Desert island game and some random thoughts

There has to be a better way. I'm heading to the place of no internets, where I'll have no distractions, no office that I have to go to, and nothing but lots of time to strike a nice balance between hanging out and doing some writing. That's the good part.

The bad part is that, as if I'm playing the desert island game, I have to choose only about 5 books to take with me. (I'm not paying for an additional suitcase this year, now that fees are applied for the first bag.*) I only have .pdf copies of a couple of books, and one of the books has to be one I'm reviewing, so that leaves four. Should they be criticism? Primary texts I know really well but will need to cite? Humongously heavy biography that is really a useful reference but could double as a blunt instrument in a murder mystery because of its weight? If I'm really desperate, there's a library about 2 hours away that will have what I need, but of course I won't be able to check out books from there.

There should be a way to bring books and solitude together, shouldn't there? I know I've ranted about this before, but if we can download entire movies or TV just by paying for them at Amazon or iTunes, why can't Google make this happen? (I know, I know--copyright issues--but couldn't they get some kind of licensing in place that would allow it to work?)

* And about those bag fees: I hate them but I pay them because a flight anywhere from Northern Clime involves so many changes of planes (and usually races through the airport) that I don't want to deal with a suitcase, too. On the several flights I've been on recently, many people seem to be putting the suitcases in the overhead bin, which seems to be working out fine.

On the other hand, when the cheerful flight attendants remind us to put our computer bags under the seat so that people who didn't pay the luggage fees will have room in the overhead bins, they never explain why my legs should be doubly cramped so that someone else doesn't have to pay a fee to check a bag, so the computer bag goes in the overhead bin whether they like it or not.

Last archives post::what's major and what's minor?

Notorious Ph.D. has an interesting post about the two broad research patterns that researchers follow when going to archives: one is "casting about until a pattern emerges" and the other is to go in search of a specific person, text, or idea and see where the search leads you. In the comments, Tenth Medieval quoted something from Robert Darnton (or maybe it was on his blog) that resonated with what I'd felt during my recent trip:

As the tenor of a life begins to emerge from the manuscripts and I see a story unfold from one document to another, I have the sensation of making contact with the human condition as it was experienced by someone in another world, centuries away from mine. It may be an illusion, and I may get it wrong. I may sound like a romantic. But the archives, in all their concreteness, provide a corrective to romantic interpretations.

That sense of an emerging narrative--that's what's so seductive about working in the archives, especially if it's a story that you haven't seen someone else tell. The problem is, of course, that not all stories are going to be of interest to anyone but you, which adds a third dimension to Notorious Ph.D.'s questions: Which parts are major, and which ones are minor? How can you tell which leads are worth pursuing because they'll actually be important, and which leads are just the means of satisfying your own curiosity about a particular idea? And, more importantly, is this a distinction that you should even be making as you're looking at materials?

Frankly, unless you're looking for something very, very specific, I don't think that you can make that distinction when you're in the midst of working with materials, although it's hard not to, given the time constraints involved in being at a research site. You can't know what's major and what's minor at that time, although you can know what's been published and what hasn't, which can tend to guide your search. If Author Y's love letters have been well mined for articles, you need to know those articles going in so that you don't "discover" a narrative that's already been written.

Also, the work you put into getting some information may be vastly disproportionate to the space it ultimately occupies in the finished work, but it may be very important nonetheless. In a recent biography that I read of Author X, for example, only a paragraph or so was devoted to one part of his life, yet I knew (because I knew the author of the biography, which took him many years to write ) that finding this information had involved painstaking research in half a dozen archives, just for a seemingly minor piece of information.

So what if this one small piece of information that you found in the archives proves that Author X really did read and respond to Author Y, or really was present in, say, a war zone even though generations of critics have said that that didn't happen? Some theorists might say "Who cares?" and that it's a minor point, given that queer theory, postcolonial theory, or whatever says that theory Z explains it anyway without the need for facts, and what are "facts" but an artificial construct based on hegemonic and ideologically driven narratives, blah blah blah, etc. But the thing is, if it's a point that no one has mentioned before, it deserves to be seen and heard, doesn't it?

I can see that this post is "casting about until a pattern emerges" and not getting there, so I'll finish with this: Part of what archival research is about is letting the narratives that are there in the documents, and the narratives that are not there but are implicit in the documents, teach you what narrative you ought to be constructing once you're away from the archive. So, in other words, you need to pursue those insights but also let them rest at the same time so that you can discern the patterns.

