After some prodding, JSTOR does the right thing

Because I had been trying to keep a self-imposed ban on reading IHE/CHE as part of the positivity campaign, I'd missed the whole kerfuffle over JSTOR's new interface. Inside Higher Ed covers it well here and here.

Apparently what happened was that the new JSTOR interface, which includes its new current journals initiative, by default showed all materials, even those not covered in an institution's subscription. Oh, and instead of using OpenURL as Google Scholar does to show what's available at an institution, JSTOR provided a handy link to purchase the articles online for a handsome fee.

Quite understandably, this upset a lot of people, especially a lot of librarians, since students might be less likely to try another database (as faculty might) and might click on the pricey link instead.

JSTOR was shocked, SHOCKED to think that anyone believed they had done this for money:

"Did you have to make concessions that benefit your publishing partners but hurt the end user?”

“Absolutely not,” Guthrie, the JSTOR founder, told Inside Higher Ed on Wednesday afternoon. “We’re absolutely not trying to have users purchase articles they already have access to.”

To JSTOR's credit, the interface has been fixed so that you can opt to see only materials at your institution, and some OpenURL features have been implemented. JSTOR wants to be a web portal, in some ways, so that students will look there first for content instead of the MLA Bibliography. I get what they're trying to do.

But I'm glad that IHE and the librarians called JSTOR out on this, just as Facebook users have called out Facebook every time it introduces a new "feature" to decrease privacy and monetize users' personal information. It seems to me this is part of a larger trend where customers are pushing back when trusted, or formerly trusted, institutions are capitalizing on users' trust to make more profits. At the post office, for example, you have to decline all the expensive options and extras one by one, repeating "media mail, please" until the person behind the counter gives up and stops trying to sell you next-day delivery.

In these times, it's probably inevitable that institutions, even those that profess a noble mission, will use whatever means they can to make whatever money they can. Maybe that's why students need us to teach them critical thinking about all the alternatives, not only in the matter of databases but in other consumer-driven decisions as well.

Meta

It's a strange feeling when you get an article back and it's been accepted, but among the minor changes suggested by the reviewers is that you spend more time citing . . . yourself.

Paper is a technology, too

I like "technology." I really do. Like a lot of people, I have used/do use Twitter, blogs, web pages, listservs (remember those?), wikis, etc., in classes. For years I've graded papers that never saw a paper version but went from the student's screen to mine and back. I've assigned e-versions of texts. I've cursed at (but used) Blackboard, WebCt, and both homegrown and newer permutations of various CMS platforms.

But you know what? Sometimes paper just works better, and we ought to be able to acknowledge that.

Example: An upcoming conference is making the program available either in e-form or in paper form. I applaud the decision on a conceptual level, but it left me in a dilemma. Since I felt guilty ordering the paper form because of all the green rhetoric surrounding the choice, I ordered the e-version, but who am I kidding? I've tried getting .pdfs on a Blackberry screen, and even if the document doesn't fail to download and go into a holding pattern, which it does about 90% of the time, the print is too tiny to read.

What I'll probably do is print some pages before I go, but I'd really rather have a booklet so that I can mark the sessions in case I change my mind later. I won't know where I'm going at the conference, but at least I won't have a conference program that pegs me as a Despoiler of the Earth.

Example: In class, if a student does a presentation with a bibliography or questions written out, handing that out on a piece of paper allows the class to follow along. Telling them "go to the class wiki and comment there" doesn't have nearly the immediacy that I want for the discussion that's supposed to follow. And not everyone has a laptop/netbook/iPhone to be able to look at the presentation materials online, either. Paper's the logical choice here.

Example: I've noticed when reading double-spaced manuscripts or papers online, "page down" or the equivalent doesn't always drop you onto the next line from the one you're reading. I have to take a couple of seconds to find my place, which means my engagement with the ideas keeps getting interrupted. I've tried to compensate for this in various ways--making the font smaller, etc.--but the fact remains that it would be easier to read some of these things on paper, even though I don't always print them out.

One example of times when I don't want to print: Invitations to meetings (and I use the term loosely) now sometimes come with a raft of .pdf documents attached and an instruction to print them out before the meeting. Uh, no. That's not part of the deal. My home printer is not at your service. In these cases, I exercise my Thoreau-given right to civil disobedience and bring the laptop with me to the meeting with the documents loaded on it. There's no reason why I should subsidize the university's printing costs.

Another thing about administrators and technology: even though I like technology, it seems wrong to me that administrators are so dead keen on it that they care less about how it's used than if it's used. Faculty are now evaluated in part on whether they use technology or not (see The Chronicle for tsk-tsking about the sad sacks who don't), and I think it's because administrators are entranced by the shiny and in love with anything they can name and count. Good teaching = can't be counted except by student evals. Teaching with technology = something to count.

Back to paper. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are all kinds of technologies that we can choose from, and we shouldn't shy away from paper if it's the best one.*
[*Edited because the former ending made it sound as though someone was forcing me not to use paper, and that's not what I meant.]

Off Topic: Positivity and Mad Men

Note: I don't think there are any spoilers here for those who are now up to speed on Season 4, but you never know. If you don't like Mad Men--nothing to see here.

In keeping with the pre-semester theme of positivity I'm trying to maintain, I thought I'd see whether the language of the characters on Mad Men has any words to live by.

Don Draper. Despite the sad train wreck that his life is becoming this season, Don has two habitual speech characteristics. The first is one that's in keeping with his life: "This never happened." As he tells Peggy in Season Two, "You'll be amazed at how much this never happened." This particular idea, like the past, is coming back to haunt him this season, as it's haunting Peggy in her recent interactions with Pete.

The second one is a little less obvious: Don is emphatically positive in his speech; he always goes one step beyond. Example: If someone asks him a direct question, he says "Yes" with no hesitation. Where a simple "yes" would do, he's given to saying things like "I do" or "I am." "Are you meeting Roger for drinks?" "I am." I can't recall a scenario in which he says "I don't know," maybe because he's always got a story worked out in advance. If he doesn't, he just says "This will be fine," as in "There will be good years, and there will be bad years, but it is always going to rain" (to the London Fog people). This may be because he's living a story, but the writers have been very consistent about his speech patterns. They're as choreographed, in a way, as his movements.

Betty Draper. "Go watch tv." "Go upstairs." "Carla! Take the children to the park." Then there's Betty, our Queen of Denial. Betty's about as eager to have her children around her as Henry Francis is to have the dog in the house. I would like to think it's because they distract her from a deep inner life of figuring out what she wants a la The Feminine Mystique or Priss in The Group, which she read a few seasons ago, but they aren't words to live by.

Joan Holloway Harris: "Look at you." All the characters in Mad Men say this at one time or another, but Joan is especially given to it. Joan usually uses it not as "Look at you--you're a mess" but "Look at you--you've finally figured out something that I knew already" (but not in a snarky way). It makes Joan a reflector of others who's so good at what she does that no one else sees it. They all look at Joan in that va-va-voom way, but they don't really look at Joan. It's in keeping with the show's premise that she's not only the heart of SCDP but that she knows more about just about everything than just about anyone--and no one gives her enough credit for it.

Peter Campbell: "What is going on?" Pete is the the forward-looking Cassandra, providing cues to the future that SCDP is slow to comprehend. He has evolved from his chronic foot-in-mouth disease of Season One. He's become more adept at blackmailing (his father-in-law this season versus Don in Season One) and has become more sympathetic as a character. He's still not adept at nuances, though--hence the classic moments in which he turns to someone and asks "What is going on?" or "What are you telling me?"

The other characters have speech patterns, too, but nothing I can pinpoint: we know Roger will say something funny and maybe outrageous, that Bert Cooper will have something pithy and Ayn Rand-ish, etc. Peggy's loosened up and gained a sense of humor this season, too, which is refreshing. But is there anything to carry forward into the new semester? Unlike Don, I'm not sure.

The middle ground of writing

In the spirit of positivity and John Steinbeck, I'm going to start the morning not with a warm-up letter to my editor but with a warm-up post.

It's that time at the beginning of the semester when no matter what you are writing, there's a voice in your head screaming "Must stop now! Must work on syllabus!" If you're working on a syllabus, it screams "Must stop now! Must get writing done lest Boice descend and strike you dead!"

But there's a middle ground for all this: manuscript reviews for journals or presses, book reviews, letters, colleagues' proposals, and so on. For those, there's a clear path: You read the materials. You bring your critical judgment to bear. You write it up in a helpful manner. You send it. You move on.

