Ugh. Playing indoor has lost some of its luster now that I’m playing on two mildly sprained ankles. The ankle braces lacerate my skin and the right one makes my foot fall asleep. Ever tried to kick a soccer ball with a numb foot? Let’s just say it adds another level of difficulty.
This is what professional athletes have to contend with. I remember a story John Harkes told about spraining his ankle back in his days with Sheffield Wednesday. He should have been off it for two weeks but the physio told the manager something crazy, like four days. The solution was to numb it with injections but again, you ever try to play soccer without being able to feel your foot? But like Harkes said, if he said he couldn’t play he may have rotted on the bench and been sold at the end of the season. Of course, the pro’s paycheck helps ease the pain. Me? I get to pay for the pleasure.
/ 
European leagues resume play this weekend after the international break. Yay!
I’m about a third through Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and I like it quite a bit. It’s not at all what I expected and the novel’s voice reminds me of something Kelly Link might write.
I also started listening to Death in the Afternoon by Hemingway and, my word, it’s a bit good. It’s about Spanish bullfighting but also about Spain in general—the people, the culture, the countryside. If you don’t have a fetish for Spain it might not push your buttons, but happily I do have such a fetish and it’s great fun to listen to Hemingway describe places I’ve been and hold dear to my heart—the nightlife of Madrid, the April fair of Sevilla, the old-fashioned wooden bullring in Ronda. We’re planning a tentative trip to Spain next spring and it’s going to be very difficult to formulate an itinerary. So many places, so little time and the two areas I’m most interested—Andalusia and the Basque region—are on opposite ends of the country.
A bunch of us English students went out for drinks last Wednesday night after class to talk about the program, what we’ve been reading, what we’ve been writing, etc. The conversation swung around to our areas of interest, being one major and two minor areas, and how much it matters for Creative Writing PhDs (the general consensus is, not much.)
Anyway, one of my friends was talking with the chair of the Literary Studies program who told him that in order to really become an expert on a given branch of literature, you need to narrow it down to a ten-year period. Furthermore, many experts narrow it to two years. As in, “Hello, my expertise is in Modern British Literature, 1940-1941.” You can forget specializing in sweeping categories like “19th Century American Literature” and replace them with “American Literature, 1840-1850.” This discussion actually branched off a number of us complaining about how literary theory makes our eyes glaze over, yet that’s what the establishment has needed to do in order to justify their paychecks. Now apparently it’s that you need to have memorized every written word from a two-year period in order to be an authority on it.
On the writing front, I pitched to my advisor the idea of expanding my short story Castleneff into a novel as part of a summer creative writing project. Getting grad credit for a novel I wanted to write anyway? It would be sweet indeed.
Current Mood: Numb From the Waist Down | 
8 Comments
I know nothing of footie, but I wondered whether you had noticed this controversy? I was amused.
Back 30 years ago, academic chemists were talking about LPU’s — the Least Publishable Unit. You work on a new synthesis, and then rather than publish one paper, you break it into pieces, write a paper on each development stage and include one or more summary papers, all of which cite each other. Thus thrashing the references and getting 8-20 publication credits for one synthesis. More papers, not much more work. More room for grad students to get a joint authorship with the P.I. on one part of the process, rather than just a team credit on one paper.
Dividing lit areas into 2-10 year subperiods is how you deal with the glut of English majors crowding the MLA job fairs… It’s also how you can have a niche AND not compete with your advisor. Win-win all around. Sort of.
Dr. Phil
John, I did see that story and I’m amused although I feel bad for Southampton as they already don’t get much respect. The funniest comment is from the guy who said it looks like the chairman from Portsmouth, Southampton’s hated rival on the south coast. This would be like having Green Bay creating a statue to commemorate Ray Nitschke and having it turn out looking like Dick Butkus.
Phil, it’s all maggots on an ever-dwindling corpse to me. Another reason why I’m glad I’m a Creative Writing student since all of your work is uniquely your own. UW-M also has a Modern Studies program that’s innovative and nationally recognized, and I believe those students are truly doing new and meaningful things. However, I think it’s much harder for Literary Studies students to find a marketable niche.
2-3 years area of specialty? Really? I never heard about that one from my peers.
Expertise is the operative word. You don’t need that kind of specialization for your PhD or to teach in that area, but to be truly considered an expert by other academic. According to the chair of our Literary Studies program, as quoted by a friend of mine.
Pssh, I’m going to one up them all. I’m only going to study author’s who wrote books in the month of December and January 1932.
I happen to agree with the eternally controversial Camille Paglia. We should be studying broader (getting an extensive background in great literature from all periods and art history and sociology and history and philosophy and anthropology) not going narrower. She discusses this “specialization” as among the many things wrong with contemporary academic studies.
Eric, do you mean to do writers in two non-contiguous months? Or are you adopting the old convention of starting the new year in March, so adjacent December and Januarys in the same winter are “in the same year”?
I love CP. When I first ran into her, reading The Chronicle of Higher Education back in the 80s, she’s been painted all over the place from saint to The Devil Herself. Firebrands are always good to shake up complacency.
What specialists, in many fields of study, fail to understand is that they need to be generalists as well — or their narrow focus will stifle and die due to lack of breathable oxygen.
Dr. Phil
Absolutely! I had a lecturer my final semester of undergrad back in ‘96 who pushed the same thing. He taught courses in an Integrated Liberal Studies program that mixed history, philosophy, literature, history of science, art history, etc. Unfortunately I didn’t find out about these courses until later in my education but I probably would have made ILS the backbone of my studies if I was going to do it over.
But the principle is that a solid grounding in many disciplines is much better than a single specialty.