Above, Yufang is standing next to our open garage door in the backyard with 12-14″ of snow filling our rather long driveway. She and I spent about an hour last night clearing off a path that I could back down in case we needed to go anywhere even though we stocked up before the storm arrived in NE Ohio. Needless to say, after clearing snow in the cold for over an hour, I made very good use of our cleared driveway to pick up Little Caesar’s pizza.

The nice thing about snow, which I believe I’ve commented on before, is that it is pretty and it makes you study. I will ignore the fact that it is a pain in the balls (or more accurately, back) to shovel snow.

Returning to one of the positive aspects of snow–its ability to make one study for lack of anything else to do (Legos and World of Warcraft are off the table at this point in the game)–I thought I would spend a few minutes talking about the worry that I have experienced studying for my PhD exams.

Since I began reading for my exams, I have increasingly found myself worrying about my ability to read everything on my three lists, but more importantly, worrying about finding, understanding, and remembering all of the VERY IMPORTANT BITS in the things that I have read. It doesn’t matter if it is literature, literary analysis, critical theory, or philosophy, I have a constant nagging concern that I may have missed something. This worry isn’t paralyzing my ability to continue reading, taking notes, and reviewing those notes, but it is something like a damned flying monkey clinging always to my back. I know it’s there, because my mind continually jumps to it, as a thought flitting through my vision, as I’m reading or doing other things such as reflecting on this worry in this blog post.

The worry that I feel is something that I’ve felt more strongly as I’ve read more and realized how little I knew or understood about a particular author, subject, or topic. Also, my essay blitzkrieg that I sent out at the end of last semester resulted in no acceptances (admittedly, there is still one out without any response, but I won’t hold out any hope at this point). Essay rejections are valuable for continuing to develop one’s craft as an academic and critical writer, but they cut the other way by undercutting one’s belief that they have done good work on what they believe to be a good idea. Despite my telling myself that I will produce work that is favorably reviewed in the future, it is without a doubt demoralizing to my self-confidence. Doubt, which I had (perhaps foolishly) not known before, is now a constant companion.

So the underlying problem that I am currently grappling with is doubt. Doubt about my abilities as a writer and professional academic. Doubt about my ability learn those important things from my readings, much less to incorporate all of the things that I have read into some kind of meaningful narrative or network of ideas, which I can draw on in the future (but more importantly for the time being on my upcoming exams).

Doubt is not an insurmountable obstacle, but it is a tiring one. I will take inspiration from Philippe Petit, someone who I believe cannot know doubt, and Miao Miao, who is very, very good at what she is without worry (see below, warming paws under my radiator), as I continue my reading.

Between reading and standing, I’m reinstalling Ubuntu on my desktop. The installation got foobared about a week ago when I tried changing my account password prior to installing some updates. I don’t know exactly what precipitated the problem, but after rebooting from the updates, the OS would load the desktop image and mouse following login authentication and then nothing else. I could load the ctrl-alt-del screen, but that was all. Ubuntu is back up now, but I need to reinstall a bunch of apps.

Oh, and I did some polyurethane painting on a special surprise for Lyndsay and John this weekend. Stand up!

I’ve been working my ass off preparing for my PhD exams, but the numbers are saying that I haven’t done as much reading as I had thought. After finishing Alan Wilde’s Horizons of Assent a few moments ago, I decided to crunch the numbers on the number of books that I had read on my reading list. Here’s how it shakes out:

Major Exam, 20th Century American Literature, 27/59, 32 remaining

Minor Exam, Postmodern Theory, 15/29, 14 remaining

Minor Exam, Philip K. Dick, 14/45, 31 remaining

Total read, 56/133, 77 remaining

I checked off 14 authors over the winter break between semesters (some of these ‘numbers’ include several short works by one author), and I am hopeful that having only one class to teach this coming semester will allow me the time and attention necessary to properly prepare myself for my exams (including my French language exam).

I would probably get a lot of reading done if I locked myself in the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning (interior pictured above) and asked Yufang to bring me a picnic basket everyday, which I suspect will contain a sleepy Miao Miao cat who ate all of my food! Admittedly, that’s too far away, so I’ll sequester myself in my office. I do, however, need to venture out now to take the trash out and get some sleep. Adieu.

We’ve been experiencing a lot of lake effect snow up here in NE Ohio, so I’ve had no good excuse to avoid reading by going outside. In the past week, I’ve knocked out Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, a few Flannery O’Connor stories, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Oh, and I read Philip K. Dick’s Puttering About in a Small Land and wrote a review of it for SFRA Review.

As a bit of fun and in the interest in my growing enthusiasm for what I call “Lego studies,” I am continuing to build and customize my Lego models. Right now, I’m working on a customized version of the Lego 7190 Millennium Falcon. I will post more pictures soon of before and after, but the one piece that I need will allow me to have a better looking cockpit from the 4504 set. Here is a picture of the 7190 after some customizations but with the offending cockpit.

And the more attractive cockpit from the 4504 set:

Expect more updates to follow soon between readings!

I need to keep this pace up–five Philip K. Dick novels read and notes completed in one week. I didn’t reverse the image above since I just finished A Scanner Darkly.

I hadn’t done a full OS reinstall on my MacBook since I originally got it, so I decided last night to remedy the situation with a clean nuke-and-pave of MacOS X 10.6.2 Snow Leopard. As you can see from the screenshot above, I am back up and running with 10.6.2. NeoOffice and CS4 along with a handful of other software goodies are reinstalled, and my files are restored to their rightful places on my hard drive. One thing that I decided to do differently, that I had never tried before, was to encrypt my home folder with FileFault. I know that this can cause a real problem when something goes wrong, but I backup my files often enough that I hope it won’t turn into a nightmare if the FileFault system develops a problem. So far, I haven’t noticed any performance hit or problem by using FileFault, despite copying back many files to my internal SSD.

While everything was being done, I finished Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. I will read A Scanner Darkly next and then switch back to some postmodern theory.

“Ray, when someone asks you if you’re a god, you say, ‘yes!’”–Winston Zeddemore in Ghostbusters

“Jason, when someone asks you if you know pomo, you say, ‘yes!’”-Not Hans Bertens

Well, nothing really funny happened while I was reading postmodern theory, but I did have a small epiphany when I finished reading Hans Bertens’ superb history of postmodern theory. I realized that I should have read this book at the beginning of the Summer when I was reading other postmodern theory. Bertens lays out the major arguments, he charts the connections and conversations, and he comes down pragmatically on who is important and whose time has past in regard to the major debates. I feel very foolish for not starting with a broad overview of the field, and it is probably due to my attempt at working through the conversation beginning with Ihab Hassan that I decided to turn to a history of the discourse rather than continuing the way that I was.

So, the bottom line is that you should begin with Bertens if you’re easing your way into postmodern theory. It will save you some time and help you be more strategic with your reading.