(no subject)
Mar. 20th, 2007 01:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Had a jumpy pre-Break period, as a number of documents needed for admission kept somehow not arriving. One turned out to be in my file, actually several copies of it were as I'd been sending them at weekly intervals since January, but no one ever alerted the database that they were in there! Worse, my backup referrer apparently has cancer, and one of the forms that prevents you from responding to emails. Worse still, one of my main referrers went incommunicado for weeks--recovering from surgery. He was good early on, faxed several times, but they "were having trouble with their fax machine" that week--also the next week; and he did come through at last, couriering his letter in exactly as deliberation began.
So then during Break the acceptance letter arrived and I saw that stipend figure. These people cannot be serious. Bad enough you have to buy an undergrad degree in this country--do we really want graduate degrees to be wealth-based?
All very sanity-affecting.
So then during Break the acceptance letter arrived and I saw that stipend figure. These people cannot be serious. Bad enough you have to buy an undergrad degree in this country--do we really want graduate degrees to be wealth-based?
All very sanity-affecting.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-20 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-21 04:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-25 01:28 am (UTC)But then University A's stipend is 20 percent less than University B's, but that doesn't even out A & B as much you'd think. At University B, I am told, it is rare to find a studio or one-bedroom apartment. At all.
It starts to all feel like some parody of a math problem. And that doesn't even include anything about the academic programs at the two universities.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-25 03:23 am (UTC)B/1.208S = c. .828B/S
"A" has a several % better income to expenditure ratio. If that's any help.
My stipend is 6000 minus undisclosed fees--my fiancee kicks back 1500 so if that's analogous, I get 4500. If that's any consolation.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-25 02:55 pm (UTC)And, unsurprisingly, my math is wrong again, isn't? 12,000 is 1/4 less than 16,000.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-26 03:20 am (UTC)oy.
Date: 2007-03-21 12:32 am (UTC)Congrats on the acceptance though!
In grad school I ate so many meals centered on beans that I can't look at them anymore.
Hey--do you know any good readings of The Triumph of Life? Bloom and de Man are the only ones I know. I have to teach it soon.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-21 05:09 am (UTC)I believe Derrida and Hillis Miller write on it in Deconstruction and Criticism also, but don't stay on topic the way De Man does. But why even ask me, ask nightspore.
I wrote a longish paper on it, and a number of contemporaneous livejournal entries, a year and a half ago. Can't remember if I'd friended you yet?
no subject
Date: 2007-03-21 10:55 pm (UTC)I'd love to see the paper you wrote on it. Do you still have my email address? We hadn't friended each other yet.
I taught Letter to M.G. today, and I now have a theory about the role of nature in that poem.
Off topic: have you read Twain's short piece "Journalism in Tennessee"? in an essay on humor George Plimpton says that Bloom pointed him to it, so I read it and it's great.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-22 07:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-21 05:10 am (UTC)