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!

Florida CC asks faculty to bid for jobs: the English Department of the Future is here

Way back in 2008, in "English Department of the Future," I wrote this:

GA: "Hmm. That's not good. Those 5 deserve better for their tuition money; we have to keep the customers happy, you know. It's a good thing we don't have to rehire him in the spring. Do we still have the instructor bids from the fall?"

Minion: "Yes. Of the 350 applications we got, at least five or six of them offered to teach the class for very close to what Instructor X is teaching it for, although none of them offered to pay for all their own photocopying, as he did. I think we can get someone for around $2,000 to teach this course.

GA: "No benefits, of course?"

Minion: (Laughs) "Of course not!"

I was kidding. It was supposed to be satire. 

According to IHE, a Florida community college trustee thinks it's a great idea:

Putting a project out to bid is typically part of the public works process, since competitive bids tend to drive down the price and ensure fair opportunity for contracts. But should that process be applied to faculty hiring in public higher education? A member of the Board of Trustees for the State College of Florida at Manatee-Sarasota thinks so, and he’s set to brief the board on his proposal at an upcoming meeting. 

That was in September. Between then and now, Beruff was reportedly working on a second proposal that would ask potential college employees, including faculty members, to quote their fee for services on job applications. That information would then be used in the hiring decision.

I think I need a sign that reads "Professor Undine and her crystal ball predicting the future of higher education are available for a consulting fee.  The consulting fee is commensurate with what the top administration pays external consultants who give the same advice that faculty give them for free."

You're in the (almost) home stretch. Be good to yourself.

Figure 1. If you don't dress like this, maybe no one will notice your absence.

For reasons I don't at all understand, this has been an incredibly stressful semester. My colleagues are lovely, as always, so it may be just the feeling, possibly exaggerated, of being pulled in too many directions and failing at all of them (which is on me, not the work or the surroundings).

The copy-edited book is back at the press, and I've finished a couple of small writing projects. Yet the stress of not getting other things finished--the recalcitrant article manuscript, conference papers, etc.-- is causing anxiety and things like the flashing lights and obscured vision that are signs of a very bad headache. It doesn't progress if I can stretch out with my office door closed for half an hour.  I don't want to call it a migraine, but still: flashing lights.

So here's a list to pry me (us) off the ceiling at this point of the semester.

1. You're in the (almost) home stretch. Be good to yourself.

2. Try a cup of green tea.  Try a tall glass of water, which also combats fatigue.

3. Even better, try to get out for a run. Listen to a podcast or a book rather than the voices inside your head.

4. Your colleagues may forgive you for not showing up at the many events scheduled every week. (Maybe they are like Fie, who has some wise words about this in the comments to an earlier post.)

5. About #4: unless you stride around in a swirling cloak like Orson Welles, chances are good no one will even notice your absence, so stop worrying.

6. Eat good, simple food and make it a meal.  A handful of crackers or almonds wolfed down before someone's presentation is not the same as lunch or dinner.

7. Looking at a list of five pieces of writing, all equally important, all requiring lots of time and complex thought, is a good way to paralyze yourself into thinking "I should do X -- wait, Y is due sooner --no, here's another email about Z."

Pick one. If you find yourself sitting in front of a screen and unable to write, grade some papers, even if it does burn the sacred morning writing time.  At least you'll be doing something, and you'll feel better for it.

8. Remember the big picture.  We're not doing brain surgery here. With the exception of recommendation letters, which have to be in on time, and grant letters (ditto), you can only get done what you can get done, as quickly and as well as you can manage it.

9. Get some sleep.

10. Get some fresh air, even if it's just for five minutes.  Breathe deeply.  The air is a wonderful tonic, which I'm making up but sounds like something Emerson should have said.

What's your advice for de-stressing?

Ten thoughts about lecturing

I should probably have called this "Ten weird tricks about lecturing" or "Lecturing: what you learn will shock you!" to grab more page views.

But it probably won't shock you.  Twitter has lost its mind over the "Lecture Me. Really" essay in the New York Times yesterday. The essay suggested that sometimes a good lecture helps listeners to bring together information in a compelling way and that taking notes might students help to assimilate information. You know, learn something.

Twitter responded with roughly this sentiment: "Lectures are evil. Did we not drive a stake through the heart of this awful practice? Everyone knows that constant interaction on Twitter is the One Best Way to teach. Students alone know how best to learn, and they know what they need to learn, too. Why are you trying to impose your terrible methods on them all the time?"

