Spring semester: day forty-nine
I went into the department chair's office yesterday morning.
"Two quick questions," I said. "The first: how psychotically should I be studying for comps?"
"Who's your director?" he asked. I told him, and he winced.
"Don't do that!" I said.
"Well, that's really the bar you have to reach then, isn't it?"
"Yeah," I replied. "And I've taken [director's] exams before. They're not pleasant."
They're not. His midterm exam for my surrealism class last fall was one of the most brutal exams I've ever taken -- it was a take-home exam, and I
still got a B+ on it. Which, I'll add, is the lowest score I've had on an essay-based exam in ten years.
"You'll do fine," the chair said. "As long as you know the concepts and subject matter of the folks on your reading list, you should be okay. The only problem would be is if you get in there and you get a set of questions on which you really don't have a whole lot to say about said texts. At that point, well..."
"...apply the liberal paintbrush of bullshit?" I mused.
"I mean, it really does come down to the questions you're given. Usually the authors on your list will be separated into themes and/or styles, subject matter, etc."
"Right," I said. "[Director] told me there would more than likely be a question on the modernists, on the confessional poets, the surrealists -- stuff along those lines, really. I can predict with what I hope is somewhat reasonable accuracy the types of questions he'll ask, but until I see the actual exam and take it, that may be all for naught."
"Luck definitely factors into it to an extent," the chair said.
I will remind you folks that I've never been an exceptionally lucky person.
"The other question I had," I said, continuing, "was how fast we get the results back after we take the comps."
"Not very long; they try not to make you wait more than a few days at most," he replied.
"They?" I asked. "Is it just [director] grading them, or are all of you involved?"
I ask these questions because as grad students,
we are told next to nothing about the comps process -- just like most other goings-on in the department, we're left in the dark on most things unless we specifically ask about them.
"[Director] and [really famous poet second reader] grade them. In the case of some sort of 'tiebreaker' scenario, I'm brought in to make the decision -- but that really doesn't happen too often. It's usually just the first and second readers."
I am glad, at least, in that sort of scenario I'd have the chair to help make that decision. As well as the help of my famous, well-read, professor-advocate-for-students second reader.
I turned to leave, but forgot to mention something. "Oh, one last thing. I wanted to see how accurate this figure was -- [now-retired professor] once told me, when I asked, that over the course of the past ten years or so, only one or two people have failed the comps. Is that true?"
He thought about it for a moment. "Yeah, that's pretty accurate. It almost never happens. If you do poorly on a question, your directors can ask you to 'redo' it."
"How does that work?"
"You set up a time with them when you're available and you redo it, basically."
I said my thanks and exited. The conversation didn't exactly make me any less nervous, but it did (to a certain extent) make me feel a bit more steely and reserved on what's to come, and I now know that I have at least two safety nets of sorts -- the director as tiebreaker and the redo if necessary.
I take my comps a week from today -- by this time next Friday, I will be done with them. I still feel sorely underprepared. My director liked the choices of poems I gave him for the exam, and requested another copy of my reading list with the individual volumes of works on it (it's probably the fifth overall copy I've given him at this point since the beginning of last month). I'm guessing he's going to be writing the questions over the course of the next few days.
