Writing in the dark

At the end of each semester, weary graduate students in universities all over the country stumble to administrative offices clutching stacks of expensive-looking paper. The work of three or four or five or more years comes down to a weary looking official thumbing through the pages to make sure all the margins are properly aligned. Then, at least in my experience, if you pass the cursory inspection, said weary official disappears with your bound dissertation and returns with an embossed certificate and, in a very weird token gesture, candy. Congratulations! you just graduated and you're now a Ph.D.

Last May I found this whole last ritual--the delivery of the dissertation and the acceptance of the candy--abrupt but inexplicably comforting. Having finished the dissertation turned out not to be as grand a finale for me as I had once imagined; I was lucky enough to find a job right out of graduate school, and so the dissertation came to signify not the apotheosis of my graduate career, but the very rough draft for an even longer and more exhausting project. I was so done with graduate school that I didn't even bother to participate in the "real" graduation-- the ceremony in the Graduate Office was enough for me, and I moved out of my apartment the day of the hooding ceremony.

In what seems like the twilight of the academic publishing era I think I book is a fairly ridiculous requirement for tenure. But I'm grateful to be in a university that only has one book, not two, as the standard for tenure. I didn't touch my dissertation at all last semester, but after attending several meetings with various deans who kept referring to the ticking of the tenure clock I pulled up all the files on my computer a couple of months ago and thought, "Now is the time to turn this thing into a book."

But I just sat there in front of the computer for about an hour, staring blankly at the screen. This was no longer a "dissertation," it was a "book project," and I felt lost in the interstices between the two. I didn't have a clue where to begin. I consulted my sublime former advisor, who encouraged me to "conceptualize the larger framework of the project," so I spent a week fixing all the little typos and awkward sentences in the first two chapters. I spoke to a charming older colleague who advised me to "think about what distinguishes a dissertation from a book and then apply that to the project." I gave the whole thing to him to read so I wouldn't have to.

After several weeks of fruitless agonizing, nitpicky editing, and watching snippets of the original "He-Man" on YouTube (clearly I, like Adam, want to transform from a cringing first-year professor into an Academic of the Universe), I have slowly resumed my research, trying to contextualize and deepen the thoughts already on the page. I still don't really feel like I have any idea how to proceed; I just got tired of sitting and started to grope about in the dark. Graduate school taught me taught me how to do research, but it didn't teach me how to be an academic, much less a professor, and while I sift through an ever-growing array of books, I'm waiting for the light to turn on.

Title?

"Rice and Keats" is not the most graceful title. I typed it in without really thinking it through, and then say back and asked myself "Why?"

The two things I seem to spend most of time on these days are food and literature. I'm no gourmand, but I do cook a lot, and as a South Indian, rice is at the core of it all. The Tamil word annam means both 'food' and 'rice'. No matter how far into the cooking stratosphere I stray, I always come back to the many rice-based dishes that are the core of my food psyche.

I don't necessarily have the same elemental connection with John Keats that I do with rice; my research interests lie in a different direction. But I have found teaching Keats to be one of the highlights of my career. He's a pleasure to teach: the meters are tight, the rhymes fascinating and controversial, and the language is simply yummy. That's not a particularly academic description, but I can think of no other word for his lush, almost tactile wordplay. Best of all, even my poetry-shy students embraced it. After a semester of freaking them out with Shelley, Wordsworth, and De Quincey, reading Keats felt like a love-fest. Teaching Keats always reminds me why I entered this ridiculous profession in the first place.

But the connections between Keats and rice extend beyond the madness of my personal universe. After I started thinking about it, I remembered that one of Keats's best friends was a James Rice, with whom he was living when he wrote a lot of his best stuff, including Lamia, one of the poems that so gripped my students this past semester.

So, rice and Keats. Keats and Rice.

The Reluctant Blogger (and Dosas)

Like some seven-year old in a crisp tutu tiptoeing onto a stage, I am finally stepping with some hesitation into the blogging world.

I disliked the idea of blogs when I first heard of them. For eight years I kept a private journal, writing copiously, vehemently, and poorly in a series of chunky spiral-bound notebooks. Then, suddenly, I stopped. The stories and poems that were supposed to materialize from these outpourings never did, and pouring my life's minutiae onto paper seemed unproductive, and arrogant. Most of all, I couldn't decide whether I was writing for just me or for some unknown posterity, and it affected the content of my journals considerably. These weren't the outpourings of an unbridled soul, they were constructed with some ghostly audience in mind.

Thinking about it this way everything I initially feared about blogging-- the seemingly endless audience, the potential spectacle, the anonymous gawking-- seemed only a realization of the potential future I had mapped out for the words I was supposedly writing just for me.

I'm still not completely comfortable with the idea of a blog, but I think I need a useful experiment in my life right now.

The other thing I've been experiment with lately is food. I finally made good dosas for the first time in my life, thanks to my tremendous Vita-Mix, and a cast-iron griddle lovingly handed down to me by my wonderful mother. You don't need a Vita-Mix, of course, any good blender will do. Here it is:

Dosas (makes roughly 30, depending on size)

1 and 1/4 cups urad dal
3 cups rice
fistful of fenugreek
salt
water

soak the dal with the fenugreek, and the rice separately in bowls with plenty of water for four hours. Rinse the dal well, then blend the rice and dal (plus fenugreek) separately until very fine (the Vita-Mix is amazing; it reduced the hard grains into a silky batter in mere minutes). Combine the rice and dal in a large pot, add enough water to make a batter of dropping consistency, and add a generous amount of salt.* Cover, and place in a warm spot for several hours or overnight. When you take the cover off in the morning, the batter should have risen considerably, and have lots of bubbles.** Taste a little of the raw batter for salt and adjust accordingly.

* If there is too little salt or water, the batter won't ferment properly
** If the batter doesn't rise, don't worry. Just portion out some of the batter for immediate use and stir some plain yogurt into that. It will add the tang to the batter that you need.

To Make Dosas

After greasing a griddle with some vegetable oil, heat until it radiates heat; then lower the temp. to medium. Drop a ladleful of batter onto the griddle and push it outward in concentric circles. At this point, you can drizzle the edges of the dosa with oil to help it unstick. Once the dosa has formed several tiny bubbles and looks dry at the edges, use a metal spatula to unstick it from the griddle and flip it over. It will cook very quickly on the second side. Slide it off the griddle and serve. The first couple may stick, rip, and otherwise bother you, but once you practice a few times you'll improve. Dosas can be thin and crispy or tender and pillowy, but either way they are fantastic.