Dame Eleanor Hull

Learning from/about writing groups

2012-01-29T21:04:00.002-06:00

In the past year, I've been in my RL group at school, Another Damned Notorious Writing Group, the Mayhew group, and the Winter Writing Workshop with the Dame. Here are some things I have observed, with the caveat that YMMV and different things work differently for different personality types:

1. Clear stopping and starting dates are helpful. Even if you don't take a long break, people seem to be more engaged and enthusiastic if they know they're signing on for 6, 10, 12 or 15 weeks, rather than committing to report weekly for an indeterminate amount of time.

2. The personality and engagement of the leader(s) are important. It's almost ridiculous how encouraging it feels to have a group leader comment positively or sympathetically on one's progress.

3. That's the drawback with being a leader: who nurtures the group leader? It's nice when people say thank you, of course, but that's not the same as being encouraged.

4. Having a weekly theme for people to comment on facilitates discussion, which means participants get to know each other a bit better, which makes their comments on other people's progress more meaningful, and so everything seems to go better.

5. Structure and trust are so important that I'm going to repeat the point, even though I've really made it already. In my RL group, where we actually read each other's work, discussion always begins with clarification questions from readers (if there's anything that just didn't make sense), followed by a "positive comment round" and then by discussion of questions that the writer posed to the group. Only after that can readers raise other issues.

6. I think it's useful for participants to commit to a single project for the duration of a . . . what shall we call it? A sprint? A workshop? It keeps the individual focused; it also helps other participants keep track, and therefore feel more invested, and therefore foster that sense of trust and community that is so encouraging.

7. As Contingent Cassandra suggested in the comments to last Monday's post, putting together the roll is the most time-consuming part of running a group. If I do this again, and I'm quite willing to do so, I think I will insist that comments come in a 4-paragraph format: 1. Last week's goal. 2. What was achieved toward that goal. 3. Comments/analysis of what worked or what went wrong. 4. Goal for next week. Then it's easy to cut and paste the next goal. This is also why ADM and Notorious imposed the you'll-be-dropped rule, I suspect. It's easy to look at a single week's comments, but less easy to go back through several previous weeks wondering who's in and who's out. Personally, I'd rather people commented every week even if the comment is "no progress."

8. But it's funny how much professors can be like students and just want to duck and hide when something is coming due that they're not done with.

9. Putting up posts on Fridays and allowing people to comment over the weekend seems to garner greater detail and involvement than posting on Monday. Friday posting encourages reflection backward, possibly more than planning forward, as well as allowing last-minute weekend work so that there is something to report. (I'm not sure why that doesn't take effect so you can report progress on Monday; maybe it's just a matter of what people will admit to doing.) I suspect that it works better for real-life groups to meet on Monday, to plan forward and to know that they've already done something about writing for the week, while for virtual groups, the weekend may be the best time to catch up on blogs and get down to work without distractions from e-mail and persons from Porlock.

Altogether I have been very happy with my writing group experiences. The accountability is helpful, the sense of having company in a predominantly solitary activity is great, and I have enjoyed getting to know some bloggers who were new to me. If there's interest, I'd be up for continuing to run a spring-semester writing group, although I think I'd make it more structured than the Winter Writing Workshop was, and I would also switch to a Friday posting schedule.

One other thing: despite what I said in #6, I'm not in a position to work on one single thing for the next 12 weeks or whatever it will be. I want to work on one thing at a time, and that thing will change depending on the nearest due date. So if I do keep running a group, either it'll be a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do situation, or we'll have to allow multiple projects for everyone, which will make it a bit harder to keep track of how things are going for any one person.

So, gentle readers, what do you think? Comments of your own about what you've learned? Shall we continue? Or is this a case of "thank you, but we think you've done enough"?

People don't read

2012-01-27T13:00:00.002-06:00

Dear people coming to the conference,

I'm glad you want to come. BUT:

Why do I have to keep re-sending the same information to people who can't be bothered to click on a link (okay, in one case you then have to click on another link from that one, but I'm not the one who designed that page; I wasn't even consulted about its design) to find out what they need to know?

All you're getting is the original e-mail with the link. I refuse to look all this stuff up and type it out just so you can not read your e-mail.

Huffily yours,
DEH

Some random links

2012-01-25T11:49:00.003-06:00

I found that blog (I love people who don't update their blog rolls. Seriously): http://professorme.blogspot.com/

A big thank you to the Grumpies for introducing the Hull family to Gunnerkrigg! Sir John stayed up till the small hours were no longer so very small, reading it. I'm still going through the archives very, very slowly because I don't want it ever to end.

Leonard Cohen is bringing out a new album. And he's releasing it on vinyl as well as on CD. I'm not actually such a geek as to get the vinyl version, but I love that there are such geeks and that Leonard is catering to them.

Someone left a link to Apartment Therapy in the comments to New Kid's decorating post. Cool stuff. Only I think you'd really have to get rid of a lot of stuff before their ideas would work, and that is precisely the hard part. I also read with great interest the post on how to pack lightly for a trip, as I always enjoy such advice, but, again as usual, I found that I actually pack lighter than the advisors do. That is, when I'm flying I pack that lightly. Driving to Kalamazoo? You'd think I was moving in.

Late papers?

2012-01-24T08:01:00.003-06:00

Are there any survivors of the Winter Writing Group who want to report on progress at this point? Leave a comment!

On my other online writing group, the Stupid Motivational Writing group run by Jonathan Mayhew (private blog, invitation only), someone asked a question about the MMP that forced me to articulate exactly what I'm doing and why. That is, not what I'm arguing but why the project needs all this non-writing activity. That was amazingly helpful. After explaining, I said, "I get a certain amount of other people encouraging me to do what I consider would be a crappy job ('you don't have to have the last word, just start the conversation'), which makes me doubt my approach. But basically I want to do what I think is right, good, and thorough, and it's less wearing in the long run to do the job right in the first place than it is to try to do the rush job and then feel unhappy about it."

Actually, and this is one of the things that was slowing me down, this is now the second place, since I've already given two conference papers on this material and thought at first that all I had to do was blend them together. But they were both based on a preliminary survey of the data; they were the fast-and-dirty version, long though I struggled over them.

I don't want to be a conversation-starting scholar. There are plenty of people who do and are; they are happy being talked about and cited, even when their work is getting corrected, even when it's being repeated as if it were Gospel although at some point some more obscure scholar who isn't part of the fan group has shown them to be wrong. That's neither my style nor my training. I don't imagine there will be a huge conversation about the MMP. I don't have the writing-personality to start one, and the skills required to do this kind of work are too rare to get a lot of followers. What I can do is take the time necessary to make my article solid, accurate, and reliable. So it's already taken more than two years. If I do it right, it will still be useful in 50.

And that's the kind of scholar I want to be.

Winter Writing Workshop report

2012-01-15T22:02:00.002-06:00

I am disappointed with my progress. Despite fairly steady work, including some 3000 new words, the MMP is not done. It's finicky work. I'm not satisfied with my original classification of the marginalia, done a couple of years ago, and I keep dithering about how many hands comment. For the last week or two, I've been working on ways to attack the problem: not even doing the analysis I think I need to do, but setting up materials so that I can do it. And I'm discouraged that I am still working on this project, because it has dragged on for a long time and I would like to be done with it.

What's more, I'm getting anxious about this spring's conference papers, and though I have carried on with the MMP, I'm not sure it's the best use of my time. Sir John thinks I should be working on the Unexpected Book, because it's a project that has got a lot of good feedback from the people who know about it, because it's a book and he recognizes the importance of books for literature scholars, and because it was going so well through the summer and fall. I think he has a point (several points); but I also feel a bit sick about the idea of putting the MMP aside yet again.

Multi-tasking is really not my thing. It took me most of my life to figure this out, because academia encourages juggling projects: you start by taking several different courses at a time in college; later, you teach however many different preps you have, plus try to keep a research program going, plus attending to your service commitments. And I have to admit that I keep getting attracted by new ideas and want to wander off to play with the new shiny thing instead of concentrating on finishing the old drab one. I want, have been trying, to stop doing that, to put new ideas on a list and try to finish the old ones, but I still feel tangled up in unfinished work.

At any rate, the discouragement is a bigger problem than the work itself. I put off revising a syllabus and putting together my documents for annual review so I could concentrate on the MMP, and now those things are past due and I regret not having just done them sooner.

Oh well. Time to dig in and do those things I ought to have done, and get back to working on a set schedule, because that was incredibly helpful. I'm going to spend till the end of January fussing with the MMP to see if I can either get it done or at least leave it with a clear sense of what will have to be done when I come back to it.

Tell me something good! How are you doing with your writing projects? Feel free to post your achievements and goals even if you're not on the list here.

Another Damned Medievalist: I am madly trying to get my classes together. And I have to write that book review.

Contingent Cassandra: the goal for the week is to complete a full, condensed draft of the article-in-revision, and also to complete some related correspondence (e.g. permissions letters). I think I'll also have time for one session with the article-in-progress this week, just to stay acquainted.

Elizabeth Anne Mitchell: I think my goal this spring semester is to triage the dissertation: contact my readers, send them some chapters. Oh, and move mid-semester.

Good Enough Woman: By next Monday, I hope to have the 12 pages I promised.

Ink: If I can make it through this new chapter before Monday, I will have met my goals for break. . . .I have planned for this term to keep one scheduled block a week for this project.

Lost in Academe: the goal is 15-60 minutes of writing 4-5 times a week.

Matilda: Goal for next week: finishing the half of the rest of the encyclopaedia work; having at least two hours a day for my own research; writing at least 15 minutes a day.

Naked Philologist: still FINISH THE SECTION. I'm also going to try my hardest to do readings in the mornings and write in the afternoon.

Rented Life: I also added several more pages of notes to my journal so I'm in a bit of a loop. Type notes, cross of to-do list, write more notes, need to type said notes, it's back on list.

Sapience: I don't expect to be done by next week, but I might be close.

Sitzfleisch: My goal: again, to meet my 14.5 hours. With the long holiday weekend, I will have even more time, and I plan to have a complete draft of my proposal letter and my introduction done by next Tuesday evening.

Trapped in Canadia: This week's goal - 500 words and writing for one hour a day

Zcat abroad: write at least 500 words a day.

In the eye of the beholder

2012-01-15T12:21:00.003-06:00

Comrade Physioprof opines, in the comments to my last, that I have "an illness."

Oh, yes, I do, but it's not what he thinks.

Organizing one's books in LC order is a minor eccentricity for an English professor (and visit the Little Professor's blog, say here, for an example of someone who has more books than I do); among librarians, I'm sure it's considered a professional hazard at worst, and probably a sign that you really love your job.

However, staying up three hours past bedtime to pore over snippets of excruciatingly illegible secretary hand (see here for an example) in an effort to decide whether any of them were written by the same chap who signed his name on a flyleaf, and if so how many, and whether the marginalia with very similar letter forms but with a different slant should be assigned to the same chap or assumed to be from a different writer . . . that's sick.

I can grant that, but I still think people with food blogs are weird.

Re-organized

2012-01-13T17:41:00.005-06:00

The Great Book Re-Shelving of 2012 is . . . well, okay, maybe not done-done, but I have declared victory!

The sorting is rough. I did say that. I figure fine-tuning will make a good activity in ten-minute grading breaks. But at least all the right letters are together, and I discovered that some things I had with PRs are really DAs (the book of my best friend, who is not a historian, is a DA—who knew?), and others are BJ or BV, and oh man do I have a lot of HQs, more than I realized. It's a good thing that I deliberately left gaps as I worked, because I wound up filling them as I worked around to Z. There was almost a gap between HQ and PA, and then I discovered the art history books, which of course were with the Zs (because my interest in art history is only in manuscripts, so they are books about books), so now that gap is filled in with Ns.

Those books I wanted to leave out-of-place are now where the Library of Congress dictates that they should be, partly because I found another S and more bibliographies to keep them company, and mostly because it dawned on me that whatever the state of my own personal booklist (often somewhat in arrears) once the books are in LC order I have only to get online and check with a real library to figure out where they ought to be.

I should feel accomplished, I suppose. But I feel tired and stuffy (dust allergy), and still dissatisfied—yes, even though my desk top is mostly clear and there is now a second surface I can use for grading, and although all my work books are now in orderly ranks and all clean. And even though my admiration for Squadratomagico has grown by leaps and bounds and even though my dread of moving has increased by an order of magnitude.

It doesn't seem like enough.

I could clean the closet. I'd like to do that. Then there might be space in there for some odds and ends. I could go through boxes of papers and see if there's more stuff I could get rid of there. I could buy matching shoeboxes to store the stuff that's now on the tops of the bookcases, in actual cardboard shoeboxes; at least then all the boxes on the tops of the shelves would match. I could have all my books covered in matching bindings, as in a nineteenth-century gentleman's library.

OK, maybe the OCD is a little out of control.

(But seriously, wouldn't matching bindings be awesome?)

I suspect that the real problem is anxiety about classes starting, which triggers a series of thoughts about time passing, the state of the MMP in particular and my research in general (not to mention other work), getting older, mortality, and . . . you know what? A snowy Friday evening in January is not a good time, in the life of a person with SAD, to contemplate such thoughts. I hope to give you a post later this weekend on things to do and the state of various projects in a more rational vein than I'm going to be able to manage just now. I'd be better off going to the gym, if only to sit in the steam room getting hot and imagining that I'm in the tropics.

Insomniac nerd

2012-01-12T00:42:00.002-06:00

I did better for a couple of nights, but tonight I'm still up after going out to dinner with friends and drinking more than is good for sleep. This is at least "good" insomnia; eventually I will be ready for bed.

As an aside, I was out with a Scot and a speaker of the Queen's English (as a second language), and off at another table directly in my line of sight was a woman who looked remarkably like Helen Cooper (at least I thought so; did I mention the drinking?), so I kept wondering where the hell I was and how I had been transported there.

But anyway! So you remember that bookcase-cleaning project. Bookcase #3 is the one that was driving me craziest, because of things stuffed in on top of the shelved books, and assorted non-book objects on the shelves to keep them away from Basement Cat's paws when he was a kitten. I really wanted to get it sorted before classes start. So, since I'm not yet done with my syllabus, I began work on that today, and have been continuing after dinner tonight.

Now, on the first two bookcases I did not do a lot of rearranging books. In the first place, those two are mainly "reference" books (the 1913 Britannica, for example; foreign language dictionaries; anthologies), and while of course those too have Library of Congress numbers, I don't feel urgently that I must range those books by LC number. In the second place, the books on those two cases really need to be organized by size as much as anything else, because of space limitations. So I managed to get things better grouped by subject, while still more or less in the configuration in which I'm used to seeing them, and called it a day.

But Bookcase #3 (I wish there were room for busts of Roman emperors on the tops; maybe I should just post photos of my grad school professors instead*), bookcase #3 starts what I think of as my real library. That is, the books that I have grouped by subject, but of which there are now enough that I have trouble remembering what's there. So (syllabus not being done yet, you recall) this seemed like the perfect time—since I was taking everything off the shelves to clean anyway—to get them sorted into LC order. Roughly! They are only ordered by letters, at this point. Fine-tuning will wait for some other OCD attack. I've done three and a third shelves: BR, BV, BX (not many of these); CB; D, DA (lots of these), DC; HN, HQ (quite a lot of these, too), HV.

But there are three books I want to have in with the DAs because I'm used to seeing them there, and because I don't have that many other books they should go with: SK, U, Z. Well, actually, I have a fair number of Zs, but they're usually not bibliographies in the sense that this one is. It's basically a bibliography of DAs. So these are staying where I expect to find them. They're off at the end of the section, though. I want them there. Really, I do. Only it bothers me a bit, now that I know their real LC identities, that they're hanging out with the DAs.

This is why I want to stick photographs on the shelves and give my books shelfmarks like Johnson A.15. Except I don't really, because a large part of the point of having my books in LC order is so I can find them in the same way I find them in the library—especially when I get round to the PRs, my biggest section (and the new contender for messiest case).

Insomniac, OCD, deranged, procrastinatory nerd. I should have been tidying the syllabus and creating my annual review documents. But you would not believe how satisfying it is to have the bookshelves in better order. (You really wouldn't believe it if you saw my kitchen: it does not suggest an orderly person running it.)

As soon as I find a way to keep Basement Cat from running off with my earrings, I'll be set.

*This is an English-medievalist-nerd joke. If you are not among our numbers, look up Robert Cotton's library.

Creative U-Turns

2012-01-09T00:01:00.000-06:00

This is the next-to-last "official" WWW post. My classes start next week, and I intend to keep working hard on writing in the first week of classes. Then I'll do a couple of "late paper" posts on the last two Mondays in January, so we can see who is doing mop-up operations on winter-break projects even after classes get underway.

The beginning of last week went well, for me, and then an insomniac period set in: not the "good" insomnia in which it's hard to get to sleep but then I can sleep a normal amount, or where I wake up in the middle of the night and get up to read for awhile. No, it's the really nasty type, in which I sleep lightly, rousing frequently, and don't get into deep, refreshing sleep. I may be sleeping, but I wake up almost as tired as when I went to bed.

So in the last few days, instead of writing (outlining) the MMP or working on a syllabus, I have been cleaning my study. Two floor-to-ceiling bookcases have been emptied, dusted, and re-filled; a small stack of books will be given away; 4 inches or so of photocopies are set to become scratch paper; four shoeboxes of odds and ends have been reduced to three. This isn't a serious attempt to purge, just an effort to be tidier, but the experience of having every item on those shelves in my hands makes me realize I can definitely get rid of some stuff.

It also reacquaints me with materials for projects that, one way or another, haven't come to fruition. The roads not taken, the genuine dead-ends, and the creative U-turns. The phrase is Julia Cameron's, referring to self-sabotage that keeps you from finishing a project: you get scared, or you get cocky and try to do too much and then get scared. "Creative U-turns are always born from fear—fear of success or fear of failure. It doesn't really matter which," she writes. But recognizing them is hard, and painful; not only that, it has the potential to undermine progress elsewhere.

The MMP has moved along in the last few weeks, but it's not done. I'll start teaching soon. I have to finish prepping for spring courses, do some committee work and other service tasks, and then there will be grading and the two conference papers I have to give this spring, and . . this . . . and . . . that . . . . The list starts to look very threatening, and between insomnia and the concrete evidence of past failures-to-complete, I begin to wonder if I will ever finish it.

But, Julia says, you have to keep moving forward and coax yourself along. I have not dropped this project. I'm feeling skittish about it, but a lot of that is the fatigue talking. Once I get back to sleeping properly, the writing will go better. Some parts of the outlining can be done fairly mechanically, as can another task associated with analysis of one part of the project. I can keep working on those things even if I'm a bit brain-dead.

Also, now that I've started, I really want to work my way through the other five bookcases.

I'm going to attempt to call roll, but if I've left you out, feel free to comment anyway, and blame the omission on my sad brain-state. I'm not sure who's still hanging around for the Writing Workshop, and I've lost track of some people's goals, but anyway, there is a list, and here are some questions to think about:

Where are you at with your goals? Are you back to teaching, or do you still have some class-free time to work? Do you need to triage your goals, or re-set for the spring semester/winter quarter? Are there fears that need to be faced? Are you tempted to sabotage yourself in some way? How can you protect yourself?

Another Damned Medievalist:

Contingent Cassandra: fully-fleshed-out outline.

Digger:

Elizabeth Anne Mitchell:

Good Enough Woman: read another chapter from the philosophy text and 30 more pages of primary text, and fill three handwritten pages in my notebook.

Ink: binge-write.

Lost in Academe:

Luo Lin:

Matilda: two hours for my work every day; finish the first part of my encyclopaedia work

Naked Philologist: Check-in/brainstorm with supervisor; finish the section I've been slogging away at; make a reading list for filling in gaps in said section.

nicoleandmaggie: do actual work.

Profacero:

Rented Life: type 29 pages of notes.

Sapience: revisions.

Sisyphus: clean up the lit review footnotes; polish the thesis a bit more; deal with Dr. Does Everything's comments.

Sitzfleisch: stick to the schedule, which includes 14.5 hours of writing.

Theologoumenathon:

Trapped in Canadia:

WTG Homesteader: one page per working day.

Writing Triathlete: look through edition materials and size up where I am with the project so I can figure out the next step; write two article abstracts.

Zcat abroad:

Clear space

2012-01-07T11:03:00.002-06:00

It's a sunny Saturday. Yesterday I cleared off my desk, and did other straightening up around my study. I'd like to do more, now that I have started, but it was a good start, and I am inspired by the sight of all this clear space on which I could spread out bits of the MMP.

Only, as it is Saturday, I will be going out to breakfast with Sir John, where we will spend some time with the papers, say hi to the other regulars, and then discover it is much later in the day than we wish it were.