You feel better because it is a professional task and you did it. Somehow, you can tackle the other stuff again. And also--here is the big advantage--you get to cross an item off your list, a sweet reward in itself.

I have more of these to do, of course, and plan to get at them in a minute. But every one I complete is a step, and I'm envisioning this process as being like those cartoons where a character stands stock still, then takes a halting step or two, and then is off and running.

Jonathan Franzen on writing

Jonathan Franzen's writing habits, from a profile in Time magazine this week (abridged version here).

He writes six or seven days a week, starting at 7 a.m. He's often hoarse at the end of the day because he performs his dialogue out loud as he writes it. . . . Franzen works in a rented office that he has stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts and solitaire, down to the level of the operating system. Because Franzen believes you can't write serious fiction on a computer that's connected to the Internet, he not only removed the Dell's wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port. "What you have to do," he explains, "is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it."

Wow. I thought Leechblock and turning off the wireless router was a big step in the right direction, but Franzen is really committed to driving a stake through the heart of the distraction. Well done!

In other news, I talked with some colleagues today, and naturally the talk turned to writing. One confessed that he'd had a good month. How much did he write? Let's just say it's in the tens of thousands of words. In a month. On a scholarly project. Envious? I am.

More Jonathan Franzen writing inspiration. 

A syllabus present

I am avoiding all talk of tenure and deadwood (still clinging with a tight, desperate grip to positivity), but if you want to know what I think, go read Historiann's great post.

Now about the present: this afternoon, I opened up the folder with the old syllabus for one of this fall's classes for to begin the long, slow process of figuring out assignments and timing.

It was already filled in with correct dates and updated assignments--woo hoo! There's still a lot left to do, but there's a lot less than I thought there'd be.

Either the Syllabus Fairy got to this folder before I did, or I worked on it back when I ordered books and then forgot that I'd done so.

So to the Syllabus Fairy or to the May incarnation of Undine or whoever did this: thanks from August Undine.

[Updated to add: see also More or Less Bunk's take on the tenure/deadwood idea: "This is the academic politics of distraction writ large. Don’t blame us, blame the senile old fogey over there."]

John Steinbeck on writing

Underneath a stack of books the other day, I found a copy of Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, and I started to read a little of it every day. (It's not a book that you want to gulp down at a single sitting.) Since what Steinbeck did was a little unusual, I thought I'd mention it here.

When he sat down to write East of Eden, which he saw as his "big book," Steinbeck took a 10 x 14 notebook that his editor, Pascal Covici, Jr., had given him and got to work. Every morning he'd warm up by writing an (imagined) letter to Covici on the left-hand page of the notebook before beginning work on the novel on the right-hand side. He talks a little bit about what's going on in his life, but he also works out his ideas there.

February 16. . . . Now I have sat a week. It is Friday and I have sweated out one page and a half. If I did not know this process so well I would consider it a week of waste. But I know better than that now and am content.

March 21. . . . You must thing I waste an awful lot of time on these notes to you but actually it is the warm-up period. It is the time of drawing thoughts together and I don't resent it one bit. I apparently have to dawdle a certain amount before I go to work. Also If i keep the dawdling in this form I never leave my story.

May 7. . . . Now to the book. This is a brooding time in the book--a time of waiting and a time in which dangers poke up their heads. Why doesn't Adam listen when Cathy says she will be going away? I don't know. Men don't listen to what they don't want to hear. I know I didn't and every man I think is somewhat the same. Every man. I must point that out very clearly. Adam has a picture of his life and he will continue to maintain his picture against every influence until his world comes down. I know that this is true. But I must make it convincing.

Part of what's interesting for me about this notebook is that the process seems to be the same for us all--not much of an insight, I know. Steinbeck gets distracted by other commitments (speeches) and finds it hard to come back to writing. He thinks about his writing tools and is pleased to sharpen another dozen pencils. He cleans his writing room--"really deeply cleaned it and found things that had been lost for a very long time." He worries about whether anyone is going to get book's Biblical symbolism.

Steinbeck also talks about his diet and how he intends to lose weight. This might seem trivial, but I think it's something else. In reading blogs and other writers' thoughts on writing, I've been struck by how often a mental commitment to writing is almost incidentally paired with some form of physical commitment or discipline--either completing a list of tasks or recommitting to some form of exercise. I wonder if the physical activity somehow reinforces the mental discipline needed to keep at the task of writing.

Now that the massive and exciting distractions of a new semester are about to start, it's comforting somehow to read about someone else's ordinary writing process.

Random bullets of academic denial

I mentioned that I'd written down my top ten internet fun sites and, from that list, am now allowing myself only one per day. Apparently, blogs (which count as one in my system) are it. So long for now, Facebook, Twitter, and NYTimes.

Female Science Professor and Historiann are reporting more attacks on tenure. If I were wearing my tinfoil hat, I'd wonder who's stirring up the let's-you-and-him-fight attacks on workers in all professions, not just the professoriate. Here's what I get from reading the news: 

professors and teachers should work for free, and they shouldn't worry if they're fired for cheaper workers after a couple of years. 

Doctors should work for free (Medicare cuts). 

Nurses should work for free. 

Union people should shut up and be happy they have a job but should make concessions to help Our Country in Its Time of Crisis by making upper management's stock options worth more. 

People in factories, managers, and salespeople, ditto. 

The only people who apparently deserve to make any amount of money are those who make huge, obscene amounts of it, like football coaches, professional athletes, and the CEOs of giant financial corporations. Them we should pay, because they are vital to our country's interests. Hmmm.

Like Horace, I'm studiously ignoring any signs that the semester is coming up fast.

The Pensive Season

In the spirit of being positive, and stolen entirely from the blog of Henry David Thoreau:

What shall we name this season?—this very late afternoon, or very early evening, this severe and placid season of the day, most favorable for reflection, after the insufferable heats and the bustle of the day are over and before the dampness and twilight of the evening! The serene hour, the Muses’ hour, the season of reflection! It is commonly desecrated by being made teatime. It begins perhaps with the very earliest condensation of moisture in the air, when the shadows of hills are first observed, and the breezes begin to go down, and birds begin again to sing. The pensive season.

As part of making life less hectic, I made a list of my top ten internet distractions, some of which I visit more than once a day if left to my own devices, like a rat pressing a lever in a Skinner box. My new plan is that I get to visit one each day but leave the rest alone. It's already made a difference in my receptiveness to the pensive season.

Positivity and Lavender

The lavender is past its peak in August, and it's a little beaten down by the rain. The bees don't mind, though, and neither do I since the smell is still wonderful if you walk by and brush your hands over the flowers. Although all the flowers on the trees are long gone, there's a rose garden right near the edge of the road on the steepest hill of my walk, and the smell of those roses encourages me on the climb. And there's lavender all along the way, and it'll still be there, and flowering, for a few weeks yet.

It's the same way with the summer. Yes, I'll need to get classes ready and ramp up for the semester, but I wanted to inject a little positivity (h/t Dr. Crazy) into these last few weeks and stop worrying about what didn't get done or any academic craziness to come. I want to concentrate on finishing up the projects that need to get finished and be open to the excitement of the new semester. I want to stop thinking about the problems of academia at large, which I can do absolutely nothing about, and take a break from IHE and the Chronicle for a couple of weeks. When the lavender flowers have finally closed and are ready to be cut and dried, maybe I'll be ready to think about the rest of it. Maybe.

More on service: Hannibal Lector explains it all

Nicole's comment on the last post got me thinking about a kind of service that's hard to say no to:

I, on the other hand, took on only programs for which I was specifically needed (curriculum development for a core I teach) or would benefit me professionally (organizing a department brown-bag) and one that has a defined goal with set time (admissions committee).

One tricky part of service is that middle kind. What if someone in your department organizes a brown-bag, or gives a lecture on campus, or gives a reading, or does a workshop? You are in the usual academic state of having way too much work to do as it is. Do you attend always? Sometimes? Never? How do you decide?

Let's assume that the most important thing here isn't learning something new (although it may be). Let's assume that the most important thing is supporting our colleagues. If we're there to support colleagues, there are at least three ways to think about this.

1. The nice way goes something like this: "Of course I'll go! I want to support my colleagues. So what if this is the third evening this week I've attended one of these?"

2. The cold way goes something like this: "My seat in the audience does not translate into a line on my vita. I have an article to write and a writing schedule to keep. See you later."

