Blogging; And You

Posted on February 25, 2014 by drosvally

As I’ve kept this blog over the years, I’ve had many different reactions from my peers and mentors about my ability to remain consistent with it.

Some have expressed that it’s an odd experience to read the blog. I’ve been told that being in the room during an event then later reading my description of the happening is a touch surreal (I can understand how this might be true).

By and large, the most common reaction that I’ve been privy to is an incredulity at my ability to keep writing and my ability to find time to devote to this project.

I will be honest, writing has almost never been a struggle. I’m a writer. Writers want to write. I have, sometimes, found myself awash with a plethora of possibilities for blog content, and sometimes I have been in the blogging doldrums with nothing that I can really relate. I’ve also been in the situation where I’m dealing with something that I would love to craft a blog post about it, but for political or personal reasons I am not able to at that given moment. Sometimes, I’m able to shelve these ideas for later use. More often than not, I have to consent that I will be unable to put my thoughts into writing about an issue at hand in a public forum until I have tenure and, at that point, the issue will (hopefully) be rendered moot.

Throughout my early PhD experience, writing was an important exercise for me.

One of my Dissertation Personalities; American Actor Lester Wallack. WHAT A MUSTACHE!

During coursework, you can spend a whole semester without writing a single page, then be expected to spit out at least 100 pages of pristine, intelligent, and interesting writing at the semester’s end. This doesn’t set a very sustainable pace for the tasks ahead.

During my comps prep, writing was important because it kept me on-task, and gave me the practice of spitting out focused content in a small time window. One of the skills which these exams test, but is extremely difficult to study for, is your ability to craft a cogent piece of writing under extreme stress and pressure. I’ve known that, for some of my forbearers, this was the most stressful portion of the exam. Because I’m used to creating such content blasts (thanks to my writing here), it was the least of my concerns.

Now that I’m into dissertation work, writing is more important than ever. Unfortunately, it’s even harder than it used to be to push myself to do it.

You see, this process is a long and drawn out one. It’s a process of thinking BIG DEEP THOUGHTS over a substantial period of time. As such, I’m engaged in work that doesn’t necessarily leave me with cogent bits of information at the end of the day. Blog posts require something that can be discussed in a certain space. The things that I’m currently entrenched in are long, drawn-out battles… and not ones that I’m necessarily willing to share. As much as I would love to live in an open-source world, Intellectual Property is a real and ever-present element of any academic’s work. Especially an unpublished graduate student. I really can’t let you in on my research process in detail that’s too great, which is really a pity because (trust me) it’s fascinating.

So as much as I’d love to share my triumphs and tribulations as I go along, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to stick to the abstract for the moment… and for the foreseeable future.

In terms of finding time to blog, I can’t articulate how worthwhile an exercise this is. I’ve given you some reasons above as to why this might be. If you’re currently writing a dissertation and NOT actually doing any writing on a weekly basis (it may sound weird to an outsider, but trust me it’s very easy to do), I can’t recommend the experience of blogging highly enough. It helps to order your thoughts and keep you together. It allows you to achieve small goals throughout the week, and that will create a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment your work often lacks since your large goals are a long ways off. Blogging is a great way to give you structure (which, as we all know, is key to any work regime, especially a free-form one like dissertation work). And, at the risk of sounding like a romantic, it’s sometimes nice to have a physical manifestation of your work and time to look back upon.

Even if you don’t choose to share your thoughts in an open public forum, you should consider a journal, or a private blog, or just somewhere to put a collection of your writing as you go through this process. It might be worth something to you someday, and the process is definitely worth something to you right now.

Breaking News: The Internet is Here to Stay

Posted on February 17, 2014 by drosvally

Over the weekend, my dearest friend and I celebrated the silly holiday by attending a performance at the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum. The performance was a staged reading called “Unfeigned Love: The Letters of John and Abigail Adams” and it was, essentially, everything you might think from that title. Some very apt performers played the parts of John and Abigail and, with the help of a narrator, led the audience through a tour of this great couple’s love via the contents of their letters.

The performance was well done and enjoyable, but I took great issue with something the

The stage-setting for our performance on the evening

narrator said in a nearly-offhand moment of his tale. At one moment, the narrator chose to ask his audience what their legacy would be; when had they last put pen to paper? When had they last spent time crafting a letter rather than composing via keys and screen? “Real” letters, his rhetoric ran, were much more lasting than the fleeting updates one places on the internet and digital technologies cannot be trusted for information permanency.

This fallacy is one which I combat on a daily basis. Distrust of technology is notorious and rampant; people seem to think that things put on the internet simply fizzle into thin air. Because these things are not tangible, they are not permanent. The paper letter is superior in form and longevity.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong mister narrator. Just…. So very wrong.

