midway . . .

I'm sitting in the terminal at Midway airport in Chicago on my way to Philadelphia. As promised, since I'm in the neighborhood, shout out to my peeps at U of C.

woes . . .

It seems that now is the time when the grad students are bemoaning the task of deciding upon a dissertation topic. Doug and Pete (and I think someone else as well, but who that was escapes me) have weighed in, so I thought I lend my voice to the matter. Yes, I realize that unlike these two, I'm at least two years away from having to decide, but I'm too much of long-range planner to wait that long . . .

Doug's major conundrum is that there's really nothing new to do in biblical studies . . . to be frank, that was one of the reasons I moved away from biblical stuff to Assyriology, Sumerian in particular. I've often missed the whole "fixed corpus" aspect of studying HB, but the big drawback is that modern academia has had a couple hundred years to pore over that relatively small data set. Assyriology, by way of contrast, is a much younger field, with far more texts, geography, history, etc. That means that, in theory, there's a lot more to do. Of course, since biblical studies is replete with secondary literature there is much to draw on (of course, that makes the bibliography review more difficult) . . . in Assyriology, depending on the topic, there might be very little previous research even in the general vicinity.

Pete's big gripe seems to be deciding upon something chic and sexy that will keep his interest for that long and tedious haul . . . or at least something that "would give me a niche and propel my research for the next decade or so." I think every graduate student hopes for that riveting topic that captivates both themselves and the entire field . . . the dissertation that scholars immediately demand be published and launches the student into a tenure-track position at a research institution.

I'm personally caught between wanting to do a topic that I personally would find interesting or at least novel or doing a topic that the field really needs. My advisor has suggested two topics to me, both of which are glaring holes in the field. One is strictly grammatical that would, frankly, be very tedious. The other deals with a set of texts that even my advisor (yes, the guy who does lexical texts) thinks they're really boring.

I think the thing about the dissertation is that (hopefully) it's not the end of your academic career . . . it's the beginning. In my case, if I can be a leading authority on even one of these minor points, no matter how "boring," that everyone would reference, then that may well be more important for my career than doing an extremely interesting (to me) linguistic topic that most Assyriologists would hate to read. Hopefully, doing the "more necessary" topic would allow me to have a long career during which I could do those linguistic studies.

For instance, Fumi Karahashi's dissertation "Sumerian Compound Verbs with Body-Part Terms" is essentially a catalog of these types of verbs, the texts and contexts in which they occur and the semantic range of these verbs . . . not at all a stimulating topic. However, it went a long way in helping us understand compound verbs and how their elements contribute to the semantics of the verb. I think every work since references her work. Since then, her work is highly linguistic in nature . . .

So . . . I've got about two years to decide which route will be better . . .

finally . . .

And now for my first month in the month of May . . . wow . . .

Why have I been out? In a phrase--finals week . . . er . . . weeks. For some reason or another I completely underestimated the closing weeks of this semester and found myself with quite a lot to do and not as much time as I would have liked . . . but then again, I suppose that characterizes everybody's end-of-term situations . . . or even week-to-week situations.

Late last month, I realized that I had misread a crucial clause in the academic catalog. I had been taking a linguistics course this semester as Pass-Fail. For some reason or another, I missed the clause that read essentially: "graduate students must attain a grade equivalent to a B- in order to pass." Let's just say that with a week or so left in the semester, I had not done B- work (that's the point of doing a course P/F, yeah? So one doesn't have to put in as much work as normal?) So I had one homework assignment and the final to turn it around . . . luckily I also had the benefit of the wonderful Curve.

On 11 May, I had my major project due for Akkadian on -ma and u in OB šumma clauses . . . I had been working on this since February or March, so it wasn't as if I wasn't prepared for writing. At any rate, come the weekend prior to the due date, I was around 97% finished with my research and analysis and chasing down a few last minute leads (which all turned into dead ends). I started writing Friday . . . on Sunday afternoon, I was thoroughly dissatisfied with my approach and scrapped it. The result: my first full all-nighter (which made the next day a bit of a wreck including the presentation of my research, a meeting, and the rest of my research day) and a paper that I think may have been my worst since high school . . . the worst part was that I failed in my initial goals and came away saying that the OB grammarians pretty well have the right of it.

Two days later, I had to write my Sumerian final and my German exam (for reading proficiency). Sumerian wasn't too bad, though I wasn't real satisfied with my performance there. However, I was thoroughly embarrassed by German. For some reason or another when I sat down to do that thing, everything I knew about German was gone (apparently supplanted by cuneiform . . . ). I've been reading scholarly German for about a year now without much of a hitch (or at least, I think so . . . maybe if someone knew how I was translating articles . . . ), but I'm pretty sure my committee thinks I'd never seen a German clause before . . .

I then had the aforementioned linguistics final . . . at 8AM on a Saturday morning!!! What the Sheol is that about??? Apart from that ungodly schedule, the actual writing of the exam wasn't bad at all.

Then I had to finish around 40 lines for my omen texts final due either Monday or Tuesday . . . I can't remember which.

I next had to finish up some data input for the prosopography project before we meet next week in Philly.

Oh, and I had my jury service today. When I called last night, I was put off to the afternoon group, so I still didn't know if I would have to serve. Thankfully when I called this morning, I'd been dismissed with obligation fulfilled.

So I'm finally caught up with everything just in time to start my summer projects. Thanks for letting me gripe for a bit. In the coming weeks, I'll (try to) talk about my summer plans, my tablet time at Penn/trip to NYC (visiting a good friend and his family), a couple reviews, perhaps a preview of my fall semester, and general normalcy for this blog.