is there a noun form of "sophomoric"?

1.5 years of a phd

Last December, I wrote about waving to the guy who sets up the cafe on my way to the office. In the spring I started taking a different path to work some mornings and started seeing him less often; Poulet closed in the summer and I only ate there once, in its last week of business. 

I started boxing often enough that both the instructor and front desk person knew me by name, that I thought it would be worth it to commit to a membership, and the month immediately after I had to cancel because I couldn’t keep up. 

For a couple of months I established a routine of taking the 9am BART to catch the 10am intermediate class at Lines, lunch at the little cafe around the corner, then the Civic Center farmers’ market for a basket (or three) of giant winter strawberries. I did this often enough that the sandwich guy started recognizing me and my order — cappuccino and a sandwich, half for here and half to go — and the strawberry guy would pack my baskets with way more berries than he charged me for. I saved some for you, he said one week when he had almost sold out. As the months passed school got busy and the commute to the city, an hour there and an hour back, started feeling like too much to ask of myself.

strawberries on (old!) bart. insane that california can produce berries like this in february!!

Over the summer I spent more time taking classes at a studio closer to me, and briefly, I even considered what it would take to get back en pointe, which I haven’t even thought about for over ten years, and then I started traveling and got busy and didn’t dance for over a month. 

In some sense, this was a year of trying to stake out some structure in the flood of my days, only to be snatched up again and again by the nebulous Hydra of “work.” Really, it would be dishonest to deny how exhausting it can be, the ambient urgency of there always being something else to do. At dinner with two friends who are also poets, I tried explaining this headspace, like when I’m just barely keeping my head above water I find myself less generous with my mental energy. Where even if I can make the time in my calendar, I struggle to make the spaciousness to give other people’s art the attention they deserve, not to mention any creative growth of my own. I’ve found myself saving books I particularly care about being present for — Bluets and On Freedom, Stay True, Ruth Ozeki’s “new” book — “for later.” (Even writing this now my words are coming out more artless than I would like, it feels more difficult to tell you what exactly I want to say, like this kind of writing is something I’ve forgotten how to do.) 

In May I cried about work for the first time in my entire life; it certainly was not the last. Over the summer it felt like I was just doing a bad job at everything. Somehow I ended up with two paper-shaped objects in my first year, which by any measure is totally on track. And yet — in June I read Real Life and Filthy Animals, back to back, and in response I wrote several hundred words’ worth of research angst in a bad imitation of Brandon Taylor. I will spare the details here but it ends like this: 

if anyone quotes that ira glass thing back at me i might punch them, okay, i get it, my skill isn’t up to my taste, okay, okay, okay. 

And yet! 

I feel tremendously privileged to be here, to be paid primarily to think, and read, and write. As one of my friends and collaborators likes to say: once you understand something, it’s yours, and nobody can take it away from you. And right now, that’s my whole job! My job is to understand things (standing on the shore of a sea of stars, I wrote once in undergrad) — in other words, to better myself, and moreover, my advisors are here to help me do that. What a luxury for it to be not only okay but more or less expected for me to be “bad” at research now. Where else am I going to find that kind of job security? (In this economy?) That Ira Glass thing: isn’t that the whole point? 

(Is this just cope?)

Well it’s cope, and also me getting very lucky with not having funding concerns and, most importantly, with having advisors who get it, who let me spend a lot of my summer on Kernel and a lot of the remaining time on other writing and editing. In July/August I wrote an essay on “alignment,” which came out of a writing workshop that Ben ran over the summer instead of group meeting and before that, out of his encouragement to think about a “research project” that wasn’t a “paper.” 

A few days after we released it, my very kind friend John texted me to call it, in keeping with his typical effusiveness, a magnum opus. When I got the message I laughed then looked it up just to make sure it meant what I thought it meant — of course it’s not literal, but still — and then of course, with my little rat brain ego, I’ve been thinking about that comment recurrently since. I mean, sure, it’s not my life’s work, but something about the process was urgent and inevitable; over the months of thinking about the topic I started feeling so strongly about what I had to say that by the time it came to write, most of it just spilled out. A pressing thing to put out in the world.¹

Then I realized that for the last several years I’ve more or less written exactly one thing per year that’s felt like this. Last year, 2022, I was basically continuously drunk with possibility, and in that vein I wrote about visiting grad schools, and the future, and what it was like to finally get there;² I don’t really know what happened in 2019, but this was true too for 2021, 2020, and 2018. 

Just one per year: I guess that’s the rate at which I generate (and execute on) ideas, and that’s not a bad baseline at all. It’s freeing, really, because it means I can take my time; because it takes the pressure off of any individual project, because I’ll of course still be doing more than one thing a year; and because it’s happened more or less organically for five of the last six years, which means, in the right environment, I’m decently confident it will happen again. The mission for the rest of my PhD, then, is to figure out how to have at least a couple years where my, uh, opus annum (sorry) happens to be academically legible. Fewer, better papers. 

The problem, as I wrote in my notes app sometime this year, is that I find a lot of AI work deeply unromantic.³

In November I saw Jenny Odell give a talk on her new book, and someone in the audience asked about how she settled on the topic (time). It was an affliction, more than a choice, she said, a thorn in my side. Rilke says Only one rule applies: ‘A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.’ My friend Paula likes to describe research directions in terms of “honesty,” as in problems that feel true to one’s self. 