Let me put it to you this way: how often do we warn our children against the dangers of putting things on the world wide web where they can be found? How often do we caution the eager youth against rampant facebook posting for fear that it may be brought to bear against them at some point later in their career? (say… when looking for a job…?) Information put online, I would argue, is more permanent and more public than any single piece of paper knowledge crafted since the dawn of the digital age.

So let’s go through these false notions one step at a time: the fallacy would have us believe that digital information is fleeting, impermanent, impersonal, and inferior to something written on a piece of paper. Additionally, digital communications are entirely replacing hand-written correspondence.

Digital media is far from consumable. It is nearly impossible to well and truly wipe a hard drive of all traces of information, and doing so requires special equipment (…rare earth magnets, for instance). Data stored “in the cloud” is actually (generally) stored in physical form at a data center with one (or several) points of redundancy. Public-facing websites are also considered something of public domain; once the information is available, anyone is free to access or archive it (and people do). In essence: to erase every trace of something off the internet, you would have to hunt down every physical copy of whatever it is you are looking to destroy, and utilize an obscure process to clean the multiple machines upon which it is stored (generally in more than one physical location). That doesn’t sound consumable to me.

And how about the notion that gmail auto-archives all of my outward correspondence? I can’t say that about the paper letters I’ve received and sent. The truth is that a hand-written note is much more likely to be lost in the shuffle or otherwise destroyed by the ravages of time than a digital one.

Oh and paper is really easy to destroy. Just ask the good librarians at Alexandria.

As for the impersonal nature of digital media, I will grant you that computer interfaces can often seem cold. Who hasn’t bemoaned the lack of a “sarcasm font” on one occasion or another? But I will say that a healthy digital presence can tell more about a person than almost anything else. Do you want to know who I am? Then read my blog in conjunction with my twitter feed; google my name and you’ll find pictures of me as well as stories about me scattered through cyberspace; you can even find youtube videos of me doing various things if you want to hear my voice. Don’t you think that will get you closer to me than a letter can? The internet allows for a variety of expression that, before the digital age, were all but a dream. So sure, maybe one brief e-mail isn’t as heartfelt as a gushing hand-drawn letter, but you can’t take the letter out of its context.

Also; the ship was REALLY pretty on the water.

As for digital correspondence completely replacing the “superior letter”, it will only do so if the individual allows it to. Despite writing a blog, various e-mails, text messages, social media updates, and all kinds of pixilated content in my day-to-day life, I still maintain a long-term pen pal connection to several of my close friends. Additionally, even this week I took the time to write my best beloved a hand-written note, sent by old-fashioned post, in celebration of Hallmark’s Holiday. E-mails don’t kill letter writing; people refusing to write letters kills letter writing.

And, for the record, digital technologies will only make the job of future historians an easier task. Can I please tell you how much simpler it is to search digitized archives than it is to page through stacks of broadsides or (even worse) hand-written letters? It’s a true joy to handle written material, but it is (by no stretch of the word) “easy” and I’m certain that much more gets lost in the cracks.

So on the whole, “Unfeigned Love” was an enjoyable event. I would, however, rather like the historians at Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum to reconsider their stance on digital technologies. There’s no reason to privilege the written word and put down the typed one; especially since social media makes great (free) advertising. Encourage your audience to tweet, facebook, and blog to their friends; not forsake the evil computer for the romance of the fountain pen.

Back Into the Fray

Posted on December 9, 2013 by drosvally

First of all: hi! I’m back! My much-needed break was much-needed, but being back is a vital portion of keeping myself afloat with my studies. While I was away, I came across several things that I think would make great posts (don’t worry, those ideas are all safely tucked away under my cap), but none that made me more angry than this blog post I stumbled across while mucking about on facebook.

Paul Mullin is a Seattle-based self-professed “recovering playwright”. And apparently in 2011 he had some things to say about my man Will. Let’s start here: go read Mullin’s post; otherwise what I’m about to say is not going to make any sense.

Mullin writes with all the bitterness of a contemporary playwright whose works have been sidelined for more “classical” material. One of the many things I took issue with in this blog is the tacit assumption that Shakespeare is, in Mullin’s words, a “cash cow” that theatres return to in order to support their other repertory. This is, at least in this country, absolutely not the case. Except for very rare circumstances (most of those being Shakespeare-specific companies), Shakespeare is not a moneymaker. If you want to look at cash cows, cast your gaze to the American musical. I guarantee you that the odd foray into Grease or Rent will gross a theatre more dollars than the pet-project Hamlet.

A pretty shot of the lobby at Trinity Rep. Because I’ve got nothing else to put here, and I love this picture I managed to get.

Next; let’s tackle Mullin’s primary thesis: “Shakespeare would hate us”. In Mullin’s world, Shakespeare comes via time machine (DeLorean, TARDIS, or otherwise) to the twenty-first century, stays for a while, and has a few things to say about the theatre scene here. All of them are bad. Shakespeare, contends Mullin, would hate everything about being a working American playwright and many things about the theatre scene in general.