Herewith are ten thoughts about lecturing, in no particular order.

1.  No one would say that lecturing is the best way to learn all the time, or that instructors should do this all the time, or that other ways don't work.

2. When I began teaching, having duly learned how evil lectures were, I did not do it. Ever. Students began to ask for lectures. They wanted some information explained, so I learned to give lectures and to make them good.

3. Lecturing is storytelling.  It ought to have a point, and an organization, and interesting information bits along with the things that they have to know, which might or might not be interesting to them.

4. Pictures help. Interaction helps.  PowerPoint is really for pictures rather than bullet points.   Ask questions. Ask them to respond to what they're seeing.

5. If you think of lecturing as if you're telling a story, you'll keep it short. Henry Ward Beecher and Jonathan Edwards are dead. No one can hold an audience spellbound for 3 hours or usually even an hour any more.  If you keep it to 20 minutes, or even less, it'll work better.

6. Brief lecture + an activity immediately after that to capitalize on what students have learned = a winning combination. Not every day, but some days.  You have to mix things up in the classroom. See point 1.

7. Keep lecturing for some of the "big picture" stuff. I had some instructors who could come into a classroom, open a book, and keep us more or less spellbound (with not much interaction) by analyzing poems for three hours. That's not a sustainable model for most of us.  Lecture entertainingly on the big ideas, and then follow it up with a group project or an analytical exercise about a specific poem or piece of prose.

8. Sometimes when you're discussing a poem, you'll hear students say something as though they just thought of it, even though you said it earlier.  This is a good thing. It means that they're internalizing the ideas and taking ownership of them.

9. When students work in groups, they may not get all the meaning that you'd like them to get out of a piece, the kind that you would have said if you had lectured about it. This is okay.  They will remember it better if they engage with it themselves.

10. Bottom line: three methods.
--Say you give 100% of some necessary information in a lecture.  Students may remember as little as 60% of it, depending on the student.
--If students discuss the work in groups, they may only get 60% of what you think they should learn, but they will remember it.
--When students present their work to the class, they may only say about half of that, or 30%. But they will have a better handle on that 30% because they've worked with it or listened to it from their peers.  That's why it's important to use more than one method.

Updated to add: Miriam Burstein has some good thoughts on this.

Audience guilt

Our campus is exploding with events right now. Everyone is hosting a talk, or giving a talk, or organizing something for students.  Club meetings. Presentations. I've taken time to prepare for and have presented at some of these and have attended some others.

Right now, there's something every day of the week, including days that I usually do research.

On one hand, it's wonderful to see so much interest and activity.

On the other hand, if you start getting a migraine because you're running from one to the other, maybe it's time to stop.

But what do you do about "audience guilt," the feeling that you ought to be going to show support for colleagues and students?

Sometimes I've emailed the person to say "sorry, but I can't be there" when I have had an appointment.

Does that really help, though, or does it ring false, as in "you should have been there, anyway"?

Last week I was supposed to go to something but was so slammed with immediate work (as in meeting my classes in an hour) that I couldn't.  I got the work done, but the residual guilt got worse.

How do you balance these things?

No time left for you, research

There's an episode of Frasier in which the character Roz Doyle (on right) comes to a Halloween party as O from The Story of O. At one point, someone asks her if she has a pencil or something.

"If you don't see it, I don't have it," she snaps.

That's where I am right now with time. When people ask me "could you do this?" or "did you send this?" or "where's that review?" or "did you finish that task?" or "when are we getting our papers back?" all I can say is, "if you don't see it, I don't have it/didn't send it."

October seems to be a kind of triage month in which you assess who's going to be the most inconvenienced or angry if you don't get the task completed for their sector of your endless to-do list. The result is a number of things that are about 90% done but can't be completed as you shift from one to the other to put out the most immediate fire.

One response of mine has been just to stockpile mildly complicated emails sent to me, some of them asking for favors.  If you care enough or it's important enough, you'll stop by the office. If not, well, maybe it'll resolve itself. Or maybe I just don't care.

The loser in all this is research.  There's a piece I've been working on, one I thought would be easy to turn around, that became more of a writing and editing project than I thought.  The thing is, writing takes thought. Thought takes time. Time is something there just isn't enough of right now.

It's still a great job, and my students were sweethearts about the papers being returned late.  But when it gets to the point where you wake up two hours after going to bed feeling that you have to get up and work some more, that's overtiredness, and it's unhealthy.

