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Oral history
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Aug. 31, 1999 |
On another matter: I gave bad advice to the Ph.D. candidate who
was having trouble with her dissertation committee, going through
a long and convoluted rewrite process, comprehending their
vagaries: The following two letters convinced me I was off the
beam. Dear Mr. Blue, About your advice to the woman Ph.D. candidate getting the runaround from her dissertation committee: Rather than an isolated
and possibly illegal case of discrimination, her story sounds
quite typical of the Ph.D. candidate in today's highly
politicized and bureaucratic graduate schools: paranoia-inducing
bureaucratic delays, needless nit-picking, the setting of hoops
("That's good; now let's try it again a little higher ..."),
personal animosities and jealousies, petty infighting, redundant
forms and copies and endless revisions, elusive committee
chairs ... the list goes on. It is a ritual ordeal. But contrary
to your advice, she should not be tempted by the futile tactic of
a lawsuit. Universities have bottomless wells of money for
litigation and will humiliate her in court. She must do as the
system tells her. Eventually they will tire of beating her
slumped and bleeding form and award her the Ph.D. in order to
move on to fresh meat. And if she persists in academia long
enough, she may get to serve on a thesis committee herself, and
show that she can dish it out as well as she could take it. Masked Doctor Dear Mr. Blue, The purpose of the dissertation is to get the piece
past the committee in such a way that the members
support you on the job market. That is the sole
purpose of a dissertation. Usually there is a definite
form that most committee members have in mind. For my
dissertation, I did six drafts. That's good training. When your
committee says this or that needs to be changed, you trot away
and do it. No tears,
just do the job. The process burns people out. Half don't finish their
dissertation. But if you do go through it you (may) get good
letters of recommendation and get an academic job and summers off
and tenure. Mr. Blue Garrison Keillor's column appears every Tuesday in Salon Books.
Feeling blue about your prose? In the doldrums over your last date? Ask Mr. Blue. A professor can write no letter of recommendation, maybe say he'll do it, but "forget" to do it. There is no law or rule that says s/he must write one. Or the professor can write, "Ms. XYZ completed the requirements for the Ph.D. in our department in September 1999. Sincerely, Prof. Blank." This says nothing bad, and it's a killer. Or the professor can write a two-page letter about the significance of Ms. XYZ's work and how she's completely original and God's gift to scholarship. In the ultracompetitive job market today, that's what you need for a job. If you can't do the work, you don't belong in the game. I did my graduate work at MIT and let me tell you, MIT was an intellectual Marine Corps. You were told to do something and you went and did it. You felt crappy, but you listened to the profs and you did what they said, as precisely as you could. It was brutal (the writing phase), and I wanted to kill myself much of the time (literally). Here at SUNY, when you tell a student to revise, s/he's as likely to have a heart attack and quit as do the work. It's a constant struggle to get something into shape without the student giving up. There's not as much steel in the spine. Professor Blank - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dear Mr. Blue, Please don't use my name!!!! I want your advice on how to get a guy to participate in oral sex. My boyfriend of nine months is fine with receiving it, but he will not reciprocate. I've tried being seductive, begging, withholding, rationalizing, but he still won't do it. He says he did it once and didn't like it. I'm starting to become obsessed. Please help. Hoping Dear Hoping, You don't "get" a guy to do this, he does it on his own steam and for the same reason he performs any other erotic feat, because it excites him and it gives you pleasure and your pleasure excites him further. You could recite to him the old limerick: A young lady got on her knees/And said to her lover, "Oh please!/It will heighten my bliss/If you do more with this/And pay less attention to these." You could ask him if he'd like you to trim your pubic hair. You could suggest things involving food -- chocolate or strawberries or whipped cream or, if he's Norwegian, herring. Or you could put this question on the shelf and give him the chance to perform without a cue. Men respond to cease-fires. You nag and nag and nag without result, and then stop, and a few months later, voilą! the garage gets cleaned, or the screen door gets patched, or the cunnilingus starts, whatever it is you need. Dear Mr. Blue, I have decided to write a novel, a big novel. I have the characters. I have the plot (more or less). Here's my problem: I am absolutely clueless when it comes to knowing what to write NEXT. I finish a scene and have no idea what the next scene should be and feel overwhelmed and spend a lot of time at the keyboard frozen like a deer in the headlights. Is there any hope for me? Stunned Dear Stunned, The problem may be that you've plunged into writing narrative before you've gone far enough in the discovery process, the process of gathering the facts of the novel -- who the characters are, where they've been keeping themselves for the past 10 years, what brand sneakers they wear, what time they go to bed, why they comb their hair that way, and so forth. This marshaling of factual material helps give you a sense of authority in telling your story. You say you have the plot "more or less" -- perhaps you need more, an outline, say. An outline sets out a narrative path and represents your clearest intentions; you're free to diverge from it later, but only as the story dictates. And if plot is crucial to this tale, as your troubles suggest, then you ought to construct the outline backward from the denouement so you feel a gravitational inevitability pulling you toward the end.
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