with fairies in it it gets softened in popular memory; this was probably more true in Victorian times than now, but even in 2011, the dreadful anti-Stratfordian film Anonymous had Oxford writing Midsummer Night's Dream as a fairly young child. Yeah, that is really egregious, and a great way to tell someone that you've never actually read Midsummer, nor studied the theory very well, since Oxford would have been about 45 when Midsummer was written circa 1595. The whole play is stuffed full of double entendres, crude jokes, and other things that a kid probably wouldn't understand as well as Shakespeare does. Like, this bit in Act 5, which only works when you remember that the Wall is an actual character being played by a guy. quote:PYRAMUS or in Act 2, where Helena begs to be Demetrius' submissive bitch (and there's all sorts of other things going on in this exchange, depending on how you read it...) quote:DEMETRIUS
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Jun 19, 2021 16:25
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Hi, so, I feel like this is as good a place to post as any. I just finished my PhD in Comparative Literature from a “highly ranked” institution, and I feel like poo poo. I want the last five years back. I got pressured into writing a dissertation on a topic I wasn’t passionate about, and when it came time to apply for jobs, I was completely burnt out and unable to feel the motivation to apply for any position whatsoever. I enrolled in an MFA program in creative writing instead, which I guess I should feel good about (I’m following my passion to write fiction, hooray), but I don’t. I’m going to a deep red state, and I’m going to be on foodstamps for three more years. I look at the MLA job list now and then to see if there’s a position that interests me enough to offer a way out, but there isn’t. It’s all a bunch of visiting assistant professor poo poo and/or things in fields that have nothing to do with my dissertation. The dissertation, by the way, while supposedly a “strong piece of work,” is, as I said, a document to which I feel no attachment. It was just a thing that I wrote (more quickly than I had to because I was genuinely miserable and dying to escape my program). I might submit a book proposal just to feel like it went somewhere, but whatever. Anyway, what would you do in my situation? Embrace the chud state MFA lifestyle even though I will be in my 30s and (let’s face it) probably not a famous writer by the time it’s done? Go for some lovely VAP position because at least it pays a little more? Try to look for work in editing and publishing or translating (probably the only fields I have any claim to experience in outside of teaching, and I don’t feel excited or confident about those fields either)? Go to law school?
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Jun 19, 2021 20:30
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TheLemonOfIchabod posted:Anyway, what would you do in my situation? Embrace the chud state MFA lifestyle even though I will be in my 30s and (let’s face it) probably not a famous writer by the time it’s done? Go for some lovely VAP position because at least it pays a little more? Try to look for work in editing and publishing or translating (probably the only fields I have any claim to experience in outside of teaching, and I don’t feel excited or confident about those fields either)? Go to law school? Not Brainworm, but for what it's worth, I started my own chud-state MFA in CW at 30 and finished at 33. It wasn't an especially great experience for me, but I work in a good tech writing position now (WFH, decent paycheck, good benefits, no egregious overtime hours) on account of Brainworm's advice about jobs in this thread. I write fiction on the side and make a little money -- obviously not enough for a living, but the job doesn't kill the fun of writing fiction after hours like grading papers/academic work did. Everyone dreams of being a best-seller like Grisham or King, but there's something to be said about the Wallace Stevens approach to work/life balance. If you aren't writing out of desperation, you can do it for fun. My point is that it sounds like you're burned out from school after the doctorate grind, which is certainly understandable. It might be worth looking for work in editing/publishing/translating, but it might also be worth looking for work in an related field where you don't have experience. I mean, you have a PhD. That's no small thing, even with today's degree inflation. I got into tech writing with an MFA despite having no applicable writing experience, though I admittedly played up some bits of my resume (like saying 'Tutored students in technical writing', which wasn't exactly a lie, but sure wasn't my focus). If nothing else it'll be a break from school. An MFA can be fun, but it might burn you out of your love of fiction writing for a while, too. I didn't write anything for two years after I finished the program. Eason the Fifth fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Jun 20, 2021 |
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Jun 19, 2021 20:55
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Eason the Fifth posted:Not Brainworm, but for what it's worth, I started my own chud-state MFA in CW at 30 and finished at 33. It wasn't an especially great experience for me, but I work in a good tech writing position now (WFH, decent paycheck, good benefits) on account of Brainworm's advice about jobs in this thread. I write fiction on the side and make a little money -- obviously not enough for a living, but the job doesn't kill the fun of writing fiction after hours like grading papers/academic work did. Everyone dreams of being a best-seller like Grisham, but there's something to be said about the Wallace Stevens approach to work/life balance. If you aren't writing out of desperation, you can do it for fun. Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply. I have thought about making more radical lateral moves (including into technical writing), but I don't really feel like I can get a foothold in anything besides the fields I mentioned. This might be in part a temporary issue as I look at everything through post-PhD poo poo-colored lenses, but every technical writing position I find seems to ask for either a degree in some STEM field or 10 years' work experience. I'm not against 'playing up' parts of my resume (I could claim my dissertation was sort of tech-oriented, I guess), but I don't even know where to start. How did you find your job?
