it was four of those weeks

I’ve been wracked with guilt over the paucity of bloggity of late. The problem, of course, as it has been sporadically over the last—um—long period of time, was that I was working on my thesis. But I finally pretty much completed the thing, 104 long pages complete with ponderous title “’A Strange Way of Becoming Fact’: Narrative Structure in Atom-Bomb Related Popular Culture of the Cold War Era,” and a vast plenitude of footnotes. All that’s left is the defense.

One becomes Fox Mulder as one descends deeper into the abyss that is thesis-writing. One becomes convinced that one is the victim of a conspiracy wrought by the Forces of the Universe. And, as it turns out, one is.

Since I did my undergrad work in English, and then taught the same, I learned MLA format very well. But for my graduate work, I switched to History. Historians generally prefer something with footnotes; they think it reduces the bunkness of historical studies. Historians were oversensitive and defensive about bunk even before Henry Ford said that famous phrase.

But my professors were never terribly specific about format; they just wanted consistency. So I ended up using a kind of Chicago-MLA pastiche.

My thesis, however, had to be correct, so I regularly referred to authoritative sources,like Turabian, the online Chicago manual, etc. The problem was that these authoritative sources regularly contradicted each other about what, precisely, Chicago style was. When I asked for help, my thesis director just said, again, “Be consistent.”

So I did my best. When I finished, I was ordered to take the thing to Gail Hall. I thought Gail Hall was a place and wandered around W.T. looking for it. How could I have missed a whole building all these years?

But Gail Hall turned out to be a person. Her desk was as tall as the judge’s in The Wall and she wore on of those old-fashioned powdered wigs, too. There was nothing on her desk but a red pen and a ruler. She greedily seized my thesis, and, in a flurry of activity, she measured with her ruler and marked with her pen: That’s wrong (cackle); that’s wrong (cackle); that’s wrong….

Then she dropped it to the floor in front of me, and all became clear.

It had been a conspiracy. The lukewarm, shoulder-shrugging advice; the conflicting style manuals…it was all designed so that I could stand here, humiliated, while Gail Hall measured and marked.

There were, no doubt, Gail Halls in every university in academe, measuring and marking. The joke probably works even better in large universities like U.T., where masters degree candidates wander eighty acres looking for a building that’s really a person. It’s a haze, in every sense of that word.

But it’s almost over. So I’ll get back to blogging.

Only, maybe not this weekend. My wife’s taking me to the City to celebrate.

Spacedark

This account has been ever-so-slightly fictionalized. And it’s all in good fun. There’s still the defense, and my thesis still has to be accepted, so it’s a friendly joke, dammit!