i've been frantically trying to find a place to live near western university in pomona, california, and so far, i've turned up squat, despite the hours sifting through craigslist, management office websites, and newspapers. evidently, there's no such thing as 'advance planning' in southern ca. i'll probably end up flying out in may, closing my eyes, turning around three times, and pointing to the hovel where i'll end up living for the next year or so. and supposedly pomona has one of the highest crime rates in southern california. can't be much different than downtown a-town, right?

today, i sent my acceptance letter and five-hundred big ones to secure my seat at western university of health sciences in pomona, ca. now...i need to find a place to live. a place that will let me have cats. a place with a stove and a refrigerator and a toilet and a shower. a place less than one-thousand big ones a month.

a place where i can fit my dissertation books for the weekends.

my work is cut out for me.

nope. didn't forget the C. i'm officially ABD (all-but-dissertation). the session was extremely constructive, and i received excellent advice from my mentors (thanks, sam!). i was unsure of the process, and after my committee was finished with the interrogation, i asked what i should do next.

prof. hughes: "leave the room."

alice: "should i start writing chapters?"

prof. hughes: "we'll decide that."

alice (putting her cap on): "um, should i go home?"

prof. hughes: "no, wait outside. we'll come get you when we're done."

alice: "oh." panic. "oh."

ten minutes later...

prof. hughes (hand extended): "congratulations. you're a.b.d."

alice: "really? by the way, do you think i'm stupid for flying to L.A. to interview for veterinary school?"

prof. hughes: "yes. you're a frigging idiot."

this means i could get hired, right?

after umpteen hours of studyingstudyingstudying, i earned an 'A' on first my veterinary neuro exam (yes, that IS capitalized). i've been walking around for weeks smelling like sheep brains, and we haven't even taken the lab practical yet.

when i first entered the two first-year veterinary classes, i felt like a walking stigma. an outsider. no simile can hand it justice. i was the reject trying to outrun my pride. and then i talked to several of the students, and the insecurities i'd been wearing like a paperbag over my head (minus eyeholes) biodegraded (really, i suck at personification and metaphors, too). there was an overwhelming kindness, an exchange of thoughts and ideas, other students instructing me on pathways and replications in study rooms, on blackboards. giving. and i am struck by kindness.

i would say that now i am even more distressed about not having been admitted this year, but i won't. i've landed two wonderful classes, of literature and composition students, who never cease to amaze me in their ability to keep up with my disgusting reading load (we're finishing our fourth novel--Light in August, no less--five to go) and their displays of perceptiveness for the obscure pieces i'm throwing at them, respectively. if i wasn't so dead tired all of the time, i'd say teaching doesn't even feel like work this semester. but that's a lie. i'm overwhelmed. and sleeping circa five hours a night. i need to get back to the gym. the stress is breeding in my shoulders. and the dogs are angry with me. and the cats are angry with me. and i can't remember the last time i cleaned the toilet. but faulkner's calling, not my kidneys. so i will answer.

from the lovely chandler madison comes my daily read. today's was especially interesting, which comes as an interesting change considering the last time i broached this topic:

At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust

Tamar Lewin

Women in the Majority

What is beyond dispute is that the college landscape is changing. Women now make up 58 percent of those enrolled in two- and four-year colleges and are, over all, the majority in graduate schools and professional schools too.

Most institutions of higher learning, except engineering schools, now have a female edge, with many small liberal arts colleges and huge public universities alike hovering near the 60-40 ratio. Even Harvard, long a male bastion, has begun to tilt toward women.

"The class we just admitted will be 52 percent female," said William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions.

maybe it's just that more mommies are tanning while ovulating, thus secreting more X-chromosomes. or maybe it's radon. um or maybe women are starting to have self-esteems. no, that can't be it. must be the lead paint. yeah, that's the ticket.

Women on Purdue faculty lag in salary, trustees told

Report cites several factors for discrepancy

By Tanya Brown
tbrown@journalandcourier.com

Women faculty members employed at Purdue University make less on average than their male counterparts in all 10 of the university's 10 departments.

Monika Ivantysynova, a named professor of fluid power systems at Purdue, is one female faculty member who isn't surprised by that fact.

"I requested more money than they gave me, and I am pretty sure that if I came in as a male with my age and my experience, that I would get the money I requested," she said.