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Jun 19, 2021 21:17
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TheLemonOfIchabod posted:Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply. I have thought about making more radical lateral moves (including into technical writing), but I don't really feel like I can get a foothold in anything besides the fields I mentioned. This might be in part a temporary issue as I look at everything through post-PhD poo poo-colored lenses, but every technical writing position I find seems to ask for either a degree in some STEM field or 10 years' work experience. I'm not against 'playing up' parts of my resume (I could claim my dissertation was sort of tech-oriented, I guess), but I don't even know where to start. How did you find your job? I probably made a lot of mistakes along the way, but it was my first experience with the job-hunt grind and I didn't really know what I was doing. I literally started with Googling "How to write a good resume" because I'd only ever done CVs. This seems like a pretty good overview if you need one. I'm sure there are other websites with specific information related to the fields you're aiming for. After that, I hit up every jobs website there was (Glassdoor, Indeed, Monster, Flexjobs, LinkedIn, even websites for local papers). A quick look at Indeed just now for remote, full-time, entry-level tech writing jobs with health insurance gives me 37 hits; might not be a bad place for you to start, if tech writing is something you're interested in pursuing. Every business has a different process and a different set of requirements for formatting, and 90% of them are infuriating, but it's just part of the search. Then I made a job out of applying and aimed for five applications a day. That doesn't seem like a lot, but each application was at least an hour (and sometimes upwards of two or three) looking over the job requirements, tailoring/rewriting my resume to highlight the skills and experience I had to meet their needs, and then negotiating their terrible Byzantine websites where I'd have to type in all the goddamn information a second time despite attaching the resume itself. I didn't always make five a day, but I applied to probably 60 or 70 jobs over the course of a couple months. I heard back from less than 10. But for the ones I did hear back from, and for the ones who set up phone or in-person interviews, I followed Brainworm's advice: Brainworm posted:The most important thing to remember is that you're writing for people, and most often for people who are in situations where they need documentation: An employee who needs to know who to talk to when his paycheck gets screwed up; a trainee who needs to know what what a CLEC is; a technician who needs to know how to get a machine to produce an error code, and how to find out what error code --X- means. Brainworm posted:For me, finding a job was easy. I had a few good offers, and a couple ones I could have taken if nothing else came in. But I've also got friends -- from my program and elsewhere -- that either haven't found jobs or haven't found jobs they're happy with. Year to year, the search is a crapshoot. Right now, for instance, almost everyone's in a hiring freeze so lots of new PhDs are stranded. [edit - Note from me, Brainworm wrote this in 2009, during the Great Recession.] So that was it, really. I showed the interviewers what I could offer them, and I was as pleasant and charming as I could be without being fake or smarmy. This took a disturbing amount of practice and effort after having been in a post-grad program for three years, where, frankly, some folks are deeply unpleasant and infect others with their personalities. I'm sure you know the type. Caveat: I'd mentioned this was my first experience looking for jobs, but it was also my only experience -- I've been with the company I'm at for seven years now. I was also extremely lucky. I've applied to a few other jobs since then (mostly part-time, looking for a little additional income to knock down my loan debt faster) and didn't hear back, even from ones I thought I was qualified for. Other folks might have some better (and more up-to-date) advice. Eason the Fifth fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Jun 20, 2021 |
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Jun 19, 2021 22:05
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I lucked into a job teaching business writing at a community college after doing my PhD in Early Modern lit in 4.5 years. I taught the business stuff for 5 years and burned out on it. Now I'm teaching lit as an adjunct and spending the rest of my time doing miscellaneous tasks and occasionally picking up various part-time work, and doing some research when I have free time, and I'm much happier. You probably need to spend some time decompressing and finding your bearings before you can make any good decisions, but there are two things that you probably should consider before bouncing into another program or bailing on it: 1) If you're not yet 30 and you have a PhD you don't know what it's like to have a life that doesn't orbit an educational institution. It might be worth finding that experience if you can manage it. 2) What will the CW MFA give to you? Will it be worth the debt you accumulate? How does that compare to just starting to put energy into creative projects now? Mind you, if you can swing the MFA without accumulating any debt, and you think it'll be fun, why not?
