I wandered

"I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD"

 
          I WANDERED lonely as a cloud
          That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
          When all at once I saw a crowd,
          A host, of golden daffodils;
          Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
          Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
 
          Continuous as the stars that shine
          And twinkle on the milky way,
          They stretched in never-ending line
          Along the margin of a bay:                                  10
          Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
          Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
 
          The waves beside them danced; but they
          Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
          A poet could not but be gay,
          In such a jocund company:
          I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
          What wealth the show to me had brought:
 
          For oft, when on my couch I lie
          In vacant or in pensive mood,                               20
          They flash upon that inward eye
          Which is the bliss of solitude;
          And then my heart with pleasure fills,
          And dances with the daffodils.
                                William Wordsworth, 1804; code from Bartleby.com

Article to Memorize (Excerpts)

...In year one and every year thereafter, read the job ads in your field, and track the predominant and emerging emphases of the listed jobs. Ask yourself how you can incorporate those into your own project, directly or indirectly. You don't have to slavishly follow trends, but you have to be familiar with them and be prepared to relate your own work to them in some way.

Have a beautifully organized and professional CV starting in your first year and in every subsequent year. When I was a young assistant professor, a senior colleague told me that her philosophy was to add one line a month to her CV. Set that same goal for yourself. As a junior graduate student, you may or may not be able to maintain that pace, but keep it in the back of your mind, and keep your eye out for opportunities that add lines to your CV at a brisk pace.

Plan out a publishing trajectory to ensure that you have at least one sole-authored refereed journal article before you defend your dissertation.

Attend national conferences annually.

Applying for a wide range of grants is one of the best intellectual exercises in which you can engage.

Avoid like the plague offers of publication in edited collections, which is where good publications go to die. If you have a piece of work that can pass muster as a publication, make sure that it goes into a refereed journal, the best one you can reasonably manage.

Cultivate a letter writer who is not from your Ph.D.-granting institution.

Most people who prevail on the market need at least two years to do so.

Devote as much time as it takes to writing out brief—and I do mean brief—summaries of your dissertation research, teaching techniques and philosophy, and your future publication plans. Practice delivering those brief summaries until they become second nature.

Make your application materials absolutely flawless. Take your ego out of the process and ask everyone you know to ruthlessly critique your CV, letter, teaching statement, and research statement. Prioritize the advice you receive from young faculty members who have recently been on the market, and from senior professors who have recently chaired a search committee.

--Karen Kelsky, "Graduate School Is a Means to a Job" My favorite comment:

Isn't this just reinforcing the much criticized claim that "there are good jobs out there for good people"? While much of this advice is very useful, I bristle at it slightly because it seems to suggest that job seekers aren't getting jobs because they haven't figured out how to mold themselves into what the market supposedly wants--not because of major structural problems in the market itself. I have a hard time believing that there is some secret formula that ensures success in academia. I know people who got jobs after doing nearly everything this article recommends, but I also know others who did everything "right" and still came up empty handed. On the other hand, I certainly did not do everything Dr. Kelsky suggests to prepare for my own job search but was nevertheless one of the extraordinarily lucky few to get a tt job my first year on the market.

Mad Men Seasons 1-2

Season one, final episode: best scene with sentimentality in recent TV; highlights to season 2.

The Last Emperor

Triad 三合会

One of the wealthiest magnates ensnared in the purges was Li Jun, a Chongqing real estate mogul. Like hundreds of other private business executives, he said during 16 hours of interviews this month, he became a target of police, government and military officials who framed him as a “black society” boss.

He eventually lost control of his $711 million conglomerate and fled the country, branded a fugitive. Before his escape, he said, he endured three months of beatings, torture and relentless pressure to implicate others in nonexistent crimes.

He said his tormentors sought to confiscate his assets and extract a confession that could help frame rivals of Mr. Bo’s powerful ally in the military, Gen. Zhang Haiyang, now the political commissar of China’s nuclear forces.

Li Jun buttressed his account with photos taken at a secret detention facility and with binders of legal documents signed by military and police officials. A scholar of Chinese politics at Columbia University, Andrew Nathan, authenticated five documents supporting his claims of innocence.

Li Jun’s troubles began within a year after Mr. Bo’s appointment. A subsidiary of his company won a $50 million public bid for a hilly tract of land outside Chongqing. The seller was one of China’s five regional military commands, he said, led at the time by General Zhang.

