Thesis!

It's done!



Photograph taken by Rachel: I was napping on the floor during one of our all-nighters

Thesis.

Unlikely as it has seemed all year--
particularly with the dramatic twists and turns that have characterized my thesis-writing process--
I have printed and turned in a thesis.

It is possible that it is just horrible gibberish,
but I don't care!
At this moment, all that matters
is that my baby, the product of months of misery,
is currently in the department's office,
being filed away to collect dust for years.

Sometime, maybe sometime soon,
I will be willing to examine the process of thesis-writing.
But for now, I am going to lie in bed and allow myself
to
be
happy!

The little things

In this, our darkest moment (by which I mean the last day of reading period), we take pleasure in the little things.

Standing over the radiator vent.
The smell of steeping raspberry tea.
Snow covering the Charles.

This was my view for a while in this latest, interminable paper-writin' marathon:


That is, indeed, the underside of a table in a dark, windowless room. You haven't hit rock bottom until you are actually lying on the floor, too exhausted to stand.

You might think I couldn't possibly produce more self-indulgent whining, but I assure you I can. Just wait until next semester!

Atrophy

Upon entering college, I was fairly convinced I wanted to study economics, and not just the fuzzy track of basic theory, but the kind that at least tried to be mathematically rigorous. So, in my freshman year, I took Math 21a. Multivariable Calculus.

Here are four True/False questions (out of a total of 20) on my first hourly exam, in October 2006:

A line intersects a hyperbolic paraboloid always in 2 distinct points.

1. There is a quadric surface, each of whose intersections with the coordinate planes is either an ellipse or a parabola.
2. The level curves f(x, y) = 1 and f(x, y) = 2 of a smooth function f never intersect.
3. The equation x^2 + y^2 − z^2 = −1 defines a one-sheeted hyperboloid.

Then a series of short answer questions, such as:

Imagine the planet Earth as the unit sphere in 3D space centered at the origin. An asteroid is approaching from the point P = (0, 4, 3) along the path ~r(t) = ((4 − t) sin(t), (4 − t) cos(t), 3 − t).

a) When and where will it first hit the Earth?
b) What velocity will it have at the impact?


I went to office hours all the time and developed nervous habits; after each exam, I exited the auditorium with both a diminished sense of self and ragged nails. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure that I could answer at least half the T/F questions on sight back then. When I look at the questions now, my mind can't even glean meaning from the scattered symbols. One-sheeted hyperboloid? Quadric surface? Re-enacting Armageddon?

This was three years ago. I don't think I will ever need this knowledge again, though my ego would love it if I could still juggle x, y, and z axes and recognize an elliptic paraboloid just from its function. What bugs me is that I so easily lost not just a formula but an entire body of knowledge. And I notice that after each summer, I read less quickly, communicate less smoothly, process ideas with less acuity. Every skill atrophies with disuse, but I am unaccustomed to thinking of thinking as a skill. So much of who we are seems to reside in our consciousness, which includes our ability to comprehend calculus but also encompasses the whole range of beliefs, responses, and impulses that accompany us through the day and makes us us (to invoke Descartes in a totally irresponsible way).

It's midterm season, so I see copies of old Math 21a hourlies -- now posted as practice exams -- floating around the computer lab. And I am reminded that what I take for granted is not a constant. After all, I've read Flowers for Algernon.

Traveling

Speaking of modernity (see Rachel's last post), I came across a very evocative quote in the opening pages of Joseph Conrad's Victory, written in 1915:

"The age in which we are encamped like bewildered travelers in a garish, unrestful hotel"

-- Joseph Conrad

The obvious point is how fitting this quote seems within its historical context: the beginning of the 20th century, after the West's imperial project but before two convulsive world wars, a time of political crises not yet redeemed by the marvel of consumer technology or the optimism of a return to democratic ideals.


The second point I want to make concerns the trope of traveling. I found Conrad's quote in an essay by James Clifford (originally given as remarks at a conference on cultural studies in 1990). Clifford is an anthropologist, and in this essay, he criticizes the dominant strain of anthropological study in the mid-twentieth century, a mode that focuses on participant-observation in the "field." This method basically means the anthropologist finds a village of "natives" in, say, Melanesia, pitches a tent, lives with the subject of his study for two years, and records his observations.


