It is, I suspect, vaguely declassé in certain U.S. intellectual circles to pick an English-speaking country as one's favorite destination abroad. The choice does matter, after all. In a system which the late Pierre Bourdieu would've recognized had he squinted a bit, cultural capital is gained the more exotic or far-off said location is, and bonus points are added for an avowed interest in either extreme sporting feats or obscure cultural manifestations. England itself, God forbid, is the sort of place you send your grandmother on vacation. Now, I've always thought my cultural interests to be fairly garden-variety (up to and including plain ol' gardens), and that the best body parts to lift up to the hills are one's eyes. I'm also not especially well-travelled: North America and Western Europe are it so far (just give me funding time), and my coverage there is anything but complete (if I had a to-visit list within those two continents, it'd run Spain, Guatemala, Scotland, Denmark, and that's not exhaustive either). But I must confess that with the possible exception of Mexico -- and I do actually climb pyramids, but that's different -- my favorite country of those I've travelled to so far is England.
What's worse is that I like England for all the wrong reasons; I think the people I'm thinking of would call them bourgeois rather than intellectual ones.* For instance, I like the occasional cup of tea -- strong black unfussy tea, to be precise -- with milk. This is a request that doesn't raise so much as an eyebrow hair in England (even when it's put in my clearly American accent), but requires one to practically resort to charades in certain other countries, including parts of my own. I like to strike up conversations with strangers on buses, and this is a damn sight easier to do in a language I'm already fluent in (truth to tell, I think I've been so cranky in Italy because I feel socially isolated). I like the easy availability of more-or-less-Indian food. I like being able to blend in in a crowd if I so choose (at least until I open my mouth). I like efficiency and continuous business hours. I like the weather, for heaven's sake. I also think cheese-and-pickle sandwiches are positively brilliant, Christopher Wren was one of the world's great urban designers, cottage gardens are lovely, not-too-terribly-touristy pubs are a lot more comfortable than bars (with infinitely better drinking options nine times out of ten**), and those red postboxes are cute. Plus, Oxford is one of only three or four cities worldwide I fell in love with at first sight (for soppily sentimental reasons, too, but I was eighteen when we first met, so what can you expect?), while parts of the northern English countryside remind me strongly of my native foothills.*** Now, I have no burning desire to become an expatriate -- I'm very happy being American, because that means I have every right to complain about our government -- and I do wish this country had taken better care of their monasteries in the sixteenth century and maybe worried about those wisps of academic anti-Semitism a bit more in the twenty-first. Still, it's awfully pleasant to be in England for the week.
Now, this is what I call a working vacation. I've already managed to consume three different types of mayonnaise-laden sandwiches (this is a good thing -- I'm from a part of the U.S. where we put mayo on hamburgers), met my temporary flatmates for the conference, said hello to another half-dozen acquaintances I'd bumped into, chatted with some booksellers in the exhibit hall (and bought a few -- er, four -- books), and decided that there's nothing which absolutely requires my presence at the conference until later this afternoon. So, naturally, I hopped a city bus to the nearest good-sized university library. I was tempted to wander around and shop instead -- it's a gorgeous day for walking, and feels wonderfully cool to me after central Italy, although the people on the bus claim it's a heat wave -- but I am being strong. Well, except for the part where I appear to be blogging from inside the nice cool library instead of going over to the annexe with the back periodicals.
Right. Work. And then maybe a nice pub lunch; if I can ignore this whole cultural-capital business for another hour or two, I'm having fish and chips.
* -- I'm waiting for someone to point out that using the world "bourgeois" as an insult has become terribly bourgeois, but it hasn't happened yet.
** -- The answer to the question posed in the post's title -- and if you haven't read Puck of Pook's Hill, Googling on that phrase will get you a nice e-text -- is "1520." I think I've covered all the topics mentioned, more or less, if you accept "turkeys" as a colloquial description for the Bush administration.
*** -- Which doubtless explains their popularity with immigrants from either side of Hadrian's Wall some three-four centuries ago. Someday I'll have to remember to blog about what precisely "Scotch-Irish" means in a Southern U.S. context, because it entertains me, not to mention accounting for most of my coloring.
