Random bullets at midweek

• How much do you remember about a book (criticism, not fiction) a few years after you've read it? After you've skimmed it?
• Do you remember the general subject? The argument? Examples?
  
• How embarrassed are you if a few years later, a student is reading the book because you said it was good and asks you about the argument--and you can't remember? (My answer: sort of embarrassed, but not as much as I'd have been some years ago.)
• You know all those writing techniques that say to get at the writing in the morning, putting everything else aside, and then stop? Well, I've gotten a piece just about finished, but the trouble is that I don't want to stop. It's like chips: you can't eat just one.
• Speaking of chips, how pampered are Americans, anyway? This is from the Wall Street Journal:

  Frito-Lay, the snack giant owned by PepsiCo Inc., says it is pulling most of the biodegradable packaging it uses for its Sun Chips snacks, following an outcry from consumers who complained the new bags were too noisy.

  Come on. Dude, you're sitting in front of your TV and the bag is too noisy? You're at home, for Pete's sake. The noise isn't going to kill you. And if the bag is too noisy for the place where you're trying to open it, here's a tip: any place where the bag noise is a problem is a place where you shouldn't be eating chips in the first place.
  

Today's Koan: If a reference can't be cited using MLA, does it really exist?

If a reference can't be cited using MLA (or Chicago), does it really exist?

For example, say you have a Kindle or an iPad. I've been given an iPad as a present--yay!--so let's stick with that as an example. You can download books from the Kindle store on Amazon.com, if you put the free Kindle app on your iPad. You can also buy or download books from the iBooks store, including free public domain ones. The thing that doesn't come along with these nifty editions is a set of page numbers that corresponds to the page numbers in the original text.

That's not a problem with .pdf documents, since they're images of the original. You can read them and, since Sept. 30, annotate them using the GoodReader app, or read and annotate them using iAnnotate. You can copy text from the .pdf and paste it into Docs-to-Go.

So far, I like the experience of reading on the iPad. If you have a book with endnotes, for example, the endnotes are links, so you can click on the note and then click back to the text. You can write notes in both the Kindle and iBooks apps, although I haven't explored that much because it's harder than I thought it would be to type on the screen-based keyboard.

What if you want to cite a book that you've downloaded? Kindle books--for scholarly books, anyway--cost about the same as the paperback edition, and they cost more than a used copy, so if I'm going to shell out the money for one, I want to be sure that I don't need to get another copy.

The piece of advice I've found most often is "go get a print copy of the book, find the citation, and cite the page." This is probably the best advice for now, but it's a colossal timewaster and a duplication of effort to have to hunt up the book if you've already bought it. If the book is in Google Books, you could try searching for the phrase in there, but a lot of books aren't in Google Books.

APA has addressed this by suggesting that you cite is as you would any unpaginated material: "Name the major sections (chapter, section, and paragraph number; abbreviate if titles are long), like you would do if you were citing the Bible or Shakespeare." Since paragraphs aren't numbered, I would be less than thrilled to have to scroll through and count the paragraphs just so I could cite the reference. And what about paratextual elements such as epigraphs? Do they count as paragraphs when you're counting?

Some other sources suggest that you cite the Kindle location number, which would be swell if the editor of the journal you're submitting to has a Kindle and not so much otherwise.

The Chicago Manual of Style suggests just citing the Kindle edition and maybe the chapter number.

The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Seventh Edition floats above the fray by saying (in 5.7.18) that you should just say what kind of file it is: "Microsoft Word file, JPEG file" or whatever. Presumably you could say "Kindle file" or "iBooks file" there, too, although all of the examples given are for short pieces. That wouldn't provide much information if you were trying to cite from a book-length source. As EduKindle asks, "Why is it so hard to cite a passage on a Kindle?"

Beats me. I'll be happy when MLA gets this straightened out, almost as happy as I'll be when they decide to jettison those #@%$& angle brackets that they make you put around a URL (see 5.6.1) as though we'd all just stare helplessly at an http:// prefix without knowing it was a web address unless it was safely contained in a set of angle brackets. [Edited to add: tenthmedieval has a good explanation for this in the comments.]

Signs of the times: "Why do they hate us?"

This isn't as much a post as a link roundup of posts explaining why the educated middle class is to blame for--well, just about everything. The title riffs on Thomas Hart Benton's musings of the same name at The Chronicle.

