I've launched a new venture

Moving to Ithaca mid-way through the summer has not proven particularly good for my job prospects. Once August hits, I'll be at Cornell and all will be well, but for the moment I'd be really happy if I actually had an income stream. So, I've decided to launch something that I've wanted to do for some time--a professional copy editing service--which would allow me to use my skills and would allow me to work from home. Check out www.guthriecopyediting.com to see where everything stands so far.

The Great Books...digital style

So, the composition class I've been teaching has spent the last week talking about the purpose of higher education. As part of that discussion, I introduced my students to the idea of the "Great Books" educational curriculum where the core of one's undergraduate education is reading through the Western canon. Needless to say, there are a lot of excellent critiques that can be leveled against the Great Books idea...it consists almost entirely of dead white men, it tends to privilege a very transcendent concept of "knowledge" that focuses entirely on external content at the risk of ignoring student's own experience-based knowledge, etc., etc. My students, needless to say, were not to hot on the idea (most of them aren't huge lit fans to begin with...)

However, it got me thinking: how difficult would it be to work through the great books on one's own? At one level, the "Great Books" list (technically, there are a number of them) is an autodidact's dream and it does promise the development of a sort of tcanonical knowledge all but unknown to modern academe. And can I really knock it until I try it?

So, I've decided to take on the challenge--but with a twist. I recently got an iPod touch, which runs a number of fine ebook readers. As the vast majority of the Great Books are in the public domain (though some of the non-English texts don't have public domain translations--or at least, don't have them available in ebook form) it appears that I could place the whole list on my iPod for close to nothing. The portability of the iPod ensures that whenever I have a bit of free time, I'll always have the reading material right there with me. For my experiment, I'll be using the Great Books list offered by Mortimer Adler in How to Read a Book

The dusty old books of a once hallowed canon meets the at-your-fingertips novelty of modern technology. What was once the most elite of educational practices awakens to a new populist affordability and accessibility.

Will I survive my digital romp through the great books? Will my eyes burn out from staring at the screen for too long? Will I ever be able to read without my beloved pencil? Stay tuned for answers to these questions and more...

Selling out

So thus far my summer has consisted, in large part, of revising a seminar paper from the last Fall semester into an article that I can actually send out. Hence, a lot of my attention has been directed towards self-presentation and learning how to "sell" myself and my work on the academic market. Obviously, working in academe is a job and it demands a certain amount of practicality and politicking. However I worry when I find myself more concerned about landing an article in the right venue or snagging a job at the ideal university than about the content of my work.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I fear that the trappings of academic culture may overrun my intellectual commitments. It seems awfully easy to no longer believe that one's work and ideas matter or to believe that they only matter insofar as they can demonstrate one's professional importance. I'm not going to lie: I want the prestige. Who doesn't? But I don't want the desire for prestige to cloud the beliefs and commitments that drew me into academe to begin with.

The "Ivory Purgatory"

I suppose some explanation of this blog's title may be in order. I puzzled for awhile over various possible euphemisms for Grad School: ghetto of the Ivory Tower; less-fashionable suburb with lengthy, torturous commute to the Ivory Tower; "the snooze button of life" (as PhD comics so aptly describes it). Ivory Purgatory, while lacking in originality and clarity, held the all-important appeal of brevity - so there.  I also suppose that some explanation of my own background may be in order: I'm a first year Master's student in English Lit at Penn State University and, contrary to the snarkiness of my blog title, I actually love it here (though I do feel forever in "limbo," neither fully "knighted" scholar nor mere student). I've begun this blog for a few different reasons (some more suspect than others): (1) Facebook was not wasting enough of my time; (2) I feared that my Facebook friends might be tiring of my overly serious, rambling "notes" that called out for their own separate forum; (3) I figured that a space where I could talk/type out some ideas that were still in their infancy (or, in some cases, still gestating) might prove of use. Nothing is worse than when one ought to be working on a seminar paper but has instead concieved of an awesome, field-changing topic that has not the first thing to do with the paper at hand (and, sadly, is rarely awesome and never field-changing). So, here is my space to store those ideas - both the ill-concieved ones that are fueled by energy drink-addiction and sleep deprivation and those that perhaps do show some promise - feel free to browse, read, and critique to your heart's content.