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Jun 19, 2021 22:12
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TheLemonOfIchabod posted:[...] So you've already gotten some good advice. Here's some other stuff to think about : Academia If you didn't like grad school you won't like being a professor. I'm sorry to say that because I think it qualifies as bad news. But, in the same way that the last year of undergrad looks a lot like the first years of grad school, so do the first few years of a professorship look like the dissertation-writing phase of a Ph.D. Decision-making When you're in doubt about your future, talk to people. Empathy is key. The only thing you need to say is something like "I'm wondering what it's like to be you." Then listen for like 45 minutes. By the time whoever it is is done talking, you'll know whether what they do -- technical writing, teaching, lawyering -- is for you. This costs you a cup of coffee. Job Hunting If you're looking for a job, the best thing you can do is the "I'm wondering what it's like to be you" conversation. Do it over and over. When you find someone who's living the kind of professional life you want, say something like "wow. Working at SalesForce sounds really great. What steps would someone in my position have to take in order to do that?" Don't ask "do you have any job openings?" because the answer is almost always "no" or the wrong kind of "yes." Second: If you're looking for a job, you're not looking for openings. You're looking for offers. Basically, you don't know what the deal is -- exactly what a job entails, who'll you be working for, and what it's like -- until you reach the offer stage. And you're not gonna know what you're worth until you get a handful of offers anyway. So if you're wondering whether to pursue an opportunity at Sulfur Springs College in Buttfuck Nowhere, ask yourself: is there a 10% (or 20%) chance that this place is doing something I'd be interested in? If the answer is yes, talk to somebody. Get the offer. Then decide. Not Finding Your Passion Don't think about this issue, or situation, or whatever you want to call it as finding your passion or your calling. It sells you short. You can make a living at, and enjoy, maybe half a dozen or a dozen different things. Maybe twenty. Fifty. Nobody knows the exact number, save that the number of things that you can be happy doing is at least an order of magnitude higher than one. Past that, it's the cloud of unknowing. Put another way: if there is one "best" career for you, you're never going to know what it is. There's no point in your life (or afterwards) that offers you a vantage point from which you can objectively decide they way things ought to have been. You never get to see the answer key. If you decide to be a lawyer, you'll never get to know what you could have done as a writer. That's not something to regret. It just means that you can take some pressure off yourself. So: Law school? Maybe. Talk to some lawyers. Maybe you're better off playing office goon at a firm, or volunteering at a pro bono association, before you just dive into law school. Is that better than an MFA? Talk to some MFA grads. Try it on and see if it fits. If you can see yourself being happy with either life, great. Flip a coin and see if you feel any urge to make it two out of three. But talk to people. They will tell you all about their lives if you buy them a cup of coffee and give them a half-hour of ear time. Once you do that, figuring out what's not not for you is pretty simple.
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Jun 20, 2021 02:53
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To piggyback on Brainworm’s advice, there is a book that has been making the rounds in my professional circles for people considering a job change (in my case, it’s mostly colleagues who are high-achieving government officials with the opportunity to retire relatively early). Brainworm echoes a lot of the advice the book gives, and the writers expand on the step-by-step of how to test-drive different career possibilities. Some people here might find it helpful. Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
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Jun 20, 2021 18:08
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Business of Ferrets posted:Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Yup. We use this in our Honors program. Some of the book is meh but the chapter on job searches is flat-out awesome.
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Jun 21, 2021 00:29
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Brainworm posted:So: Law school? Maybe. Talk to some lawyers. Maybe you're better off playing office goon at a firm, or volunteering at a pro bono association, before you just dive into law school. Is that better than an MFA? Talk to some MFA grads. Try it on and see if it fits. The BFC law thread has an OP here that is five full posts long and includes a section devoted to people considering law school. That section ends with the following:    Despite this, I invite people considering law school to head over there and ask about what it's like, beyond the extensive OP material. To directly quote the thread, "we could use some fresh meat to laugh at". Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Jun 21, 2021 |
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Jun 21, 2021 02:29
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Discendo Vox posted:The BFC law thread has an OP here that is five full posts long and includes a section devoted to people considering law school. That section ends with the following: I have zero doubt that law schools are turning out more JDs than the world can comfortably employ and -- as in the rest of higher education -- there are a whole lot of programs whose job-placement outcomes make them, like, indistinguishable from grifts. At the same time, I'd advise anybody interested in e.g. law school to talk to law school students and recent graduates, in person, about their experiences doing whatever it is they do, instead of just reading the forums. Regret minimization is a thing. Some kid might decide not to go to law school and, later on, wonder whether that decision was a good one. If it was based largely on what they've read on the internet, they might have a good reason to doubt their basis. Like, I wouldn't make relationship decisions based on what I read in r/relationshipadvice, even if what I end up reading is somehow more-or-less correct. Big life decisions need diligence. You don't ever get to learn whether you got them right. Three or four over-coffee conversations cost, like, five hours and fifty bucks (if you go fancy). That's cheap compared to self-doubt. If you talk to four or five lawyers and you'd be miserable living their lives, well, you can decide not to go to law school without second guessing the matter.
