Writing inspiration: Why do you write like you're running out of time?

Hamilton was an exuberant genius who performed at a fiendish pace and must have produced the maximum number of words that a human being can scratch out in forty-nine years. 

--Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, p. 5.

 I came to Alexander Hamilton through two sources:

1. I am and have been for some time a huge fan of Ron Chernow, having read his Washington biography, all 35+ hours of it. I have Nancy Isenberg's Fallen Founder but haven't read it yet. These are for fun reading (not related to work) and there hasn't been a lot of time recently to do any.

2. At one point in my life, probably the mid-century males portion of it, I read and reread obsessively Gore Vidal's Burr and, to a lesser extent, 1876. 

Burr was the best piece of fiction that Vidal ever wrote, at least that I read: Washington, D. C., the supposed third volume in the trilogy, although it had been written much earlier, was too louche and decadent, and the other American historical novels (Lincoln, Empire) relied too heavily on a few stylistic tricks.  Vidal was much better as an essayist.  But Burr was exceptional in Vidal's canon, maybe because the acerbic wit that Vidal brought to it seemed temperamentally suited to discussing Burr.

So, knowing that Chernow had written Washington, I downloaded his bio Alexander Hamilton and got about halfway through it when I started hearing about a musical based on it.

Yes, that one. 

I bought the soundtrack and am now obsessed with it.  Quite apart from the amazing lyrics, though, it's a great piece of writing inspiration for the story it tells.  Hamilton writes his way out of the West Indies, writes as Washington's "right-hand man," writes 51 (or so) of The Federalist Papers, which I think I last had to read some of in high school, and writes writes writes for the rest of his life.

One thing that struck me forcefully this time: Burr was 48 at the time of the duel and Hamilton was 49 (if you accept Chernow's date of 1755 for his birth).  Middle-aged. Old enough to know better, which makes the whole thing more sad, somehow.

But still, an inspiration to writers.

Random bullets of so much travel, with a side order of Sinclair Lewis

• Reason for blog absence: travel and conferences and more travel and more conferences. Paid for by the department or frequent flyer miles and savings? What do you think? 
• Did I just fall asleep in my chair a minute ago? Yes, indeed. If I stretch out on the floor for 20 minutes, does that count as a nap (which I'm forbidding myself) or as, um, "yoga"? Yoga it is!
• The hardest part is giving up the momentum I had on Thing One and Thing Two, which I was working on like a demon before having to quit and get ready for the conferences. Using the old rule--all right, my old rule--of having to spend at least one hour of wasting time and avoidance for each day you're away from the project, I think I'm ready to get started again. 
• About the election: I used to think I was watching Berzelius T. Windrip (legally available here if you're in Australia), but now I think I am watching Dusty Rhodes, which is Andy Griffith at his most folksy and most terrifying.  
• You all know by now I'm a Sinclair Lewis fan. Here's a section on Berzelius T. Windrip from Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here (1935), with some breaks, comments, and bolding added. Liberal editor Doremus Jessup is speaking first:

But wait till Windrip shows us how to say it with machine guns! . . .  On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy's given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had. That may be menaced now by Windrip--all the Windrips. All right! Maybe we'll have to fight paternal dictatorship with a little sound patricide--fight machine guns with machine guns. Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!"

"Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen." 

 "The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical--yes, or more obsequious!--than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio--divine oracles, to millions.

Comment: Listen to AM radio, as I do during the long distances. Hasn't changed.

Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'?

Comment: Remember "Freedom Fries"?

And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the--well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it?

Comment: Check out the link for a recent endorsement.

Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? . . . Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children?

Comment: Contemporary equivalents--we have them.

Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?

Comment: Still happening and still here.

. . . Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition--shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor--no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We're ready to start on a Children's Crusade--only of adults--right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!"

"Well, what if they are?" protested R. C. Crowley. "It might not be so bad. I don't like all these irresponsible attacks on us bankers all the time. Of course, Senator Windrip has to pretend publicly to bawl the banks out, but once he gets into power he'll give the banks their proper influence in the administration and take our expert financial advice. Yes. Why are you so afraid of the word 'Fascism,' Doremus? Just a word--just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours--not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini--like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days--and have 'em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again. '

Comment: Or "great again"?

Nother words, have a doctor who won't take any back-chat, but really boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not!"

Comment: What do you think?

Projecting power, gender edition

How do you project power--not arrogance, but power--through your speech and body language?

We've all seen the advice telling us not to say "sorry" or "just" in emails, and I did quit using these so much once I realized how much they tended to diminish the message. It's one thing to be polite, but when you use those words without a reason (i.e., reflexively, not if you've screwed up), you're putting yourself in a submissive position for no particular reason.

For example, if you've been charged with collecting a specific type of information, you can be polite but there's no need to couch your request in the form of some kind of huge personal favor.  You know the kind of message--and I've written plenty of them: "Sorry to bother you, and I know you're really, really busy, but could you just take a minute to fill this out for me?  I'd really appreciate it. Thanks so very, very much!" The studies say that this is a gendered thing (guilty as charged), so stopping the excesses of this kind of language is a start.

There's another way that we project power or fail to do so.  An example: I'm on campus today, and there's a big whoop-de-do type of meeting--Regents or something--happening as well as some other campus activities.  As I was going down the main staircase in one of the buildings, I passed by a woman who stared long and hard at me when I passed.  I did not have spinach on my teeth or a tinfoil hat on, so there was no reason for that.

Now, as a young female person in the world, many years ago, I had somehow internalized that the proper response to a stare like that was to drop your head and smile.  It was respectful, and somehow friendly, and, more to the point, it was just what you did.  What I realize now is that it's a posture of submission and that the dominant person in the exchange person will probably not do the same, though a person of roughly the same age/gender/status probably will.

But then I realized many years ago that the moms at the gym, the ones who worked the Stairmasters as though they were training for the Iditarod and bragged incessantly about their kids, always gave the cold hard stare. I learned to give the cold hard stare back, and boy, did it feel good.

Back to the staircase.  Instead of the "drop head, lower eyes, and smile," did I give the long, hard stare back?  Yes. Yes, I did.  Was it because I was saying to her "I'm a full professor at Northern Clime and you can back way, way the --- off before you give me that stare?"

Not exactly. What I was saying is "I'm a grown person in the world, and if you want to stare at me, I'll stare right back. The end."

This is the message we need to be sending. You can be polite, but when it comes to taking up space as a human being, you will meet people with the respect that they mete out to you.

And you won't. back. down. https://youtu.be/nvlTJrNJ5lA

Productivity post: Time is on your side (yes, it is)

Two recent articles are making me think about how we conceptualize time as academics.

The first is Laura Vanderkam's "The Busy Person's Lies" in the New York Times. I knew her name from discussions over at nicoleandmaggie's place. Although I'm not a True Believer (because what she & Sheryl Sandberg seem to attribute to savvy management I see as having money enough to throw at problems), the information Vanderkam provides about where her time actually went is interesting.

Vanderkam's point is that we exaggerate the misery or the things we hate to do and that there's a lot of time wasted that we don't count. We don't work as long and as hard as we think we do, she says. Her estimates seem pretty reasonable except that she says she spends only 3 minutes a day logging her time every half hour, which seems very low.

