Take a break! Let's go away for the summer; let's go upstate

Take a break. That's what everyone thinks academics do in the summer, to our infinite fury.

"Take a break FROM GETTING PAID FOR THREE MONTHS. Is that what you mean?" we mutter under our breath.

Yet we need some kind of break, for sure; even a week is good.

I recently spent a week with family, near but not at the beloved Land of No Internets.  And when annoyed, insistent emails about non-urgent matters from my collaborators piled up--as in, if I didn't respond to a question within an hour, they'd send the wrong reply to higher-ups--I had had it and told them that they could keep emailing, but I wasn't going to respond.

Once a year I get to see family together in this way. Once a year. The collaborators can chill out for 5 days, don't you think?

But it was a much better visit overall than last year's because I took Lin-Manuel Miranda's famous advice and took a break. I didn't cook as much, or clean as much, and if the dog wanted to steal food off the table, fine by me.  (Others dissuaded him, but I was not going to.)

I swam and kayaked and sat by the water and read and went to get spring water.  I talked with my mother about genealogy (which she loves, but I'm the only person who will listen to her talk about it).  It made me think about all the family who have lived in that part of the state for generations, since it was settled, especially when I drove by the old graveyards.

Did Facebook & Twitter, when I checked them, make me feel guilty about not getting work done? Of course. That's their job. But I have a sabbatical, and I'll get into work mode soon enough.

So did "take a break" work?

Yes.

What I learned was that the world does not hinge on my control. It only wants my participation. There's a difference.

More writing inspiration from three prolific and popular authors: Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Scalzi

Here's some writing inspiration from prolific and popular authors, from what I've been reading during my lunch breaks. Lunch reading cannot be work reading, and that's when the library's electronic books are a godsend.

1. I've just finished Stephen King's On Writing, and it is as good as everyone has said it is. The only Stephen King novel I've ever read was The Shining, years ago in The Land of No Internets, but even if you're not a horror/suspense fan, the evocation of his early life and his writing life are really interesting.  A few specifics:

• Write every day--and don't do anything else until you get your targeted writing completed. He writes every morning and aims for 2,000 words a day, which he generally achieves by lunchtime.  Afternoons are for exercise, chores, etc. and evening is for reading.  He gives a long list (updated in this edition) of people he's read and considers to be good.
• King says that if you don't write every day, you risk having the thing go stale. Press ahead even if you don't know about the background; you can check on that later. 
• Once you have the manuscript done, during which time you've shown it to no one but may have an ideal reader in mind, leave it in a desk drawer for 6 weeks. Go work on something else until you've almost forgotten it. Then take it out of the drawer and read it with a fresh perspective.
• For one of his books after the accident that nearly killed him, King used what he called the best wordprocessor in the world: a Waterman cartridge fountain pen. Pen geeks among you will be disappointed that he didn't say which model, but still: fountain pen!

All this sounds really flat, but he says everything more entertainingly in the book.

2. Next up is John Scalzi, who wrote this today in what he probably wouldn't have tagged "writing inspiration"--but it sure is. Those of you who follow Scalzi know he's a prolific Twitterer, blogger, etc., as well as a novelist, so this marks a change for him:

I also think it also has to do with a certain amount of habituation, i.e., if I’m checking email, by brain just goes “Oh, we’re on the Internet now,” and just fires up those parts of my brain that work on the Internet. These do not, by and large, correspond to the novel writing parts of my brain.

How to deal with this? Well, I’ve made a new rule, which really isn’t a new rule, but kind of an update rule. And the rule is: before 2,000 words or noon, whichever comes first, no Internet at all. No blog, no Twitter, no Facebook, no email, no checking the news. When I sit down at the computer (usually around 8am), I disconnect it from the network. I leave the cell phone in the other room (and unless you’re my wife, daughter, editor or agent, if you call the landline, it’s not going to get picked up, either). No Internet. At all.

 3. What to say about Joyce Carol Oates, whose productivity puts us all (except maybe Anthony Grafton) to shame? I've just started her memoir The Lost Landscape and will report back soon. Until then, here are some bullet points from a video I wrote about before in which she discusses writing:

--She can "basically write all day long."
--She writes every day, as soon as she can, even before 7 a.m.
--She looks out the window and her cat keeps her company.
--Revision is "exciting and relaxing."
--Writing is "thrilling."

4. And finally, a different sort of writing inspiration: reading inspiration. Hugh McGuire, at Medium, identifies a problem:

And so, the problem, more or less, is identified:
1.  I cannot read books because my brain has been trained to want a constant hit of dopamine, which a digital interruption will provide.
2. This digital dopamine addiction means I have trouble focusing: on books, work, family and friends
Problem identified, or most of it. There is more. 

And his solution:

And so, starting in January, I started making some changes. The key ones are:

1. No more Twitter, Facebook, or article reading during the work day (hard)
2. No reading of random news articles (hard)
3. No smartphones or computers in the bedroom (easy)
4. No TV after dinner (it turns out, easy)
5. Instead, go straight to bed and start reading a book — usually on an eink ereader (it turns out, easy)

Off-topic: Farewell to the Land of No Internets

Can you write an elegy for a place?