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Jun 21, 2021 20:36
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Brainworm posted:I have zero doubt that law schools are turning out more JDs than the world can comfortably employ and -- as in the rest of higher education -- there are a whole lot of programs whose job-placement outcomes make them, like, indistinguishable from grifts. Why does this tend to happen and how would you fix it, philosophically, say rebuilding all the involved systems from the ground up?
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Jun 22, 2021 09:24
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Fuschia tude posted:Why does this tend to happen and how would you fix it, philosophically, say rebuilding all the involved systems from the ground up? This happens because there's, like, zero accountability for colleges and universities with respect to student outcomes. If you have a totally appalling dropout rate, you can (theoretically) lose access to programs like Pell grants. But there's not a governmental appetite to enact even common-sense reforms that prevent outright scams, or even to enforce some of the regulations that already exist. Put another way: there is no regulatory or financial reason -- and I mean none -- to prevent a college from starting an MFA program in creative writing (for instance) and cajoling students to take out $80K in loans to attend, even when they know that most of the students who graduate from the program will never earn enough money to pay those loans back (let alone make enough to justify borrowing in the first place). I'm picking on CW, but the most egregious offenders here are business schools and their fly-by-night MBA programs. The good news is that there are some easy fixes. You don't need a ground-up redesign of higher ed. And you don't need to foreclose on students' God-given right to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at a terrible idea. Accreditation Our current accreditation system is pretty broken, at least if its purpose is to allow students to tell the difference between programs that at least try to offer an education and programs that are designed solely to siphon loan money from unwitting students. In the US, so-called "national" accreditation is basically worthless. Any program can get it. Regional accreditation is where meaningful review actually happens. So one of the first things that needs to happen, reform-wise, is either ditching or revising national accreditation, and restricting the use of terms like "college," "school," "institute," or "university," to institutions that actually undergo meaningful accreditation and review. That's not going to solve the problem of law school overgrowth, but it will do something about the DeVrys. Cost/Income Ranking Back when my sister went to college (roughly 1999), we attended a mandatory education program for her Federal student loans. The metric they gave her in that program was that you shouldn't borrow more money for a college degree than you'll make during your first year on the job. That said, the program actually used an average of graduates' earnings over the first five years of their career as a synthetic "first year on the job" salary benchmark. Fair enough. The rough metric works out something like this: if you mean to be a public school teacher, you shouldn't graduate with more than about $50K in student loan debt. That of course varies. In much of California or in NYC, that number is closer to $80K. In red state America, it's more like $30K. So a short-reach improvement most programs would be to use data from e.g. graduates' tax returns to calculate the ratio of a program's cost to its graduates' income, and rank or categorize programs on that basis. Maybe gold, silver, and bronze, like health care plans. A student can still absolutely go to a bronze program (where the graduates just categorically don't make enough to justify the cost of the program as an investment), but at least they know what they're getting into. And when there's an apples-to-apples comparison -- a bronze law school compared to a gold law school -- students have an easier way to make a financially informed decision. In the long term, this kind of ranking system ought to get programs focused on cost control and job placement, rather that just on maximizing tuition revenue. And it ought to kill off programs that are just tuition mills. I think that this, or something like it, is a solution to the "overproduction of J.D./M.B.A" problem. Price Transparency and Scholarship Portability A third and, like, necessary reform is price transparency. College pricing is totally opaque, and that creates an environment where cons can thrive. A good example is Ph.D. programs. At a university that's on the up-and-up, at least nominally, the "cost" of a graduate program is six years of tuition at, like, $25K or $30K a year. But in most of those programs, that number doesn't mean anything. Nobody actually pays to get a Ph.D. Instead, they work as research or teaching assistants, or get fellowships, etc. But online Ph.D. programs exist because un- or under-informed students don't see the fellowship or scholarship process at work, or even know that it exists at all. Instead, they compare prices to products and say something like "hey. I can get a Ph.D. from Walden for $80K, while the same degree from OSU costs $100K. And it's all online, so I don't have to turn my life upside down in order to do it. It's all win." But of course the out-of-pocket cost for an OSU Ph.D. is, like -$50K if you're a research or teaching assistant, so your truly garbage-tier online Ph.D actually costs something like $130K more than its OSU competitor. In the undergraduate realm, the University of