How to Ask a Question in Public

At a really interesting symposium I attended yesterday, I realized I hate the question-and-answer period with a passion. I'm sick of narcissistic academic verbal diarrhea, especially when it follows a carefully constructed, well-argued paper. I offer the following list of dos and don'ts in the spirit of intellectual community. To all the smug professors and graduate students out there, please have the good taste to conform to these rules.

1. Do ask a question. Why is this obvious rule constantly broken? Why do so many people stand up and say, "My question is really more of a comment"? Ugh! I don't necessarily think it's because all academics like to hear themselves talk, although there are plenty who do. Rather, I think lots of us are used to thinking aloud, especially when we teach. Classroom settings magnify our own importance. We're also accustomed to having intellectual conversations with one another. A public forum, while it may resemble a group discussion, is not a conversation, nor is it a classroom. If you're sitting in the audience, you're not the most important person in the room. No one wants to hear your navel-gazing exegesis on the decline of the Roman Empire or the problems of the left when the rest of us are thinking about Victorian cast-iron doilies or whatever. If you can't think of a question, don't pretend you have one. Pipe down.

2. Do be brief. Many times challenging questions do not require a lot of mushy convolution in order to be asked. In contrast to Thinkus aloudicus, described in rule 1, is the genuine question-haver who feels compelled to restate his or her query dozens of times. Sometimes this is a matter of giving contrary examples, which is fine, but if you find yourself using the same words over and over again, you might be prattling on and trying others' patience.

3. Don't try to outwit anybody. There are questions that challenge, and there are questions that try to force people into contradicting themselves. Stick to the former. Serious intellectual differences can be addressed directly and don't require forcing people into corners to make them look foolish.

4. Don't refer to your own work. I don't care how famous you are, there are going to be some people in the audience who haven't read all your books. They are not stupid. This also applies to you if you think everyone is intimately familiar with the historiography of your latest research project.

5. Nobody likes follow-up questions or multi-part questions. Don't ask them. Do you want to confuse people? Then ask a three-part question. Do you want to annoy people? Then ask a three-part question.

Here is my basic formula for asking an intelligible question that will get a substantive answer. Always have a concept or theme to your question that you can express in a single word (preferably not jargon): "gender," "order," "power," "utility," or what have you. This concept or theme must be recognizable across fields—in other words, it should be something that most people might consider as they write. Begin by mentioning this concept. Then elaborate. Without sounding like the second-year graduate student who's come up with a few pet critiques ("How would this book look if it paid attention to class?"), ask the speaker something related to this theme: a clarification, an expansion, a connection, a variation. Then restate the theme (one word, remember) and ask directly for comment on it. Don't trail off; this can prompt the speaker to finish your thought for you and avoid your question, especially if they know you're a grad student.

Once I figure out how to get your question answered when the moderator is taking a bunch of questions at once, I'll tell you. Adieu till the next conference.

Outcomes Assessment

For every dissertator, there's a different work rhythm. Some of us get up early to write and don't move till sundown. Others have a daily goal of churning out so many pages. But whatever way you do it, you don't get as much done as you want to. This isn't a business ruled by consistency. We don't make so many widgets per day. Yet most of the time, we feel guilty for not getting more done, no matter how much we do get done.

I'm trying to move from an ideas-based model to a page-based model. Under the old regime, I'd have a couple of ideas I wanted to work through each day. I'd start by skimming what I'd written the day before and think about where my argument was headed, the kind of evidence I needed to get there, and so on. I could make my way through about two or three ideas a day. To translate: one idea per paragraph equals a maximum per diem output of about two or three pages. Most days, though, I would need to edit what I'd written the day before and spend a great deal of time clarifying to myself where I was headed. Sometimes I wouldn't get through an entire paragraph. I didn't really care, though. I thought this method would probably spare me a lot of revising down the road.

I think I'm probably right about this. I only did one revision of my prospectus, for instance. Nonetheless, I was advised by a committee member to switch to the page-based model, for reasons that are unclear to me. Like a good little Do-Bee, I tried this today. I cranked out what I think is probably three pages, which was roughly three paragraphs. (I still reckon composition length by words, not pages—a holdover from my journalism career. Today's output was roughly 850 words plus a few notes, which I'm guessing equals three pages.)

