Rant, rant away

Be forewarned.  This is another school-specific rant that will likely go on far too long and mean nothing to you unless you're affiliated with DU.  By the end of this, you may wish you had these few minutes back.  Read at your own risk.  

I'm generally feeling better, getting things mostly done, and maintaining during this chaotic time.  To keep up this warm little center, I have been eschewing all discussions of departmental politics and avoiding the pretentious newbies of whom I have so highly spoken of late.  There are a couple of the first-years who aren't bad, but I have yet to officially connect with even these folk, and the bulk of them are, well, annoying as fuck to deal with.  Here's an example:

Laura and I have to - for reasons I won't dwell upon here and would require a lengthy tangent - take this two-hour teaching seminar designed for the first-year students.  I actually rather like the experience of talking about teaching, particularly with the professor of this course.  However, I am sick to death of these snotty newbies who think they have not only the right, but the authority to walk into a classroom and say ridiculous, erroneous, or even sophomoric statements and take up the time of the rest of us without a bat of an eyelash of guilt or humility.  This woman in last night's class is an insufferable fool, who, it seems, honestly feels entitled to talk twice as long as anyone else, continue her conversation for 20 minutes past the end of class, and fully expects all of us to care.  But I'm ahead of myself; let me tell you my history with her thus far.

Newbies were milling about the copy room when Laura went in to use the copier; one of them was The Shrew (yes, as in Taming of, which will soon become apparent) and they looked at Laura and asked "are you a graduate student?" with the same superiority usually reserved only for high school head cheerleaders who have previously never acknowledged so much as your existence in the world.  When Laura replied that she was a third year, the tone naturally changed, but I am positively incensed across the board at the lack of their acknowledgment of hierarchical deference.  These are the same people who call professors by their first names without waiting to be told to do so; when you don't know a prof, you always address him/her as "Dr." until they tell you not to.  People in the doctoral program ahead of you deserve at least minimal respect for what they've suffered to date, just as you will expect the same deference when you reach ABD status.  That's just how manners work.  

At any rate, one of the newbies - who looks too much like our current megalomaniac chair of the department for me to ever possibly like her, despite the fact this is not her fault - asks Laura if she knows me.  The Shrew was trying to "find me" because I am currently the only graduate student in the Renaissance/Early Modern period, which is a position I've relished a bit because it means I get the independent attention I need.  Surprising as this sounds, I'm not much of a "team player" and rather enjoy doing exactly whatever the hell I want to without dealing with others.  Ha.  Shrew is also a "Renaissance person" who "studied under a prominent Shakespeare scholar, BUT she's not JUST a Shakespearean."  Guh.  Before I even met her, she annoyed me.  Turns out, she's in the newbies class on Thursday nights, and missed the first week; the second week, she looks across the room at me, over the top of her glasses in that affected way and says, "I don't know you."  I replied, without even looking up from my computer, "no; you don't."  Aren't these people scholars of the ENGLISH LANGUAGE?  This is what passes for manners of speech?  

So before this week's class, Laura and I had come from the gym as usual (and as an odd kind of protest, we refuse to shower after or even change our clothes) and were eating dinner, when Shrew comes and sits with us, stares, says nothing, and then gets up to move.  ????  A few minutes later in class, I realize just how perfectly irritating this woman is - she is certain that all of her answers are correct, she appears sure that each and every thing she says is valid and worthy of attention, and mostly, she talks slowly so it takes even longer to listen to her.  I should add that I don't normally mind the fellow student who dominates a conversation as long as it's interesting or insightful.  It was also her week to "present" and the object of the game is to provide a teaching assignment that incorporates theory for the undergraduate without it being Theory.  I should also add here that during my presentation two weeks before, she asked me only one question and it was ridiculously stupid and short-sighted.  I see now why; she admits to having never taught before (really? at the doctoral level and at her age?), and her presentation wasn't a presentation at all.  It was a forty-minute, wandering, self-involved story about her getting to take seminars at Oxford and how she published part of her master's thesis.  BFD, I say, and it's pretty arrogant in a room full of scholars who have been teaching for years, know their shit, and can smell a pile of it at three paces.

The class ends at 7:50.  She had spoken without so much as a breath or coherent thought or POINT until 8:05, when her assessments of Renaissance drama were so fucking wrong and uninformed that I had to interject.  I don't think of myself as being openly contentious in the classroom, but there are certain things I cannot abide, and people who dare to speak of things they know nothing of as if they do must be interrupted at the very least.  I admit that I'm not much for, say, American literature, and while I will sit in a class and talk about Henry James, I would never dare go beyond that which I am sure about in a room full of people whose specialty is James.  I am not afraid to admit to what I do not know, but dammitall, I fucking know my Ren drama and I'll be fucked silly if I'm going to sit there and listen to her just be WRONG fifteen minutes past the time I thought I'd be on my way home.  She claims to have "invented" her own theory - with those prestigious colleagues at OXFORD - about "dissidence" in Shakespeare, and then some damn thing about Catholics and Jews.  Whatever.  George Bernard Shaw did the same thing over a hundred years ago.  She talks of The Merchant of Venice as "anti-semitic" and says that The Jew of Malta isn't.  If you know anything about either of these plays, you know that it's pure shit and she hasn't a clue about any of it.  When she asked me about my dissertation work and I started to explain it, I got no further than two words, one of which was 'pamphlet' and she was off talking about herself and this book I should read about the Catholic/Protestant rift in England.  Huh?  I corrected her that my dissertation had nothing at all to do with that, but I had a digital side project about the debate over The Book of Common Prayer and that many people completely miss the point of said rift.  She didn't even register that I had spoken at all.  Shrew.

When I asked her in class what makes what she's saying any different than New Historicism, she went on some inexplicable tangent about Stephen Greenblatt and how his name is Jewish, and this thing she read that he wrote about Hamlet.  When I pointed out to her that everything she was hinging her "argument" upon is not only nothing new, but also that she had overlooked the other major playwrights of the period (who, incidentally, were all doing the same thing), she nodded as if she knew what I was talking about but clearly she didn't.  She is one of those scholars who studies only in a vacuum, is unaware that things were written before Shakespeare, clearly doesn't know shit about the medieval period (which you pretty much have to know to do Ren lit), and isn't willing to admit she doesn't know.  She is one of those people who would never see the value in reading V for Vendetta alongside Macbeth and Faust.  I would have brought this up to her, but no way am I giving this woman my good ideas.  No way is she latching onto me to listen to her, either.  I tried to be nice in correcting her fallacies of comprehension, but she kept putting me on the spot, literally calling on me, and finally I just told her in the nicest way possible that I thought her idea wouldn't work.  But what do I know?  I'm only two years ahead of her, have way more experience in the classroom, am more well-read, probably better published, and have a mind of my own (versus the parroting of folks who thought about this before me).  Guh.

And this, friends, is what I hate about graduate school.  I can't wait for my parole hearing - er, graduation.