throbbing light machine

I get to work on Sor Juana this week yay! I saw her name in the files list, but was sure the assignment would have already gone out to someone. God she's the best. So excite.

Can any of y'all recommend resources for a Japanese ESL student dealing with college-level intro to composition coursework? My daddy goes soaring with a Japanese girl who's doing the aviation program at the local community college, and I guess she broke down on him last Sunday out at the airfield, overstressed and undersupported, so we're trying to help her out. I had her bring her materials to a meeting yesterday and sat with her for a bit; it looks to me like the main problem she's having is that she's having to deal so slowly and carefully with the language-comprehension stuff that she's not able to keep her thoughts clear, or cut through bullshit. There's also an awful lot of bullshit - I took the course she's in, long time passing, and it's comp-through-analysis-of-American-stereotypes, pretty much, and she neither knows nor really needs to know those stereotypes - but she does have to get through this class and the one after it in the comp sequence. I suggested audiobooks when possible, told her to stop writing in GoogleDocs and get herself a darn word processor with a spellchecker, but I was wondering if those of you who are trained for ESL education, or who have specific experiences with a Japanese/American situation, would know of anything more directly relevant to her needs.

some links, mostly about gender violence, abuse, and affective labor/exhaustion:

this comment on Jezebel about gaslighting was helpful for me in figuring out why I've found the UCSB murders and the conversations in their aftermath so profoundly triggering

Re-imagining Disclosure as a Collective Act of Listening over at thefeministwire: "this formulation is that the burden of social change is placed upon those least empowered to intervene in the conditions of their oppression. The figure of the subaltern, or the survivor, gaining voice captures our political imaginary, shifting the focus away from the labor that might be demanded of those in positions of power to learn to listen to subaltern inscriptions—those modes of expression that are often interpreted as ‘silence.'"

Abuse as DDoS at Model View Culture: "DDoS attacks are so difficult to deal with largely because of their distributed nature. Even if the individual attacks aren’t particularly powerful, deal with one and dozens more will sprout up like some terrible mythical creature. Systemic abuse in the tech industry is also like this. Even seemingly minor acts of misconduct become a problem because they don’t happen in isolation."

also from the same issue of Model View Culture, The Fantasy and the Abuse of the Manipulable User: "Social media’s social-reinforcement mechanisms are also far more powerful. The “network effects” that make fledgeling social media sites less useful than already-dominant platforms also serve to lock existing users in. It’s difficult to practically set boundaries against existing social media products which have historically served one and one’s friends. People’s natural desire to be in contact with their loved ones becomes a form of social coercion that keeps them on platforms they’d rather depart. This coercion is picked up on and amplified by the platforms themselves - when someone I know tried to delete his Facebook account, it tried to guilt him out of it by showing him a picture of his mother and asking him if he really wanted to make it harder to stay in touch with her."

The Empathy Trap at Hook and Eye: "I mean really, what responses are left when faced with someone you ostensibly respect who hasn't found a place in the system? You tell them they matter. The work they do matters. You tell them that it stinks that they don't have stable work and that it is unfair. And probably it is unfair, but there you are, face-to-face, at a stalemate. If you're jobbed and you care then you're inevitably in a position of empathy. You are in a position of relative privilege. If you're not jobbed and you care, then you're in the position of needing to tell the caring person you're ok. You'll manage. Because honestly, it is the system, it isn't them. This, friends, is the empathy trap. It is a real thing and we are all, one way or another bound up in it, be we jobbed, not jobbed, or somewhere in between."

Thanks for all the supportive comments over the last coupla weeks, y'all; you guys make such a big difference in my life. Nothing better than falling into media fandom has, like, ever happened to me. I'm doing okay. Feeling grouchy, which is prolly a good sign. I still got to get myself a new apartment this next week, and then I can get back to stressing about academic ish full-time!!! Naw, don't listen to me.

Man, I don't know why I don't just watch Shameless all the cotdamn time. Because it is my kind of shit. It is so good to see representations of being poor. I'm not Gallagher-type poor, tho I come from Chicago-poor stock - but my people are hippieshit backwoods artsy types for the most part, conjobbery on the side not front and center. But I am having so many feelings about Lip and college and how fucking bullshit it is that the American educational system is clogged with all this suburban whitebread babysitting timewasting felgercarb. The question isn't "how will we use this in the real world," it's "is the purpose of this lesson to efficiently inform us or help us acquire a skill, or is it just another hoop to jump through, another way to waste our time?"

