Why I Am a Doctor Who Fan

People sometimes ask me why I think Doctor Who is so great. Since its 50th anniversary is this Saturday, I thought I'd take some time to talk about what Doctor Who means to me.

First, a bit of personal history. I grew up watching Doctor Who. KUED 7 used to air it late on Saturday nights. I remember sneaking out of bed, peeking around the hallway corner to watch it when my parents thought I was asleep. Later, they let my brothers and me stay up to watch it with them, as long as we took our baths in time. Peter Davison was my first Doctor. When my dad got a computer with a 14.4k modem in the early 90's, I joined rec.arts.drwho on Usenet, and #drwho on IRC. I still remember how to draw a Tardis using only ASCII characters:

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I chatted with Doctor Who fans around the world--there was nobody else I knew outside my family who even knew what Doctor Who was. This was during the dry years after 1989, when there was no new Doctor Who on television, and probably never would be. I witnessed (and sometimes joined) several canon wars, the endless debates between "frocks" and "guns" over which serials were the best, and whether the fact that the show was canceled before the Cartmel Masterplan could be realized was a blessing or a curse (a blessing, by the way--unequivocally). Jon Blum and Paul Cornell once complimented me on a bit of fanfic I wrote as a teenager, which sadly I have since lost. I got trolled by the infamous David Yadallee. I collected many of the Virgin New Adventures during the long years, and somewhere along the way, I also acquired the 25th Anniversary commemorative coffee table book (which I pored over endlessly), a Dalek T-shirt, a Cyberman and a K-9 poster, a Dapol Dalek, and a ceramic police box coin bank that my mom found at a thrift store.

I was over the moon when the first news of the Fox/BBC 1996 TV Movie broke, angsted with my fellow fans online over every dreadful production rumor (and they were truly, truly dreadful--complain all you want about how awful the TVM was; be grateful. It could have been so, so much worse), cheered when I watched it, bought a t-shirt with McGann's face superimposed over the Seal of Rassilon, and debated endlessly about just how terrible the movie was, and why--except for Paul McGann of course, and the new orchestral arrangement of the theme song. They were perfect. I was a founding member of the Paul McGann Estrogen Brigade. And I was, to tell the truth, a little sad, but mostly relieved when Fox didn't pick up the option for a series based on the movie, even though it certainly meant that Doctor Who was gone for good.

Nearly a decade crawled past, the internet evolved, Usenet became a quiet backwater and IRC just kind of faded away--or anyway I faded from them. I grew tired of retreading endless fan debates, I drifted away from the online fan community, but I still watched and re-watched my collection of VHS tapes, and re-read my books, and made up fanfic in my head. And then in 2005, a miracle happened. The BBC brought Doctor Who back. Months before it got picked up by the Sci-Fi channel, a friend from the UK sent my family a copy of "Rose" recorded off his telly. Those of us still living at home at the time huddled around my brother's little 17" CRT monitor to witness the rebirth. The moment the familiar theme began, I remember jumping out of my chair (I knocked my knee against the desk in my excitement), cheering and dancing gleefully with my mom. We all felt it: Doctor Who was back to stay, as it was meant to be--almost as if it had never been gone at all. I still get a thrill every time the opening credits roll. I just can't believe how lucky I am to really be seeing new episodes of Doctor Who.

It's surreal to walk into a Barnes & Noble and see Doctor Who merchandise on the shelves. If I mention Doctor Who in company these days, I'm as likely to be met with broad smiles of fellow feeling as I am with blank stares or sneers. Yesterday, I passed a student on campus wearing a 10th Doctor coat. I heard there was a Dalek on campus during Homecoming this year. I know some people dislike all the new series' popularity and kitschy merchandise. There's some nostalgia for the old days when only the True Fans were in on the secret. I'm not one of those people. Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather that Doctor Who be good than popular. But as long as it's still good (and it is so very, very good!), popularity can only be a bonus. And even though a lot of the merchandise is frankly rubbish--look, when I was a kid, my brothers and I used a broken tire pressure gauge for a sonic screwdriver. Now I've got two proper toy Sonics--TWO! And the 11-year-old me could not be more thrilled.

But the fact that Doctor Who was such a massive part of my childhood and adolescence doesn't explain why it's so popular all over the world now. It doesn't explain what's so great about the show itself. Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, it's about the Doctor. It's about the kind of being he is, the kind of life he exemplifies. And it's about exuberant, unabashed joy.

Let me explain. In case you didn't know, the Doctor is an 1100-ish year-old Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. He has two hearts, and when his body gets worn out by illness or injury, he doesn't die; he regenerates. He's been travelling through time and space in a stolen ship (called the Tardis) for about 900 years, and in that time he's seen a lot, lost a lot, and saved the universe a lot. Yet despite all he's seen, and all the pain he's experienced, his default reaction to every new encounter is openness, curiosity, and wide-eyed wonder. He's incredibly clever, and always eager to learn something new. He's incredibly powerful, but also deeply fallible, and despite the darkness lurking inside him, he chooses to be a good man. That's why he calls himself the Doctor--a name that means healer, and wise man. That name he chose, he told Clara, was a promise he made to himself. It's an ethos the show itself embraces. As Craig Ferguson put it, "It's all about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism."