May I say that page length is the most stupidest way to assess the quality, thoroughness, and clarity of a day's output? So often I hear people bragging about how many pages their seminar paper is or how many pages they wrote for their qualifying exams. But when you read it, sorry, there's a lot of bloviating that could be cut. Or ideas that need to be developed. I'd rather spend a day working through the implications of one idea in a single paragraph than gun the writing engines toward an arbitrary cutoff (which I no doubt will spend time rewriting the next day).

I don't know how much longer I'm going to keep this up, because I know what I wrote today is kind of sucky. Frankly, I think goals reckoned in terms of pages get you a lot of long-winded nothing. But since I know many of my loyal readers (reader?) work this way, I'll give it a try. I think the only advantage of it is that you can bullshit for long enough that you don't feel guilty once you hit your three-page mark.

My Name Is Billy

Thanks to Vgirl (who has her own allen wrench!), Resolution 1 is complete! My Ikea Billy bookcase stands a whopping eighty inches tall in my dining room. I really must thank Vgirl, who did most of the work. The assembly directions I found online contained weird screws that were not in the hardware EDB gave me. I was all ready to blame EDB when V stepped in and visualized the proper assembly. It was amazing. Thanks, V.

Play "Where'd I Read That?" With CheeseQuest!

When it comes to reading, I'm a notoriously bad note-taker. I never figured out how to outline a chapter without going into microscopic detail or just copying direct quotations by hand into a notebook. I tend to focus on weird, tangential stuff that pulls my mind into different galaxies. Typos and grammatical errors can distract me for minutes: I get angry at the author, the editor, the press, and people in general for not being able to write or proofread well. I tell you, it's a miracle I passed my comprehensive exams. Thank god for my loyal study group—MK, PH, KS, and JHS—who either tolerated or didn't notice my inability to write good summaries.

Everyone who has visited Casa CheeseQuest has noticed the 171 library books stacked in neat piles on my living room floor. People are usually impressed that I've categorized them and labeled each pile. What they don't seem to notice is the lack of tape flags or any other indication that these books are being read. If I made my way through each of these books when I checked them out and took good notes, the piles wouldn't be nearly as large and probably not as neat.

I know people who use programs like Bento to keep track of everything they read. Believe me, I've tried Bento (my mother was nice enough to buy it for me a couple years ago, and I upgraded my OS so I could run it). But again, my databases have way too many fields and go into too much detail.

So I find myself playing "Where'd I Read That?" all the time. Right now I'm going through Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality to find where he talks about the contingency of heterosexuality. At least I'm pretty sure he talks about this in the Three Essays. Actually, he talks about it all over the place, but there's one quotation I really want and I think that's where it is. I've only read a limited amount of Freud (don't tell my adviser), so there's a good chance I'm right. It's a really short book, too. (It's three essays, duh.) So I'm sure I'll find it today. If it's there, that is.

"Where'd I Read That?" can be a cool game, because sometimes when you lose, you win. I've found great stuff poring over books I didn't read all that carefully the first time around, like a minute case study of a knockabout girl who disguised herself as a boy in a book about delinquents. I don't know how much of this stuff will make it into the dissertation, but it's fun to find things like this. On the other hand, the frustrations of "Where'd I Read That?" are obvious. It takes lots more time to write anything. I also sometimes feel tempted to cut out parts of arguments because I simply can't find the historiography that will buttress my assertions, even doing searches on JSTOR or whatever. That's not good. I once made a wish blowing out my birthday candles (yup, I still do that) that I could magically start taking good bullet-pointed notes.

As long as I have funding, though, I'm happy to play "Where'd I Read That?" occasionally. But if you know that quotation from the Three Essays, could you email me, please?