According to Vanderkam, logging one's time leads to a feeling of abundance and gratitude as women realize that they aren't as busy as they think they are, #blessed.  Her honesty in this article, or what appears to be honesty, goes a long way toward supporting this point and toward giving me more respect for her ideas than I have had previously.

Still, not all hours of the day can be productive, or maybe "productive" in the way that can be quantified.  A recent article on time-logging mentioned that, for example, waiting by the side of a road when your car breaks down gets logged as "leisure," but it's not exactly a day at the beach.

Another example: Full-time care of young children is rewarding but also exhausting in ways that no productivity charts can measure, something Vanderkam may not realize because she has a nanny. If you go to a computer after a day with a 2 1/2 year old, you might just stare at it, too tired to move, let alone think.

And although I log some kinds of time (the writing spreadsheet and a to-do list system that's similar to some of the ones at Profhacker), I suspect that logging time every half hour would lead to a feeling more like #killmenow than #blessed.

The second is an article at IHE about The Slow Professor by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber. It's clear that they're women after my own heart or entirely right (same thing). A few snippets (quoted from the article but broken up because who doesn't love a listicle?):

1. [T]he discussion focuses on the links between time, commitments and personal stress, and emphasizes trying to achieve a sense of “flow” or “timelessness,” which presents as creativity (and productivity). How to get into the flow? Avoid or eliminate to the extent possible environmental factors that interfere with creativity, the book says. Protect “a time and a place for timeless time” and continually remind yourself “that this is not self-indulgent but rather crucial to intellectual work.”
2. Slow Professor proposes getting off-line as much as possible and doing less by thinking of scheduling as eliminating commitment’s from one’s day, not taking them on. 
3. Perhaps most importantly, it proposes leaving room in one’s schedule for regular “timeless time,” starting with some kind of relaxing, transitional ritual. Incorporate playfulness and shun those negative self-thoughts. And don’t forget leaving time to do nothing at all, the book says.

Maybe writing books based on some kinds of popular data (time management) only requires the 5-minute snippets that Vanderkam doesn't want us to waste. It's a convection oven for when regular heat just isn't fast enough, and it makes a palatable product.

The kind of books and articles that most academics write, though, can only be done with reflection and time not only for the "flow" experience but for knitting connections together in the brain. It's slowcoach writing  or maybe slow cooker writing, since the ideas have to simmer to break down the tough membranes of resistance between the ideas to bring out the flavor of the new and strange. 

Writing inspiration: Hemingway again

From David Brooks's column on Hemingway's house in Cuba, with commentary in italics (I know it's David Brooks, but give it a chance):

1. When you see how [Hemingway] did it, three things leap out. The first is the most mundane — the daily disciplines of the job. In the house, there is a small bed where he laid out his notes and a narrow shelf where he stood, stared at a blank wall and churned out his daily word count. Sometimes it seems to have been the structure of concrete behavior — the professional routines — that served as a lifeline when all else was crumbling.

Worth remembering, those "daily disciplines of the job." This has been a tough week at Northern Clime, but the routines--even writing when I could manage it--have helped. 

2. Second, there seem to have been moments of self-forgetting. Dorothy Sayers has an essay in which she notes it’s fashionable to say you do your work to serve the community. But if you do any line of work for the community, she argues, you’ll end up falsifying your work, because you’ll be angling it for applause. You’ll feel people owe you something for your work. But if you just try to serve the work — focusing on each concrete task and doing it the way it’s supposed to be done — then you’ll end up, obliquely, serving the community more. Sometimes the only way to be good at a job is to lose the self-consciousness embedded in the question, “How’m I doing?”

Dorothy L. Sayers has a good point. Ultimately, you have to write what you think or know or believe is true, which is what Hemingway always talked about--"the true gen." You have to do what's right and focus on the task at hand even if some necessary unhappiness results. "Serve the work."  You're not going to be applauded, but if you're protecting others, or your work, you need to keep going.  

And if others don't like what you're doing or writing, think about it: what's their perspective or interest? Where are they coming from? Is their opinion valid, relevant, and ethically in tune with what you're trying to do? Do they wish you and your work well, or do they have a different agenda in mind? 

Maya Angelou once said,  "When people show you who they are, believe them." Their response to your work or your actions is conditioned by who they are, just as yours is. Believe who they are, and consider whether the power you're giving them over your words or actions is warranted.  

3. Finally, there was the act of cutting out. When Hemingway was successful, he cut out his mannerisms and self-pity. Then in middle age, out of softness, laziness and self-approval, he indulged himself. But even then, even amid all the corruption, he had flashes when he could distinguish his own bluster from the good, true notes.

Flashes, yes, although there's still a lot of bluster and self-pity in some late Hemingway. What he seems to have hated is that for stretches he couldn't distinguish the false from the true or, even worse, when he knew what he was writing was false and couldn't write truly (a Hemingway phrase). Valerie Hemingway's Running with the Hemingways gives a good account of some of those last years, when it seems that no one dared to stand up to him. Standing up to Hemingway might have made him unhappy, but it might also have resulted in better and truer work. 

Edited to add: And here's all you need to know about Mr. Morality, David Brooks: https://www.chumplady.com/2019/04/david-brooks-can-bite-me/

Springtime Festivus

What happens every spring? No, not baseball. No, not daffodils, although they happen, too.

Spring, and especially the end of the semester, is the time when otherwise sensible and rational academics get. . .touchy.

Minor slights become major affronts that demand action.  Discussion lists and Facebook blossom with testy demands for accountability.

Letters and petitions flourish about matters that a face-to-face conversation could solve. Sides are chosen and colleagues demand that you join them or else be held accountable for not caring enough.
Escalation becomes the norm, and old injuries, real or perceived, are brought out for their annual airing. It's a springtime Festivus.

I'm not talking about the social issues that are genuinely causes to protest, but rather things like "how come the professors on one floor get green staplers and we have to settle for red ones?"

I'm exaggerating, of course, but I get caught up in this, too.  A few years back, I recognized that it's a pattern and now earnestly try to keep my mouth shut and, if that doesn't work, to "take my hands off that" problem.

Have you noticed this, or is it just my end-of-semester crankiness clouding my judgment? Or should we be more attentive to these issues all the time instead of just in the spring?

Does luck play a role in academe? Absolutely.

Figure 1. Walter White in Breaking Bad? 

At The Chronicle, "Do You Know How Lucky You Are?" asks that very question. (It's behind the paywall, unfortunately, so the first piece of luck would be actually getting access to the article.)

The author, Robert H. Frank, explains that if John Cusack and Matthew Broderick hadn't turned down the role of Walter White on Breaking Bad,  the world might never have gotten the chance to see the brilliant performances that Bryan Cranston gave in that show.

Frank, a tenured professor, says that luck played a large role in his life as well, from being hired as part of an unusually large cohort of tenure-track faculty at Cornell to the success of his publications. As one proposed essay collection falls through, he submits the essay to one of the most prestigious journals in the field, and it's accepted. He extends the argument in another essay, sends it to another prestigious journal, and bingo, it's accepted, too.