Phoenix uses the same strategy: underprice on sticker tuition while overpricing on out-of-pocket costs. If you're from a poor or middle-class family -- think an annual income of under $70K -- your degrees from top-tier schools like Harvard, Yale, or Stanford are free. You're also cheap-as-free at most small liberal arts colleges (at mine, $70K of family income would put you on the hook for $5K a year), and at most state colleges (in those states with half-decent systems). But your University of Phoenix Bachelor degree will still set you back $50K. This does a lot of harm, especially to first-generation or other students who don't understand (or don't have the time, money, or expertise to discover and exploit) the advantages (like need-based aid) that conventional tuition pricing structures at least allegedly afford. I think the best solution to this problem is a combination of price transparency and scholarship portability. What you want is a regulatory environment that says: (a) Every student in a program pays the same price for tuition. It's a lump sum broken into installments, rather than year-to-year variable tuition. Your undergraduate degree costs $50K, and you can use loans to structure those payments over 20 years. So, for instance, every student pays $40K for a B.A. from my private college. Down the road, at State U., a B.A. costs $20K and a B.S. costs $25K. That's it.The price is the price, regardless of whether you're from a family of millionaires, a star athlete, or valedictorian. (b) Scholarships and need-based aid are given by benefactor organizations or by government -- not by colleges -- and are portable from program to program. If you get $7K in need-based aid, you can take it to my college, to State U., or to any accredited program. This makes the process of comparing college costs, and of applying for scholarships and financial aid, much simpler. It also eliminates the complex and opaque pricing structures that allow schools like UPx to exploit students' process ignorance.
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Jun 22, 2021 17:23
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Wouldn't that system mean that no poor person ever goes to Harvard again? A rich person can pay $50k/year to go to Harvard (just making numbers up). A poor person can get their government scholarship for up to $10k/year in portable tuition and get to go to any community college or midwest public university. They'll get a fine education, but never at a private school. There won't be a full $50k transferable scholarship, whereas Harvard can easily waive that tuition currently.
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Jun 22, 2021 17:40
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TacoNight posted:Wouldn't that system mean that no poor person ever goes to Harvard again? A rich person can pay $50k/year to go to Harvard (just making numbers up). A poor person can get their government scholarship for up to $10k/year in portable tuition and get to go to any community college or midwest public university. They'll get a fine education, but never at a private school. There won't be a full $50k transferable scholarship, whereas Harvard can easily waive that tuition currently. There's nothing that says a benefactor organization couldn't set up a scholarship that gives a high-performing student from a low-income family up to $50K a year in tuition. Scholarships of that type and of that magnitude are actually pretty common, and cost about $1M to endow. There's also nothing that says that Harvard has to keep their tuition at $50K. If that's a barrier to the students they mean to attract, they are absolutely free to lower it. Right now, most scholarship-funding donations are given in trust to specific universities. The problem with this -- and one that donors don't often realize -- is that these types of restricted funds get effectively redirected by rejiggering discounts. If you give a high-need student a $5K merit scholarship, all that happens at most Universities is that the student's need-based aid gets reduced by $5K. The student pays exactly the same amount out of pocket, and the University pockets a gift that the donor intended to benefit the student. The problem, in other words, is that giving colleges and universities the power to (a) set prices arbitrarily, and without regards to cost, and (b) discount arbitrarily, and on a per-student basis, and (c) do this in an easy money/credit economy that is heavily subsidized by State and Federal governments, but that (d) doesn't require anything like accessible public reporting, means that Higher Ed. in the U.S. ends up with almost exactly the same intractable pricing issues as health care. Nobody knows what anything actually costs, and so informed decision making is nearly impossible. So, at the very least, colleges should be obligated to set tuition for a student (and award any need-based aid) before finding out how that student pays their tuition (i.e. with loans, grants, or scholarships). They should be obligated to set tuition in advance, and for the duration of a degree-granting program, so that students don't get priced out of an education because their mother takes on a second job, or because a sibling dies, or because their parents' house goes up in value. And they ought to be able to control either need-based aid or merit-based scholarships, but not both. These kinds of aid ought to be awarded consistently, according to public and objective criteria. The common practice of using one kind of aid to offset the other is, like, really gross. I'd also be in favor of a program of need-based aid where, rather than providing a discount, government sets a ceiling on the tuition and fees a student can be expected to pay.