1. For a minute or two, I thought the Chronicle had let up on the professor-bashing, and Benton does give some logical answers to his questions (albeit ones that we've mostly discussed on blogs before). But fearing that he's gone too far, he slides into his hairshirt and admonishes us to do the same:

But perhaps it is enough to say that the reason we feel more "hated" than ever is that we deserve it. Instead of collaborating, we competed with each other. We focused on our research instead of on the needs of undergraduates. We even exploited our graduate students, using their labor to underwrite our privileges, and then we relegated most of them to marginal positions as adjuncts. We waited too long to institute reforms to our profession, and now—after 40 years of inaction—the reforms are going to be forced upon us.

You hear that, you academic Marie Antoinettes? It's not that education has been systematically defunded over the past forty years, or that tenure-track jobs have been decimated, or that administration and college athletics have fattened themselves at the expense of instruction. It's not even that economic conditions and laws designed by the wealthy and for the wealthy have gutted the middle class, or that the richest 1% of Americans have gone from taking in 9% of the country's income in the 1970s to 23% in 2007. Nope, it's all our fault, because while the media were breathlessly waiting to hear what we had to say, we squandered the opportunity by bickering, and being selfish, and saying "let them eat cake," and all that.

2. Feeling guilty yet? No? Maybe that's because you're not a lazy librarian. Now, the public librarians I've known have worked very hard for very little money, but Santa Clarita just privatized its libraries and outsourced the work to a foreign-owned company, L.S.S.I., whose spokesperson makes the following winsome pitch about his love of learning in wanting to run the library:

“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

See, what regular librarians with a living wage and pensions do is "never have to do anything." What his workers will do for a pittance, besides enrich the pockets of investors and retire into poverty, is "work."

3. Still not convinced that the economic downturn is the fault of the college-educated middle class, with special guilt points if you're engaged in trying to keep knowledge alive? You're supposed to die if you're over 50 and don't have a job; everybody knows that. The conservative columnist Megan McArdle will show you the error of your ways in The Atlantic, but I'll let alicublog recap her two most recent posts for you:

• [McArdle] actually composed something called "Why Are The Rich So Rich?" that basically answered the question with Beats me, but it's definitely not because they have some unfair advantage!
• MEGAN McARDLE'S ADVICE FOR OLD PEOPLE WHO LOSE THEIR JOBS: Have more money, and get to work.

4. Actually, the one person who seems to get why they hate us and say so honestly is Warren Buffett. From the New York Times, 26 November 2006:

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Too ranty? Maybe I should take this down. Let me know.

Philip Roth on writing

From this month's Esquire, Philip Roth on writing (p. 186):

Has the writing gotten any easier?

That's hard to answer. There are days and weeks that are very difficult. I've never been without the struggle. When I started writing, I did have false starts. I would write seventy-five, a hundred pages of something and toss it aside. I don't do that. I don't make false starts any longer. So that's an improvement.

Who knows what'll happen in the next ten years. Maybe it'll get better. Maybe it'll get worse. I don't know. At this stage of the game, you don't know what's going to happen. You see different writers as they get old, what happens to them. Some shut down. Some write sporadically--the way Bellow did it.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: "The ordeal is part of the commitment." It's one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

Mine is from a fat relief pitcher, Bob Wickman: You gotta trust your stuff.

That's very good. I used to have little things over my desk at various times. One of them was "Don't judge it." Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.

I have four or five friends who I ask to read my final drafts and to say whatever they want to say to me about it. I put it through that sieve, and they tell me what they think about it, and then I consider it and make changes if it seems appropriate. Often it does.

[See also Historiann's post on scholars writing about writing.]

Today in numbers

• Approximate number of words written today: about 3,000.
• Number of words that had anything to do with my own writing: 0.
• Number of words in letters of recommendations, etc.: about 3,000.
• Number of words in emails: who counts?
• Most frequent interjection: "Don't you dare quit on me, screen! Don't you dare go all white and fuzzy with a "Not responding" sign. Don't you know I'm 2 hours into this letter already? What's that? The little Vista spinning blue circle that means the system is going nowhere fast?"
• Number of times I sat and watched the little circle spin: who counts?
  

A new reason for writing class notes by hand

The New York Times Magazine has an article about middle-school students using the Livescribe pen (used to be Pulse Pen) in class. Short version: it's helping them, for several reasons:

• They can focus more on what the teacher's saying instead of trying to write down everything, since the pen captures the audio of the lecture. One student just writes down "LIST" if the teacher is rattling off a series of items; he then goes back to fill in the list.
• They can review the material with the audio and fill in their notes later.