Now obviously, as Louis Pasteur said, "fortune favors the prepared mind," but luck plays a significant role as well.

Maybe you send an article on, say, the aesthetics of lawn-mower blades to the Journal of Lawn-Trimming Aesthetics and the editor has just said to him/herself, "You know, we haven't done an issue on trimming tools for a while."  Is that luck, or is it the zeitgeist, or maybe both?

Or you meet someone at a conference who happens to be putting together a collection.

Or your manuscript is turned down by one press only to be published by a better one.

Of course, Frank only talks about good luck, not bad luck.  I still wonder what would have happened way back in 2007 if I hadn't been rushing off to class when Major University Press contacted me. About what, you ask? I never found out.

Can you think of times when luck played a part in your career?

The Masked Avenger: an extension of "A Good Little Girl"

I was blown away by xykademiqz's fabulous post "A Good Little Girl," which I had somehow missed the first time around. Go read it. You won't be sorry.  Here's the heart of the matter:

The good little girl is in danger of a) doing much more service then necessary, b) doing much more or more laborious teaching than the colleagues who are not good little girls, c) generally being misinformed about what all that teaching and service really do for her career, because everyone expects her to act as a good little girl and, at the same time, thinks less of her for doing so.

nicoleandmaggie point out in the comments that women do this because study after study shows that they are punished more for not doing all the extra service, etc.

Now, this is hypothetical, because all my colleagues are and have ever been lovely human beings, but I've alluded a few times here to those who would impose, if possible, by making excessive demands for service, or would make life complicated because they are very special and shouldn't have to answer emails, or would, in an "office commons" situation, manage to be so unpleasant that others would give in just to shut them up. (We have offices at Northern Clime, so this is truly theoretical.)

But there is hope because there are Masked Avengers out there, and I am one.

The Masked Avenger is a senior-in-rank person who wants to see justice done. Ze is not going to be bullied, in part because ze is senior and has no more--well, you know--to give. Ze is unimpressed by rudeness, even by "God, PhD."

And the Masked Avengers are on a mission. They--I--want to see equity and fairness, even in the petty things, where often times unpleasant behavior pays off when people give in so that the unpleasant person will shut up and go away.  They take it on so you don't have to, maybe taking on administrative or service tasks that allow this protection of juniors to happen.

We Masked Avengers can't make your life massively better, because we don't always have that power.  But we are out there, and we are legion, and we have your back.

Are you a Masked Avenger in your department? Do you have one in your department?

Dear Ms. Undine does not tolerate April fools

Dear Ms. Undine,

Why do people like to play April Fool's Day pranks? Especially computer pranks, like Google's failed mic drop?

Signed, Pranked

Dear Pranked,

Ms. Undine has never quite understood this.  Mark Twain said (in Pudd'nhead Wilson) that on this day we're reminded of what we actually are during the other 364, but that's not a good enough reason.

Frankly, Ms. Undine thinks that the computer manufacturers play enough pranks on us every year, making us play hide and seek to find the features we depend on with each new iteration of software (looking at you, Microsoft Office) and with each new version of hardware (looking at you, Apple.  I have enough Mac dongles to make myself a hula skirt by stitching them together, and you just introduced a new connector?). If we had one "stable computer day" every April 1, now there would be a holiday to celebrate.

As for the other pranks: well, apparently human beings love humor better if it is crude and/or cruel, which is why we invented the internet after we made bear-baiting illegal.


Dear Ms. Undine,

I think you are a hypocrite.  After making fun of the awesome Cue Cat, you bought one recently. Why?

Signed,
Inspector Gadget

Dear Gadget,

Because all the lovely commenters on that post said it would be good for LibraryThing, that's why.  I haven't tried it yet, but I have already rounded up little catnip toys for it to chase.  It's the only non-rectangular thing on my desk and is already a fine distraction. Go Go Gadget Paws!


Dear Ms. Undine,

You write about mid-century male writers sometimes.  What did you think of Gay Talese's recent comment that he couldn't think of any women writers that inspired him?

Signed,
Surprised and Outraged

Dear Surprised and Outraged,

Figure 1. Supposedly Frank Sinatra, but maybe Gay Talese.

You should only be one of those (outraged), because how could you be surprised?

Ms. Undine admits that she had classed Gay Talese in her mental memory bank as a 1960s Esquire writer, sort of a ring-a-ding-ding generation Jonathan Franzen, who wrote something about wife-swapping way back in the day. He was brought up in a generation when it would have been a manly point of pride not to have read any women authors, and a look at his Google books just now suggests that that hasn't changed much.

In other words, Ms. Undine thinks this is a tempest in a gin bottle.  She recommends that women writers forget him right back and quit worrying about it since  there are bigger fish to fry, like this year's VIDA count. 

Conferences and other things

1. When you go to a huge conference that you've never been to before, where your field is only a small part of the conference and there are multiple panels devoted to things you never even knew people studied, it's wonderful.  You don't feel obligated to attend every possible panel but can wander around and enjoy the city.
2. You can also drop into some of those panels totally unrelated to your field and just enjoy the presentations that sound interesting. You might learn something about Fountain Pen Studies or Wookie Genealogy or the Numerological Symbolism of  Divination Techniques that will be useful, but you don't have to. It's a wonderful feeling. 
3. Here's an etiquette question: say you're one of 4 people in an audience, and the other three are obviously friends of the three presenters.  A question gets raised about a work you know well, and the presenters and audience are all agog with the implications of this question, which they've obviously never heard about before, though it's a routine one in the criticism. Do you (1) raise your hand and explain this or (2) sit on your hands and keep your mouth shut, since you know they'll figure it out if they research it? I chose (2) because I didn't want to be That Person, but I wonder if I did the right thing. 
4. Because of the conference and other matters mostly relating to the book, my writing streak is seriously broken, but I'm getting back to it today.  
5. Huffington Post distilled the New Yorker piece on writing inspiration down to a 10-point listicle for the TL;DR crowd, but I can't link to it because I have never clicked on a HuffPo link that went where it said it was going to go. HuffPo is as bad as the other aggregators with the click-n-switch annoyance, so I don't want to subject you to the same frustration. 
6. The Amazon Dash, the "awesome Cue Cat of 2015" that I wrote about last year, is real, and Amazon is extending it to things like breath mints (insert your own joke here) and cat litter. By the way, I think there is a market for packaging cat litter in smaller packages, because elderly people have a hard time lifting the 35-40 lb. packages that the rest of us carry around. Even if they can get it to their cars with the help of the grocery store baggers, they can't carry it into the house. 
7. One of the sessions listed in #2 is something I actually attended.

Writing inspiration: dreams, creativity, and process edition

Some writing inspiration ahead.

First of all, Maria Konnikova's "How to Beat Writer's Block" at The New Yorker sums the research up in a nutshell. Here are two especially good parts:

“I think one must trust the writing process. Understand that creativity requires nonlinearity and unique associative combinations,” he says. “Creative people do a lot of trial and error and rarely know where they are going exactly until they get there.”

