My metaphor for this stage of the dissertation process: It's like the moment in doing laundry when you've put the clothes in the washer, added the liquid detergent, and turned the machine on. No matter how much drying and folding and schlepping lies ahead, at this point finishing the job is easier than turning back.

Speaking of graduate school, all grad students and prospective grad students should read the advice in the right hand column of Tim Burke's weblog (newly discovered via Electrolite, permalink). The February 12 entry on weblogs and public spheres brings back strong memories of the glory days of Usenet:

I am also pretty well done with one major alternative, the closed-membership or heavily moderated virtual community or listserv. I’ve done a number of those, one of them for five years until I semi-quit this week, and they lack some things that I desperately crave.

For one, no matter how much people try to keep fresh blood flowing in, eventually any virtual community gets senescent. Eventually everyone knows what everyone else thinks, and the more you know about how some people think, the less you want to talk to them. Even in the case of the people you really like and find interesting, you eventually run out of old things to talk about and find yourself sitting and waiting for some new event or issue to hash out with them. At that point, no matter how determined everyone is to avoid it, metathrash is going to start happening, for the same reason that animals kept in cages that are too small start picking at their own scabs: just because it provides some momentary amusement ...

I was on one of the listservs he refers to, and at the time someone compared it to a group house. At first, everyone is infatuated with one another and their new utopia, and then it wears off and other people's habits start to grate and you get sick of finding their dishes in the sink and their underwear drying on the radiator. See, everything comes back to laundry.
. . . posted by Diana 2/26/2003 01:17:42 AM

Thursday, February 20, 2003

So much crazy cat stuff in the world. My cat hates you dot com is back (via Fussy, permalink). And the Viking Kittens have a certain scary charm (via comments at Making Light, permalink).
. . . posted by Diana 2/20/2003 07:07:44 AM

Tuesday, February 18, 2003

I forgot to mention that it's parliamentary election season in Finland (official Ministry of Justice site, in Finnish). Over the weekend, the frames for the party posters went up all over town: 20 identically sized panels because there are apparently about that many parties operating in Helsinki. On Monday morning they were filled, and the buses and trams were full of election posters for specific candidates, some of them absolutely comical efforts at self-promotion. At some point I'll dig up a picture from the last campaign to post here, but for now, go look at the cat lady "that even dog people vote for." She's running for the Greens and that picture on the left is all over the metro.

Update: I misspoke - as of Thursday there were still no party posters in the frames, which I've finally seen in daylight. Can't remember this much of a delay in past elections. The election season is clearly open though.

The cat lady (at left) campaigns. At the back right
is the election shack belonging to the Greens.
. . . posted by Diana 2/18/2003 04:21:38 AM

You know, the only thing that is making it possible for me to let go of these dissertation chapters one by one is the knowledge that this is just the first draft, and I can revise it. An option I would not have if I had caved to professorial pressure to write an "article PhD" consisting of four published articles and an introduction.

The thing that surprises me is that I am capable of revision. In high school and college I was one of those writers who either got it right the first time, or didn't, and this was such a powerful self-image that I never seriously tried to revise anything. One of my advisors told me what seemed at the time to be a pointless story about Harvard [1]: she was coaching a Radcliffe student who swore she couldn't revise and then found that she could revise. Well, the lightbulb went off over my head sometime when I was either finishing my bachelor's thesis or working for The Computer Magazine, and now the story doesn't seem quite so pointless. Now I am a compulsive reviser.

(Really. I rewrote my master's project twice from the top just to show that I could, and also to keep my supervisor from getting bored with it. I often change these entries after posting them if improvements occur to me.)

There's another side to this, though: in the days when I was a one-draft writer, I was mostly working on a typewriter. I was probably part of the last generation of college students to do this. The clumsiness of the physical production probably made me think things out better before I sat down at the keyboard, and make a greater effort once I was there. I wrote my last Technology Review column in two hours the morning it was due, partly because I had it down to a formula (as I very obviously do not have the dissertation) but also because there wasn't going to be time to rethink it. Once I got used to word processing (which was several years after I first got regular and uncontested access to it at The Tech and Project Athena), and especially once word processors became reliable, I learned that nothing was final.

This was perhaps not a good lesson to learn and I'm trying to unlearn it in the other half of my life, at the translation firm.

[1] I characterized nearly everything H. said to me as "a pointless story about Harvard." She had one other advisee, a guy named Joel who was badly miscast for MIT. It wasn't just that he spent all his time at the newspaper office and the Shakespeare Ensemble, and it wasn't even that he had serious artistic ambitions, which quite a few people did; it was that he failed to also learn a trade along the way. One day Joel dropped into the newsroom and announced that he'd just been to H.'s office and signed the paperwork for dropping out of school, after which he planned to go into summer stock, after which he planned to go into whatever the year-round equivalent of summer stock was. I asked if she told him a pointless story about Harvard. "Actually, yes, that's exactly what she did," said Joel, looking surprised.
. . . posted by Diana 2/18/2003 01:58:01 AM

Thursday, February 13, 2003

Read Uzbekistan Diary, quick, before something terrible happens to it. Via Central Asia Central, the journal originally known as Tashkent.

Read Sure Thing, Babs, quick, so when she gets a book contract to be the American Bridget Jones, you can say you saw it here first. Incidentally, Pamie's book is almost ready, and it's fiction, which means we still have her autobiography to look forward to. Via Tomato Nation.

Speaking of which, read Tomato Nation, quick, because, uh, well, actually the current entry isn't so hot but I couldn't stop rereading the Columbia entry and the silly cat walks entry, and there's always The Vine, where you only have to skim the questions to appreciate the answers.
. . . posted by Diana 2/13/2003 11:52:23 PM

Tuesday, February 11, 2003

Once again, Helsinki is on the cutting edge of culture: We in Finland Alumni have been playing Mafia for almost three years (and some, especially the Russian members, for much longer) and now it's the craze of the moment among literati in New York. Read quickly, before the cache goes away.
. . . posted by Diana 2/11/2003 04:12:01 AM

Another research flap that I would be trying write up for Lingua Franca if they still existed, if I were still in contact with them, if I weren't buried under dissertation work, and if I didn't have multiple conflicts of interest is the Baryshnikov affair.

Briefly, a Russian historian published a book saying the Finns were responsible (or more so than previously allowed) for the Siege of Leningrad - a significant attack on the prevailing view of Finland as a victim and not an aggressor country in World War II. (In their own history, Finns actually refer to their participation mainly in terms of the Winter War and the Continuation War, the two main border fights with Russia, in preference to "World War II.") Other historians from both countries reacted, and then the whole thing quickly degenerated into the classic Usenet fight about comparability or lack thereof to the Holocaust, at least in the listmail I was getting about it.
. . . posted by Diana 2/11/2003 04:07:56 AM

July 2002, August 2002, September 2002
April 2002, May 2002, June 2002
January 2002, February 2002, March 2002
October 2001, November 2001, December 2001
July 2001, August 2001, September 2001
April 2001, May 2001, June 2001
January 2001, February 2001, March 2001
October 2000, November 2000, December 2000
July 2000, August 2000, September 2000
May 2000, June 2000