The bottom line is this: Shakespeare would have no sense of perspective about the twenty-first century American Theatre scene, even if he could somehow magically be transported here to stay for a while. There is nothing about any of the things that Mullin takes issue with via his Shakespeare avatar that Shakespeare could have even hoped to fathom as making sense. Saying that Shakespeare would hate us is like saying that Jane Austen was a feminist – there is no cultural context for these people from their own times to have the modern interpretations of opinion which we impress upon them from our 20/20 historical hindsight. The world, after all, has changed a lot in the past four hundred years.

These kinds of arguments (and I see my fair share of them) recursively glamourize the same unchanging past that they strive to break free from. By romanticizing the Bardic Avatar, we create a Shakespeare who judges from his untouched perch at the heart of historical perfection. By putting the ultimate judgment about our theatre today in the hands of a long-dead playwright, we give that playwright the authority over our theatre. In this way, we privilege Shakespeare’s stage as some kind of perfection which we have strayed away from. This, you will note, is exactly what Mullin is explicitly attempting to fight as the first half of his post is dedicated to establishing a theatre outside of Shakespeare. In struggling to remove the agency from Shakespeare’s hands, Mullin strays right back to them.

Another issue I have with this article is a purely historical one. Mullin’s facts are, for the most part, blatantly wrong. His assumptions are formed around some few elementary notions about the Elizabethan theatre which don’t hold up to careful scrutiny: that all Elizabethan playwrights were actors (not the case; Thomas Kyd and John Lyly just to name a few off the cuff who put pen to page but never acted professionally), that Shakespeare spoke as eloquently as he wrote (where can we even begin to prove this? Anecdotal evidence: does everyone you know speak exactly like they write?), that “new” plays were and ought to be privileged over “old” plays in Elizabeth’s London (… because the Elizabethans surely didn’t worship old material.. you know… like any of the stuff they ripped plots from on a regular basis).

What really gets me going is when people try to put words in Will’s mouth. Mullin’s most

Adventuring in Boston

blatant instance of this occurs when he claims: “Shakespeare may have envied his social superiors, but he also knew at his core he was better than them”…. Uh…. What? I can’t even fathom where the seed of this information is coming from. How is it even possible to ascertain this from the few facts we have about Shakespeare’s life, none of which come from Shakespeare himself? Making any statement about how Shakespeare “felt” about anything is far-fetched at best, but this is flat out fantastical thinking worthy of a set of wings and a magic wand.

So can we stop dredging him up to put words in his mouth? Can we talk about him and not for him? Meaningful conversation can only be placed upon a firm foundation of fact. Lacking that, all we have is opinion. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love for someone to unearth Shakespeare’s diary from the bindings of some age-old book; but until then let’s not speak for him. It’ll only anger his already-restless spirit and make him devour us all-the-quicker when he takes over the world as a super zombie (…hey, if you can fantasize about Shakespeare’s afterlife, then so can I).

Writing

Posted on April 30, 2013 by drosvally

A tip: if at first you don’t succeed, re-analyze your plan of attack and try again.

Over the weekend I tried desperately to get some work done on this one paper I’ve got looming. I did get one draft pounded out, but try as I might I couldn’t seem to do any editing. Every time I sat down to work, I realized that something else needed to get done: my desk needed to be cleaned, my floor needed vacuuming, I had other things I needed to write, I hadn’t answered x, y, or z e-mail, etc.

It took some serious oomph before I realized I had to resort to the old stand-by: print and red pen.

When I was in my Master’s, I didn’t do anything electronically. Every single paper I wrote was something that I would (admittedly) preliminarily type, but then hand-edit. Draft after draft after draft I would ink to my heart’s content and, after about six to ten drafts, I would have something worth turning in.

In recent years, I’ve tried to become a bit more “green” and conscious of precisely how many trees I was killing in the process of producing 60-80 finished pages of writing a semester (multiply by 8; the average number of drafts I go through; yikes). Not to mention the money I was spending on ink and paper (which, believe me, wasn’t insignificant). I developed some ability to edit at my keyboard and I’ve even produced full papers without printing more than three drafts.

But this one was simply eluding me. It was taunting me on the screen and I was left with no recourse.

I printed, and went for a walk.

I find that, given the right environment and the right project, I can be much more productive away from my desk than at it. This only works for papers in draft form as, before they are

mid-way through my draft; a still-life.

coherent, I have to reference the piles and piles of books from the book fort I’ve built on the floor next to aforementioned desk. But once I do have something I’m playing with, once the words are on the page, often times the only way I can advance past this is to go to a coffee shop and not let myself come home until I’m done drafting.

