Archives Day 2: Digging

Both metaphorically and literally that is.

 I spent a shortened day in the archives today transposing the annual reports and minutes for the Physical Culture Committe responsible for the physical department at the Minneapolis YWCA during 1894-1896.  The irony I find for most people digging in the archives is that you have no idea what the hell you’re looking for.  It’s not like digging for treasure (Michal was right!) because when you’re digging for treasure X marks the spot, right?  I did find some interesting stuff though.  As some may know I’m looking for connections between sports and performance.  Yesterday I found out that the YWCA held an exhibition of their classes at the Lyceum Theatre.  I also found out (not in the archives) that Dudley Allen Sargent was originally an acrobat in the circus.  I’m still not totally sure what I will do with these little morsels.

I also found some interesting tidbits as I dug in my garden.  When we moved in the former residents of this house left us a nice pile of burnt crap in the clearly unused garden in the back.  Since we’ve been fostering Ellie she’s also decided that the garden is the ideal place for her toilet.  So, yesterday I began to clean it up and dig it up.  In the process I found a lot of nails.  That’s right nails.  All sorts of nails straight, bent, ones with swirlies going down, big ones, little ones.  Oh and bottle caps.  These items really followed a general theme.  In front when I was pulling weeds I frequently found shards of glass.  Again, digging must rarely result in treasure, although I suppose one person’s garbage is another person’s treasure. 

While I don’t have any conclusion about what I found in the archives yet, I do have some thoughts about what I found in my garden.  Our house has over a century of history to it.  According to numerous sources it went through some fairly difficult times relatively recently including two fires (which we found out about after we moved in).  I don’t know how long it’s been since someone paid attention to the garden, but the earth around our house has been spitting out its pain the last few weeks, belching up glass and metal.  Hopefully it likes the lavendar I’m about to shove in its face a little better.

Archives Day 1: Haunted by DeCerteau

In The Writing of History  Michel DeCerteau evokes this amazing image of history and the writing of history, (ie. historiography) as a collection of dead bodies and ghosts inhabiting the present.  He says the “dear departed find a haven in the text because they can neither speak nor do harm anymore.  These ghosts find access through writing on the condition that they remain forever silent” (2).  Here he points out how the past gains access to the present through the supposed immortality of the written word.  However, that immortality requires a death in order to exist in the present.  In a way spending time reading book and researching in an archive is communing with the dead.

I had an odd experience today when my “ghosts” suddenly switched identities on me.

I’m rehashing some previous research I was working on last fall about the YWCA in Minneapolis.  I’m looking at how exercise for women at the turn of the century gave rise to women’s athletics, in a nutshell.  So, I began transposing the monthly and annual reports written by the first director of physical training at the Minneapolis YWCA which begins around 1892.  The first director was Abby Mayhew.  Last fall I transcribed a couple of her entries in this journal of reports.  Part of my goal this summer was to transcribe all of these reports.

First of all, I have to say that working with material this old is really interesting because the reports are all handwritten.  As a result, the author’s body appears in ways that you can’t access with typewritten material.  For instance, I can see all the moments when the ink in her pen begins to run out and she has to dip it back in the ink.  Today I kept wondering how this affected her thought train.  Did people think in different ways as they wrote?  Stream of consciousness writing must have been a different mode.

As I’m going through these and typing them into my computer (also an interesting connection between this woman’s hand writing the words on the page and mine typing words into a computer) the writing breaks for several pages.  There are probably like six or so pages that are blank.  Then suddenly it starts up again, only the handwriting is different, the voice is different, even the pressure of the pen to the paper is different, and the entries are signed, “Respectfully submitted, Abby S. Mayhew.”

I pause.  Wait a minute…she wasn’t writing before?

This identity whose body had so clearly been coming to me through her handwriting suddenly changed.  Beside the fact that I’d already written a paper where I cited the earlier entries as if they had been entered by Abby Mayhew.  Then my head began to buzz.  What if neither is really her but an assistant who entered all the reports into a common log?  Bascially enacting the same scenario I was transcribing someone else’s words into a convenient and easily accessible file?

I began to wonder about authorship and ownership.  If these entries were compiled by multiple people could I still assert they represent the philosophies of Mayhew’s gym?  Do I need to radically shift and discuss them much more amorphously and potentially homogenously as “the methods of the department of physical training” referring to them as a collective?

 Then DeCerteau comes back at me again.  For him writing about history “liberates the present without having to name it.  Thus it can be said that writing makes the dead so the living can exist elsewhere” (101).  Ouch.  It’s all about me, really.