It's come to the time where I really can't push my nerves and worries out of the way anymore and preoccupy myself with something else -- I have to attack those demons head-on this weekend. While everyone else is out enjoying the weather and celebrating Easter and the like, I will be locked away in my dungeon-o'-study, immersing myself in books, notes, and caffeine/nicotine even more than I did over spring break. There is a pall of silence about comps which has fallen over the department -- of all of us third-years who are taking them next week, which is about ten or twelve of us, I seem to be the only one who is outwardly, crazily nervous and worried, or the only one who is asking questions and trying to get more information on what everything entails. Everyone else seems fairly calm about them, or conversely, they have a "eh, I'm not too concerned about them" sort of attitude. I don't get it. For my reputation and demeanor as a "laid-back kind of guy," I become deathly serious when something really important, such as comps, is in the balance. I have always worked, to repeat and/or appropriate the phrase,
psychotically hard on my studies and assignments -- I've always been the one who locks himself in his room for twelve to sixteen hours at a time to write a paper from start to finish with no breaks, to do so two weeks before it's due, and have the final version be several pages longer and more detailed than necessary in order to get the "A" on it. I've always been that guy -- it's why I had a 4.0 in undergrad when I was taking four lit classes and two seminar classes at once, and why I still have a 3.96 (or something close to that; damn those two A-minuses I have on my transcript) in grad school. I work my ass off when it comes to school and what I do in and with my education -- it's about the only thing I have in my life that lets me say "hey, look, I'm smart -- this makes me a worthwhile human being." Because, really, otherwise I can't point out anything else that does -- if given the choice, I'd sleep until 6PM every day, get up and play Xbox and computer games, smoke a pack of cigarettes, and go back to bed at 5AM. For the rest of my life. That's not a joke; unless I'm motivated by my desire to prove to other people that I'm as good as or better than they are, I have no motivation to do
anything in life. If I suddenly became independently wealthy, nobody would ever hear from me again, because this is what I'd do with my life. This is also why I hate the fact that I'm going to have to actually find some sort of
real job in the
real world after graduation. I am a very, very inherently lazy person who, for the most part, is bored with his existence on this planet and, overall, hates life.
Wow, that went to a dark place really fast, didn't it?
I would absolutely define myself as a
slacker, though ninety percent of the people on this planet who know me would call me anything but. That's because I go to great lengths to impress people in positions of power over me, or people whose opinions I respect. I do care more about what people think of me than I let on, but only those people important to me or those people who hold some sort of sway in what I do or can do in my life and position in my job. And the scary thing is, with comps...
I'm just not feelin' it. Even though it's the most important thing I have to take care of when it comes to my education and job in the past three years, it takes
great pains, great strides, to motivate me to study and read all of this material and retain it because I just don't care about it. That may be really shocking to hear from me, and it may also be scary, but I don't. I just don't care about what people like Wordsworth or Whitman wrote. I could give less than a fuck about Philip Levine or Anne Carson. It's horrible to say, but they don't have any sort of influence on me as a person or as a writer, and being forced to read/study all of these different works is further killing my love of reading and of poetry in general. More than that, when I thought it would be somewhat inspirational to read poetry of many different authors, genres, and styles, it's doing the exact opposite -- it's frustrating me to no end. I've read so many poems that would have been torn apart in an
undergraduate workshop, let alone a graduate one -- poems that are nothing more than masturbation on a page, poems that make no sense whatsoever, poems that
say nothing and do nothing. And yet, they're published. Yet, the authors of them are famous. Yet, the authors of them make a living from putting out a new collection every few years. I think some of the more contemporary people are clearly
faking it, and by that I mean they throw some words on a page and have yes-men say it's brilliant, and have publishers throw money at them when, secretly, they have no true talent and nothing meaningful to say.
There are few people on my reading list who, after reading through their works, actually
inspired me to write more. Emily Dickinson is one of them. So is Sharon Olds. Ben Lerner. Anne Sexton. Michael McGriff. Frank O'Hara. Even, to some extent, William Carlos Williams. These are talented people who have/had meaningful things to say, meaningful observations, in their poems. But even with that said, I can't keep myself motivated; I can't keep myself
wanting to study these readings or all of the notes I've taken. It's not about being burned-out, really, but about the concept in general more than anything else -- I am wholeheartedly opposed to even the
concept of comprehensive exams, as you are probably well aware. I think it's fucking stupid; they shouldn't exist. As undergrads, we were basically lied to about what graduate school would entail -- we were told that it would be a time that we were to focus on our writing and our own works first and foremost, that we'd study craft and form, and would have lots of downtime to spend working on our own creations. Instead, it was two and a half years of nothing but lit classes, criticism classes, and pedagogy-oriented classes, with a measly
four workshops
over three years -- meeting once a week -- thrown into the mix (almost seeming like an afterthought). In a more open program where we take more workshops and craft classes, I could see the purpose of comps. Really, I could. In a program that's basically a lit program with the creative writing classes tacked onto it, comps are meaningless -- we've already read all of this literature and studied it not only in undergrad, but in the graduate classes as well. We've written long, detailed papers on it. We've gotten A's in those classes, otherwise we wouldn't be in graduate school. And now, at the end, for comprehensive exams they're basically saying "read it all again so you can be tested on it"? It's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. We've already been tested on it and have passed those tests from all of the classes in undergrad and grad that we've taken and passed.
