Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

We at the Institute are nesting dolls: Karen the admin assistant who has no M.A., then me who has an M.A. but dropped out of the Ph.D., then Meredith with her Ph.D., with Hugo encircling us all. Meredith is sensitive to slights from Hugo; I am sensitive to slights from Meredith and Hugo; Karen is sensitive to slights from everyone. The hierarchy is all we have. We are all publicly rather flirtatious with Hugo, privately disdainful, and occasionally afraid. I have spent so much time with these people that I can’t tell whether I hate them or whether I can’t live without them.

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.

Reflexively I navigate to the Purchasing Portal to see whether my $483 in miscellaneous catering expenses has been reimbursed. Half of them have gone through, although this only means they have successfully navigated the labyrinth of approvals associated with the original submittal. This means that our financial analyst looked at the fund number and confirmed that the Al-Ihsan Foundation would theoretically countenance the expenditure of endowment income on twenty-four donuts two meze platters and two coffee cambros to enliven a workshop on Islam: Theme and Variation, but that no one has actually released the money to pay me. I remember that I had to pay for extra daycare for that workshop for which I will not of course be reimbursed. I also remember that a man named Todd spent most of the allotted time talking about Yarsanism, which as far as I can tell has to do with Islam in only the most arcane and theoretical sense, and that Faisal from Religious Studies spent the rest of the time talking about Islamophobia, which is more of a unifying Islamic experience than a variety of it, and that Hugo then chided me mercilessly for letting things get off track. Hugo is of course notoriously and militantly irreligious, if not actually Islamophobic himself, but he has an Arab surname and family origin which was presumably what impelled the Vice Provost to appoint him director of the Institute, a post highly sought by many faculty members due to endowments that provide over 300K in no-strings-attached funds annually, most of it from Saudi entities with no mailing address. In fact currently none of the staff of the Institute for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations is a Muslim. Not me, not Meredith, not Karen, not injured Maryam, and not the other work-study, a poli-sci-majoring redhead from San Diego whom we think Hugo personally interfered in the hiring process to select over Meredith’s and my preferred and head-scarfed applicant from Senegal because he found her sexually compelling. He can do this because we live in a lawless shadowland, one of the hundreds of Institutes and Centers and Programs and Initiatives that have blindly replicated themselves over the body of the University so that it is like a once-vigorous person covered with tumors that behave exactly as they please.

I look at my remaining e-mails which are various things dealing with THE CONFERENCE. I already know that the end result of all these e-mails will be great personal frustration and the expenditure of $20,000 of endowment funds in direct costs and untold taxpayer dollars in person-hours. We will be left with a series of badly lit recordings wherein people either (a) deliberately ignore the exhortation not to read prepared papers and drone on at length from a journal article they are polishing up (b) talk in extreme generalities about things that any fool could read about online or (c) deliver a cogent and accessible statement on the topic at hand based upon a vast body of knowledge they have amassed in the course of their research. The latter people are typically about to be denied tenure or are in the middle of negotiations with another university and will be somewhere else within the year. The taxpayers are rarely in evidence at these events, although they are all ostensibly free and open to the public.

There is no e-mail about Ellery, but I know the voice mail from the Office of Risk Management is still sitting inside my office phone like an evil charm. I smoke one more cigarette and then I feel sick and then I go back inside and lie down on the couch. With the eight books for Honey I brought no book for myself, the TV has five channels, I don’t have my Turkish notebook or poor Sait Faik, I have literally nothing to do except mother my child who, thank god, is still in her Pack ’n Play giving me a respite from this obligation. I am thinking about how stupid I am and wondering when Honey is going to wake up and suddenly I am myself waking with a start, my hand over my face and the skin baking a little in the sun.