The Whale, Cont'd

I put down Moby Dick before Christmas--and I mean that literally: I had to put it down because the book was too heavy to carry around with me while I was traveling--but I've picked it back up again. This has been hard to do, since I put the book down at a point where Melville was describing the physiology of whales in pretty dense detail. This may sound boring, and at times it really is. There are moments, though, he comes up with things like this:

Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.--Why then do you try to "enlarge" your mind? Subtilize it.

Melville was wrong about the ability of whales to see very well (they could probably benefit from bigger eyes) but they do have excellent hearing despite their small ears. Whale audiology aside, I enjoy the conclusion: most of us could stand to cultivate greater subtlety of mind. I'm not sure how to do that yet, but hopefully Melville will explain in the next couple hundred pages or so. 

not-a-celebrity sighting

I'm sitting in a Pret on Capitol Hill, and Ross Douthat is sitting across from me, headphones on, (possibly?) working on his column. I hope he doesn't have a google alert for himself; it could get awkward in here.

Exegesis, schmexegesis

It came to my attention this morning that there is a thing called genius.com which has, incredibly, taken up what is (or perhaps was) the job of literature scholars and political theorists everywhere: exegesis. They even use that very word to describe what they're doing. This website will interpret and annotate Machiavelli, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and even Supreme Court decisions for you, in addition to tons of rap lyrics and even Chipotle's menu. Really--their slogan is "annotate the world." And not only that, but they recently received an investment of $15 million to do more of it. Yes, that's 15,000,000 in actual money, for doing, I kid you not, exegesis. And all the humanities grad students in the world just issued a collective scream of jealousy, am I right?

Here's the catch: the website is crowdsourced. It's wikipedia for exegesis. As the website puts it: "There is no single genius who writes all the annotations—anyone can contribute. Genius is powered by the community, and that’s what makes it special." Uh, sorry, but no. Genius.com may be powered by community, but regular old genius is not. Machiavelli did not crowdsource The Prince, my friends, and Plato did not fund his Academy on kickstarter. Even the Declaration of Independence, perhaps the greatest document ever written by committee, had one principle author. Opinion is powered by a crowd; good literature is not.

Admittedly, there are many respects in which I am a bad democrat, and this is probably one of them. But I also speak from the experience of having tried to teach 18-year-olds what exegesis is and having attempted to do a lot of it myself, and I know how hard it is to do well. Providing exegesis by committee is going to leave you with a lot of really boring drivel and half-formed assertions. And as it turns out, genius.com seems to have already encountered this problem. Granted, the whole "annotate the world" project has only just gotten started in earnest, but all that's there so far seems to be...not really exegesis.

What attempts at exegesis there are, however, are pretty bad (look up some of the stuff on Nietzsche and you'll see what I mean). If my students had tried to use this stuff in their papers they wouldn't do so well. My recommendation to genius.com: rethink the use of words like "genius" and "exegesis" in your mission statement. If you really care about exegesis, you should think a bit harder about what words you use and what they mean. Humbler aspirations may be in order.

Regardless, I find it stunning that there is even a market for this kind of thing. Other than scared freshmen writing their intro to political theory papers, who is reading the annotations for The Republic? If this really does take off, though, I'm really looking forward to the day the Straussians and the Cambridge School face off on their respective interpretations of Machiavelli. That will be the political theory version of celebrity deathmatch!

bread making

After bemoaning unemployment, I should point out that, being unemployed, I have a lot of time to do stuff that I would never do normally. Such as: making bread. I've wanted to do this for a while, and even more so since I read this article in The New Yorker. To briefly sum up, the article explains that there is a bunch of crap in more store-bought bread that we should not be eating. Given that bread is really only flour, water, yeast and salt, the number of ingredients in your average store-bought wheat bread is staggering.

After reading the article, I started buying bread from the Whole Foods bakery, where they steer clear of the weird additives. But, given the aforementioned unemployment, I thought that paying Whole Foods prices for bread was a bit absurd. All this is to say that I have now started baking bread at home.

The initial lumpy goo

The risen lumpy goo

The finished product!

And it tastes alright, too. Not as good as the pricey Whole Foods bread, but I imagine I'll get there one day. Or maybe I won't, because as soon as I get busy again, I highly doubt that baking bread will be on top of my list of things to do. 

No, I'm not that kind of doctor

Last Friday, I went out to celebrate a friend-of-a-friend's birthday, and there happened to a number of ABDs and recent PhDs present. None of us had long-term, steady work (as far as I could tell). Granted, we all have PhDs in the humanities or social sciences, so this was not at all surprising. In fact, it was a real relief to talk to people who were not surprised to hear that I have a PhD and no steady work. The problems of academia are well-worn, and I have nothing to add to the debate over how to translate a PhD into an alt-ac career or the adjunctification of the academy. (The first is hard, and the second sucks, and that's all I have to say.) My subject here is identity, and how losing the one you used to have is difficult.

An example: a year ago, when people asked what I did, I told them that I was a PhD candidate in political theory. This generally elicited positive responses, and sometimes even questions about Plato. But what to say now? A couple months ago, I could say I had "just finished" a PhD, but that's wearing thin now, four months out. "I'm unemployed" is really the only honest answer, but it feels so...incomplete.

Worse than declaring my unemployment is the inevitable response, which is usually a version of the well-meaning question, "what kind of work are you looking for?" When I was finishing up my dissertation, I would quickly diffuse this question by insisting that I would figure it out once I was finished. But what to say now? I don't have a very good or clear answer. And if I was in the shoes of the question-asker, I would be wondering what on earth I had been doing for the past five years, and whether I had been living under a rock. The answer is that I've been teaching and reading and writing for the past five years, and I have also been living under a rock.

In short: my present circumstance has called for some reinvention and career soul-searching, but this has not been the hardest part of being unemployed. The hardest part (other than lack of salary, of course) has been losing my work identity, which, in DC, is one's most defining characteristic. For half a decade, I was part of an exclusive and rarified club: academia. And now, yes, I'm unemployed. Not only that, but I need to find a whole new field. I knew this would be hard, but I wasn't expecting to feel a real sense of loss over the transition. Especially since I didn't even want to stay in academia. I guess I thought that I would be able to take some of my identity with me, that the PhD would at least confer a measure of gravitas on the years I spent working for it.

The standard reaction to being expelled from the academy is bitterness, but as someone who was happy to leave I just can't work up the requisite resentment. I do wish that post-PhDs would back off a bit from the bitterness, though, if only so there could be more space for a discussion of what to do with what we have, and how we might be able to show people outside the academy that a PhD can be an asset, even in the workplace. 

p.s.

Alex has started blogging again! Hooray! Now if we could only get Becky back in the game, it would be a virtual 5402 reunion. 

London & Oxford

I always mean to take more pictures when I travel, but I seem to get too distracted by being someplace to actually take out my camera and document it. A failure of artistic vision, probably. In any case, here are some of the pictures I remember to take on a recent trip to London and Oxford.

Tower Bridge

Interesting lighting underneath Tower Bridge

Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, with University Church of St. Mary in the background

John Locke's grave! In Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford

Reflections of Christ Church College

I was most excited about finding John Locke in Oxford--I knew Locke went to Christ Church but I had no idea he was buried there until we entered the Cathedral, and then there he was, right next to John Ruskin! I love his epitaph, though I was more impressed by the idea of being a "censor of moral philosophy" before I learned that a censor is basically a fancy Oxbridge title for a student supervisor. Josh and I were definitely the only people touring the college who were excited to find Locke's grave. In fact, to get that picture Josh had to stand and block the hallway so people would stop walking into the shot.