tara's tierra

Why Microsoft Word Sucks and other Negative Comments on Dissertating as Told by a Grump on a Friday Night at 10:44pm

Microsoft Word, especially as designed for macs, sucks. Not only does it suck lemons, it also sucks eggs. Runny, yellow eggs.  For one thing, my version of Word has the weirdest, oddest bug that runs like this: I open a new document. I write a bunch of pages (let's say 38, because that's the # of shitty, illegible, verbose, vague, convoluted pages that I have so-called written in my current chapter). I get to about page 23 by scrolling around aimlessly, since that's what I do most of the time while I am writing, and realize that I had better put page numbers into the document because I am getting completely lost, dizzy, and discombobulated because I have no guideposts. So, I insert pages, as a normal person working in Word does to their multi-paged manifesto. Well, my computer is on a very expensive form of page number cocaine. It starts inserting pages, blank ones, by the thousands in between page 23 and 38 (the end of the document). You have to hit Ctrl+Command+Shift (or something like that) to get it to stop. I kid you not. So, I wind up with a document that is 23,423 pages long. It is seriously insane. It is so aggravating because to get from page 23 to 38, you have to s-c-r-o-l-l-l-l-o-r-c-s-c-s-ll  through the thousands of pages that have been inserted! Oh my marbles.

The good news is that this inane computer mystery usually results in one of my favorite angry human activities, which is slamming my hands as hard as I possibly can onto my keyboard, in a fit of rage only matched by the times I have jumped on top of my printer with boots on while waiting for some lame worksheet on how to differentiate the verb ensure from assure for a writing class with only ten minutes to spare before the blasted class starts. "Printer jammed." Blink blink blink. "Printer jammed." Yeah, fuck off, Hewlett. And you, too, Packard.  With all these geniuses like Steve Jobs in the world, why is it that printers and photocopiers (oh, don't get me even started) suck so much? Oh yeah, and Word for macs.

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But actually, let's just face it, it's not really Word's fault, it's really my brain's fault that I hate my dissertation. I write these paragraphs that belong in the Introduction to the entire project, not the current chapter. Those are frequent. Then, I write sentences like this, "It seems to me that it could be very apparent that in the 1920s there may have been a tendency to write what could be called poetry..." Dammit all, Tara. Say what the hell it is you want to say and cut out the beating around the bush. Or I write, "As I will elaborate further..." which is code for, "I am too fucking lazy to talk about this b.s. right now, or ever, so please just remember this chapter as if I spoke eloquently about this certain concept that totally eludes me and always will." And then my favorite is my shorthand, "xyz" which stands in for, "information that will never be inserted but instead just deleted before I hand this into my advisor, or maybe, never."

Oh, and I also have this recurring nightmare that secret thoughts I have write themselves into my document without me even knowing it. I mean, stranger things have happened. So, I'm afraid that I hand it in and someone (haha. who am I kidding? The only person who reads this shit is my poor advisor who tries to be nice to me even though I know she secretly thinks, "How did I wind up with this insane girl who cannot construct a basic argument and clearly knows nothing about that which she writes?") reads something like, "God, I fucking hate this project and wish that Dwinelle burned down" or worse . . .It's the same way I sometimes wonder if I am mentally deranged and the whole world knows it but no one will tell me, so whereas I think I am doing a Ph.D., I have, in reality, been in a mental institution for the last seven years, and everyone just nods their head and tells me what I want to hear while conducting meetings that assess my "limited mental capacities" behind closed doors. Tragically-comically, the difference between the loony bin and academia has become more and more indiscernible with each passing year...

I also just have to ask the obvious question: Has anyone besides Heidegger, Hegel,  Judith Butler and probably one or two annoying loser phenoms I have met at Berkeley ever written a good dissertation? I mean these things are just plain awful. Let's face it. After seven, eight, ten, twelve years of learning, we really lack eloquence, sophistication, precision, and well, knowledge. When it's all said and done, the  best we can hope for, girls and boys of your thirties, is this gem of a comment: "If you wish to publish this interesting draft, you should research more deeply, expand ideas, reformulate argument, rethink topic, and well, possibly just start over. Have you considered the world beyond academia? I hear there is a lot out there for people like you. Of course, I myself have no idea what's out there since I was born this way. But news creeps in from the other side...and there are possibilities for you."

