Chitty Chatty Bang Bang

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This is a thing they “do“

I started off this blog to get rid of the unnameable lousiness arisen during thesis writing and now have to continue it because of my work... as much lousy as my thesis (I won’t say that my work is as lame as my thesis because at least I earn my life from it. Yes, so much about the idealism of humanistic education and still beaten by the materialistic condition).

The topic is “doing,“ with which I have been obsessed since my first draft on the master thesis was sent to my supervisor. No, it was in the end NOT about my thesis, but the reading I did in parallel to it-- Hannah Arendt, with whom I immediately fell in love so much that I almost wanted to name my future daughter Hannah regardless if it is a German name and it is the same when you spell it from left to right or right to left...

Let us finally back to the topic: Doing. Ever since I started to work, I often got asked “what are you doing?“ as a opening line to any random talk. Be it friends that I haven’t seen for a long time, new acquaintances or old relatives... They are all interested in what I am doing but not referring to any specific moment or what I really would like to achieve with my limited lifespan but what my job is.

I understand that this is a topic of utter importance and that even though I intend to make it funny I seem to fail with this post. But to this kind of questions, I always answer with deadly seriousness that “I am talking with you“ as I want to remind them that this is not about how I am symbolized through my social status (if there is any) but about our talk, about you and me, right here and now.

I think it is the greatest kindness and tribute I can play to my conversation partners, but unfortunately people do not seem to understand it. My mother, for example, keeps scolding me that I am neither respectful nor mature enough to finally have this discussion.

Well, it’s no big deal. Let’s say this is a thing I do and will keep doing anyhow until I am tired of it. Yes, this is how we do.

[bookmania]

Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.

D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (via bookmania)

I use this sentence to sum up my four-month adventure until now. It is funny to see how one can change one’s course of lie (or rather, the focus of one’s life) so easily. A few moments ago I was still living in the student dormitory (as I intend not to do now), and now I am sometimes in Germany  and am able to perhaps enjoy my weekend in Barcelona or Paris.

Remember one word: perhaps.

Before I was able to finally come to Germany (and even now, I wouldn’t call my work as “stabilized,“ but I guess that’s the way I like it). I spent a couple of weeks in China, where I experienced the worst diarrhea in my life. Honestly, it was quite regular and speaking from the positive side, it could spare me some working time and you know, kind of provided me the chance to enjoy some private reading time in the (not so) quiet and (not so) clean restroom. Nevertheless, it was to my surprise to learn that my body accepted the food conditions there after 3 weeks; I even got to enjoy the food (to a limited amount though) there.

So that’s about how my stomach chopped itself to fit the world. I guess even though D.H. Lawrence meant well, this is still easily said (or written) than done.

The nice thing about it is: You don’t have to chop your stomach anymore once you have it chopped. In other words, now I can be confident to say that it is ready for all kinds of food, spicy or not, buggy or not... Yes, for bugs I even reserved a certain space (remember back then my stomach was constantly emptied out). I could claim now I have done what was on my checklist for China: eating bugs, even though it was not even from the top priority...

[ccbbang-blog]

Say YES to Yourself

And say NO to thesis.

Recently I have been busy with my chapters so I forgot to update news in my tumblr (however, I did remember to post something on my facebook-- who DARES to forget facebook these days?).

So these weeks of thesis writing I developed a habit of not sleeping at night, aka insomnia. Of course when I am really tired, say after meeting two strangers in a day for interviews (I am really an introverted person), I can sleep just like a baby. But for days like yesterday, when I went to bed early and found out that I could not even fall asleep with the thought of Adorno, I was totally desperate. 

Finally when my consciousness was fuzzy at around 5 A.M., someone knocked the door. I jumped up because I wasn’t really properly dressed. It was not my door. And from the loud conversation I could tell that they were police. The girl from the next door had a fight with her boyfriend and he called the police to look after her in case-- in case of what I would not imagine.

Even though, you know, I understand that she really deserves somebody who takes care of her, I would suggest that she breaks up with him immediately because, in all of these, he interrupted the sleep of those who live in the same dorm with her. Such an inconsiderate person-- not to mention that he let her so down that she might do something bad to herself-- one should not be in a relationship with.

On the other hand, it might do him good if he breaks up with her. As a girl who did not even apologize for the inconvenience she induced to her dormmates-- and this shall definitely be the main reason-- and who makes people think she might do harm to herself if she is down, she would not be a good partner unless you want to have a dramatic, highly roller-coaster-like relationship.