"Cats" Bashing

When I was a child, many years ago, there was one family on my block that seemed more intellectual than most. They subscribed to The New Yorker, for instance, and listened to NPR—with the volume way up, as it was meant to be listened to. I was friends with their youngest daughter. One day, as we were playing in the kitchen, I heard an odd song come over the radio waves. It was something about calico cats, or so it sounded. My friend and I were probably running around playing with this eighteen-inch doll, something like a knight with removable armor, which had belonged to her older brother. The song stuck with me the way songs do when you're a child and you can't quite understand the lyrics. (I was so confused by the word "used-to-bes" in one lyric from "You Don't Bring Me Flowers": "It used to be so natural to talk about forever/But used-to-bes don't count anymore/They just lay on the floor till we sweep them away." What the heck is a yoosta bee, I wondered. Do they sting?)

A few years later I was on a quixotic mission to get the theater people in high school to like me. This was very hard because I was a pretty sour teenager, and to be a theater—excuse me, theatre—person, you had to be kind of in another world all the time, vaguely chipper, constantly journaling, singing randomly in the cafeteria, and so forth. You also had to have a few accessories. One of these was a worn-out Cats T-shirt, possibly with the neck cut away to reveal the collarbone.

In those days, Cats had only been on Broadway for about four or five years. That wasn't so long in relative terms. We're talking about a place where not many people read stuff like The New Yorker or listened to NPR on full blast. People forget this now, but Cats was really, really cool. It was around this time that I learned that the whole musical was based on light verse by T.S. Eliot, which was pretty darn highbrow for a Broadway musical, maybe a rung or two down from Sondheim. What I'd heard as "calico cats" a few years earlier was "Jellicle Cats," from "Song of the Jellicles." I have never seen Cats or studied the poems, so I can't tell you what a Jellicle is or what it has to do with people in cat-patterned leotards.

Even I can't resist making jokes about Cats; any sentence with the word leotard in it has to be a joke, right? I just think it's important to remind ourselves that even when stuff gets super outmoded, it was once important. And we have to remember why. For evidence, look at Frank Rich's New York Times review from 1982.

I was at an interestingly playful "lecture series" the other night, and one of the lecturers did a PowerPoint that used the photo above as a visual punch line. He was a really great, smart guy, and he clued me in on a bunch of interesting stuff going on these days in the theatrical world. But his presentation made me think about Cats and its odd, minor, indirect effect on my life. Anyone who was awake in the 1980s knew about Cats, and it's possible that not all of us were wrong.

This is why I'm sincerely hoping for some kind of revival of Cats, perhaps by an avant-garde outfit like the Wooster Group (although I think they stick to the classics, but someone like them). I don't want someone to "make it relevant for the present day"; I want to figure out what people saw in it in the first place. Unfortunately, I can't do that if the cast wears cat-patterned leotards. Sorry.

Take That to the Bank

Resolution 4 is completed! Today I deposited $91.50 in dimes, nickels, and pennies into my account at the little savings bank down the street. I felt just like Ragged Dick the bootblack.

"I've Been to Vidal Sassoon"

One of my favorite movies is Rosemary's Baby. Mia Farrow plays a woman who gets pregnant, to her joy, only to wonder if she's being hounded by witches who want to get her baby and eat it or something. Her husband, Guy, is played by the amazing avant-garde filmmaker John Cassavetes. Guy is such a narcissistic creep that it's no surprise he's a New York actor. As Rosemary keeps reminding people, "He was in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross, and he's done a lot of television and commercials." (By the way, Nobody Loves an Albatross was a real play! The 1960s had a way with Broadway shows that sported flashy, lousy titles, like, I don't know, Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.)

Anyway, until the last quarter of the movie you're never quite sure whether Rosemary is really onto a plot to take her baby or is simply going crazy because she's pregnant. At one point she eats raw liver. Another thing she does is walk into the apartment one afternoon sporting a brand-new, very short, very mod haircut. "I've been to Vidal Sassoon," she says. "It's very in." At which point Guy, ever the gentleman, says, "Well, it looks terrible." Vidal Sassoon was possibly the most influential hairdresser of the pre-hippie 1960s. Rosemary might have been trying to copy the fashion icon Twiggy (whom you might know in her craggly, botoxed form from America's Next Top Model a few years ago). Rosemary's awesome haircut is in the photo above. She is so not crazy for getting that haircut, right? Yet her husband is so vehement, and she's so spacey, it makes you wonder.