On that note..I think, if I may,  I propose, I surmise, I interrogate, I argue, I postulate, I pontificate, I  contradict, I believe, I sort of have this kind of idea...that it is time to put this cursed MacBook and all her unnecessary words down...at least until tomorrow.

Insert page #: 32,987.

p.s. I just read this over and have to say, for better or worse, once in a great while, I crack myself the hell up.

Satiating Hermeneutic Longing

Doesn't that title sound like the name of a porno movie? Or is it just me? It is not. It could be, though.  The life of a graduate student in literature is full of hermeneutic wanting, desiring, yearning. We want to understand how to interpret so many texts: theoretical articles with their requisite backslashes, parentheses, and puns, novels, epic poems, crumpled faces of students, mutating masks of professors, our purple-eyed selves in the mirror. How are we to put it all together and what, exactly, is supposed to fall out? Is it a bound dissertation? Is it a furry rabbit that suddenly launches itself into our laps from a deep black hat? Is it a hug from some mentor that is an acknowledgment that we exist as a human being? The hermeneutic longing is simply never satiated. Meaning is always around the corner, up on the top shelf, beneath a blanket, or out in the recycling bin. It is floating around like dust in the wind, and we grasp at it like kids in a backyard with an empty peanut butter jar running after lightning bugs. Night dawns. The blinking commences. A choir of cicadas sings. As soon as we finally catch that little glimmer of substance, the cracks in the jar wear too thin, and poof -- the light is out, the chase is over, the meaning has quickly died.

How to capture the  pain of war? I began reading Vallejo's two collections of poetry, Poemas humanos and España, aparta de mí este cáliz and found myself climbing up his words like a rock climber on Everest. They are precarious words, full of edges and sharp turns, full of breathtaking views -- but wait -- views of what, exactly? In fact, much of the view is of a partial scene. It is like looking at a stage with a bunch of body parts strewn about it and tons of black holes and metal shards. It is like looking at a painting that has barely survived a fire. There are blackened edges about to crumble, that are disintegrating into nothing; there are lines and form, but they are blown out by the destructive force that has whipped through the canvas. The poetry, when chewed, leaves the mouth tasting like burnt leaves and cigarette ashes. It is dusty and damp and acidic and cloaked in an untouchable gauze of death.

Well, then, what to do? I turn to Pablo Picasso. And his painting, Guernica. And what does this visual art turn mean? I try to explain it to myself, to understand this longing in myself for more representation. The black, white, and gray monochromatic mural pulls me into its figures. I find myself tossed about between the images, like a sock in a washing machine, sticking to one thing or the other but only really experiencing the spaces in between the items. Behind the bull and above the baby, lies ashes. From behind  the woman and beneath the lightbulb death's tentacles grab at me, wringing me out as I spin.

I bounce around on these planes, between Vallejo's poetry and Picasso's images. I swallow the words and I wrap myself in the painted figures. I eat the tale of the horse and I jump up and down with urgency on Vallejo's image of death. It is that desire of possession -- of pulling someone's hair and at the same time, tasting them -- that is the hermeneutic desire. I want to understand, I want to gulp it all in, I want to feel the very fleeting moment of the firefly just as it enters the jar, just before the light goes out. It is between the image, between the word, between the genres where that spark of longing is satiated, only for a split second.

I long to understand because I never quite have . . . and I hope that I always will.

Paleonomies and Launches

In his book Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life, Gerhard Richter begins by way of Derrida and the concept of a paleonomy. In Derrida's words, "A paleonomy is the maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept." Richter's work goes on to analyze what he describes as the often neglected genre of the Denkbild, "thinking image," "image of reflection" or simply "thought image" as a paleonomy itself. The Denkbild are described as "conceptual engagements with the aesthetic and aesthetic engagements with the conceptual, hovering between philosophic critique and aesthetic production" (Richter 1-2), and Richter proposes to visit them anew.