Update

I've been back for a couple of days, which is really just long enough to do laundry and pack, this time for a trip to the land without internet.

Lessons from the archive III: monkish life

When I told people I'd be coming to Research City, they said things like, "I live right near there! Let's get together" or "I want to take you out to lunch."

But I didn't contact them, partly because of basic inertia, partly because I didn't want to take hours out of research time (how selfish is that?), and partly because I didn't want to disturb this whole monkish life thing that is working in the archives.

There's a simplicity to this trip, after all the travel planning (which I hate) and arranging that goes into it. It's a combination of knowing what you're going to do and not knowing what you're going to find.

Knowing what you're going to do: Every day I get up, make the bed, go to the archive, work, eat something that's easy to find, read, and get some sleep. Except for a nightly phone call to my family, about all I say every day is "Yes, I'm finished with this box; can I have the next one?" and, at lunch, "Do you have iced tea?" I'm not here to fight with the phone company, or pay bills, or cook, teach, or do anything except work: read and think. (And write--I finished a long-promised and long-delayed article I had started and sent it off while I was here.)

Not knowing what you're going to find: I didn't find any smoking guns, anything that would tie together an entire line of reasoning, as I had done in a previous trip here. But reading through the materials was a kind of revelation, in that it made me see connections that I hadn't seen before, and that's a really good thing. I found enough to make me want to come back and live the monkish life a little more. It's not a contemplative life in a religious sense, but it's a contemplative life in an academic sense, and that's fine with me.

Lessons from the archive II: as the days dwindle down to a precious few

When I arrived and started working, it felt as though I had all the time in the world here. I could pursue some loose ends, look at letters of minor interest, and so on.

But now, every piece of writing becomes an exercise in time management, or maybe I should say time anxiety. What if I spend a lot of time on Box X, when Box X + 1 has what I really want? What if I get back and discover that the part of the letter I didn't transcribe is the one I need?

The answer to this one is simple, but not cheap: throw money at the problem. Plan to return, or, barring that, request copies.

That's only part of the solution, though. What's different about being here is that if I see a lead, I can pursue it, something that's difficult to do long distance.

Also, and I think this is the real issue: I like being inside Author's head for now. It's nice to be immersed to the point where you start to see certain phrases showing up in her letters to several people, or to see her sense of humor, or to read her response to a cranky lecturing letter she's received from someone.

But now I want to know more about certain things: why did she abandon some stories and finish (and publish) other ones? With some of them it's obvious, since the plot has no place to go, but others are at least the equal of those she did publish. More to the point, why were a number of stories that she didn't finish or publish about a particular kind of relationship?

I guess she's never going to answer that last one, so coming up with an answer, however hypothetical, is my job.

Lessons from the archive

• No matter how much a word looks like "podcast" in the author's handwriting, it is highly unlikely to be a word that the author would use.
• It may be easier, on the whole, to be a tortured creative genius and fill notebooks with tiny handwriting in black ink than to decipher that handwriting years later.
• No matter how much energy I think I have, it is never as much as that of an author who likes to write letters.
  

A brief hiatus

I'm in Research City, spending long, concentrated days in the archives, enjoying hours spent seemingly inside the head of the authors whose letters I'm reading, and wondering if, with all this typing and transcribing, absorbing words and sentence structure, I'll start to sound like these authors once I'm done.

Trance day

Other bloggers have talked about their plans for the summer, mapping out their time, and so on, and I have a chart along those lines myself. Somehow the chart failed me today, however, even though I have a lot to do. It was a trance day, and I did nothing all day long.

A trance day is a day when you might as well have stayed in bed. It's sort of like a vacation day, except instead of doing lots of outdoorsy fun things, your only exertion, mental or otherwise, is fixing a bowl of cereal, and even that seems like kind of a challenge.

On a trance day, the exercise plans are the first to go: even my beloved early morning walk didn't get done this morning. I got up early and fell back asleep after I sat on the couch to put my shoes on. All day it felt as though someone else was carrying my brain around, and they'd wrapped it in a comforter so I couldn't hear what it was saying.