It does two things: first it removes any possibility of distraction (especially if I’m a good good girl and turn my phone off for the duration of my writing session), and secondly it gives me the impetus to work faster. If I want to go home in any reasonable length of time, well then I had better get to business hadn’t I? Often, there are artificial limitations on this: how long can I sit without a break for the necessities (food, nose-powdering, etc.), but if I work diligently, I can crank out a draft of a 20-page paper within the two to three hour time window that my attention span and biology usually allot for.

So that’s just what I did yesterday. I took my draft, I took my red pen, and I bought myself a giant iced coffee and went to town.

Luckily, it was a random daytime during a Monday so there weren’t many people there to talk around me (something I can’t abide while I’m working). I also happen to know a great place that doesn’t play obnoxious music (another thing I really can’t work through).

Done! I can go home now, right?

Writing, actually writing, the old fashioned way with a pen, is very romantic. Whenever I do so at a coffee shop, I can’t help but imagine myself into some antiquated notion of academia where we all wear tweed suits and use monocles. There’s something nostalgic about it; an act that connects you to your forefathers. Everyone I’ve ever read wrote this way (and certainly those I most admire wrote this way); pen in hand, caffeine source nearby. I guess unless you’re Kerouac in which case I’m not sure I’d want to write the way you wrote…

Anyway, my ploy worked! This paper is in great shape, all of my projects are under control, and despite any misgivings I may have about walking away from my desk at the end of today (because I know there’s more work to do, I just can’t do more work right now), I can comfort myself with the fact that everything is where it should be and nothing is getting left out in the cold.

…Unless I’m forgetting something huge. Which is always a possibility.

A Little Help from my Friends…

Posted on December 17, 2012 by drosvally

I had a moment of panic the other day.

I had been summoned to participate in a departmental thing. I’m really not sure who decided it was a good idea to schedule any departmental thing smack dab in the middle of finals time. This, to me, seems like a sure-fire way to make at least one of your graduate students slit her wrists in hopelessness.

Any who know me will tell you that one of the things I am best at is time management. I never leave anything to the last minute, I have a good sense of how much I can handle, I work until I’m done, and I know what is okay to sacrifice and what simply can’t be cut from any given day. As such, my schedule books very far in advance. Often, I have trouble squeezing in social engagements unless I’m made aware of them at least two weeks before they happen (at the busiest times of the year, this becomes more like a month). As such, if I was having trouble departing from my desk to attend said departmental thing, it was not because I was having last-minute finals panic, it was because scheduling a departmental thing during finals is inhuman.

The departmental thing took longer than I had planned (but not longer than it had been scheduled, I simply misread the schedule and under-calculated my timing). I got into my car and felt like my chest was clenched in an iron clamp. I still had errands to run. I still had all kinds of work to do. And I still had one more appointment with my ever-wonderful Partner in Crime that I could not miss because of a long, convoluted series of events which amounted to him helping me clean my apartment (I think he realized by looking at me that even mundane tasks were well beyond my capabilities to handle and, left to my own devices, I was in very real danger of exploding… spontaneous human combustion: not just an urban legend).

During the drive home, the panic attack symptoms started setting in. Increased heart rate, hopeless whirl of uncontrollable thoughts, and pressure behind the eyes that threatens to burst into uncontrollable weeping.

I got to my desk, sat down, and forced myself to breath.

For those who have ever experienced a panic attack, you will know: the only way to coach yourself through it is slowly and methodically. You need to clear your mind, breathe deeply, and slow your heart-rate back something resembling normal. Sometimes you need to cry for ten minutes just to get it out. I don’t have them often, but my PhD has taught me all kinds of new and wonderful things that my body is capable of when pressed against the wall (some of these things are more useful than others).

This time, head in my hands, trying to calm myself down enough to look at the word documents I had left up on my machine, my gaze drifted to my desk ornaments.

I’ve spoken about them before. Over the years, I’ve accumulated a seemingly random assortment of bits and bobs which have come to reside in happy harmony upon my desk. What I didn’t realize until that moment is that all of the little guys directly under my monitor (and, in fact, most of the baubles as a whole) were given to me by various important someones in my life. Shakes-cat: a gift from a dear old friend. Baby-hatching-Gargoyle: a

a selection of my desk baubles.

present from my grandmother upon realizing that it looked just like the logo for the theatre company I ran out of New York. Liberty-Duck: a random Monday offering from my Partner in Crime. Long-Duck-Silver: from my mom when she came to visit me during my brief-tenure in a soul-sucking office position pre-Master’s (it came in a box of Band-Aids and helped to cheer my gloomy day). Tribble Fluff the Yarn Monster: made for me by my wonderful penpal and sent in a box of comfort yarn around the holidays one year. The list, believe it or not, continues to the point where I really can’t chronicle all the things on my desk attached to all the wonderful people in my life.

And, in that moment, it was like getting a hug from all of them simultaneously. Like somehow they were all there (without even knowing that I needed them) to tell me to get my act together because I could totally handle this.