I suspect that part of the benefit here is that with this pen, students are actually going over their notes more than they used to. They're also able to relax and listen to the teacher, which may take away some anxiety.

Of course, one education expert is raining on this particular parade. Lisa Nielsen, who works for the school district, doubts whether this is useful; teachers should instead be pulling in YouTube videos and web sites from "content experts" because, after all, students who were given (and probably memorized) a teacher's PowerPoint slides did better on a test than those who listened in class. They don't need to "write down everything that the teacher says."

Well, who said they did? The point of the article is that students don't have to write down everything but that they tend to be more focused--in part because if they're talking instead of paying attention, the pen picks that up, too.

I wonder, though, how much information those students retained after a few weeks and whether those given PowerPoints were able to recall the information as well as the others. The article doesn't say, but it does predict that maybe having one good note-taker in a class would allow everyone else to stop taking notes.

I think this misses the point. For a lot of people (myself included), making those marks on a piece of paper while listening helps you to focus and remember the content better. The marks can be notes, or they can be doodles; it's the process of making the marks that helps. If you write notes instead of drawing a giant, tattoo-like picture in your notebook, the notes may help you later, but for concentrating at that moment, both kinds of making marks seem to accomplish the same thing.

At any rate, it'd be interesting to see if this worked in a college classroom. It would be right up there with the other invention I'd like to see: a giant tilted mirror at the back of the room like those in stage musicals, so that I could see who's taking notes and who's writing vital Facebook updates.

Productivity roundup

You know how the conventional wisdom is to break up your exercise routine so that you don't get too bored with it and so that your muscles will get stretched in different ways? Maybe productivity is like that, too, so here are some new links, mostly from business. A lot of it is stuff we know, but hearing it in a different form somehow gets me revved up to get back to work.

• Presentation Zen has a 10-minute video of John Cleese talking about creativity. Among his points: (1) Create an oasis or "tortoise enclosure" for yourself by limiting the time and space in which you work and (2) If you sleep on a problem, often the answer will come to you. The same video is at Ewan McIntosh's site, along with a list of Cleese's points.
  
• Sebastian Marshall's post on "What gets measured, gets managed" suggests a level of record-keeping for productivity (and life!) that's well beyond what I could ever manage but that does work.
  
• Ryan Waggoner suggests the "pomodoro technique" using a timer (25 minutes of work/5 minute break), which is basically the "sprints" method that a lot of us use. It's a variation on a technique called "timeboxing," which is what Cleese is recommending.
• The ever-trusty Lifehacker has a post recommending that the timer you use should be an external timer, not one that sits on your computer desktop; the post includes links to good (free) timing applications, though.
• Don't forget all the productivity posts at ProfHacker, too.
  

For a little eye-candy for all you library-lovers, check out the middle picture in this sequence. It's from an article about a couple who bought the house next to theirs and remodeled it into a library. (As seen at Nicole and Maggie's)

Bookless library, meet bookless book

We may have a winner in the "let's kill all the libraries" sweepstakes. Inside Higher Ed reports on"A Truly Bookless Library" at the University of Texas at San Antonio:

The difference between the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Applied Engineering and Technology Library and other science-focused libraries is not that its on-site collection is also available electronically.

It is that its on-site collection is only available electronically. . . .

San Antonio says it now has the first actual bookless library. Students who stretch out in the library’s ample study spaces — which dominate the floor plan of the new building — and log on to its resource network using their laptops or the library’s 10 public computers will be able to access 425,000 e-books and 18,000 electronic journal articles. Librarians will have offices there and will be available for consultations.

In other words, UTSA has built a library, a.k.a. a large expensive room with comfy chairs, so that students can do exactly what they can now do from their dorm rooms and the local Starbucks. Frankly, I don't know how it calls itself a library. From what I can gather, it lacks even the basics, such as an espresso stand or a set of treadmills.

More seriously, I can see how a College of Engineering may not need books; I don't know enough about the scholarship of engineering to say. What does confuse me is why UTSA felt that it needed to dedicate a space called a "library" when what they're envisioning is a place for students to hang out and talk to each other. Does UTSA not have a student union? Is there not a room in there which could be designated a "library" or quiet studying space? My assumption is that UTSA must be rich enough not to worry about it, so I won't worry about it, either.

