Herr Professordoktor

I've moved in to a fabulous flat in downtown Nowhere, WI (thanks for the help, GB and LM), and after a week it's pretty comfy. Clothes are finally up off the floor, books are slowly making their way out of piles and onto shelves. I have inaugurated the kitchen and taken my first bath. So it's starting to feel like home. I'll have pictures soon.

Among the good points about living here:

• Farmer's market every Tuesday and Saturday.
• Bakery around the corner that sells entire breakfasts for three for the price of a Starbucks Mochafrappawhatsit.
• A campus with a calm, well-trimmed, big-trees-and-columned-building quadrangle.
• Stars. All of them. You can walk five blocks and see the Milky Way.
• My name on a door upon which people will knock looking for Professor Me.
• A coffee house where one can sit for hours eating decent pie and reading Madame Bovary with no music playing. No music!
• A local bar that gets Fox Sports World.

All that said, although I've been too busy to be properly lonely, it's going to come soon enough. I'm jonesing to get back to Madison, to be in a place where everything isn't closed on Sunday, where I can walk three seconds to have Afghan food, where the wholesomeness is not so oppressive and Panoptic that I'm getting paranoid about forgetting to floss.

The College has a pre-semester tradition that will tell you about all you need to know about it. The week before classes start everyone who works for L'Ecole, from the lunch ladies and groundskeepers to the deans and the president, meet in one room. That's ONE room. There are maybe a hundred and twenty of us. And all the new people--faculty, adjuncts, administrators, secretaries, bookstore managers, and physical plant workers--are publicly introduced to the community. So now I know that Deb in the bookstore has six kids and that Dino the janitor enjoys playing and watching sports. It's all very democratic, which is good, but of course there's still a bit of self-imposed ghettoization. The guys with embroidered nametags had their own tables at the staff luncheon. I ate with biologists, myself, but then even if I'd wanted to clique up with the English department, all of us together wouldn't fill a table. It's a really collegial place, beyond the merely polite realm of "Hi, Dr. Weevil; how was your summer?" and into the territory of "Hey, Lorna, I found a stuffed alligator for your daughter, whose diapers I used to change." They all seem to like it, though. Claustrophilia, I guess that'd be called.

C'est tout

Yesterday, Friday the Thirteenth, Two Thousand Four, was a really beautiful day. And it marked the end of my eight years in Madison. Today I squash everything that isn't already gone into my beat-up-but-zippy Mazda and go to my little upstate town and don't come home. Or rather, I go home. The population will shortly become 7613. I've really loved it here, and I've never lived anywhere longer. I guess there was that year in England, but still, we'll call it eight years in Madison.

Yesterday also marked the end of my twenty-five straight years as a student. After dissertating for fully FIVE of those years, I walked my 282 pages (plus several boring forms and a 350-word abstract that's somehow supposed to condense it all into a page) up Bascom Hill to the graduate school and got everything stamped, approved, paid off, and signed. Here's a photo of me, flush with victory and exhausted, but jauntily sporting my Doctor Hat.



Note the two 8-foot stacks of UW-Madison dissertations behind me there. Such a lot of paper. Such a lot of Engaging Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry. Such a lot of silly crap. Finally I have room to try to conjure up some perspective. The question of whether or not we acknowledge rhetorics of place in the emergence of early modern authorship seems highly irrelevant.

So I'm a doctor now. And a doctor who still has to dust his blinds before moving out. You'd think they'd provide PhDs with someone to do that kind of thing for them. But you'd be wrong.

T-minus one week

Yesterday the movers came. Since the college is paying for the move, I went ahead and let them pack my dishes for me, move my stuff 70 miles to the new apartment, and bring me back the key. It cost a lot, and I tipped them well, but hey, it's only sort of my money. So now I have nothing in my apartment except what can go back to the library or be squashed into my car, and I'm living in the floor of what used to be my living room for a week while I do the final revisions, reference checking, and polishing (please Lord let there be no major problems) of my dissertation. At 2:30 pm on Friday the Thirteenth I will finally, finally be a Philosophiae Doctor. And at about 3:30 I imagine I shall be a Philosophiae Doctor Inebriatus.

This is my campsite.

A futon, a computer, a printer, a lamp on a crate and a pile of books. I swiped a chair and a tiny table from my landlord, so I'd have something to write on.

T'other night I went out and celebrated with the English department's MA class upon their completion of their exam. Good golly I've been here a long time. I took that exam in 1997. Which was 7 years ago. The summer after I got married. My marriage, by the way, lasted exactly to the week as long as my dissertation has taken to write. Just over five years I'll have been a dissertator here. Phew.