For now, I'll keep plugging away at the list and wave at the research materials from the corner where they're sulking--no, actually they're waiting patiently, and they'll be fine if I get more sleep.  

Podcasts, with a detour to Lucille Ball

I just learned from the post over at Historiann's that today is International Podcast Day, so Happy Podcast Day!

Historiann mentioned Karina Longworth's You Must Remember This, which I binge-listened to over this past month (all except the actual Manson family murder segment).  The old Hollywood ones are especially wonderful, although I'd like to add this to the most recent one on Buster Keaton:

Guess which famous redheaded TV star of the 1950s was tutored and mentored by Keaton and his director, Ed Sedgwick?

Did you say Red Skelton?  You'd be partly right.

The other redhead is Lucille Ball. Ball learned a lot from Keaton and Sedgwick not only when she was at MGM but also later, before I Love Lucy. Sedgwick especially was a father figure to her--she'd lost her own father as a child--but they both taught her a lot about comic timing and how to perform gags to best effect. Keaton was a genius, especially with props and physical comedy.

Before I Love Lucy, Ball and Arnaz had an act in which she interrupted his band by pretending to be a tramp auditioning with a cello.  From the inside of the cello, which she'd open up, she'd bring out a little chair and a lot of other props. This act was taught to her by a European comedian whose name I can't recall, but who taught her how to get the most from those props? Keaton.

Fun fact: when Skelton won an Emmy for his comedy show in 1951, he said, graciously, "You're giving this to the wrong redhead." 

Back to Podcast Day.

Here's a link to You Must Remember This. http://www.vidiocy.com/youmustrememberthispodcastblog/

Also worth checking out: Futility Closet http://www.futilitycloset.com/category/podcast/, which has unusual stories from history.

BBC History Extra: http://www.historyextra.com/podcasts

What are your favorite podcasts?

You are not invisible. Put down the phone.

In "Stop Googling. Let's Talk," Sherry Turkle reports what she's learned about the ubiquitous habit of checking one's phone and what it has done to conversation, especially within families:

One 15-year-old I interviewed at a summer camp talked about her reaction when she went out to dinner with her father and he took out his phone to add “facts” to their conversation. “Daddy,” she said, “stop Googling. I want to talk to you.” A 15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation. 

In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.

But doing one thing at a time is hard, because it means asserting ourselves over what technology makes easy and what feels productive in the short term. Multitasking comes with its own high, but when we chase after this feeling, we pursue an illusion. Conversation is a human way to practice unitasking.

 Go read the whole thing; it's worth it.

The thing is, if you take out your phone because they* take out their phone, all of a sudden it's a phone duel and not a conversation. You both win, and the conversation loses. 

TL;dr. You are not invisible. You are a human being in a community of human beings. Put down the phone.

Or, as Sherry Turkle says, "Conversation is a human way to practice unitasking."

*I am trying out the inclusive "their" to see if I can do it.
[Edited because I sounded like the world's crankiest crankypants and am tired of being negative. ]

In which I am tempted to MOOC: How Writers Write Fiction 2015 from the Iowa Writers Workshop

I saw this at The Toast: the Iowa Writers Workshop is offering an 8-week MOOC on creative writing, and I am really tempted. http://iwp.uiowa.edu/iwp-courses/distance-learning-courses/fall-2015/how-writers-write-fiction

How tempted? I actually signed up to be on their mailing list the last time and got a notice of this a week or two ago.

Do I have time to do this? Absolutely not.

But I have wanted to find out more about creative writing for a long time. I have longed for the opportunity to write fiction or creative nonfiction without the abject humiliation of showing my possible writing to the creative writing people I know. Abject humiliation from strangers, on the other hand, would be fine.

I don't really want to do this under my own name, though, in case I am terrible at it. I'm pretty sure this was George Eliot's reason, too.  I wonder if I could use one of my aliases to sign up.

Writing inspiration, Hemingway word count edition

Figure 1. So Hemingway was a record-keeper!

Instead of "sit down and write," this has been a week of "sit down and drive, stand up and teach, walk down the hall and meet," etc.

I have a list of about 15 things to do immediately, divided up into writing, reviewing, teaching, and admin.

Guess which category is the one with nothing crossed off?

But just in time, the NYTimes has some writing inspiration: an exhibition of Ernest Hemingway's artifacts at the JFK Library.