I am writing this blog hoping to re-engage with my dissertation in a new way. I have been working on it for about a year and a half, in a real way, and am at a place where progress feels impossibly slow and where the theoretical and poetic inspiration that used to drive me has become increasingly obfuscated by politics which stymie my spirit. I wonder what it would be to consider an artistic, philosophical and political concept like the avant-garde as a paleonomy as well. How does the avant-garde continually relaunch itself, even metaphorically as a thinking image, through our critical engagement with it? I remember like it was yesterday sitting in a university library in Cuenca, Ecuador and reading a book in Spanish (!) about Adorno. It was so many years ago, but it was one of the more honest moments I had of "work," in the sense that no one knew what I was doing (namely, professors, fellow graduate students, or love interests) and I had not spoken to anyone in English in weeks. I would go to the library in the morning, return home for my soupy lunch, and go back in the afternoon. Yes, I was afraid walking there alone, but no, I was not afraid at all to be alone, with my ideas, my self-direction, my sense of me.

Perhaps the hardest gesture, in all of life, is seeing the self, the proper name and the little girl and everything in between, as a paleonomy. I want to relaunch Tara. I want to maintain the very core of who she is but not involve her with so many other people and so many other people's desires for and of her. The way I have always found myself is months of reflection in books, ideas, and art. By August, I hope that my dissertation has been re-engaged, but more importantly, that Tara is has been successfully re-launched.

P A L E O N O M Y, all over again.

Art and Arguedas Revisited

José María Arguedas is one of my favorite authors. But I don't know if it is really his novels that get me or just his letters and diaries. I think he is one of those people who I recall when I think about what it is to live a good life. I don't know if Charles Taylor would agree with me, but I don't really care. Arguedas lived a good life. And on some level, I think we all want to do the same. When I gave the first conference paper I ever gave, I gave it on Arguedas's El zorro desde arriba y el zorro desde abajo and I believed every word of what I was saying, and had worked so many hours to get to the nine pages I actually delivered. I read it once in English at UNC and again in Spanish at JALLA in Bogotá. I remember this guy got up when I was reading it in Bogotá and I was so scared that he had hated the paper so much that he just up and bolted. That or he was so blown away he went to find me a book agent. Ha. But anyway, the point is, when I was reading those papers I seriously believed that literature could change the world and that it actually had changed mine.

Now? I don't really recognize myself. I have read so much theory in English that I am usually talking about subjectivity and Otherness and Levinas and Foucault. I try to return to the literary text and then I am suddenly back with a book on the politics of form or aesthetics. None of this is necessarily "bad," it's just that I do need to remember that the literature in and of itself does actually excite me, stoke my fire, lead me to very same questions of Bataille and Derrida and Lacan and Deleuze. I wrote a one-page project description the other day that was a good philosophical exercise because I got to the end of it only to realize that I had not said anything about the literary texts themselves, or at least not directly. I had hoped they would miraculously shine through the tightly bolted philosophical matrix I had built for myself. Instead, it should be the reverse: the best writing on literature should probably let the philosophy shine through on it's own, like that light of Kafka's, emanating from behind the law.

Upon accepting the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega Prize in Lima, Peru in October of 1968, Arguedas said: "In technology they will surpass us and dominate us, for how long we do not know, but in art we can already oblige them to learn from us and we can do it without even budging from here." It is about getting back down to the arts, the creation, the paint and the carbon. It's enough, already, to have read what I've read of theory and philosophy. It's not that I will stop, it's simply good to finish the project I have without trying to swallow the universe.

Two Lists (to do and not to do)

I have finally turned a hard corner. It is always the same cycle. I like my work for a spell, I do some, I rethink it, I rewrite it, I get to a stopping point, and I become paralyzed. In my paralysis of late I have been highly unproductive. I have sat around and thought about what I should be doing while doing very little besides thinking about the fear of moving along. And I'm still really afraid of moving along in any kind of reading or writing process, but at least I'm talking about this fear out loud and trying to figure out why it is that I cannot pick up a book. I'm at least having some ideas again, even though they are sometimes ideas I have already had. I'm going to just list some projects or themes I want to pursue, next, in the hopes that they push me to finish what I am doing now, which is not what I really want to do. Isn't that life, though? We are always doing what we really wanted to do a few years ago. Professionally, this is.