Okay, the Academia Top-Ten update will happen... er... next week. Hopefully earlyish. I've been poking at it in my spare time, and there have been a lot of really good suggestions, but I think Alex may have had the right idea about combining blogging and travel -- that is, that they shouldn't necessarily be attempted simultaneously. Suffice it to say that, instead of working on blog posts, I have seen a truly extraordinary number of Gothic altarpieces over the past couple of weeks -- one might almost say too many Gothic altarpieces, and I am the sort of person who not only likes Gothic altarpieces but will happily discuss the effects of Lateran IV's liturgical reforms on said altarpieces with complete strangers in bars (which probably explains why I seldom go to bars). I am currently at that stage of art-viewing fatigue in which one's critical faculties are pretty much reduced to saint-spotting and thinking that certain colors would look good in one's guest bedroom.*
In further artistic news, I have been using my cheap little going-to-get-a-digital-soon camera mostly to snap photos of especially good exorcism-miracle scenes on dossals depicting narrative saints' lives; if commercial film developers ever glance at what they're developing, mine may be somewhat taken aback, since there's at least one thirteenth-century image which would merit an R rating on nudity (female) alone. Certain of my family members do expect proper vacation photos, though, and so I had a colleague use the camera to take one shot of me in front of central Italy's most easily recognizable landmark (which, no, I did not go up), wearing a moderately silly straw hat I purchased at a nearby market. I am not ordinarily a Hat Person, but I wanted shade, and a lace parasol seemed just a bit excessive. The hat has lots of raffia and a really ugly fake flower on it, which strikes me as a good balance for my current decade; I think one needs to be at least forty to carry off stuffed birds with the proper flair.
Unfortunately, I've been experiencing a little set-to with Italy's equivalent of FedEx -- they seem to have misplaced a package which, while not strictly irreplaceable, contains several articles which I very much wanted in my hands two to three days ago -- and I've remembered that I'm spoiled rotten with regard to well-stocked research libraries. I'm also slightly peeved to realize that the language-producing part of my brain, which tried to speak Spanish for most of the time I've spent in France, has taken to providing me with fluent French in Italy. (No doubt I'll start thinking in Italian when I make it to Portugal.) Finally, for greater personal peace of mind, I have really got to stop reading novels with sub-, super-, or just plain ol' text addressing recent European genocides: all I've got on hand at the moment is Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Iain Pears's The Dream of Scipio,** and the other day I caught myself feeling threatened by a T-shirt slogan about Palestinian occupation (which is silly of me on several levels, especially the one on which it wasn't a very good T-shirt slogan).
With one thing and another, then, I'm perfectly happy to be taking a vacation from my vacation and heading off to Inghilterra for Major Professional Conference #4. My conference paper's mostly done -- there's about half a paragraph which is waiting for me to either get hold of the relevant article (see above) or fake my way through it. Still and all, I think there should be plenty of time for me to enjoy (relatively) cool weather, good beer, several types of fried potatoes, and a couple of university libraries. I'm also taking recommendations for good used booksellers in parts of London reachable by Tube (more specific recommendations than "Covent Garden," that is). European airlines have fairly minimal baggage allowances for intra-EU travel, but I'm leaving one of my bags in Italy, and I have a fairly radical definition of "a reasonable amount of reading matter for the flight" which I will, if necessary, support via speed-reading demonstrations. Or possibly by glaring from under my new hat.
* -- The part of my brain which takes the faces worn down to their green undercoat and classes them under "Virgin Mary as Orion slave girl" depictions, then checks for pointed ears in case any of them are actually Vulcans, is, depressingly, still quite functional.
** -- Which, by the way, has either a mistake or a typo in the middle timeline -- the Great Western Schism wasn't resolved until 1417, in the most optimistic of all possible histories -- and would probably have impressed me a lot more were I not already on close speaking terms with all three of the time periods he's switching between and therefore capable of picking further nits here and there. It's still a good vacation book, though -- but better that vacation should be somewhere outside continental Europe.