Here's a little writing inspiration for your Friday:

He began the original draft of his first novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” which he finished in just nine weeks during the summer of 1925, on loose sheets and then switched over to notebooks. It wasn’t until the end of the third notebook that he wrote a chapter outline on the back cover (which also records his travel expenses and his daily word counts, something Hemingway kept careful track of), and some of the pages on display show him slashing out not just words and sentences but whole passages as he writes. “Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it,” Hemingway wrote later in an Esquire article. “That is .333, which is a damned good average for a hitter.”

Figure 2. Even Hemingway had to cut words.

Those are nice round numbers, but of course, Hem didn't have the Word Count feature. He kept track of his weight, too, writing it in pencil on a wall near his bathroom scales, and I'm guessing that the "fishing diary" in which he wrote an angry letter to Harold Ross of The New Yorker contains size, weight, and numbers of fish caught.

The interesting thing for me about all this record-keeping is that Hemingway never mentions it in A Moveable Feast (either version), although whole chapters of that book are basically writing inspiration and absence-of-food descriptions. It's not in keeping with Hemingway Image (TM), probably, but it's oddly inspiring to those of us trying to keep on track by keeping track.

Reading and writing all the things

Reading: 

When will I learn, oh, when will I learn that if I assign really long novels, criticism, and theory in a seminar that I have to (re)read them along with the students?

I am now officially convinced that reading on a screen has destroyed my reading concentration for reading books on paper, which is really sad, since I'd rather read on paper. 

It's more than the interwebz destroying concentration, though. I don't need glasses for the screen but do need them for reading on paper.  I can read endlessly on the screen, but my eyes tear up and get blurry after more than an hour reading on paper.  This is not optimal, to say the least.

But then you go to class, and you get to talk to students about the reading, and they say things that are insightful about the work or that reveal something about their thought processes, and it's fun.  There, I said it. It's fun to teach even though we're supposed to prioritize other things.

Writing: 

The writing has been disrupted because of running back and forth to campus so much for meetings.  I've been trying to do more of my own writing in the office by sitting at a table, which signals writing, instead of at the desk, which I associate with class work, email, and other tasks. The other day, I left the office entirely and went to a table in the library.

Melissa Dennihy's essay "How to Get Writing Done" at Inside Higher Ed suggests holding fast to a research day, which probably is essential for new assistant professors but might be difficult for associates and others who have a lot of committees. 

On the other hand, I've had several meeting requests lately that were the kind I associate with when my kids were toddlers and I used the psychology of the forced choice: maybe they don't want to get dressed at all after their bath and you ask them whether they want the blue or the red pajamas.   "Which of these two times [when I'm not available but the person requesting the meeting is] would you like to meet, Undine?" "Neither, but how about this time, when I am?"

What's your take on the Victorian Lady?

Figure 1.J. Herbin ink and some of my pens.

Recently, the frivolous corner of the internet has lost its mind over something even more inconsequential than the "blue-black or white-gold dress" controversy: Victorian Lady Sarah A. Crisman, who chooses, she says, to live as a Victorian in Port Townsend, Washington. This means dressing up, making your own clothes, lighting by kerosene, and so on.

There's an article on Vox,  a precursor article on xojane from a couple of years ago, and innumerable pieces like this snarky one on Deadspin that point out the things that get left out of this vision like, oh, slavery, racism, colonialism, imperialism, industrial oppression of workers, and all those wrongs that we are at least trying to right.

My most immediate reaction on reading the article when she mentioned ink "from a company started in 1670" was "Cool! She uses J. Herbin ink, just like me!" I have written with dip pens, although I don't currently own one due to an act of heroic resistance to buying one when I was in Research City this summer.  I cook and bake from scratch (cakes, bread, pizza, Yorkshire pudding, etc.) using cast-iron pots, so there's that.

But think about it: who among us doesn't have some vestiges of the Victorian age that we carry over into our lives? Isn't that what a lot of craft-people are actually doing with scrapbooks, quilts, and so on? We/they just don't write blog posts patting themselves on the back about living like the ancestors. And is this different from the many other acts of impersonation that populate television reality or reality re-enactment shows like Pioneer House or its brethren?