If I were single, I might just get down to work. On the other hand, if I were single, I might feel that I had all day and procrastinate, or I might be feeling depressed because I hadn't had a date in years.

So I'm going out, but in the meantime, welcome to any new readers who have wandered over from Grumpy Rumblings, and if y'all need something to discuss until the next installment of the WWW meets, consider this: how do the people (or critters) you live with affect your work/writing habits?

Transitions

2012-01-02T00:01:00.000-06:00

Most people think of the new year as a beginning, but for northern-hemisphere academics it's the middle of the year, which really begins in September (Zcat, of course, gets to have all the new beginnings at once). Similarly, this first meeting of the Winter Writing Workshop in 2012 is also our mid-point, or at least my mid-point, though for some of you it's the point at which you can finally get down to something, and for others, you're about to be back in the classroom.

My plan to work 9-1 last week worked out very well, except on Friday, when the Shakespearean Heroine had an early vet appointment that couldn't be switched around; after that, I didn't settle into a proper work routine, but I did read a whole Renaissance play that had to be read, so that was something. As for writing, my focused free-writing on topics I hope will lead to a good, big-picture framework for the MMP is up to about 3500 words. I really need to produce an outline. I have plenty of words, but they need to be in the right order. I also need to re-analyze some of my manuscript data, and to do this, at least to do it really comfortably, I'd like to acquire a larger monitor instead of squinting at my laptop. So, goals for this week: outline, continue scheduled routine, invest in a monitor, outline, fiddle with data. Outline. And try to do some other work, like write up the syllabus for my spring classes, without letting that distract me from outlining the MMP.

Last week, Contingent Cassandra wrote, "I'm not as good as I need to be at switching from writing and research early in the morning (6/7-9 a.m.) to other work for the rest of the morning (9-12/1)." This sort of transition is hard for me, too, especially if I'm not going elsewhere (say, to campus) to do whatever the next thing is. Once I get settled in with a task, I like to keep at it. It can help to move around, to break the attachment to the desk and the particular task: walk around the block, or just make a cup of tea. But really, if you have the discipline to get up and do either of those things, then you don't have a big problem with transitions.

So far, I haven't worried too much about this. On some days, I set a timer for 25-minute stretches, and if I feel like continuing rather than taking a break, I just re-set it at once. Other days, I forget about the timer and submerge myself in work till I have to come up for air. If I feel stuck on a task, I look at my list (my hideously long list) of things that need to get done and just do something, anything, because they all need to get done so anything I feel like is fine.

But with two weeks till classes start, I feel like I should get a bit more methodical, and that is going to mean more attention to breaks and transitions, to doing a certain amount on one thing and then moving to another. So that's the topic for the week: how are you with shifting focus? If it's easy, why is that, and what do you do that other people might copy? If it's hard, what have you tried, and how has that worked for you?

And, of course, what are your writing goals for this week?

What the hell: celebrate!

2011-12-31T21:40:00.002-06:00

Looking at some other blogs tonight, it seems that 2011 is getting mixed reviews. I don't have any special attitude toward it: certainly not one of my worst years, but it doesn't stand out particularly either. It was a year. I've had almost 50 of them. At this point, I'm happy just to be here and healthy.

But hey, it's New Year's Eve, and one of my basic principles is that Any Excuse Is A Good Excuse for champagne. Although we're staying in tonight (working crossword puzzles, watching some B5, the usual sort of quiet happy Hull evening) and will quite likely be in bed before midnight, we toasted the New Year as it came into London and I'm still slightly tipsy. Love the lovely champers.

So happy New Year to both regular readers and anyone who just stops by! I hope 2012 brings you good things, or at least Sucks Less (hat tip to What Now). Hope for the future is always worth celebrating. Enjoy the real or virtual bubbly, and come back soon for the next WWW post.

(In)flexibility

2011-12-29T13:52:00.002-06:00

An interesting discussion is going on towards the end of the comments to my last post, about whether academic schedules are flexible, how flexible one should be in scheduling oneself outside of what one's college requires ("mindful inflexibility," in Sitzfleisch's marvelous phrase, is one possibility), and similar topics, so let's haul it out into a post of its own.

Here are my thoughts, probably rather jumbled:

Academic schedules are in some ways completely inflexible. When you're scheduled to teach a class, you have to show up. Sure, it's possible to get a sub every now and again, or show a movie, but at the college level, who is going to substitute? A professor, by definition, is the ranking expert on a topic in a department. In larger departments, you may actually have three or four people who cover the Renaissance and can substitute for each other (even if one really specializes in religious prose, s/he can probably manage a Shakespeare course for one day), and in smaller departments, you may have a larger proportion of generalists, but by and large, if you're teaching in your area, then it's you who needs to show up, and if you don't, you'd better be pretty damned sick or pretty damned well required to be elsewhere. (Graduate students may be another option to cover a course, but again, you have to both be in a department that teaches grads and have a grad who knows enough to teach a class on the scheduled topic.)

Thus, everything else in your life works around your course schedule. You don't take half a sick day to go to the dentist unless you're in agony. If you're scheduled to teach at 8:00 a.m. or 7:00 p.m. or whatever other time, you have to be there. Sometimes, as in my first semester in my job, you're scheduled for 6-9 one evening followed by 9-10 the next morning, which can be rough, as Dr. Crazy recently attested. Of course there are people outside of academia who do night work, or work rotating shifts, as nurses and firefighters, for example, sometimes have to. But mostly people with office jobs work something like 9-5, maybe 8-6 or some other minor variation.

There are some schools that require so many office hours that you're going to be on campus effectively 9-5, M-F. There are some departments with control-freak chairs who insist that their faculty be on campus 9-5, M-F (I'm told that there was one such in LRU's English department, before my time; the night owls were profoundly relieved when he stepped down). If you're in the sciences, then you may need to be in the lab for long and regular hours.

But in the humanities, you don't need a lab or special equipment. You really just need books, paper, and something to write with; or maybe you need a computer, but we (academics) nearly all have our own personal computers and/or laptops and/or tablet computers, these days. And that means we can work anywhere, anytime.

Therein lie both problems and opportunities. If people are always dropping into your office to shoot the breeze when you're trying to grade or do research, then of course you want to go to the library, the coffeeshop, or your home office so you can get something done. If you're a night owl then you want to work noon to nine, or even six p.m. to three a.m.; if you're a lark, you may long for a five a.m. to one p.m. schedule and be totally done in by those night classes. If (like me) you dislike shopping in crowds, then you want to get your errands done early when the stores are quiet, even though that ruins a morning's work time, because shopping on a busy Saturday afternoon is such a nerve-shattering experience. And so there you are working on Saturday afternoon because you need to make up for the morning you spent on important Life Maintenance tasks.

I have observed that people who spent two-three years in the office world, working 9-5 (or similar) really are better at organizing their time and sticking to schedules than a lot of the career-academic types. Shorter periods don't tend to be so instructive. In the year I took between undergrad and grad school, I did have a 9-5 job. I also had two other part-time jobs, one Tuesday evening and Saturday morning, and one that was MWTh evenings and sometimes weekend afternoons, and on my lunch breaks and on the bus I studied Latin. After that, my grad school schedule was a breeze.

So if you're an organized academic, then you work out your mindfully inflexible plan: Monday 7-9, 1-7; Tuesday 7-8, 10-5; Wednesday 7-8, 1-10; Thursday 1-5; whatever it may happen to be that gets you to your classes, your meetings, your research time, your grading time, your dentist appointment, your grocery shopping, and your exercise time. (What exercise time? some of you say. Well, some of us would be incapable of work if we didn't work out, so we find it. Here again, there can be flexibility: I've read a lot of academic books and articles on the elliptical trainer or exercise bike, though the treadmill doesn't work so well for reading and the pool is right out.)

If you're not so organized, or if life circumstances conspire to ruin your plan, then there you are, working at midnight on Saturday to make whatever deadline it is this time.

So, go ahead: are you flexible, inflexible, rolling with the punches, powering through on caffeine, forced by health considerations to look after yourself, sandwiched between your small children and your aged parents so that you get your work done in doctors' waiting rooms and on planes, early-career working 80 hours a week to get your prep and research done, late-career and able to say No and focus on your own priorities? What do you do, what would you like to do, what do you observe your colleagues doing, what advice would you give others?

Big changes or small ones?

2011-12-26T00:01:00.000-06:00

Time for another Monday check-in and goal-setting. I'm not going to call roll; we'll take care of attendance via in-class writing. If you're here, leave a comment.

The usual advice about making changes in one's life is to start small and be specific. Rather than saying "get healthy" or "lose 50 pounds," you're supposed to to say "I will walk for 10 minutes a day" or "when I want a cookie, I will eat a piece of fruit first." Small changes add up, and little shifts like more exercise and more fruit can lead to larger lifestyle differences. Some of you are thinking along these lines, like Z's resolve to work 25 minutes a day for three days.

I have myself found that these small changes can be helpful and long-lasting. That said, sometimes it's more helpful to make one single big decision rather than trying to work out a lot of small stuff. For instance, if you're capable of quitting something cold turkey, well, that's a decision made that you never have to revisit. You'll never again smoke a cigarette, have a drink, eat meat, whatever. When you're tempted, you say you've made that decision, it's not negotiable, you're not revisiting it.

This does not work for everyone, or in all circumstances.

Possibly it's not going to work for me this time, either, but I'm going to give it a shot this week. This is my big change: I'm going to work from 9-1, Monday to Friday. Everything else has to get done before or after that. Exercise, cat wrangling, phone calls, blogs, paying bills, novel reading, sorting closets, meals, shopping, cooking, if it's not work, it has to happen before 9:00 a.m. or after 1:00 p.m. What's more, I'm not going to do work outside of those four hours, either (that's the part that really freaks me out, actually). Afternoons and evenings will go to fun stuff or at least life-maintenance stuff.

I'm tired of trying to work out the optimum schedule, of trying to figure out whether, when I get up, I should first write, go for a walk, do yoga, feed cats, or hit the gym. Since fall classes ended, what happens first generally depends on what time I wake up and whether or not it's sunny. Clearly I'm capable of sticking to a schedule when I have to, because I always show up on time for my classes. I have written before about enjoying the flexibility of academic life, but I think I should give inflexibility a chance, for once. Nine-to-one, some translation, the MMP, some class planning, some other academic work, and then I'm done. We'll see how it goes for a week.

So what are you going to do this week? Make a small change? Try a bigger one? Keep doing something that has been working? Sometimes it's good to stick to what works, and sometimes it's good just to change things up so you don't get stale.

Weak, grouchy, grinchy, whiny SAD post

2011-12-22T15:16:00.003-06:00

I'm not sure what sort of strength it is to suffer from seasonal affective disorder. Maybe the other side is the energy I have from April to October, or that I would be a superhero if I could just live in the right climate. But at the moment, that last post is sitting here mocking me, so I'm going to try to exorcise the grumps with a new entry.

The good news: the Solstice has passed. Tomorrow will give us five whole seconds more daylight than today. But it is getting better. For the next six months, every day will be lighter (though it will take 6-8 weeks to get out to where the difference is really worthwhile, and three months till I will shift gears into summer-light mode).

Also good: in a few days, I will be able to go out without hearing trite Christmas music everywhere. Tomorrow is one bit of family festivity (preceded by the dentist, oh joy), and the 24th is another (preceded by baking for it); then on the 25th we can go to a movie and veg out and then the horror will be over for this year.

The bad: now it's winter. And we have grey, dank, drizzly weather. I want sun. I'd take snow over this dreary version of winter. Snow is bright. And Sir John loves it, so at least one of us would be happy and one would be several degrees less wretched.

Time passes. The holidays will pass, the weather will pass, the winter will pass. Soon enough, I'll have to show up for classes and act like I'm in my right mind, which will help; and before we know it, spring break will arrive and then it will be conference season.

It's just these short days that seem so long. So dreary, and so pointless. Even with my full-spectrum light, and exercise outdoors early in the day, and more exercise, and baking and so on. Maybe I should just start going to Morocco by myself.

Our strengths are our weaknesses

2011-12-19T00:01:00.001-06:00

I believe this is true in all areas of life. The key is to find a way to make your weaknesses serve you. Jonathan Mayhew has a number of posts about taking inventory, establishing your scholarly base, and so on; if you’re not familiar with the concept, maybe you’d like to check out some of his ideas this week, and think about what your strengths and weaknesses as a writer are.

One of my strengths is an ability to write quickly. One of my weaknesses is trouble organizing an argument, or even coming up with an argument in the first place. These may not be exactly the two sides of the same coin, but they are related: I can easily produce a lot of verbiage that doesn’t really go anywhere, although it sounds plausible if I run it by you quickly, as in a conference paper. But coming up with an argument (beyond, “Wow, this is cool!”) and getting it organized, this is hard, slow work for me (not least because I don’t always know a good argument when I have one).

During this intersession, then, I’m trying to harness the strength to make up for the weakness. What the MMP really needs is a strong framework to support all its details: an overview of the fields where this research matters, and a clear statement of how the MMP contributes to these fields. I made a list of the topics the MMP might contribute to, and I’m using the writing-quickly strength to produce around 500 words on each of the topics. Sometimes it turns out that I have more ideas than I thought I did; sometimes I just come up with questions that I can’t answer without doing more research. But if I can identify the questions sooner rather than later, that’s a good thing.

So: can you use the idea of making your strengths serve your weaknesses, or turning a weakness into a strength?

Roll call, based on the latest info I have from you all:

ADM: finish grading, then get Rewrite.

Contingent Cassandra: 3 or so short writing sessions per week.

DEH: Last week’s goals were to work 2 hours a day and do three 500-word directed free-writing sessions.
Achieved: work was intermittent because of illness, but I have done three 500-word directed freewriting sessions (actually 545, 624, and 604 words). They were supposed to be on particular topics, but kept drifting back to my central questions, What can we tell? and Why do we care? I’ve come up with new questions, whose answers (when I find them) may help with the central questions.
New goals: one library day (check out books, consult reference works), another day or half-day if possible before Wednesday (then the library will be closed till January). Read and take notes on at least 3 books/articles. Start working on an outline, using the format that worked for the sections-turned-chapters of the Unexpected Book.

Digger: finish schoolwork by 20 Dec. Then, finish the Why Wheels chapter.

EAM: lit review.

GEW: I'd like to read 30 pages of primary text and and freewrite for 15 minutes at least four times during the rest of the week. In addition, I will decide which texts to take with me on my trip (space is limited!).

Highly Eccentric: at least 1/2 a day every day to finish a chapter by 3 Jan.

Ink: finish grading. Then revise previous novel chapters, write two new chapters, put in two hours a day.

Luo Lin: make plan.

Matilda: finish encyclopedia entries, 2 hours a day.

nicoleandmaggie: finish a draft.

Profacero: at least 25 minutes of work by Monday night.

rented life: finish grading. [For 2-week break: 44 hand-written pages (small journal sized pages) that need to be typed up and then I need to compile it with what I already have written and see where my (fiction) project is going]

Sapience: finish re-reading my primary texts (14 novels total, 10 to go) and outline the rest of my argument.

Sisyphus: find/collect everything I need for the article and pack it. And refresh my article to-do list.

Sitzfleisch: complete academic book proposal due in January.

Theologoumenathon: lit review for my next project.

Trapped in Canadia: read and review one book and finish the book chapter about my mob. My goal is to write two hours a day, but three hours would make me super happy.

Waytogohomesteader: write a page a week.

Zcat: goal for week one is to write 500 words a day.

If you're writing over break . . .

2011-12-16T11:17:00.003-06:00

and if you were starting with the Winter Writing Workshop this week, then it's Friday already, and that means that in 3 days we'll be doing the next week's check-in.

If you're still grading, GOOD LUCK! Hang in there! It will get done, the students will go away, time to breathe and write and exercise and eat holiday cookies is right around the corner.

Now, I've been sick all week, and all I've done so far in the way of work is a bunch of conference-related stuff. Well, and about 600 words of notes on a book, plus reading some articles I didn't take notes on and probably should have. But I haven't done any actual MMP-writing, not even the directed free-writing I assigned myself, so I'm thinking that it's time to start.

Right.

Now.

Because though I'm still not all well, at the moment I can breathe, and my eyes don't burn, and so I am going to do a bit of writing. So I'll have something to report on Monday.

And so I am posting this not only for my own accountability, but to point out to anyone else in the WWW who might be in the same position that we still have a few days (and anyone who's buckled down and got way ahead can gloat a little bit—yeah, go ahead, you know you want to).

What we teach when we teach Chaucer

2011-12-15T17:17:00.003-06:00

"Chaucer" to most people means the Canterbury Tales. But should it? Over the years, I think I've taught every Chaucerian work in the canon, except for "A Treatise on the Astrolabe" and "Anelida and Arcite," at least once, and yes, I do include the Melibee in that list. For graduate classes, the syllabus has varied more widely than for the undergrads—even though many grads have not had any undergrad Chaucer, or even any undergrad medieval lit, so there is an argument for giving them a "standard" Chaucer, too.

If there is such a thing as a "typical" undergraduate Chaucer course in my repertory, it tends to include several of the Canterbury Tales plus one of the less famous texts, usually either Troilus and Criseyde or the Book of the Duchess. Lately I've just been doing Canterbury Tales and short lyrics.

My recent trawl through other people's syllabi suggests a fairly even division between CT-only courses and CT-plus-Troilus courses. It has been a few years since I last taught Troilus, and I want to bring it back. In fact, I want to make it the main focus of the class, because I think then I could structure the course in a way similar to the way I structure my Arthurian class, which usually goes much more smoothly than the Chaucer classes: begin with a modern translation of an early source (Latin or OF), and only deal with Middle English after the broad outlines of the plot have been digested. This also allows me to introduce close reading through analyzing different translations of a single Latin sentence, along with a representation of that sentence accompanied with a super-literal translation plus parsing; after that, the whole idea of the close reading goes a little better.

But since people seem to think "Chaucer = Canterbury Tales," I suppose I had better include some of them. Let's put it this way: what tales would you be absolutely shocked to learn that an English major didn't know? Channel your inner old fart, and comment.

Or, if you're not amused by fart jokes (some Chaucerian you are, in that case), which tales "go" best with TC? (Your litel tragedie, does it go? Bet it does, bet it does!)

Time is not infinitely elastic

2011-12-12T00:01:00.004-06:00

Welcome to the Winter Writing Workshop! Most of you have a clear goal that sounds reachable in 4-6 weeks’ steady work. Some of you may still be doing triage: what absolutely has to be done, now? How much distraction will there be from holiday shopping and parties, or from job market angst and conference-going? How much time do we need for getting back to a good exercise routine, or for excavating the laundry pile, or any other necessary real-life activities?

So let me urge you to Pick One. We all have lists. Give yours the hairy eyeball.

But first, think about your time. How many weeks do you actually have? Where will you be during that time? How much time must you spend on non-work activities? How understanding is your family about your need to work during “vacation”? Winter breaks can be hard to work in, because they’re short, they involve holiday stress, they come at what for most of us is a cold, dark, depressing time of year (Zcat, can all of us with SAD come and visit you down under?), and our libraries and universities may close to save money during at least part of them.

So, can you schedule two hours a day in a coffee shop? Can you put in four hours a day at home? Do you reliably have one hour in the evening, and other less predictable time here and there? Add up that time first; then look at your list again, and figure out which item you can do in that amount of time.

Consider, as well, your longer-term goals and term-time work habits. Will you be better served by getting an ugly rough draft of something that is now only notes, so you can revise it when you go back to teaching? Or would you prefer to get something almost-ready revised and out the door before you go back?

Make a plan, and post a comment about it. And again, welcome. Turn on your broad-spectrum lamps, crank up the space heaters, pour yourself a drink and stick a little paper umbrella in it, and we’ll all pretend we’re writing around the pool at some tropical resort. (If you actually like winter, carry on, but don’t tell me about it.)

My goal is to read/write at least 2 hours a day. Four will be ideal. But if I do two, that's enough. Because, you know, the gym, the excavation, and so on. I'd like to turn this into a game, and see how many days and weeks I can get up to four.

The current participants:

Another Damned Medievalist (hereafter ADM): finish revisions

Contingent Cassandra: finish article

Digger: finish project

Good Enough Woman (hereafter GEW): not come to a standstill

Elizabeth Anne Mitchell (hereafter EAM): lit review

Highly Eccentric (Naked Philologist): either atoning for sins or committing more; I can’t tell.

Ink: fiction?

Matilda: finish draft of paper

nicoleandmaggie: finish draft?

Sapience: article due 15 Jan.