About noon, I quit staring stupidly at the computer, gave up, and watched Bette Davis movies all afternoon. I did a little reading, but I barely moved off the couch all day, and yes, since falling asleep in the morning wasn't apparently enough, I fell asleep this afternoon, too.

I'm hoping that the trance day has given me a lot of stored energy for tomorrow and that whoever has my brain will give it back.

[Edited to add a picture of Davis in Jezebel.]

Summer school teaching, the absence of (II)

Ink's comments on the last post about summer teaching got me thinking.

It's about 80 degrees here, dry and sunny, but I'm in the shade, and there's a cool breeze blowing. There are birds chirping all around in the trees, and, since the cats sharing the deck with me are too comfortably lazy to go after the birds, it's peaceful all around. The neighbors have mercifully progressed from their Windchimes Phase to a Water Fountain Phase, which is far more pleasant to listen to, and all the kids and dogs seem to be elsewhere, so all I hear are the birds and the wind in the trees. The work I'm responding to today is up on the screen on my laptop, and I have a tall glass of iced tea near at hand.

So yes--is the absence of summer school something I could get used to? To quote Ink, "It sounds kind of heavenly."

Summer school teaching, the absence of

For a variety of reasons this year, I didn't get to teach summer school even though I put in for it. This is the first time in several years that I'm not teaching a summer school class. Yes, it's taking a hit in my travel funds, the reason I teach every summer, but I've been fortunate enough to have some small grants this year to make up for it.

I didn't think it would make a difference in terms of time, since I try to teach the same class each year (an online one), so although there's some time spent in getting the materials together and grading, it's not like teaching a whole new prep. No big deal, right?

I was wrong, and here's why.

• Without teaching to take up that time, I don't feel that I have to reward myself by "treating" myself to fun sites and am spending a lot less time web surfing.
  
• Without grading, I don't have any way to procrastinate about writing; there's no "well, I have to get these papers back to them, so I can't write today."
  
• Since I don't have to check email constantly to see if students are contacting me, I can ignore it with a clear conscience--or turn it off entirely because there's nothing from colleagues that can't wait.
  
• I'm also finding out the truth of Winifred Gallagher's advice to sit down for 90 minutes of uninterrupted time early in the morning, since the intervals of attention I can pay to the writing diminish during the day.
  
• This works even better if I get up and go for a long walk very early, before sitting down to write, since that helps with the "get me out of this chair!" twitchiness that can otherwise occur.

By now you're probably nodding and saying "Of course you can write better if you're not teaching, too! Duh!" But you see, I thought the two were compartmentalized, that the time I was devoting to teaching wasn't having an effect (except in terms of time) on the writing. I was convinced that with sufficient time management skills I could do both.

What I've learned is that with sufficient time management skills I can do both--but there's no solution to mustering sufficient attention management skills except not to have the huge attention elephant of teaching a class at the same time in the room. It's a little humbling to realize that rationally compartmentalizing your time doesn't have any discernible effect on how much you can actually get done.

Deny, deny, deny

Over at the Blog of Henry David Thoreau is posted one of my favorite passages from his journals. You see, HDT had been out fishing with a friend and had set fire to some woods--yes, those woods. What he concludes is sort of tragic and comic at the same time:

I said to myself, "Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them ? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food." It has never troubled me from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it. . . . I at once ceased to regard the owners and my own fault, — if fault there was any in the matter, — and attended to the phenomenon before me, determined to make the most of it.

What's funny about this, besides the obvious irony of his burning up those woods, is that he never even gets around to saying "Whoops! My bad" or its nineteenth-century equivalent. "If fault there was any in the matter"--none at all if you say so, Henry. Break out the marshmallows and make the most of it, by all means.

What's sad about it is the self-righteous denial of responsibility, the one that nowadays manifests itself with phrases like "It's obvious that X happened, but there is nothing to be gained by rehashing the past, so let's move on."

Let's move on.
Let's put this behind us and look to the future.
There's nothing to be gained from second-guessing this decision.
There's no reason for a post-mortem about this issue.
It is what it is.

Every time I hear one of these coming from the government ("Markopolos knew about Madoff's Ponzi scheme and tried to warn the government? That's not relevant right now"), or from large corporations ("You've wanted us to make small cars for the last thirty years? Why didn't you say so?"), or from university administration, or from an individual who has colossally screwed something up in ways that it will take someone days to untangle, it makes me crazy.