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Jun 22, 2021 20:03
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Thank you to everyone who replied to my posts. I am, at this point, going to go ahead and at least try the MFA, albeit with a strong "I can quit if I want to" mentality. It is a project I have worked on for two years (I could have actually started it last year but didn’t because a. COVID and b. I was hating my Ph.D. very slightly less than six months earlier and decided I wanted to finish it first after all), and I would obviously hate myself if I didn’t go through it to some extent, even if I am currently terrified and unsure it was worth all the effort.Brainworm posted:Academia I mean, this is probably what is causing me the most stress—both because, yes, wow, what a loss it will feel like if I am not supposed to be a professor, AND because I genuinely do not know how much of my misery over the last three years (the first two years of the program were actually fine) was due to personal temporary circumstances (big clash of personalities with my advisor, somewhat toxic department environment, relationship issues) and how much was just the life of being an academic. And here’s another question: if I decide in say, October, that I want to apply for postdocs after all, will the fact that I entered an MFA program to "try it out" sink any applications? And how closely related does my postdoc project need to be to my dissertation? As I said, I do not really have any desire to revisit my dissertation other than maybe to write a book proposal. Edit: I am asking specifically about postdocs because I understand those to be the most time-sensitive positions, but my questions sort of apply to any teaching position. Edit2: I also want to add that I am thinking of taking the Foreign Service Officer Test. I don’t think anyone in this thread has advice on that, but I wanted to add for context that that is a career track that appeals to me, and I’ll probably go make a post in that thread soon. TheLemonOfIchabod fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Jun 25, 2021 |
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Jun 25, 2021 00:32
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TheLemonOfIchabod posted:Edit2: I also want to add that I am thinking of taking the Foreign Service Officer Test. I don’t think anyone in this thread has advice on that, but I wanted to add for context that that is a career track that appeals to me, and I’ll probably go make a post in that thread soon. I mean, I basically wrote the FAQ/OP of the FS thread, but yes, that’s the place to post. The short answer is that you can do the FS application and testing process independently of whatever else you’re doing. I sometimes half-jokingly tell aspiring FSOs that they should start a new job or buy a house because either of those will pretty much mean you’ll soon get an offer from the State Department.
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Jun 26, 2021 05:28
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TheLemonOfIchabod posted:I mean, this is probably what is causing me the most stress—both because, yes, wow, what a loss it will feel like if I am not supposed to be a professor, AND because I genuinely do not know how much of my misery over the last three years (the first two years of the program were actually fine) was due to personal temporary circumstances (big clash of personalities with my advisor, somewhat toxic department environment, relationship issues) and how much was just the life of being an academic. OK. I think that the advice I want to give you is that personality clashes, toxic departments, and relationship issues are all part of being an academic. Everybody, academic or not, sees some version of these, but when you're an academic they take really specific forms. Department Chair/Assistant professor looks different from manager/employee or team lead/team member in the same ways that relationship issues present themselves differently if you have an academic job or work in a college town. If the academic versions of those issues are worse for you than the plain vanilla ones (if there are plain vanilla ones), you're probably better off learning that sooner than later. You can get better at dealing with them. My second marriage looks a lot better than my first because I'm better at explaining how academic stuff works to a non-academic, for instance. But the issues themselves persist from graduate school into professorships in the same way that you see middle school-level bullshit play out in nursing homes. quote:And here’s another question: if I decide in say, October, that I want to apply for postdocs after all, will the fact that I entered an MFA program to "try it out" sink any applications? And how closely related does my postdoc project need to be to my dissertation? As I said, I do not really have any desire to revisit my dissertation other than maybe to write a book proposal. The MFA isn't going to hurt your application at all. Depending on the position it might even help.There are a lot of CW positions that are really something like 50% lit, 50% CW, and so some CW experience is better than none. And for postdocs, well, there doesn't need to be much alignment at all. Most Lit. or CW postdocs are just an alternative way of framing a one or two-year VAP or Visiting Writer position. It's not like Chemistry or Physics, where you're gonna spend your PostDoc actually researching. That said, there are some PostDocs that rely on a specific set of applied skills -- maybe editing a literary magazine, directing a writing center, or running some project or another as part of a grant. You're in great shape if your dissertation happens to align with these, but that alignment is usually something like "I've worked with his specific tool or method." I have never heard of somebody getting a PostDoc that was, like, a natural or organic extension of their dissertation research, although I suppose it could happen.
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Jun 28, 2021 01:49
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I've stolen this shamelessly from a reddit post and just wondered what your thoughts/counterarguments would be.quote:Shakespeare is grossly over-rated...
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Jul 27, 2021 13:31
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On a completely different topic, can anyone help me find a short story I can barely remember? It may have been Daphne Du Maurier but googling can't find it. It starts with a man returned from America to Europe and his plane crashes in the Alps. The survivors sit and wait a few days for rescue and then they're led to the nearest village. But the protagonist used to be a mountain climber so instead of carrying on he decides to turn back and explore the peaks instead. I think he next goes to stay in a tavern and has vaguely foreboding conversations with first the tavern keeper and then his daughter before heading into the mountains. That was as far as I got before I lost the book.