But speaking about other people’s affair is always easier than to talk about one’s own, especially when I turn on my laptop and only see a few names of OLD guys who wink at me with an evil smile. 

One of my examiner for my oral defense announced that she is going to be really bad (and only ask what I am not prepared of) in my defense. I guess that is because she is originally from Germany although she has been living in my country for about 20 years. To this she answered: “No, I just pretend to be German, you know.“ I don’t even know which of her statement I should really take to heart.

In the end I try to convince myself that everything will go on as well as it could, at the same time as badly as it could. It is not in my control-- aside from that I am going to finish my thesis in time, DEFINITELY with this stupid smile:

(that was a cake I made :) )

And I am going to sing this song to Mr. Mean Comments and all my thesis people:

[ccbbang-blog]

April is the Cruelest Month

The cruelty started already on the first day of April--

On that day, I read two posts from two of my facebook friends talking about their traumatic experiences with their thesis advisers. They were saying, when you eliminate all the annoying and varying details, pretty much the same thing which I also have along the way of my thesis writing: conflicts with the supervisors, crises of starting all over again, difficulties of meeting deadlines to hand in the first, second and so on until the final draft and becoming a complete failure in this program. I totally bought those stories because they had in general a great potential to be true, at least in my case. One needs to convince oneself all the time and hold on to it. It is not very easy as many would think. So I sent out PMs to express my care for them and offered my help.

As it turned out, those two posts were only jokes on the Fool’s Day. All my caring actions became solid proofs that I was a fool. Never mind, that I chose a topic relative to German literature and culture in an quasi English and American focused institute is already foolish enough.

So I am having my qualifying exam next Tuesday, after a long story of worries and negotiation. Due to the suggestion of Mr. Mean Comments, I attended one of the qualifying exams that took place last week, in order to get a sense of what and how it should be. Mr. Mean Comments was one of the examiner, and Mr. Nice Hypocrite was the other (I am calling him Mr. Nice Hypo hereafter). In my imagination-- please also heed that it is only in my imagination-- exams as such are a bloody brutal battlefield, where the examiners shoot out hidden weapons and the examined must fight back with words and maintain the harmony in the war-room. 

Nevertheless, it was not so in the one that I attended. Mr. Mean Comments, as he always is, has shoot out some arrows, directing at some logical fallacies, while Mr. Nice Hypocrite took over the right to respond from beside and turned the attack from Mr. Mean Comments into nothing. Mr. Nice Hypo, when it was his turn to question the student, asked questions such as

“Do you understand French? Can you read XXX in French“

“Have you ever thought about doing field studies in India?“

“What kind of classes you have taken does enable you to do this project?“

“How do you justify your project in a literary institute instead of in the graduate program of history?“

“Do you think you can finish this project before July?“

I am not saying that these questions are not important, but I could see Mr. Mean Comments rolling his eyes, literally. And that made me wonder if I was not the only one who really bullied his eyes with my words (and he mine with his comments in return). I jotted some random thoughts in my notebook on the upcoming qualifying exams, and they look like:

1. Refreshments- maybe some cake from Oma (a bakery nearby)

2. Title, symbol...

3. Figure 8?

Yes, some of you who know my thesis title know what figure 8 means. In the first meeting with my thesis supervisor after a long time, his first question to me was "how do you get this symbol in word???" But what I really thought of was this song: 

Yeah, Figure 8, I need you more than I can take.

[forgottengenres]

Great writers aren’t great first-drafters. They’re great rewriters.

Andrew Bennett (via thatlitsite)

So from this point of view, I only see this quote to be, you know, overtly optimistic and ironic. If they are able to be great re-writers, of course they are also able to be great first-drafters. But I guess that here the verb tells you what matters: it is not whether you are CAPABLE OF, but whether you ARE. If you have a writing project, you must be ready for the revisions. That is what my thesis process tells me as well.

[ccbbang-blog]

How to Handle Conflicts

Or an alternative title: The ABC of thesis writing

My internship earlier this year was at a coaching and training company which customizes the process and focuses on several special areas, and one of them is change management. When I browsed through the workshop and training materials, I encountered a thing called iceberg theory: when one faces conflicts or changes, one only shows a little and if you have to deal with it, you have to discern all the messages from few signals, including anger, wish or disappointment so that you can go straight and do something about it. 

Anyone who reads novels or who listens to a friend talking about her own love affairs and tries to give some quality advice knows what to do in this kind of situation. A model does not help you understand more.