I recently got a haircut inspired by Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby. I paid $55 for it, which I think is a deal. (I also tried to find out from the internet how much that haircut would have cost in 1966, when the movie takes place, but no dice.) I don't have the mod clothes to match Rosemary, but I still think I look pretty cute. The stylist had never heard of Rosemary's Baby, so it was a good thing I brought in a picture. I hope it was a learning experience for her, and I hope she watches Rosemary's Baby!

New Year, New CheeseQuest!

In the Land of School, "new year" has two different meanings. There is January 1, the new year that normal (adult) people celebrate, and the day after Labor Day, the new year that U.S. Schoolians celebrate. I used to work at a magazine geared to people under twenty, so there were two official new years, the January issue and the September issue. Both were occasions for the cover line "New Year, New You!" The only difference between January and September in the Land of Publishing in New York City was that on the first day of work after new year's there would be a line of shivering editorial assistants stretching for five blocks in the cold, waiting to get to the salad-tossing station at Cosi. September wasn't much of an "I vow to eat salad every day until I realize it's just a salad" month.

From time to time I like to pretend I'm still living in the Land We Call the Real World and celebrate new year's day on January 1. I do make resolutions every year, but I'm always making random resolutions and forgetting about them. I thought writing them on my blog would get me to hold myself accountable for them. So here we go.

1. I resolve to put up that Ikea bookcase that's been sitting in my dining room for a few weeks. My friend EDB generously gave it to me. He took it apart and saved the screws and drove it all the way from where he lives to where I live. I lost one of the screws. But I think it'll still be good. The only thing is I sliced into the little finger on my left hand a couple days ago and it hasn't quite healed. I'm afraid of screwing things and hammering other things until it looks less like Frankenfinger. Ah, already trying to talk myself out of something. That's no way to begin a year, CheeseQuest! Try again.

2. I resolve to stop trying to make my African American friends think I'm down/fresh/dope/off the hook and start trying to convince my Jewish friends to invite me to more holiday parties. CheeseQuest isn't Jewish, only Jew-friendly. But kids, the Chosen People know what they're doing when it comes to baked goods: rugalach, challah, hamentashen. Brisket? Bring it on. Other stuff (carp, matzoh, kosher wine) I don't particularly care for, but I'd give up pork for at least a day to get one of JF's tasty pastries. Next year in Cheeseville!

3. I resolve to call my landlords to fix everything because I'm paying them enough in goddamned rent. The big pole that holds up the coats in my front closet fell down the other day. I haven't called the landlords to have it put back up. Why? They scare me. I don't want them in my house. (I think they might come in anyway while I'm not here.) But jeez, don't I deserve a little quick action on the repairs? I'm not even asking for them to remove the peeling lead paint that's probably poisoning me or turning me into a moron.

4. I resolve to make a deposit of all my change in the bank. Like a good Yankee wannabe, I save all my change and occasionally put it in the bank. I haven't done this in about four years. I made a first step on making good on this resolution when I gathered my change together into one bag. It weighs a ton! But I use my quarters for laundry, so I was thinking that it might be better to exchange all of my pennies, nickels, and dimes for quarters. Because I've got to do laundry tomorrow.

5. I resolve to avoid people who say they're on a spiritual journey or try to guess my sign within five minutes of meeting me.

6. I resolve to blog more and Facebook less. I've said for a long time (well, a few months) that Facebook is going to kill the blogs. I used to read them avidly. Now I can't even remember the names of the ones I used to like. Some were really good. I have about two political ones bookmarked, two or three academic ones (plus the job wiki), and about five friends' blogs. But we haven't been updating all that much lately. I'm getting so proficient at the two-line status update that I don't feel the need to write a whole blog post about my work. (I do try to avoid the "I'm taking a nap" status update unless I think of a way to make it really pithy.) Not that I blog about nothing (I try to avoid the "I'm freaking out about work" post), there's sometimes nothing to blog about. In the hands of some, blogs can be about nothing. But Facebook is really about nothing. Except funny kitty videos.