Sisyphus: finish article

Theologoumenathon: hang onto groove

Trapped in Canadia: finish book chapter

Zcat: Finish article

Updated to add:
Luo Lin: finish article

Profacero: resubmit one article (that might be two combined, or two separate)

Vocabulary

2011-12-11T20:15:00.002-06:00

I keep saying that I think my students' trouble with ME is not so much ME as small vocabularies in PDE. I'm still working my way through the last batch of translations on the final exam (while wiping my nose, and sneezing, and feeling generally yucky), and I started making a list of perfectly good words that more than one person is having trouble recognizing:

adversity, arse, assent, aught, churl, deem, ere, grisly, haunch, privily, proffer, suffer (in the sense of "allow"), sunder, twain, villainy.

"Arse" keeps coming out as "ears." It's not like we didn't talk about what happens in the Miller's Tale.

Then there are a couple of phrases that I think of as somewhat archaic, but still, I would have expected them to be recognizable to English majors: "must needs" and "plight troth."

I'm thinking next year's exam will have fewer chunks to translate and a very strong insistence on producing grammatically correct sentences that make sense in PDE.

Weekend bullets

2011-12-10T21:24:00.002-06:00

Sir John has had a cold for several days. I think I'm finally getting it. So I'm staying up late to try to finish grading before I feel awful.
Of course I should have finished already.
Why, with all the "teaching to the test" that presumably happens in schools these days, can my students not manage to read and follow simple instructions?
Grading the outlines of essays (on exams) goes much faster than grading translations.
I can't believe I made it through the whole semester without getting sick; but then, why now? Why could I not just avoid illness altogether?
I would much rather be working on the MMP, and this morning I procrastinated for awhile by staring at handwriting snippets trying to decide if one A resembled another. Or not.
On a related handwriting question, I found a reference to an opinion of Ian Doyle's that was . . . wrong. Not in a major way, but he left out a perfectly legible* letter. My world reeled.
*Perfectly legible if you read English secretary hands.
Every time I look at an example of secretary, I panic and think all my skills have fled, or maybe I was deluding myself all along. It takes several minutes to get my eye in and start seeing the shapes again.
Really I should be thinking big-picture thoughts about the MMP, not tiny-detail thoughts. Have I mentioned that I'm nearsighted?
Must finish grading translations. Then if I'm sick tomorrow I can spend days lying on the couch watching B5 DVDs and drinking toddies, guilt-free.

Winter Writing Workshop with the Dame

2011-12-08T11:13:00.002-06:00

In the last ADNWG meeting of the fall term, I proposed a six-week winter intersession group for those of us who are trying to get some writing done over the holidays.

I'm in it because, as long-term readers know, I hate cold, winter, and the December holidays, and since I can't spend the entire month in Morocco or Malaysia, I'm going to distract myself this year with the Macedonian Marginalia Project, an article I had hoped to finish over a year ago.

It seemed so simple when I started; but this week when I was looking up call numbers for books I need to check out for the MMP, in addition to my usual DA, PR and Z suspects, we also have DF, LC, and Q. This probably says something about the complexity of what I'm trying to do.

So, anyway, this post is the invitation, advance warning, whatever you want to call it. Starting Monday, 12 December, when my grades have to be in, I'm going to post weekly goals and progress reports for myself. LRU starts up again the day after MLK Day, so January 16 will be the official end of the intersession. However, I expect I'll still be tinkering (how I hope it's only tinkering) till the end of January, so there will be a couple more "unofficial" Monday posts where late papers can trickle in.

I know we're not all on the same schedule; some of you may still be teaching. So this workshop will be less structured than ADNWG. You can start late and finish late, or drop in for three weeks and then drop out again.

If you're interested in taking part in the Winter Writing Workshop, please leave a comment, and I'll post the starting list of participants and goals on Monday.

Guiding independent research

2011-12-05T22:37:00.002-06:00

This is really a question. I've had a couple of independent studies/capstone projects to supervise this fall, and will have a couple more in the spring. It has occurred to me that I would like to assign a book that would help guide students through the research process. The books I'm most familiar with focus more on writing literary essays; I'd like something geared to the humanities a little more generally, and to the "research paper" of 15-20 pages, that might include elements of literature, history, and art history. How to read around a topic and then focus the reading, how to develop research questions, these are more important than details like citation style. Any suggestions?

Thys may wel be rym dogerel

2011-12-04T15:19:00.001-06:00

In th’olde dayes of the Teching Kynge,
Who knew best how to manage everythynge,
This land was filled of grading fayerye.
Th’endityng elves, with her compaignye,
Daunced ful ofte on many a scolar’s book,
Esily seen by any that myght look.
This was the olde opinioun, as I rede;
But now the worde is come that elves be dede.
For now the service and utilité
Of Blacke Borde and such futilité
That filleth every classe and every halle
As thikke as leves that in autumn falle,
This maketh that ther ben no fayeryes.

Very bad news from the Chron fora

2011-12-04T14:23:00.002-06:00

Not that I've ever got the grading fairy to show up, but I always thought the cats frightened them off. I can't bear to think there just aren't any. And for such a lousy reason, too.

At least I'm making grading progress on my own.

Re: Ask Mended Drum your nagging questions here; get a completely awesome answer.

« Reply #220 on: December 02, 2011, 03:02:46 PM »

Quote from: concordancia on December 02, 2011, 01:52:48 PM

Will the grading and final writing fairy come if I take the afternoon off for beta testing a game?

The last known member of that particular species of fairy was throttled to death during a regional assessment committee visit to a formerly pleasant campus. Rumor says that the murderer was a member of SACS.

Steps in grading

2011-12-03T20:56:00.003-06:00

1. Assemble papers.
2. Open Windows Media Player; plug in headphones and un-mute the computer.
3. Find new purple pen.
4. See if anyone has added a comment to ADNWG's end-of-term post.
5. Check to see if anyone else has updated a blog. Consider saving new posts to read during breaks from grading after actually doing some. Read blog entries anyway.
6. Count papers in stack.
7. Check the Chronicle fora, especially the Thread of Grading Despair and Paralysis Analysis, to see who else is grading right now.
8. Eat chocolate.
9. Check current Lexulous game(s).
10. Start music. Read first page of top paper.
11. Worry about unfinished book review.
12. Finish reading first paper.
[13-17: Repeat steps 4-8.]
18. Worry about needing to order ILL books for winter writing project so they'll show up before the library closes over Christmas, and whether it would be better to do that now or keep grading.
19. Grade more papers.
20. Take longer break: cook and eat a meal, say.
[Repeat steps 4-10; expand 5 into checking out blog links never before clicked on and going into the archives of some previously known blogs.]

The Place: Babylon-5

2011-11-30T20:13:00.003-06:00

When it was first on television, Sir John and I watched B-5 regularly, and soon started taping episodes if we couldn't watch them live. We loved that show. Several years ago, he gave me Season 2 on DVD. We were on vacation at the time of the gift, and although we watched a few of its episodes then, once we were home again we lapsed. For the last couple of years, there's always been so much on the DVR that we rarely watch anything on DVD.

But over the Thanksgiving break, we broke out B-5 and have been galloping through that second season (I'm hoping to get more for Christmas this year). It's a great show. Watching a lot of episodes all at once makes clear how carefully planned it all was, and how significant clues were planted early on. You forget that kind of thing when you see one episode a week.

I'm loving it, but there's one thing about the show that's really making me crazy, and that's how . . . chick-flick-ish it is. I can't think of any better term for it. The human characters are always going on about their feeeeeelings. Every episode, someone says some variation of "Do you want to talk about it?" ("I'm here if you want to talk about it. If you want to talk, I'll listen. How do you feel about that?") Tough guys always have a marshmallow interior and have to reveal their vulnerabilities. Dysfunctional family situations can be fixed if a victim of bullying will just tell the bully s/he loves him. People in dysfunctional relationships of any kind regret not telling the other person they loved them before it was too late.

Well, I'm not that much of a chick. I'd like the humans to shut up and kick some alien ass. Or at least conspire and back-stab and mutter about dark political plots, or even dark mystical forebodings, the way G'Kar does. The "aliens" (except for Delenn) are way better about getting on with things instead of emoting.

Maybe it was a nineties thing. Maybe the writers read too many self-help books. Maybe it was an attempt to get female audiences into sci-fi series. Whatever. This female was begging Steven Franklin to grow a pair and tell his dad to fuck off instead of longing for his approval. Acting like a victim is the perfect way to get a bully to keep bullying you. With some people, using your words just doesn't work.

I guess there's a reason sci-fi and fantasy are shelved together.

Random bullets of November

2011-11-26T12:22:00.002-06:00

I'm feeling unimaginative lately, which is why I haven't posted anything. I'm not even desperately busy; indeed, if I were, I'd probably have more heretical ideas about teaching, or more updating about writing projects, or whines about committee meetings. But we're just chugging along here. Nonetheless, just to prove I'm still alive in the blogosphere:

The Grammarian is a very strange sort of picky eater. He meows piteously for food. I put down a plate with his usual food on it. He stares at it in horrified disbelief and informs me that I am trying to poison him, he can't eat this slop, he has been miserably betrayed by someone he had trusted to have his best interests at heart, etc. etc. I run my finger through the food, force his mouth open and smear it on his tongue, whereupon he says, "OMG cat fud!!! Why u not SAY so?" and sets to.
Why is it so hard to find a financial-advice book that will just answer some simple questions (or at least run through a list of things to think about when considering various situations) without a lot of touchy-feely claptrap? With all due respect to the Grumpy Pair (and that's quite a lot of respect) and their enjoyment of Your Money or Your Life, I'm quite clear on my values and my risk tolerance, I am very well aware of the costs of my commute, and I don't want to live in jeans and thrifted clothing making my own bean soup like some damned hippie (grumble grumble), except on maybe one weekend a month, because I do, after all, hail from hippieville and the apple doesn't fall that far from the tree. Suze Ormond, a recommendation from someone else, also has a lot of "spiritual" blah-blah. I just want to know, hypothetically, how to balance the tax advantages of having a mortgage plus a larger lump sum in the bank against not having a mortgage and having a smaller lump in the bank. Sure, it's a nice hypothetical problem to have. How do I approach it?
In these days of miracle and wonder, the long-distance call and e-mail, it is a complete delight to get a hand-written letter from an old friend. Such a sense of intimacy and connection! It's enough to make me contemplate sending a few ~~Christmas~~ Solstice cards.
One more week of classes. Just three days of actually meeting students. But OMG that means I have to invent a final exam right quick.
I am never going to get involved in conference-organizing again. Be it resolved.
Writing update: I have now drafted two chapters of the Unexpected Book. Both need work, especially with source material, but the basic argument is in place. I think I am going to use the winter break to try to finish an article (the MMP) that should have been finished a year ago; my library now has a reference work I need, so that should help a bit, except that the library will be closed for a couple of weeks (where are the foreign/broke graduate students supposed to go???). I will need to cannibalize that chapter for a conference paper this spring (and I think I should get at least some of the source material worked into that paper), and I have another conference paper to write, so making this decision makes me a little nervous: I'd rather like to do those things first. OTOH, conference papers don't have to be as complete or as polished as full articles, and I do have the chapter as a base for the one; so I think I can do those things while teaching, whereas the MMP needs some undiluted thinking time. And it would be so great to get that particular monkey off my back.
Now that I mention it, getting the MMP out ASAP is a great idea because if I can get an R&R within six months, I can work on it in the summer while I will have access to the relevant manuscripts. Be it resolved.

Give yourself a holiday

2011-11-20T13:11:00.002-06:00

I make papers etc. due after holidays (Thanksgiving, Spring Break), not before. That way I get a break, too. Or at least I can use the time to read and write, rather than grade.

The grading we have always with us, and it can get done while we're teaching. At the end of term, putting off due dates till after Thanksgiving works even better, because then you don't have to put detailed comments on anything.

If you really want to game the system, have the "original" due date before the break and then "change" it to after.

I have to grade all afternoon, but after I get this batch done, I'm good for a week. So I'll be able to write a book review.

More heresy (plus nostalgia)

2011-11-18T12:39:00.002-06:00

It seems that for quite a long time (that is, a decade or more) there has been more and more pressure on professors to plan the whole course, day by day, before the semester begins (and put the schedule on Blackboard or similar), so that everybody knows in August that on November 15th we'll discuss Fitt 3 of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and on November 17th a paper is due. Students expect to be able to look up their reading and paper assignments weeks or months in advance; a few super-conscientious and organized people (usually the returning students who are planning their coursework around their kids' school and sports events) even start work on the papers well in advance.

Such planning can also be useful for professors, who get notably more harried as the semester wears on (Thanksgiving? you mean it's the end of November already? it was Labor Day about an hour ago). October, we all know, is Exploding Head Month; I don't know if there's a name for November (except NaNoWriMo), but you have to figure that the month post-head-explosion can only be messy.

But in Olden Times, whatever long-term advance-planning professors might have done, I sure didn't know about it. When I was an undergrad, a syllabus listed contact information, required texts, number (and sometimes due dates) of papers and/or exams, and maybe some general goals for the course or a note that it was a pre-requisite for something else. Schedules and assignments might be given as separate hand-outs, later, or maybe just announced in class.

And so, not knowing any better, I wrote syllabi like that when I started teaching, as a grad student. I taught in a writing-across-the-curriculum program that gave grad T.A.'s a great deal of autonomy (excellent training for being a professor). I made up more detailed schedules and assignments that covered 3-5 weeks at a time, and as we got to the end of one such segment, I'd make up a new one. Of course I had a general sense that students would write so many pages during the term and that we'd spend weeks 7-10 (or whatever) on Sir Gawain. But if in the event it turned out that three pages turned into a revision instead of a new paper, and if SGGK got weeks 8-11 so we'd have to read less Malory at the end, well, fine. Who (but me) would know how my plans had changed?

The great thing about that way of teaching, which I continued into my early years on the tenure track, was the ability it gave me to be flexible and responsive. If I found that a large chunk of the class needed work on thesis statements, then we'd work on thesis statements; if they were great with thesis statements but had no idea how to argue against possible objections to their ideas without feeling they were undermining their position, then we'd work on that kind of argumentation. And so on. I liked that. I wasn't forced by the syllabus into spending time on topics that were unnecessary and boring for most of the class, and if interesting ideas came up in discussion, I could alter our trajectory so that we focused on, say, medieval castle construction instead of clothing, and create paper assignments accordingly.

Many things are much easier with fewer students, of course. Even though classes were bigger at LRU than they were at my graduate institution, I benefited from a reduced load in my first three years, 2-2 instead of 3-2, and so I had fewer students overall than I do now, and could manage this model effectively. Once I added the third course (and there were some years when I taught 3-3, to make the release available to hires who came after me), it got much harder to take stock of where each individual class or section was, three or four times a semester, and change course accordingly. It actually came as something of a revelation to me that I could plan the whole semester in advance and just stick to the plan. If this is Tuesday, it must be ~~Madrid~~ Marie de France.

Students like knowing what will be due when, of course, and I think it makes them feel secure (or something) to know that the professor is organized, has a plan, and will stick to it. But I think better teaching may happen when the plan gets thrown out, or is vague to start with, and the professor can respond to what interests the students and get the whole class to hare off in some unforeseen direction.

This doesn't seem to fit with my other heretical ideas about more lecturing. But I think what both posts have in common is wanting to be truly student-centered: if what the class wants and needs is more lecture (that is, a stronger framework), then I'm willing to provide that; and if what they need is more short papers with outlining and revision stages, then I'd like to be able to do that; and if I find that they can manage the five-paragraph essay handily but have no idea how to construct a more complex, somewhat longer paper, I'd like to be able to teach that, without feeling locked into a particular structure.

As I write, I notice that I'm emphasizing teaching writing, which was not at all the idea I thought I was starting with. Perhaps I'm still, really, thinking about content vs. skills. It does seem like what students really want in a detailed syllabus is information about written requirements: how many papers, how long, due when, what the papers should do (the "what do you want?" question). I'm reasonably sure that the students are happy to let me decide most if not all of the content issues. But somehow I need to assess what they're learning, and in an English class I am not willing to give multiple-choice exams to see what facts they can regurgitate about SGGK, and yet if I want papers that don't make me want to cut my own head off I wind up needing to teach writing skills.

So. I was going to say, heretically, that I want to give up on the detailed syllabus and respond to what my classes need and/or find interesting; that I'd like to have an end goal in mind but not plan the route in detail; that the class should, ideally, be a quest. And I was going to lament that having lots of students, and the kinds of students that we have at LRU (complicated lives, can't meet outside of class, need to plan library time and writing time well in advance) makes this quest-model rather difficult to put into practice. But if my real topic is still "what sort of writing assignments should I give" or "how to blend content and skills-based teaching," then I have to start this essay over.

Not right now, though. I shall mull for awhile, and see what further thoughts, orthodox or heretical, occur to me.

Was it something I said?

2011-11-16T16:22:00.003-06:00

I am really disturbed by the number of papers that imply that the Wife of Bath is responsible for Jankyn's violence, that she deserves to be hit, and that she shouldn't "allow" him to treat her this way. I'm now examining my teaching-conscience, wondering if something I said or the way I presented the Wife's Prologue prompted such attitudes, or if the students really believe this.

Students should feel free to disagree with me; I don't want to get pious papers that just parrot my own words or pay lip-service to politically correct notions. The papers I'm complaining about show flaws in logic and insufficient attention to the text. The fact that my skin is crawling over some of the statements (most, though not all, from female students) has nothing to do with the grades they're getting. I just need to vent, before I go into the classroom and calmly, thoughtfully, make students think about the likely effects of a twenty-something man hitting a forty-something woman over the head.

Grading whine

2011-11-16T14:33:00.002-06:00

The only thing worse than papers about the Wife of Bath that treat her as a representative medieval woman who, like all medieval women, is sadly oppressed by her husbands, yet somehow comes up with some modern feminist principles in order to redress the balance: papers that suggest that the domestic violence she endures is all her fault and that she has no business complaining about husband #5 hitting her on the head so hard "that in the floor I lay as I were deed."

Teaching, heresy, and logic

2011-11-11T13:30:00.003-06:00

I'm sure you've read, somewhere, a rant against Boring Old University Farts Lecturing In A Monotone and thus Preventing Active Learning.

I must say, even though I took six years to collect an undergraduate degree, and heard a number of lectures while I was doing it (as well as experiencing various other types of classroom activities), I never heard anyone lecture in a monotone. In fact, my only experience with this was very recent. At a conference this fall, I heard someone read from a paper held close to the face, in a monotone, and I thought, "Wow, maybe this is the source of all those rants." The speaker was quite animated in private conversation; I think the problem was poor eyesight and a laser focus on just getting the paper delivered, without any frills like eye contact or performative speech.

But I digress, as is my wont.

Anyway, according to this pedagogical theory, we university teachers are not supposed to lecture. We must engage our students in active learning, discussion, projects, teaching one another, all learning together. According to this model, the students learn more this way than they could from lecture. Also according to this model, students are independent thinkers, responsible for their own education, able to adjust their approach to their projects in accordance with their own learning styles.

It is not, at the moment, my purpose to critique this theory, though if you want to do so in the comments, or give links to people who have already done so, please do. I just want to note that the theory gives considerable agency to students.

OK. Now you have probably also seen the reports on how professional actors lecturing from a script get better teaching evaluations than the professor with the real expertise in the subject area. Well, of course we all like to be entertained; but doesn't that experiment show that lectures can be both entertaining and informative? And further: students also report that they prefer lectures from professors—people whose expertise they recognize—rather than working with their peers, who don't know as much as their professors. Students feel they are paying to learn from experts, not to try to teach each other.

Now, if we grant students agency, if we say that we trust them to know how they learn best and what they need, should we not then take their desire for lively, informative lectures seriously? A good lecture provides a framework for reading and writing (or projects and homework) done outside of class; it's a starting point, raising questions for students to consider and try to find answers to, or a finishing point, rounding up answers and synthesizing the work that has (one hopes) happened outside of the classroom. Oh, but students don't really know what's good for them; we should force them to do the active learning projects etc. because that's how they'll learn more . . . . But if they don't know what's good for them, why must we then treat them as if they did?

Actually, I have spent my career thus far teaching almost entirely via discussion, with relatively little lecture, or at least, little that's formally planned. My students have discovered that what they think is a simple question can easily wind me up for a 10-20 minute lecture. I can often predict at what point in the semester someone will ask the question that triggers the lecture on the Black Death, or on medieval demography, or various other topics that I can cover apparently extemporaneously. That is, I want to get those lectures into the class somewhere, but the particular day doesn't matter; the questions are going to come up, and then I will let my tape unspool.

Such teacher-training as I had emphasized discussion, in part because we were dealing with small (17 or fewer students) classes, where it was easy to make sure everyone was participating, and in a student population where it was easy to devise good discussion questions and ways to get students to prep so that really informative, significant discussion would happen. And there's nothing so much fun as going in and having a really good talk with smart, interested people about topics that interest all of us. That model worked quite well for me for a long time, even at my current job, where the classes are twice the size and the students are a very different population.