For example, this model, though I personally have seen it in German, English, translated it into Chinese, did not help me at all understand what Mr. Mean Comments was thinking when he asked me to write in any human language while I was obviously using English. I was trying, as many other students would do, to understand what the hidden message behind those piercing words was. I sometimes even took it, not without sarcasm, as a real life practice of Derrida’s theory of writing, of the death of the author (with this term of course I was playing with the pun and cursing him at the same time). 

I finally realized, during a facebook conversation with one of the fellow graduate students in my institute, that the best thing to survive-- or persist with your stance-- is not to see the whole thing as a conflict, but as a missed process of communication, or more radical-- a process of negotiation.

Use Mr. Mean Comments as an example.

I don’t need anymore to win over Mr. Mean Comments, either in terms of his favorite master thesis nor in terms of a good score to my master thesis. I want to finish my project and that’s it, period. I am not going to ignite a fire just because I can’t satisfy his endless pursuit of quality. I am going to let go of it and be clear about what I want and need. So that’s my ABC now:

1. State clear your goal

2. Hear from the other side

3. Decide together how to proceed

But Mr. Mean Comments is never so easy. He never responds to any of my questions or mails. The only thing he did was proofreading my drafts and giving destructive critiques. So I decide to add one more principle:

4. Don’t show emotional breakouts.......

For the last one, I was thinking if I should send him an email, confronting him and telling him that he shouldn’t bully me anymore with his words or I WON’T LET YOU BULLY ME WITH YOUR WORDS ANYMORE all in big letters. I had one particular vivid dream about it and in the dream, I did’t dare to log into my email account to see his response...

So there should be another principle: 

0. Take a deep breath and close your eyes when you do the following...

[ccbbang-blog]

Snow

I really like Orhan Pamuk. Last year when I was in Turkey during the summer, hanging around in all kinds of tourist places possible, I also remembered to visit the museum of innocence because the novel of the same title has so touched me that I couldn’t bear to think of the possibility of letting it go. You know how it is when you read a good novel: you feel the time passing and the scenery around you changing but your mind keeps focusing on words as if the fleeting moments of reading are a self-sufficient world, juicy and sweet.

Snow is nevertheless very different. 

I started to read it a few months before my trip to Turkey but then I gave up. Before giving up, I was in Antalya, a southern city with a beautiful view to the sea, searching for a second-hand bookstore. I was not sure what I was in search of-- maybe travelling around in a country where my language was not really useful brought me too much melancholia that I yearned unconsciously for an interesting conversation. Anyways I found the bookstore and he showed me, upon knowing that I also speak German, a lot of German books from the second world war as his proud collection. (Turkey was a place where I was forced to speak German all the time!!)

But then I started carefully with the topic of Pamuk, knowing that he was quite controversial in his own country. The bookstore owner, with his cat crawling on the floor, gave me a strange fruit, asked me to eat it while he commented on Pamuk. I thought he might start giving me a speech so I even sat down. The fruit (by the way it was purple) was very small and his talk was very short. Or to be more precise, he only said, “that’s nonsense!”

I did not know-- and I do not until today-- what I should react to it but I honestly don’t think Snow is to my taste really so good a book.

Aside from the cliches such as the West vs. the Turkish culture or where the civilization should go under the hegemony of western influences or what God means (regardless what kind of name God has...), there is one big problem for me. On the one hand, you can say Pamuk in the book reveals a poet/writer or a sentimental self who is weak and so bound for love that he does everything just to gain happiness. Yet on the other hand, he distances himself consciously from his protagonist and usurps especially at the end of his book this sentimentality. To me it feels like being cheated-- at the beginning I appreciated how he, as a writer, would be so honest to himself that he exposes his own weakness to the readers. But in the end, you get so confused by the overwhelming deaths and the town’s resistance to be understood. I feel betrayed when someone attempts to go deep but disappears at one certain point. No wonder this was considered as a negative depiction of Turkey.

I finished the book on a train in Harz, where the steam locomotives go daily through the serene villages in the mountains where you could still see snows lying around at this time of the year. Snow is to me always a privilege since in my country there is normally no such thing to be seen. I figure that snow is nothing that is purely beautiful; its essence is cold, its task to cover the world with a white surface without promising how long. 

I cannot forget the sour of the purple fruit as much as I cannot forget the admiration when I first saw the world covered in white and the fear when I played with it. And that is why this book was so disrupting to me.

I am so sorry this is not so chatty-- I will try to do better tomorrow! 

[ccbbang-blog]

Math test..!?