Longtime readers, if there are any, might recall that over the course of a few summers I wrote about going to a place I called the "Land of No Internets." Those of you who read writing as jo(e)'s blog have an idea of the kind of family place it was. It was a place without a lot of modern conveniences, but it was on the water, and old, and beautiful.

The house had wide-planked floors, and poles made of whole trees for supports under them, and mildly wavy glass in some of the windows. It had woods and rocks and space all around. It had deer, and birds, and more stars when night fell than I had ever seen before because there was no light from anything around. It had quiet.

But as happens, maybe inevitably, with shared family places, when some of the family want to sell, the place gets sold.

When it dawned on me that the end of the semester was coming in a couple of weeks and summer was coming in a couple of months, I thought about the place.

Maybe, like Thoreau, I can content myself with ownership of the eye of the beholder, or in this case of the eye of memory. But I can't go there any more.

http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/search?q=land+of+no+internets

A fresh start and a break from rants

I'm starting to feel as though this poor blog is turning into a soapbox from which I continually yell "hey, kids, get off my lawn and while you're at it, start thinking about what you're doing with that new technology."

How did that happen? I like technology. I teach some classes online and do a good job with them. I don't want to get in the position of holding up a banner for The Way Things Have Always Been Done, including handwriting, because mindlessly preserving tradition is not how I feel, yet that's how these posts are sounding to me. They're pushing me into a false corner and making me sound like someone I don't want to be.

Here's the common theme of those posts: I just want people to pay attention to what they're doing when they adopt something shiny and new and to think about the consequences of it more than 5 minutes down the road.  There, I've said it, and now I'm going to shut up about it for a couple of months.

So for a while, you can come here safe from MOOC musings, alarm about the liberal arts, and ridicule of what our new educrat overlords have in store for us this week. (Well, maybe a little of the last will find its way in.)

I'm off to the Land of No Internets soon, so posting will be light anyway. The real reason, though, is that I want to write about something less stressful for now.

Home is where the dishwasher is

Historiann has an interesting post up about Michelle Nijhuis's "Not one more winter in the tipi, honey." It's about the gendered division of labor that creeps in when idealistic back-to-the-land-for-a-simpler-life types experience parenthood. The glamor jobs like siding the yurt win a lot of praise whereas the realities of invisible (and repetitive) domestic work like washing diapers don't, and the division of labor that usually attends these tasks often means that women bail out first on the Arcadian dream.

I think it's partly the invisibility of these tasks, as Historiann says, and partly their lack of glamor, but also the sheer amount of mental as well as physical energy that they take. I've never done anything remotely yurt-like in terms of pure back-to-the-landness, but being in the Land of No Internets in the summertime has given me a little appreciation for that life.

I used to get impatient when whoever was in charge of cooking would ask what we'd like for dinner hours before dinner time, but I have more sympathy for that now, though I try not to ask. Once you're the person in charge of cooking, baking, and the rest, you realize that if you don't think about it in advance--first at the grocery store, since it's a long trek back there if you forget something, and then counting back from dinner time to the preparation time you're going to need--dinner and breakfast and lunch aren't going to happen.

Now, to be fair, other family members always offer to take over some of this work, especially washing the mountains of dishes, and certainly at home we have an equitable division of labor: one person cooks and the other cleans up, and so on. I've chosen to take on the more traditional role at the LoNI mostly to give everyone else more free time and because I don't have to do this permanently. I've also done this as a kind of experiment in 19th-century living and as an exercise in shifting focus from one form of work to another.

A lot of commenters over at Historiann's mentioned Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, and I'm reminded of something the character Laura thinks about in The First Four Years. In this book, she's pregnant and feeling miserable, but she realizes that "the work must go on, and she was the one who must do it."

To get back to the "not one more winter in the tipi" idea: You can put a solar panel on a yurt or not, depending on how you feel that day, but for all the domestic tasks, the work has to go on whether you feel like it or not. That makes a difference.

No phones, no lights, no motor cars

I'm back, in a manner of speaking, although my body clock is still set to several time zones away. It couldn't be called a restful trip, what with flying in and then driving 4 separate trips of 500 miles each due to family emergencies, and when I woke up this morning, I'd been in so many different places that I didn't know where I was for a minute.

But there were a few days in the land of no internets, and that helped a lot. I've written before about the land of no internets, which feels sort of like a private family theme park where the 19th century comes alive (no phones! no internet! no washers! no dishwashers!). Life slows down and spreads out before you when you can't check messages and the phone is off. Instead of looking downward at the phone, a gesture that's become more and more ubiquitous, you lift your head. You look out across the water or across the room at your family members.

Some days I watched the rain pour down and decided that it was a good time to make some cookies or maybe a blueberry cobbler. Other days, I was out on the water and just breathing in the early morning smell of the air. At night, it's so dark I can see constellations that I don't see at other times, and if I ventured a few feet from the house, I wouldn't see it unless the moon is out.