Times change, though, and people change, and students change. I've alluded here and in comments on other people's posts to some of the changes I've been noticing this fall. In short: my students are smart, and certainly engaged in their own education (most of them), but definitely lacking in the kind of preparation, and the kind of doing-college skills, that I could expect nearer the beginning of my career. They seem to profit enormously, disproportionately, from lectures that give them a framework for their readings, and they are (many, not all) nearly helpless to even begin constructing such a framework for themselves, as I was expected to do in much of my undergraduate work.

And I remember (digressing again) wishing someone would provide such a framework: even though I was able to build one up for myself, I did, at that stage of my life, feel it might be a waste of my time to do so when I could have got one from a professor and used it as a springboard to get me further into the material. Am I glad I did the frame-building myself, was it useful after all? I don't know. It's what happened. It was my formation. I am the thinker, the scholar, the professor I am because of it; but I don't think it was the best or only way that my education could have proceeded. It's useful to build your own frames, but it can also be useful to start with a nice sturdy frame someone else has constructed and focus on adding the wallboard and the wiring. I guess it depends on what you think you're teaching: how to frame a house, or how to finish it?

At any rate, while I think there are places for discussion, and for the kinds of projects that require students to frame and solve problems on their own, I also think that (a) there is a place for lecture, (b) lectures are not in and of themselves boring, (c) if we're considering students as independent adult thinkers then we should pay attention to what they say they want and value, (d) they say they want and value lecture from their professors, and so (e) I should lecture more.

Besides, I seem to be good at lecturing.

Heresy.

Hard/not

2011-11-05T20:06:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I had a conversation with a distinguished senior scholar. When I mentioned one of the projects I'm working on, he said about the area of study it falls into, "It's hard." He said this a couple more times about this field, once explaining why there are few people currently working in it, and once more along the lines of lamenting that more people aren't being trained to go into it.

Every time, I thought, "No, it's not. It's easy."

Finally, when he began to explain what it takes to do this well, the "hard" comments began to make sense to me. As graduate education is normally comprised, this area is interdisciplinary, and so people trained in one department don't usually have any significant acquaintance with the other one necessary to do this work; and furthermore, the general attitude of scholars in at least one of the disciplines is dismissive about this area.

But I had a checkered undergradate past, and an interdisciplinary graduate education, and so I am in fact very well trained to do this work, besides having a native talent for the underlying skills. So it is easy for me. So easy that it doesn't really occur to me that not everyone finds it easy and fun, and that really I ought to be focusing my energies here and making a name for myself in this area.

I'm putting it on the list. Once I work through all the various current and sidelined projects, I will turn to this thing that is easy for me.

And because Profacero has sensitized me to the question of whom it serves to say that writing (or anything else) is hard, I am going to try to use this experience to adjust my own way of speaking. Rather than saying "X is hard," I will prefer "If you have good basic skills in Y and Z, and a talent for Q, then X is easy. And if you haven't got those basic skills in Y and Z, then you must work at acquiring them."

Some people will still find this discouraging, but the statement specifies what you need, and so even for those who lack the prerequisites, it may lead to the question "How do I get those skills?" rather than to the thought "oh, it's hard, I won't be able to."

Chaucer syllabus review

2011-11-04T21:41:00.003-05:00

Every fall, I have 70 students in Chaucer, and no help with grading. Teaching Chaucer, for me, is not an occasional treat with a small group of enthusiasts, but a constant hard slog of Middle English boot camp with a bunch of draftees, who every year appear to be in worse shape when they start out than the last batch of maggots.

So tonight I have about a dozen web pages and three more PDFs open to different undergraduate Chaucer syllabuses. It's interesting to see the range of requirements. At Harvard, for example, no papers are required. The grads are supposed to write a paper, and the undergrads may do so, if they want to make up for a skipped exam. But the planned undergrad assessments are exams.

I suppose at Harvard, you can assume that your students already know how to write papers.

There's a whole group of courses structured around a term paper. For some, it's really the only significant assessment, though there may be some quizzes along the way, an annotated bibliography here, a rough draft there. Some make a concerted effort to break down the parts of the research paper and teach students how to do it. Others may do this in class, but it doesn't show up on the syllabus.

A significant minority seem to rely heavily on team/group work, often involving creating webpages or some other sort of visual presentation, alongside more traditional papers and exams.

Another chunk of courses do the little-bit-of-everything approach: some translations, some quizzes, one or two or three shortish papers, or maybe collections of discussion questions, a short annotated bibliography, a longer paper, maybe a final exam. This is what my syllabus used to look like, but it's a model I want to move away from. It's confusing. My aim is to simplify.

I'm never really happy with my Chaucer course. There are too many things I want to do, or feel I must do, and it's hard to set priorities and work out how to teach all the necessary skills alongside teaching the real essential skill, how to read Middle English. Unlike Harvard students, many of mine still have to be taught how to write essays for literature classes. Possibly they knew before they were confronted with Middle English, and what I'm seeing is a reversion of one skillset while they're in the process of acquiring a new one. But whatever: I'm not so much interested in why I have to be very clear about instructions, model processes in class, give sample papers, and so on, as I am in the fact of having to do it, and how that changes what I can do in class.

A lot of my students also face significant time pressures, because they work (often full-time), have children, or both. I know I'm looking at a school very different from mine when a syllabus says that if a class is cancelled due to weather, they'll find a time to make it up. That, to me, says "traditional-age undergraduates living on-campus in residence halls." Chez moi, if we lose a day, it stays lost. Similarly, trying to get people to work in groups outside of class is much, much worse than herding cats. I could herd a troupe of Basement Cat's demonic little friends more easily than get my students together outside of regularly scheduled class time. Anyway, that's another thing to take into account when I'm thinking about what I'm going to require, and how much scaffolding it will take.

My students really seem to want, and do better at, lots of short, low-stakes assignments: translations, worksheets, short papers. I've seen this in the past (right after sabbatical, when I was feeling fired with idealism, I had my classes do some sort of short paper every week: it was great for them, but nearly killed me), and I'm seeing it now, when I've made some mid-course alterations to grant student desires for this sort of thing. After two weeks of students handing in a translation at every course meeting (we go over them in class; I just check them off later), I'm seeing significant improvement in reading comprehension.

Maybe it's a matter of my own bottom-up way of building research topics, but I don't think I can teach how to do the research paper on Chaucer. I'd have to break the process down into teensy steps and collect work every week or two, grade it, and then re-grade the whole thing when it came back as a paper at the end of the course. And I believe in "reading around" for awhile before coming up with a topic; I don't want to assign topics at the beginning of the semester ("bird imagery in tales told by women" or whatever). So I'm not going the research paper route, though I worry a bit about that art dying out: I now have to teach the grad students how to write a term paper, so clearly not everyone is learning that in undergrad any longer.

My primary goal is to get students reading Middle English comfortably. I'd be thrilled if they get through this class and then go read some Chaucer on their own. Not necessarily for fun, but say they take Shakespeare and want to look into Troilus and Criseyde as a source for Troilus and Cressida, and feel okay about reading TC on their own: that would be grand. On top of that, if I can teach (or reinforce) some basic literary analysis skills, that's good, too.

Thus I'm thinking, in future, lots of translation, some worksheets, and some short papers that focus on the skill of close reading. Oh, and I think I want to go back to memorizing some lines, which I let drop awhile back due to popular demand. But I think it's important and should come back. Part of my justification for the type of written work is that learning Middle English now seems to be much harder than it was 15 years ago (I blame poor vocabulary, whatever is causing that); part is that close (nay, myopic, the way I work) reading is a useful skill not only for literary scholars but for readers in general, and yet students rarely seem to get much of this in their other classes. There are other things I consider desirable, and I'd like to work out a way to let my top students stretch more than this model would allow, without killing myself grading. But these are the essentials.

Reading Comprehension

2011-10-30T20:31:00.002-05:00

A couple of books recently entered this house (actually, books enter this house on a regular basis, and few of them ever leave), and I was struck by the contrast in their style. I have mentioned my reading tastes before: Pamela Dean, Lois McMaster Bujold, Amanda Cross, Angela Thirkell, C. J. Cherryh, and so on. But when I'm not reading mindless fluff, I'm usually deep into something peer-reviewed. I have little patience with jargon-filled obfuscation, but on the other hand, I do expect serious reading to have serious vocabulary.

So when Sir John brought home Willpower (Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney), which has been well-reviewed in such august places as the New York Times, I was surprised by its chatty tone and pop-culture references. Here's the first paragraph of chapter one, in its entirety: "If you have a casual acquaintance with Amanda Palmer's music, if you know about her banned-in-Britain abortion song or the 'Backstabber' video of her running down a hall naked holding an upraised knife while chasing the equally naked guy in lipstick who was just in bed with her, you probably don't think of her as a paragon of self-control."

I have no idea who Amanda Palmer is, nor does this (what I take to be an appeal to popular taste) want to make me read on. I was hoping for a serious treatment of willpower, which is what the reviews led me to expect.

Now, for contrast, here's the first paragraph of A New Stoicism (Lawrence C. Becker) acquired at the same bookstore, same shopping trip: "After five hundred years of prominence in Greek and Roman antiquity, stoic ethics was pillaged by theology and effaced by evangelical and imperial Christianity. A few stoic philosophers survived, most of them by providing analgesics for use in pastoral counseling, the military, and what then passed for medicine and psychotherapy. Only those shards of our doctrines were widely seen during the Middle Ages, and the term stoic came to be applied merely to people who used remedies. This confusion persists."

I would have expected serious non-fiction to sound more like example two than like example one. In fact, I am amazed that Willpower has had such good reviews, when it seems to be written for people with a sixth-grade reading ability. But if that's what we're reduced to, then no wonder my students don't know the words "bough," "clad," and "boisterous."

The Existentialists and happiness

2011-10-28T15:17:00.002-05:00

One day Camus had said: "Happiness exists, and it's important; why refuse it? You don't make other people's unhappiness any worse by accepting it; it even helps you to fight for them. Yes," he had concluded, "I find it sad the way everyone seems to be ashamed of feeling happy nowadays." I agreed with him completely.

Simone de Beauvoir. Force of Circumstance. Vol. 1: After the War. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Originally published as La Force des choses, Paris: Gallimard, 1963. 162.

I apologize for the translation: I acquired my copies of Beauvoir's biographies in my middle teens, before I learned French.

At any rate: if even the existentialists believe in being happy, why in the world should the rest of us suffer? It is the weekend, so we will sing.

Reflections on fantasy and real life

2011-10-26T22:16:00.004-05:00

Awhile ago there was a blogger who wrote as Professor Me (IIRC); some of you no doubt remember her, or even have the password to her blog. As I recall her blog, it was very appealing, and I read it with the sort of attention and wilfully suspended disbelief that I usually reserve for space opera. She couldn't get down to academic work until the kitchen was clean, so every night after cooking dinner for her husband and adorable child, she cleaned up and scrubbed the sink, then settled down to writing or class prep.

I loved that image of the clean, tidy, orderly setting for the life of the orderly and productive mind.

At the same time, I noticed that it was achieved at the cost of a fairly traditional division of household labor. The husband was handy at doing household repairs and remodeling, but only the wife cleaned the kitchen.

Now, if it were possible to leave dishes of milk out and attract a brownie who would clean the kitchen every night, I'd go for it, and risk the cats getting diarrhea if they got to the milk first. I guess it would fall to the brownie to clean up, anyway: dude, them's the breaks if you're late to work.

But in the absence of brownies, my life is much messier, in all respects, as well as more egalitarian. No one around here is at all handy (except maybe Basement Cat, and we are lucky that he still finds the lack of opposable thumbs a considerable handicap), so if the house needs fixing up, we hire someone else to do it. We share laundry. Sir John shops for groceries, because I hate shopping in all its forms (no, I have no idea where all the shoes came from; maybe some brownie dropped them off). I pay the bills. I cook. Sir John handles the dishes.

Some readers might justly recall David Lodge's novel Nice Work, in which Robyn Penrose says, "I quite like washing up, it's therapeutic," and Vic Wilcox replies, "You don't seem to need therapy very often."

The thing is, however you divide the work, you can't micromanage each other. So tonight I moved some dirty dishes aside to wash vegetables, put a cutting board down over this morning's newspaper so I could chop them, and got on with the cooking. And then I left the dishes and prepared the guest lecture I have to give tomorrow morning.

This was all clearer in my head when I wrote it as I was cooking dinner. Post-lecture prep, it's gone fuzzy and the logic is lousy or missing entirely. But it's supposed to be a sort of meditation on the differences between what we expect or think we want and what our actions show that we really value, and about letting go of expectations. I want to make it clear that I'm not complaining. I sometimes fantasize about a self-cleaning kitchen, but I don't want it enough to do it myself, or even enough to hire our cleaner for some extra hours. The dishes get done sooner or later, the cleaner scrubs the sink once a week, and that's good enough. What I do want is home-cooked food (because I am greedy and like my own cooking), and time to do my work, and the ability to think of household work as shared responsibility, not just mine.

Also, I guess, I liked the chance to live vicariously a little, to imagine that someone has time and energy to both clean the kitchen and get the real work done.

Re-booting the semester

2011-10-22T22:46:00.005-05:00

Even before Notorious Ph.D. suggested the theme of the re-set button, I had been thinking that I need to re-boot my semester. While I have achieved a couple of significant goals (submitting the fellowship application; adding some polish to a drafted chapter), other areas of my life have suffered: I'm slower than usual to return papers, am not exercising enough, and often don't get enough sleep. I'd like to start over and aim at a better balance for the remaining weeks of term.

Fortunately, I don't have any more conferences to go to (I think in general it is a mistake to go to conferences during term-time, at least in three-course semesters). And I have no more hugely significant deadlines, either. There are six more weeks, I guess, for the current ADNWG term, and about the same before I have to turn in a book review (IIRC; maybe I should check that e-mail).

Last week I was suffering a bit of let-down after getting the application done, and also from withdrawal symptoms (oh, am I not supposed to admit being a research addict?). I enjoyed the focus I needed to exert on the application and sample chapter, the feeling that this was the most important thing I had to do and that I could justify dropping everything else lower on the priority list. I also enjoyed having an external deadline, which forced me to put aside some of my perfectionist tendencies. Put those things together with a resolution made earlier this year to submit something, somewhere, in 2011, and I had to look over my various projects to see what I might be able to finish in the next couple of months.

(I know it's a good thing to have a book that really wants to be written, and I love the conference-paper-turned-book project. But I was so set on sending it out as an article this year. I want more publications!)

So there's the Macedonian Marginalia Project, which could probably be done in a couple of months; but not these months, when I need to catch up on grading and then prep and grade final exams and projects. I planned to work on the MMP in January-March 2012, and that still seems like a good idea. I will have two courses with the same prep in the spring, and (most likely) a lighter workload on my major committee; that will give me more head-space to think about a fairly complex project in which the argument stands or falls on tiny details. I'd like to wrap it up by spring break, on the theory that the second part of the semester tends to have more grading in it, and also that I will have at least one conference paper to prepare in the later spring.

Then there's the Unexpected Project that was a conference paper in the summer. When I got that digitized scan that proved I had a third manuscript to deal with, I got all excited and thought maybe that was the piece that I would push out the door by the end of December. And then I checked on what the manuscript actually is and realized that I have a huge problem with the dates, and because of that, I have far less of a viable draft than I had thought. I have to start all over on part of the research for that essay, which is rather discouraging. I wish I'd thought more about this third manuscript at some earlier stage. I knew it was a possibility, but no scholarly source I found said for certain it was the same hand, and I hadn't seen it myself, and so I just pushed the possibility aside and tracked something that seemed plausible. But "plausible" is now "provably wrong."

Another possibility for a submission this year was a note related to the Big Volume of Manuscript. But the issues involved are similar to those in the Unexpected Project, and so now I'm spooked about that kind of research and want to be very sure that I'm right before trying to publish anything along those lines. It's bad enough feeling that I've given conference papers that are so wrong; at least I didn't publish the incorrect Unexpected details.

Anyway, those were the options for alternate goals for this fall. And none is viable, so I'm back to Plan A: finish a decent draft of another chapter of the book, and work steadily if slowly on the Big Translation. It's a relief, really; my motto for the past few years has been "stick to Plan A," which works for both small and large plans. I can drive myself crazy thinking up alternate plans and wondering which would be best, for everything from "what to wear tomorrow" to much more significant decisions. I am so much happier when I make a plan and stick to it, with only minor modifications (if it's colder, wear a wool blazer instead of a linen one; if it rains, wear the rain boots; if short on sleep, stare at a draft of the writing project and tinker with sentences instead of trying to work on the organization).

As an aside, I think a lot of my difficulties with planning and organization are not native, but learned. For me, the Myers-Briggs categories explain a lot. By temperament, I'm fairly strongly J (in the sense of wanting plans and to stick to them; there are other elements to J-ness, and I think finer granularity in the sub-elements makes the MB types work better: when I took the test, each of the four axes had ten sub-elements), but I grew up with parents who must have been super-P. Thus I both had to learn to tolerate the chaos of our household and did not get any decent modeling of how to plan and stay organized. It's only relatively late in life that I've realized how stressful and irritating I find P-ness, in most areas. Sometimes I want to put off a decision while I collect information, but that is something I plan for, and once I make up my mind I don't want to revisit the decision.

Then wouldn't I just have stuck to the plan about the chapter all along? No, see, the original Plan A was to write an article, not a book. That's where the recent thrashing came from. Must. Have. Article. But no. The better part of valor, considering long-term goals, is to accept the change from article to book, and get a chapter finished this fall, so that I can cannibalize it for a conference paper in the spring (if that abstract is accepted) and have two reasonably complete chapters when I start (oh please oh please) a fellowship year of writing.

So the plan for the weekend was to get all caught up on stuff, get enough sleep, get enough exercise, and re-boot the semester this coming week. Goals: continue to write every day, but stop after half an hour or so (unless I really am caught up on everything else). Turn back papers promptly. Prep more thoroughly for the grad class. Exercise an optimal amount on non-teaching days, and a sub-optimal but acceptable amount on campus days. Set a manageable sleep schedule, and stick to it.

It's a great plan. Sadly, I think Sir John and I both accidentally got caffeinated coffee earlier today. So I'm still wide awake, and expect to be up for awhile yet. I have things to do, of course: grading, notes on books I want to get off my desk, planning. I may not get the sleep schedule sorted out this weekend, but I can at least get caught up (if I don't start remembering more things I have dropped the ball on!), and I'll keep working on the sleep thing.

Dating is hell

2011-10-19T11:14:00.003-05:00

The new MS is all kinds of interesting, but there is a problem: since the hand is the same, and the MS is securely dated, my identification of last summer is wrong.

Just plain wrong. Impossible. Factually incorrect. As I said then, there's no way to hand-wave my way out of this.

At least I haven't made the claim in print. But still: a lot of research and clever connections that I thought had me well on the way to a cool publication, all that is right down the drain.

Calvinball. Humph. I think I just scored against my own side.

OMG ponies!!! Elebenty!!11!

2011-10-18T23:45:00.002-05:00

A manuscript scan popped into my inbox this morning.

It's the same hand.

This is very exciting.

I know you have no idea what I'm talking about. But it's good news.

So I have to think about whether I'm sticking with my goal of finishing a book chapter this fall, or whether I want to get on with this other project while it's relatively fresh in my mind. There is a bit of a problem about visiting this other manuscript, given my teaching schedule. But that's a mere detail.

The advantages of a long commute

2011-10-16T08:54:00.004-05:00

Lately, it seems like I keep seeing comments, blog posts, and Chronicle fora posts about the joys of living close to campus, and how much people's quality of life improves when they move a five-minute walk away from work. Undoubtedly I am sensitive to such comments, so they may be less prevalent than I have suggested.

For over fifteen (15) years, I have commuted to a job about 60 (sixty) miles from where I live. It takes about an hour in the car, sometimes a bit more depending on traffic. I don't exactly like the commute. Frequently I add up the number of hours per week I spend in the car, realize that they are equivalent to a day of work, and remind myself that this is why I don't really have hobbies. On the other hand, I do see certain advantages, if not to the commute, then to living where I do.

1. Perspective. I don't leave work at work; I normally work a great deal at home. When I'm on campus, I'm usually in class or in a meeting, or having office hours. I have to schedule library time when I need it. But though work comes home with me, the institution recedes into the distance. I can work in my study without having anyone pop in for just a minute; I can work in a coffee shop without seeing anyone I know who wants a quick word about a paper or a committee. It's clearer to me, from a distance, which tasks really matter to me as opposed to those that someone else wants me to do. The job is a job; it's not my life. Yes, less time in the car might mean more time for "a life" as most people mean it, but I don't really want "a life" in the town I work in.