3. The middle ground goes something like this: "Quid pro quo, Clarice. Quid pro quo. (while mumbling something about fava beans and a nice Chianti)." In other words, you show up at my presentation, and I'll show up at yours. If you've been collegial in other ways, I'll show up, too, even if you haven't been to my presentation.

What about you? How do you decide?

Managing your time: how to make this semester different from all others

Historiann and Tenured Radical have a pair of great posts about how to take control of your time: their theme is "say no and set limits." These quotations in particular might get printed out and put above my desk:

TR: "Your scholarship is part of your job. Schedule between 25 and 30% of the time you allot for work during the week to keeping your scholarship going."

Historiann: "And just a reminder, friends: Don’t be afraid of being called 'selfish.' If you are in fact 'a girl,' it will happen anyway, so do what you need to do to succeed."

What I'd add is two things:

1. You can never do enough. Whatever you do, however many meetings you attend, someone will decide that you're not there, or have not written enough reports, or didn't show up for their best friend's piano recital, or something else equally vital.

Case in point: last year, during graduation, a colleague said, "Have you ever been to graduation before?" I bit my tongue and said, "Yes, last year, and the year before that, and the year before that," without adding, "where we had extended conversations each time. What's wrong with you?"

2. Don't take it personally. I used to worry about this more (do I really walk around in a cloak of invisibility?) before realizing that this says more about the memory/distractedness/nuclear level of self-absorption of the person making the comment than it does about you.

Come to think of it, maybe TR's and Historiann's quotations should be cross-stitched to a sampler suitable for framing. If I weren't comically inept at all Womanly Arts involving a needle and thread, I'd make one right now.

New office commons: a day in the life

Scene: The shared office commons now being touted in the Chronicle. Faculty sit at tables, their brightly-colored rolling carts by their sides. An elaborate Starbucks-like coffee counter is in the corner, its machines hissing and burbling. Students hover around the outside, waiting to see faculty but not wanting to break into the herd, so to speak. A few have braved the crowd.

Professor X: "I'm glad you came to see me, Stu Dent. I've noticed that you haven't been coming to class much lately."

Stu Dent: "mumble"

Professor Y to student at the next table: "I can lend you a copy of that--oh, wait, I don't have any books on campus any more."

Professor X: "I'm sorry, but I couldn't hear you. Can you tell me again?"

Stu Dent: (very quiet voice) "It's been rough at home, because my mother has ca--"

Barista: "MOCHACHINO UP!"

Stu Dent looks nervous, but continues: "cancer, and she hasn't been doing well lately--"

At the next table, a cell phone rings, and Professor M answers it: "HELLO? REALLY? SHE THREW UP AGAIN? I THOUGHT WHEN I DROPPED HER OFF THIS MORNING THAT SHE'D BE ALL RIGHT."

Professor X, trying to be encouraging: "That must be really hard. Well, on the assignment you missed the other day--"

Professor M: "DOES SHE HAVE A TEMPERATURE? ARE YOU SURE? OKAY, I'LL BE THERE IN HALF AN HOUR TO PICK HER UP."

Stu Dent: "I wanted to talk to you about that one, because [words drowned out in the noise from the steaming machine]"

Professor X: "I'm sorry, what?"

Professor N, who's been watching The Daily Show on his laptop with the volume low, now erupts in laughter.

Barista: "LATTE UP!"

At this point, Professor Y and the student are trying, but failing, not to look at/listen to the conversation of Professor X and Stu Dent.

Stu Dent: "Never mind. See you in class."

And--scene.

Disclaimer: This post in no way is meant to insult mothers, coffee drinkers, students, Daily Show watchers, professors, or baristas, but you get the picture.

Office Space, Academic Version

Update: The New Office Commons, a Day in the Life

First they said, "You don't need good salaries, do you? You don't mind making less than a high school teacher, right?" and we said, "Low salaries--no problem."

Then they said, "Tenure just encourages deadwood. You don't need tenure, right?" and we said, "No, we trust you to give us a fair salary and decent health benefits, because that's how capitalism works: ethical standards of compensation for all!"

And now, at the Chronicle: "You don't need offices, do you? How about a big cart so you can lug your stuff around and sit in a lounge, Starbucks-style?"

Say a department provided a spacious, well appointed, comfortable, very exclusive commons area for its faculty members—something like a library's reading room, maybe, with library tables that professors could spread their work out over, conference rooms in which to meet students or make phone calls, club chairs and sofas for relaxing, reading, and conversing, maybe even a patio or garden. Each faculty member would have a big lockable storage space, or perhaps a rolling cart for books and papers, and could plug in a laptop anywhere in the commons on any given day. (Some companies have taken similar approaches.)

I'm sure there are faculty members who would hate such an arrangement. So maybe a two-tier system would be in order—a professor could have a private office if he or she thought it necessary, but those who agreed to use the shared space might get a little supplement in their paychecks each month, or get better parking or maybe a free faculty-club membership.

Ah, the ever-popular two-tier system, where whoever can be the most unpleasant gets the goodies and the most accommodating gets the rolling cart. Or, better still: charge us for the space necessary to meet with weeping students and conduct time-intensive advising appointments--that's the ticket!

I think I'm going to go ahead and call Lumberg out on this one. If he takes my red stapler, he's toast.
Edited to add: With all the anti-tenure articles and the rest, I'm starting to think that the Chronicle hates professors. It's getting to be like Dean Dad over there about how tenure is destroying the university and the old fogies are destroying it by not using technology. Just saying.

Writing process: zombie time

I don't talk about him much on this blog (partly because I don't have a clever name for him), but Spouse is also in a writing profession, except that he's a model writer in ways that I'm not: he gets up, goes to his study, and starts writing. He puts in a couple of hours before breakfast and before going to his office. We kid about this sometimes, since if one of us has a good writing day and the other one is struggling, we'll say that one of us has used up all the writing energy allotted to our house for the day.

But when Spouse is done writing for the day, he's done. He won't work after dinner because (a) he's already put in 12+ hours of work by then and (b) he says he dreams about work all night if he doesn't take some down time.

I get a second wind after dinner and a few hours into the evening. The only time I actively have a desire to write is after about 7 or 8 p.m. Even if I think I'm done, as in reading an unrelated book, I feel a positive compulsion to go to the computer and write "just a little bit."

It feels as though an alien force is dragging me there. I move to the computer as if against my will, and, once I'm there, I'm not distracted by anything. Before I know it, it's 11:30. It's zombie time, and I'm a writing zombie.

Edited to add: task for tonight's zombie time = finding a title. I brainstormed about 40 of them and they're all terrible--except the ones that somebody has already used for a book, of course.

Writing process: let yourself go

I'm still talking about the writing process because I don't want to think about all the "end of tenure" arguments going on right now. My take, based on my years as an adjunct: end tenure, and universities will do what's cheapest--and that doesn't mean a happy future of "high salary and limited job security with fixed term contracts." It'll be more like this example from recent history: "Outsource all the manufacturing and the U.S. will be the KNOWLEDGE economy and not lose any jobs." Uh huh. That turned out well, didn't it?

Back to writing. I've taken to starting each day with a Q & A about the project, a talk-out-loud (write out loud?) session in which I list all the things I'm thinking about in the project, what needs to go in there, what the objections might be, and so on. The entries go sort of like this:

• Q. If you talk about the Floradora Girls in this chapter, you can't talk about them again in chapter 5. It's too much.
  
• A. Rats. You're right. But if I shift the focus to Bert Williams, I can then make the connection to Marilyn Miller.
  
• Q: That's better!
  

The other day, I sat down to this little self-colloquy and realized that the project was out of balance. The focus was wrong in two chapters, and I didn't know how to fix it. After struggling with it for a few hours, I did what any sensible person would do: I turned off Leechblock and read reviews of Mad Men. I cleaned the kitchen. I read a book related to the project. I went for a walk.

After a few hours of wandering around, it hit me: these chapters aren't about X; they're about Y. That should be the focus, and talking about Y also allows me to talk about other important issues. Hooray! I sat back down at the desk and wrote down what I needed to do. I'm excited about the project again.

Now, if I had just listened to Our Muse Ginger, I would have known that already, wouldn't I?

Off Topic: Mad Men

As a counterpoint to work, I've been rewatching Mad Men, which is a dessert/chaser so that I don't have bad conference dreams all night long. At its best, it's like a good novel, and thinking about it has banished a lot of 4 a.m. obsessive work thoughts when I wake up too early.

Last night I watched the premiere, and here are some thoughts--with spoilers, so stop if you haven't seen it or don't care about the show:

. . . . .

Ready?

. . . . .