But what this passage says is that this kind of rationalization didn't spring up overnight; it has its roots in human nature and, yes, American individualism.

(Next time: happy thoughts, I promise.)

Limitless paper in a paperless world

Or "Dunder Mifflin, I love you."

I keep reading about people scanning all their paper to .pdf files, and I think it's a great idea, in theory. I have a naming system for files now that I like a lot, and I almost always read articles in .pdf format now. I scan my conference notes to .pdf so that I'll actually use them (although I still look wistfully at the Pulse pen site.) When I print, I print duplex.

But (and you knew this was coming).

Every time I've changed from one computer to another, I have managed to lose some files. Every time, despite backups and my new best friend, Dropbox.

Today, I've been working on something that I had given a conference paper on about five years ago. Easy, right? Since I hadn't published that paper, I went to look for it in the computer folder where it should be, and it wasn't there, nor was it on the old computer, the backup drive, or anyplace else.

So I went searching down in the file cabinets in the basement. I keep a folder for each conference with conference notes, a program, and a copy of the paper I gave in chronologically-arranged file drawers. Sure enough, it was there under "2004 Conference Name." I brought it back upstairs, scanned it to a .pdf, and converted it to a text file, so I'd have it the next time I went looking on the computer.

The point is, though, that if I hadn't had the paper copy, I wouldn't have had any copy at all. This is at least the fourth time that I've had this experience. Maybe I'm unusually careless with saving work, or maybe these had gone up in smoke with some of the hard drive crashes I've had over the years, but whatever the cause, the paper copy has saved me every time.

I'm writing this down so the next time I get the urge to toss out all the folders and put everything on a jump drive, I'll think twice.

Writing Practices and Diet Books

I was at a conference recently, and since it was a conference where I know people and go out to dinner (not always the case at conferences), some of us got to talking over dinner about our writing practices.

This topic fascinates me, and apparently it fascinates a lot of us, since it comes up as a blog topic from time to time. I think that writing practices and the books that describe them, like Professors as Writers or How to Write a Lot, are really diet books in disguise. You know how the bottom-line message for diet books is really "eat in moderation + exercise + inspiration + maybe one catchy magic ingredient (like grapefruit) = weight loss"? The bottom-line message for writing books and programs is "write every day + keep writing every day + keep writing every day = productivity."

Yet we're all still looking for the "one catchy magic ingredient" that the weight loss books have trained us to look for, the one that will ensure that we can actually get the writing done. That's the magic ingredient that Boice and company are determined to deprive us of, because it doesn't exist, but that doesn't stop us from seeking it. It's our little talisman, the grapefruit that we think keeps us writing, when actually it's the practice of writing (the "exercise" part) that is responsible for the good result we're seeking.

So here, in no particular order, are some of the writing practices and talismans:

• The lucky chair. This one speaks for itself, I think: if the beginning of your project goes well when you sit in a particular chair, that's the chair you want for the whole project.
• Handwritten first drafts. These are very important for some people--and they have to be written with particular tools.
• The lucky pen or pencil. For the handwritten drafts people, this can be a particular kind of pencil or, if it's a pen, a specific pen.
• The right kind of paper. "A legal pad." "No, a yellow pad that isn't legal length." "No, a lined pad, but the paper has to be white, not yellow." "A ruled notebook." "A Moleskine--everything goes in here, thoughts and initial drafts included."
• Atmosphere. "I have to have music on when I write." "I write with the tv on low in the background, or else other thoughts crowd out the thoughts about the project." "No music. No sound at all."
  
• Time of day. "I get up and start writing." "I can write during the morning if I've already started a project, but I usually start a new project by writing in the evening." "I can only put in about 4 good hours a day." "I can write all day if I'm really working."
  
• Space. "I write in the dining room." "I can't write in my campus office--too many distractions." "I have a room in the library." "I have an office in the research center." "I go to my family's cabin in the woods." [Note: I actually met someone once (not in an MLA field) who wrote all his books on cruise ships. He would gather all the material and go on a longish cruise, and he would have a book when he stepped back on dry land.]
  

One person at dinner, a highly respected senior scholar, seemed a little bemused by this conversation, as though writing was just something you did, not something that you obsessed about the minutiae of, and we did eventually turn to another topic. But as long as we're all still searching for that magic grapefruit, I think it'll continue to be a fascinating topic.