So how do I handle this dead body that speaks to me and through me not only with words, but with the pressure of the pen, the breaks to re-ink, the haste, the apathy, the sceintific fervor that the body of the words reveal about the body of their author?

Deleuzian Dandelions

“The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers.  When rats swarm over each other.  The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed.  Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass.  We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome.”  Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Here, the beginning of a rather long passage from Deleuze on the characteristics of a rhizome.  His notion of becoming as a rhizomatic process sneaks its way into almost all of my classes at some point.  The idea is that with a rhizome, a weed, it’s difficult to pin down an origins or a progression.  It is both multiple and singular, it’s a weed and a tuber, simultaneously.  It travels and circulates.  If you  interrupt the chain at one point it will just pop up again somewhere else.

I wonder if Deleuze had any experience with dandelions.

My first experience with Deleuze occurred in my anthropology class last spring.  I loved the idea of the rhizome.  I wanted to become the weed.  Hardy, elusive, the weed is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.  How can I be a rhizomatic scholar, I wondered.

My first experience with dandelions occurred when I was a child.  I never understood why people would want to kill dandelions.  I took personal offense when they were referred to as weeds.  I found them to be beautiful.  I picked them all the time.  Brought them home and put them in water.  They have a stunning yellow blosom.  When you pick them they bleed milk.  Dandelions were beautiful and poetic to me…..

….until yesterday when I started gardening.

  Pulling up dandelions is a bitch because of that huge root.  Using my fairly mean looking trowel I went to town on the dandelions in my plant bed out front.  I dove the trowel into the ground, wiggling it back and forth, waiting for that tell-tale pop when the root has been dislodged.  The dandelions require me to get up on my knees for more leverage.  The first one I pulled freaked me out.  Here’s this root like two, three time the diameter of the plant on the surface.  On the ground they look innocent enough.  In fact, while searching for this image I found pages and pages of tastefully photographed fields of dandelions.  It’s what it hides under the skirt of its green leaves that makes dandelions the bane of the gardener.  Dandelions are agressive weeds.  They are all over my backyard and every week or so they regenerate when those beautiful yellow blossoms seed and blow all over the place.

That root, though, is grotesque.  One aspect I think that is seldom explored regarding Deleuze’s rhizome is its capacity for evil.  He says the “rhizome includes the best and the worst.”  The dandelion has both, but no one wants to see the “worst” the grotesqueness of the plant.  Deleuze invites us, really, to explore the rhizome’s grotesqueness:  “when rats swarm over each other.”  That’s an extremely powerful image and I doubt he meant for it to be glossed over in the reading.  The images he conjures are all entities that exist and thrive below.  Neither rats nor roots (nor potatoes for that matter) dwell on the surface.  They thrive in the bowels of things, in the ground, in sewers.  What does it mean that the rhizome is not a surface dwelling agent?  Or rather, that its life force exists underground, its home so to speak.  Its circuitry is necessarily then always already hidden, covered, invisible on the face of the thing.

Unfortunately for my dandelions as well as the pesky crabgrass inhabiting my front plant beds, they aren’t a part of the rhizomatic picture of plants I want to see in my yard.

End of year two….

That’s out of five, in case you were wondering.  I was just talking with the guy I get my burritos from for lunch at the airport (I work there) and adding up all the years I’ve been in college.  Seven if you don’t count my “unofficial” two post-years at CSU.  I’m ten years removed from most of my students.  Um, yikes.

So, a brief review of where I was at a year ago: 

“Getting a PhD is scary. I’m just finishing my first year and it was rough. I’m officially getting a degree in Theatre Historiography which is a fancy postmodern version of theatre history where we pick apart all the biases present in the writing of theatre history. It gets even stranger. I’m writing my dissertation on sports as a performance event. I’m specifically looking at fan cultures surrounding sport, so I’m also working on ethnographic research. I teach and I love teaching even though I’ve fought the desire to teach all my life. I plan to take my degree and run with it, become a professor, get tenure, and have job security doing what I love, theatre and teaching.”

“Well, folks.  I made it through my first year of this crazy PhD program.  I checked twice today and it seems all my limbs are still intact.  Also, checked, again twice, and my husband is still around, sleeping quite soundly right now.  And as far as I know all my friends and family are still speaking to me….right?

So, I turned in my final paper of the year today.  It was on the connection between pottery, theatre, and the divine in the Middle Ages, I might add, using Heidegger as my key methodological structure, if you can call what Heidegger does “structure.”  See that?  That’s what we call a bad academic joke.  It usually means you’re a lifer.  I put the paper in my professor’s mailbox and felt fine.  It was when I turned in all my library books that I had the sudden urge to vomit and cry at the same time.  I didn’t, but the rest of the day did go by in a haze. 