Over the past week or so, I’ve received an immense amount of support from my usual support network, but also some very unexpected places. People who are around, but whom I don’t speak with frequently (perhaps the epitome of this being a random and unprompted text from an old friend with the news that he had procured a GIANT BAG full

some very old friends who are still in my life came to help me celebrate my birthday this weekend; they are amongst the awesome folks who helped me get through finals this semester.

of my favorite girly-scented lotions and things and was sending them to me imminently… thanks again, Brian, you seriously made my week). People who would have little way of knowing the insane amounts of pressure and stress that I’m under right now who, from some twist of the universe, had me in their thoughts on a given day and thus found some way to send some extra love my way.

My point is this: no man is an island. The PhD is the equivalent to academic boot camp. It will strip you down to your most basic human elements, take those away, then re-build you (and I’m not even through the “easiest” part of the process yet). But just because you’re stressed, just because you’re tired, just because you think your brain is going to melt out the side of your head, doesn’t mean that you should forget something: you are loved. And if you can’t remember that, take a moment to find someone who will help you remember it.

So many thank-yous to all of my wonderful friends who, wittingly or not, have once more gone above and beyond to help me get through this difficult time of year. If I seem ungrateful or passive in person, it’s just because I lack the brain cells to express how much you mean to me right now.

And on that note, it’s time to face the music. Turning in my first final today. Queue The Imperial March, La Marseillaise (it always sounds victorious to me), anything from Newsies, or One Day More and send some good thoughts to Dani-land. Here we go.

The Finals Countdown; Fall 2012

Posted on December 15, 2012 by drosvally

This is a drive-by. Things are nuts; For the past three weeks I’ve been doing nothing but work, go to the gym, and sleep. My brain is currently the approximate consistency of tapioca pudding. And not even the good kind of tapioca pudding, it’s the soggy from a plastic container and tin lid sort. And it’s likely been sitting on the shelf for too long so it’s just this side of “okay to eat”…

…this is not an invitation for zombies to come raid my apartment.

In that vein, I do not feel that I have anything intelligent, pertinent, or inspiring to say at the moment. I’ve been communicating with my roommate and partner-in-crime using grunts and clicks (I’m past even the capacity for charade-like hand motions), and I don’t trust my own judgment right now as to what would constitute “intelligent, pertinent, or inspired” anyway.

Sooo…. I will re-assert a few basic truths about this point of the finals process, and then dive back to the turmoil of the ever-present grindstone.

Thing One: Proofreading saves lives. Amongst the errors which, uncaught, would have proved outright embarrassing (mind you, in drafts that are far enough down the writing process that I even ventured to show one to my PiC the other day) are: several punctuation mishaps, misspellings of authors’ names, and (most embarrassing of all) several accounts of the correct Shakespeare quote attributed to the incorrect character in a play completely different from the one it was in in the first place. Apparently, I can quote Shakespeare verbatim in tapioca-mode, but I’ll be darned if I can attribute these quotes correctly. So far, I’ve attempted to put Touchstone in Twelfth Night (this is particularly puzzling since, of all shows, you would think that As You Like it would be freshest in my

my Sassy Gay Friend pretending to be Lincoln

mind right now and, indeed, it’s only my performance recollections which saved this mishap from making it to the final cut of the paper), and re-attribute a piece of Macbeth’s “sound and fury” speech to Hamlet (What, what, what are you doing?).

Thing Two: I am, as of today, T-minus two papers and four days from completing the last Fall Semester of coursework in my PhD. My first paper goes down Monday, my second Wednesday, in between I proctor and grade a final for one of my TAships. On Wednesday, I will drive to campus, drop off my paper, and drive directly down to NY for holidays with my family. Because my life isn’t stressful at all.

Thing Three: It’s remarkable what slack people will cut you when you look at them with the glazed-over look of hopeless “good god, I don’t remember how to talk to a normal person because my mind is still reeling about early nineteenth-century draperies”. Either that, or my friends are amazing. I suspect a combination of the two. Maybe I look worse than I think I do. At least I’m bathing regularly (IMPORTANT!).

Here is a cute picture of a baby hippo I took at the San Diego Zoo… for no reason other than it is sometimes good to look at cute pictures of baby hippos.

Thing Four: No matter where you are, I can assure you that if you aren’t done by now, you are very close. If you, in the past few days/weeks have experienced the same jarring helplessness that I have experienced, I would like for you to take a moment, take a breath, and remember that the light is right there at the end of the tunnel. I know you’re tired (“exhausted” might be a better word… actually “bone-weary beyond all possible means of human comprehension” might fit best), I know you’re frustrated, I know you’re worried. But you will do it. I have faith. Hold fast, Horus.

Thing Five: I’m going to take a break and sit on my couch for a few minutes. I haven’t actually sat on my couch in at least two weeks. Since I’ve put in a good six and a half hours already, I think I deserve this.