On the positive side, the pace was good, with a new office and a new energy. The light and one of the views in this new space actually echoes the opening credits, which was interesting. The only trouble is that the show has always included some brief pauses or silences to let the multiple motives of the characters and the implications of their actions sink in. That's missing.

On the other hand, they've converted Don from a part-time SOB with a troubled interior life to a full-time SOB with none, or none that we care about. He's all brisk surface, and none if it is pretty, even if the character is played by Jon Hamm.

Speaking of pretty, the new lighting washes out the planes of the characters' faces, making them look older, pasty, and not good. If your lighting makes people like Jon Hamm and Christina Hendricks look bad, there's something wrong.

This episode had three plots: a sitcom plot with Peggy and assorted ad hijinks; a grouchy melodrama starring Don; and the beginnings of a tragic melodrama starring Betty.

The thing is, I didn't feel that I knew any of these people, even though I've seen every previous episode, and, what's worse, I didn't want to know them. There has to be a sympathetic or somewhat likable character somewhere, doesn't there, to engage the viewer? Maybe this isn't true in postmodern fiction where we're too busy being dazzled by the intricacies of the author's cleverness and self-referentiality to care, but thinking about character is what chases the work dreams away for me. When I woke up at 4 a.m. today, I chased the work dreams away by composing this blog post in my head.

Any thoughts?

T. S. Eliot critiques my manuscript

So, Tom, I've been working along here on this manuscript pretty intensively. When you said my argument was like nothing you had seen before, did you mean that it was brilliant and original?

“That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

But the prose is good, right? After so many drafts, isn't the language in the introduction pretty clear?

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...

Well, maybe it could use another draft. Once I get this next part done, it'll be ready to go, though, won't it?

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions

Oh, all right. But don't you think I should get out a little more? I have no conversation any more because all I do is sit and type or stare at the screen.

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Yep, that's my life, all right. Wouldn't it be better if I went to campus and saw some people for a change?

Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time

Maybe not. So tell me, is this process of writing going to get any easier?

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

Sorry I asked, but thanks for the advice.

Cargo cult, manuscript edition

More about the codex as inspiration idea:

Last Friday, I did something that might be helpful to the project: I took all the previously published pieces* and conference papers I want to put into this book and put them all in one big file. Yes, it's messy, but it was exciting to see about half a book's worth of manuscript all together.

It was even more exciting when I printed out the entire mess. It was truly a stack of paper. Now, we all know that a stack of paper does not a book make, although with some books I've read, I've wondered whether that was the organizing principle behind the whole thing. In reading the pages and marking them up, I started thinking about the ideas in different ways. I also did some cut-and-paste in the big mess o' articles document. That advice about how helpful it is to "touch your work every day" was even more true when I could actually, you know, touch the pages.

Of course, what I've really done is made something that looks like a manuscript but isn't. You know the cargo cults that make airplanes out of packing boxes so that airplanes will come and material goods will follow? The faux manuscript is really just my airplane made of packing crates.

Still, if it helps, count me as a believer.

*Not more than two of these, of course, because I want a publisher to accept the book.

Blogging the writing process: the gray room

I'm struggling with a piece of writing (as if you couldn't tell) and it turns out that a difficult piece of writing makes the struggling writer extraordinarily inventive when it comes to avoidance techniques, especially those that look like progress in other directions (like cleaning the house).

To break up the cycle, I was able to borrow an unoccupied office on another campus of Northern Clime University for a day or two. The office is gray, as in gray desk, gray walls, and dark gray carpets. Black chair and grey balance ball for sitting at the desk.

It's quiet. It's cool. It's dark. I only had two books with me, and, after installing Freedom, no internet access for periods of time. You'd be amazed at how peaceful it was in there.

While the writing is still at the stage of spectacular awfulness that makes you hurry through it, looking at it sideways lest yet another terrible phrase catch the eye, the point is that it did get started.

Raymond Chandler's idea about writing is that if you get bored enough with your surroundings, you'll start to write out of desperation. The gray room helped to make that happen.

Blogging the writing process: seeking and finding

Tenthmedieval has a pair of lovely posts up, one about taking notes (with screenshots) and one about writing in which he uses the term "environmental fretting," which I'm going to adopt immediately. He also has links to others' posts about their writing processes and to his notes catalogue.

Here's the problem I keep running into: if my notes are organized into something like an Endnote database or put into folders, I perceive them as hidden and can't remember what I wrote in them. If they're disorganized, as in "heaped into one big Word file with a whole lot of commentary added" or stuck in a huge pile on my desk or in the huge folder optimistically labeled To File, I know what they say but don't have them organized at all.

What I've been trying to do this morning is to organize some concepts so that they cohere in this project I'm working on: I have five things that relate to concept X, three for concept Y, etc. It's been kind of like those word puzzles on the SAT: "If John sits next to Jane but two seats away from Tyrone, and Tyrone has a beach cottage, who is sitting next to Susan and which person has red hair?"

Reading the little pieces in Endnote, even if I search for the keywords I've inserted, doesn't make these ideas come together. Index cards don't work for me, either, because somehow they encourage a sense of fragmentation. I've tried, but the concepts just sit there like little white specks of dead ideas on the floor. Index cards worked great as flash cards for memorizing Anglo-Saxon vocabulary words back in the day, but for concepts, no dice.

What this project apparently requires is the magic of print. I recently printed out transcriptions from various research trips, including the one last year and the recent one (and boy howdy--if I could write as fast as I can type and transcribe, I'd have a book manuscript by now), got out my trusty three-hole punch, and put them in notebooks. Now the pages are alive: I can flip through the pages of the notebook and read them in a manner that my brain has decided is the proper one for reading. When I was reading these files on the screen, I wasn't getting anywhere. Now that I have what appears to be a narrative, even though the order is random, I can see narrative patterns emerging. I can only "find" if the files aren't set up in the order that would allow me to "seek."

Today's distraction: why, this blog post, of course.

Tenure, R.I.P at the Chronicle

There's a lot to talk about in the "Tenure, R.I.P." article over at The Chronicle, but there was one part in particular that struck me. Here, making the argument against tenure, is Cathy Trower, with my comments added:

Cathy Trower, a senior research associate at Harvard University who has studied tenure for about a dozen years at the institution's Graduate School of Education, says tenure's harsh up-or-out system—and the escalating demands for research and publication at the nation's top universities—is actually driving away talented young people. "More and more men and women are saying, I don't want to be on that fast track," says Ms. Trower, who has studied 11,000 tenure-track professors at the nation's research universities. "Many are saying, This system is broken, I don't want it."

Really? They don't want it? Why am I not hearing, on blogs, from grad students, or from anyone else, comments like "Tenure? Not my style. Glad I dodged that bullet!"?

Only 70 percent of the tenure-track professors Ms. Trower studied at research institutions said they would choose to work at their universities if they had it to do over again.

This is not the same thing as having the other 30% say they would never choose to work at a tenure-granting institution, though, is it? Trower defines tenure as "tenure at an R1 institution," which--breaking news, Chronicle!--isn't the only kind of institution that exists.

And finally, this:

Ms. Trower says it is possible to run a university with hard-working, committed scholars who are off the tenure track. "I'm outside the tenure system," she adds, "and I work really, really, hard."

In other words, you can choose to work "really, really hard" and have all the stress and anxiety of a tenure system without any of its traditional protections. More work, less money--why, according to Trower, it's a win-win!

What am I missing here?

Writing house fantasies

Does anybody else out there have fantasies about having a writing house?

I do. I know--I have a desk, and bookcases, and a computer, and space to write already, for which I'm grateful. Still, when I'm walking, or driving, or paddling a kayak, a little voice in my head will say, "That could be one. That could be a writing house. I could really get a lot of writing done there."

Writing houses--at least the ones I focus on in my imagination--are small, about the size of a study, but they're self-contained buildings like the ones at the Tiny House Company or Michael Pollan's writing house. They have a window or two, and a view that's just beautiful enough to reward a glance without encouraging prolonged staring out the window. They have lots of natural wood surfaces, including tables or desks, and room for some books. The writing house of my fantasy has electricity but not Internet access or phones. Sometimes, in the nineteenth-century version of my fantasy, I bend the rules a little and picture working in a screened-in porch attached to a beautiful old shingle-style house high above the water (a recent house I saw inspired this one). So--wood, light, air, and nature are the only real requirements.