I’m taking a break before I start my summer work which includes studying for the first round of three sub-field exams that I will take in the fall and working on several grant applications for financial support of a graduate student conference I’m helping put together for next fall.  I’ll also keep working at the airport.  In that break, though Scott and I are flying to Tallahassee to see our dear friends Eva and John tie the knot.  In June we will be going to New Jersey to visit our new nephew who was born yesterday, a strapping 9lbs 6oz.  In July we will be meeting up with our friends the Shrums in Michigan and in August, yes I’m doing it, I will be coming back to Colorado for my ten year reunion.  We obviously don’t have much to do this summer.”

Recollection.  Perspective.  Here’s a retrospective.  This past year I managed to get a somewhat tenuous grasp on what the hell historiography is.  Get me drunk some time and I’ll tell you all about it.  I also managed to feel less like a fake in this program.  My confidence is better and I feel like I won some big battles with myself.  My fall seminar on 19th century theatre/theory completely shifted my thoughts on my dissertation when I “discovered” the U has a YMCA/YWCA archive.  There is something incredibly seductive about finding information and people no one else is talking about.  Tip:  This “discovery” is never as easy as it seems and is usually really dangerous, ethically.  Negotiating historical research is a challenge.  However, this work also has its rewards.  The promise of original research is part of what got me money for the summer to play with……..sorry, the dog we’re watching just totally ate a fly out of mid-air.

Where was I?  Oh, milestones.  I helped manage and put together a graduate student conference last fall.  It was incredibly rewarding and a success in my book.  Facilitating and creating that space was enormously gratifying even though I cried at the end.  The hard part is deciding to do it all over again.  We’ll see how it goes in the fall.  Totally different ideas for this one.  Check out the website at articulations.umn.edu

Real life milestones.  We bought a house.  I sometimes wonder is we hadn’t if I would have felt as at ease this year as I did.  It’s a sanctuary for me.  Honestly.  Not only is the sense of ownership (okay, loanership) incredibly fulfilling, but I feel like it’s like having a giant canvas that you can paint whatever you want on.  It’s a space of endless possibility.  For instance, we have this enormous closet in our bedroom.  I keep imagining all the different spaces we can turn it into.  Target, sadly enough, has become one of my favorite places to visit along with IKEA (yes, this is what graduate school will do to you).  So, later today I get to start working on our yard and hopefully working on building some gardens.

Tip:  Just because you’ve gotten a small, but fierce house does not necessarily mean inviting the entire family to it is a good idea.  We invited my family to our house for the holidays.  The pros:  it was the first time since I was under ten that we’ve had my parents, my sister and I, my aunt and my grandma together for Christmas.  Also, I would endure just about any pain to spend a minute with my nephew, let alone the joy of having him come and wake me up every morning.  My sister and brother-in-law are also some of the coolest people I know.  My grandma turned 90 with all of us with her.  Cons:  Well, if you haven’t heard the story already, buy me a drink and I’ll tell you all about it.  The highlights:  mom, uncle, mom, wine, window, mom, grandma, mom, Town Hall, mom, St. Paul.  See, it’s like a fun little poem.

This summer looks a bit different from last summer.  I’ll spend the first six weeks working in the archives.  You know you’ve entered geekdom when that’s like the most exciting prospect imaginable.  I’ll still be working at the airport which is also actually exciting since I’ll be there part time for most of the summer.  We have two trips tentatively planned with our friends the Shrums, hopefully, again to Michigan and also, tentatively, to our other friend’s lake house.  Harry Potter comes out mid-July.  Nuf said.  My brother and sister-in-law and nephew #2 will be making a visit late summer for the state fair.  Oh, I’ll also be studying for yet another round of sub-field fun.

To sum up, no urge to vomit or cry as I turned in my library books yesterday.  The act was fairly uneventful.  I did celebrate by drinking an obscene amount this past weekend.  Like, sum total, 24 hours worth of drinking.  Somehow I never got to the point of being really housed nor did I get a hangover or so much as a headache.  All I can figure is that somehow my body needed the break.  Or, more probably, I just lucked out.

What’s in a name?

Apparently quite a lot.  I’m not a Dr. yet, but this blog will chronicle my way there and hopefully help motivate me on the way.  If all goes as planned I will really be Dr. Walsh in about three years.