Doctor Who, the show, has not always been great. At times it's been very, very bad. But at its best, there's simply nothing better. It's a show that can go anywhere, do nearly anything (and nearly has). It's got all my favorite things--cleverness and silliness, historical drama and space adventure, robots and monsters, heroism and friendship. And that beautiful blue box that's bigger on the inside. How could I not love it? Doctor Who is hugely ambitious but not at all pretentious. Even the embarrassing episodes always make me smile. Doctor Who reminds me that although the universe might sometimes be a terrifying place, it's also beautiful and wonderful and full of goodness, and that the wonder is worth the monsters.

Guilt-free Writing Time

This update is a little late because I was in Utah over the weekend celebrating my grandmother's 90th birthday. Fortunately, I was able to use my tablet to keep to my writing schedule while riding in the car on the way there and back. Without a WiFi connection, I couldn't access many of my notes, drafts, and reference articles, because they're all stored on Dropbox and apparently it didn't all sync to my tablet because I haven't been using my tablet nearly as much since I finally got a smartphone. That made it a little harder to put my writing time to as good a use as I would have liked, but I still wrote something. This potential problem with my writing infrastructure will have to be addressed in the near future.

The other thing I had to deal with last week was guilt-induced writer's block. See, I had this pile of student papers to grade, and I should have had them finished by the end of the previous week. So on Monday morning when I was trying to write, all I could think about was those papers that I still needed to grade. After 45 minutes of non-productivity, I gave into the guilt and went back to grading. The same thing happened Tuesday afternoon. On Wednesday morning, however, although I still wasn't done grading (it was a particularly arduous grading process for various reasons), as I sat down at my computer, my internal voice was telling me "I have to write now, even though the grading isn't done."

That "I have to write now" didn't feel good at all. Then it occurred to me that no, I don't have to write during my writing time--or any time, actually. But the whole point of having writing time set aside is that it means I get to write then, totally guilt-free, no matter what else I have to do that day, or that week, because writing time is writing time. Not grading time. Not answering frantic student emails time. Not helping friends' daughters with their Language Arts homework over the phone time. All that other stuff is what the rest of my time is for.

For two hours a day, I get to work on my own writing, without worrying about anything else. Writing time is guilt-free writing time. 

That was a tremendous realization for me. It probably shouldn't have been, but I'm just thick like that sometimes. The other thing that I had to do this past week was turn off literally every notification I could find on my computer, my tablet, and my smart phone. Notifications are my enemy. They make me feel bad about the things I'm not paying attention to right now, as opposed to being fully engaged with what I am doing right now.

Anyway, I'm still well behind schedule, but I'm still making progress. I've reached a point where I need to go back and re-read some Kenneth Burke, to clarify my definition of his comic frame and figure out how it maps onto the concepts of techne and phronesis. Reading Burke is fun, in the same way that opening clamshell packaging is fun. It's ridiculously hard but the goods inside are usually worth the challenge.

In other news, my housemate Stephanie got left behind this weekend as the rest of us were traveling. Apparently, she got a little lonely, and couldn't stand to wait any longer to buy my Christmas present. But she got attached to him herself over the weekend, so we're going to have joint custody of this beautiful little guy (I can't blame her. He's so relaxing to watch). He needs a name. Right now I'm thinking about Kazran, Rory, or Jim the Fish.

Episteme, Techne, Phronesis (AcWriMo Update)

Having a schedule of specific times for writing every day is helping, though I missed Tuesday entirely, had to bump my writing time to later in the day on Monday because of a doctor's appointment, and seriously overslept on Friday. It is challenging to change from a habit of fitting my writing time around everything else in my life, to fitting everything else around my writing time. Still, other than Tuesday I did spend at least 2 hours writing, or doing writing-related reading every day this week, and as a result I have written 1300 more words for my first portfolio paper--not even remotely close to my goal, but progress nonetheless. I have also written about 3700 words of annotations for the books and articles I read this week. The balance of writing should really have been be the other way around, but at least my extensive annotations will help me when it comes time to study for my comprehensive exams.

One of the things I'm trying to do with my revision is to construct a new theoretical framework from which to make sense of my data, and in fact to make new sense of the entire project. When I say "make new sense," I mean that it already makes a kind of sense. I know what happened, and even a good deal about the chain of cause and effect that led to the point I'm at now--the point of having a mess of data that I need to write something meaningful about. I'm not exaggerating when I say mess, by the way. It's such a mess that I've spent the better part of the past five months in a cyclical pattern of anger, anxiety, and avoidance over what to do with it. This, my colleagues and advisor assure me, is not uncommon and does not mean I am a total failure as a researcher. So they say.