Keep calm, and keep editing folks! See you on the other side!

“It is my birth-day”

Posted on December 11, 2012 by drosvally

Today is my birthday.

In recent years, it has become harder and harder to be festive on my birthday. During my Master’s (when I realized that this academia thing might actually be a lifetime commitment rather than a passing fancy), I resolved myself to come to terms with the fact that, for the rest of my life, I would be stressed out, over-worked, and over-wrought on my birthday.

Some years this sticks, some years it doesn’t.

It’s funny because, as I understand it, on birthdays you’re supposed to think back across the expanse of the year and have some thought about things you’ve done, accomplished, follies, foibles, adventures, etc. And maybe when you’ve done that, cast another thought forward to the things that you might accomplish in this year next. Since I’m still in the phase of my PhD during which landmarks are fairly mapped out and planned, I have the good fortune to be able to predict, with some degree of certainty, at least some of the things I will do before the world comes back around to December 11^th once more. I will pass my German qual exam. I will study for (and pass) my comps. I will successfully execute my oral exams. And, at this point next year, I will be sitting pretty, poised for dissertation planning, and may (for the first time in many years) actually be able to relax on my birthday.

This year is not that year.

Today, I have a meeting, student final projects to look at, library books that will go into arrears if I don’t return them today, an article to track down, and mountains and mountains of writing to do. I didn’t even have time to wake up early enough for a run due to the absolute insanity that was yesterday (I spent thirteen hours on campus yesterday, left at 11PM and am doing the eleven-hour turn-around and will be back on campus at 10AM this morning…. ah the glamorous life of a theatre academic).

But I did get to partake of my new favorite birthday tradition: birthday Shakespeare. Last year, as a birthday gift, my ever-wonderful Partner in Crime took me to see Hamlet at the Gamm. The production was meh, but the point was to be able to sit back and enjoy something I love rather than worry about deeper issues (…of course, I did worry about deeper issues, but that’s just the way I’m wired). Last night, the cast of Measure for Measure treated me to the first (rough) run of the show. Some really interesting things going on and, if they continue to grow at a good clip, I think the product will be well worth the ticket price. I even had a Shakespeare-revelation while watching (this happens to me sometimes; the text hits my ear in a different way and things click into place and suddenly I understand something new about the show). So; thanks, cast!

So yes, I will be spending the day working. A lot. But the way I see it, this is paying it forward. Next year, oh sweet next year, I may even be able to take the day off entirely.

And so, dear reader, I leave you with this: have a wonderful day, think about Shakespeare for me, and have a watch of one of my favorite Shakespeare mashups: the muppets, Christopher Reeve, and Cole Porter:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWndLb3z5nY]

Just Another Manic Monday

Posted on December 3, 2012 by drosvally

I know that I’ve been doing a lot of lists lately, but finals land is inexorably vast this year… I don’t recall hell-time being this long last year… maybe I’m just wearing my rose-colored denial glasses.

Right now (as in I have actually put work into all of these projects at some point this evening), I am:

-Doing final prep on my presentation for Thursday. What is life without powerpoint, I ask you?

-Finishing up the grades for one of the classes I’m TAing. Ethically, all I can say about this is that it happened. At some point I will find a way to talk about grading in general enough terms that I don’t feel like I’m betraying confidences. That day is not today. I look forward to that day as I know I have learned a lot from the experience of commenting upon and critiquing the students’ writing, and I feel as though these lessons are universally applicable. When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.

-Working on the official twitter feed for the Comparative Drama Conference. This

The CDC conference hotel. I took this shot last year. Yea, that hotel is pretty sweet.

is particularly exciting; by my calculations (if we get the feed up successfully, which is a small if right now but an if nonetheless) it will be the first official twitter feed for a national conference in the humanities. The digital age has officially hit academia, and I can’t be more proud to be one of its heralds. There’s nothing on the feed at this moment (and we’re looking at a few weeks before you see anything exciting happen), but nevertheless go check us out at https://twitter.com/compdramaconf. Give us a follow, keep an eye on us, let us know how we’re doing. Then, when we’re all in Baltimore, we can have a drink and talk about how great the internet is.

-Working on some dramaturgy bits and bobs for Measure. We’re bracing for impact as we wind up to wind down over the break. I’m headed to rehearsal on Thursday to have a listen to the text and then on Monday, December 10^th the cast gives me a full run for my birthday (which, by the by, is December 11^th… right smack during the middle of hell-time… I have reconciled myself to the fact that I will, for the rest of my life, be inordinately stressed out on my birthday).

-Doing final dilly-dallying with outlines and research before I draft out paper number one. I was going to do this tonight, but a Sandy-granted extension gave me a little more wiggle-room on the timeline. I am also waiting on an e-mail from an archivist to see if I can’t do another archive dive to bolster this paper, but plan to forge forward tomorrow one way or another.