Italy is hot, and I am finishing a conference paper I'm due to give next week, both of which somehow explain the relative lack of updates here -- especially the lack of academic top-ten edits which I promise to work on during the bus-riding parts of tomorrow's trip to Italian Towns Sponsored By The Letter P. Instead, you lucky people get to hear more about my religious and reading habits, and especially what happens when I combine them. (Note to anyone interested: I will be reading and reviewing that Rushkoff book as soon as I get within shooting distance of a bookstore which carries it -- but that might not be until the seond week in August, unless it's available in the UK.)
Until I moved to Boondoggle, I didn't realize I was collecting siddurim, that is, Hebrew prayerbooks. I hadn't unpacked all my books in several years, and when I did, I took most of the Jewish-related books to my office, where they occupy a good five feet of shelf space. That left me with a couple of spare volumes of Scripture*, some books of modern commentary I occasionally use to kick off Torah study, an old copy of Like A Driven Leaf (which will someday get its own blog post), some liturgical music left over from my choir days, and six or seven Hebrew/English prayerbooks. They're different prayerbooks, of course, and I picked them up everywhere from library sales to Jewish bookstores: old and new Conservative, old and new Reform, a Reform "home" prayerbook I think I got at my Bat Mitzvah, some random old-style Ashkenazic Orthodox I must've inherited from some relative or other. Looking at them together like that, I realized that I really needed the new Reconstructionist siddur, which I like, and maybe the Artscroll Sephardic, and some version of the Siddur Ha-Ari.... and yeah, I think I have a problem collection.
It's a working collection, because while I can only pray from one book at a time, I like reading prayerbooks -- especially the ones with footnotes -- and comparing liturgies. I think this habit is one of the nicer things I absorbed from my college Jewish experience. I certainly didn't learn it as a child, because the Reform temple of my childhood, the only one in town, was a very nice place -- still is, in fact -- but it wasn't precisely steeped in liturgical literacy during the time I attended (I'm pretty sure it's improved). The handful of morning-service prayers I picked up were only because I happened to sing in the High Holy Days choir; Rosh Ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur, plus the rare morning Bar or Bat Mitzvah, were the only time we did full-on morning services (much less on weekdays). Then there are the items that just aren't in the Reform prayerbook (or weren't twenty years ago, at least): quite apart from things like, oh, an afternoon service or a full Kaddish, I still don't know the Ashrei properly, even though Orthodox and Conservative kids learn it by the time they're eight or so. Liturgical philosophy is one of the few ongoing gripes I have with the Reform movement: I guess it's okay to streamline the service, and there are a very few bits even I can kiss goodbye without much regret,** but most Jews wind up attending a variety of synagogues during their lifetime, and it seems like it would be useful to prepare them for this eventuality. Then again, I read prayerbooks for fun, so what do I know?
As it happens, I hadn't done much synagogue-hopping before I left for college; I think my grandparents took me to one or two humongous ticketed High Holy Days events up in Coast City, which didn't leave me eager to learn more. Our confirmation class took a bus with two other classes to HUC in Cincinnati, where we attended a spirited Reform service I really loved, but nothing came of it afterwards, and the whole confirmation experience (OK, the part where the rabbi wouldn't let me actually lead anything) left me less than enthused with the synagogue. The summer before college, though, I took a bus tour of Europe which went through Dachau. Wanting to thumb one's symbolic nose at the Nazis is probably not the best motivation in the world to start attending services regularly, but it's a pretty common one, and I wasn't too terribly original in my thinking at age sixteen. ;) So I was looking forward to turning over a new leaf with new and different Jews once I reached college. Unfortunately, Prepster College was so poor a fit for me that I'm amazed I didn't start popping Prozac in my first semester, and this carried through to the Jewish front. Everyone except me and one other person (hi, Kass!) seemed to be from New York. Most of them were from Long Island; a whole group of them had gone to the same Jewish day school in some part of NYC I was apparently supposed to recognize, and since we didn't have a rabbi or anything, they were running the show for my first two years of college.