"There might be still some conventional facts that lead to this impression that ... as a woman, you have to show more of who you are and why you are really good."

In a governance report to Purdue's Board of Trustees on Friday, Rabindra Mukerjea, director of strategic planning and assessment at Purdue, attributed the salary lag to a number of sources.

In engineering, for example, women faculty members are paid on average $18,000 less than males in the same college. The largest gap between the sexes comes in the College of Pharmacy, Nursing and Health Sciences, where women on average are paid $61,100 -- fully $25,200 less than men.

"There are those differences, yes, but why that's caused is associated with what kinds of disciplines they are in and their levels of seniority," Mukerjea said.

Purdue Provost Sally Mason said there tend to be more women in fields that pay less overall, and fewer women in higher-paying fields.

"We have more women in liberal arts and education and more men in science and engineering," she said. "It reflects the supply. We're finally getting more women in the pipeline."

She said her office carefully tracks the salaries of the genders as well as minorities versus non-minorities to ensure they are equitable based on those guidelines.

"In every case, there is either a reason for it (salary inequity) or we give them a salary enhancement to take care of it," she said.

Overall, Mason said, Purdue employs many more women at the assistant professor level, which is the lowest paid salary rung. She said that is because not enough women come in with the experience levels to be recruited as associate or full professors.

"This is something that will change over time as they remain here and are promoted," Mukerjea added.

Still, Jennifer William, an assistant professor of German, said the tenure-track system is inherently more difficult for women, who often face time-consuming child and home responsibilities.

"Female faculty members are not necessarily given enough moral support to meet the requirements for promotion as men who have women at home to meet those needs," she said.

"Anecdotally, it just seems that more women than men get stuck at the associate level."

Ivantysynova, who feels Purdue is trying to address such concerns, agrees.

"It is harder for women, maybe to get there, still."

the reviews are finally posted for the cccc, and here's one from our session:

CCCC 2006 in Review

A25 Network Literacies: First-Year Composition Instruction for the Digital 21st Century

This panel was comprised of three members of the first-year composition program at Purdue University and who shared their vision for 21^st century composition, or composition in the digital age.

In her presentation, "Networking: Realizing the Composed Self," session chair Mary Godwin discussed her belief that the world must be brought into students' writing in order to realize better writers in the composition classroom. Here, Godwin relied on the notion of critical literacy that sees students as agents making sense of the world; therefore, they must be writing about it. Further, Godwin believes that digital networks empower student writers toward such critical literacy ends, and that these networks explore all four worlds of writing: personal, academic, professional, and civic or public. Bringing these ideas together, Godwin poses, "What does it mean to write oneself into meaning?" As members of the digital age, Godwin responds that students are writers realizing themselves as composed texts in search for connections as part of, borrowing the term from John Trimbur, the call to write and as part of the rhetorical triangle. Further, Godwin notes that these realizations result best from explorations of digital networks as the "interconnected architecture of participation" that allow students to realize their multiple (digital) identities, again based on notions of critical and computer literacy. Godwin then applies her theoretical talk to the digital design of her composition course along with student responses to it. In these student voices, Godwin believes that she has achieved her goal-realizing better writers writing in the digital age.

Following Godwin, Alice D'Amore presented her own awareness narrative, but this awareness was a realization of a much different sort. In stark contrast to Godwin's positive assessment of digital technologies in the teaching of writing, D'Amore presents, in her own words, "the pessimistic view of new media and digital literacy," especially for the composition classroom. Technologies such as blogs, D'Amore argues, fail to develop the sense of community idealized in the literature of digital rhetoric as well as fail to provide a heightened sense of student ownership of writing. To illustrate this point, D'Amore details her experiences or attempts at involving digital and visual media into her composition classroom. At first, D'Amore notes that these technologies were somewhat successful at fostering community until issues of sexuality became a focus and then an immovable force. D'Amore provides several poignant examples of new media gone wrong as she laments that students today are unable to distinguish images and advertisements on the web from the manipulation of them. Further, the focus on network communication and students' comfort with it combined with the lack of face-to-face communication creates a resistance to both critically analyzing and taking ownership of writing. As she argues, "Blogs and other technologies have been assignments, not opportunities." D'Amore concludes that community was not achieved through the use of digital networks in her composition course, though it may be more appropriate to state that the community that was achieved or realized was not at all what D'Amore wanted.