And who doesn't remember the implicit "Thank DOG I now have a sewing machine" in Ma Ingalls's voice when she had to do all that sewing for Laura's wedding in These Happy Golden Years? Okay, that's not what she actually says, which is this:

"[Pa] lifted the blanket away, and there stood a shining new sewing machine.
"Oh, Charles!" Ma gasped.
"Yes, Caroline, it is yours," Pa said proudly. There'll be a lot of extra sewing, with Mary coming home and Laura going away, and I thought you'd need some help." . . .
A long time ago, Laura remembered, a tone in Ma's voice when she spoke of a sewing machine had made Laura think that she wanted one. Pa had remembered that.(241-242)

And when Laura decides to sew the long seams of the sheets down the middle instead of using the traditional method, Ma agrees: "Our grandmothers would turn in their graves, but after all, these are modern times" (265).

Why, yes, Caroline Ingalls. Yes, they are. Caroline would have shooed Victorian Lady out of the house with her ever-handy broom. 

I think a lot of the condemnation that Victorian Lady has received is due to her smug tone, insistence that she's living as a Victorian rather than doing this as a hobby, and condemnation of the 21st-century's pace, as if she herself doesn't have a website and a business plan for monetizing her way of life. She's living a medical age of penicillin and pretending that she's not, so to speak.

Or maybe it's a fear that, like some other re-enactors (see Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic) this kind of cosplay will encourage the erasure of historical evils.

But the counter-argument is this: Victorian Lady obviously has plenty of money to indulge her hobby, and what's the harm?

What's your take on her decision to cosplay (or is it steampunk?) by "living" in a different era?

A bright spot or two

This was one of those weeks when some kind of Fool Translator Device inside my brain made every statement come out as halting and idiotic. 

Everything came out wrong, or so it seemed. When I made a joke in the department meeting, I had to say, like Foghorn Leghorn, "I say, that's a joke, son!"--but not in those words. 

I misnamed files, sent out files with errors in them, and all the while cringed at the promised work that I wasn't getting done. I stumbled over words in front of the class. You know how you can be writing on the board and all of a sudden the word looks strange to you and you can't be sure that you're spelling it right as thirty pairs of eyes bore into your back? Yup.

Even writing was giving me trouble.  I need to use a better word than "humble-bragging" in an essay, but that's the only one that comes to mind, so it's still there.

I thought caffeine was supposed to make you sharper, and I need to drink tea or Diet Coke in order to stay awake during the long commutes on a narrow and twisting road. The VW Bug that drove me off onto the shoulder this week as it passed an 18-wheeler in my half of the two-lane highway is just the latest example of why keeping alert is important.  This level of caffeine makes me sleepy all day and up every hour at night, however, and it's my theory that that's when the Fool Translator Device gears up for the next day.

But then on Thursday, behind on everything, behind on and barely finishing the novels I was rereading since I'd assigned them, it all worked out. We did group work in one of the classes, and as I walked around, students were eager to talk with me about the topic their group was researching.  We had good discussions in another class--high-intensity but with a lot of laughs, too.

And the edited Laocoon manuscript came back to me nearly a month early, with nice comments about how it really didn't take much editing and was a pleasure to read.

So after most of a week that had me saying "what's the point?" and feeling that I couldn't do anything right, these two bright spots turned it around.

Writing inspiration: by popular request, the Excel writing spreadsheet.

Thanks to Sisyphus's and anonymous's requests in the comments to the previous post, I thought I would talk about the Excel spreadsheet I use to keep track of writing.

First of all, here's what it looks like:

1. The first three columns are pretty obvious: Month, Date, Day.

2. The next two columns (4 & 5) are the beginning and ending word count.

3. The next column (6)  is a total word count for the day, based on a pretty simple Excel formula (B5-B4, and so on). If I'm editing and have a negative word count, I put in a zero. That's not accurate, but it's more happy-making than seeing the total go down.

4. The number of pages column  (7) is just the word count total divided by 350.  I know that 750words.com counts a page as 250 words, but if you're using a proportional font like Times Roman or Cambria, 300-350 is more accurate. I usually keep this scrunched up so that it doesn't go to 8 decimal places.

5. The Task column (8) says what I did, rather than what I intend to do.  An intention/aspirational list of things to do always makes me less productive, so now I just record what actually got done.

This is from January, when I was going over the footnotes and manuscript for the millionth time before sending it to the press.  You don't see a panicky note about "Write MLA paper" there because I presented part of the book instead of writing something new.

6. The right-most column with nothing in it is actually the most satisfying one; it's the "Sent" column. When something gets sent, whether it's a letter, a manuscript review, a recommendation letter, or whatever, it gets noted in that column.