In December 2009, under orders signed by the police chief, Mr. Wang, Li Jun was detained on suspicion of more than a dozen crimes, including organizing prostitution, usury, contract fraud, bid-rigging and bribery. He was bound to a “tiger bench,” a medieval-style iron seat with a straight back and a grooved bottom, and was kicked, pummeled and berated for 40 straight hours. At that point, he said, “I just wanted to die.”

A top military interrogator presented Li Jun with a list of more than 20 military officers, apparently rivals of Mr. Bo’s ally General Zhang, and accused him of bribing 2 of them to win the bid on the tract of land. “Don’t you see?” he said his interrogator finally told him. “Bo Xilai and Political Commissar Zhang are friends who grew up together. You are being framed. ”

Li Jun said he refused to confess. Finally, in March 2010, he was released and cleared of wrongdoing after paying the military command a $6.1 million fine. But after a police prostitution sting against a club he owned that October, he received a tip that he would be rearrested, and fled the country.

Thirty-one relatives and colleagues have since been jailed. His wife served a one-year sentence for aiding his flight. His elder brother was sentenced to 18 years in prison, his nephew 13 years. He had transferred ownership of his company to them in an attempt to shield it.

“It’s just like some new kind of Cultural Revolution,” he said. “Chongqing strikes down the landlords, redistributes the land and slaps a bad name on your head, ‘triad,’ from which you can never be freed.”

-"Crime Crackdown Adds to Scandal Surrounding Former Chinese Official," by SHARON LaFRANIERE and JONATHAN ANSFIELD, The New York Times

Fielding's Classicism

Fielding's attempt to cater to three audiences indicates that he anticipated more than a single response to his fiction. Readers who shared his knowledge of the classics would probably recognize the misuse of classical references as one signature of a given character and could identify with the narrator of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, or Amelia, appreciating the way he skillfully exploits allusions to ancient literature. Readers with only a smattering of Latin might initially identify with characters who rely heavily on Latin tags because that level of learning would most closely match their own, but they would be entrapped, because Fielding often links faulty learning and dubious morals. Fielding's least educated audience, who could be annoyed at untranslated quotations or would simply skip the classical references altogether, might misread characters who misuse classics -- as have some modern critics. Such readers might be blinded to characters' positive attributes by their hostile reaction to classical allusions and quotations; without other clues to personality, such an audience would probably rely more heavily on the narrator for guidance, thereby reinforcing his authority.

***

One cannot deny that Fielding reacted to the works of Defoe and Richardson -- and to those of a host of other eighteenth-century writers -- and that he drew on genres such as romance and spiritual autobiography, which also influenced others. As Watt has demonstrated, however, Defoe and Richardson entirely rejected the relevance of classical tradition because of its supposed immorality. Unlike them, Fielding drewon the classics in developing his conception of the novel as a form and used classical authority extensively in his criticism and his discussions of morality. When he openly acknowledges his debt to ancient literature, he self-consciously distances himself from Defoe and Richardson and associates himself with others who drew from the classical tradition. By identifying his fiction with classical forms, Fielding calls attention to the differences between his "literary" novels and those of his contemporaries, and he establishes a legitimate genealogy based on another tradition.

-Nancy Mace, Henry Fielding's Novels and the Classical Tradition (1996)

Glance at Muir, The Structure of the Novel

The dramatic figure is the opposite of the man of habit; he is the permanent exception. He breaks habit, or has it broken for him; he discovers the truth about himself, or in other words develops. He dramatises his real nature, where the flat character dramatises his second nature, or at best something in him which has been real but is so no longer. The utterance of the dramatic figure is therefore actually true, the utterance of the character symptomatic or symbolical.

A few instances will make clearer what is really a very obvious point. Here is the first:

MICHAEL HENCHARD’S WILL “That Elizabeth-Jane […] be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me.
“& that I be not bury’d in consecrated ground.
“& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
“& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
“& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
“& that no flours be planted on my grave,
“& that no man remember me.
“To this I put my name.
“MICHAEL HENCHARD

Here are the others:

'And eggs,' said Mr Pecksniff, 'even they have their moral. See how they come and go! Every pleasure is transitory. We can't even eat, long. If we indulge in harmless fluids, we get the dropsy; if in exciting liquids, we get drunk. What a soothing reflection is that!'

As I must therefore conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall chuse to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females.

Cape Breton an island ! wonderful ! — show it me in the map. So it is, sure enough. My dear sir, you always bring us good news. I must go and tell the King that Cape Breton is an island.

The last quotation is from history, the others are from fiction. The difference between the first and the rest is, in any case, striking enough. Michael Henchard speaks from the heart, the others speak from their habitual selves; and the reader is quite well aware of it.

-Edwin Muir, The Structure of the Novel, 1928