I am NEVER going to say that learning is pointless, or even a bad idea, because I am SO DOWN with knowledge for knowledge's sake - but at the same time, how the fuck much time and money can you ethically mandate kids need to spend faffing around on distribution requirements when some people legit need to be living their lives at the same time? The pursuit of a well-rounded education ought to be a joyful supplement to a working life. I want both at once, jam and bread all together - anyway, why is it such a big thing to expect, to be able to have a home and a family and a work and learning too? I empathize a lot with Lip's emotional tension, his irritation at ritualized college social scenes combined with the intense affective pull of his family. I feel that now; I'm sick of living away from my people. And it was weird for me too back as an undergraduate, because I was also essentially a new wife at nineteen/twenty, keeping my first house, and that put me out of step with the private liberal arts college scene. But lots of the girls I grew up with were getting married and having first babies at that point in their lives.

Iiiiii need to get more freelance writing assignments and get paid, y'all.

eta: and anyway what's up with notjob disciplinarians who teach Foucault? do they not cognitive dissonance?

I need advice. I wish I had someone on faculty here that I could turn to, that I felt like I could be straight-up enough with, but I don't. So I'm turning to you guys.

This dissertation prospectus thing has been such a fucking nightmare - and I think one of the reasons is that I've been overreactive to faculty comments in terms of changing my topic. I've written up like six different projects and abandoned them. The situation as it stands now is this: I have 2/3rds of a prospectus written up about the problem of feminine sympathy and the Contagious Diseases Acts. Most of what I need to do is further primary research, pulling out some specific instances and quotes and things. My advisor likes it, because it's properly historicist - as soon as I mentioned the CD Acts in one of our meetings I could see him light up. I CAN execute the project - but I really don't want to. I just want to talk about books :(

I've done a lot of work on the sisters Brontë over the years, them being my favorites and all, and I have material on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Villette that could turn into chapters; I was also thinking about my Rochester-reading, picking at the bits of him that don't fit the Byronic mode. I'm sure I could find a fourth thing to work on there, probably Gondal to get Emily into the picture.

I WANT to write about the Brontës, but I also just want to get out of this hell already. Do I just need to suck it up and finish the CD Acts project and get myself the fuck out of grad school? It's been a month since I've worked on anything, recovering from the stupid unnecessary fiasco that was my August defense, and I think my internal anxiety about it all has been starting to ratchet up again. I feel guilty for not working.

(also they are STILL cutting down trees along the drive, and it's driving me mad.)

So right now I feel like I should thank, like, the entirety of the Due South fandom. Because y'all are giving me some of the best and most healing reading experiences of my life.

I think that it took me a while to really fall into due South because I was having an interpretation error: I have an impossibly hard time understanding Benton Fraser as anything like a remotely unreliable narrator. He is, but his mindset it just so familiar, so much like my own, that his thoughts feel like my thoughts and I always believe him. Instead of reading him as a sweet but screwed up guy, I'm right there next to him, going: stand your ground, maintain the right, always get your man, love can move mountains, the truth is the most powerful thing there is.

( personal stuff and also a DS-fandom-wide lovefest behind the cut )

JFC so much work. Drowning in words send help and/or gifs.

All of these things come due next week:
-exam list. With alllll kinds of internally inconsistent input from the members of my committee.
-teaching proposal for the dirt discourses class. Am debating whether Nella Larsen is too long, whether I should add a scene from Boucicault's "The Octoroon" for lulz, or if Victorian melodrama humor is one of those things that does not translate to people outside of the field.
-portfolio for teaching award. Seriously, uni, if you want to give me awards that's great and everything, but I do not appreciate them coming with extra work attached in order to even compete.
-trial assignment for a summer freelance position with Thomas Riggs: a 1,000 word bio of Anne Wharton, who I'd never heard of but seems way cool.
-grading, eternally.

I miss having time to do research. And it's like 80 degrees out so I don't even have a brain right now. I just wanna listen to Tom McRae forever.

Do any of you have any intel on the nature of Jesuit universities/colleges? I have a cousin who'll start college year after next, and she's looking for a city school in the Great Lakes area. Both Loyola and DePaul are good geographic options, but we're concerned about dropping her into a politically conservative environment - and about financially supporting a religious institution. Thoughts? Opinions? Anecdata? What actually happens when religious institutions sponsor educational ones?

Am reading Peter Pan criticism. A large number of persons in the 70s and 80s are Freudian and sexist and wrong. I am tagging their articles as such, in all caps, as I save and download them.

The thing you don't know about Catherine Gallagher when you've only read her writing is that she also does all the voices. Heathcliff voices = pretty much best Victorian lit. lecture ever.

Out on the farm for the night, with my auntie and a soap opera and a fire and a bottle of Shiraz and an odd group of integrating cats & dogs.