Other notes:

• I don't use a lot of color, but days when I'm on campus are tinted in one color, and days when I'm away on trips are tinted another.  
• There's a running tally of words for the year down at the bottom of the Total column. 
• Every year, I rename the spreadsheet, make the appropriate adjustments for dates and days, and clear the rest of the contents. 
• I keep notices other items on another page of the spreadsheet: to-do items like manuscript reviews, letters of recommendation, upcoming papers to write, etc.

Paul Silvia, of How to Write a Lot fame, keeps a spreadsheet in SPSS that is simpler than this. From p. 41, here are his categories:

Month / date / day / words [total] / goal / project / year

• I didn't bother with "year," because it's pretty obvious that it'll be the same year for 365 days.  Maybe SPSS doesn't allow the same flexibility as Excel and he has many years on the same page.
• Silvia's "Goal" column has two settings: "Met" and "Unmet." The idea is that you assign yourself a project or a number of words for the day and assess whether you've met it or not. I tried this, but it was too discouraging on bad writing days. The simple number totals work better for me. 

Anyway, this is a combination external record and conscience that nags just the right amount, so I've kept it going since 2011.

Secret messages I didn't send

Dear Blackboard: I have the course materials online and a course blog and a Twitter presence. No, I do not plan to click through eight kajillion menus and watch yet more instructional videos in order to put everything in your course space. That goes double for all the "Partner" for-pay sites that are much more prominent in your interface than how to do simple tasks like setting up the gradebook. 

Dear Facebook: I am so much happier now that I've gone cold turkey and given you up at least for the time being. Then some professional thing will drag me back in, like Michael Corleone, and you can go back to making me sad again.

Dear Writing Progress spreadsheet: You are showing me, right there, why I should never agree to do a "little" piece that is not directly related to a current project. You show two weeks of writing and another week of pointless angst before I could get started. It turned out well in the long run, but all that pointless angst could have gone to a new project!  Lesson learned, I hope.


Dear Morning Self: This is just a reminder that if you half-read something and fire off a measured and polite but stupid response to a group of people, you will cringe-- because "stupid." Enough with the shoot first, aim later approach to email.  Save yourself the grief and don't respond.

Dear Future Self: There are two big national conferences at the same time next spring, one all the way across the country and one a short plane ride away.  Both have exciting work in your field. You want to apply to the far-away one, but next spring, you will wonder what you were thinking. Do yourself a favor and submit the proposal for the one that's closer.

Dear Colleagues and Students: It would sound sappy to say that your enthusiasm and good humor make the whole back to school process so much easier, so I won't say it. But it's true.

Writing inspiration: you're part of the Borg, and that's a good thing

I haven't been writing here as much, partly because I've been writing other things but partly because of something I read.

When The Little Professor announced a while back that she'd cleaned out her blogroll because most bloggers either had stopped writing or were boringly repeating themselves, I gulped and thought, "Is that me?" (For the record, I don't think I was ever on her blogroll, but still.)

Now I keep thinking that everything I post here has to pass by the ghost of  Edward R. Murrow standing at my shoulder. 

But two other pieces were reassuring.

First, Historiann's post about public engagement, with which I agree.  I've done interviews (under my real identity), given lectures, etc., because it's important to do and also flattering to be asked. But even here, where I'm not posting under my real name, I can still contribute.

Second, over at John Scalzi's Whatever blog, this terrific piece from Felicia Day that sums up the writing process perfectly. You should read the whole thing, but here are just a few excerpts that helped to get me up and writing this morning:

I am plagued with perfection syndrome, anxiety and an acute self-consciousness that makes me convinced that I have a gob of mascara under my eye when I attend any public appearance. In general, hubris is something I avoid at all costs. (The internet helps reinforce it because someone is always willing to step up and tell you how much you suck. Thanks internet!)

But after the initial seed is planted, all our emotional baggage arrives with a jolly, “Hey idiot, reality knocking!” to dry up the enthusiasm. Inhibitions show up. Second guesses. Procrastination-reading of five other works in a similar vein leads to crushing thoughts like, “He had a robot dog in his book, I can’t do that now or I’m a copycat! I have no other ideas. I’m the worst!” I went through it all. And it cost me weeks of my writing life.  [much good stuff omitted]

So when you think about creating, focus on the idea of adding to the collective Borg consciousness, if only to get over your own road blocks and make it easier to get your voice out there.