When I left the land of no internets, I discovered that I'd been pelted with phone and email messages from colleagues who didn't take a hint from my previous "I am away from my desk" responses and seemed to want replies! right! now! to deal with issues that were important to them.

But I don't have to care about those messages when I'm in the land of no internets.

Update: light posting

More travel, including a visit to the land of no internets = no posts for a while.

Reentering blogland

This feels like a strange place after nearly three weeks. Actually, since I haven't visited this blog or any other in that time, it may be more accurate to say that the blog isn't a strange place but that I am strange in it.

The Land of No Internets was its usual nineteenth-century self, even though I didn't spend as much time there as usual. What did I do there (besides a lot of cooking)?

I read. It was kind of surreal catching up on my reading of people like Lisa Gitelman and N. Katherine Hayles in a place where the electronic world felt far away.

I watched the wild geese and the foxes. The goslings were about half-grown at this time of the year, and they'd eat while the adults stood guard. The foxes watched them but didn't chase them.

I paddled the kayak for miles up and down the shore, looking at birds, rocks, trees, sailboats, old houses, and new houses built to look like old houses.

Time to reenter the world, I guess.

Slow blogging for a while

I will be in the Land of No Internets for a while, so posting will be spotty. The Land of No Internets is a place where I spend a lot of time cooking, baking, washing dishes, filling the washer with water from buckets, and other nineteenth-century pursuits.

Also on the agenda: watching the rain and reading. Lots of reading.

Back

In the end, I took three books: giant spiderkilling hardcover biography, which I reread; giant spiderkilling hardcover collection, in which I read some lesser-known pieces and made notes about them; and book I'm reviewing (which I finished). I also read some .pdf books that I'd downloaded from Google Books, Antonia Fraser's Faith and Treason about the Gunpowder Plot because it was already in the house in the Land with No Internets and most of John Berendt's City of Falling Angels (on the plane on the way back).

I didn't write a lot, but I did think a lot. I thought as I was taking almost-daily walks to one of the earlier settlements in that part of the country--5 miles round trip from the old house I was staying in. I also cooked, baked, washed immense piles of dishes three times a day, and did a lot of wash, the latter requiring that I fill the ancient, quirky washer using huge buckets of water, which has done wonders for my upper-body strength.

I shooed flocks of wild geese off the lawn early in the morning and went kayaking when the water calmed down as the sun was setting. That was usually when the heron flew out of the woods and made his way across the water to another set of trees.

Sometimes, instead of reading, I watched the rain pour down and listened to the thunder, or I tried to figure out the different eras of the wallpaper peeling away from the lath-and-plaster walls.

There was no television and no newspapers, so unless I was visiting relatives and someone mentioned the news, I didn't know what was going on. I didn't miss it a bit.

It was a nineteenth-century sort of trip, come to think of it. In terms of scholarship, it wasn't very productive at all, but it was very satisfying.

Back

I'm back from the land of no internets and thought you might like a picture of where I was for some of the time. A few thoughts:

• It is much, much more peaceful living without newspapers, NPR, internet, and television. (Actually, there was a television that got two whole channels, one of which was in English, but it was hardly used.)
• It felt like culture shock to go to a conference, as though I was traveling from the 19th century into the 21st, although I had my computer to anchor me to the present day.
• On the other hand, it is pleasant not to have to go on Spider Patrol before going to sleep at night. I know that Arachnids Are Our Friends when it comes to keeping down the bug population and that spiders are inevitable if you're by the water, but after a couple of nasty bites, you stop preaching peaceful coexistence if the spiders are near where you sleep.
• I tried one more Panera run before returning, but the experience of getting online there was even more disorienting than before--not Panera's fault, but the fault of the culture shock. You know how when you open the oven door when something is baking and you feel a blast of hot air? It really felt like that, although there weren't even any stressful emails.
• Those books I insisted on lugging with me and paying the extra money for another suitcase? I used maybe 1/5 of them.

It's good to be back.

Notes from underground

Well, not actually underground, but with no internet access until today (the land of no internets).

Without access, I started reading more and writing more. If I couldn't think of an answer to a minor factual point in two seconds, it really didn't matter, since I knew I'd find the answer eventually. "Eventually" is a word that doesn't seem relevant in a Googleized world, but I'm warming to it.

Without access, I still wasted time, but I wasted it in different ways. I looked at the floorboards where I'm staying, which are a good foot across, and the crossbeams supporting the house, which are just peeled logs, and wondered when the last time trees that big were in this area. I wondered how, when the place got retrofitted for things like bathrooms and kitchen sinks, the owners decided where to put them.

Without access, I spent more time outdoors and in the sun.

When I finally drove the many miles to a place with a Panera and got online, I thought I'd be glad to be back in touch. Instead, though, it felt like an assault. I felt dazed as I sorted through the emails, as if Panera had melted away and left me with this world.

Then I got angry: why were people nagging me to do things? Of course they weren't doing anything but proceeding on the normal assumption that everyone is responsive to email 24/7/365; that's not their fault but mine for opening up the emails.

There's a lesson here someplace, but I'm not quite sure what it is. I think I'll drive back and stare at the floorboards some more.