The best timing to write a chitty chatty blog, I have figured out, is in the midday break or right after the dinner. Because after enjoying your food you don’t want to go back to the endless long sentences anymore, writing things like 

“Despite the academic struggles to find asuperior methodology, there flourishes nevertheless a resilient and productive engagement with Celan’s work on his efforts to achieve an authentic idiom in an age of simulacra and collective crisis.” 

Please don’t ask me what is an age of simulacra and collective crisis. Since Mr. Mean Comments has left no comment to it (strangely!), I am going to leave it as it is. 

But what does a math test in the title have to do with a master thesis in literature? Nothing.

I am going to talk about it anyway because I am interested in one career that is called management consulting. You will find those famous consulting firms, if you have also browsed through their websites, talking about similar things only in different colors. For one, they have the most brilliant people (then a photo wall with people from different backgrounds with different skin colors); or they offer great chance to get a wonderful work-life balance (then a list of what their people in their free time have done, such as learnt 4 languages or attended culinary schools); or how they contribute in the knowledge of management or market research (then a bunch of download links to their studies and surveys); or how much they care about social responsibility (then a short introduction of their projects in the social sector). So what is left is their representative color: some uses navy blue, some green, some red, some a little more colorful... You can’t really tell them apart if your eyes are closed and you hear someone read those texts for you.

They are also similar in how they select their employees. 

The first round, after CV screening, is usually a numerical reasoning test to see how you master your quantitative skills. (Now we are finally moving into our topic! Yay!) I thought it would be something very difficult like calculus (I passed this course basically at the mercy of my professor, a really nice guy from Austria) or statistics/probabilities (which I also passed at the mercy... why were my old professors so nice!?!?). But NO. 

Let me show you some examples I collected from the internet:

1. You have a jar filled with red, yellow and blue balls. What is the minimum number of balls you must pick out to guarantee 3 balls of the same color?

2. I have 19 bills totaling $215. The value of each bill is either $5 or $20. I have 9 bills in my pocket. What is range of money in my pocket?

3. I shuffle a deck of cards and randomly pick one card and keep it aside. It is an Ace of Hearts. What is the probability that the next card I pick up is a heart or an ace? (OK, this is probability, I was wrong!)

...

If the students of my brother (who happens to be a math teacher in junior high) knew English good enough to take this test, they might have done better than many of the applicants... I myself had practiced such questions a lot before I graduated from elementary school but after that I can’t do them anymore... And I figure the best way to pass the first round is either:

give a 12-year-old 10 dollars for around 20 minutes to solve them for you

or

start your consulting career at the age of 12!

[ccbbang-blog]

So let’s talk about professor...

What I want to talk when I talk about professor is not the general idea of professor as someone who peeks at you and your work and says no, you have to do it another way, but about one particular professor-- mine. 

For the sake of convenience, let’s call him Mr. Mean Comments. Sometimes giving a person a fake name adds to some romantic sensation, like Mr. Right, Mr. BC or Miss Irreplaceable. Yet, it is NOT the case of Mr. Mean Comments. The reason why he is called Mean Comments is obviously that he only gives mean comments to my drafts. Being mean seems to be one of the special requirements if you want to be a (beloved/be-hated) professor. He uses the comment function in MS Word and there appears this small box (oftentimes) in evil purple, saying “HA! You did something RIDICULOUS again!” Or saying “Uncl.” as if I should have more uncles. But all that is okay.

What is not okay is to imagine his face behind this small purple box. Was he looking at me with contempt through his (badly-selected) round and heavy glasses with his newly (ugly) grown beard? Did he, sipping his Turkish coffee (which I bought in Turkey as a gift for him), touching his cute little black dog, slapping his keyboard like slapping into my face, enjoy the whole process of saying mean words like sharp swords? I don’t want to dramatize the whole thing. Neither do I want to picture him in such a detail, but this motif constantly appears in my nightmare...

So an antidote is necessary. Yesterday I went to the library located in the center of a beautiful town and brought back around 20 books under his recommendation. The town was my all-time favorite in Germany and before I finally drifted into library, I visited the bridge again for the view of the castle. But as soon as I stepped through the door of the library, I knew immediately that I was once again at home. The smell of books and the heaviness of knowledge, the later of which was later confirmed by my backpack... I suddenly came to the conclusion that his comments were nothing compared to my inner resistance to acknowledge that my work sucks. 