It’s true, I do find a lot of AI work deeply unromantic but maybe it’s not romance that I’m looking for. I think I’m starting to see what Paula means by honesty; I think I’m starting to feel afflictions and thorns and necessity and maybe, just maybe, I’m figuring out how to give shape to what they’re telling me. In fact I’ve found myself rushing through writing this because I want to get back to work, not because of the crush of oncoming deadlines but because I just really want to find out what happens next in the story of these projects. (That’s my job — !!!???.)

Henry Threadgill: What sets art and science apart from every other domain of human endeavor is that they are formalized realms for radical experimentation.

a cool tree in new orleans (dec 2023), tables of contents (apr 2022), greenwood cemetery (jun 2021)

A few weeks ago I was in New Orleans for NeurIPS and found myself with an extra day or so, which I spent walking along Magazine and drinking coffee and reading a paperback of Olga Dies Dreaming from Jasmine. 

At some point I reached the middle of the book where Olga’s describing her neighborhood and her commute, the chaos of the Atlantic Avenue station and what it’s like to enter Sunset Park and the difference between 5th and 7th, and suddenly I recognized this as the section that the author (Xochitl Gonzalez) had chosen to read at Tables of Contents a year and a half ago, this reading and dinner on the second floor of the Ace that cost $40, long skinny tables covered with butcher paper, and Jasmine and I drew on it with crayons, in my memory everything was shimmery and warm, winter outside, but maybe it was just the wine and the light — and I remember, during the reading, thinking about when I briefly lived in Brooklyn after graduation and when I’d change trains at Atlantic Ave, that whole summer feeling a little bit damp and a little bit warm, like pressure building before the release of a storm, and then the one time I went that far south and west in Brooklyn, on probably one of the first weekends I had in the city, going alone to the first live music I’d seen since the pandemic. Gil Shaham playing Beethoven at the Greenwood Cemetery; a jazz group opened and I cried, I slacked Zack to tell him that I finally understood the thing about jazz, the thing about jazz is that you have to remember it first and foremost as a performing art, and at that point I don’t even know if I had really decided, yet, to apply to grad school; I had no idea that nine months later I would be crying in the car and ten months later I’d be at this reading, remembering the concert, that less than two years later I’d be remembering it all again, sitting in PJ’s Coffee after the first conference of my PhD, and the word that came to mind as I finished my cafe au lait was superposition, all these overlapping versions of myself. (How much of getting older is just more of this?)

I have to laugh at myself, because while I was in New Orleans I felt for some reason compelled to go see all the shows, see all the parts of town, get particular keepsakes, New Orleans-specific art prints and books. I kept forgetting how many more times I’m probably going to be back, whether it’s for NeurIPS or ICML or some other conference. I guess I’m here now,  this is my work, and at least for now there’s no endpoint in sight, as long as I’m hanging out around this academic community I’ll be going back again and again, meeting older (younger) versions of myself over and over and over…. 

When I went back to boxing in November they still remembered me though it had been months. To quote a long-ago Strava comment from Jake: Nothing is ever so far gone! 

---

the year in art

(some of my favorites, some things that moved me “in a way that research [n]ever will”)

• Reading theme of the year is unhinged women (Either/Or, The Possession, August Blue, Y/N) and artists (The Red Arrow, all of Brandon Taylor but especially Real Life and Filthy Animals, Easily Slip Into Another World).

• Hilary Hahn, by myself in a box, collective exhales between movements, and once — in this audience that definitely knew better — a quick sizzle of applause, a release, what must have been an involuntary response. This is what they mean when they talk about texture, this is what they mean when they say a tone that sparkles. 

• Parsons at the Joyce, again, in the $10 partial-view first-row seats, again, as brilliant as last time except now I also got to see Kevin see it for the first time. 

• English at Berkeley Rep with Deb, warming me up to theater as a medium. 

• Ink. Space. Time. by Wang Dongling, The Heong Gallery at Downing College. I could have spent hours there, physical evidence of time passing, of someone having tried to bend it into a certain shape. 

  

  and the gallery was empty

• The Oakland screening of Misty Copeland’s Flower, a program of local dancers, everyone dressed up and the Paramount full, an exquisite corpse (but what isn’t), high schoolers storming the stage, what a lovely rare thing to put your heart into a work and to have people pay attention. Is it bad that I was touched more by the production of it all — the fact of all these bodies coming together to share their time — than the performances or the film themselves? 

• A truly awful play about “tech ethics” (with Kevin and John) which will remain unnamed because I think it’s important to support local artists, and to allow people to try things and be bad, but still. This was so bad that it, horseshoe-theory style, made the list.

• Tick Tick Boom (with Kevin and Alex), again, what a lovely rare thing…. the if u even care meme is so potent because, honestly, mostly people don’t, the creative life is to put something out that is your entire world only to be met mostly by indifference, and then to just repeat that until — if you’re lucky — it ends. 

1. I said something similar about Kernel 3 pieces. I really believe this is what makes the best work…

2. I know this is three things but I think of them as a series, don’t worry about it…

3. It’s a perennial problem, I guess; last year I wrote that “intellectually unserious” things, which live beyond the realm of work, move me in a way I sometimes wonder if research ever will. Which is not to say that they’re actually intellectually unserious, merely that they concern ideas and experiences that (CS, but also probably most other) academia would find wholly illegible.