My question is more about the bookless books in the bookless library--the 425,000 e-books that will be available to students. I have three basic questions:

1. Does UTSA have licenses enough for them all (something that's brought up in the comments at IHE)? Let's assume that two professors assign an outside reading from one of these books in their 100-section lecture classes. Does UTSA have 200 licenses for this book, or are some students going to be shut out?

Disclosure: I've had this happen in much smaller classes once when I assigned a reading from a licensed e-book. The first person was able to check out the book for 24 hours under the university's license and everyone else was out of luck--and very vocally unhappy when the class next met. I never used an online book in that way again for exactly that reason.

2. The second one may be more idiosyncratic: it has to do with the handling of books. Historiann's recent post details some of the issues, such as not being able to mark up the books as easily and not being able to flip back and forth as you can with a paper book. I'd agree, and to these I'd add another: doesn't the sheer amount of screen-time that you get from reading things online, even on a dedicated device, contribute to some eyestrain and fatigue? There's something about switching media (screen to paper and back again) that rests the eyes in ways that a prolonged exposure to one or the other can't accomplish.

3. Will UTSA check in with its students to see how they're faring in this brave new world? I'd be interested to see if they're taking some kind of benchmark measurements about what students know/how much they read and will check again a few years down the road.

Audiobooks

I've been thinking about writing about audiobooks for a while, and Tenured Radical's recent post has inspired me to do so.

1. It's easier to keep several books going at one time and keep your mental place in them than it is with print books. I don't know why this is, but I can click on Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello after a couple of weeks spent on, say, Lyndall Gordon's Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds or Simon Schama's Rough Crossings and still recall what's going on with the Jefferson-Hemings family very well.
2. Since you can't skim and can't easily jump ahead when you're driving, if a chapter is dense with an intricate accounting of financial documents, you have to be able to tolerate the less-than-gripping stretches where you'd usually skim.
   
3. It's also hard for me to get past the "I paid for this, so I ought to listen to it" sense of a book, much harder than it is to put down a dull print book that I've bought. I did skip a chapter of David Aaronovitch's Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History but now don't feel that I can say I've read it. Of course, can you ever say you've "read" an audiobook?
   
4. On the other hand, as you listen you really do get a sense of every word, although you can't mark or highlight the text as you would when you're reading. I've listened to some literary works that I knew well and have picked up on additional nuances just by listening to the audio version.
   
5. I hope this doesn't sound too shallow, but the narrator/reader can make a difference. For example, some readers do the accents when they read quotations, and some don't. The reader for Lives like Loaded Guns, who sounds a little like Julie Andrews most of the time, does a kind of dry, scratchy New England accent when she reads the words of the Dickinson family (lower voice for Edward and Austin, higher for Emily). John Slattery (yes, that John Slattery) does a great job with accents and the regular narration in A Farewell to Arms, although I didn't even realize that he was the narrator for a while. ("Why does that voice sound so familiar? Oh, wait--")
6. I hate it when the recording engineers or producers or whoever decide to snip out too many natural pauses in the editing process. I couldn't say for sure that that's what happened in Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, but listening to that one for too long will leave you breathless since there aren't pauses where you'd expect them.
   
7. Buy an abridgment only if you're up for the challenge of figuring out what's going on, since a lot of them seem to simply lop out random chapters. I've bought a few by mistake and been mightily confused with a random character pops up in the last third of the book.
   
8. With audiobooks, you're limited to what's available. I've downloaded some books from Librivox but mostly go through audible.com (2 books/month for $22). Having a limited set of choices isn't necessarily bad since it forces you to read things you might not pay $35 for in a bookstore. For example, I might have given a casual glance to Martha A. Sandweiss's Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line if I'd seen it at a book exhibit, but since it was available in audio form, I bought it and it was excellent.

Does anyone else listen to audiobooks?
[Edited to add links.]

Of newspapers, libraries, and H. L. Mencken

Tenured Radical has an interesting post up about her travails in getting the paper copy of The New York Times delivered early enough to read it before it ends up in the recycling bin. Hearing that the NYT is going to an online-only model in the future, she concludes with this: "Then I was struck by a brighter thought. At a certain point you have to stop running from a problem, and do the sensible thing: throw money at it. So off to the iPad store I go." She also writes about Jeffrey Hamburg and Anthony Grafton's article on saving the Warburg Library.

I've experienced some of what she's talking about-- (I used to subscribe to the Sunday NYT but had to give up because it usually arrived on Tuesday)--but the part about the Warburg Library was what caught my attention.