I have placed the words natives and field in quotation marks not to be obnoxious, but rather to show that Clifford finds these concepts problematic. A field is restrictive: to define a field, you must draw boundaries, outside of which is not the field, not a part of the anthropological study. Culture thus becomes circumscribed within the field. The "native" is assumed to be a dweller, not a traveler; he lives within an enclosed space out of contact with the larger world. Does this kind of hermetic native even exist? The village-mode of anthropology marginalizes a long list of actors: missionaries, converts, people of mixed blood, merchants, tourists, pilgrims, servants, entertainers, migrant laborers, translators, and so forth. Culture does not stay still, it does not live and die in a bounded village. Clifford's essay is tellingly titled "Traveling Cultures."


Why have I spent so long talking about Clifford's critique? Anthropology has long moved beyond a Jane Goodall-esque study of natives, witness the attention paid to the migrant labor phenomenon in Southeast Asia (Pei-Chia Lan's Global Cinderellas, Rhacel Parrenas' The Force of Domesticity, Servants of Globalization). In the process of reading Clifford, two thoughts occurred to me.


First, I like the conjunction between academia and traveling. Imagine anthropological studies of liminal spaces: hotel lobbies, airplane terminals, hospitals, urban cafes, buses, and trains. But travel here can also be a metaphor. How do we as students "travel" between discourses, disciplines, and paradigms? (Edward Said published a paper specifically on this topic: "Identity, Authority, and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveler.") And on a shamelessly personal level, I think of myself as a traveler, an individual defined by my schismatic crossing of the Pacific. How does this shape my awareness and thought?


Second, the layering of traveling and culture pulls me inevitably towards JASC. I can't help it; I've been reading essays on culture, cultural identities, and cultural confrontations, and I always end up trying to map these theories onto my understanding of JASC. If, as Clifford suggests, the act of traveling is culturally meaningful, then JASC can be imagined not just as the meeting of two hegemonic cultures. Rather, the process of JASC -- the four weeks of traveling -- is itself a site of cultural production and hybridity. Does this obviate the need for an overarching mission? Is the fact that JASC happens at all sufficient?

My thesis, part 1

Since this blog is supposed to keep a record of our lives, it's only fair that I introduce the terrible preoccupation that rules my life: my senior thesis.

Nancy and I both major in East Asian Studies, which doesn't require seniors to write theses; nonetheless, out of a combination (you can decide in what proportions) of profound intellectual passion, hunger for glory, and foolhardiness, we are both writing theses this year.

It's only September, the year is young, and crushing reality hasn't set in yet, so I'm still wildly in love with my thesis. Let me introduce it to you! Here is a brief description I filed in a form yesterday:

I will investigate the use of classical Japanese literature in Enchi Fumiko's work and how it relates to what Nina Cornyetz calls her "literary configuration of femaleness." The center of the thesis will be a translation of selected essays about The Tale of Genji from Enchi's Genji monogatari shiken. Through her nonfiction writings about the Genji, I aim to clarify the role of classical Japanese literature within her oeuvre and specifically her work about gender. Finally, I will attempt to put Enchi's use of classical Japanese sources in the context of gender theory, 20th century Japanese feminism, and the similar literary efforts of her peers.

What makes this project so exciting to me, at least in part, is the way it pulls together so many of the disparate threads of my academic career here. Translation is, of course, my current passion and one of the things I want to work toward in my post-college life. I've written term papers on Enchi in both my sophomore and junior years. And Genji itself is my shameless obsession--I've taken two seminars on it, I learned classical Japanese to read it, I've hunted down art, plays, movies, and literature based on it, and I am basically an enormous dork about it.

This thesis lets me play in all of my sandboxes at once. Through one project, I can deal with gender theory, feminism, modern Japanese women's literature, classical Japanese women's literature, Genji studies--everything! It's all still in an embryonic stage, but I love it so much already!

(P.S.: In Rachel Opera Project News, Berg's Wozzeck is still totally eluding me, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin was pretty dull, and I've given in and am now listening to Britten's Billy Budd. Because I love Benjamin Britten. A lot. I have to say, the Opera Project is actually increasing my quality of life quite a bit.)

Library adventures

I spent several hours this morning on an extended library pilgrimage--an epic adventure that brought me to the very depths of hell (by which I mean Pusey Library) and back!