2. The kind of life I want. I like cities. My job is not in a city, but my home is. On days I don't go to campus, I can enjoy the advantages of city life, including items 3-10:

3. Quicker, easier access to cultural events. Obviously it would be possible to drive in for these from the place where I work, and when I lived there, I did. But it's nice to get home faster at night, when the show's over.

4. Good public transportation to libraries and places of cultural significance.

5. Excellent restaurants.

6. A posh gym that I truly enjoy using (and I never see my students in the locker room).

7. Better medical care than is available where I work, and a wider range of insurance options.

8. More sophisticated veterinary care for my spoiled and sickly darlings.

9. Anonymity. Obviously this does not appeal to everyone. Lots of people like being thoroughly woven into their communities, and I know that studies show this is important to happiness and well-being. Sure, if you're an extrovert. Extreme introverts like me love cities because no one is paying attention to us, no one knows us, no one expects a lot of interaction.

10. More interesting, better-stocked grocery stores. And bookstores. And other shopping. Sure, now we have the Internet, but sometimes it's fun to browse in person.

11. Decompression time. Intense interaction with people, as in teaching, somehow both exhausts me and gets me all wound up. It's like being an over-excited little kid at a party, who's really in need of a glass of milk and a nap instead of cola and cake and more games. The hour in the car alone is a good opportunity to start winding down, to debrief myself about how things went and what I might do next time, to sort out what I really need to tell Sir John and what is just stuff I need to think through on my own.

12. Warm-up time. Similarly, the drive to school helps me get my head around what I'm going to be doing for the day. I don't plunge from my house into the classroom. Now that I have usually already read (several dozen times) what I'll be teaching, I can do a lot of class prep in my head, in the car.

13. And, to make it a baker's dozen, better access to more interesting walking trails and outdoorsy stuff like that. It sounds counter-intuitive, but in an area known for farming, living in a small town does not necessarily put you in a good spot for a nature walk or bike ride, unless you want to check out the amber waves of grain while cars zip past and their occupants yell rudely.

I have many friends and colleagues who love living where they work. As the Grumpy Pair keep saying, my choices aren't judging yours. I'm weird. That's not news. But this here's my answer to the question (usually asked with obivous horror) of why I would undertake this long commute; and notice that this answer doesn't even open up the two-body issue.

Update; lists

2011-10-12T23:17:00.002-05:00

I think the fellowship application is done. Tomorrow I print the final copy (I expect a bit of futzing around with fonts and margins, once I'm on a computer hooked up to a printer). Friday it gets postmarked.

Papers are commented and handed back: without grades, though. We're going to do some revision exercises and stuff with those papers. I'm thinking what to do about actual grades/credit. I still need a revised syllabus for the rest of the semester.

My guest lecturer for tomorrow just bailed on me this evening. It's not a situation that can be helped; but that's so much less time to work on the syllabus, because I need to cover what the guest would have covered.

So, I have ideas for substantive posts (commuting; changes in/because of/after grad program; titles), but they're not going to get written tonight or tomorrow. We'll see after that.

Oh, noooes

2011-10-09T23:37:00.003-05:00

If I didn't have to spend most of tomorrow in a series of meetings topped off with a night class, I'd be in great shape with the grading.

Or if my out-of-town friend had visited some other weekend.

Or if I hadn't stayed up much too late on Friday reading a new book that Sir John got me (really, shouldn't one show appreciation for presents?).

Unfortunately, I have done those things I ought not to have done and will do other things that I wish I need not do, and at the moment I feel I should go to bed very soon or there will indeed be no health in me. And since this term I am grading hard-copy papers, I will not be able to grade discreetly during tomorrow's meetings, blast it. Chalk up another point in favor of all-electronic grading, though I still feel that over all, I'm happier marking up paper papers.

A simple tweak

2011-10-07T16:36:00.003-05:00

Grading is boring. Mostly. It's not so much painful as just boring. I'm not frustrated or angry at writing the same comments over and over, and seeing the same mistakes. I expect that. It's okay. I'm asking my students both to cope with Middle English and to do a kind of detailed literary analysis that most of them aren't used to. I can teach that, and I do, and by the end of the term most of them will get it, but the first paper shows that they can't really believe I want what I say I want, and that they feel safer falling back on the kind of thing that has served them in the past. I get that. We can work on all this.

But I get so bored that it's hard to stick with the task.

And then, finally, I remembered the solution: music! I can't believe I forgot that. The problem is that I cannot work on writing or other "serious" work with music playing (except in coffee shops, where somehow I concentrate to block it out and that concentration is actually part of the way work in coffee shops happens). So after a summer of quiet work alone in my study, I really do forget that for some kinds of tedious work, music is the answer. It gives my fretful monkey mind something to think about while the teaching brain comments away and plots how to present these lessons the next time we talk about doing this kind of criticism.

So never mind the four papers and a break. Once I got a soundtrack, I sat in front of an open window and worked steadily for a couple of hours, getting through 9 or 10 papers in that time. That's a respectable rate. I'll still be grading all weekend, but it's looking like a less horrid prospect now.

As Z would say, it is the weekend so we will sing.

Grading day

2011-10-07T08:42:00.003-05:00

I have re-written the opening salvo of my fellowship application, and now I have to go feed the fluffy horde. I declare the rest of today a Grading Day. I intend to do four-paper batches, since that seems to be the number I can do comfortably, with breaks in between: no reading, no computer work, but stretching, walking, maybe weeding or housework, something physical anyway, for about ten minutes, so that I will be truly refreshed when I go back to reading papers.

This is the Plan! I shall conquer the mountain of papers!

And tonight or tomorrow I'll let you know how it goes. The Plan pretty much has to stay in effect the whole weekend, which could get a little problematic since I have a friend visiting from Far Away whom I want to see. Ten-minute breaks don't suffice for social life.

Conquer. Conquer! Excelsior!

Writing etc. report

2011-10-05T21:49:00.002-05:00

Sample chapter: done. Done enough, that is, to send to recommenders. It still needs work before it's publication-ready: more conversation with critics, more historical support, more direct discussion of a textual problem. But the argument is clear and well-developed.

Grading: oh, so not done. So just barely started.

Syllabus in need of revision, too.

I need to devote myself to teaching for a bit once I get this application finished and sent.

It's very clear that when I have a single writing goal for the week, I do quite well at it, and when I have more than one thing needing attention, I get anxious and scattered and don't do very well at any of my goals.

In fact, I think this may apply more generally: on writing-intensive days, it is very hard to switch gears and think about teaching. One of the reasons writing first thing in the morning is good for me is that that time-slot compartmentalizes the writing.

Female Science Professor had an interesting post about types of worker. I think I am an X1 who has managed to learn to juggle a few things. In grad school I thought I was an X2 but actually I am good at organizing my own structure: I wrote most of my dissertation in a single year on fellowship while also on the job market. It was a stressful time (more because of the job market and personal life than because of the dissertation) but I got a lot done. But I have never been a W. I wish I were, but I'm not.

So today I meant to finish fixing up the chapter, grade some papers, and pay bills. I finished the chapter, graded about half the papers I wanted to, and went to the bank, which was a precondition of the bill-paying. I went to the gym and took the boys to the vet.* Not a bad day. But all the gear-switching was hard.

I still believe in writing first thing. I'm not changing that. But I think I need to consider ways to "do less" but get more done: maybe that "three things" way of listing tasks, or have days that are supposed to be primarily for grading or for Life Stuff after the writing gets done in its little compartment.

*Basement Cat was so good. The Grammarian fought vigorously against going in the carrier, shouted for help to the whole neighborhood, and then gave up and sulked at the back of his carrier once he was loaded into the car. But Basement Cat was a dream. He ignored the Grammarian's pleas for aid and jumped in the carrier when I tossed in some kibble bits. BC is totally venal: anything involving kibble is fine with him. Since I have no head for philosophy or theology, I hesitate to draw eschatalogical conclusions from this. But I assure you that he thinks it is better to reign with kibble than to serve without kibble.

Book meme

2011-09-27T22:21:00.002-05:00

I got this from the Little Professor. But I’m answering these questions selectively—just those I had a strong reaction to.

1. Favorite childhood book?
Just one? Childhood lasts awhile, you know. Tastes and abilities change between 5 and 12. They change between 11 and 11 1/2, come to that. But if you insist, I think I was and am particularly fond of Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes.

2. What are you reading right now?
A blog, you silly person.

5. What do you currently have checked out at the library?
More than 60 books, on assorted medieval topics.

6. Do you have an e-reader?
Yes. It was a gift. I haven’t put anything on it in the, um, year and a half? that I’ve had it.

8. Have your reading habits changed since starting a blog?
Not since starting my own one. Since starting to read blogs, yes: I read fewer novels.

10. Favorite book you’ve read this year?
What is it with the favorites? I like different things for different reasons, in different moods and circumstances. It’s not as if I keep a pile of this year’s books around organized from top to bottom in order of how much I loved them. It’s not even as if I can remember what I’ve read this year or last year.

15. What is your policy on book lending?
Fuck right off! Put that down, now!

17. Do you ever write in the margins of your books?
In pencil, lightly. I find it difficult to write in books, even my own. Post-it notes are very common, though.

22. Favorite genre?
Again with the favorites. I am not such a simple character.

26. Favorite cookbook?
Get a grip! Depends on what I’m cooking.

30. How often do you agree with critics about a book?
Depends on which critics (is this a “favorite” question in disguise?). I encourage grad students to get to know the works of scholars in their field so they’ll know whether they can count on their reviews. From some people, a bad review means I know I’m going to want to read the book.

32. If you could read in a foreign language, which language would you chose?
Modern language? I already read fluently in French and Spanish; with a dictionary I can get through Italian and German adequately. So I think I’d go for something more exotic, like Arabic or Japanese. Dead languages . . . I’ve made a couple of attempts at classical Greek, so it might be nice to get a shortcut to fluency there, but then again, if I’m taking shortcuts, I’d probably pick hieroglyphic Egyptian. Or cuneiform.

33. Most intimidating book you’ve ever read?
For the love of . . . listen, a book is an inanimate object. It’s not even a dangerous object, like a gun or a guillotine. I have never been intimidated by a book. And neither should you be. No one can intimidate you without your consent.

35. Favorite Poet?
W. H. Auden. Or Louise Labé. Or A. C. Swinburne. Diane Wakoski has her points. So does Charles d’Orléans. And Francis Jammes. I think I should go back to my “that’s too simplistic” stance on the topic of “favorite.”

36. How many books do you usually have checked out of the library at any given time?
I decline to answer this on the ground that it may tend to incriminate me.

38. Favorite fictional character?
39. Favorite fictional villain?
Go away, I’m tired of these.

40. Books I’m most likely to bring on vacation?
Take. Unless you are currently on vacation, in which case you have indeed brought books, you will take a book or books on vacation.

41. The longest I’ve gone without reading.
You mean, while I’m awake? I can’t read after an eye doctor has dilated my pupils for that one test they do . . . that may last 4-5 hours.

43. What distracts you easily when you’re reading?
Comma splices.

46. The most money I’ve ever spent in the bookstore at one time?
La la la la la. Not answering. You don’t want to know, anyway. But I’ll tell you this: two years ago I spent $250 on a single book and knew I had a bargain, though the people I was traveling with gasped when I answered their question about the cost.

55. Favorite guilt-free, pleasure reading?
Why would you feel guilty about reading? This is like the intimidation question. Whoever thought this thing up has some psychological problems.

On working when you can't

2011-09-25T22:51:00.002-05:00

Another cross-post, this one directly from the comments on this week's check-in at ADNWG. I feel it's worth making this one more generally accessible.

When you are tired, ill, emotionally wrecked, or physically traumatized, but feel taking time off will put you so far behind that you’ll be even more stressed and tired, see if it’s possible to (a) make yourself more comfortable, and (b) work in tiny chunks.

(A) Sitting at your desk in a normal chair might be too much, but perhaps you can work in a recliner, on the couch, or in bed. Maybe even typing on a laptop is too much, but it might be possible to take marginal notes on a book, to be typed up later. Wear your owl pyjamas and fluffy slippers. Assemble pillows and heating pad (or ice water and fans, depending on the season).

(B) Then work in increments of 10-15 minutes, with 10-15 minute rest periods after each work session. Obviously this is not good for those big problems that need 3 hours of clear head time, but you’re not going to be trying to do those anyway when you’re sick/tired/traumatized. OTOH it is very possible to do half a day’s work in a full day by this work-rest pattern, reading, taking notes, grading, editing, writing half a paragraph at a time, and then you’re not so terribly behind. It is important to rest, really rest, between these little sprints, and not do things that will suck you into procrastination mode. Small household tasks (not a big clean-up project) are also appropriate breaks from the work if you have the energy. The point is to do something that does not involve a screen or a page.

And remember that the best is the enemy of the good.

What problem?

2011-09-25T11:17:00.004-05:00

I've written before about the joys of teaching at a large regional university. And now I'm going to say it again: there are plenty of schools that don't have a drinking problem.

Most of my students work 30-40 hours a week. They live off-campus, with their partners, with their children, with their parents. A significant number are not just in-town though off-campus, but commuters from a good way away, just as I am. On weekends they're at work, or doing their homework, or cutting the grass and ferrying kids around, not at football games, not at frat parties. We do have fraternities and sororities, and I can believe there's some alcohol abuse on Frat Row. But I'm not seeing it: those students are majoring in something other than English.

My students have trouble, academically, for varying reasons: they went to bad high schools. It's been too long since they were in the classroom. Their baby had an ear infection and they haven't slept in days. Somebody else didn't show up for work and they had to work an extra shift. Although they're not working extra, they are working, and they only had 3 hours to work on a paper that needed 6. Their chronic illness isn't under control and they spent the night in the ER. Their National Guard unit was unexpectedly called up. Their anti-depression meds aren't quite right. And, sure, there is some ordinary not-getting-it-together, some bad study habits and time management skills, some garden-variety colds and break-ups, as well.

If a person goes straight from a pressure-cooker high school, overseen by helicopter parents, to an expensive college where paying tuition seems to guarantee a prestigious degree, and where students suddenly have a whole lot more freedom and independence than they're used to, then I can see why schools like Tenured Radical's might have this problem.

But it's not a big problem at LRU, and I wish people would stop tarring all "colleges" with the same brush. They vary by region, by mission, by student body and by culture, as well as by size and rankings.

Now for something completely frivolous . . .

2011-09-24T19:11:00.002-05:00

Should I get a pair of flannel pyjamas with owls on?

I usually sleep in a t-shirt. Or leggings and a t-shirt. Or half of Sir John's pyjamas with something of mine on the other half. I rarely am in a situation where anyone but Sir John is likely to see me in my sleepwear, so I don't feel any particular need to look even presentable, let alone matchy-matchy. Furthermore, I detest the pastel cutesy look of lots of women's nightwear. So I just don't buy any.

But these are royal blue, not pastel, despite the eyelet trim. And they have owls.

Then again, I toss and turn too much in bed for flannel to be a good idea—I'd wake myself up when the p.j.'s pulled against the sheets. I think I'm talking myself out of it.

But. Owls!

Writing, pacing, sports metaphors and aging

2011-09-23T14:59:00.003-05:00

As usual, posting about progress and goals in ADNWG makes me want to write a very long comment that I wind up bringing back to my own blog. I've got a decent draft of my fellowship proposal, exactly the right length, which probably means my RL writing group will suggest substantial changes that will mean a lot more editing to get it back to length. But at least that much is done.

It got done, as I predicted, mostly in a series of baby steps. Monday: 264 words. Tuesday and Wednesday: tiny bits of tinkering, a new sentence or two, a spot of editing. Thursday: combined the new framework with the old chapter descriptions. Today: wrote the 100-word abstract (98 words: I am awesome at writing to length), and edited the rest of it so it "flowed," in undergraduate parlance, and came to the right length. It's funny how (reluctantly) cutting a phrase that I feel really does a good job of expanding the implications of what I just said actually makes the argument spring up sharp and clear. So I came to terms with what I thought I was losing in nuance.

There's a lot more stuff to do with the proposal, what I think of as technical details: bibliography for the project, CV (do I have a reasonably up-to-date version in normal format, rather than the weird format required for my annual reviews at school?), a form to fill in that basically reproduces a lot of CV info. This seems like good "tired work," things to do on days when I'm low energy, or when I couldn't manage to work when I was really sharp and am trying to do something useful in the evening just so I keep moving forward. Or maybe, to introduce the sports metaphors, this is my yoga work.

In my more energetic moments, I will work on revising my most complete chapter into a good sample chapter. This, then, would be the more vigorous running or cycling.

For a brief period, I was a runner, and I loved it. But then I hurt my ankle, and ever since have been cautious about weight-bearing exercise. Swimming is good. Long walks seem to be okay. Elliptical trainers, stair climbers, and exercise bikes seem to be okay. Jogging . . . iffy. So my marathons, or triathlons, whatever, are virtual, done in the gym. All the same, for a long time I have thought about writing/research in terms of training, keeping in shape with the daily stint, even if it's a 20-minute walk or 2-sentence writing session rather than an hour on the elliptical or 90 minutes of writing.

My body has been recalcitrant for a long time. It's hard to frame this suitably: I've never had anything the least bit life-threatening, nor even anything so immediately unpleasant as migraines, and the only meds I take regularly are for allergies. But on the other hand, I've never been very tough, either. When ADM says, "My digestive system seems more sensitive. I can’t drink as much as I used to be able to—and especially not if I want to avoid a hangover," I think, well, I've never been able to drink enough to have a hangover: I get sick long before drinking hangover-worthy quantities. And my digestive system has been sensitive since I was around 13, and since my mid-30s I've had to be very careful about, oh, let's call them "lifestyle issues." What I mean is, skipping the gym or powering through the day on caffeine are both right out, for me. I have to exercise and do yoga every day, and I have to limit caffeine severely, in order to remain functional. In some ways, I have the body of a person much older than I am; but since I've been dealing with this for over 10 years already, the "normal" aging issues just aren't hitting me that hard. (Knock on wood.)

So this is why I, personally, insist on that little-bit-every-day thing. The body is no better at coping with insane schedules and ridiculous amounts of work than it is with running an actual marathon. The metaphorical sprint wasn't really my thing even as an undergraduate. I've never been any good at pulling all-nighters. Even when I write at the last minute, I've been thinking and outlining for a long time. I can come up with a sprint every now and then if I really, really have to—or maybe I mean I can run if I really, really have to—but the rest of the time I want to be on the elliptical trainer instead of stressing my ankles and knees. The physical consequences of overwork are, indeed, very real.

Certainly I have days that fill up with teaching and meetings. It would be easy not to write on those days. It would be easy not to exercise, too. But I know how awful I'll feel if I don't at least go for a walk and do some stretching, and I know how much harder it will be to start in again on the writing if I take 2-3 days off. And I know it'll be easier to get through the meetings and the classes if I do some "actual real work" in the morning, before all the rest of the world starts demanding things of me.

This may also have something to do with what people think of as "actual real work." I am a conscientious teacher and committee member, but I am not gifted at either teaching or administration. Research is what I love, the reason I'm here and not working as a tax accountant on the west coast. I don't get to do it full time, but if I didn't do it at all I would be very unhappy. I am, at best, at mid-career: maybe a bit later than mid-. If I'm going to do something about what I love, it has to happen now. Today, and every day. A sentence at a time. Love has to manifest as commitment.

400th post

2011-09-19T08:08:00.002-05:00

I guess I'm a slow worker, considering I've had this blog for four years next month and am just getting to my 400th post. On the other hand, look how consistent I am: still here, and apparently a pretty consistent blogger. Even if I don't post frequent updates, I haven't taken many long breaks, either, and the ones I do take usually happen because I'm traveling and don't have good access to the internet.

Anyway, happy 400th to me! I'd like to start off the week on a celebratory note, because I feel like I'm running way behind with a lot of things. I had a fun weekend (long walk on a beautiful day, with friends; dinner out; read The Magician King, which I liked better than The Magicians, though I still don't like Fillory and still think Quentin is a wanker), did a little laundry and a couple of other minor household tasks. Like, a normal person's weekend. Only I'm not really a normal worker, so I'm worried about starting the week with undone tasks I would like to have finished already, especially because I will spend most of today in meetings.

Things will get done because they have to. I'll manage. But I wish I could settle into a rhythm here. We're four weeks into the term, and I still can't get used to this teaching schedule. I thought it would be great, but never underestimate the disruptive power of change, even a good change. Teaching two days in a row at the beginning of the week is not something I have ever done, and so I keep being surprised that I have to go in on Tuesday, and that Wednesday isn't Friday or Saturday, and so on. When will I get used to this?