That, in the end, seems to be the main message of research into writer’s block: It’s useful to escape from external and internal judgment—by writing, for instance, in a dream diary, which you know will never be read—even if it’s only for a brief period.

 I'm glad to hear this. I started keeping a dream journal of sorts about four years ago, and while I can't prove that it's helped, simply writing things down seems to have made things better. I don't write the dreams down here, usually (some exceptions: the Mad Men writing group, hiking dreams, and blog wonderland), but a lot of times I dream in movies--that is, watching a movie that I wrote and directed. Sometimes they're just comic skits but more often whole movies. Move over, Stephen Spielberg and Martin Scorsese.

Seriously, though, the stories I tell myself in my dreams have, I think, gotten less formulaic and more creative since I've been writing them down, and writing while dreaming has to help with writing while not unconscious.

And recently the whole work process has gotten easier--lots of ideas and a willingness to work on them.  There's still a little dither and blather early in the morning, but this week (spring break) I've been moving from writing on Thing 1 to revising Project A to drafting Project B to editing project C. And I want to work on them. That's the most amazing part.

What's working?

1. Reconciling myself to the idea that, rain or shine, the only time I want--really want--to write new and creative things is after 7 p.m. and deciding that it's okay to do other things (edit, revise) before that. If you sit down to do it every day, who cares if it's 7 p.m. or 7 a.m.? 
2. Building in little breaks with Pomodoro. Sometimes when I've been concentrating on a paragraph or sentence, even a couple of minutes of distraction (news sites, a glass of water, putting in a load of laundry) sends me back to it with a fresh perspective. 
3. Logging the work, in the spreadsheet and in a little time notebook that I've been keeping. 
4. Getting the reward of an X in the box at 750words.com. 

Nicoleandmaggie have the second in their series of writing productivity posts up; go read it.  Unless someone forces me, I'm always going to fail on two of the measures: (1) drinking coffee (never learned how) and (2) writing in the morning. But this week is showing me that those aren't the only ways to go.

Dear Ms. Undine answers your March questions

Dear Ms. Undine,

Every day on the interwebs, I see new words that no one defines but that everyone seems to understand all of a sudden. I've seen "neoliberalism," which is something unspecified but very, very bad, and "intersectionality" (ditto), and "woke" as an adjective meaning "awakened." Do I need to look these words up every time I encounter them?

-- Signed,
 OED

Dear OED,

What you're encountering is the beauty of the interwebs. It used to take a longer time for words to trickle through the culture, but now they take over like a torrent. It makes for lively writing and an interesting culture. Here's a tip, though: do not simply google a word, especially if you aren't sure how it's being used, since there may be some regrettable, never-can-be-unseen images attached. Try Urban Dictionary instead.

Dear Ms. Undine,

Are these expressions cliches, or are they true?

1. "The perfect is the enemy of the good." 

2. "The best dissertation is a done dissertation." 

--Signed,
Afraid to be a Cliche

Dear Afraid,

Both. And do you know what they call people who are not afraid to be a cliche? Ph.D.

Dear Ms. Undine,

Sometimes when I am very tired, I watch House Hunters or House Hunters International. Don't judge me, Ms. Undine. IHE says we can learn from this show.

The house hunters used to be can-do types. "We can fix this," they'd say upon encountering a roofless shell with three crumbling walls.

Now, however, they mostly focus on their needs: "It needs to be an older house with charm, but totally modern rooms and bathrooms the size of an airport, in a perfect neighborhood." They also spend a lot of time ridiculing the homeowner's taste, like Ortho in Beetlejuice. Remember him? "Deliver me from L. L. Bean!"

I have two questions:

1) How do the homebuyers, who usually give their occupations as something like "freelance artist" and "visionary entrepreneur," afford $500,000 houses?

2) Am I a sociologist or a schadenfreude-filled hate-watcher for silently cheering when some of the more obnoxious homebuyers fail to get what they want?

--Signed,
Confessional Clara

Dear Confessional,

1) If you find out, please let Ms. Undine know.

2) Why did you pose this as an either/or question? Who are you, Pierre Bourdieu?

Writing inspiration: going rogue with Thing 1 and Thing 2

The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play,
So we sat in the house
All that cold, cold wet day.
(You know the rest)

I've been faithfully writing (beginning in 750words.com) on Required Projects and logging the results in my trusty spreadsheet. Some of those days are notes, but as Dame Eleanor says, notes do count.

But the other day, a mad gleam came into my eye, and I declared to the cats that I was going rogue.

"Going rogue" meant that, in response to a tantalizing CFP, I momentarily dropped the projects I've been slogging along on. Instead, I went looking at conference papers that I had never developed (why?) or published (again, why?).

One was on a topic--let's call it Thing 1--somewhat related to another topic--let's call it Thing 2.

I reread one of the books for Thing 1 and made notes on it. I skimmed articles I'd read and some new ones as well. One whole day's writing was devoted to brainstorming about how I could develop Thing 1 and Thing 2.

I forgot to eat lunch when I was working on the Things, and I barely wanted to eat dinner. This was exciting! This was what I liked about scholarship, which is what I had forgotten in the midst of the Required Projects slog. And I put off responding to a document because the people I'd be sending it don't always respond to my comments anyway, so what's the point? Anyway, I was still going rogue.

After rereading both, I'm not sure that Thing 1 and Thing 2 will play well together, so maybe they'll need to be developed separately.  But both of them are pretty decent in their rough stage.

The day(s) of going rogue were some of the most fun days I've spent recently, and it all felt delightfully illicit.  I'm back on Required Projects today, but I'll switch off again to Thing 1 or Thing 2 tomorrow.

Now it's time for a game that I call up-up-up with a fish.

Katy Waldman in Slate: Those olds sure are stupid. Also ridiculous. Also old.

This is going to be short, and it ought to be tagged "I skim read it so you don't have to"or maybe "Tempest in a Teacup Thursday."

Anyway, apparently David Denby at the New Yorker, channeling Sven Birkerts, wrote a lament for the decline of reading, roughly as follows: "Kids these days! They don't read, amirite?"

Laments for the decline of reading are as old as literacy.

Laments about kids these days are as old as human beings.

Katy Waldman at Slate calls this "the get off my lawn" genre of writing, and she has a point, and a metaphor, and a cliche, all in one.

I'm not saying she's wrong--she isn't--and after the obligatory snarky Twitter screenshots, she actually links to some statistics.

And she's totally right about the laments being about the decline of (old, white, male) classics rather than (living women, people of color) contemporary novels or YA fiction.

But she beats this "old people--stupid, clueless, and too bad they're not dead" cliche to death. "Geriatric Cassandra." Isn't Denby wrong enough without age entering into it?

I get that this is Slate (I actually mistyped it Snake at first), the command central of snark.

But can't she dismantle one stereotype without encouraging another?  It's kind of like listening to 7-year-olds hit each other in the head and say, "I know you are, but what am I?"

Writing inspiration: Hershel Parker's writing house

Because we all need a little writing inspiration now (you know you do), and you surely want to see what a literary scholar's writing house looks like (you know you do), here's Hershel Parker's beautiful writing studio in California back in the day.