There are some of you who are probably thinking
well, it should be easy for you then, like a review, and it shouldn't be any problem to prove what you know. The point I'm trying to make is that it's meaningless; we've already proven what we know or otherwise we wouldn't have gotten this far. For the vast majority of us, what we study for comps has no bearing whatsoever on our actual writing, on our future career paths, or even on our ability as instructors/GTAs. Nobody is going to get "smarter" or will derive any sort of useful skills from studying for comps and taking them -- it's more of the same bullshit we've had to deal with for however many years we've been in school.
Prove to us you're smart, even though we already know you are. Dance, monkey. Dance. As a simple look at our transcripts will prove that we're intelligent people, comps are meaningless and useful to precisely
no one, not even the university as a whole, and it is my firm belief that they're still given "because that's the way they've always done things."
There's also my gripe about timed tests, as well -- it's the same as when I give my undergrads their final exams in English 101 and 102. Some people, even if they're horrible writers, do exceptionally well in timed-test environments. Some people, despite the fact that they're brilliant writers, fail miserably in timed environments because they just don't think that way -- it's not how their brains are wired. They need time to draft, to plot, to edit, and to craft. I myself tend to fall somewhere in the middle. Sometimes I can knock out a timed test with no problems whatsoever if I have a stroke of brilliance, and sometimes I will have a brain fart and sit there having no clue what to say or how to start while the clock ticks away. It's not an accurate representation of how intelligent an individual is on a given subject. You know what is?
Looking back through someone's transcript or grades and seeing ALL A's. That is why I'm so opposed to comps, that's why I'm so opposed to the concept of them, and that's why I'm so unmotivated and have to physically
force myself to read and study for them -- there's nothing in it, personally, for me, my writing, or my future. It's not going to benefit me any. It's an outdated exercise executed by the university of use to precisely no one. Everybody thinks and writes individually; our grades themselves should be more than enough proof that we're worthy of that very expensive piece of paper called a diploma, and that should be the end of it. Period. Game over, you get your degree. Good job. If I wanted to get my degree by studying 5,000 pages of literature, I would've gone to a school which offered a PHD. I didn't. I wanted to get a degree on the strengths of my own writing, not studying the writings of
dead white men who, while they may be central to the study of literature as a whole, mean precisely
dick to me and my own writing.
So yes, we were basically lied to about grad school, and once we were in it, if we wanted that oh-so-precious degree, we were trapped there. Not all of us stuck around; some of us left when they realized graduate school wasn't what we were told it would be. Offhand, I can count seven people who have left the program over the past three years, and I'm probably missing one or two, if not more, who I didn't know personally. If I had a good job waiting for me and I didn't have student loans to worry about, I probably would've left too. I have stuck around because I want my degree, because even though I have my mostly minor gripes about it as a whole, I've gotten great teaching and educational experience during my tenure there, and
have been able to devote useful, meaningful time to my writing.
