How to be a Successful Doctoral Student During the Holiday Season

Don’t spend time with the wife and the kid, just read. Start with bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, then graduate to Rothenberg’s White Privilege, put a bow on it all with Anzaldua’s Borderlands. Wonder about the professor who assigned the books prior to the start of the Spring semester, but don’t question her. Look forward to doing the same to your own students in four years. Take short breaths, short baths, short bites — more time to read. Don’t get dragged into your daughter’s playroom to play ‘kitchen’ because you might enjoy it and get caught up and forget about all you have to do. Show your daughter your books without pictures and she’ll leave you alone. Throw on The Princess and the Frog DVD and she won’t even know you’re there. Sigh for a nanosecond, not too long. Hit the books again.

On the other hand, you could forget all that shit. Go ahead, sit indian-style in the playroom and swallow some imaginary tea. The books’ll be there. But your daughter at this age and her smile with that gap between her teeth might not.

Oh, and one last thing: Before you begin your New Year’s rollick, here’s this week’s recommended reading.

– I rented a truck to drive over my neighbor. All of this because he’d taken a backhoe to my once beautiful lawn. I got the last truck the rental place had. It was a great lumbering beast. On the way home I stopped at a bar specializing in darts and arm wrestling and got blind drunk. Navigating the truck was difficult but I felt invincible. – Andersen Prunty in The Dream People

– She lets herself in and turns on the lights. The bookcase in the center separates the living room and the bedroom. Bill’s a lump on the waterbed, which takes up every last inch of the room. She has to crawl along the edge of it to get to the bathroom door. Bill rises and falls on a wave. – Kathy Fish in Frigg

– When I’d come here three years ago, I’d been fascinated by milk sold unrefrigerated in boxes, and eggs sold unrefrigerated in clear plastic bags. The unpasteurized cheeses in the market, offered by the señoras from the campo, attracted me as well, until I got violent stomach cramps from eating them. Doña Teresa’s donkeys also captivated me, especially the long, thick eyelashes of their young. – Teresa Nicholas in SOL: English Writing in Mexico

– If I keep moving, I won’t be hacked. He’ll only hack me if I’m still as a cow. So I hop from room to room, but there is nothing and there is no one. The cows moo outside like stationary ghosts, haunting the yard with piles. – Casey Hannan in Staccato Fiction

– Mother is shameless, flaunting her breasts with their dark nipples, their aureoles the color of dried blood, feeding the legion babies in public. She suckles them then orders them to march. And though they have barely been able to crawl, they totter up onto soft, plump legs and waddle off, goose-stepping as best they can, burbling and cooing, dribbling and plopping into shreds that pass for diapers. Mother salutes as they toddle past, a ragged infant phalanx among other, equally ragged infant phalanxes, an army of tender hoplites sucking their thumbs. – Patricia Eakins in Big City Lit