In case you don't know his name, he's a very famous Melville scholar; here's more from his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershel_Parker. 

Here are all the pictures, at Parker's blog, of a house that is now a vacant lot, because California real estate prices, enough said.  Or should we just say, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown"?

http://fragmentsfromawritingdesk.blogspot.com/2016/02/83500-in-1968-5100000-in-2015-627.html 

And see also his beautiful current workspace:

http://fragmentsfromawritingdesk.blogspot.com/2016/02/all-for-moby-dick-superb-working-space.html

Random bullets to ponder in mid-February

• We should designate February the "Dream Big" month. We do this at the beginning of the school year, but maybe now would be a good time to think about this. How would you shake up your life or change, if you'd like to do that? 
• Thinking about Google's self-driving cars: Can I give a self-driving car a driving test under actual conditions?  Here's one, and it's not hypothetical or even uncommon: two-lane road, with a 4-foot shoulder and a 300' dropoff on your side, no guardrails. You see a set of headlights barrelling down the road in your lane. Okay, Google car, what do you do? Go.
• It's a link I can't find now (this one is close), but I'm surprised no one has written about corporations mining employee health data, including when women have birth-control pill prescriptions refilled, to predict in advance whether they're trying to get pregnant. "This would never be abused," the article piously stated, but in corporate thinking, knowing an employee is getting pregnant = about to tap into more medical benefits, leave policies, etc. What's to prevent this from being used against the employee in performance reviews and hiring decisions? Haven't we seen ample evidence that corporate interest is, to understate the case, not always aligned with the individual or public good?
• How happy would you be as a big donor to a college if your gift was going, not to students or faculty, but to the president's travel budget so that she can go to Davos and hire new administrators? 
• Every day in February where there's no snow and ice is a gift, even if it's raining. If you get up and there's no snow, it's already a good day.  I'm even seeing some delusional early daffodils coming up and am grateful.
• Those big splash panels demanding that you subscribe that now infest almost all web sites and that hold your phone hostage if you're trying to read there? I'm grateful to them, because I always click away--no article is ever worth it--and thus decrease my junk internet reading time. 
• For excitement in real life, I got a Netgear WiFi Range extender and am looking forward, more or less, to installing it this weekend.
• I'm on the seventh day of a chain of writing at least something every day, regardless of how tired I am. 750words.com is again my salvation on this. It tasks me, it heaps me, and I see outrageous strength in it, sitting there waiting for me to do something every day.

Enough's enough: knowing when to say "I'm done with this"

As one part of my job, I have to deal with Fiendish Counterintuitive Software.  (I figure that every campus has some kind of FCS, so I'm not alone.) FCS requires training, and workshops, and more training every time they change FCS, which is constantly.  I have some administrative assistance with FCS, but I still have to deal with it. (I'm reminded of Bardiac's post about how universities are off-loading clerical tasks as an unpaid addition to faculty duties.)

When you think you have FCS-taming down to a fine art, it suddenly locks you out, or won't permit changes, or otherwise balks. Then the FCS gods say, "Oh, didn't we tell you? You can't do it that way."

Sometimes it doesn't load at all, and you contact the FCS gods, and they tell you variations of "You're doing it wrong"--must be the wrong browser, wrong time of day, poor connection, etc. It never is.

And we continually get sudden, cheerful threat letters from the FCS gods: "X has to be done during the week of [insert inconvenient date] or else." 

The time spent on this part of my job has literally doubled since FCS was installed. I keep time logs of this, because I can't believe how much time it takes.

This week and last have been devoted to servicing the FCS, to the exclusion of any writing and the barest minimum of class prep. 

The latest cheerful threat letter--let's call it Threat Level Midnight--commanded that a New Procedure should be done. I tried and failed (more hours wasted) over the past two days before learning that--"Oh, didn't we tell you?"--I don't have access to do New Procedure, which requires yet more training, before I can do yet another task that is essentially clerical.*

Did I mention that at all the trainings I attended, I saw only women, and mostly support staff, involved? No male department heads, professors, or administrators.

Did I mention that as an academic, my job description is publishing, teaching, and service, in that order, with the last-named now completely overwhelming the other two, thanks to FCS?

Did I mention that I recently received a small university-wide honor for my scholarship and not my FCS-wrangling abilities?

So I walked into the chair's office and said, "I'm done with this. No more FCS training. No New Procedure. I'm done." Ze agreed, wholeheartedly.

Sometimes, enough's enough. 

*Edited to add: I've worked at clerical jobs and enjoyed them. But this job is not supposed to be one of them.

Writing Lessons from Groundhog Day

 Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties because it's COLD out there today!

So remembering the "writing in the morning is best" mantra, you beat your head against the stone wall of a few paragraphs for several hours until they loosen up slightly.

You do this over and over again.  Eventually, your eyes are watering so much that you can't see the screen.

You check your email, having turned it off as part of the "good writing demands concentration" mantra. You realize that a whole conversation is going on between a couple of your collaborators, who are never, ever off email, ever, and that they've been demanding answers from you for a couple of hours now.

You look at the list of stuff you failed to do today and that you cannot do tomorrow because of being on campus. Fail, fail, fail.

What can you do?

First, you can give up and watch Groundhog Day, since you can't see to write any more anyway.

Second, you can take a lesson from the movie.

No, not this one, although it certainly feels true every February: "It's going to be cold, and it's going to be gray, and it's going to last you the rest of your life."

It's this: if you make incremental change, even just a tiny bit every day, eventually you will get there.

Random bullets of oh-please-don't-let-it-be-nearly-February

• Historiann nails it, as usual, by calling out the gendered mommy politics of "Hillary, can you excite us?".  I am sick to death of this "yeah, but she's not exciting" argument. "Not exciting," even if it's true (it's not), is a refreshing change from the Trump wackaloonery spectacle--or, as John Scalzi calls it, the "howling sampler box of Dunning-Kruger that is the current GOP field."  I'll be happy with any of the three Dems--there, I've said it--but would remind the "exciting" crowd that George McGovern was exciting and inspiring to hear, too, in 1972, and that got us the infamous "four more years" of Nixon.  Nader voters got to be all pure and pious in 2000, and I don't have to remind you how that one went.
• I am so far behind with projects that I need a time machine (a Tardis?) to catch up. I got up at 5 to write but wanted to write this blog post instead. That will inspire me, won't it? 
• I recently read the comments on my student evaluations, which were down slightly on the numbers in one class. The written comments were mostly really good, though, except for some that dinged me for telling them that they needed to write in complete sentences and use punctuation. Their other teachers think this is completely bananas and that only ideas should count, I was informed. So noted.
• Time to get to work.

Procrastination: not the thief of time but the generator of creativity

At the New York Times, Adam Grant suggests not being a "pre-crastinator" but a procrastinator. He used to write everything weeks or months in advance but was convinced by a study that procrastination can actually help your creativity.

The short version: if you know you have to do something but put it off for a bit (but don't wait until the last minute), the ideas that emerge are likely to be more creative.