New MLA Handbook: Print. Print. Print. Print.

Ink asked an excellent question in the comments, so rather than hijack my own comments section, I'll write about it here:

I just heard about that yesterday and I don't really understand what is wrong with print being viewed as default...is it not PC, somehow? I don't have the new version yet, so maybe it's explained in great detail.

Frankly, I just don't want to type "Print" a billion times on my Works Cited. Especially since we're all trying to go green and that just makes the bibliographies longer...sigh.

I hadn't thought about the longer bibliographies issue, but Ink is absolutely right. Maybe the MLA thinks that taking away its requirement for long URL citations will balance that out. The MLA giveth, and the MLA taketh away. And once the varieties of e-readers (Sony, Kindle, Kindle reader for iPhone, and the various tablet readers that are on the way) get involved, I suspect that the MLA Handbook, and our bibliographies, are about to get a whole lot longer.

The MLA thought (and still thinks) it was important to specify the database, so we all do that, even though it seems unnecessary if you're citing a .pdf version of a print journal. Aren't they photographically identical? At least in the new version, you don't have to specify which library site you were in when you accessed JSTOR or EBSCO, which is an improvement (See 5.6.4). I can also see the necessity of specifying "Print" for the sciences, since so much of what they do is online, or for specialists in digital media areas within the humanities.

But for plain vanilla literature and literary history people? How many of the books you actually use, including new books, are available in any complete form online? (I don't mean Google's book snippets; they don't count.) In my field, that figure is about 3 out of 100, and I've looked assiduously (questia.com, netlibrary.com, books for the Kindle, etc.) to find books available in this form. Believe me, if they were available online, I'd be throwing money at them, since it would be so convenient to have them online.

Are there enough books online to justify this new MLA requirement of "Print" after what may turn out to be 97% of the books in a bibliography? What about the books you use; are they online enough to make this necessary?

[Updated to add: check out Ink's satiric post on this issue (link is above).]

You know you're procrastinating when . . .

. . . after removing all other possible distractions, you reach for the new MLA Handbook, look at the citation formats, and say to yourself, "This is fascinating. Fascinating!"

Oh, and while I like the "all media are equal" idea in that it doesn't assume that print is the default medium, I'm kind of curious to see the first books coming out that will have bibliographies looking like this (from 5.5.2):

Kirby, David. What is a Book?. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002. Print.

Tatar, Maria. Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Print.

A shout out to editors

Because I've been doing minor revisions on a piece for a collection that's in its final stages before production, I've been thinking a lot about the process of editing. My conclusion is that (drum roll) it makes writing better.

Now I know that sounds like a no-brainer, but sometimes I've heard people complain about the editorial process as one in which their deathless prose was mangled. I'm not sure if anyone writes deathless prose any more, now that Henry James is dead, but my guess is that everyone can use a little help, even if you're enraptured with your own prose right after you've finished writing it. Most of us do a lot of self-editing before we send something out (although I've reviewed manuscripts where someone apparently thought, "Commas? I don't need no stinkin' commas!" and sent it), so it ought to be in good shape.

But here's what editors can do, if they're good, when they're responding to a manuscript*:

• They can praise the right things, and praise them in the right proportions. I know that this is the "carrot before stick" approach that we use in student papers, but we use it there because it works, so why shouldn't it work on us as well as for us? This is the sugar high that gives you the energy to tackle all the work that you know you're going to have to do when you revise.
• They can point out, tactfully, when your wilder flights of fancy have left the building, so to speak, and can ask questions that can bring you back down to earth.
  
• They can suggest phrases to cut while still retaining the sense of the piece, phrases that you'd labored over for so long that you can't really see for yourself that they aren't needed.
• They can question you on matters of fact and on items that you'd thought were obvious (but weren't).
  
• They can also, through their questions, make you think about the issues in new ways.
  
• Although you have to try to conform to the citation style, it's their job to make sense of the style, which sometimes is MLA, sometimes Chicago A or B, and sometimes a little number that the publishing house has whipped up all on its own, like Chicago with a soupçon of MLA and a dash of CBE.
  

Of course it's initially frustrating to receive a request to cut 1000 words and add another line of argument to what you'd already considered done. Also, occasionally there are problems: in a recent piece, the editor had changed a sentence so that it was a grammatical error, and I appended an explanation of why I'd changed it back in the proofs.