Did you catch the fallacy in this particular fantasy? After I've swooned over cabins, screened porches, and other writing-house contenders for a while, somehow another voice always brings me back to that last sentence: "I could really get a lot of writing done there." The voice says, "It's not what's outside, but what's inside. It's not about the house; it's about you getting work done. You can do that perfectly well in your study at home if you just get at it."

The writing house fantasy helps, though, because when I see one of the houses, I get excited about writing all over again.

Updated to add more food for fantasy:
David McCullough's writing shed.
Roald Dahl's writing shed.
Mark Twain's garden study.
Virginia Woolf's writing house.

"Stop Close Reading" in the Atlantic

Hey, kids! Here's a fun activity that you can do at home in your spare time to earn cash--and it won't take you more that 15 minutes! Honest!

1. Take a term, any term.
2. Define it narrowly in just the way you want it to be defined, preferably in a way that makes it sound terrible.
3. Take a provocative stance, preferable one that argues against the term.
4. Slap a bunch of ill-informed generalizations and opinions on it. (Logical arguments and evidence aren't necessary. See, I told you it was easy!)
5. Write a 5-paragraph essay.
6. Sit back and wait for the check from The Atlantic to arrive in the mailbox.

While it's true that the metaphor-and-symbol hunt can become drudgery in the wrong hands, and an agonizingly slow pace can suck the life out of any book, "close reading" is more than it's made out to be in the article. If I were being a curmudgeon, I could point out that there's a logical inconsistency in "there would still be plenty of opportunity to point out metaphors and similes"--when, exactly, would you do this if you're speeding through all three volumes of Twilight or whatever "the kids" will "like"?

Somehow I'm reminded of Woody Allen's joke: "I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." Yes, and Moby-Dick is about a white whale, and all hell breaks loose in a Hawthorne novel when some woman starts wearing a piece of bling--a red letter A on her chest.

Close reading isn't the devil. It's a technique that helps students figure out what's going on in a passage. It helps them to learn how to think critically and at multiple levels. It's possible to beat a dead horse about this (cliche alert! metaphor alert!), but even if you hate Brooks & Warren with every fiber of your post-New Criticism body, you have to admit that at some point interpretation comes down to the level of the word--or else how would you read Emily Dickinson?

[Edited to add: Okay, this took me 15 minutes and is a 5-paragraph essay. James Bennet, you can send me my check now.]

Grumpy answers to excellent questions

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Kerry Ann Rockquemore has a series of columns on productivity, of which the latest is "Why Aren't You Writing?"

Why, indeed? Before taking some of her excellent advice, I decided to answer some of her questions from the foot-dragging position I'm now occupying instead of the one that I hope to adopt in a day or so.

"What's holding you back?"

Would you accept "I'm really tired and don't feel like writing" as an answer? No? Let's try again with the errors she identifies.

1. "Error 1: You haven't set aside a specific time for your research."

Well, yes and no. I've set it aside, but my brain isn't showing up.

2. "Error 2: You’ve set aside the wrong time for writing."

Rockquemore suggests that the best time is morning, and she's probably right. Morning is the time when your brain is freshest, but that also means that it's a time when resistance toward writing can be at its highest. Balancing those two factors can be tricky.

3. "Error 3: You have no idea how long writing tasks take."

Oh, but I do. I know how long they take: for a slowcoach writer like myself, way too long. I like her idea of a chart, though. Anything that spells "chart" usually gets me back to work.

4. "Error 4: You think you have to do everything yourself."

She suggests "inexpensive" options for help with research tasks, but even "inexpensive" is too expensive for me and not the best option for the kind of work I do.

5. "Error 5: The tasks you have set out are too complex."

That's true, but I actually have a whole range of tasks. I don't want to work on any of them, even the kind (like reading copyedited proofs) that are usually gratifying and kind of fun.

6. "Error 6: You can't remember what you have to do."

I remember, all right. I made a list (her recommended remedy) even before reading the article, but that's partly causing the resistance to getting to work. There's such a lot of it.

7. "Error 7: Your space is disorganized."

My space is a thing of beauty--desk cleared right down to the wood, books arranged on the bookshelves in front of me, and folders with hopeful, ambitious labels signifying various projects all in their proper places in the wire folder stand. Excessive cleanliness for me is a symptom, not a cure: if I've been organizing, I haven't been writing.

Rockquemore closes with this list:

• Write every day for 30-60 minutes.
• Identify what (if any) technical errors are holding you back from writing each day.
• Experiment by trying one new strategy this week.
• If you feel reactive to trying new strategies to increase your writing time, ask yourself: what beliefs are keeping you from experimentation?
• If additional resistance emerges, welcome it with curiosity, engage it in conversation, and identify the behaviors and the feelings associated with it (you may even want to keep a resistance log).

I think this post may be the first step in a resistance log. I don't know if I'm going to welcome Resistance with curiosity (we're old friends, Resistance and I), but I may engage it in conversation long enough to tell it to get out of my study.

Student evaluations: unrequited love?

I'm not always a fan of Stanley Fish's columns in the New York Times, but his recent ones on student evaluations are interesting:

I respect students as persons who deserve to be treated with courtesy, which means, minimally, that they should not be harassed or singled out for ridicule or graded up or down on the basis of gender, ethnic, racial or religious affiliation, or sexual orientation. But this courtesy and respect does not extend to their ideas, which may or may not be given a hearing depending on the instructor’s preferred teaching style, and which may be summarily dismissed if they are judged to be beside the pedagogical point. Treat them as human beings with inherent dignity by all means; but don’t treat them as sages before the fact.

While I don't agree that we can summarily dismiss their ideas--with proper discussion, mighty oaks of good ideas can grow out of little acorns of bad ones--he has a point.

Fish quotes a lot of commenters as saying that they feel hurt if they get bad evaluations. That's something that we've all experienced--forgetting the 30 good evaluations and remembering in vivid detail the one from the student who obviously hated you. Why do we beat ourselves up about this (besides the issues of hiring and promotion)?

I think Dorothy Parker had it right in "Two-Volume Novel" when she talked about unrequited love:

The sun's gone dim, and
The moon's turned black;
For I loved him, and
He didn't love back.

Now, the sun doesn't necessarily go dim, but we put a lot of ourselves into those courses and those students, so when they don't love us back, it hurts.

I looked at my course evals for spring recently, and while they were good overall, there were a couple of students who were sort of "eh--who cares? It was okay, I guess" about the course (and me). Some of you may remember the course on flying dinosaurs that I was so excited about teaching. I had poured all kinds of energy and time into that course, neglecting my writing in favor of lavishing attention on pedagogy and interesting assignments. While some really liked it ("fantastic course"), a few comments were along the lines of "all the flying dinosaurs sucked."

Now, while I understand intellectually that the comment speaks for itself (then why did he take the course, which was conspicuously titled "Flying Dinosaurs"?), emotionally, it feels as though I loved the course and students and they--or one, really--didn't love me back, even though I've been teaching for long enough to know not to take it personally. For them, it was just another course; for me, it was a project in which I'd invested a lot of time and effort.

What to do? Disengage from your courses and students so that you have no investment in them? Can you really do that and be an effective teacher? Or get cynical (like "Dr. Bob," one of the commenters Fish discusses) and cater to an entertainment mindset, handing out A grades like M&Ms?

Or maybe this: next fall, scroll back over to this post and think twice before responding at length to every assignment or spending hours over preparing a single class.

Or not.

What do you do?

Repeated lessons from the archives

I'm calling these repeated lessons because they seem to occur to me anew every time I get to an archive.

When I'm reading letters, I'm struck every time not only by the graceful way in which the letter writers express themselves (even when they're obviously annoyed) but also by how much of the language of the standard forms (congratulations, thanks, condolences) seems to be a lost art. It makes me want to seize my fountain pen and go forth and write--if only there were anyone who wouldn't think I'd taken leave of my senses to do so.

It's surprising, too, how much the pattern of a person's handwriting lodges itself in your brain, so you can pick it out immediately even if you're scrolling slowly through microfilm.

Along with pattern recognition, there's something else that happens: sometimes a phrase or word will puzzle me because of the handwriting, and I'll type two different possibilities for the transcription. If I look away or look at something else for a minute, though, and then look back--boom! The actual meaning of the phrase comes through as clearly as though it were typed.

The more I read, the more I start to feel as though archives of letters are a vast text in themselves but that I can only find out the narratives of the characters and their relationships if I keep reading and reading. If Mr. F is a mutual acquaintance of Miss Y and Mrs. Z, I can play "guess the context" better with every letter that I read.