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Jul 27, 2021 19:44
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FightingMongoose posted:I've stolen this shamelessly from a reddit post and just wondered what your thoughts/counterarguments would be. Heh Shakespeare is overrated but that doesn't mean he isn't first-rate. Bardolatry just hits levels of uncritical worship that aren't a useful lens for understanding anything. The Marston example cracks me up because that play actually rips off three of Shakespeare's plays.
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Jul 27, 2021 19:49
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CommonShore posted:Heh Shakespeare is overrated but that doesn't mean he isn't first-rate. Bardolatry just hits levels of uncritical worship that aren't a useful lens for understanding anything. Agreed.
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Jul 27, 2021 20:00
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FightingMongoose posted:On a completely different topic, can anyone help me find a short story I can barely remember? FYI, there's a thread for that in the Book Barn.
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Jul 27, 2021 22:12
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Thanks!
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Jul 28, 2021 07:43
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FightingMongoose posted:I've stolen this shamelessly from a reddit post and just wondered what your thoughts/counterarguments would be. So my late to the party point: Shakespeare doesn't get put on a pedestal because he's the best storyteller ever. He gets put on a pedestal because he was the first storyteller to use many significant modern storytelling techniques in their modern form and in coordination with one another. In other words: Shakespeare is a Thomas Edison. You don't get to dunk on Edison because, like, over the past hundred years the collective efforts of humanity have produced a better electric light, or say something like, "the Woodward lamp was better than Edison's because it was earlier" and just leave out that it only lasted like six hours and cost as much as a racehorse. There's something to be said for refinement. It's why we all have iPhones and not Blackberrys. So. If you're given a well-told modern story (a movie, novel, play etc. in which a character wants something), you can basically break it down either as a direct employment of Shakespeare's methods or as a refinement of them. You'll see a character who begins their story behaving in ways that hurt themselves and other people, and who either learns to behave differently or, significantly, does not. That, by itself, isn't original to Shakespeare. But: During that process, the character will also be differentiated from other characters (who are also learning to behave better) using a variety of different techniques (like symbols, scene weave, and character webs) in such a way that we learn a great deal about each character by seeing how they are different from one another (and rather than having to be told directly). For instance: in Hamlet, we get four young-ish characters (Hamlet, Laertes, Ophelia, and Fortinbras) who must decide how to respond to their father's murder. How they each respond differently tells us how the characters are different form one another and, in the world of Hamlet, what kinds of responses are possible. (Nobody demands weregild, hires a lawyer, or calls the police, for instance.) And so we get some remarkably economical character- and world-building. Shakespeare is the first Anglophone storyteller -- and, I think, the first storyteller in recorded history -- to give us this kind of economy. That is, we get plays like Midsummer where something like a dozen characters all embark on a journey of self-discovery and change, and, less than two hours or 150 pages later, we all know how they've ended up. Nobody else does that. Those are the basics, right? Just about every modern storyteller uses them, and some use them better than Shakespeare did. That is 100% not the point. The point is that, just like you can trace the design of the modern electric light back to Edison, and you can trace the design of the modern smartphone back to the O.G. iPhone (a glass slab with none of that sliding keyboard/trackball nonsense), you can trace the design of the modern story back to Shakespeare.
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Aug 2, 2021 17:19
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I guess. But I wouldn't be super excited to go and see a reproduction of an original Edison lamp.
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Aug 2, 2021 19:56
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Brainworm posted:character webs This is maybe a stupid question, but what do you mean by this? Google seems to think it's a chart you assign school children to demonstrate reading comprehension.
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Aug 2, 2021 21:44
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Wallet posted:This is maybe a stupid question, but what do you mean by this? Google seems to think it's a chart you assign school children to demonstrate reading comprehension. Brainworm wrote a whole book about all of this called something like Shakespeare's Storytelling. That said, I feel like the book didn't do much to establish that those storytelling techniques were original to Shakespeare; it just sort of asserted this and focused on explaining the techniques themselves and how both Shakespeare and later writers used them. Which I guess fits the book's intended purpose (introducing undergraduates to useful lenses for analyzing Shakespeare and other fiction), but doesn't really provide much help in the debate over whether Shakespeare's reputation is truly earned.