Marc C. Santos concludes the session by recasting these narratives through his own theoretical approach to the networked classroom. Santos begins by noting that he chooses to achieve his goals in the composition classroom through images, as they are more open to analysis (much like they were in D'Amore's class). Santos then focuses the rest of his presentation on his current project-having composition students revise previous students' digital compositions. Such a project is built on the hermeneutic aspirations of rhetoric and the ethical dimensions of knowledge, and it is further reliant on notions of time and space, kairos, and situatedness, according to Santos. Networked environments create a space, an ambiance, an ethics of decision for students composing in the digital age; therefore, Santos' composition classroom relies on these environments and expands the boundaries of how teachers and students realize and write themselves in them.

—Randall McClure

For more information on the CCCC 2006 conference,
visit the NCTE Web site at http://www.ncte.org/profdev/conv/cccc/.

well, i rushed up to school today to get my letter of acceptance (or denial) for teaching in the women's studies program. turned out to be the latter. i already have a women's studies minor and turned in recommendations from three prominent women's studies profs, so i'm thinking that i was nixed because i have three years of funding left in the english department. sigh.

i called my wonderfully human advisor this afternoon, checking on my prelim. exam status. he said he wasn't able to give me the result over the telelphone/email, but basically told me that it won't be my tenth rejection of the month. I PASSED MY DAMNED PRELIMS! the one week and one day exam from hell, completed with nary the assistance of spivak, bhabha, and, r.i.p., the uberfeminist (cough) frantz fanon. so, the next step is the prospectus, defense, and dissertation, with veterinary school somewhere along the way. eventually, i'll be a dead woman with a bunch of letters following letters on my tombstone (i will make them chisel each and every one).

i survived my presentation at the ccccs. much wider audience than at purdue's teaching and learning technology conference from a few weeks before--there had to be near fifty in the audience. i walked into the hotel, and found that there were close to seven floors of panels. i spoke casually for the tlt presentation, and for this one, i stepped in with two pages of written material, but naturally ventured off into my rant after two paragraphs. i think that the powerpoint spoke for itself. and i was very surprised--people laughed. they found it humorous. which it was--but i wasn't expecting this calibur of a conference to have a sense of humor. shame on me.

link to my powerpoint

link to my short speech which i basically did not rely for the twenty minutes i spoke

what surprised me, for as non-theoretical as my presentation was, people asked theoretical questions related to my experiences and waited to speak to me afterwards. and for as much as i was bashed at purdue for 'doing what i do' on my blog, the audience was receptive. evidently, i confused north carolina with northern california. wishful thinking, i suppose.

evidently, colorado state visited our panel and are reviewing us (eventually) here.

maybe i'll post some pictures later.

shameless plug for a panel i'm trying to organize for the next usaclals conference (http://usaclals.org) in october.

CFP: Fissures and Sutures: Sources of Division and Mutual Aid in Postcolonial
Reflections on History and Literature, United States Association for
Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies

selling trauma: post-apartheid(?) and tourism
Apartheid ended more than ten years ago; regardless, bulletholes in the
stained glass of Regina Mundi remain, long after the June 1976 Soweto school
uprisings, as do the lime mines on Robben Island, the squatter camps in Soweto
and Cape Town, and the to-be-furnished space for representing the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission in the Apartheid Museum on the skirts of
Johannesburg.

Likewise, the cells on Robben Island have been painted, cleaned, and prepared
for tourism. A large, powerful boat leaving from a popular restaurant and
shopping spot carries you to those cells, whose apartheid-era squalor, hard
labor, and death are relegated to small black-and-white photographs. Outside
of the expensive bars and restaurants lining the tourist strip in Cape Town
are squatter camps and worker transportation vans riddled with bulletholes
spent by competing cabbies. The Gold Reef Amusement Park stands beside the
Apartheid Museum, advertising a "Victorian Fun Park."

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes:

“But there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real
horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering
of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say,
the surgeons at a military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those
who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to
be. In each instance, the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or
cowards, unable to look. Those with the stomach to look are playing a role
authorized by many glorious depictions of suffering. Torment, a canonical
subject in art, is often represented in painting as a spectacle, something
being watched (or ignored) by other people. The implication is: no, it cannot
be stopped—and the mingling of inattentive with attentive onlookers underscore
this” (42).

