The Golden State

Meredith endlessly counsels me to go back and finish. “You’re so smart,” she says. “You need to get a Ph.D.,” oblivious to the universe of condescension that lurks behind this formula. In my secret heart I am susceptible to the formula too, but since working at the Institute has amply illustrated the precarious shitshow that is a life of the mind in 2015 I can always talk myself out of it. The only time I think it’s not a bad idea is when something comes along like THE CONFERENCE as Hugo calls it when he e-mails me about it, and people I’ve never met are e-mailing me lists of demands regarding how to arrange the program, who will give the opening remarks and who will give the lunchtime keynote and who will introduce the person giving the evening keynote and who will be the panel chairs. Apart from the recent death and maiming THE CONFERENCE is the thing that is most intolerable about the Institute. It’s a big anniversary spectacular deal which has been looming for two years now and which I had been assured I wouldn’t need to take too great a hand in the execution of, but like so many things in the University it acquired so many cosponsors demonstrating so many exemplary strains of interdisciplinary collaboration that no one was actually tasked with planning it. Every few months in a desultory way someone would ask whether I had found a venue, or created a budget, or made the arrangements for the speakers and sooner or later it was clear I better make it my business to do these things.

The more education you have the more removed you are from the ineluctable yawning core of work at the University, which is not in fact teaching but is the filling out and submission and resubmission of forms, the creation of scheduling Doodles, the collection of receipts and the phoning of caterers, the issuing of letters and the ordering of supplies and the tallying of points in poorly formatted spreadsheets. The secret work of us administrators—of everyone at the University—is to put as much distance between ourselves and this yawning core as possible, to be the thing rather than proximal to the thing. Your relative position in the hierarchy will dictate how much Doodling will be your responsibility, how many humiliating interactions with incensed French experts whose taxi got lost on the way to the lecture hall.

I guess I could have kept up with the Ph.D. and also married Engin, but I wasn’t an optimal Ph.D. student to begin with. Doctorates require specialization, specificity, and all I ever wanted was to speak Turkish perfectly, to speak Arabic perfectly, to speak Persian perfectly, to understand everything, to go everywhere. Turkic verbs and Persian poetry; religion and migration; art and civilization and change. But choosing religion means learning classical Arabic and hours of reading hadith and hadith interpretation and counterinterpretation and choosing migration means counting surnames in dusty archives and making GIS maps and choosing change means picking one very specific thing like Mongol legal practice and establishing how it evolved after they invented postage stamps or whatnot, and choosing language means linguistics and all those god-awful equations and formulas on the white board. I wanted to study the world-altering beauty of Muslim civilizations, but that’s not a topic, it’s an enthusiasm, it’s a fetish for rug-collecting Berkeley-dwellers. But I made a show of choosing and thus have approximately one-third of a Ph.D. in Turkish Republican literature, clearly a mistake since it has taken me three years to not even finish for example a seminal work by Sait Faik Abasıyanık on the BART train.

In a sense working at the Institute is perfect for me, since now I can just listen to all the people who did choose and presumably weave them into some tattered tapestry of erudition. But then I have to reimburse them for their taxis to and from the airport and write effusive introductions about them for Hugo to deliver.