Hey. Hey guys. Guess what? I am in the process of getting a Schlocktorate. Schlock-torate! Haha! This Schlocktorate entails Schlocktoral coursework, and eventually I will write a Schlocktoral dissertation and earn the title of Schlocktor of Philosophy!! Alana Murphy, Ph. Schl.!!! Hahaha... HAHA... HAhaha... ohhhhhh.....
Clearly I am very pleased with my dazzling new bit of schlocky wordplay; however, at the same time I am astonished that this particular, um, neologism did not occur to me until after my blog had been kicking around in cyberspace for over a YEAR. You would think that a website that is predicated on two basic conceits-- 1) my so-called life as a sort-of-aspiring academic, and 2) Schlock (the concept of, and also the linguistic possibilities of)-- would have long ago trotted out a glaringly obvious groaner pun that is capable of welding these two blogular motifs into a single verbal unit of stunning lameness. But as a doctoral/ schlocktoral (!) student, I sometimes miss the forest for the trees-- like, I get hung up on finding a way to prove that Composer X was familiar with Piece Y written by Composer Z and thus was possibly quoting Piece Y in his own Piece Double-Z (whoops, I ran out of letters of the alphabet-- again, forest, trees) and I get compulsive and scary-intense in proving my point and yet I remain blind and deaf and dumb to the inevitable reality that I will not be able to do this stuff for a living forever, that at some point my funding will be cut and I will be handed a shiny diploma and then be made to walk the real-world plank and I will cry out at the last second that no! wait! I have good critical thinking skills and I can read medieval musical notation, so clearly I can also learn to become a programmer or content-builder or business-model-mogul-guru for your cutting-edge innovative outside-the-box startup social media web-design whatsit wait please just give me a chance I have the skills I swear NOOOOOOooooo....!!
(distant splash)
Anyway. School. Schlockorate. Schlockademe. Yes. That stuff. I have not written substantially about my adventures in higher ed here for awhile, mostly because it unleashes torrents of cynicism and anxiety like the one that you just witnessed, and said torrents reek of bratty first-world entitlement because of course I am insanely lucky to even have the opportunity to study something so impractical and take a stab at making a career of it. But I've been experiencing a malaise-y restlessness lately, a sense of stagnation and apathy that is difficult to articulate, and if I do not take the time to articulate it, to adequately diagnose the situation, then I will never have hopes of fixing it, and what is a schlockspot for if not for airing one's grievances and seeking counsel in the densely-populated echo-chamber of the interwebs? So let me lounge theatrically on the cyber-couch for a little while, Dr. Internet: toss me a box of Kleenex, have your clipboard at the ready, and hear me out on this one.
Getting a doctorate in the humanities is a gamble; everyone knows that. At some point in a past quasi-mythical golden age that I've heard rumors of, it was all but guaranteed that if you did the necessary hard labor to get the diploma framed, the dissertation bound and disseminated to a handful of dusty university library shelves, then you could secure a respected position and attain your upper-middle-class comforts, yaddah yaddah. Not so anymore, duh. We schlocktoral folk now exist mostly to give those tenured overlords something to do-- they need a few bright-eyed young advisees, after all-- and to serve as adjunct-y labor for universities, teaching entry-level classes for a fraction of what the Real Professor people receive. Disclaimer: I adore teaching! This is not the issue; I was essentially put on this earth to pace around and be a professional know-it-all who cracks bad jokes that will only be answered by answered by deadening silence or by the light tapping sounds of students who are texting. It's great! I love teaching! It's my calling! The issue is that I might not get to continue doing it after my funding runs out and my appointment is over, based on the dismal realities of the market.
But anyway. That's not even the REAL problem. I had grasped the scope of the job situation long before I had even committed myself to the degree (remember that once upon a time I had planned to become a Schlocktor of Piano rather than of Schmoozicology, which would have been an equally impractical decision). I came into this field of study in full knowledge that it would be a long slog for a big old question mark. But I also came into it thinking, "I am going to be so friggin' INSPIRED all the time! Imma live the Life of the Mind so hard! I'll eat Critical Theory for breakfast, I'll take Schenker Showers in the evening, I'll hum tone-rows to myself on the subway, I will dream of the Well-Tempered Clavier every night. I'll become a bionic super-bastion of musical knowledge, a seer and a prophet, a fearless defender of our culture's greatest artifacts! Hell yeah schmoozicology!"
I wanted to attain this state. I still want to attain it. True inspiration is a giddy drug, but it is difficult to self-generate: it often requires an external motivating force, and, in the moment, in my program, such an effort is not being asked of me. See, I have GRAND AMBITIONS and INTELLECTUAL FERVOR, but I will only act on these impulses if some super-driven upper-echelon heavyweight person is kicking my ass and instilling the righteous fear of God in me. I cannot kick my own ass in the way that I would like it to be kicked. When I try to do so, my thought process will go something like this: "Hmmm, you know what you should do, Alana? You should really read through the Beethoven string quartets to learn them better and to practice your alto clef reading. Piano's right over there. Chop chop. But whoops, your laptop is on the table on your way to the piano, so maybe you should look up a Yelp review of the new small-plates restaurant that is opening in your neighborhood, and also you haven't blogged in awhile and your faithful public is salivating with anticipation, so maybe try to eke out a few sentences but don't forget to check Facebook because something might have happened..."
Do you see the impossibility that is me being left unto myself? I need a hard deadline, a despotic adviser, something, somebody to not cut me any slack. And then I would shine! I would suffer and stress and wail and freak, but then I would break through to the other side and emerge triumphant in a delirium, brimming with knowledge and passion and drive. I want somebody to be all like, "What? You mean you don't know every movement of the Mahler symphonies by heart, and you couldn't sit down and read them on the piano from score at tempo, right now? How could you ever expect to produce a polished argument about this repertoire if you know it only superficially? No, get thee to an iPod and/ or a practice room, load thineself up with information, you turd, and do Gustav proud." See, if someone were to ask me to do that, it would be so great, you guys! I would die in the process, of course, but at least I would die in the luscious embrace of some tortured extended tertian chord.
Instead, my post-post-post secondary education has sounded a little more like this lately: "Well, when a reader interacts with a text, said reading is very personal and so it becomes difficult to say where the text ends and the reader begins, because there is no text in text blah bah Adorno blah blah post-structural blah blah limits of language blah blah so really, just write about something that might not even have an answer! Just explore." And of course I'm like, "so you're saying I can BS this? Done and done!" and then somehow I end up blogging listlessly about this state of affairs during the time that I should be frantically consuming and processing information to appease the Unappeasable Gods of Schlockademe. Huh.