The services they led were basically traditional Conservative -- nothing I couldn't lead now, but back then my experience was very limited. I didn't realize that some congregations spoke the second line of the Shema silently, or why people would say michayeh ha-metim instead of michayeh ha-kol, to pick two obvious examples. The thing is... it didn't seem to occur to them that their way wasn't the only one, and when I asked why we were doing this or that, most of them wouldn't or couldn't tell me. A decade later, I do realize that some of those kids were just repeating what they'd seen done and had never thought about the reasons behind it, but sometimes I think they enjoyed keeping me out of the loop. I still remember the Shabbat when none of them would open their mouths for a full thirty seconds while I asked what was going on; it was my first encounter with the custom of staying silent between hand-washing and bread-blessing, and I guess it's a perfectly good custom, but I'd stop to explain it to someone who's actually asking about it, y'know?*** Nowadays my reaction would be to organize the occasional Reform service in order to provide a safe space for folks like me, but I wasn't quite that assertive at the time. I didn't leave; I just stuck to the areas in the building where I felt welcome, namely, the kitchen and the bookshelves. I browsed through a full set of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah in translation, and several shelves of siddurim. That -- with some judicious questions to people back at my home synagogue -- was how I figured out what was going on in the services I'd mostly stopped attending. And so that's how I picked up the siddur-reading habit, and it's carried through even when I'm not attending a synagogue.
It took a really ridiculous amount of emotional energy on my part to get myself to services here last Friday night, but that was thanks to one of the less fortunate aftereffects of the aforementioned college Jewish experience: a small part of me is still afraid of attending new synagogues, and especially of appearing stupid in front of Orthodox or otherwise more "traditional" Jews. (This is an incredibly vague phobia; I am not afraid of individual Orthodox Jews -- I'm related to quite a few of them! -- but of some inchoate Orthodox presence ready to laugh at me when I screw up in a liturgical context. Obviously, the problem is mine rather than Orthodox Jewry's.) Anyway, I put on my most terminally demure outfit and went, but the result was a decided anticlimax -- me, about twenty other American tourists in a group (some sort of college reunion), one expatriate, two natives, and the chazzan, who got the expatriate to recruit female bodies for candle-lighting and then ignored everyone so that he could follow the cantorial method of Mildly Melodious Mumbling At The Ark. They had some old Ashkenazic Hebrew/English prayerbooks for the tourists -- donated, according to the bookplates, by a congregation in North Miami Beach. It was a nice thought but unhelpful, given that the chazzan was following an order I'm fairly sure was neither Ashkenazic nor Sephardic but some local or regional custom. I wound up counting Kaddishes to try and orient myself, and I still can't quite sort out what happened to the Amidah (the near-total lack of recognizable melodies probably threw me off). At any rate, now I can say I've been to a not-a-family-event service with separate seating -- the balconies for women haven't been used in decades, so they have men and women facing each other across the room in a setup so egalitarian it didn't bother me a bit.
I couldn't quite convince myself to get up for Saturday morning services -- I have next weekend to try that, and the thought that I don't count toward a minyan isn't exactly a powerful inducement to attendance. I also wish I had a prayerbook I can follow; I read Italian more than well enough to manage an Italian/Hebrew siddur, but it seems that the regular congregants (wherever they are) bring their own, and the expatriate was toting a Sephardic version. I miss my eensy-weensy Artscroll Ashkenazic siddur, the one I usually travel with (see, Orthodox prayerbooks are my friends -- well, anything with good footnotes, really). The night before the move, I sensibly packed it in my tallit bag, and my tallit bag in a plastic bag, and the plastic bag in... well, it gets hazy right about there, and there are a lot of boxes in my house right now. At least this will motivate me to finish unpacking quickly once I get back, since I need the tallit to read Torah a week later.
On the other hand, if I could just find a Judaica shop (not here, I know, but possibly in a larger city), I could buy myself a new siddur. Just, you know, in case. Might come in handy someday. Plus, I kind of want to read one.
* -- The Soncino chumash goes in my office because it has an index; the Plaut stays at home because I need something I can grab and take to Torah study on a Saturday morning, and because I enjoy mocking some of its more rationalist attempts at commentary. The JPS parallel English/Hebrew Tanakh goes back and forth, to the point where I'm thinking of buying myself a second one next year at Major Professional Conference #1 (where, yes, JPS is among the book exhibitors). I also want a Fox chumash for the translation, an Etz Chayim for the commentary, and a Stone/Artscroll for Rashi. But I was talking about collecting prayerbooks, right?
