My First Update From Grad School!

Hi kids! I promise to try to write more in my blog, now that my schedule is straightened out. Times have gotten pretty hectic here. Just to really illustrate my point, I will tak you through my typical weekday in Madison (as in today).

6:45 AM - I wake up. I check my email to get the news of the day, shower, have a good breakfast, and head out the door at 7:30.

8:00 AM - I arrive on campus. I have to take the#80 bus from my apartment on the west side of Madison to the Chazen Museum on the east end of campus. I arrive this early because I work as a project assistant in the slide library from 8-1 M-TH (20 hours a week). I scheduled it this way so I would be up and ready to do schoolwork after regular work ended.

1:00 PM - After five hours of scanning slides, updating websites, and performing tech support services for what seems like the entire department, I go and have lunch. Today I stopped in the Memorial Union to grab a small stir-fry, then sat in the cafeteria on Lake Mendota while I read some articles for class later in the day. I have three classes, one 300-level lecture course on Italian Art and two seminar courses. Seminars are two-hour long discussions, led by professors, but all the talking is done by students. Your grade essentially is your contribution to the class discussion, which is supposedly entirely based off of the class readings you are assigned for the week. This coming week, I have a combined 200 pages of reading for both seminars (actually probably more). On top of this I have 40 4-page papers to grade for another class, as well as two presentations to prepare and a paper to write.

So I used my lunch time to read the Onion. (Published right in Madison!)

4:00 PM - After reading for a few hours, I still only marginally understand what Homi Bhabha's article is talking about. I run over to my tougher seminar, "Visual Transculture." It is based on very theoretical and complex readings about culture (or lack thereof), vision (and the vision of vision), and other such western academic theoretical constructs. For the next two hours, myself and the other 25 students in the class hotly debate such topics, despite the fact that no one outside of the room really cares that much. (I will discuss the reason why that is in an upcoming essay in my other blog.) After 2 hours, everyone leaves exhausted. This may be because the class dynamic makes it seem like all the students need to be as protective and defensive of their ideas as possible, despite the fact nobody really knows what anybody is talking about.

6:00 PM - I leave class with the three other first year students (all of whom are awesome and make grad school much more enjoyable), and collectively we decide (for the tenth time) that the class dynamic sucks and thus a cafe visit is in order.

8:00 PM - After two hours of complaining about school to each other, we all leave said cafe and head home. I should work. I don't want to because I am tired.

Tomorrow - repeat.

Today's Bushism From My GW "Quotation Of The Day" Calendar

"It's very interesting when you think about it, the slaves who left here to go to America, because of their steadfast and their religion and their belief in freedom, helped change America."

-Dakar, Senegal; July 8, 2003

. . .

I am going to have to investigate this. Because I cannot believe any human being could actually say that. In Senegal. To Africans. In any context. I really cannot.

I'm Alive!

Sorry I haven't been posting recently - since classes began, life has been pretty hectic. Even tonight I still have to read about 60 pages (critically read them - not just skim) and write up some thoughts for a seminar tomorrow with a bunch of Ph.D. students. Very hardcore.

But at the same time fun. The discipline I focus on is called "visual transculture" which is something like superstring theory except for art historians. Basically, I am studying the visual aspects of the larger anthropological and sociological perspective of transculture, which in itself posits that cultures cannot exist in discrete units because cultures are inherently incomplete and thus must borrow from the world around them. What this creates are objects, ideas, and people which are not cross-cultural, but transcultural in the sense that the span not only across but above the "borders" of cultural production. This is a radical idea in anthropology, one that is only just being understood, and UW-Madison is one of the only art history departments in America where one can study it in depth.

So basically I feel privileged.

More to come later, including restuarant explorations, more about grad student life, and why Hot Spicy Cheese Bread is the greatest invention north of I-80.