With all of this being said, I do still have to force myself to study for the next three days, and even more next week (when I can) as the exam gets closer and closer. It's not a pleasurable experience, and I get very, very little out of it. I'd be better off just taking the exam today and redoing any question that I was iffy on than to try to cram my head full of notes and the like
again over the course of the next six days. It's my mentality of
oh my god all of this is so fucking meaningless and I'm getting nothing from it that drives me insane. My stress levels are through the roof; I can barely sleep, I'm frustrated and cranky about everything and everyone, and everyone around me seems cool and calm, or is telling me not to worry or stress too much about it. How about
you try not to worry or stress too much about something that keeps
your graduation, and therefore the rest of your foreseeable future, in the balance, especially when it's something so absolutely meaningless in respects to
everything else you've done over the course of the past three years? I'm so internally stressed and worried that I'm going to fail the comps miserably that I'm having nightmares, that said stress and anger is spilling over into
everything else in my life. Seeing friends and colleagues who are like "oh, yeah, I've been reading and studying some; it won't be that bad, why are you so worried?" make me want to scream. You'd think that I'd be able to channel that stress into my work, into my studies, to help propel me through them -- in the past, I've been able to do so -- but this time around? I can't. I just want to be
done. Studying for comps goes against everything I've done over the course of my graduate school career; it's in complete opposition to everything that has come before them.
Some of you are probably like
so what? Just shut up and study for them, and do your job. And in most cases I would agree with that mentality for most tasks. Shut up and do it if you want to graduate. I only wish I could make my brain and my psyche see that point of view. I wish I could flip a switch and turn off my frustrations and stress. I wish I could be studying something I enjoy, as I'd have so much more enthusiasm about studying it, and would take delight in the exam's ability to let me strut my proverbial stuff next week. I'm not that kind of person, however. I've been the kind of person my entire life who puts his head down and plows through classes because, in order to get a decent grade, that's what I have to do. I don't
enjoy any of it, but in small doses I at least have the time and patience to get through it and understand it, and more importantly,
I know what I'm going to be tested on. With comps it's completely different. I don't know what I'm going to be tested on. I have
some idea, yes, but a good chunk of my reading list I am wholly uninterested in (or, conversely, it is wholly incomprehensible to me), and it is a very, very wide selection of works. I can cram into my skull a limited amount and categorize it, such as for a single class's worth of reading, but with comps it's just
so much that everything runs together, that even after a while my notes don't help and I become lost. I have that "brain fart" fear, the fear that I'll be calm and collected when I go in there to sit down and take the exam, and then when I actually try to answer a question, all of my knowledge will go right out the window and I'll blank on it. No amount of study or preparation is going to protect me from a question on which I'd have little to nothing to say, either. There are
some topics I can write on at length now, yes, but there are some where I'd be like "Yeah, so there are similar themes running through the works of Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost. So what? Most of their poems all sounded like they were writing about the same stuff over and over and rearranging their lines and sentences. Frost likes God and nature. Whitman likes man and our role in nature. Williams likes nature too, and really likes to talk about the snow, water, and spring in his poems. Again, so what?" Ask me something about Auden, Keats, or Wordsworth, and I'll be totally fucking lost. "They like writing about mythical things. Their poetry was good and well-respected in its time, but nobody reads them anymore, and for the most part most poets today have no real true use for their works, as their themes mostly no longer apply to contemporary writing." I mean, what the hell am I supposed to say other than that? I can't force myself to care, nor can I force myself to understand something that I just don't comprehend because said authors make hundreds of references to mythical or historical works that aren't part of their writing or my reading list. When it comes to comps, one has to be a formalist -- study and dissect the text at hand, and nothing else.