** -- Actually, I would personally rather not streamline services, but I concede that more families are likely to attend a two-hour service instead of a four-hour one. And as I was reminded this past weekend, the bit about "three reasons why women die in childbirth" is actually in the Ashkenazic Shabbat afternoon service (or somewhere early in the evening service, I forget). Um. Well. Good teaching opportunity, and no point in pretending it wasn't/isn't there, but probably something I can live without my daughter reciting on a weekly basis.
*** -- We won't even get into their collective reaction to learning that my father wasn't Jewish, except to say that this is when I decided that (a) the synagogue I grew up in had some serious good points, like never making me think that that was an issue, and (b) "half-Jew" was an equivalent insult to "Yankee" in my fairly limited lexicon of fightin' words.
The family of one of my fellow seminar participants is arriving from the U.S. today, and a few of us -- myself included -- have changed rooms so that they can all stay together. Frankly, I was delighted to move: my previous B&B room was large and attractive but lacked anything resembling a desk, a quiet neighborhood, or reliable hot water in the bathroom next door. Now I am safely ensconced in a small hotel run by Dominican tertiaries; I not only have a desk from which I can plug in my laptop, but also an en-suite bathroom and a row of lace-curtained windows looking out onto some peaceful and exceedingly historic roofs. Of course, my new room also features a reproduction of a Raphaelite Madonna (I know the painting, but couldn't tell you its proper name) and a tasteful six-inch crucifix above the bed.
For a nice Jewish girl, I'm developing quite an acquaintance with crucifixes. I didn't grow up with them by any means: I come from a part of the U.S. with few Catholics and even fewer Catholic institutions beyond the occasional parish church or school. The churches I sometimes attended in my childhood were Methodist, Moravian, or Baptist; they featured clean wooden crosses and pictures of Jesus with nicely combed hair suffering nothing more grueling than the occasional little child. I believe I encountered my first crucifix outside a book on my first trip to Europe, more than a decade ago. That trip had our group of high-school seniors staying in hotels, though, and the only crucifixes I saw were safely tucked away in churches or museums. I preferred the statues of saints in side-chapels, and spent most of the trip wondering whether or not it would be appropriate to light the occasional candle to them.*
My first encounter with a residential crucifix came early in grad school; I was doing a summer language-study program at a major university considerably north of Metropolis, and I arranged for cheap accomodations at one of that university's residential colleges, which happened to be run by a Catholic religious order. When I finally reached my assigned room late one evening, I found it entirely unornamented except for a small crucifix hanging on the wall. It barely registered at the time; I dumped my suitcases, ventured out for a meal, came back, started unpacking, and was about to change into my nightshirt when I paused... yeah, the crucifix was watching me. (I'm sure it had no evil intent -- Jesus could hardly have looked less interested -- but I was raised to only get undressed in front of men on purpose.) I turned my back on it and started to pull my shirt off, then changed my mind -- the crucifix was still there. Carefully smoothing down my clothes, I climbed onto the nearest bed, took it down, and gently placed it face-down on a convenient shelf, where it remained for the rest of my stay.
Six years of living in heavily Catholic cities later, I think I am becoming a little more accustomed to crucifixes, and I may just leave the one in my current room alone (for one thing, I don't think I can reach it from the bed -- and if necessary I can dress in the bathroom, or think a lot about Jesus-as-mother imagery in the High Middle Ages). Unfortunately, crucifixes have not lost their power to perplex me. Case in point: the nice people who sold me my house left some odds and ends around, most of them welcome -- a couple of sets of windchimes, some shelves, a lawnmower. However, they also left a small wooden crucifix (along with one set of windchimes) in the mudroom. (If I were the sort of person who decorates with crucifixes, the mudroom would not be my first choice of venue, but perhaps they took others with them.) I can only assume that this is like a mezuzah, in that you leave it if you think the next occupant will be able to use it. However, I cannot use the crucifix; although I have no plans to get undressed in the mudroom (apart from shoes and the like), I am not anxious to have Jesus watching me bring my groceries in. On the other hand, if this is like a mezuzah... well, putting it in genizah wouldn't be quite the thing, I suppose, but I don't feel right about chucking it in the trash either. It's not mine, I think.** I took it down and laid it on a shelf in the basement for the time being, and when I get back I'll probably leave it inside one of the local Catholic churches.
