Dear Editors at The Unsafe Journal,
I have been visiting the library twice a day for the past week to check my inbox for a response from your team.1 Each visit has ended in disappointment, until this morning’s visit, when my measly, semi-sentient brain was at long last illumined by the bright idea to visit your website. LO, what did I find there? My letter, my strictly private, clearly confidential, obviously unpublishable letter, nevertheless published on the front page!
PLEASE TAKE IT DOWN IMMEDIATELY UPON RECEIPT OF THIS EMAIL.
Neither did your little “illustration” of my circumstance escape my attention: very funny. I suppose this is your journal’s interpretation of the term “peer review”? The joke’s on you, in any case, as the drawing is terrible.
You understand, no doubt, that this is extremely unpleasant for me. My one saving grace might be the scarcity of your readership. Hopefully no one who matters has seen it yet – by which I mean the experts in my field. Not that any of them speak to me, but if they were to read that letter, it would certainly seal the deal now and forever. They’d cast me into hellfire without so much as a handshake.
At the very least I know you are willing to publish my work – any of it, it appears. Now that I think of it, it hardly matters what you publish, as texts in academia are not so much read as they are controlled for the cardinal sin and chief virtue of the Ivory Tower: Plagiarism and Key Words, respectively (and most of the time Key Words are Key Names). The letter, at least, avoids the former and upholds the latter. In fact, it is quite original, but that’s precisely what makes that cardinal sin so devilish: one’s research must never be too original, and that makes me worry about my letter, what with all its talk of the man murdering the cat and the international conspiracy. A Good Academic never invents, always tweaks. I at least appreciate that you preserved my footnotes so fastidiously.
Look, I don’t have much time to explain. I’m being watched at the library here, because they suspect me of stealing books. And they’re right to suspect me of that, because I am. But I don’t consider it stealing. I’m safeguarding them. There are just a few essays written about Halibut Schmidt before he suddenly “became” a feminist activist. Over the past few weeks, I noticed that the stock on the Schmidt shelf of publications presenting his passion for swastikas as something other than “aesthetic” or “queer reappropriation” has been dwindling. Meanwhile they are increasing orders on books by Schoonmaakster, Baksteen, Pik and Van der Tieten. I don’t know. Maybe I am losing my mind. I have been on edge lately, what with the homelessness and losing my laptop and – oh, just forget all that.
Of course, defending one’s PhD on the basis of ten published articles is just one option for defense. Apparently, your journal enjoys some degree of circulation, as I have already received two concerned emails from people of goodwill, asking if I was privy to this requirement or if it was unfairly sprung upon me. The answer is neither. Previously – for the past ten years that is – I was pursuing the traditional PhD route of defending an entire, unpublished dissertation. But that has all gone belly-up now. It’s all gone. All gone…
My only recourse is this: I need to be loud enough in the outside world so that they cannot ignore me in the Ivory Tower. Do you understand how difficult that is? Their walls are very thick. I need to shout, scream from the top of the mountain! And naturally, it cannot be just any mountain, no: it must be the right mountain! But how am I going to do that now that I have lost everything? No publications, no supervisors, no visa, no contacts? What choice do I have? What other path?
Bah. You’re just like the rest of them. I can already imagine your reply to this letter: there’s something she could have done, but didn’t. She’s stubborn. She didn’t follow the rules.
I’ll concede that I’m stubborn, but as for not following the rules, let me ask you: how does one follow rules that change all the time? That aren’t written into any contract? That are determined by the whimsy of each university, each department, each professor?
Now you’re probably asking: why didn’t she stand up for her rights?
Ha! What rights? Do you really think a PhD student has rights? In order for one to have rights, one must be subject to rules. No rules, no rights. Rights only kick in for a PhD student after they have encountered a catastrophe worthy of complaint. Their right to complain in hindsight is protected. But that’s all, aside from a few trivial provisions no one tells you about in the first place. By the time you discover them, it’s already too late.
I will admit to one mistake. Not long after the publication of my first article and the incident with the cat, I began encountering obstacles. I won’t go into all of them here. Suffice it to say that certain offices wouldn’t answer, archives were shut, and professors were all too busy. I relayed this to an old mentor one evening, who told me: do something boring for your PhD. Something that doesn’t matter to you. Then, once you have it, you’ll be free.
Reasonable advice, you say. Well, it sounded like a Faustian bargain to me. How could I commit to four years (if only!) of researching something I didn’t believe in? What would I learn? What bonds of value would I forge? Who would I become? I politely declined the advice. I was too naïve to realize that it wasn’t advice at all. It was a requirement for entry.
I’ll finish this email now: the receptionist is watching me and is saying something into her landline and now security is walking towards me. He has a walkie-talkie and a belt that jingles. He’s portly and tall, and means serious business.
I’m watching him from behind the desktop screen, typing furiously. Yes, it’s him, Mephisto embodying a library security guard! It’s as if that bargain is closing in on me, keys jingling along the way. With each step it strips me of everything I hold dear – not just my computer, my home, my visa, my books – their books, really – and my papers, but my identity, forged from all the hard work I have put in, in the name of truth. Yes, I still believe in truth. Go ahead, crucify me! I’ll never submit to curbing my curiosity. There’s a truth hidden in Schmidt’s paintings and I have every right to try to find out what that might be. Even if I can’t ever know what it is, or what he meant it to be, I can try. And I can defend that for my PhD.
Can’t I?
Okay, he’s asking me to leave. If I don’t, they’re going to call the police. Ha! Let them! I’ll throw one of Van der Tieten’s mammographical tomes at them. Oh. They’re actually calling the police now. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. But mark my words, one day when this is all over, I will be –
DOCTOR SISYPHUS
Respectfully,
Sisyphus ABD2
References
- My computer was stolen at Maasdam Centraal Station two weeks ago. See Police Report (Aangifte #17650), copy in the collection of the author.
- All But Doctorate.
Susana Puente (b. 1992, New York) is a writer and an art historian based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She is the author of De God van Nederland. Leven en werk van Pyke Koch (Prometheus 2026).