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Aug 2, 2021 21:55
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Silver2195 posted:Brainworm wrote a whole book about all of this called something like Shakespeare's Storytelling. Well, isn't that asking to prove a negative? What you're asking would require an exhaustive survey of every single written work predating Shakespeare (at least in English), to prove that none of them had ever done all of those things that he did together in one work before. And even that alone wouldn't be enough, because many works have been lost, more and more as we look further into the past. Thus, even finding no such examples in all known works are not enough; because what if there were some work that Shakespeare may have had access to (or perhaps not), but which has since become lost to time? This task is both figuratively and literally impossible. Meanwhile, his critics have it easy. All anyone has to do is find one single counterexample, a single example of such a work produced before 1590 with all of those elements in place and functioning together, to prove that he wasn't the first to put it all together. Fuschia tude fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Aug 2, 2021 |
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Aug 2, 2021 22:00
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Fuschia tude posted:Well, isn't that asking to prove a negative? What you're asking would require an exhaustive survey of every single written work predating Shakespeare (at least in English), to prove that none of them had ever done all of those things that he did together in one work before. Heh, fair point. I'm actually agnostic about whether Brainworm is right about this; I've read and watched some Shakespeare plays, as well as some non-drama English literature contemporary with and prior to him, but I haven't actually read or watched any plays by his English contemporaries. (I have read slightly-later French plays by Moliere and Racine in translation, and came to the conclusion that Racine's work is "less flawed" than Shakespeare's, but that this isn't necessarily the same as being "better." The key difference lies is Stendhal's classical vs. romantic distinction; Shakespeare was more willing to take risks by breaking neoclassical "rules.")
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Aug 2, 2021 22:33
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Silver2195 posted:Brainworm wrote a whole book about all of this called something like Shakespeare's Storytelling. I actually read (a draft of) the book a while ago whenever it was that he was finishing it but I don't remember what he was calling character webs  .
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Aug 2, 2021 23:46
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Wallet posted:I actually read (a draft of) the book a while ago whenever it was that he was finishing it but I don't remember what he was calling character webs The book is here, or on Amazon. If anybody is tight I'll happily send them a copy. Silver2195 has the right end of things, which is that the book itself doesn't try to establish that these techniques originated with Shakespeare. It's a textbook, and the point is to catalog the techniques that Shakespeare uses rather than to make an exhaustive case that Shakespeare used them first. My agent's of the opinion that nobody wants to read a book that makes the "Shakespeare as originator" case, and I think that I agree. I could be one of those guys who tries to make that point in a series of articles over several years, but there's not much point to it. I'm, like, not a debater. If I can't make my point in a way that feels obvious once you've thought of it, I'ma just throw my hands up and play another round of Mike Tyson's Punch Out!.* Whether you buy the whole "Shakespeare was the first modern storyteller" argument, I think we can all agree that Shakespeare's reputation rests on his influence and not on the fact that nobody's ever written a better RomCom than Much Ado. I think what I want to say -- just to lend the whole thing more focus -- is that the centrality of Shakespeare might be arbitrary, but that this doesn't make it trivial. If generations of writers have been trained up thinking that Shakespeare is great writing, that's who they're going to emulate or react to. * 35 years and I still can't get past Mr. Sandman.
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Aug 3, 2021 01:52
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Brainworm posted:Whether you buy the whole "Shakespeare was the first modern storyteller" argument, I think we can all agree that Shakespeare's reputation rests on his influence and not on the fact that nobody's ever written a better RomCom than Much Ado. I think a significant part of Shakespeare's broad reputation comes from his work having penetrated into English pedagogy in a way that no other playwright has. His isn't the only influence laundered by enough generations to have become part of the fabric of storytelling as we understand it, but it might be the only one virtually everyone in English speaking countries has direct experience with. Whoever his influences were no one has ever heard of them. Brainworm posted:The book is here, or on Amazon. If anybody is tight I'll happily send them a copy. Based on my post history it was just over a year ago—maybe I'll give it another read. Before I had a job I used to remember things.
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Aug 3, 2021 14:54
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Wallet posted:[...] Based on my post history it was just over a year ago—maybe I'll give it another read. Before I had a job I used to remember things. I forget whether I sent you a copy of the book, but I'm happy to. The pre-production manuscripts I sent around were pretty messy. And if this was a year ago, I think they went trough one more major set of revisions.
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Aug 3, 2021 15:29
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Brainworm posted:I forget whether I sent you a copy of the book, but I'm happy to. The pre-production manuscripts I sent around were pretty messy. And if this was a year ago, I think they went trough one more major set of revisions. No worries, I'm happy to buy a copy. I think you were waiting on a last round of edits when I read it and it was in pretty decent shape. The fact that there isn't a more or less universal terminology for (now) fundamental components of storytelling like abstract relationships between characters being used to define them in the context of a shared work or that thing what you do when you put scenes in a particular order to express something beyond their literal content is probably my least favorite part of literary scholarship; it's like everyone has Sapir-Whorfed themselves into talking about symbolism until the end of time.
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Aug 3, 2021 16:19
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