A visionary scholar, Warburg was obsessed with cultural exchanges of all kinds and in all periods, and tinkered throughout his life with new ways to frame and display visual images, in order to reveal their interconnected meanings across time and space. His unconventional tool for studying this shifting web of historical relationships was a picture atlas that remained in perpetual flux, and to which he gave the name Mnemosyne, or memory.

The library is in danger of having its special character changed and its stacks closed, not to mention the possibility of having parts of its collection sold, which would, of course, destroy the connections and interconnected meanings that were possible by seeing the materials in context. (Go read the article, which says this much better.)

Not everyone agrees, I know, but regular libraries foster those connections in a smaller way when you browse the stacks. There's a process, and I don't know what to call it, when you're gathering information on a topic and working with its concepts in the back of your mind. You browse through your own books, or journal articles, or the library stacks, and suddenly you're making more connections. Conferences have always helped with this, but in recent years, the online bookstores (amazon.com, Powells, and university press web sites) added to the process, as have Google Scholar, Google Books, and the online journal databases. It's not exactly research, because you're not "searching" so much as "informing" yourself in a casual way, and it's also not research because it's not in depth. You skim information; you don't take notes on it. But it's a useful and important process, because it feeds your mind with pieces of information that may not seem useful at first but may arise at a later state in the project. It's our own version of the picture atlas, maybe.

Why H.L. Mencken? Because Mencken believed in the value of books, and because Hamburg and Grafton quote him to good effect:

A center of European culture and a repository of the Western tradition that escaped Hitler and survived the Blitz may finally be destroyed by British bean counters. It is a picture, in the words of H.L. Mencken, “to bemuse the vulgar and to give the judicious grief.”

And because it's his birthday, of course!

Random bullets of this week so far

• I think I've talked to more people this week than I talked to all summer. It's exciting to talk with students about their plans and projects. It's exciting to teach. It's exciting to go to the library and get books.
  
• It's also tiring. Last week was so exciting in that way that all I could do for two days of the weekend was fall asleep every time I sat down, not that I sat down if there was any chance of lying down. According to those around me, I was a little less animated than the inhabitants of Zombieland, with less color in my face.
• I read the "10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly" at the Chronicle and paused at this:

  2. Set goals based on output, not input."I will work for three hours" is a delusion; "I will type three double-spaced pages" is a goal. After you write three pages, do something else. Prepare for class, teach, go to meetings, whatever. If later in the day you feel like writing some more, great. But if you don't, then at least you wrote something.

  While I really like this goal, on some days, that means I would be teaching at 11:30 at night if I waited until I got three double-spaced pages.

We need to get better at making analogies

Just to let you know in advance: no positivity here.

There's another article on tenure at the New York Times; it's Christopher Shea's review of those books attacking tenure that we've all seen in the news. After repeating the false assertions, he defends university professors. To Hacker's and Dreifus's airy (or should I say "windy"?) assertions that professors barely work anyway and could write books on the weekends, Shea writes:

But it seems doubtful that, say, “Battle Cry of Freedom,” the acclaimed Civil War history by Princeton’s James McPherson, could have been written on the weekends, or without the advance spadework of countless obscure monographs. If it is false that research invariably leads to better teaching, it is equally false to say that it never does.

Shea then makes the accurate point that public institutions are being gutted while some wealthy institutions have fared much better. I saw a connection here to what Robert Reich asserts in his Op-Ed piece:

Where have all the economic gains gone? Mostly to the top. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income.

Anyway. Let me climb down from this soapbox and make a point. We need to get better at explaining that the "few hours a week" we spend in class is actually the culmination of a lot of work--the payoff period. Think about it:

• Do we say that wheat farmers only work a couple of weeks in August and make the big bucks for their year doing two weeks' worth of work? Of course not. There's a lot that goes into farming, including planting, harrowing, spraying, etc., but if you look only at the payoff period of harvest, that's what you'd say.
• Does a clergyperson work only for the hour on his/her holy day that he/she delivers a sermon, leads prayers, or whatever?
• Does a salesman work only when he/she makes a big sale? That's the payoff period, so we should only count those hours when we figure what the salesman's annual wage works out to, right? All the sales that didn't pan out, all the prep work--they don't count as work, if you use the calculus that academic critics use.
  