And some epic procrastinators are in this boat with you:

Steve Jobs procrastinated constantly, several of his collaborators have told me. Bill Clinton has been described as a “chronic procrastinator” who waits until the last minute to revise his speeches. Frank Lloyd Wright spent almost a year procrastinating on a commission, to the point that his patron drove out and insisted that he produce a drawing on the spot. It became Fallingwater, his masterpiece. Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter behind “Steve Jobs” and “The West Wing,” is known to put off writing until the last minute. When Katie Couric asked him about it, he replied, “You call it procrastination, I call it thinking.”

I'm hoping this works, since I've been taking care of a family member all week and haven't touched email or writing, despite deadlines. Time to face the music and dig in--but here's hoping that today, when I do, the ideas will be all the better for it. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And his solution:

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

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

Happy New Year, writing inspiration, and the boulder in the cellar

Happy New Year! The resolutions and memes are still going strong:

• Fie's ongoing series
• Flavia Fescue and JaneB have done the New Year's meme.
• Bardiac has a year-end roundup.
• SophyLou has year-end resolutions and questions. 
• Dame Eleanor Hull continues to free herself from unnecessary things.
•  Leslie M-B resolves to do more writing.  
• Tattooed Prof resolves to drink more coffee, do more blogging, and especially not to let time be stolen by academic processes:  

Planning a process for planning another process. Bickering over semantics in a committee meeting, or worse: group-writing policy statements (LIGHT ME ON FIRE NOW). All of these steal our time.

 I didn't write as much last year because most of the year was taken up with smaller projects, a collaborative project, and the Laocoon manuscript, which meant lot of rewriting and revising but not as many new words.

As this blog's long-suffering readers know, the Laocoon manuscript took years of writing, editing, and fretting. It's now at the publisher (page proofs are coming next month), so it'll be out this year.

 But having that boulder of a manuscript meant that I always knew what I was supposed to be doing next.  There's an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show where Rob and Laura Petrie want to buy a house that seems perfect -- until they see the giant boulder that's in the cellar. It can't be moved and is a fixture in the house that they see every time they go into the cellar. It's an obstacle, true, but it's their obstacle, and they learn to structure their cellar around it. That's the Laocoon manuscript: the beloved obstacle that allowed me to focus on it and structure my writing space for the past few years.

But now, the Laocoon manuscript is gone, and this leaves me with the problem of the empty writing cellar. What do I do when I go to the writing space? Which project should I work on first? I have some promised essays to work on, some with deadlines that are quite soon, but I had those alongside the Laocoon manuscript, too. They don't take the place of the boulder, so to speak.

I'm starting by transcribing (to 750words & hence the research journal) a lot of the handwritten material that I wrote in the Moleskine notebook last year, omitting anything that went into the book revisions. It's the fancy kind that supposedly works with Evernote and is searchable if you take pictures of the pages, but I have never been able to make it recognize my handwriting.

I used to save the Moleskines for special notes and then realized I never wrote in them. Last year, I took to carrying the Moleskine everywhere and putting everything in it--schedules, conference notes, to-do lists, comments on books and movies, and daily records. Not all of it is going to be useful, but maybe it'll help as I look for the next boulder in the cellar.

New Year's Resolutions: Read better stuff. Work better. Live better.

Both GetaLifePhD (" How to become more creative, focused, relaxed, and productive") and Fie have recently posted New Year's resolutions, so I'm inspired to do the same. Basically, they're all in the title of this post.

1. Read better stuff. When did reading an actual book turn into a commitment rather than a pleasure? Was it reading for work in grad school?

Somehow, clicking on one more internet listicle news seems to ward off the work of opening a book, when the book makes you feel better, is more informative, and is less likely to result in rage at rampant stupidity, bad facts, and worse grammar.

Some books are work, true, but it's more the commitment of time than anything else that leads to stupid internet reading. "I only have 5 minutes, so let me check the news," I say, but how much better spent that 5 minutes would be if I read something real instead of fake--or something that, if it's real, makes me feel enraged and helpless in the face of the events.

2. Work better. After the big push of a collaborative project in the fall, I haven't done much for the past couple of weeks. It's time to get moving--back to the gym (did so today, so hooray) and back to writing. How is this working better? A new year, a new Moleskine, and a new shot at a 750words.com 30-day challenge about writing every day, maybe, will help with those January deadlines.

3. Live better.  The simple version of this is pretty basic: move more, eat less, sleep more, fret less. But maybe it's even simpler than that.

• What makes you happy? 
• What makes you feel creative?
• What are you proud of being able to do, even if it's something no one else would care about?
• Was there some incident or you came through with flying colors? Keep it in your mind as a talisman against worse moods or bad times.  
• Someone's being a jerk? Take your hands off that man.

Post-holidays roundup

• Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
• Turning into a cooking and cleaning machine for a couple of weeks is my favorite part of Christmas, except for seeing family, which is, of course, the reason I do it. Honest.  I love seeing people eat what I cook and bake. I love doing laundry and picking up.  I love the idea that if I don't bestir myself, there'll be hungry people milling around the kitchen wondering where dinner is and that nobody can get out of the driveway if I don't shovel it every day.  They offer to help, but I choose to do it. There's a beginning and an end point to it, and it's just very satisfying, probably because I can go back to wrestling with writing refreshed at the end of the two weeks. It's a good workout, too--I am really tired at the end of the day-- and, unlike the also invisible work of administration, people are grateful that you do it. 
• You can think about all the foods that you don't have to make or eat any more when you sing holiday songs. "So bring us a figgy pudding"--uh, no thanks. 
• It's easier to ignore the news and (justifiable) endless outrage on Twitter, if you're too busy to look at it. 
• Ditto for ignoring email, which I've been happily doing for more than a week. Grade-grubbers? Contact me in January, for you are not getting a response to the email you sent on December 24. 
• Sometimes I dance a little happy dance at the thought that I am not going to MLA this year. 
• Speaking of MLA, it does not have good tidings of great joy this year. From Inside Higher Ed:

"The MLA's annual report on its Job Information List has found that in 2014-15, it had 1,015 jobs in English, 3 percent fewer than the previous year. The list had 949 jobs in foreign languages, 7.6 percent fewer than 2013-14. This is the third straight year of decline in jobs listed with the MLA. And those declines have reversed the gains made in English and foreign language jobs after the severe declines that hit the disciplines after the economic downturn that started in 2008. The low point for jobs in that economic downturn was 2009-10. But the job totals for English this year are 7.7 percent below the English positions of 2009-10. The job totals for foreign languages are 7.3 percent below those of 2009-10."

Thank you, Rebecca Solnit. Just thank you.

Over at LitHub, Rebecca Solnit has a follow-up to her recent and provocative "80 Books No Woman Should Read"  called "Men Explain Lolita to Me." You should read it. Everybody should read it.