The little glow-in-the-dark statue of the Virgin Mary I'm going to unpack once I get back home is mine, though; she's part of my computer-desk Parliament of World Religious Kitsch, running the gamut from little statues of Neolithic goddesses to little statues of Confucian sages to little statues of the Buddha to a wind-up R2D2. Hmmmm... I need some little statues from my own tradition. Do they make Lubavitcher Rebbe action figures?
* -- Since my email Talmud-study list has recently breezed through Avodah Zarah, I can safely say that one should never leave a female sheep alone with a Nochri the halakhically proper thing to do would be to avoid the church itself as a house of idolatry; failing that, one should at all costs avoid any appearance of worship. However, any halfway decent Catholic theologian would tell you that lighting candles or otherwise petitioning saints is not a sign of worship proper (latreia) but merely of devotion or reverence (dulia). On balance, then, I don't think it'd be especially terrible for me to light candles to saints I actually respect; it's not unlike lighting Yahrzeit candles (three guesses where and when that practice originated, by the way). Of course, I have yet to actually test this conclusion out. ;)
** -- For the purposes of worrying about Avodah Zarah, I am considering the little sucker as being on loan -- presumably from the Archdiocese, God help them -- rather than my own possession. Really, though, what we need is an exchange program; I would love to get kosher mezuzah scrolls for all the eligible rooms in my new house, but I can't afford to -- at least, until I start getting paid again at the end of August. I'd like to find a nice Catholic family who's just moved into a formerly Jewish-owned house with a leftover mezuzah and trade.
Now that I've located a functioning floppy disk, there's been a bit of a blogburst as I empty my laptop of the posts I've been writing. Check back behind the "False Starts" one for two new posts comprising my views on moving, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fourth season of Angel, and babies on overseas flights. (It's possible that you can guess that last.)
This post is getting the top/current position because I really, really want feedback on it. See, I've been getting just a bit disturbed at the realization that the two posts in which I've been most negative about academia have gotten more links, comments, and pings than the rest of my academia posts put together. I'm also starting to feel that the excellent web resources being assembled in the blogosphere for people thinking about grad school are... well, rather negative. Understandably so, yes, but I think there are good things to say about academia and even grad school, and I have a bit of webspace in which to post them.
I also know myself, and someone like myself is willing to take advice from strangers on what to do in a given career path but will bristle at being told to stay away from it, no matter how sensible the reasons. I somehow doubt that I'm alone in my obstinacy. So, looking over the plethora of web pages telling people why they shouldn't go to grad school, I thought... well, why should they go? And that's how I started writing the very, very rough draft of what I someday hope to put on its own page as the (provisionally titled) Top Ten Reasons You Should Go To Grad School After All, Especially In The Humanities. This is advice, not satire. Right now I'm worried that it's too condescending and not clear enough, which may be typical for grad school but isn't satisfactory to me.
I'm hoping for some editorial help, and would welcome this project's being publicized elsewhere so everyone can put their two cents in. I'll try to give credit to all contributions, and I may make changes in this post as I go (edits indicated by strikethroughs or some such); I'll see how it turns out. And for those of you who don't think they could possibly bring themselves to lend a hand with such a quixotic enterprise... well, see, you probably shouldn't go to grad school, and that's just fine. ;) So here we go:
The Top Ten Reasons Why You Should Go To Graduate School After All, Especially In The Humanities:
The assumption here is that we are dealing with an academically oriented Ph.D. (or M.A.-to-Ph.D. program, although some of these reasons also apply to other types of graduate education.
10) You have done thorough research into methods, trends, and placement in your proposed discipline, field, and program.