So here is what I really want to do right now, but will probably never do:

(1) Sylvia Plath/Alejandra Pizarnik comparative study
(2) Analysis of Diary Content that then Repeats in Artistic Product (Rosario Castellanos, Jose Maria Arguedas, Sylvia Plath, Alejandra Pizarnik, Frida Kahlo....and who knows who else)
(3) Conceptual Literature (what is it? why is it? if you like it, think about honking...)
(4) Sadomasochism in Latin American women writers

Here is what I have to do before I can do anything I really want to do:

(1) Finish Chapter 1 of dissertation
(2) Finish Chapter 2 of dissertation
(3) Start Chapter 3 of dissertation
(4) Start Chapter 4 of dissertation
(5) Finish dissertation
(6) Finish dissertation
(7) Finish dissertation
(8) Get a job

Why does everything in the first list sound exciting and everything in second list sound like as much fun as hammering nails into my toes? I guess I will start doing what I don't want to do tomorrow. This is procrastination at its finest. There are ten more things I really want to do right now, too.

(The) Avant-Garde

A  va nt-G  ar  de. I like the sophisticated French of the term and the radicalness of its intent. Advance Guard. Those that go first. Beforehand. Boundary breaking. Ahead of time (see time fall behind in the race). In the process of writing my dissertation, I think I myself try to be "avant-garde" in my approach and thereby avoid any terminology that smacks of the literary or niches me into some exiled corner where I can only talk about a pinpointed idea that has no bearing on the rest of the world. There is an implicit fear of being pigeon-holed and labeled. The idea of a literary or artistic "movement" seems to be so totalizing, instead of opening up to possibility.  I don't want to ever know everything about one thing, I rather know a lot about the way connections themselves operate. But then again,  working on connective tissue rather than one limb, so to speak, is quite tricky and can often feel destabilizing in terms of shaping a professional identity of sorts. For a while, I have tried to be all "out" on literature, even though I am situated, quite clearly, in a literature department. It's not that I don't love literature, I do somewhere deep inside, like how I love the people closest to me. I love literature like my raggedy Ann blanket that I've had since the week I was born. I love it so much, I don't see it anymore. And those who only see literature bore me to tears.

But recently something new has been  happening to me.  I have been waking up to the sound of literary periods in my head. She what?! I know. It's so not my style. But it isn't just literary periods, it is not just the avant-garde, whether that be the unmodified European/North American avant-garde or the Latin American avant-garde, or the Andean avant-garde, but rather the notion of anything that could be classified as an avant-garde something and the way in which it functions in relation to an historical genealogy. The avant-garde, in my mind, is about breaking free from the institutional norms of an era while actively critiquing those norms in the process. It is also about breaking from an historical genealogy based on contingency, while at the same time, tacitly needing such contingency for the "break" itself to actually mean. The avant-garde seeks autonomy, but constantly feels itself pulled back into the system it rejects. Therefore, the avant-garde is about playing within some kind of field of historical constraint. Some have critiqued the European and North American neo avant-gardes as precisely the institutionalization of what was supposed to be counter to such normative systems. 
It is about taking language and exposing all the ways that we can manipulate its rules and regulations. It is about recontextualizing and shuffling, not throwing away. It is about critiquing the rules we use to critique.

There are also critics who have claimed that the notion of an avant-garde is dead because the nature of a fragmented post-modern world makes the avant-garde itself "post." However, I believe that the notion of an avant-garde aesthetic that is actively critiquing even the most local networks of power is not only alive, but thriving.  To fail to believe in an avant-garde is to fail to believe in a world of infinite possibility in favor of one of stagnating totality. The left is not entirely fragmented, at least not in Bolivia. And I like to think it is less fragmented than we might think here, as well. The avant-garde can retreat, but it will continue to emerge as long as we continue to actively critique and create.

Disclaimer: I'm over tired, sorry if this post is incoherent. It's scratch work for my project. It is thinking out loud.