To make new sense of my research means to go from merely knowing what happened, to constructing particular meaning from it, meaning that will be recognized as meaningful by the community of scholars I'm trying to join. To do that, I needed a theory, grounded in the discipline, which would not only help me interpret the data but also the ultimately quite haphazard method by which it was obtained. To find it, I went all the way back to Aristotle, mainly by way of Janet Atwill and Joseph Dunne.

The ancient Greeks loved knowledge, and they loved to classify and systematize absolutely everything--including knowledge itself. They recognized, and had words for, many kinds of knowledge: nous meant first principles, which must be apprehended since they cannot be derived from observation or logic; episteme, or theoretical knowledge, is logically demonstrable truth; sophia is the power of both apprehending first principles and demonstrating theoretical knowledge; phronesis is practical knowledge, or the virtue of wise action; and techne is productive knowledge--that is, the power of rational creation, or of knowing how to intervene in specific cases in order to bring about a desired end. Whereas episteme is universal, techne and phronesis are particular, and whereas phronesis constitutes a mode of being, techne is about accomplishing specific ends. Though there is some ambiguity about the boundaries (and even the legitimacy) of some of these definitions of knowledge, the ancient Greeks as well as modern theorists generally agree that rhetoric is a type of techne. Atwill, however, gives an account of rhetoric that seems closer to phronesis. Even Dunne admits that the distinction between the two is ambiguous; his whole book is a project of teasing out the difference.

Anyway, the problem I had with my portfolio paper is that I wanted my research project to yield episteme. I wanted to be able to construct a rational account connecting my data to universal principles as unambiguously as possible. It couldn't possibly have worked--not only because I am such an amateur when it comes to designing and conducting such a study, but because the subject itself is one of particulars and not of universals. What I need--and what I ought to be seeking, is not theoretical but practical or productive knowledge, a rational but highly flexible way to deal with inherently messy and largely uncontrollable situations, ideally in order to increase the likelihood of bringing about specific ends. In order to be a techne, that way has to be teachable: it can't just work once, or only for me. As Charles Bazerman explains, "We consider theories successful when we do better with their guidance than without, when we accomplish more of what we wish when following their accounts than when following any or no other account. When considered this way, theories can be seen as heuristics for action" (103). Really though, I'm not sure that what I have--an application of Kenneth Burke's "comic frame"--amounts to a techne, or is more a type of phronesis. In any case such a heuristic would not only help me make sense of the data at hand but also make sense of the larger process of doing this research and writing project--and, I hope, future projects.

If you've actually read this far, congratulations! You're a giant nerd. Here's a cookie. 

...What's that? Aristotle ate your cookie! What a jerk. No, no, it totally wasn't me. It was Aristotle. Check out that guilty look on his face! Well, you know what they say about gifs bearing Greeks.

Source of images: Wikimedia commons.

AcWriMo Pledge

I started this blog a year ago as part of DigiWriMo, and although I failed miserably at DigiWriMo, I'm still enjoying blogging, albeit sporadically. But I'm not one to give up on a goal just because I messed it up last time. At the moment what I really need is to make some giant strides in my academic writing, so instead of doing DigiWriMo, I'm making a commitment for AcWriMo--Academic Writing Month.

As part of my PhD program, I have to create a portfolio of two "publishable," article-length research papers related to my area of primary study. I have (and have had for several months now) a beast of a draft of the first one that needs significant revision--a whole new introduction, some pretty major structural as well as content revision of the body, and a new conclusion. The other exists so far only as a somewhat nebulous web of ideas in my head, plus a few scattered notes about potential sources.

I'm giving myself eight days to revise the existing draft, then a maximum of twelve days to read and annotate sources for the second paper before I start drafting it. By the end of the month I'll have at least a first draft of that one. Since you can't write anything out of thin air, focused reading counts toward my writing goal. One of the biggest obstacles to my writing so far has been the tendency of other priorities to intrude on my writing time; if I'm going to be successful, I'm going to have to be a lot more rigid about my writing schedule--I'm blocking out the time in my calendar just like I would a class or a meeting. I'll spend at least two hours every day (excluding Sundays) working on these two papers: 9-11am Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays, and 3-5 Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturdays.

Once a week, on Saturdays, I'll post status updates on this blog. I'll talk about where I am in the writing process and anything interesting, frustrating, or cool that's come up in my reading or writing that week. Of course that won't be the only thing I'll have to blog about. I just got another round of student papers to grade, so Jock the TA Octopus might make another appearance. And the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who is coming up this month (which reminds me--I'm deciding now to take a break from my writing schedule on November 23rd because it would conflict with my Doctor Who party; I'll work an extra hour on Friday and Monday each instead).

So, that's my plan: Two papers. Two hours a day. One month of writing like there's no December. 

image source: https://society6.com/DanLebrun/Doctor-who-Geronimo_Print