It does no good to rant silently to myself about conventions of dating letters that range from "Saturday" to "July 17" with no hint of a year in sight. Sometimes the year is clear from the context (mentioning an event, a dinner,a visit, or a work in progress) and sometimes from the paper or handwriting. Still, when I find a correspondent who puts an actual year on the letter, I applaud. And I have it easy, comparatively speaking. I can't even imagine what you medievalists and early modern scholars go through between the handwriting, the abbreviations, and the various orthographic and language barriers.

When I'm working in an archive, I don't want to stop, or eat, or go home. There's always just one more source, isn't there?

(I'm trying a new template, but that's not a lesson from the archive.)

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.

Marc Nouri 's warning to ambitious, pathetic, "lonely and isolated" academics going up for full professor

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Marc Nouri writes about "premature promotion". As best I can tell, being promoted to full professor means "you have demonstrated all the necessary qualifications," which would mean "not premature" to most university administrations. (See Historiann's post on this, too.)

But Nouri draws a distinction between being technically eligible and some transcendent state that embodies Full Professorhood or Professorliness or The Force or something:

That honor, in a more intrinsic and meaningful sense, is reserved for those who take a different path, a more patient, methodical and dedicated path, driven by a deep desire to be something really special as a scholar and as a member of his or her university community.

This kind of reminds me of the old academic system, borrowed from British universities, in which it was thought presumptuous to think about publishing a book until you had 20-30 years of teaching and learning about your subject under your belt. I even knew a few graduate students who believed this back in the olden days; they thought it was presumptuous and careerist to submit an abstract for a conference, let alone try to publish something, and would ridicule mercilessly anyone who did anything so crass. Those who tried to "professionalize" were, in their sights, no better than grade-grubbing students.

A few more of Nouri's points:

1. I don't know why he pegs those who go up for full when they're allowed to by their departments as "eager early birds . . . who are lonely and isolated, and for very good reason. No one likes them and their attitude," as though all they're lacking is a three-name moniker and a rifle to be the next serial killer.

2. Nouri says that you ought to be "A NAME!" or the go-to person in your field before you have the chutzpah to go up for full. What have studies consistently shown about male and female faculty and their respective willingness to (1) put themselves forward, (2) negotiate hard for raises, and (3) do what it takes to catch the positive attention of the powers that be?

3. Not to get on my pink glitter gender horse again, but while all that university service and that "patient, methodical path" may sound good for the Platonic ideal of the full professor, the way most people have to get there is through research as well as service. Gosh, do we know anyone in the university who's likely to be stuck at associate level through pursuing the "patient, methodical path" of unacknowledged service? Anyone?

Thoughts?

Writing as habit

I shouldn't even be posting this, but I really need the writing inspiration.

From Rachel Toor's "The Habit of Writing" at the Chronicle:

"I only write when I am inspired," Faulkner apparently said, and added, "Fortunately, I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning." Most of them say that you need to take writing seriously, to treat it like a job.

That's probably good advice. It just doesn't work for me. For me writing has become less a job than a habit.

A friend who wanted to start running said that he'd heard it takes three months to form a habit. I don't know whether that's true. It sounds both facile and pseudoscientific. But over the years, I seem to have performed a trick of mind, managing to convince myself that getting up every day and going someplace to write was as normal as brushing my teeth, making my bed, or watching reruns of House. Whatever psychological move I used, it seems to have been successful.

And in the comments, a quotation from Philip Glass:

In my student days I knew a lot of composers, many of them more talented than myself. But I learned one thing most of them did not: good work habits. When I was still a teenager, I forced myself to write music during a set period every morning, and I also forced myself to stop at one in the afternoon. I refused to take down musical ideas at other hours, even when they came to me. You might say I trained the Muse to come calling at my hours, not hers. And it worked. For years now, I have gotten my ideas in the mornings and never in the afternoons."

Now back to work.

Eight things no conference-goer wants to hear

1. "I'll skip this part in the interests of time, but in it I discuss this idea . . ."
   
2. "How many of you have read Mildly Obscure Author?" (Half the audience raises their hands, because why else would you go to a panel where said author is likely to be discussed?) "That's great--great! He should be better known. Well, Mildly Obscure Author was born on this date in . . ."
   
3. "How much time do I have left?" "You're two minutes over." "All right, I'll just skip to my last few pages, then."
4. "Since there aren't that many of you in the audience, let's move our chairs into a circle and we'll just talk about what our papers would have said if we'd read them." (This can work on occasion, but usually not.)
5. ". . . and I've brought along a number of her books so that I can share some passages with you . . ."
   
6. Twenty minutes into a supposedly twenty-minute paper: With several pages left to go, Presenter looks up from reading the paper and starts extemporizing: "You know, this reminds me of her other work, Y, in which . . ."
7. Paper read in a quiet, rapid monotone with no emphasis on any one word so that it's hard to grasp the ideas. We call it "reading" a paper, but we actually should call it "performing" the paper. Sometimes people are nervous, and it can't be helped, but practice the paper ahead of time.
8. "Our time is officially up, but we can take a few questions from the audience . . ."

Most presenters don't do these things, but there are a few. What else don't you want to hear or see at a conference?

On writing, from ProfHacker

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Planned Obsolescence) has a good post up at ProfHacker, "The First Half-Hour of the Morning":

This is a lesson that I've had to re-learn repeatedly. I'll find myself, about mid-semester, having a hard time squeezing any writing into my schedule, and it will only slowly dawn on me that the situation is being worsened, if not created, by the fact that I'm starting my day in crisis-management mode, which is a mode I can never get out of once it's set in.

On the other hand, if I start my day with thirty minutes of writing, I'm far more likely to be able to return to the project in some random free block of time later in the day.

So I discipline myself: I climb out of bed, brush my teeth, feed the cats, make the coffee, and then sit down at the computer -- and do not open my email. Instead, I open whatever document I'm currently writing in and set a timer for thirty minutes. And I spend that thirty minutes focusing exclusively on that document.

Because whatever new crisis my email is going to bring me that morning isn't going to get any worse in the next thirty minutes, but getting my focus back once I've allowed the crisis into my morning simply will not work.

This post has stuck with me, even though a lot of bloggers (myself included) have talked about setting aside writing times before. Although some of the commenters say that you can block out any 30 minutes in a day, it's not as easy to shut off your mind as it is to close the office door and turn off the internet.
Fitzpatrick's post reminded me of this study:

She [Winifred Gallagher, author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life] recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point your prefrontal cortex probably needs a rest, and you can answer e-mail, return phone calls and sip caffeine (which does help attention) before focusing again. But until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption. (For more advice, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

I've noticed this, too: my attention span shortens throughout the day, until it lengthens again in the evening and I can concentrate once again.

A side note: I like ProfHacker, although my reaction is often "hey, I wrote about that a while back/have been doing that for years." What ProfHacker posts on productivity do, though, is remind me of this: if you've written about this before, why aren't you following all those precepts you've been writing about for years?

Application fail.

Service and gender equity

Profgrrrl, Dr. Crazy, Historiann, and Female Science Professor have some great posts about issues that Dr. Crazy grouped together as "Gender, Equality, Mobility": spousal hires (Profgrrrl), salary compression and gender equity (FSP and Historiann), and all three (Dr. Crazy). Go read their posts for some thoughtful commentary.

I'd like to add a fourth one loosely connected with gender: service and promotion.

The MLA Report "Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey" says it best: "On average, it takes women from 1 to 3.5 years longer than men to attain the rank of professor, depending on the type of institution in which they are employed and regardless of whether they are single, married, or divorced or have children." According to the survey, women report that they do not spend significantly more time on service than men do, although they spend more time on teaching.

I wonder about this, although all I have is anecdata. Do women really spend the same amount of time on service as their male colleagues, or do they just not count some of the kinds of service that they do perform?

I'm thinking of conversations with colleagues from other institutions who are irritated that "the men" in their departments aren't doing X or Y service task. When I asked them why they didn't give the tasks to "the men" instead of taking those tasks on themselves, they laughed and said, "They wouldn't do it! It would never get done."

My belief is that if "the men" wouldn't do Task X or Y, the department would soon figure it out. Either (1) something would go badly awry in the operations of the department, in which case the faculty member who hadn't done the work would come under scrutiny, or (2) it wasn't worth doing in the first place, in which case the female colleagues should give it up, too. Either way, the colleagues weren't doing either themselves or "the men" any favors by completing these tasks.

Were "the men" really slackers, or were these colleagues just unfairly painting an entire gender with the same "slacker" brush? Did my female colleagues count the extra work that they did as service?