The Library of Babel

On some shelf in some hexagon, it was argued, there must exist a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books, and some librarian must have examined that book; this librarian was analogous to a god. --Jorge Luís Borges, "The Library of Babel"

Something shifted in the air today as the first wind of fall came upon Berkeley. Finally the relentless beating of the sun broke a little bit and I don't feel claustrophobic in my house. This weather change was a good thing for me as it reminded me that I am here in Berkeley because I am, unfortunately, still a student. So I went to Doe for the afternoon. I love the fact that at ten minutes to one there are students swarming around the massive front doors to Doe like flies around a garbage can. It bothers a lot of us that on Sundays Doe does not even open until 1pm, but I understand that people have to work to keep the library going, so I guess it's alright if they need to sleep in one day a week.

I have had a long solitary affair with libraries. When I was in fifth grade I was part of a reading group at the Fairfield Woods Library on Fairfield Woods Road in my town. Every week I would go and read a new book and discuss it with my peers. I remember we would spin this wheel to see what "type" of book we were to read -- fiction, science, art, history, etc. I loved spinning that wheel and by the end of one summer I remember I had my photo taken as one of the most frequent readers of the branch --  or something exciting like that. I liked the feeling of being alone amongst the books, and each one opened up a new piece of the infinite universe.

In high school, I remember I used to go up to the second floor of the high school library and sit studying Latin during my junior and senior years. I can picture the formica gray table top below me as I translated. I felt like I was good at studying, like, I liked the way I felt as I leaned over a book and tried to concentrate. It made me feel like I was serious and directed instead of a floating body in crowded halls.

In college, my friend Brad and I were the two most frequent library goers. I would find him late at night on the main floor of "Boatwright" library and we would go outside, wax sophomoric about Shakespeare, and occasionally puff on a cigarette as if we were terribly tormented. This was a key period of the cultivation of my studying self.  I would sit in different places of the library depending on my mood. The basement levels were dark and weighty and held the philosphy and literature books. I would go there when I was feeling extra hardcore about my studying. The main floor was good if you could find one of the hidden cubbies behind stacks where no one could really bother you but that still afforded a nice view of Richmond's beautiful campus. The second floor was the most social and was where all the lameass business and economics majors hung out. I remember these turquoise couches that were up there that were really comfortable but attracted all the sorority/frat types who used the library as a place to flirt.

Doe,  Berkeley's main library, is mapped onto the inside of my mind and body. It is as much a part of me as my ideas, I think. During my MA years I would always study down on Level D in a back cubby where no one would ever bother me. I really was ascetic in those days, and could sit for hours without checking email or writing one of these horrid blog posts. I wrote papers there and felt really safe next to the PQs. As I gradually got bored with the stacks I read in the second floor oil painting reading room -- not even sure what it's called -- for a while, working at the long tables with mainly undergraduates. They invested in these wingback chairs a few years ago that make it a much more inviting space now. On rainy days or when I was particularly sleepy, I used to go hang out in the Morrison Room, which is right off the entrance and has these great antique couches and chairs that you can curl up into when there's space. It also has these cool little balconies that used to hold the music collection. If you can sleep in public, which I seriously cannot, it is a great place for a little snooze.

As I matured intellectually (as if I have at all? I have my doubts), I started going to Grad Services, which is only for graduate students and holds a lot of great theoretical books that cannot be checked out. Of course, Grad Services can be good and bad. It is generally great for me, and I get a lot of work done, but it can be depressing because there are people -- like myself -- who have been in there for so long that they seem to be part of the furniture. I bet people think, "Gee, that blonde girl must be so slow at writing her dissertation" because it's been so long.  I also have haunted the Art History library, although not of late, because I was sick of bumping into the furniture people in Grad Services.

But then, really, the best part of Doe by far, is these chance encounters I have had in the library with people who appreciate them as much as I do. On Level C in the stacks, I felt a tap on my shoulder and in Moffitt I took the elevator to the fourth floor once. Borges writes another enigmatic story that is titled "El Aleph," which is about the point in the universe where you can see and feel everything at once. There is a certain spot  in Doe where you can look down at campus and almost see it all, if you can only find the key. This is the pinnacle of the library, the place where it all begins.  I haven't been there in ages, but I am trying to make my way back.