A sample, with added boldface:

It all came down to Lolita. “Some of my favorite novels are disparaged in a fairly shallow way. To read Lolita and ‘identify’ with one of the characters is to entirely misunderstand Nabokov,” one commenter informed me, which made me wonder if there’s a book called Reading Lolita in Patriarchy. The popular argument that novels are good because they inculcate empathy assumes that we identify with characters, and no one gets told they’re wrong for identifying with Gilgamesh or even Elizabeth Bennett. It’s just when you identify with Lolita you’re clarifying that this is a book about a white man serially raping a child over a period of years. Should you read Lolita and strenuously avoid noticing that this is the plot and these are the characters? Should the narrative have no relationship to your own experience? This man thinks so, which is probably his way of saying that I made him uncomfortable.

. . . . 

But “to read Lolita and ‘identify’ with one of the characters is to entirely misunderstand Nabokov” said one of my volunteer instructors. I thought that was funny, so I posted it on Facebook, and another nice liberal man came along and explained to me this book was actually an allegory as though I hadn’t thought of that yet. It is, and it’s also a novel about a big old guy violating a spindly child over and over and over. Then she weeps. And then another nice liberal man came along and said, “You don’t seem to understand the basic truth of art. I wouldn’t care if a novel was about a bunch of women running around castrating men. If it was great writing, I’d want to read it. Probably more than once.” Of course there is no such body of literature, and if the nice liberal man who made that statement had been assigned book after book full of castration scenes, maybe even celebrations of castration, it might have made an impact on him.

What she says so well is what I was trying to get at here:

Oddly enough, though, it was all right to dissect the thought processes of Tess Durbeyfield and figure out whether she was raped or just seduced because of Nature coursing through her veins and her attraction to Alex d'Urberville. We were supposed to admire the intricate wordplay of Lolita and feel compassion for Humbert Humbert because he is a literary construct and in the grip of compulsion and anyway, look how Lolita behaves.  See, she's really in charge and he is helpless. I didn't buy it then, emotionally speaking, [and I don't buy it now] but I know a party line when I hear one and after one protest (met with scorn: "Can't you see that he's a literary construct?"), I shut up.

Solnit's "nice liberal men" mansplaining the book to her as though she just didn't get it--well, it took me back a few decades to when I had the same losing argument. I shut up, because I was a student and it was already a timeless classic, and if I couldn't see that, guess who was wrong?

There were only two possibilities:

1. You ignored Lolita's plight and reveled in all the nuances and games-playing and puzzles, etc. etc. etc.
2.  You expressed discomfort at Lolita's plight, which revealed your obvious inability to "get it"--just as Solnit's commenters have said to her.

Literary criticism has developed many ways of shutting people up, but this one is the most common. If you express discomfort at the subject matter, you just don't get it. Irony, satire, subtlety--all are beyond you because you're expressing emotion, like a fool (or a woman?) rather than reason and being smart. Remember, the adjective we prize most as academics is "smart" ("it's a smart book," "that's a smart argument") meant in a very specific way.

Criticism loves the transgressive and gruesome, of course -- still does -- and this was transgressive for the time.* It was the same mindset that said if you don't laugh along with Hemingway at the comical spectacle of the horses gored in Death in the Afternoon and The Sun Also Rises, you just didn't get it. You don't have aficion. You're not Lady Brett Ashley, as you should be.

What we find transgressive today isn't what was transgressive then, but it's the same impulse.  "Don't be sentimental," we hear, although the single most sentimental thing I ever saw was the movie Leaving Las Vegas, much praised for its unsentimental toughness because its subject was a male alcoholic writer (which critics love as a subject, because alcohol + writer = tough and manly) drowning in self-pity, or what would have been called self-pity if he had been a woman.

But as with tech enthusiasts (I am one, really), to balk at something doesn't mean that you don't get it. Maybe it means that you're operating from a whole different set of ethical or social premises, and maybe, just maybe, those stirrings of discomfort deserve a second look.

* Exhibit A: Current literary darling Mary Gaitskill. From Alexandra Schwartz's "Uneasy Rider," The New Yorker 9 November 2015, p. 77: "By reputation, Mary Gaitskill is a writer not only immune to sentiment but actively engaged in deep, witchy communion with the perverse."  Critical jackpot: "immune to sentiment" and "perverse."

End-of-semester anger management

Figure 1. Cary Grant does exactly what he's told to do.

It's the end of the semester, and a lot of us are getting a little punchy because of too much work and too little sleep (and yes, we know we are privileged to be academics at all).

I've been operating under the "two phrases" nonconfrontational approach recently. Some things are worth fighting for or about, and some aren't. If the subject is the latter and is a low-stakes situation, I think of these.

The first is "a soft answer turneth away wrath." On a collaborative project recently, one longtime collaborator used some phrasing in an email that would normally have made me send a blistering reply. But it's clear we're all under a lot of stress with this project and that zie was feeling it. I sent a more diplomatic email and received an apology, where a blistering one would have made the whole thing worse. The length and strength of the collaborative relationship helped.

The second is from the movie Gunga Din,* which I don't think I have ever watched beyond the opening scene. In the opening scene, you're introduced to the three main characters, of whom Cary Grant is one, and they're all brawling with a bunch of other men (I don't remember why).

In the midst of the brawl, Cary Grant pushes one of the men to the window.  A sergeant watching from below says, "Hey, take your hands off that man."

Grant does as he's told, and the man promptly falls out the window (but of course isn't hurt). He shrugs as if to say, "What? You told me to do it, and I did."

Here's how "take your hands off that man" is helpful.  The hardest thing to learn as an adult is that (1) you're not in control of everything and (2) sometimes you have to shut up and let decisions that you wouldn't agree with take their course. Maybe things will work out.

But say you've worked hard on something, or informed someone of the likely consequences of an action, maybe a couple of times.  The committee or person isn't listening.  There's nothing you can do. What do you do in that case? "Take your hands off that man."

Obviously you need to continue to press your point if it's a high-stakes situation, but if not? Think Cary Grant and release your grip.

* (Yes, I know: racism, imperialism, colonialism, war, violence, etc. etc. etc.)

It's their game, but you don't have to play

I was reading a post at Curmudgucation about all the information our shiny K12 education overlords now want to collect and datamine for their own amusement and/or enrichment (see also this one expressing skepticism about technology that will solve all educational problems).

It got me thinking about how much truth to tell, or not tell, about the increasing demands for data we're getting.

Does Facebook need to know my actual date of birth and educational information? Nope. Does it know them? Nope. If it's optional, I leave out the information. If it's not optional, I make something up.  I understand that this is part of the new social contract--getting "free" content in exchange for looking at ads--but the rest of the information isn't part of the bargain.

I'm convinced that this is a good principle, not only because of identity theft cautiousness but because of a little something we used to call "it's none of your business."  When I used to answer surveys once in a while (because of good citizenship or something--this was before the ubiquity of push polls made me stop answering my phone), I'd tell them that I'd answer questions but nothing demographic about age, income, children in the household, etc.

But there's a creeping (or creepy?) need to know more and more on the part of organizations.  For years I subscribed to Consumer Reports because I thought that's what grownups did and because it had useful, data-driven information about what appliances worked and which ones broke down.  I answered their annual surveys (good citizen, remember) about consumer products and felt as though it contributed to a useful aggregated whole.