PiC and I on a boat this weekend past. It was his birthday, so we threw tea into Boston harbor. It seemed legit.

-Waiting on a call from my partner in crime to tell me that the first release of Offensive Shadows has gone live. We wrote the copy this afternoon and he’s uploading the sound as we speak, so by the time this is posted it may very well be up. If not, I’ll be updating the twitter feed and the facebook group when things are all green lights over there. Prepare for Shakespeare awesomeness!

-Finishing up some loose-ends classroom business for my own coursework (regular reading, message board posting, etc.). One of the great things about an academic schedule is how fast-paced it is; as soon as you get into a rhythm, or really feel like you know anything about anything, suddenly the world shifts on you. This semester has been great, but I can definitely say that I’m ready for some world-shifting. The projects I’m working on now, however, will definitely stay with me and I’m hoping that they will be extremely fruitful future endeavors. After all, “publication” ain’t just an eleven letter word.

-Setting up and administrating forums for my Shakespeare reading group. Because, like I said, the internet is a wonderful thing.

Alright, since I’ve clocked a solid fourteen hour day, I think I’m putting it down for the night. At least… as soon as the podcast goes live.

Catch you later!

Finals, Finals, Finals….

Posted on November 30, 2012 by drosvally

Multi-tasking at its best is the name of the game right now. As I begin to take the dive into deep-finals mode, here’s a list of things I have done/will do over the course of last week and this coming weekend.

After much waiting, gnashing of teeth, and bating of breathe, it looks like we are a GO GO GO! for the launch of Offensive Shadows! About a year ago, my ever-wonderful partner in crime hatched the plan that we should co-host a podcast dedicated to explicating Shakespeare for the common man. He, as a normal smart
Myself and aforementioned partner in crime during our visit to Gallow Green this summer.

person who has been adulterated by having a best friend doing a PhD in Bardy Goodness, had realized many things over the course of watching me at my work: 1) that Shakespeare (and theatre in general) is pretty neat! Like, much more neat than he had maybe at first thought. 2) That normal smart people (like himself) could definitely get into Shakespeare and connect with it if they had someone to talk to about it . 3) That I’m a good someone to talk to about it and, through the process of this talking to, we could help other people get into it as well.

So we set out on our quest. We are going to cover all of the plays in (roughly) chronological-to-being-written order (as much as we can), omitting the War of the Roses cycle for its own special run in the middle of the series. We will be releasing one episode a week and each play will have between three and five episodes dedicated to it. The episodes will include discussions of the play’s major themes, things to watch for in the play, information about dramaturgy, history, textual notes, and special readings of snippets by our very talented friends.

In short, if you like Shakespeare, or think you might like Shakespeare but have no idea where to begin, or know nothing about Shakespeare and would like to learn, or would really like to listen to the dulcet tones of my voice on a regular basis, you should definitely check us out!

The first series (released this weekend) is a set of preview episodes on Titus Andronicus. Through the process of recording these episodes, we learned a lot about the podcasting process and, by learning a lot, didn’t produce what we thought was our best work. As a result, these episodes will be a taste of what Offensive Shadows has to offer, but won’t be exactly what you’ll get in the real deal episodes.

Our first real deal stuff will be out the following Monday and will focus on Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Prepping the last of my presentations of the semester. This talk is on the work I’m doing for my paper on William Brown’s 1821-22 production of Richard III. Some pretty nifty and exciting stuff if you like early American theatre.
Wrapping up research on my two finals papers and transitioning into writing mode. This is one of the more difficult stages of the research process; when is enough enough? There is always something more to learn and when do you walk away from the books and begin to write? For term papers, I constantly have to remind myself that I am not writing a book, I am not expected to know everything about a topic, and I am definitely not going to be able to dig up every bit of archival evidence available. I tend to research until I can see (very clearly) my research looping back in on itself. What I mean by that is that if I’m reading the same facts or the same re-printed letters, looking at the same sketches or the same scripts, or if my sources start to reference each other, it’s pretty clear that I have enough to write a 15-25 page paper. There’s always the lurking gremlins, and generally there will be something you’ve forgotten to verify that will rear its ugly head when you’re elbow-deep in the writing process, but for the most part my philosophy should do you as a general rule.
I turned in my essays on Measure for Measure for Prologue (Tufts’ Drama publication that comes out in conjunction with each of the shows the department puts on). For Measure, I had to write two 800-1000 word pieces; one a dramaturge’s essay (fondly referred to as “Page Three”, guess why?), and one a sort of op-ed piece about some issue which the play brings up (“Page One”). These essays, short as they were, caused me no undue amount of stress. Prologue is disseminated fairly widely and a good amount of eyes will be upon my work for it; it’s yet another way that we graduate students can bring honor and glory to the department. Have I done it with my pithy writing skills? Stay tuned to find out!
Prepping my abstract for submission to the 2013 Comparative Drama Conference. I had a great time at this conference last year, and have been helping the conference
The CDC conference hotel. AWESOME!

chair get an official conference twitter feed on its feet. I’m pretty excited about the possibilities that social media can bring to a national conference like this, so here’s hoping my abstract wows them enough to ask me down there to speak!

