Musings of a 21st-century researcher

I've been using Goodreads for a while now to keep track of the books that I read, and one of its features I find most useful is the new one that recommends books you might like based on ones you've already read/reviewed. I always get the best recs from friends who know my tastes, but Goodreads' system is still helpful when I'm not sure where to start.

I'm in the process of pulling together a bibliography for my MA essay (about the truly zany gothic novel Zofloya -- more on this later!) and finding myself wishing that there were a similar feature specific to the scholarly community. So often I scour books of literary criticism for their footnotes/works cited, looking to see who's quoting what and using that research to get a sense for the other books I should be reading on the topic. I've been using citation management software to keep track of the books I've read and cited on this project so far, but I wish there was a way to link that bibliography-in-progress to a database containing other scholars' bibliographies, past and present -- a database that would analyze everyone's input, look at the kinds of books/articles/authors that are often cited together, and provide me with recommendations for other works I might want to check out based on the ones that I'm currently reading.

Of course, there are drawbacks to this kind of recommendation system. Sometimes the best research projects result from pairing texts or fields of inquiry that haven't been previously considered in tandem. Sometimes I go to the library looking for a single specific book, only to find several others shelved nearby that are just as relevant to my project, but which I never would have known to look for in the library catalogue. But I can't help thinking that specialized database like this would still be helpful -- so helpful, in fact, that I have a niggling feeling it may already exist and I just haven't heard about it yet.

"Makdom and Fairnesse"

Maybe it's because I'm still in the honeymoon period, and I will shortly metamorphose into the expected image of the graduate student, deeply dissatisfied with academic life, but right now, despite the fifty pages of academic writing that I have to complete over the next fifteen days, I don't feel distressed. I'm frustrated that I'll spend my favorite time of the year writing papers instead of window-shopping on Fifth Avenue and ice-skating in Central Park, and I'm not looking forward to the long days spent in libraries, the late nights spent with eyes glued to the computer screen. But whenever I turn my gaze to the big picture, I can't help but grin a little bit. Being a grad student is hard -- but it's something I care about, deeply, something in which I'm still incredibly invested, and right now this makes all the difference.

Fifteen to twenty of those fifty pages will be spent writing about George Eliot's Middlemarch, which I finally finished reading earlier this semester, and which is one of the most intricate, thoughtful, complex, and beautiful novels I've ever read. It's not light reading, but it's been incredibly worth it for me, and I suspect part of this is because of the way some of its characters attempt to define work: not just as a job, not just something that pays the bills, but as a vocation, a calling, something you are instead of just something you do. Early in the novel, Eliot describes in detail the moment when one character, Lydgate, decides to become a doctor. On a rainy day, he wanders into the library, pulls an encyclopedia off of the shelf, and opens it to a random page to begin reading:

The page he opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame. [...] the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces blanked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge. From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual passion.

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's "makdom and her fairnesse," never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of "makdom and fairnesse" which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires?

Or to put Eliot's question another way: why is it that no one writes novels about how men and women come to fall in love with their jobs?

When my professor asked this question to the class of mixed undergrads and grad students, there was a kind of silence, punctuated by a few suppressed giggles and blank stares. How could you fall in love with your job? That's not what jobs are about. They're things you do because you need to pay bills and put food on the table, and even if they start out in love with your job that's not a sustainable attitude, sooner or later the system will grind it out of you, and then you'll come home after work and on weekends and do your best to forget your job ever happened.

It's a response that I've gotten before after guiltily admitting that I really do love my work. I think it's an understandable response in our cultural context. But it's one that I hope I'll never come to share.

I'll still complain, I'll still be upset and frustrated, and there will still be days when I just don't want to do all the work that needs to be done -- but I will never think it isn't somehow worth it. The study of literature and all that it entails is my vocation: for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer (let's be honest, it's for poorer), in sickness and in health.

Yes, I have fifty pages to write in the next fifteen days. But I also get paid to read books and talk about them with other interesting and interested people, and I can't imagine any career more worth wooing.