This panel seeks to address the following:

--Is there a "post" for regimes such as apartheid?
--How do we, and those who suffered, condone/reject/support tourism/voyeurism
of suffering, ongoing and past, globally?
--Where does the intersection of suffering-as-commodity and commodity-as-
suffering occur? Where do the fissures and sutures emerge?
--How is trauma marketed to 'Western' audiences? Is it 'authenticated' when
the (previous?) sufferers are working at the museum desk or guiding visitors
through a church?

Please direct papers for 15-20 minute readings to:

Alice D'Amore
adamore@purdue.edu
PhD student in Postcolonial Literatures, Women's Studies
420 Heavilon Hall
Department of English
Purdue University
500 Oval Drive
West Lafayette, IN 47907

conference info: http://www.usaclals.org/?q=usaclalsconference2006

i have not had this much $#&*ing anxiety in ten years. final exams SUCK. the material is so incredibly comprehensive that you need to have it all mastered. three courses mastered in the course of a week. one down, two to go. it's MUCH simpler being an english grad student.

I was emailed this week by Minrose Gwin, a Faulknerian and queer theorist at Purdue. She informed me that she would be taking a position as an endowed chair at UNC Chapel Hill, an amazing and exciting opportunity for her (what she called her "dream job"). With her she is taking her partner, Ruth Salvaggio, yet another amazing instructor. My initial reaction wavered between a sense of loss (as Minrose was on my plan of study committee due to her work with trauma) and feelings of pure envy and inadequacy--my own neuroses and shortcomings surfacing....feeling behind and feeling not scholarly enough and feeling a nagging sadness that there are "better" schools than Purdue.

When I broached the subject during our First Nations class on Thursday, I expressed my dismay vocally, and was met with a seemingly cold response from one of the students. She claimed that this event was an "academic reality." I felt shorted. Granted, my complaining was an emotional response, if not childish. But the difference in responses...how this situation evokes a sense of loss in me; in others, it's shrugged off and taken as par for the course [though I think she might have been humming another tune if the professor(s) she came to study with at Purdue took other positions]. Personally, I need a space to react, to heal. I'm not sure I would want to accept such a moment, in a tight-knit department like Purdue, without mourning it. Yeah yeah, I have a lot of growing up to do, but I hope to hell I never lose the need for human connections.

Regardless, I am very pleased with the outcome of the situation. dr.b. graciously agreed to be a member of my committee--her amazing breadth of knowledge regarding composition theory and rhetoric, as well as her work with Afro diaspora literature (of which I was unaware), will be a stronger match for my research interests and will provide me with access to a base of knowledge with which I am unfamiliar. She is also an academic who is very easy to talk to, and has graciously opened her office door many times when I simply needed to vent. And most importantly, she has opened the door to teaching with technology for me, another process through which I am maturing.

Well, after 16 weeks (17 including spring break), I'm essentially finished with my first year in the PhD program at Purdue. The past three days have been a testament to the madness that has been this semester. With 6 courses, including a monthly seminar at the Newberry Library in Chicago (which I consequently just completed about 9 hours ago), I am breathing for the first time in 4 months. I still have another 20-page paper to write and a presentation to give on an ETS library fellowship program, but aside from that...it's OVER. Thursday involved class from 9am until 5pm, and then hopping into a skirt to get a miserable computer printout of Purdue's Graduate Teaching Certificate (and the audience was made fully aware that this certificate was not an award, but professional development. The graduate student who worked for NASA and invented the safe nosepicker got $500. I got a survey to complete). Home by 9pm; wrote a page or so of the seminar paper due at the Newberry on Saturday morning. Boarded the Lafayette train at 7:30am, wrote a few more pages on the train, almost got ran over by a bus at 11am, only had a $5 and threw that into the slot (even though I had a CTA pass in my pocket--the busdriver was amused), worked on my paper until the seminar began at 2pm. Went out for dinner to a tapas bar with the group at 5pm. Lit on pitchers of sangria by 6pm. Ken and the dog picked me up. Home by 12am. sleep for 6 hours. Back in Chicago by 10am, printer in tote. Handed in paper and reading journal. Remained thoroughly confused after listening to 4 hours of Early American theory. Ken and the dog picked me up. Came home and collapsed unt 8:45pm, when I woke up after dreaming that my pet catfish was telling me his autobiography. Now, it's time to pick out some wall colors. And get back to blogging.