The most recent CR survey, though, didn't care if I had car trouble but did want to ask me a bunch of squishy questions about attitudes, which is in keeping with its new USA TODAY-ish emphasis on infographics with no actual information.  The survey wouldn't let me answer anything about products unless I answered the squishy questions, so I bailed out, pursued by a lot of angry-sounding emails hounding me to finish the survey.

The same creeping information collection is occurring professionally, too, with more and more surveys sent out from various university departments or offices, always with more and more assurances that even though you have a unique identifier, the results are completely confidential.  They ask you questions, you decline to answer one, and they won't let you go on to the next page until you do.

The survey designers seem to think that answering all the questions is mandatory. They couldn't be more wrong, because even if the good citizens have dutifully invested some time in answering, they'll bail out in a heartbeat because they know it's really voluntary. The survey designers can and will pursue you by email (thanks, "anonymous" unique identifier!), but it's your right not to answer.

And our beloved Megahuge Literary Aggregation now demands a lot of demographic information. I could understand answering honestly about salaries, because it has a sliding scale of membership fees. But now it wants mandatory data about degrees, date of birth, and the rest. You can't pay your fees online unless you choose a year of birth, although you can respond "prefer not to answer" for gender.  What do you do? My answer: refuse to re-up online; write them an actual paper letter complaining about their intrusive demands, and make them send me a paper version for which I will send a check, which is more inconvenient for both of us. Update 2019: MLA no longer requires a date of birth to join the organization or renew membership.

Remember, it's their game, but you don't have to play.

Enjoyable, by a woman, modern literary classic: "critical walkback" says you can only pick two

Happy Thanksgiving!

I don't read much modern fiction (too much ancient stuff to unearth) and haven't read Jennifer Weiner, so I don't have a dog in this hunt, so to speak. But I did read The Goldfinch, which was really good for getting me through a bunch of delayed and canceled flights a couple of years ago, and what Weiner says in the article sounds right.

In "If you enjoyed a good book and you're a woman, the critics think you're wrong," , Weiner describes a "critical walkback" that happens--surprise, surprise!--if a new book by a woman, at first critically acclaimed, becomes too popular:

Call it “Goldfinching”, after Vanity Fair’s 2014 yes-but-is-it-art interrogation as to whether Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer prize-winning, mega-bestselling book The Goldfinch is or is not literature. It’s the process by which a popular and previously well-regarded novel and, more importantly, its readers, are taken to the woodshed, usually by a critic who won’t hesitate to congratulate himself on his courage, as if dismissing popular things that women like requires some special kind of bravery – as if it doesn’t happen all day, every day.

Weiner says that the same critical smackdown happened with Gone, Girl, The Lovely Bones, and some other books I haven't read. It's not just James Wood at the New Yorker, either: Mary Gaitskill took on Gone, Girl. 

Now, women aren't obliged to like books just because they're written by women. They're not obliged to like any books, and if you read Dorothy Parker, who hated about 80% of what she reviewed, and Mary McCarthy, who slapped down just about all of it, you'll see that the critical smackdown isn't the province of men.

But I'm intrigued by the idea that these works are considered bad only after they become popular. Why is that? Why is someone like Jonathan Franzen allowed to be popular and critically acclaimed?--which was the subject of another Weiner-Franzen controversy a few years back.

With some critics, you get a feeling for their prejudices and can take their recommendations with the appropriate grain of salt. Emily Nussbaum apparently only likes gross-out or transgressive horror, for example, and ranks television shows accordingly.  The New Yorker puts (or used to put) David Denby on movies if they're to be favorably reviewed and Anthony Lane* (always entertaining) if they want them to be ripped up, unless they're foreign films, which are always favorably reviewed.  You get the picture.

Yet are critics doing this critical walkback because they genuinely have second thoughts or because to be dismissive, even retroactively, gives you more critical standing as a Judge of High Art?

*edited because Adam Gopnik doesn't write the film reviews, although he is always entertaining, too. 

*poofed*

*Poofed*

Universal truths

• If you get put on a new committee because of your new rank, they don't ask you when you can be there; they just tell you. If you're teaching at that time, too bad.  You get to burn a research day coming to campus so that you can meet with someone and get up to speed.
• If you write a grant proposal, you will discover either an egregious typo or an unfinished sentence somewhere in the proposal--after the deadline and after you have turned it in. 
• In this interview at the Chronicle, Camille Paglia has some good writing inspiration and some even better self-regard, with which she lights the paper and the interviewer on fire, I think.  But hey, writers should be confident, right?
• Doodle polls have a "hidden" setting so that you can't see what other people have put in; did you know that? I wonder if it's so the person running the meeting can privately overturn the "most popular" date and time if it doesn't suit him or her or them. 
• The best way to ensure a deluge of work is to sign up for something you want to do (the Iowa Writers Workshop MOOC), which will be entirely swept aside since you can barely keep up with what you are supposed to be doing. 
• Too tired to work and in the mood for something with no thought to it at all? The Kitchenette's "Behind Closed Ovens" series has some funny stories and screens out anything disgusting.
• The guy who invented NoMoRoBo is a god and should receive the Nobel Peace Prize for keeping those of us who still have land lines (because relatives) sane.
• You can have a "no email on weekends" policy, but if more than 30 emails from your collaborators pile up in a day, you may have to break down and answer them. Never Weaken is a Harold Lloyd comedy, not a phrase to live by.

I can't add anything to what's been said

Thinking of those in Paris and Lebanon and wishing them even more of the courage and the strength that they've shown to get past this nightmare, and hoping that other nations can band together to fight this scourge.

Image credit: https://twitter.com/jean_jullien/status/665305363500011521

Random bullets of November

• Flavia Fescue is right: "you should always ask."   In a quiet moment recently during an in-person exchange, I managed to ask an editor of a collection about an essay, tentatively accepted, that had me so stumped that I hadn't turned in the final version.  I wanted to ask "has that ship sailed?" but not in so many words.  Answer: no (hooray!).  I had been too chicken to ask via email, so this worked out well.
• It's energizing as well as exhausting to see people at a conference, as I'm not the first to observe. Have you ever noticed that conferences (some of them, anyway) are among the few places where we can praise each other face-to-face for scholarship, whether we're acquainted or not? Think about it.  How many other places, except for an invited talk, do you get to hear applause for your words and kind words for your ideas? There's a glow of good fellowship, if that's still a word, that can make quite a difference in the most Novemberish of November moods.
• On the other hand, you're always reminded that you can never work hard enough, fast enough, or long enough to get all the things done. To judge by the tone and number of emails that greeted me, I am pretty sure that some people never sleep and find you morally remiss if you don't email them from the plane on the way home.  This makes for a depressing return and a resumption of the feeling of hopelessness that has dogged me all semester. 
• It's like this: When one of my kids was little, one unusually busy day I asked hir, "Have you done X? How about Y? Z is coming up," until ze said, "Stop chasing me!" and I apologized. Without going into specifics, that is exactly how I feel right now: Stop chasing me. 
• But to end on a happier note: it will get done because it has to get done.  If it doesn't, people can be angry with me but unless they take to torchlight mobs and tumbrils, they can't actually hurt me.
• And soon it will be Thanksgiving!