All right. On to the next thing. I hereby wish my readers a happy or at least decent Monday; good luck with your lists, your classes, and your writing!

(Cross-posting)

2011-09-16T10:43:00.002-05:00

I've just reported on progress and commented about pacing to Another Damned Notorious Writing Group, but as usual, thinking about writing in one venue makes me want to pick up the theme elsewhere, as well.

The Shakespearean Heroine's middle-of-the-night drama meant that I had a couple of days this week when I didn't manage to write. First I was completely exhausted from being up most of the night, and just gave up on everything except meeting my classes that day. The next day I was still rather tired, and focused on exercise and catching up on non-writing activities, though I did round up a replacement letter-writer, so that at least moved the project forward.

I really like the goal of moving forward in baby steps every day: if all you can do is write one sentence and edit another, hey, that's a new sentence and an improved sentence, and you're keeping in touch with the project and what it needs, and it's infinitely better than nothing, and maybe tomorrow will be better.

Reflecting on turning a chapter description into a conference abstract: this was weird. The description was based on my Main Points and Thesis work. It had an argument. But the argument fit into the shape of the whole book* as it is currently planned. It did not stand alone. I re-wrote it. I didn't like it. I let it sit, and thought about what is special and useful about this chapter if you haven't read the rest of the book. The solution came to me while I was thinking and doing other things at the same time, which may be a first: I have never been one of those people who can work out problems while running or whatever. I need paper or a screen. But maybe the trick is to have a tidy problem to work on, which I feel I often don't. Anyway, once I knew where to start, the abstract was easy-peasy, and I liked that draft right away.

For the next couple of weeks I am not going to be able to work on the chapter that is my goal for the fall edition of ADNWG (Another Damned Notorious Writing Group, and that's the last time I'm writing that out in full). The book project is the base for a fellowship application, and I have to work on that and on a sample chapter, which chapter is going to have to be the most complete to date, in other words, the first one I wrote, back in July. I knew it would need revisions, and made notes to myself about what it would require (turn this section around so you lead with the discovered mini-thesis! and so on). But I blithely ignored a major textual controversy. Oops. I knew about it; but I was away from my books, writing from notes, and I didn't think it would prove to be so important as I now realize it is. It will make the chapter more interesting, but also more of a challenge to revise quickly. Probably I will continue to do a certain amount of finessing the topic, as in asserting that for this draft I'm just using MS Z and later I will explain the reasons for preferring Z to X and what the various claims of Z and X are.

Grading will commence. Class prep will continue. Committee reading will get heavier. I will keep feeding cats and exercising myself, and somehow the writing will get written.

*the whole book: how cool is it that about six weeks ago I was queasily wondering if this article might be a book, and now I'm casually saying things like "the shape of the whole book as it is currently planned"?

And once again . . .

2011-09-13T03:36:00.002-05:00

Why, when a cat has what we may euphemistically term a problem in the middle of the night, a problem that involves the humans' bed, is the alternate mattress pad always already awaiting its turn to be laundered?

Some families

2011-09-12T00:15:00.003-05:00

"Oh, God, if you could just see my brothers, you'd see what a refinement it is for you to spend time missing [your sister]. Christ, why do you all have such marvellous relatives and wives and husbands to worry about? Why didn't I have a few, just a few?"

Margaret Drabble, Jerusalem the Golden

How mean am I?

2011-09-09T08:27:00.002-05:00

My Chaucer classes seem to expect the worst. I assigned each of them a pilgrim, in the General Prologue, to read particularly carefully, get to know, report on, write a paper about, what-have-you. This is, I believe, a not-uncommon approach to teaching the Canterbury Tales.

Both sections (even though after the first I re-organized the way I presented the assignment to try to avoid this), both sections I say, seemed to believe I was assigning them to go off and read the pilgrim's tale. On their own. In Middle English. By next week.

Here I've been bending over backwards to introduce Middle English slowly, gradually, with lots of help and scaffolding, with little bites of text carefully analyzed to show them how it works. Why, why would I suddenly throw them into . . . not just the deep end, but the cold salt storm-whipped sea?

I doubt it's that they feel ready for scuba diving. They were worried about the quiz they had just taken. The quiz that was entirely based on the practice quizzes from class, which were posted to Blackboard, and which I had suggested they might want to review before the real quiz. I guess anxiety feeds on itself.

But should I keep trying to reassure them, or should I just revel in this apparent carte blanche to be the Mean Prof?

Done!

2011-09-07T14:55:00.002-05:00

I finished the not-so-small task and sent it off to another team member today. My thoughtful estimate of the time it would take (as opposed to my initial off-the-cuff and off-the-mark guesstimate) was exactly right. I thought I would finish and send tomorrow, and if I had stuck to my plan of how much to do each day, I would have . . . but when I finished this morning's stint, knowing I was so close to being done, I went back to it this afternoon. It feels good to get it done.

Since the reward for a job well done is another job, I'll have something else to work on in tomorrow's writing time. I am trying to clear out several tasks not related to the article-turning-book project, so I can focus properly on that. Soon, soon.

A question: when you ask someone to write a recommendation letter for you, how long is it polite to wait for an answer? I know this is a busy time of year. That's why, if people are going to say no, I'd like them to say it so I can give other people a decent amount of lead time. Is a week enough time to think?

I can't leave it alone . . .

2011-09-05T15:17:00.003-05:00

I'm always grumbling about things in the Wall Street Journal, usually (to be fair) items on the op-ed page. This time, it's a letter in Saturday's issue. And yes, I do feel like I belong in this XKCD cartoon.

The letter (in response to something about higher education that I don't remember) recounts the recent interaction of a college junior majoring in English with the old fart who wrote the letter. He said he was an English major 50 years ago, and his favorite author was Faulkner. "What did he write?" asked the college junior. The old fart was shocked, and did not ask who her favorite author might be.

The encounter was related, apparently, as an illustration of the Dire State of ~~Kids These Days~~ Higher Education.

Dude. She's a college junior. She's twenty, or thereabouts. How much of the whole of English and American literature had you read at 20?* Maybe she's heard of Faulkner but isn't quite sure she's not mixing him up with someone else and would rather ask than start talking about the possible mix-up. Some 20-year-olds don't like embarrassing themselves by getting something wrong. Maybe she's been studying British literature so far, and will get to American authors next year. Maybe if you actually talked to her about her favorites, and your favorites, you might discover a new-to-you author you might enjoy reading, and maybe you could even tell her what you like about Faulkner and get her interested enough to either take a class or read him on her own. But no, you have to get all huffy and write to the WSJ instead of thinking about the value of reading different things, and, you know, using your education to expand your mind and the minds of others.

*And if you try telling me you knew it all at 20, I am getting in my time machine and going back to quiz you about Piers Plowman.

Like it? or lump it?

2011-09-01T00:02:00.002-05:00

This week (so far) I'm doing better by research and writing than last week, and I'm not so tired. I've used tricks like setting up my desk the night before with the materials I will need in the morning, and leaving myself a note with precise goals to meet, and reading a little bit in some "inspirational" writing book in the evening, to psych myself up.

But, really, though I enjoy such books and have a fairly extensive collection, some of them must be taken with a grain of salt. Or maybe not taken at all. Paul Silva, for example, says at the end of his book, “Writing a lot will not make you enjoy writing or want to write. Writing is hard and it will always be hard; writing is unpleasant and it will always be unpleasant” (130).

Jeez, Paul, speak for yourself. Or even, if you must, for psychologists, though I have trouble believing everyone in the field feels that way. I enjoy writing. I want to write regularly, I get grumpy and anxious when I can't write steadily, and (within reason) the more I write, the more I want to write. I don't mean going on binges, I just mean that if I put in fifteen minutes, I want to go for an hour, and if I write an hour a day, I'm happier if I can get to two hours. I don't think I need more than that on a regular basis. Sometimes writing is hard, for me, but really the hard part is organizing and working out an argument, which I don't think of as writing, but as thinking. Producing words, once I know where I'm going, is easy and pleasant. Editing is enjoyable.

So the mild pleasure and interest that Boice advocates is my natural state. For me, then, if I "don't feel like" writing, or am procrastinating or anxious, it's a sign that something is wrong. And I think it is worth figuring out what the problem is, rather than ignoring it.

Often, though not invariably, my problem is time management gone wrong. Today, for instance, I had a lot of trouble getting started on what I thought was a smallish task I had been putting off for no good reason. Well, okay, it seemed that the reason might be anxiety that a co-writer would think I was stupid. But once I got started, I quickly realized that this is not such a small task. It's not huge, but it does need about 6 hours and is really three separate-but-related tasks, not a single one-hour piece of work.

As soon as I figured that out and had a plan to tackle the work in an appropriate way, all the anxiety vanished, and I happily got on with things. The problem wasn't really feeling stupid, or fearing my co-writer's opinion; that's just a sort of reflex to "explain" anxiety in a plausible way. At some level, I think I knew that my one-hour estimate was wrong, but I hadn't considered the matter closely enough to be consciously aware of how far off I was. The anxiety is a symptom, not the disease.

I know Z is with me on pacing, planning, and work as a pleasurable part of a life. Writing is not the problem. Other things cause problems with writing. Sometimes, as when my mother was very ill, there is nothing much to be done about the problem except push it aside during writing time. But with tractable problems, it seems to me much better to work out what they are and then address them, so I can get back to working contentedly.

Are Z and I the only heretics who think writing is easy and publishing is fun?

One down, 14 to go

2011-08-26T14:25:00.003-05:00

I am so wiped out. I know, it's not digging ditches or removing trash, but teaching produces its own particular kind of exhaustion. Especially during the first week or two, when I've been enjoying a fairly solitary life most of the time since mid-May. So! many! people! and they all seem to want something.

They're good people. I think I'll have good classes. It's just that there are so many of them, and I am the complete opposite of gregarious. The students seem good-natured, with no obvious problem children among them; at the second class meeting, people had either the books or photocopies, an excellent sign of preparedness and commitment. It's true I can tell who knows how to study a language, and who does not. I will have to give more recommendations on how to learn (internalize, commit to memory) Middle English pronouns and verb endings, because I think some people just look at the tables and move on. But the self-corrected practice quizzes should make clear to them (I hope) that they'll have to do more work.

I think the students are having fun, which is good, because I've worked hard at figuring out how to teach ME as if it were a living language (never having taught a foreign language, let alone had pedagogical training in how to do so), and written a lot of dialogues and so on from scratch. So I hope this works. I think some of the fatigue comes from doing a New Thing, and some is from the intense interaction that language teaching seems to require. I am feeling a lot of sympathy for (and considerable awe of) Z.

And some of it is scheduling. Like Dr. Crazy, I have a night class (I nearly always have a night class) and then teach again the next day. I'm not 'on' as early as she is, but I don't think she has my commute, either. And in any case, if you are not a night person, night classes are their own special brand of hell, for you have to get jazzed up enough to be an energetic teacher at a time when you want to be winding down, and then you stay jazzed up because of the teaching buzz long after you would like to be in bed. And this goes on week after week, unlike the occasional social event that seems worth staying up for. I read the advice at Dr. Crazy's place hopefully, but I have never found that any amount of rituals (or drinks) help. It's like the common cold, in that it lasts seven days if you treat it and a week if you don't. The only thing that helps is allowing the requisite amount of time to pass. The rituals (or drinking) are just something to do so you feel like you're doing something while the time passes.

It'll get better. I'll get used to being with people more. We'll move on from intense language study into literary analysis. I'll get to know the students so the interactions won't be with complete strangers. I'll reconsider my schedule and figure out what I can manage and what has to change. I'll eat more chocolate.

Planning

2011-08-23T07:29:00.002-05:00

Although I keep trying to focus on a single project at a time, the Octopus Touch remains in full force. Or maybe it's just that my ideas breed like rabbits, and then grow like weeds, so that (for instance) I start with a conference paper to revise into an article, and wind up with a book-in-progress and a fellowship application to base on the project, in addition to other projects that began as conference papers and need to develop further.

I know: I should just say no to conferences. But I keep having bright ideas that I want to do something with. My ideas and papers are, at least, on closely related topics, and contribute to a reputation as an expert in a particular area. Or will, when I get the blasted rabbits caught, spitted, cooked and served up. Ugh: no wonder I don't like these writing metaphors. I can't imagine eating rabbit, any more than I could eat cat. But really, what else do you do with rabbits? OK, comb them for fur and make Angora sweaters. My brain as sweater factory; fuzzy ideas; no wonder I have these problems. Maybe I should go back to the "growing like weeds" idea.

So anyway, given the list of things I have in hand, I've been trying to set weekly goals for both research and teaching, for the semester. I've got through the first three weeks, things like "get coherent chapter outline to send to recommenders" (it can be edited and polished later, but I need to give people time to sit with it) and "give one 'practice quiz' to be graded in class, then collected and checked for participation credit." As I work later in the term, it will be things like "work on project X for 2 hours," where I'll have to determine later what that work should be, and "grade 20 papers." I'm hoping this will keep me focused.

I talked with a friend yesterday about this, who couldn't believe I was planning so closely—"I've been flying by the seat of my pants the whole time I've been here!" (not a short time, either). I did not say "How's that working out for you?" though I admit the phrase crossed my mind.

Instead, I said, "So have I, and I'm not really happy with how that's going. Also, I'm going to be teaching pretty much for 21 months straight unless I get that fellowship, which I don't want to plan on, so I won't have big chunks of time in which I can get caught up on things I put aside. I need to keep the momentum going even while I'm teaching."

I'm not sayin' . . .

2011-08-20T16:15:00.004-05:00

If you work in a place that emphasizes openness, transparency, playing-by-the-rules, is it harder to get people to stand for election to personnel committees, chairships, and directors of this or that? It seems to me that unless you manage to hire people with a strong public-service ethic, or unless you can offer significant financial or other incentives, it might be more difficult to get people to volunteer for jobs that are known to be thankless. Committees are probably less onerous, and more likely to get people simply rotating through, but directorships where the director has responsibility without power . . . well, really, who'd want to be responsible yet powerless?

In a cutthroat department that plays favorites, then, there is an obvious reason to volunteer for committees and to try to become a director or chair: you can protect yourself and your friends, and take revenge on your enemies. I'm not saying I want to work in such a place, mind you. I'm just sayin'.

Updated to add: Dr. Cleveland discussed what's-in-it-for-me here.

And we're off . . .

2011-08-19T08:21:00.003-05:00

Faculty meeting, scanning, picking up a graduate exam to read, making copies, returning books, pulling books for reserves, such is the day ahead of me. I have turned in one syllabus, just minutes ago, though I can see that the other is going to get done over the weekend, and I have written 340 words.

I wish I didn't always revise my syllabi. Given the number of times I have taught Chaucer, you'd think I could just re-use one of the dozen or so old ones. But no, I always have to tinker. This year, we're starting with intensive language work, so the first three weeks need a lot of revision (and extra handouts and exercises, as well). After that the class will look a little more like past versions, but I'm still swapping a couple of Tales around, and the books are different, and I'm sure I'll think of some other things to mess with while I'm at it this weekend.

Of course I wish I'd done this long ago. I did start thinking about it long ago. But I wrote 15,000 words of what is going to be a monograph this summer. I haven't exactly been . . . no, actually, I have been, precisely, sitting on my ass. It's just that I was applying ass to chair in order to produce those words, not to produce an undergraduate syllabus.

A teaching thought

2011-08-16T21:46:00.002-05:00

In my next-to-last post, I wrote "This is also making me think I have to do more to encourage my students with their writing. I try to do this, of course; but it's so easy to point out problems, and harder to cheer them on, especially when cheering results in questions like 'if I'm doing so well, why is this a C?' How do you come up with encouraging comments that don't imply you give A's for effort?"

Maybe I should divide my classes into small groups that are supposed to be writing groups, and give them the rules that my RL group uses (first round is clarification questions, second round is saying something you liked about the piece, third round is answering the writer's own questions), and get them to do the encouraging. Or let them form their own groups. Or just have them use the groups to set goals and comment on what helped them to meet their goals and where they had problems. This could be done online, via Blackboard say, so I could keep an eye on things; or I could have them meet in class for a few minutes every few weeks.

I do not have "peer review" in mind. Just encouraging the act of writing, without getting into the A-for-effort trap.

This just occurred to me a few hours ago, so I haven't really thought through how it might work and what the pitfalls could be. Any thoughts from my Gentle Readers?

Mirabile dictu

2011-08-15T14:30:00.002-05:00

So the August thrash has paid off, possibly literally! Because I was stiff from sitting at my desk for a long time, I got up for a physical task: pulling from my shelves library books that I am going to return (yep, decided that would be worthwhile). Among them is a book that went missing nine months ago. It is from another library. I have already paid a fine for it, because I hoped that if I did, the online check-out system would stop showing this book as overdue and with a fine owing (that did not work, though the check cleared months ago). So now, if I return the book, and start sending letters and making phone calls, maybe I can get the fine refunded. Honestly, I'm not 100% sure it's worth the trouble, but I might be able to convince myself to do it if I get to spend the money (if I get it back) on either shoes or books.

I would still like to know what happened to the other book from the same library that went missing at the same time. I did not find it on my shelves. The found one has a spine title that is really the series title: no wonder I couldn't find it when I looked for its individual title.

So the other good news is that now I have space on my shelves that I can use for piles that are presently on my desk. Not that the desk is cleared yet; one thing at a time. It's August. I'm thrashing. I'm writing two blog posts in the space of a few hours instead of continuing to create a new spreadsheet for a conference paper for next spring, or working on syllabi, or going to the gym, or phoning my dentist.

The bad news is that I have piles of books on the floor, because before returning them I want to be certain that books I think I will need again when I return to the Old Current Project (jeebus: I hereby re-christen that thing the Macedonian Marginalia Project, MMP for short) or to the previous Putative Book project (MaryAnn Ginger! the Big Volume on a Manuscript, or BVM, how's that?), anyway, I say, I want to be sure those books are noted in the appropriate notes, bibliography, or "dump file," especially those that are somehow obscure, or came to me via ILL, so I can get them back easily. And no, I will not re-write that sentence. Also I want to be certain that I have sorted out the ILL books from the home library books, so I get receipts for the ILL ones. Would someone please check back with me in a week's time, to see if I have in fact taken the minimal notes and returned the books? Just leave a comment. If you want to be sure to get my attention, leave a comment on a post more than 2 weeks old, and then I'll have to moderate it.

What I learned

2011-08-15T12:00:00.003-05:00

Notorious asked what we learned about writing, this summer. I missed this when I added my comment about progress, and I could use a topic for a post, so I'm just going to answer this here.

1. I learned how useful it is to think about interim lengths of time. Not a whole year, not even a whole semester. And not this week, or this month. Twelve weeks is an interesting amount of time. Maybe if you're on the quarter system, it seems more natural. But except for two-three years long ago, I've spent my life on fifteen-weeks-plus-finals semesters. Twelve weeks out of the summer makes it clear there is some time off. Twelve weeks out of a semester leaves some time to deal with end-of-term grading.

I think I might actually like to think in ten-week increments. Maybe I'm just being contrary. But a few years ago, when visiting family, I met a woman who had a "focus group" that met regularly: it was about 10 women, who would meet to set goals that they would try to accomplish over 10 weeks. There were, I think, intermediate check-ins (I'm not sure if these were in-person, via e-mail or phone, or in small groups), and at the end of the ten weeks there would be a party where everyone brought food and they celebrated what they had achieved. They did three or four ten-week attacks on goals over the course of a calendar year, with time off around holidays and in the summer, when people were likely to be busy or travelling.

My first thought about this was how strange it seemed, since I was so used to dividing my life into these 16-week segments, two semesters, and the summer. But then I started thinking about the usefulness of having an alternate rhythm, a counterpoint to the academic calendar. I think it could be very helpful to have such a group. I've thought about trying to set one up IRL, but haven't got around to it. Even without the actual group meeting in real time, though, some shorter (but not too short) time divisions in my life could be helpful.

2. Other people in the writing group said it, too: it's very helpful to have to check in, and to know that other people are struggling with similar problems: how to get down to work, whether it's okay to count organizing time as contributing to writing, recovering from the problems of OBE. I like to think of myself as an introvert, and it's pretty plain that I'm not gregarious, but I've done as much as I have this summer (about 10K words toward a book, and a conference paper, and some translation), because of the support of two online writing groups and one real-life one. I love feeling that I have company. Partly it's that the company replaces the discouraging voices in my head. And it is wonderful to get encouragement from other writers. (This is also making me think I have to do more to encourage my students with their writing. I try to do this, of course; but it's so easy to point out problems, and harder to cheer them on, especially when cheering results in questions like "if I'm doing so well, why is this a C?" How do you come up with encouraging comments that don't imply you give A's for effort?)