Without decent research skills, you're several steps behind when you start grad school, but that's not really the point here. You need to know the basics of how graduate education and academia work, what it takes to get a job, etc. -- and you need to know those things going in, not after devoting years of your life to graduate education. There are a number of important resources listed on the sidebar here. You should also look at both the job ads and the placement statistics provided by various programs and professional associations in your field, and you should locate as many testimonies as possible online from grad students and professors in your field.
9) Your undergraduate mentor(s) think you have what it takes and are willing to write you glowing recommendation letters for whatever comes down the pike over the next several years.
Your undergraduate mentors have, after all, been through grad school themselves (the more recently the better for the purpose of judging your readiness). Also, academia runs on letters of recommendation, and it will take a few years before you have taken enough classes with enough graduate faculty to have them write all the letters; meanwhile, there may be fellowships or new programs you'd like to apply for. (And see below about support networks.)
8) You are self-confident.
Graduate school tends to chip away at confidence in the name of accelerating learning; this is unfortunate but insoluble at the moment, so you need to go in with a fairly strong sense of self. This is not arrogance; this is a survival skill.
7) You love to learn, to teach, and to meet new people.
If you hate public speaking, much less interacting with other human beings -- or, on the other hand, if you hate detailed analytical writing -- you should really consider another career path. Academia requires all these skills in one person, and while you can probably tough your way through grad school without some of them, you'll wind up qualified for a career which makes you miserable. Contrary to stereotype, most confirmed introverts should not be professors; neither should anyone who can't stand to be alone with a computer and some books for hours on end.
6) You can, in fact, do something else for a living; you just don't want to.
Academics have to wear half a dozen hats on a daily basis; someone too inflexible to switch careers is probably going to have trouble turning from advising to administrating. We certainly don't need people afraid to leave school! And that's quite apart from the very good odds that you'll have to support yourself with a non-academic job during or after grad school: you need to have a Plan B, whether it's law school, librarianship, or nonprofit work, in case you're unable or unwilling to get a tenure-track job once you've got your Ph.D.
5) You already know how to write clearly, and how to edit your own writing.
Grad school will probably not teach you how to be a good writer; if anything, it will encourage you to adopt stultifying prose, labored constructions, and scads of jargon. Despite all of this, the ability to convey your ideas clearly and precisely is crucial to the successful reception of your research and teaching. (Yes, there's always Judith Butler, but do you really want to bank on being her successor?)
4) You have gotten a full ride (at least paid tuition plus some stipend or work arrangement) to one of the top five programs in your discipline or subfield.
There's some wiggle room here for highly specialized or regional focuses and for people with trust funds or wealthy spouses, but this is a fairly serious recommendation. Getting more money from a mediocre program isn't usually a good trade-off, but neither is destroying your life trying to borrow and beg your way through a top-notch program. It's your final choice, of course -- just choose wisely.
3) You have a strong support network outside academia.
This can be family, friends, fellow hobbyists, fellow bloggers, whatever -- but you definitely want several someones whom you can call or IM and tell them your latest Stupid Professor Tricks. You will continue to acquire these people throughout grad school, especially if you value your sense of humor.
2) You have a strong support network inside academia, or are prepared to acquire one -- and, at a minimum, you know that there is at least one faculty member at your chosen graduate program who shares significant research interests with you, possesses decent advising skills, and is currently accepting Ph.D. advisees.
Later on, you will need at least three or four additional faculty supporters, some colleagues at other schools, and some friendly fellow grad students, but those you can meet during grad school. Academia runs on connections, just like every other profession in the world, and you'll want to start making them now. It helps if your undergrad institution has ties to -- or at least a good reputation at -- your future graduate institution, but it's not crucial. Having a decent advisor going in is crucial, and should be a dealbreaker even if everything else about the program seems ideal.
1) You think the kind of research and teaching you'll be doing is unspeakably nifty, so much so that you're willing to deal with the many flaws in the academic system, severely reduced earning potential for at least several years, and an extremely uncertain (if not downright lousy) job market.
There are many, many easier ways to make money or get a flexible work schedule. You've got to be in this for love.