So that’s me right now. Excuse me as I take a deep breathe and head down deep into the land of paper writing. I think I’m well-prepared for it at least; and I know that I will always have my trusty French press at my side. Small comfort on this long and winding road to slay the semester’s final chimeras.

Have a great weekend!

LOOK! SHINY!

Posted on November 27, 2012 by drosvally

It’s finals time.

That means a lot of things (among them: grinding the gears, burning the midnight oil, and lighting both ends of the candle for the next few weeks).

If your life is like my life, then inevitably when you become the busiest is when everyone suddenly decides that they would like to be social with you. And, while I do love my friends and family and do need occasional breaks from aforementioned clichés of business, it can be really frustrating sometimes that busy season of necessity means “the season in which I ignore people”.

I’m not doing it maliciously, it’s just the only way I can get anything done.

Distractions come in two varieties: the long-form distraction, and the momentary distraction.

The long-form distraction is by far the simpler type to avoid. If I don’t plan well in advance for a night away from my desk, I don’t spend a night away from my desk. As much as it kills me to miss the various parties, social functions, and gatherings that inevitably occur right before the holidays, it would kill me more to neglect my work and do poorly on my finals. Wise researchers take note: this policy works. Understanding friends will understand; this is what your job entails at the moment and, thereby, any declarations of “lameness” on account of it should be systematically ignored.

For that, a break is a break and it’s important to remember that the world doesn’t revolve

this is my desk from several months ago… the book fort gets built to the right and is, currently, taking up more space on my floor than my actual desk.

around nineteenth century circus clowns performing Shakespeare. Make sure you budget time for drinks, dinner, or some fun activity at least once a week or you will wind up an overwrought bucket of stress by the time things are said and done. Also, human eye contact is good for the soul.

So long as you can balance work and play, the long-form distraction shouldn’t prove too much of a problem.

The momentary distraction can come in several forms: an e-mail, a text, a facebook message, a gchat, or a well-meaning person (your landlord, your roommate, etc.) poking a head into your workspace to bring you news from the outside. While this may seem the less innocuous form of distraction, for me it’s deadly. I find that, reliably, for every thirty seconds I have spent being momentarily distracted, it will take me at least five minutes to get back to where I was in my stream of thought pre-interruption.

For me, the problem is several-fold. I have a hard time in general with my attention span, especially if I’m not yet into “the zone”. Once I hit the red, I can go for hours; but getting there is particularly difficult for me. I blame modern technology; I am truly a product of my generation who would rather have a constant influx of disparate information to keep my mind chewing than go deep-diving on any one thought. How I wound up a professional academic with this particular personality quirk is a giant question of the universe. In addition, I am extremely sensitive aurally and have found that external words in any form (music, TV, talking, etc) will completely take me out of the internal mind-tempest that research requires.

The best way to avoid these problems is (I have found) to turn off (or at least silence) my phone, keep my browser windows open to library resources ONLY, and work during the day when there’s no one in my house but myself. If I wind up working overtime (which is extremely frequent during finals crunch), I either try to arrange to work when my roommate is out of the house, or arrange a schedule with her that involves noise-canceling headphones (I am fortunate to have a very understanding roommate). Alternately, working after the household has gone to bed is something that I have found to be extremely soothing and productive (though you do have to plan for it so that you make certain you get your much-needed finals-time sleep).

Today’s short-form distraction: decorating the department’s desk with a menorah made from a Poland Spring bottle, some glitter, and a dream.

A great way to improve the quality of your finals life is to make your nearest and dearest aware of these distractions and what they do to your work. If those people most likely to distract you understand that encouraging text messages are best left sent between the hours of 9 and 11 PM, they are less likely to inadvertently interrupt your stream of thought with a mid-day friend-crisis. If those people can fathom that when you say “I’m buried in mountains of work”, you literally mean that your book fort is actually large enough to cause a deadly avalanche, they are less likely to give you a hard time for skipping Friday night beer-o-rama. Give them concrete examples of how their actions affect yours in this volatile, stressful time. If they really love you, they’ll let you go crawl into your cave and re-emerge sometime after December 18^th.

So… what are you waiting for? You have finals to write! Heck, I have finals to write! Go stop procrastinating and get your butt in gear! (…unless it’s your pre-planned night off in which case have fun, relax, and get enough sleep. Drink lots of fluids, eat right, and we’ll all get through this together somehow, I just know it).

Daniprose

academic adventures, theatric theoretics, and sundry snobberies.

Tag Archives: writing