3. I was reminded of how much gets done in regular work sessions. I know this, of course. But knowing it is one thing, and seeing it happen day after day is something else.

4. I learned that it really does pay off to work on outlining, focus, thesis, and topic sentences. Writing is easy, for me. If you give me a topic and half an hour, I'll give you 500 words on the topic. They may include some plot summary; they may not be well-organized; but I can most certainly deliver 500 words. This is both good and bad. The good is probably obvious. The downside is that I am often tempted just to keep producing words on related topics, without figuring out what I'm doing. Then at some point I'm struggling to find the pony in a vast heap of manure, juggling pages of printout and crossing out whole paragraphs, underlining the few bits that look like argument, turning (where possible) to a trusted friend who is brilliant at figuring out what I really ought to be saying. This friend's complicated life means I'm having to think for myself quite a lot more, which is a good thing. Apparently I can come up with an argument when I'm forced to (and after a certain amount of pre/free-writing). The topic sentences I came up with for my summer article are working as thesis statements for chapters. They will undoubtedly undergo revision as the project develops, but they are very, very, very helpful, as are the other entries in the outline I devised for this project. With these, I can sit down and give you 500 useful words.

So despite the pressure I feel to "keep writing," sometimes the most important thing is to stop writing and start thinking. Z of course said this long ago. (I can't find the exact post: it was about planning her dissertation carefully, then writing one page a day, and being done in a year. But here and here are related and interesting posts.)

5. (added as an update) I am motivated to do things early. Way early. The closer a deadline comes, the more I panic and struggle. If I ever knew this about myself, I forgot, because of living a life in which deadlines cascaded. But I found this summer that I love getting things done early. Back in July, I turned in a manuscript review a month early, and now I am thanking my Earlier Self for getting that done. It was rather fun at the time; it would be a drag now. There are other things I wish I had done earlier in the summer (syllabi!), and a thing I did just this morning that was due today; but at least, keeping in mind the deadline, I got it in by noon instead of close of business, and it's off my plate. I expect there will still be problems with deadlines in my life, but I am going to try to apply this discovery in as many ways as I can, and hope that with time, I will clear out all the past-due stuff and move to doing as much as possible well in advance, like Jonathan. Of course this will not stop me having to read committee documents at the last minute, because other people will still turn things in as late as possible; but at least I will not be reading committee homework at the last minute when I meant to be using the same minute for other work.

Yes, I can tell the semester hasn't started yet, because I am full of good intentions.

Weeding is FUNdamental

2011-08-11T21:52:00.003-05:00

Morning writing time today went on the incredibly overgrown garden. I didn't exactly mean to do that, but such is oh-shit-it's-August syndrome. I took my tea outside to get the paper, and pulled a couple of weeds, and it was so nice out (yes, nice! not hot! not cold! pleasant!) that I did a few more, and I thought, well, twenty minutes or so and then I'll go write. There were a lot of weeds with obnoxious roots that wanted to break off, so I was about to stop when I hit a damper patch where they came out easily, so I kept going.

Eighty minutes and a backache later . . . it was clearly breakfast time for me and the cats. And then yoga. And then a vet appointment. And a scheduled House Maintenance Thing. Then I dashed off for my last chance at seeing a friend in a performance.

Tomorrow night there will be a different friend, in a different kind of performance. Opportunities like this are why I live here and not within walking distance of campus; but they are definitely disruptive to work, too.

But the most overgrown part of the garden is 3/5 improved. It's actually easier and quicker to pull out the big weeds that are there now than it was to deal with the smaller ones that were there before I went to England. Another reason to procrastinate! Woot! Wait till you have big easy problems instead of small difficult ones!

Wait, what?

Anyway. This means that tomorrow I have to get some mulch, to stop (or at least slow) the cycle of weeding and not-weeding.

Syllabus. Book. If I wait, will they turn into big easy problems?

August syndrome

2011-08-08T13:08:00.004-05:00

Over at ADM's new blog some charming people enjoyed my reference to "oh-shit-it's-August syndrome," and two weeks ago Notorious wrote about not panicking, so now I'm going to do my own post about the syndrome, and panic, and lists . . . (wait a minute while I freak out, which is what the syndrome is all about).

OK, so there's what I really have to do, and there's what I really want to do, and there are all those things that I thought I'd like to get done but need to let go of. And then there's the question of whether some elements of the last group don't actually belong there.

It's August. Classes start in two weeks, with faculty meetings beforehand. Besides writing and class prep and having some last bits of summer fun, I have a couple of medical appointments I'm taking care of before classes start, and possibly one or more dentist appointments depending on whether a sensitive spot calms down or gets worse. (If it's going to get worse, I wish it would just come on and do it already, instead of waiting for the first or second day of classes.) I'm pretty clear on the have-to (syllabi etc, and at least one House Thing) and the most definite want-to (a little more fun reading and a sewing project).

But then there are writing-related but not-writing activities, which are desirable but not really essential, like tidying up my home office. It's workable right now. It's not fabulous. There are heaps of books on my desk. There are more library books on the shelves than I really need right now, especially if I'm mainly focusing on the article that wants to be a monograph. There is a heap of paper stuff that needs to get filed. But all of these are fairly normal procedure, really, and I am working. Since I got back (not counting writing done on the plane), I've produced . . . let's see . . . Basement Cat, get off my research journal . . . about 2000 words. These are what I might call "focused pre-writing," rather than true rough-draft writing, because the section presently under construction didn't get as much pre-writing as the first chunk I wrote. But that's fine. This stage of writing has to happen sometime, and I might as well do it now, while I'm on a roll.

Anyway. Clearly I am managing to work. OTOH, the desk where I worked at the Wilde Wommene's Colony for Enditers was truly spare. I thought it was actually a little intimidating: no friendly heaps of books, no way to look things up! But I sure got a lot done while I was there. That might just be because of the lack of distractions in the way of cats and household stuff, and because "chapter one" had received more pre-writing, so I had a lot to work with. Nonetheless, you know how writers are magical thinkers, and have to have their Special Writing Clothing, or Special Pen, or Special Coffee Mug? Right. I am wondering if I would do better to have my Specially Cleared Desk.

Certainly I could return some books that are meant for last year's Current Project (which really needs a better name). The only reason I don't is that it's a bit of a hassle to get the interlibrary loan ones back again. But that doesn't sound like such a good reason, really. If I sent some books to their natural habitats, I could get the heaps off my desk, and maybe be a bit more organized with the current current projects, including class plans.

So is working on my only-manageably-cluttered study a good use of my time that will pay off in greater efficiency down the road, or is it a piece of magical thinking that I should let go of in favor of writing syllabi, working on my sewing project, and hacking back the horribly overgrown and weedy garden? Actually, I am terribly tempted to abandon the garden until frost kills off some stuff—this seasonal nonsense is good for something!—though I do rather fear What The Neighbors Will Think. And, come to think about it, for optimal sewing enjoyment the study-clearing would also be a good thing, because there might then be room to set up the machine in here and not clutter the living room with it. I could give up on the sewing and garden instead . . . if we ever get a cool enough day that I want to be outside.

Thrashing. It's what oh-shit-it's-August syndrome is all about.

People I'm not

2011-08-06T09:07:00.002-05:00

Obviously there are loads of people I'm not. For starters, I'm neither Ralph nor Tony. I'm thinking more about people I might have been, people I went to school with, where I don't quite see how I turned out to be me and not them. I already found that a college friend of mine teaches third grade; Lady Maud told me that my childhood best friend is a teacher in the school one of her kids attended last year. And that a junior-high and high school sort of friend, sort of rival, earned a Ph.D. but never found a job and is now changing careers.

I don't know why this makes me wonder . . . not exactly about paths not taken, but about luck, I guess, escape by the skin of my teeth. I had one job offer, and I took it. I refused to limit my search geographically. I did something "right." Who knows what? Lady Maud pointed out that I never wanted to work with children. Yeah, but assorted people in my immediate family were elementary school teachers, and my mother wanted me to stay near her, and teaching school was a very suitable job for a young woman (more suitable than graduate school), and why didn't I succumb to social and familial expectations?

Maud laughed at me. To other people, I guess I look(ed) like a determined go-getter who was not going to let anyone else's expectations define me.

I'm glad it looked good. It felt totally terrifying. I went abroad, I went to grad school, because I had to get out of where I was. But I did not act out of a cheerful spirit of adventure. It looked like determination and felt like desperation, and it was surely through some undeserved act of grace that graduate school suited me so well. And my rival-friend had so much more cultural capital than I did, back in high school . . . time has probably erased many of the differences I saw then, but in our teens, they were real. I know what she wrote on, and that she finished (maybe started?) later than I did; I don't know what her geographical or other constraints may have been. She could have been me. I could have been her. And I wonder what similar ghosts haunt other academics. Do we all carry around the albatrosses of the people we avoided becoming? Maybe some of us wish we'd been them, instead of being where and what we are.

Writing retreat

2011-08-04T09:46:00.002-05:00

My good friend and most gracious lady, Queen Joan, whom I have oft attended when she did make a royal progress, recently requested the presence of myself and my old friend Lady Maud at the Biona Camp for Wilde Wommene and Colony of Enditers, where we did disport us most marvellously well.

And where I wrote about 5000 words, in less than a week, plus did some work on the translation project, and all quite painlessly.

My friends did not mind if I went to bed early. I got up around 6:30, when it got light, made a cup of tea, and went to a desk that had been cleared for me. I worked till around 9:00, when Joan and Maud were up, and then we'd have breakfast and do yoga together. Afternoons were spent at the beach or a park, before dinner out. In the evenings, we worked on a jigsaw puzzle. Hanging out and catching up was blissful.

There were no cats. The social life was built in, and took place in the afternoons and early evenings, instead of keeping me out late. Moreover, it did not involve discussion of movies and TV shows that I haven't seen and am not interested in. There were no household distractions (call here, arrange that, get the other fixed) because it wasn't my house. I went to my desk with a sense of pleasurable anticipation, eager to discover what that day's work would bring.

Now, I love my cats, but they are a total pain in the ass in the morning, wanting to be fed as soon as I wake up, and if I don't do it, Basement Cat will start banging cupboard doors, which wakes Sir John, and picking fights with the Grammarian, and so on and so forth. So when I work early in the mornings at home, it's with one ear straining first for the pathetic cries of a black cat who can't bear to be locked up any longer, and then for the hissing and grumbling from downstairs, and then I have to go close the bathroom door to stop the cupboard-banging. All four get different things for breakfast, because the Grammarian has kidney problems and the Tiny Cat has vitamins mixed in with her food and the Shakespearean Heroine gets other stuff mixed in for her joint problems. Basement Cat gets Prozac on his. So it's not a matter of just putting out more kibble and getting on with things. Breakfast is a production, and flings me into housekeeping-caretaking mode.

I'm still working, now that I'm back, but a little more slowly and with rather more grim determination than pleasurable anticipation. Intense nostalgia for the break and deep gratitude to Queen Joan set in about ten minutes after I woke up yesterday.

What's the test?

2011-08-01T09:55:00.002-05:00

Nicoleandmaggie asked "Is there a test you can take to see if you're with book or not?"

This is precisely the question I have. How do you know when you're writing a book?

I haven't done this before. I did not turn my dissertation into a book. It was conceived as a series of linked studies, discussions of the way a single theme worked in multiple texts. I mined it for articles (one good one, part of another, one bad one that never got published), and got tenure by writing articles. I'm not exactly an article-producing machine, but I do have a good idea of how to write an article and what one looks like.

Over the years, I have planned two books (two different takes on the main idea, since there came a point where it seemed the first version wouldn't work), and worked on them in fits and starts: a conference paper here, another there, chapter "dump files" on my laptop into which I put quotations and insights I hope to use in that chapter. These files are not even zero-drafts, just a place to collect bits and pieces. For the last couple of years, I have been trying to clear the decks of various articles in various stages of production so that I could stop being distracted by such unfinished material and work on the latest version of the Putative Book as my sole project.

So this summer's article project was supposed to be part of that deck-clearing. I did not expect a conference paper to turn monograph-sized. But having finished writing up the first section of my outline and coming in around 6000 words this morning, either I am being incredibly long-winded, or I'm looking at a longer project.

Five chapters of around 6000 words each would be 30K words. I'm looking a friend's monograph, 128 pages before the notes and bibliography. Assuming 250 words to a page, that's 32K words. I think I'm in that ballpark.

So what's the test? How do you tell? How and when did you, gentle readers who have written books, know that that was what you were doing?

5000 words

2011-07-31T11:58:00.003-05:00

Some bits are still long quotations that can be cut/massaged/edited. Some bits are notes to myself (what was the status of the duchy of Lorraine at this time?). But it's 5000 words. And I'm still not done with the first section, though I am getting close.

All week I've been feeling a queasy mixture of dismay and excitement. Is it . . . ? Could I be . . .? I didn't think . . . . Was it when . . . ? It might be fun to . . . . After all, lots of people manage it. . . . I just didn't imagine it this way, right now . . . but, really, it is exciting!

There's no official confirmation yet (it may still be too early for that), but I strongly suspect that I am With Book.

So far, so good

2011-07-28T10:43:00.002-05:00

Posting about work progress makes me a little nervous, because I fear I will jinx myself. But I'm now writing that essay I wanted to finish this summer, and in 4 days I've reached 2550 words. If I can keep producing at least 500 words a day, every day, I will have a full rough draft before classes start, and then I can edit and polish in daily sessions after teaching begins.

In fact, at the moment, I'm a little worried that the essay will keep growing at an excessive rate and turn into a monograph. That would not be the worst thing that could happen, obviously, though it would take longer to finish.

I'm telling myself to just keep doing the 500-600 words a day and we'll see what that produces by mid-August. If I hit 10,000 words and there's no end in sight, then that's one thing; but if at 10,000 words there's only one section left to write, then I'll just have to do some slashing and burning when I reach the editing stage.

I love getting the writing done. And I'm glad I took all the time to outline and take notes, because that's what makes it possible to pour out all these words.

Oxfam coincidences

2011-07-26T20:49:00.002-05:00

I'm sure no one remembers this post, or cares. But what I'm pretty sure was this book came into my hands in an Oxfam book shop in York. Of course I'd mis-remembered some details, and totally forgot the drunken writer. I probably imported some bits from other fluff I'd either looked at the night I didn't buy the book when it was new, or found elsewhere, or just thought would make a better story. After all, I decided not to buy the book when I first ran across it, and when the York copy came into my hands, I soon knew why: I can't read anything with basic punctuation errors of the sort I regularly and repetitiously explain to undergrads.

But it was in Oxfam, which is a good cause; I acquired it, read it in the tub to decompress from a very intense (and wonderful) conference, and left it behind. So it'll probably turn up back in the Oxfam shop soon enough.

Hmm. Maybe I should write the version I came up with.

Not-quite-random: books and writing update

2011-07-25T22:31:00.003-05:00

My missing book revealed itself. It was not, after all, at school. Once I got back from campus, I found it hiding among the books about medieval reading, on a shelf below one of its more plausible homes. I don't think there's any book-list application that will reveal where I've absent-mindedly put a book when it isn't where it ought to be. This is why I want space for a proper LC-ordered library (and time enough to get all the books labeled and organized), so I'll put books back where they belong in the system, rather than stuffing them where there's room on a subject-related shelf. Or, in this case, near a subject-related shelf.

I really would put them back. I'm a little obsessive about proper shelving, once books are visibly coded.

My RL writing group thinks well of my outlines for mini-essays in my summer project. This is encouraging.

They also think one of the mini-essays should be a full-size essay of its own. This is, at the moment, discouraging. I'm hoping to feel better about it soon. After all, I've already done a lot of research and some organizing for such an essay. It's not as if I'd be writing from scratch.

But I already have another spin-off from this summer's project. It's not so closely related, but it's more exciting. And I'm trying to clear the decks so I can write the Putative Book that has been haunting me for years now.

While I'm wishing for a bigger study, view of trees, etc., I wish the Writing Elves would stop by now and then. I know it's no good hoping. They're undoubtedly terrified of Basement Cat.

Dame Eleanor Hull to the Lordly Elves of Scrivening sends greeting! I would let you know that Basement Cat is shut in his own room at night, and my study is available to you. It is true that the Grammarian sometimes sleeps there, but he's much more gentle than BC, and really I'd be willing to shut all the cats out of my study if you'd come and help with all my projects. Or even one of them. Please let me know what I should leave for you in exchange: milk as for brownies' household help? Whisky? Coffee and cookies? Quill pens made from doves' feathers? Genuine linen paper? Silken cushions upon which to rest between sessions? Your wishes are my commands. I remain your most humble and well-wishing servant.

Who needs Prozac?

2011-07-23T15:01:00.002-05:00

Because of my carelessness, this morning Basement Cat got to eat all the kibble he wanted. This was quite a lot of kibble.

He has been remarkably sweet and placid all day.

Lest you think we have been starving him, he has been at a stable, healthy, vet-approved weight all his adult life. But his normal diet is canned food, and what he really loves is crunchies. We use kibble to reward him for good behavior and to lure him to his room at bedtime.

That may not work today.

It's not the first time I've wondered if it might be better to have a fat and happy cat than a healthy aggressive cat. The thing is, we had a diabetic cat once, and we don't want to go there again (especially because Basement Cat would likely be much less good about insulin shots than our former cat). Diabetes is commoner among cats, especially neutered males, than you might think.

Still . . . a placid Basement Cat is a different critter.

Writing groups redux

2011-07-23T09:45:00.002-05:00

A couple of years ago, I wrote about real-life writing groups. This summer, I'm involved in three different writing groups. The RL one is still going, though at least for the summer we've ditched the facilitator and are managing just fine on our own (and again, I wonder if getting us to that stage was one of the secret goals). There is one other person in that group who works on literature not so very far away from mine, and she and I can be very useful to each other as "real" readers, people who might run across each other's work as we do our own research. The others have no real clue about our topics, but the effort of answering their very basic questions often produces insights that are worth writing down.

Then there are two online groups, the Stupid Motivational Writing Group organized by Jonathan Mayhew, and the one organized by Notorious Ph.D. and ADM. Jonathan's just has members posting their weekly goals, and then reporting on how they did in the past week. The medievalists' group also does that, but in addition the hosts ask thought-provoking questions about writing-related topics: what you did when you got scooped, how to get back on track with a laid-aside project, how you like to organize your time.

All my groups are useful, in their different ways. Weekly check-ins are good. Though the RL group meets weekly, we rarely talk about goals; rather, we discuss whatever piece of writing was submitted for that week, and then whoever is up next briefly introduces what is to come. In that respect, it's product-oriented. So the Mayhew group is useful in clarifying what I want to do and making me face what happened if I haven't done it.

But the medievalists' group also has that aspect, plus it's more helpful to me because it is so social. This may be a gendered preference; when I talked about this with Sir John, he said men are more likely to be motivated by the threat of public humiliation if goals are not met, while he thinks women are more motivated by positive social interactions. What matters to me is that I "know" a lot of the people in the medievalists' group, some IRL, some through their blogs, and I made the acquaintance (whether virtually or RL) before the group started. So I care about their opinions; and I like hearing their responses to the questions (and those questions are a great way to get to know people I didn't know of before the group started); and I enjoy the feeling of having a lot of company as we work toward our summer goals. And ADM and Notorious are good about giving feedback, too. Even a brief acknowledgement of one's weekly comment is encouraging. Participants also interact with one another, offering advice on various topics, and I like that a lot.

The Mayhew group just doesn't have this sort of interaction. I "knew" a couple of people in it before it started, but not so well as I "knew" some of the participants in the other group. I've checked out the blogs of some Mayhew-groupers, when they have blogs; and I've tried to comment on other people's posts, to encourage some of the interaction that I like in the other group. But interaction isn't really happening. The group seems very impersonal. Now, this may be deliberate. It throws people back on their own resources, and I can see the ways that this is a good thing (as I wrote about all the meta-purposes I could see in my RL group, in the post cited above). Writers need to be resilient in various ways, and just as being able to dismiss some comments from my RL group makes me better able not to get bent out of shape about comments received from reviewers, being left alone with my writing (after check-in) may be good for me.

Still, I find it so encouraging to check back to people's comments in the group run by the medievalists. On a bad writing day, hearing what other people are achieving (or not) makes me want to emulate the currently happy writers, while it comforts me to know that they, too, had their bad weeks. I can easily believe that this is a gendered difference. The odd thing is that so often, I am a guy (don't ask for directions, more likely to offer advice than just to let someone vent, etc). So I find it strange that when it comes to writing, I'm a girl. If that's what it is.

Anyway, I want to thank all the organizers of writing groups. Clearly I find them useful or I wouldn't be signed up for three different ones! Thanks as well to all the participants who make the groups possible. If you don't have a writing group, allow me to encourage you to organize one; and if you do, I hope you'll find this post useful. Think about what kind of group you want, and how to achieve that.