Reading and writing is such a long process that one sometimes turns blind to what one really understands. I had put in a footnote that I spotted some affinity between Adorno’s reflection on Auschwitz and Agamben’s conception of subjectivity also by means of Auschwitz, and my professor threw back a comment (in a longer and therefore bigger purple box) that Agamben has nothing to do with Adorno. “Nothing” all with capital letters. It is okay for me if my idea is proved to be wrong. But one of the books I brought back yesterday has spent also one longer footnote-- which is totally more than one page long, sometimes scholars are also naggy like mothers-- explaining the affinity between Agamben and Adorno and saying that he was also not sure if there was a difference between the two. I guess Mr. Mean Comments, in this sense, might have also forgotten what he had read.

Sometimes when professors don’t believe you, like Mr. Mean Comments, you will have to rely on another person with a bigger name to back up for you. But the good thing is, just what I am going to do, that with the bigger name you can slap back to Mr. Mean Comments and say: Please also do your homework and read what you should read. 

But of course I am not going to be so explicit. As usual, if the requirement of a professor is to be mean, the prerequisite of a student is to be elusive and vague. I am going to write in my draft, softly gently but with strong sarcasm, that some might doubt ignorantly that there is no inherent relation between Adorno and Agamben, but...

I didn’t mention Mr. Mean Comments and I hope he will not read this post!

[ccbbang-blog]

Practices

The last quotation from Adorno was from a piece called “On Lyric Poetry and Society.” I put it in this blog because I wanted to test how the theme would look like with a quotation (it turned out to be boring XD).To put it simply without using the terrible academic terminology, Adorno pretty much says that you have to read poetry not in order to see what the poet has to say, but to see what the society has made the poet say what he wants to say. Such a beautiful formulation as philosophical sundial is, as far as I have read in Adorno, quite seldom. Aside from this core, he does not say much in this essay but keeps referring to his own concepts and ideas. Well, if Adorno were born today to be a scholar, he might gain extra reference points in the modern evaluation system...

To get away from Adorno (and his whole idea of bourgeois subjectivity which owes to a great extent Freud a lot), I started a little practice to improve my shyness in front of people: I have to read one news article each day and make a short-- really short, until today they were all less than 1 minute-- speech of it. The first time I put my three dear puffy animals in the sofa as my audience, and you know what, as usual, I started off laughing although there was really no reason to! 

The topics I have covered were also less than serious. One was about the federate reserve which wanted to raise their interest rate but not knowing when and how much-- I wonder how such a piece of news makes sense to me (not as an investor or whatever of course). Even though they have decided to not to be patient anymore (and please note that they also don’t want to be impatient, I sometimes really don’t know what people want), they are obviously not being very efficient in their decision.

Another one was a head of Fedex talking about the potential strategy of uber to develop a day delivery service in urban area. I was first intrigued by how the algorithm makes day delivery possible in the sense of logistic, but then I couldn’t stop to think how one should pronounce uber-- shall I do it like ü in German or u in super or u in utopia... the name is really distracting...

[ccbbang-blog]

Permit me to repeat that we are concerned not with the poet as a private person..., but with the poem as a philosophical sundial telling the time of history

Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Notes to Literature

[ccbbang-blog]

The beginning is always...

Difficult might be the correct word to say, but it doesn’t feel right. 

The beginning is always easy, since it doesn’t require much aside from a few impulse to start-- but to hold on, to endure and to finalize the result is difficult. I am in the middle of my thesis writing, and I am aware that without distraction it is impossible for me to complete such a job. “Wholehearted” sounds so far-fetched in the field of thesis writing. I am trapped in the demon’s circle of doing or not doing, doing or not going well enough...

Don’t want this to kill me. And don’t want to be a always complaining to my friends who have unfortunately already had enough of my negative emotions. This blog is then a little space of mine to record my daily thoughts, progresses, regressions (let’s hope they do not happen often) or interesting things. It should be always in a chatty mode-- not so very serious, a little funny but also providing food for thought.

I want to end my first post here and start a new one since this one has become not so chatty anymore. If you have read it through until now, please go on to the next post. If you haven’t... well, I suppose you won’t read these words then! All the good luck to those who need to write a thesis-- either for a degree or simply for a seminar. I sometimes really wish to enjoy the process, you know, of thesis writing like turning from a caterpillar to a butterfly, but at the end it turns out to be a process of changing from one hobby to a whole new one. Like I’ve started to learn Japenese, with the help of my dear friend of course, with the lovely song from Doraemon:

I wouldn’t like to admit that I have already attended some Japanese courses in the elementary school, after which I couldn’t even speak anything aside from a few easy casual greetings. Nevertheless, under the stress of a master thesis, I managed to learn the Japanese Kanas in between two meals... 

Theses are sometimes really magical. So let’s go on with it.