Are the kinds of service that women do different from the kinds of service that men do in departments? Does that service have anything to do with rates of promotion?

So how's your new employee, writing boss?

• The first week of the "pay yourself" plan went pretty well. I finished the edits on an accepted article and got it sent back, made some inroads into a conference paper due soon, and got some textbooks ordered and a secondary reading list started for the fall. The textbook order and reading list weren't the scholarly work I'd assigned myself to do, of course, but it did need to be done, and I got to perform the magical operation of crossing an item off the to-do list. Yes, I am one of those people who will write an item on the list just for the pleasure of crossing it off later.
  
• Once again, I discovered that my favorite time to write is really in the evening. The house quiets down, the sky opens out in darkness, and it's just me, the computer screen, and ideas. This would be perfect if I didn't wake up unbidden at 5 a.m. every day regardless of when I get to sleep.
• The write at night/get up early syndrome may explain why yesterday was a trance day. I got a fair amount of reading done, but every time I stopped moving for too long, I fell asleep.
• On the other hand, getting up early means that I can walk early, thus being exposed to the smell of early morning (which dissipates by about 9 a.m.). I can't explain it, but the air just smells different at that time. I'm working on a theory that it is somehow much better for the brain to get out and walk then since there are some kind of special chemicals that will make writing better later.

[Edited because no one needs to hear my Cassandra-like political ruminations.]

Being your own boss, scholarship edition

Since September, I've been putting some money in the bank each paycheck because I wanted the time to write this summer instead of teaching a summer course. This is in part an extension of the "book review mantra"; I can manage with less money (I hope), given what I've saved, but I can't get back the writing time that I'd usually spend grading and teaching.

Now here's the part that sounds a little crazy: what I've saved isn't exactly as much as a summer course, but I'm thinking of it as my salary for the next 6 weeks. I have $X amount per week, and thus $Y amount per day, that I am paying myself to write. If I don't write, I'm not only wasting time; I'm wasting money. Every day I don't write is not simply a day that I could have gotten some writing done; it's a day when I could have been teaching and making money instead.

In a way, it's not terribly different from what we usually do when we think about writing and productivity. Somehow, though, having to account for that $Y at the end of the day as well as for a word count seems to give the whole thing a different twist.

Lessons from Mom

Lessons I'm glad I learned from my mother (although she didn't put them in these words), with commentary:

• A person who treats you abusively once will do so again. Make the first time the only time. You're better than that, so walk away and don't look back. This was phrased in terms of if a boyfriend ever grabbed you roughly, but it's a great lesson for psychological abuse as well as physical abuse--and men aren't the only ones capable of being abusive, either.
  
• Don't make any rules you're not willing to enforce consistently or statements you're not willing to stand behind. I picked this up from her based on parenting, but it really applies to pets, children, students--really, everyone. For example, don't write a policy on your syllabus unless you're willing to enforce it. If you're going to have exceptions, make them available to everyone, not the students who will beg the hardest.
• Trust your instincts.

Lessons I wish I hadn't absorbed:

• Education is all right, and so is working for a year or so as a teacher, but the real goal of a successful woman is to get married so you don't have to work again ever. She denies now that this is the case, but it was the clear message when I was growing up. I may have been the last person in the U. S. to hear this message.
• Only stupid people need to do homework or work hard at school. A B without effort is better than an A you worked for.Boy howdy, did this one cause me problems!

If they only knew . . .

• that sometimes their papers are so interesting that I have to set a timer so that I can stop commenting and go on to the next one.
• that sometimes their papers have so many problems that I have to set a timer so that I can stop trying to untangle their sentences and go on to the next one.
• that sometimes I laugh out loud because they've said something so clever or witty or insightful or true that I can't help it.
• that sometimes I try to stop myself from exclaiming out loud if I've entered the paper zone known as the Howling Wilderness of Factoids and Generalizations.
• that the test of perfection in MLA citation style is its invisibility: if it's done correctly, I won't notice it and will feel more free to concentrate on what they're saying.
  
• that in reality I care a whole lot less about correct MLA citation style than they think I do.
• that although I am impartial in that I look at each paper as a fresh start and not based on what the student has done before, sometimes I can hear their voices as I read.
• that although I have an elaborate bookkeeping system for tracking who turned in what and when, at this point in the semester I may forget that something came in a little late.
• that if they didn't turn in something despite a reminder from me, I have to tell myself it's not my fault, and I spend more time thinking about their failure to turn it in than I should.
  
• that I think about this even though I know that they may be attending my classes for all sorts of reasons, and doing the best work that they can do may not be at the top of their list of life priorities right now.
• that I'm looking forward as much as they are to the real end of the semester, when finals are over and grades are in, and I can be put back into my pod person teacher closet (as they see it) until next fall.
  

From The Chronicle: "A Gentle Reminder to Special Collections Librarians"

"A Gentle Reminder to Special Collections Librarians" is not for the many friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable Special Collections librarians out there. No, it's for the ones who look at you as though you are standing there with matches and a can of gasoline if you ask to see an item. It's by a Yale Special Collections librarian, Todd Gilman, who was not able to see a collection he was both knowledgeable about and interested in because it was guarded by Cerberus a librarian who "believed she was doing her job—that her behavior was justified because I was foolish enough to just 'turn up' expecting to use 'her' collection." He adds this as the lesson:

Let this, then, serve as a gentle reminder to rare-book curators that your job is not to keep readers from your books but just the opposite: to facilitate readers' use of the collections. If altruism or professional integrity aren't sufficient motivators to get you to play nice, you might consider the fact that you have a job only because people want to read what's in those collections, and you will keep your job for only as long as readers feel welcome to approach you to make use of the materials.

I've had both kinds of treatment (mostly good) in visits to archives, but I always assumed that the few instances of bad treatment occurred because I was not one of the Elect in whatever way the local librarian chose to define it.

Have you found helpful librarians, or is Todd Gilman's experience more universal than not?

News from the flying dinosaurs front

I've been talking this semester about my class in "flying dinosaurs studies," which has just ended, so I thought I'd share the results of an end-of-semester survey that I usually do so that I can choose texts for the next time. I did this in my other classes, too, with similar results. I ask them what their reactions were to what we read, what they'd like to read that we didn't read this semester, etc.

• "I liked what we studied." I can live with this one.
• "Why didn't we study the stegosaurus? I studied the stegosaurus in high school and wrote a paper on it for my class last year, and we study it in every dinosaur class ever offered, so why wasn't it included in this class?" What part of flying dinosaurs was unclear to you in the course description?
• "I really wanted to study T.Rex. T. Rex rips things apart, and there's a lot of blood and cool stuff to look at with T. Rex. I've read about a hundred books on T. Rex, like everybody else in the class, so why didn't we study more about T. Rex? Also: zombies." What part of flying . . . oh, never mind.
• "Why didn't we discuss the color of dinosaur claws in more depth? They are pretty. We talked about the wings a lot, but we only spent a little time talking about the claws." You've got me there.

Seriously, though, if they're given a choice between something they haven't read before and something they have, why do they go for the familiar text?

Hoovering through

When I was in junior high, I used to walk to school with a sort-of friend. Every day I'd stop by her house to pick her up, and sometimes I'd stop on the way back, too. Invariably, regardless of the time of day, her mother would be hauling around a gigantic upright vacuum cleaner on the blue shag carpet; the vacuum cleaner, like the house, dated from the early 1960s and looked as if it were all steel and built to survive Armageddon. "She's Hoovering through," my SOF would explain, as though it were the most normal thing in the world to be totally attached to a vacuum cleaner all day.

I think I have been Hoovering through with teaching: chained to it at the hip, getting teaching epiphanies, worrying about students who checked out of class long ago (one of whom has decided to withdraw, thank goodness), and generally concentrating all my work/cleaning time on it day and night. On the plus side, my Excel gradebooks have never looked more cleaned-up and shiny, whereas usually there's an "oh, rats, I have to turn grades in" moment in which everything on paper gets entered into the spreadsheet at the last minute. I can actually tell students how many points they have for X or Y without saying "let me get back to you on that" and making frantic calculations. On the minus side--well, we all know what the minus side is, don't we? Although I did write and deliver a couple of conference presentations recently, that momentum didn't hold. Oh, no. Apparently I'm compelled to Hoover through.

Part of it is just being on campus all the time (and I'm not done for the week yet). The last few weeks of the semester are a favorite time for students whom you haven't seen all semester to materialize at your door and for administrators and faculty to schedule receptions, celebrations, award ceremonies, meetings, and presentations.