Contacting the Artist

Sometimes the moments of connection are just that easy. In 2006 I was in Cochabamba taking a Quechua course, and I somewhat accidentally stumbled upon visual artist Alejandra Dorado's work. After months of thinking about my dissertation post-2006 trip, I decided I would include her work as part of my project. And now, two years later, I am back in Cochabamba and am meeting her on Wednesday. I have called her a few times on her cell phone and exchanged emails. It is somehow so satisfying, after thinking about her work for over a year, to just say "Hey there" on the phone as if it were just that simple. I think we will have a lot to talk about this week.

Likewise, two years ago, I met Julieta Paredes of Mujeres Creando in Sucre, Bolivia. This year she made a visit to Berkeley and slept on my air mattress and in my bed. In La Paz, I climbed up the winding hills of Villa Fátima a few times in cabs to meet her and went to the first Cumbre de mujeres sociales in Sucre with her and and about 800 other women from the nine provinces of Bolivia.  She has in many ways, become a friend.

In literature departments, we don't always have the fortune of meeting the people we work on. In many cases, we work on authors who have already died, or whose material work becomes detached from the artist him or herself. As someone who firmly believes in the continual birth of the author, the importance of knowing him or her as a multi-dimensioned person, I feel really lucky to have a project that puts me in direct contact with the faces behind the images and the words; that enables me to hear what their voices sound like and what kinds of gestures they make while drinking tea or api (a corn-based hot drink very common among indigenous populations in the Andes). It is really good to make contact with people that are genuine, inspiring, and generous with their words and ideas. I hope I can convey just part of the uniqueness and spirit that define them as people through my dissertation, as well as their work.

Lost in Piles

I am rowing through piles with my back to the wind and my oars are heavy in my hands. I have tiny blisters from the oak wood that chafes against my palms as I sift through the waves of the following:

(1) Tax Pile: Last year's, this year's, 2003's and assorted bank statements. It is southwest of my helm, here at the window, that awful w-2 print, that federal smell.
(2) Composition Pile: My students' last compositions, ear-turned, coffee-splattered, slightly damp. Also southwest of my helm, 10 degrees east of Taxes
(3) Mujeres Creando Pile: Articles, Drafts, Notes, etc. etc. growing higher and higher about 45 degrees east of my helm
(4) Martirio Pile: Second chapter notes, assorted regalia from museum exhibits, next to the Mujeres Creando Pile
(5) Miscellaneous Pile: Due South, short response papers I wrote years ago I think I might need for something soon and random other articles that I have started reading but not finished.
(6) Plate Pile: In my sink, as usual, perpetually recreating itself while I sleep next to my pillow pile in my bed
(7) Towel Pile: far west of my windowed helm, towering over the bathroom in its green and purple glory.

Row row row. Arms are heavy. Back is sore. And every time I look at the piles I think about the fact that I want something that is smack wedged in the middle of the stack, somewhere between A and Z and 0 and 1, and it seems impossibly hard to just lift the single sheet of paper I would have to to make any headway toward the answer.

My dashboard blinks. My compass spins. Bring me into shore. I am lost in material culture.

My Garden of Weeds

When I look out at my backyard, all I see is an overgrown mess of colorful weeds. I have serious issues with beginning projects and not seeing them through to some kind of end. I tend to plant so many seeds that I cannot possibly tend to each plant, and so I continually wind up with a garden of baby trees, none of which will ever grow because I will just abandon it as soon as it gets about two-feet high. I like planting too much, you see, the part where I kneel down in the rich soil and dig around and and get messy. And then once that is done, once I pat the soil on top of the seed to let it germinate, I am utterly bored and onto the next seed. Obviously, I am a terrible academic. Academics are supposed to find ideas and analyze them carefully, for a long time, until they grow into beautiful trees. I am the gardener, the bricklayer, the garbage woman of academia. I just sling around mud, soil, and detritus. I am a bottom-feeder, lurking around the tiny pebbles of the fish tank, trying not to get eaten by the big fish. I am a lowly god damn seed-planter that has no living plants to speak of. I am the beginning of a thousand beginnings that lead to concrete dead ends. I am all rhizome and no trunk. I must change this. Immediately.