The day began in Yenching Library, my spiritual homeland.  Although it appears modest, Yenching is the largest academic East Asian collection outside of Asia.  No question, this is one of my favorite places in the world, and I feel quite comfortable here.  I spent a while looking Enchi Fumiko up in encyclopedias of Japanese literature in both English and Japanese, and felt innocent delight that I didn't have to deal with call numbers at all--I'm so familiar with the reading room that I can just walk over to the bookshelf by the window on the right and pluck the 近代文学事典 (or whatever) off the shelf.

At Yenching I picked up six volumes in Japanese about/by Enchi Fumiko (including a memoir by her daughter and the Enchi Genji!), Doris Bargen's book on spirit possession, and a book about Ono no Komachi in literature (Komachi, you say?  intriguing!  it's almost as if you think you might write about Enchi's 小町変相!  but that would be foolhardiness).

My backpack is beginning to become a little heavy.

I then proceeded to spend a fruitless half-hour in Widener Library, Harvard's largest library, with 65 miles of stacks.  I was attempting to hunt down some mysterious monograph by someone I've never heard of that may or may not have been in German, in the interest of thoroughness.  Despite help from librarians, I was unsuccessful; however, I got to visit my favorite part of Widener, so it wasn't a total waste of time.

Widener actually has two separate classification systems: the Library of Congress system and the Old Widener system.  This is because the Harvard library collection is actually older than the United States, and they never bothered re-classifying the original collection.  So there are about four bookshelves hidden way in the back of the stacks classified under "Jpn" that contain some unimaginable treasures.  There are just heaps and heaps of ancient, fragile books, bound in knobbly leather and gilded and in all sorts of European languages all mixed together.  It is here that you find the archaic books about Japan by Europeans and Americans that are terribly unsuited for objective academic research but brilliant period pieces.

There are somewhat political books by Baron Suyematsu, the first translator of the Tale of Genji into English!  (I bet you thought it was Arthur Waley, didn't you?)  Here is a particularly delightful quote from a 1903 book entitled Queer Things About Japan:

In matters of taste the Japanese never can grasp the Western standpoint.  The worse the color, the more worthless the material, the better they like it...

FUN FACT:  Harvard's library system contains three books bound in human skin.  Please think about that for a while.

I was attempting to find a copy of a dissertation filed here, at Harvard, only eight years ago.  This was unexpectedly difficult.  A Widener librarian directed me to the Harvard Archives, which I'd never visited before.  They're in a featureless, rather musty-smelling basement guarded by a white-haired elderly lady who warned me that I shouldn't carry around so many heavy books or else I'd feel it in my back when I was old like her.

The archives have even more aggressive library security than other Harvard libraries; you have to be buzzed in and out by the person at the desk, file a form to be allowed to even look at materials, leave your belongings in lockers, and keep all materials inside the library.  This was a bit overkill for me, but fortunately the archives lady was very nice to me and told me that I should go to...

Lamont Library, the undergraduate library here.  Lamont is often open for 24 hours, and it contains both many comfy couches and a newly constructed cafe; it is not an exaggeration to say that many Harvard students routinely spend days on end at the library without leaving.  At all.  Really.  (The bathrooms are also notorious gay cruising spots, but this is unverified rumor.)

At Lamont, I picked up a book for JASC (whoo-hoo!) and four more operas (opera project going well!):

Beethoven's Fidelio

Adam's El Niño

Berg's Lulu

Berg's Wozzeck

Alban Berg's Lulu, an opera about a woman who destroys various men's lives in increasingly improbable ways.

My backpack can no longer contain all of my books at this point.

One of the things that really makes me feel like an old, cranky senior is that they renumbered the floors in Lamont.  One of Lamont's many (dungeon-like) charms is that it is half underground, as is Widener.  You enter Lamont on its third floor.  When I came here, the floors and elevators all properly identified the ground floor as the third floor, the third floor as the sixth floor, and the lowest basement as the first floor.  It was weird and charming.  Now, they've made the ground floor the first floor, the third floor the third floor, and the basements are A, B, and C.  Straightforward and intuitive--for shame!

Anyway, I went to the microfilm research center for the first time, where the two enthusiastic librarians both showed me where to find the tiny pieces of plastic that contained the dissertation, how to use the microfilm machine, and how to scan the microfilm to pdf.  I felt very grown-up using the microfilm, and very satisfied to finally see this dissertation after using several online databases and visiting three libraries to do so.

So that was my library adventure--I emerged unscathed, except for some very sore shoulders (oh no!  the little old lady security guard was right!).  I will be so educated!