But now a few secret messages before I put the vacuum cleaner away for the day and concentrate on work:

• To the technology gods: if you had to bestow a massive, class-ending technology clusterfail on me, and apparently you did, thank you for leaving it until the end of the semester.
• To the student who wants to know if I've had a chance to grade the weekly work from February, March, and April that he tried to turn in all in a heap yesterday despite knowing that the deadlines have long passed: no, and you're too late to get credit for those.
  
• To the "oh, are you here today?" colleague from an earlier post: thanks, because your comment annoyed me so much that I went on the offensive with this, asking you, "which day are YOU here? I didn't see you last week."
  
• To the students who are excited about the options they chose for their final project and said so: I'm glad. It took a little longer for me to come up with those assignments, and it'll take longer to grade them, but your engagement in and excitement about the material makes that extra time worth it.
  

Short takes on deep thoughts

After a ridiculously busy week, I visit the blogosphere and discover that instead of celebrating April with daffodils and bunny pictures, everyone has good posts filled with deep thoughts.

• Notorious Ph.D. has a pair of posts asking graduate students how faculty members can best help them ("honesty").
• Historiann points out that mothers are once again being blamed and asks why it's so difficult for Americans to acknowledge the difficult realities of family life.
• Dr. Crazy contemplates a change (possibly generational) in the makeup of the academic blogosphere.
  
• Professor Zero provides the real translation of an exchange with an arrogant and clueless colleague.
• Ink had a week filled with testing (of the doctor kind) and grading (of the grading kind).
• tenthmedieval comments on the works of academic rock stars and, you know, rock star rock stars.
• Clio Bluestocking responds to messages composed of equal parts racism and incivility.
• New Kid gets exasperated by advice on professional dress that boils down to the perennial (and sexist) "don't dress in a way to distract men ('sexy' clothes) or make women jealous of you ('wear a big engagement ring').
  
• AnnieEm describes the reasons behind choosing a set list of questions for interviews.

Here is the only thing I can offer in response: [there used to be a bunny picture here, but it disappeared.]

Machines need rest, too: an animistic theory of the universe

Just to clarify: I don't really believe that there's a mystic connection between machines and human beings, since (sorry, Tracy Kidder) machines don't have souls.

But it sure helps to act as if they do, doesn't it? Do you stand there in front of a class and mutter "come on, come on" when a particularly balky overhead projector or computer is creaking slowly through its deliberate startup routine?

Do you maybe think to yourself, "Right, then--if you want to be that way about it" when about 1 time in every 10 it won't work at all for no apparent reason? If I weren't in front of a class when that happened, I'd go through the startup routine until I figured out the problem by eliminating variables, but for some reason students seem to find this a less-than-gripping entertainment when they're ready to talk about literature, so I don't do that any more.

Do you ever feel a mixture of bracing yourself up for battle and a willingness to accept defeat when you're trying to use media at a conference, since whatever machine has been set up might take a dislike to your USB drive or your computer and refuse to show anything but a blue screen?

Have you ever had a machine that just stopped working, and you put it in the garage or just left it turned off for a few months or a year, and then you plug it in and it works again? I've had that happen too many times to count and have simply concluded that machines need rest, too.

Or, closer to home, all of a sudden Firefox stopped showing up for work this week. I don't know whether it was tired of browser duty or what, but I'd click on it, and I'd see it in the "running processes" list, but it never actually opened. After several days of this, I interpreted the theory to mean "sometimes browsers need rest, too" and uninstalled it. I'll reinstall it in a week or so, after it has had its Florida vacation or whatever it needed to recover from its fatigue.

Has any of this happened to you?

The iPad: techno-envy

If I had a dollar for every review and blogpost I've read about the iPad over the past two weeks, I would have enough to buy--well, not an iPad, but maybe a cover for it.

I know all the drawbacks: why buy this when you have a netbook? It doesn't do anything a laptop can't do. It's a content-consumption device, not a content-creation device. It's expensive (although I have a rebate from something else that I could put toward buying it.) On and on.

I don't care. I at least want to get my hands on one to see if there is a Mystical Connection between woman and machine.

It isn't rational, this feeling. I just am drawn to the idea of it, the way that (stereotype alert) many men are drawn to cars and apparently, as Dr. Isis has taught me, most women care about shoes. (I don't.)

I waited two years for my Kindle envy to go away, and finally it did, but what's the use if iPad envy took its place?

Maybe I need to wait until this wave of techno-envy goes away.

The non-grading "teaching professional"

From the Chronicle comes this heartwarming story of a professor with seven (!) teaching assistants who was still just too oppressed to grade anything. Her solution: outsourcing grading, which allows her to continue talking in front of PowerPoint slides with arrows on them:

Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out—often awkwardly—nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback.

Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn't deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. "Our graders were great," she says, "but they were not experts in providing feedback."

That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.

Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., took over. The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task—and even, the company says, to do it better than TA's can. . . .
"People need to get past thinking that grading must be done by the people who are teaching," says Mr. Rajam, who is director of assurance of learning at George Washington University's School of Business. "Sometimes people get so caught up in the mousetrap that they forget about the mouse."

I do appreciate the professor's wish to have her students write more as an aid to learning, and it's true that she couldn't possibly grade all that writing in a large lecture class herself. Still, here are a few questions:

1. If the TA's are not up to the task just yet, how about training them and working with them until they can work with students' writing effectively? If they're teaching assistants, presumably University of Houston has some kind of graduate program in the field in which they're assisting. If they're graduate students, they're supposed to be learning and to be guided by faculty, aren't they? What am I missing here?

2. Doesn't this feed into the worst accusations of critics of academe that TA's are being accepted into programs primarily to teach (cost effectiveness for courses) and not to learn?

3. If additional instructors must be hired to help with the grading, it's good to know that there are absolutely no unemployed or underemployed M.A. and Ph.D. graduates trained in composition theory and experienced in the teaching of writing in Houston who could be hired and that outsourcing is entirely an ethical choice for the "director of business law and ethics studies."

4. I'm going to draw a polite curtain over the mousetrap/mouse analogy (students and their writing are the mouse, a mousetrap kills the mouse--oh, never mind.)

[Update: There are lots more comments on the article now at the original link. They range from "This is cost-effective; what's the problem?"(a few) to "For those prices, you could hire on-campus graders" (#18) to "What is teaching about, if grading isn't part of it?" (quite a few) to "Hire me! I'll grade them for $12 a pop" (a lot) to "You fat, lazy Americans won't take this job anyway, so why are you complaining?" (#43) to "How about we outsource administration?" (#47).]

Getting back on the horse

I try to keep a record of writing productivity, a la Silvia's How to Write a Lot, but that particular spreadsheet isn't one I've opened in a while. "Here I am," it says to me, and I'm off in another room with my fingers in my ears, singing "La la la, I can't hear you. Look! There's another book on flying dinosaurs to prep! Another paper to grade! Another set of response papers to read!" I have never used teaching as a distraction and procrastination device before, but lo and behold, that's what I've done this semester.

This morning, in trying to write and get back a sense of order, I took a look at the spreadsheet. The record has more zeros in it than a hedge fund manager's salary, except that mine doesn't have the mitigating number before those zeros that measures worth in millions or billions. No, I just have zeros where a record of days spent writing could be.

To be fair, a number of those days were on-campus days, usually 3-4 a week; that means 12 hours per on-campus day, counting travel, and an absence of opportunity to write between teaching, dealing with students, and attending committee meetings.

But that's really an excuse. What I've done is like making a big sandcastle instead of building a house: by the time the semester is done, all the writing on those papers, all the prep--everything--will be washed away, and I'll be standing there on the beach with nothing except satisfaction in what I did with teaching to show for the semester.

Now, that kind of satisfaction is valuable to me personally, and presumably the effort I put into teaching helps students, but in a count-happy culture (how many publications? how perfect are your evaluations?), it doesn't really matter to anyone except me. As we're constantly being reminded in a count-happy culture, and, as we remind our students, effort doesn't count. Product does.

So although it's not one of the traditional times to turn over a new leaf--beginning of the semester, January 1--I'm going to get back on this particular horse of writing, and to do that, I have to record the progress I've made. I'm going to stare down those zeros every day until they turn into something else: evidence of work accomplished.

This is not a real post

Grumble . . . reading other people's words . . . writing letters for other people's projects, awards, and evaluations . . . reading student projects . . . evaluating . . . evaluating . . . being on campus and kept from writing many, many days in a row . . . grumble.