But by giving this kind of careful reading to your work, they can do something that you can't entirely do for yourself. It's sort of like carrying a suitcase: you get to a point where you can't carry it any more, and they pick it up and carry it for you. When they hand it back to you, you have a new energy and can take it further than you ever could have on your own.

*(and this is where I knock wood so that some kind of editorial nightmare doesn't befall me after I've written this.)

Lessons for girls: trust your instincts

Historiann, Dr. Crazy, and Profacero have a series of excellent posts that Historiann has grouped under the title "Lessons for Girls."

I have one more: trust your instincts. By that, I mean judge people based on how they treat you, not based on hypothetical models of how people behave.

For example, as a feminist, I believe that women can and do help each other, can fight against injustices, can support each other against exploitation and harassment, and so on. But people are individuals, and individuals have their own flaws and their own agendas.

[I redacted the rest of this post because, upon reflection, it didn't fairly reflect the person I wrote about--sorry.]

Productivity: more good advice to ignore

This is really a placeholder post, put here as a reminder and a reproach to myself, from John Tierney's article in the New York Times:

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

“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.

“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”

Gallagher says in a follow-up answer (to "Sarah") that "Like dieting, getting control of your craving for novel information requires rationing and self-control."

Now, I know this. You know this. So does Paul Silvia, the author of How to Write a Lot, who recommends the same method.

So why is it so hard to follow through, except by actually turning off the internet connection? But Gallagher has inspired me. I'm going to pull my funds from the investment bank of Facebook and put it under the mattress known as Word.

On writing: morning five and evening five

I've been working on a piece of writing and have noticed a certain, shall we say, refrain at the beginning and end of days.

Morning.
1. How could it suck so badly when I worked so hard yesterday?
2. How did that sentence get in there?
3. What delusional state was I in to think that there was an organizational plan here?
4. I still have how much to go?
5. Well, that part isn't too bad.

Evening.
1. At least I have more words than when I started.
2. All right, the bad parts are better now.
3. I think I know where I want it to go tomorrow.
4. I still have how much to go?
5. I can do this. It's getting there.

Fine lines in the road to promotion

Recent articles in the Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed discuss the MLA's report on slower promotion rates to full professor for women. (The Chronicle's is behind the subscription wall, but you can get all the information at IHE.) Here's an excerpt from IHE:

Many women report being punished for performing the parts of their job in which they may take the most pride. One woman is quoted saying that her career had been “helped and hindered by my own propensity continually to propose new courses or substantially revise existing ones" and by "the unusual time/effort I put into grading written work by both undergraduate and graduate students.” Another woman surveyed said she hurt her career because of a "difficulty saying no."

The issue about saying no is really partly an issue of energy. In the case of BSS (whose most recent bullet I dodged, by the way) saying no, and knowing that you'll say no, still eats up time and emotional energy. I think part of the issue for female faculty is calibrating the kind of response to give. If you're too pleasant and accommodating, well, there are always other faculty out there looking for an Academic Handmaiden who'll take your pleasantness for a strong wish to be one. If you muster the energy to say no--and it does take more energy to say "no" than "yes"--sometimes it may come out in a more strident way than you intended, just because of the unintended vehemence of your answer. Then you look like someone who's "not a team player"--or worse.

Time spent in the office. My theory is that although admin would like people to be in the office a lot and students would like us to be there 24/7 in case they get a random impulse to drop by, women faculty who make it to full professor are in their offices less than those who seem to be stuck at associate. In short, the culture of a place may encourage being available (and police it through pointed remarks like "oh, are you on campus today?") but it rewards staying away and getting research done. Could mentoring help this paradoxical situation? I'm not sure how, since there's a double message here: "Be on campus and available" and "Stay away and write if you want to get promoted." Balancing the two is another of those fine lines.

In the comments section at IHE, one commenter ("Jen") mentions that she's on sabbatical but is going to go in for a meeting since there otherwise won't be a woman on the committee. Would I do this? Not on your life; if you're on sabbatical, you're gone. Committees are eternal, and the mills of academe grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small, so there's little chance that something major would transpire while you're away. Yet I wonder if women aren't more prone to the "my department can't get along without me, for who else would do X?" syndrome than men are.