Then again, there are many questions I could answer like a badass right now. How do Whitman and Ginsberg relate to one another when it comes to concepts like the existence of man and the illusion/failure of the American dream? Bam. Done. How does Breton's concept of surrealism influence writers like Ginsberg, Philip Levine, and Dean Young? Bam. How do Dickinson, Anne Sexton, and Robert Frost write about death in different ways? Bam. Stuff like that, I can do. Stuff like that, I can write pages on, and form outlines in my head on how to answer them. But I somehow doubt my questions will be that simple. If they are, fine. But they won't be. And it's the uncertainty of that, including the uncertainty of the possibility that I'll be asked questions that I really
don't know how to answer or have anything to say on, that keeps me so stressed that I'm sure I'll have more than a few gray hairs in my graduation photos in May. Provided, of course,
that I graduate.
Regardless, I'm not going to be writing here a lot, if at all, over the course of the next week or more, as I once more bury myself in books. I need to review everything I have, I need to read through the Crane book (which actually arrived in the mail this week,
finally) and I need to brush up on several authors as well as look through the criticism books I own in case my director pulls a concept or two from them to work into a question here or there. Despite my frantic mind, I am confident that I can and will do well on my comps, even if I'm buried in a mountain of stress and what-ifs and desperately want to scream. I have safety nets, I have the four poems I gave my director (which he'll use 1-2 of on my exam), and I know that to a certain extent, my brain is in panic mode and is overreacting to everything, envisioning every worst-case scenario under the sun. I'm hoping that over the next week I can override that with a zen-like calm, a confidence that tells me I can do anything once I get into that testing center, even if that means I have to apply the aforementioned liberal paintbrush of bullshit to a question. If there's anything I've learned over the years, it's that my capacity to spew smart-sounding bullshit has only gotten better as time goes by.
This is not all that's going on in my life, mind you; it's just that it's what's at the forefront of everything else. Daisy's sister is in labor right now with her second child, and will deliver said child tonight (I'm guessing, anyway). Said sister's husband is also an ordained minister, and has offered his services to marry us free of charge, with any sort of ceremony and/or language we wish him to use -- meaning that he'll say whatever we want, it doesn't have to be religious at all, etc. This is good. I told Daisy to tell him yes, we'd take him up on that offer. It's very nice of him. Little parts of the wedding plans are slowly coming together, though as much as I want to, I cannot focus on it before the comps are done and over with. With Daisy's work schedule and my need to study psychotically (as well as take care of everything else I have to do around the house and for my students), we've barely had time to talk over the past few days. I told her that tonight I will be studying until I pass out -- whether that be 1AM, 3AM, or later -- and that the same process will basically be repeated on Sunday and Monday as well:
My plans for the
rest of the night are to study psychotically until I pass out, whenever
that may be. Could be 1AM, could be 3AM, who knows. I don't have much of
a choice. I have to keep everything I can as fresh in my head as is
possible.
And then once more continue that tomorrow. And Monday.
Translation: you won't talk to me much until Tuesday.
Translation: when I come home Tuesday I will be doing the same thing, and then passing out again.
Translation: Wednesday? More of the same.
Thursday
and Friday: probably no contact at all aside from a stray FB message or
two, as I'll be going to bed almost as soon as I get home on Thursday
and Friday is my exam.
This is my life. I hate it.
I don't know how else to say it than that. This is a dark week, a dark time, a very grueling time. I feel like a fighter pilot in a dogfight, screaming and firing all guns, until Friday night -- when said pilot finally gets shot, his plane explodes mid-air and kills him instantly, and there is
nothing. On the plus side, I'll probably lose weight this week from the sheer amount of caffeine and nicotine I'll consume with little actual food entering my system.
Food? Pshaw. That doesn't fuel my studies as well as coffee and Red Bull.
Yes, I will be purchasing Red Bull.
Daisy told me that I may hate it now, but this is only my life for a relatively short amount of time.
"Unless I fail my comps," I replied.
"Brandon, I love you and I don't think I'm being unrealistic optimistic when I say that you are going to do fine," she said. "But,
you know what, if you fail them, you fail them, and you'll take them
again, and eventually pass, and that too will be a relatively short
amount of time."
If there's one thing that woman can do better than almost any other, it's to put things into their proper perspective.