 So my journey.  In a nutshell spliced together through fragments.  I was a high school theatre geek.  I was actually a high school theatre-choir-orchestra-stuco-AP-NHS geek, but theatre always ran first on that list.  For the moment, I’ll skip the high school details and move on.  I went to a liberal arts school on the east coast, Maine to be exact, where I doubled majored in biology and theatre, theatre being quite an unpractical profession in my mind at that point.  I am practical, occassionally.  Failure there.  Transferred to Colorado State where a double major in biology and theatre was impossible. 

Fragment:  I sat on my couch at home talking to my mom about my decision.  I had agonized over it for weeks.  Spent time talking to people from both programs.  I had already made my decision, but hadn’t yet vocalized it.  “I can’t not do theatre.”  My mom, always supportive, fully agreed with me.  A rarity as parents go.

Fragment:  My boyfriend and I, after both transferring back to Colorado, go back to our high school to talk to our teachers.  Mrs. APEnglish teacher.  You know, the one you always tried to impress, but managed to always fall short.  I tell her my choice.  “What a disappointment.  What a waste of talent.”  The words stamped themselves on my being.  I will prove her wrong, I thought.

The program at CSU was small, but fierce.  As I moved through the other activities I chose to hang on to fell away, cello, and eventually singing (the end of my relationship with musical theatre). 

Fragment:  I’m in the design studio at CSU.  Three years of class work is being persued by the faculty, set designs, costume designs, and a massive pile of papers.  “So, what do you want to do for you senior project?”  “I want to write a thesis.”  Pause.  “I don’t think anyone’s ever done that here.”

I graduated early (thought I graduated anyway, another story I may or may not re-live here) and there I was with a BA in performing arts.

Whoop-dee-friggin-do.  As any theatre BA graduate will tell you, this particular degree does not buy much in the real world.  Let me re-frame that statement.  A BA in performing arts from CSU doesn’t buy you much.  However, as with any degree, it’s what you make of it.  Initially I didn’t make much of it.  I thought at the time I wanted to be an actor.  I worked in town in community theatre and dinner theatre shows and worked full-time (as actors do) during the day at a daycare and the mall.  I toyed with the idea of grad school. 

Fragment:  I’m standing on a slope next to I think a bell tower at UC Berkeley.  To my right is the library.  Stretched out in front of me is San Francisco bay at sunset.  I want to be here. 

I always sent for the applications, filled them out halfway and never sent them.  A few years passed, three I think.  I did plays in town.  I fell in love with my husband.  Before we got married I told him I wanted to go to grad school and that it probably meant leaving Colorado.  He was cool with that.  He got a job that was easily transferrable.  We got married and I applied for schools in the fall. 

Fragment:  I’m sitting in the library at CSU on Valentine’s Day.  An e-mail pops up from a professor at Florida State.  “Call me so we can chat about the program, it says.”  I have to leave the library to shout out loud.

My master’s program at FSU was amazing.  After one semester I knew I wanted to get my PhD. 

Fragment:  I’m at Smoky Bones having beer and watching the first night of Monday Night Football.  I’m a few beers in.  The sideline reporter, Lisa Guererro comes on wearing a light purple chiffon dress and heels to interview players on the sideline.  Jesus!  What the hell is wrong here?  She looks ridiculous, like eye-candy.  I rant about it.

 I write a paper about women in sports, particularly focused on football.  I present it at my first conference.  It turns into my thesis on women’s performance in sports.  I apply for the FSU PhD program.  At my faculty’s urging I also apply to UT Austin and UMN. 

Fragment:  I leave Sonja’s office.  I walk outside.  It’s mid-March and fairly freezing.  I have to go somewhere to cry.  I walk behind what I now know is the music building, look across the river and sob.  How can they not want me?  Why did they let me come here?  Maybe this is fate.  We’re not supposed to be here.  I call Scott and tell him about my meeting.  He tells me to turn around and tell them I want the spot and whatever I need to do to get it, I’ll do it.

I write Sonja an e-mail.  I want a position in your program, is in essence what the e-mail says.  Three agonizing weeks pass.  I finally get my acceptance letter from UMN.  The PhD program at FSU folds.

Here I am, though.  Two years in and still going.

This blog has a specific purpose.  I’m getting ready to begin work, allbeit preliminary work, on my dissertation.  I’m also reading a book called How to Write Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day.  In it she says that writing has to become a way of thinking for you.  You have to do it everyday; a lesson my advisor from FSU also told me.  So, this blog will contain my daily dose of writing.  I’m not sure how interesting it will be for other to read.  It will chronicle….well, definitely my dissertation process.  Who knows what else.  “It’s a mystery really.”