• Does a manager only do real work when he/she presents at a major meeting? The rest of the work (staff meetings, writing reports, managing people, etc.) doesn't count, because it's not the "payoff period."
• Does a surgeon only get paid for the time he/she is actually in surgery operating on patients?
  

These aren't great examples, of course; that's why we need better ones. And this wouldn't address the serious problems and academic injustices that Shea also mentions (adjunctification of the work force, etc.) But among the most damaging attacks on academe is the idea that we only work a few hours a week. Maybe we could start countering that with some good analogies.

Life of the zoned-out mind, or thoughts while copying

Notorious Ph.D. has an interesting post called "Life of the Mind" in which she notes that a lot of bloggers are setting up times for reflection (like Heu Mihi), doing yoga, or attempting to be positive in a sea of negativity. I like this post because it gave me a different way to think about spending time at the library getting materials, which I did for a couple of hours this week and last.

Now, not everything is online, as you may have heard a few thousand times, and having to get bound periodicals and other materials in the stacks is a mixed blessing. On one hand, you're spending a lot of time doing something that's taking you away from writing, but on the plus side, you get to browse the stacks, and I found a lot of potentially useful items to check out.

When I got to the copiers, though, I started to think that other faculty have research assistants or departmental work-study students or maybe personal assistants (yes, some faculty have these!) to do this work, because there was a notable dearth of faculty types around, although to be fair maybe I just go to the library at odd times. I put my stack of journals on the table and settled in to copying, which is a slower process with the new scan-and-copy copiers than with the best of the old copy-only ones. It was just me and a row of under-20-year-olds, copying away. *

You can't really do anything else when you're making a copy, because you're flipping pages and pushing buttons and checking to be sure that you got everything. You can't text or check email, and you have to keep track of what you're doing. You're in the copy zone. It's a little like knitting, maybe, but you're surrounded by snippets of words and pieces of paper, so you have to pay some, but not too much, attention.

It was while I was in the copy-mind zone, though, that I got a terrific idea for a new course and also figured out what I wanted to do with a piece of writing.

I'd been thinking of the copying as an inefficient process (which it is) and a distraction from writing time (which it also is) and something that other faculty don't seem to spend time doing (which may or may not be true). When I read Notorious Ph.D., though, I realized that I could think of it as a different kind of enforced thinking time. How's that for positivity?

Incidentally, am I the only person who still needs to get articles from bound journals once in a while?

*Edited to add: Now that I think of it, the 20-somethings were not actually using the copiers but just milling around a row of empty ones. I'm guessing that the bound journals don't hold a lot of attractions for them.

Literary Stock Market

Maybe because I'm working at present on a figure whose critical stock was once high but has fallen dramatically, I'd like to see someone (not me) put together a line graph called the "Literary Stock Market." Although you can get a sense of this if you read the year-end reviews in various discplines, it'd be nice to see this in graphics form, wouldn't it?

Although numbers of conference, conference panels, and so on could help to determine rankings, you could also get a pretty good ranking by basing the Literary Stock Market on the numbers of citations in the MLA Bibliography each year, for a start. Whoever puts together the Literary Stock Market could also have little line indicators giving possible reasons if there are drastic rises and falls. For example, if you were working on James Fenimore Cooper (I'm making this up), there could be a spike and decline around the topics of American exceptionalism and the whole "American Adam" idea, maybe followed by a revival after postcolonial theory arrives. It would be hugely interesting as well to see how authors neglected in previous centuries have been revived or recovered.

You could also do this with individual books, as the classic, must-read novel of one generation of critics recedes before an interest in another of the author's books. You'd probably want to limit this to a particular area or time period, too, since following more than 15 or so lines would make the viewer dizzy.

I think you could do this in history: topics or figures once considered essential for study may have fallen into obscurity, and previously neglected topics may come to the fore.

Are there any figures in your discipline whose stock on the Literary Stock Market has fallen particularly far, or whose star has risen drastically?

[Edited to add: Speaking of popularity, that's why Joel Stein is against net neutrality. Shorter Joel Stein in this week's Time magazine: "Some sites should receive priority, including Fox News, if they are more important to many people, and especially to me, Joel Stein. How dare independent sites get in the way of my Glenn Beck, Lady GaGa, and Lindsay Lohan news? Fie upon the masses yearning for unpopular information not sponsored by a corporation! Let them eat cake--or at least wait longer while I get vital updates paid for by corporate America!" The article is so ridiculous that I think, or maybe hope, that he's kidding.]

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?