Odi et volo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris*

2011-07-19T11:53:00.003-05:00

I hate it when my books go missing. I know I own a copy of On Arthurian Women—my book list attests to it (thanks, Laura), but it's not with the English Arthuriana, and not with the French Arthuriana, and not with the recent acquisitions that haven't been properly integrated into the larger collection. It's not in the piles around my desk, which I reduced considerably before going traveling. Possibly it's at school, because I did teach Arthurian lit this spring, but then why didn't I bring it home? And why can't I teleport my books back and forth? Why don't I at least have a web cam set up in my office so that I can scan it from here, instead of wondering for the next week whether I'll be able to find the blasted book in my office when I next go in? GRUMBLE grumble grumble. I had an idea, and I wanted to look into whether it was viable.

Oh, well, hey, if I used it to teach, maybe I made a PDF of the essay I wanted . . . yes, indeed I did. Ha. More ways than one to skin a cat. But I still need to remember to look for the book when I next go to campus.

Which brings me to what I want: a bigger study. Now, this is definitely a complaint from privilege. Since I finished grad school, I have always had a study, and I know this is not a luxury every scholar enjoys. In my condo, where my study was smaller than the present one, a male friend once visited and lamented that he would love to have so much space for his own work in his house. But he had children (and in the Bay Area, at that), so if he wasn't in the office, he worked at the kitchen table or on the couch.

Nevertheless, I still want. I want to have space to organize all of my books by LC number, in order, without banishing any to "oversize" or "undersize" shelves. I want space for shelves next to my desk where I can put the in-current-use books and have them immediately to hand when I'm writing an article. I want to have a separate table (or even a separate little room or nook) for the sewing machine and other hand-work supplies. I want to have less cat paraphernalia in my study. I want space for two desks (or one much bigger one) so that I can have a grading/teaching prep station and a research station set up simultaneously. If my study continues to do double duty as my dressing room, I want more space near the closet to keep accessories, so they aren't distributed between different rooms and perched on top of books. I want a space to stash the wastebasket where Basement Cat can't knock it over, instead of having to put it up on a shelf where he can't get at it! I want space for a comfy chair or futon couch, or maybe one of those zero-gravity chairs, so I can read more comfortably. And, as I have said before, I want one or more big windows that look out onto trees, and get a lot of natural light.

What do you long for in your work space (whether or not this is a realistic wish)?

*Paraphrase of Catullus's "odi et amo": "I hate and I love: perhaps you ask why I do this." He continues, "nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior," "I don't know, but I feel it happen, and I suffer." I memorized these lines long before I really learned Latin, because I ran across them as the epigram to something and found them so striking. Apologies to Catullus if I have mis-remembered.

Tour de Chat

2011-07-18T10:15:00.002-05:00

Since the big guys are taking the day off, I bring you this pre-recorded commentary on the highlights of last night's stage in the on-going Tour de Chat:

Basement Cat hit a fast pace right out of the starting zone, going straight up the Col de l'Escalier, followed by two laps around the bedrooms, including the Cat Four climbs of the Col du Lit Matrimoniale and Col du Futon. A daring descent of the Col de l'Escalier almost ended in disaster when he took the last corner a little too fast and came frighteningly close to the wall at the foot of the stairs, but he recovered and turned the corner into the last short descent before making up time in a rapid dash across the living room, completely ignoring the feed zone. He kept his cadence high in his ascent of the Hors Catégorie Col de l'Arbre du Chat and detoured onto the Boite de Carton before negotiating the highly technical descent of the Col de l'Arbre du Chat. He kept up the pace through the second climb of the Col de l'Escalier, descending rapidly and gracefully, and collapsed at the finish line in front of the rocking chair.

Unfortunately, the time-keepers were laughing too hard to record what was undoubtedly a personal best for the individual time trial on this course.

The Shakespearean Heroine abandoned after the first climb of the Col de l'Escalier.

The Grammarian says he'll attempt the time trial when he gets good and ready, although he prefers multiple laps of the Col de l'Arbre du Chat: "The Col de l'Escalier just isn't my style. I need a steeper course to make an impact."

Basement Cat said, "I was feeling really strong, really good, my legs were strong and I was on good form, so I just went for it."

Outlining

2011-07-16T07:56:00.002-05:00

Anyone who has been following the summer writing group hosted by ADM and Notorious, and some who haven't, know that I'm working on an article this summer, in between writing a conference paper, traveling, gardening, watching the Tour de France, working on a translation, and what seems like a zillion other things but probably is under 50 even if I listed every single thing, which I'm not going to do (fellowship application, shit, forgot about that one; maybe I should list every little thing).

And since there has in the past been some interest in outlining and developing an article, I thought I'd write about my process again. This time, I was lucky: the basic thesis is pretty simple, and the component sections of the article pretty obvious (well, obvious after a lot of free-writing on the topic), so I was spared a lot of the "re-arrange the pieces" stage. Instead, I free-wrote about each of the sub-topics, and then set up six or so pages (first on paper, then on the computer), each with these headings:

Thesis
Main points
Topic sentences
Textual support
Critical support/arguments
Historical support
Other notes (this was a late addition, after I started wanting to remind myself of particularly brilliant bits of writing from the original conference paper or free-writing)

I started by filling in either "main points" or "textual support" (the bottom-up approach, still). Critical and historical quotes or sources mostly got moved in from another document containing notes on things I'd read for the conference paper or while I was thinking about how to expand the paper. Sometimes this showed that on a given topic, I needed more of one or the other. When I was clear on the main points and how they grew from the text and how they interact with the current state of critical thought, then I constructed a thesis statement and topic sentences.

Most of the outlines now run about 1 1/2 pages. They are not conventional IA1a(1)(a) sorts of outlines, but I think they will do the job of keeping me on track with the argument and the necessary critical and historical references as I write the full essay. I expect there will be moments, nonetheless, where the writing takes the bit between its teeth and runs off in an unexpected direction, and moments where I realize that This Big Point, though big, can be very simply stated and does not need a lot of development, whereas some quite ancillary point may have to be argued in detail. Both of those things always happen to me. But I can now see a map of the whole essay, and when I print these mini-outlines, I'm going to spend awhile thinking about how the thesis statements and topic sentences work together in the larger context before I start the stage of further expansion of outline/rough draft.

"Further expansion" and "rough draft" are more or less the same stage. Ideally, the outline expands to the point where it is a draft, with prose stringing together the points, the quotes, and so on. But sometimes it's easier to "expand" than to "write," and sometimes it's easier to allow the writing to run than to hold it back and keep thinking about the shape of the outline.

For this week, I'm happy with my progress. (On this project: I have a collaborator waiting on a chunk of translation, and there's that fellowship application I forgot about, and I need to communicate with some graduate students about their work, and I'm way behind with Project D, and I should do more planning of fall classes [I made a start on the flight home, at least], and I have to write up a reader's report on an essay I was asked to review for possible publication, and . . . ack. Ack!) I'm happy with this one thing! All you other nagging tasks can piss off for five minutes!

De-fraud-ing

2011-07-14T22:22:00.003-05:00

I've always worried that my English professor licence would be yanked if I admitted that I do not listen to NPR. On my long drives to and from work, I like to crank up the local alternative station and rock out. (I'm positive my students would never believe this, and many of my colleagues no doubt expect that I'm either a classical-music type or an NPRer, like them. I know a fair amount about classical, and I used to listen to it more, but no, it's not my driving-drug of choice.)

But that station is changing formats. I'm going to have to figure out something else to do about music. I don't want to listen to books on tape. Tried that. For me, it's tiring to be read to; besides, there's not a lot available that I actually want to hear, and sometimes I take against a reader. I listened to a lot of Teaching Co's lectures, but there's a limit to how much of that I can take, as well. Basically, I'd rather have my time in the car be down time, not an effort to learn or keep up with something serious.

Because, you know, I'm lazy. I like radio because it's right there, no need to download anything, and because it's a good way to find out about music I wouldn't necessarily pick for myself. So I'm bummed.

Even if it means there's one less way in which I might be revealed as a fraud.

Another use for spreadsheets

2011-07-14T07:43:00.002-05:00

They're useful for keeping track of cognate manuscripts, and I'm setting up one to do that for a manuscript collection I've been working with for some time. As an aside, you can't tell that from my recent publications, as I've just realized, so I'm wondering what I could quickly throw together as a note, just to put something out there with my name on it and keep marking my territory. Discussions of scoopage at Notorious's place have me slightly spooked.

But anyway: a cognate manuscript is one that shares texts with another. Since the collection I have in mind is a large one, I'm not interested in manuscripts that share only one text with this one (though if you had a smaller batch of texts, you might be). Two or more shared texts, however, and I'm paying attention. So here a spreadsheet is very helpful: it's easily searchable, and gives a clear visual representation of which texts appear in different cognate manuscripts.

I think I'd need a three-dimensional spreadsheet to do a perfect job, because ideally I'd want to show all the contents of the other manuscripts, to indicate what they have that my main interest doesn't. I can imagine this in some sort of holographic device, color-coded so that the shared texts would really stand out. But I'm not so technologically inclined as to be able to create the holograph-cube.

I'll just make a note of it for my sci-fi novel about manuscript study . . . .

Home again, home again

2011-07-11T08:06:00.002-05:00

"Well, I'm back," she said.

No, no, that was the end of the story. We're not done yet. I have two weeks to work, and then a brief vacation, and then three more weeks to work before classes start. It only feels like summer is almost over. Five weeks is a good bit of time. I can finish the article-in-progress, and review a manuscript, and plan my fall classes, in that time. I even believe that. It's all the other stuff that I keep forgetting about that may derail me: conference organizing, house stuff, rec letters, and so on.

The trip was good. Intense, but good. All potential travel problems, like booking a train ticket for the wrong day (well after my flight home) resolved themselves. I achieved the things that had to happen in London, Cambridge, Lewes, and York; the conference paper got done and delivered; I finally had lunch in the BL with ADM; on my last night I stayed with a friend from grad school (and her niece and niece's boyfriend—in a 2-room flat—it was a bit undergraduate) and we got to catch up a bit. I have photographs. I have transcriptions. I have plans for lots of interesting work.

The cats seemed glad to see me, especially Basement Cat, who groomed my hands and arms very thoroughly yesterday. Today is a rest day in the Tour de France, so that gives us a chance to catch up. I keep getting too sleepy to stay up, so we still have half of yesterday's stage to finish. I'll try to post something more interesting soon.

If the paper's crap . . .

2011-06-24T23:04:00.002-05:00

I have reflected before that people who need to do archival research Elsewhere in the summer ought not to have gardens, or only the most self-sustaining kind (or hire gardeners, but then what is the point?). Alternatively, perhaps people with gardens ought not to go to libraries and so on that are Elsewhere in the height of growing season.

A large chunk of time today that might have been better spent on the paper went to finishing a chunk of digging and re-planting that I started two weeks ago and then bogged down on. If it were left till I get back, it would all be to do again, not to mention how dreadful it would look in the meantime. More weeding is called for, as is mulch in quantity, but I truly do not have time for that; I will just have to resign myself to hours more when I get back. But at least the front of the house looks like I made some effort.

Really I should leave things like collecting cat meds and cat litter to Sir John (and he'd be the first to say so), but I did those errands, too. So the garden is okay, and the cats have what they need, but I have yet to pack, and I feel I need more time with my books. But maybe the books are just a sort of security blanket.

Chance is a fine thing

2011-06-23T14:45:00.002-05:00

OMG. I have just spent hours making final travel arrangements for my trip to the UK, when I should have been/wanted to be working on my various papers. I had one night unaccounted for; I didn't think it would be difficult to find somewhere suitable, but it was a weekend night, and I think I ran into two-night minimums at a lot of places. The obvious thing seemed to be to stay in London near the station I'd be traveling out of the next day, but all the hotels I tried (online) showed no vacancies, and the alternatives I got offered were northwards of 150 quid. I don't think so, thanks.

Since nowhere in England is so very far from anywhere else, I'll be staying in the south, near where I'm rambling around that day. The next day's travel is still very manageable. The hotel I booked looks quite attractive. The one negative online review was from a man who complained because when he left the window open, the cat came in. Some folks don't know when they're well off.

The hotel response was even more encouraging: though they don't keep a hotel cat, there are eight cats in the near vicinity.

Do you think I need to leave an open can of tuna in my room, or will catnip likely be sufficient?

Finishing the week

2011-06-17T22:23:00.002-05:00

I was going to just do a boring post about what I've managed to do this week (not enough!) but Renaissance Girl's comment on my last post inspires me:

"Spreadsheet with data for article.

(blinks.)

(blinks.)

Sometimes I feel like I'm in a different field from...you know, other folks in my field."

Well, I am in a different field from other folks in my field! Maybe because I was once a STEM-field major. I'm a concrete rather than an abstract thinker. I don't get on well with theory. I like manuscripts because they're concrete things, and I like research projects where I can count things like corrections, or marginal comments, or uses of a particular language or type of vocabulary. For a long time, especially in grad school but continuing afterwards, people found me weird (or "naive"), and I struggled to be different (that is, more like the people who thought I was an unsophisticated thinker) but I have finally said, "Screw it, I'm doing what I do well (or at least what I love enough to work at)," and it's working for me.

That is, I like what I'm doing. Two acceptances in the last 6 months, both a bit outside my real field, but all the same, those decks are getting cleared. The article with the spreadsheet was a conference paper last year, that was solicited for a journal after a member of the editorial board heard it. I'm doing something right.

And I have to remind myself of that because the conference paper in progress is a hot mess. The initial stage, last winter, was so promising, but now I need all kinds of non-circulating material that is available only in places that take at least an hour to get to, mostly more. And in some ways work is going backward: a connection I thought was direct turns out to be a step-relationship, not blood, and that may be a problem. I have a feeling I'm going to be finishing up the research in the BL, in hours snatched between other scheduled library visits and meetings, and writing the final version of the paper on the train the day before I give it.

I still have a week before I leave. There's some time to sort some of this out. It will be all right.

It better be all right, because I really can't hand-wave my way out of this one. This is the problem with concrete, spread-sheetable research: you have it or you don't. And when you don't, it's obvious.

the promised boring post

2011-06-15T13:09:00.002-05:00

The work report: there was some reading yesterday, but not much else. Errands, yeah, a bunch of those.

Up at 6:30 this morning, and I've taken notes on a book for the article in progress, added some more entries to a spreadsheet that has to do with data for that article, edited 104 lines of the translation, and . . . jeez . . . is that all? Renewed books. Ordered another book ILL. Sent some e-mail. Reviewed the present state of outlines for article-in-progress and for conference paper (for the latter, it's not so much an outline as a series of questions).

Tomorrow I'll be on campus again, and my plan this time is to do less bureaucratic stuff and make more use of my office's large monitor and high-speed internet connection. I need to do some searches of archives and staring at digitized MSS, and that's easier with my official equipment.

I had an idea for an actual interesting post, but when it didn't get my immediate attention, it wandered off somewhere into the ether. Sorry about that.

The difference a day makes

2011-06-14T12:22:00.002-05:00

I feel fine today. Even woke up hungry. This is much better. Now, how to get some work done this afternoon, when I have errands I need to do & then the housecleaner will be underfoot, & then I have to get to the gym? The combination of weekend social life and food poisoning was very hard on the Ideal Schedule. I felt I was doing well to get up at 8:00 this morning. Tomorrow I'll try to haul myself out of bed earlier---but I still need to salvage something of today.

And what I'd really like to do is get back to the gardening I was in the middle of on Sunday when our friends called. Who needs a social life anyway?

Be it resolved: I'm going to have some work to report in tomorrow's very boring blog post. You can bring on the wet noodles if I don't.

[groan]

2011-06-13T13:16:00.003-05:00

Six people went to a Japanese restaurant last night. I was the only one over age 7 who didn't eat raw fish. I was also the only one to get sick. Is this fair, right, or reasonable?

I'm tired. My head hurts. Looking at a screen makes it hurt worse. I seem to be able to read on paper in 10-15 minute increments, interspersed with resting my eyes or doing some undemanding bit of housework, like laundry.

Would someone please give me permission to spend the day putting sticky notes in books for later written note-taking, sorting out stuff that needs to be filed or tossed, and otherwise taking it easy, instead of panicking over the conference paper and the article that both need to get written?

Travel plans

2011-06-10T11:15:00.004-05:00

I found out this week that next summer, I will be teaching in one of LRU's summer-abroad programs, in the UK. Woot and all that—yes, it's awesome, and it's been 10 years since I got to do this, but as I've done it before and have a good friend who does it more often, I know that it is also a lot of work and a whole lot of interaction (morning noon and night) with students. In some ways, that can be a very good thing, but if you get a difficult person on the trip, it can turn nightmarish. And one has to be even more extremely focused and goal-oriented than at home in order to get any scholarly work done, even with one of the world's great libraries right down the street, because there are so many distractions, of both the teacherly and the historical/cultural kind.

But I am pleased, and I am trying to think about next summer's research (and conferences), and the class I'll be teaching, even as I begin to panic about this summer's work (more on that shortly). What will I be likely to be working on in a year's time?

As for actual travel plans, the trip that is still a year off keeps bleeding into the one that is coming up much sooner, as I think about what to pack, what arrangements to make, and how to get organized. Even at Kalamazoo, I had strong reasons to believe that the next-summer trip would happen; and unfortunately, I think knowing about it helped me procrastinate on things like booking places to stay this summer, because, of course, next year I'll have a place to stay, no booking necessary on my part. I'm bad about these things anyway, because I am so afraid of flying that anything that reminds me I will be flying creates considerable anxiety. So, although I arranged for my flight months ago, I put off dealing with the rest of the trip, hoping there would come a day when I felt stronger . . . . Well, there came a day, yesterday, when I was too panicky about the possibility of not having somewhere to stay that I faced up to the task. Panic strength works, too.

So I'm staying where I wanted to in London; and somewhere more expensive (but probably nicer) in the UK's Second City than I probably would if I'd booked months ago (query: do I delay on purpose so I have an excuse to stay in nicer hotels?); and have e-mailed a B&B elsewhere about availability. I really hope this last place comes through, because they have a cat. It would be nice to be able to indulge my addiction to felines while I'm gone.

This means that now I am free to panic over the conference paper (and oh boy am I doing that well, or at least plentifully). And, more generally, panic about trying to achieve as much as possible in the next 10 weeks because, once classes start, I will have only fairly short breaks between teaching responsibilities for the following 21 months.

One reason I like to get up early to write is that my conscious mind hasn't fully kicked in with all its anxieties. Another is so that I can get something done before Irritating People and Life Events can start getting in the way. Yesterday I got a bit of a late start; at least I read and took notes on an essay before the day started to go downhill. An unexpected House Thing required an urgent trip to the hardware store and time dealing with the Thing; an expected House Maintenance Guy did not show up in his window of opportunity, which meant a call to the company to complain and reschedule, and time hanging around the house (trying to work but getting distracted) when I could have been driving to campus or going to the gym. I achieved the most urgent things on campus, but stayed late to do so, and so I was up late last night, and then slept late and am dragging today.

Today, then, I think I need to do easy things, like taking notes and organizing bibliographies. Stuff that's useful but not brain-intensive. And hit the gym.

A mediocre day

2011-06-08T14:30:00.002-05:00

I've been waking up before my alarm goes off, around 5:30, so last night I didn't set it. Whoops. I slept till almost 7:00. My plans also changed in that I decided last night not to go to school today but to put that trip off till Thursday (weather, cats, Sir John's schedule all figured into this decision). I don't adapt well to changes in plans, so maybe these two differences made it harder to stick to my usual routine today, on top of being done with the rough translation of my sample thousand lines (no point in going on with that, for now, though I could have either started with reading further or with polishing what I have).

Instead, I spent my work time today reading (skimming) various books and articles that I have around my study, looking to see what anyone has had to say about the topic I was working on yesterday. I also did a JSTOR search and downloaded three PDFs. They each have something relevant but not threatening. Many of the items I have looked at have similar tit-bits, useful for a quotation or a ritual footnote, but not something that steals my thunder. I have a few more books at home to look at, and I want to collect a few more from the library, but I'm feeling hopeful that my article in progress will contribute to another conversation about the author I'm studying.

All together, I have about 600 new words from today: all belonging to other people, which is why I'm calling this a mediocre day. Mediocre is fine; it's still forward progress, though I'll probably end up using only a fraction of today's words in the essay. And I worked during my scheduled work period, though with a late start, some longer-than-usual breaks, and a later end point. So I'm sticking to the plan in that way. I wish I had broken off at some point to work on the translation, or on the conference paper, but at the same time, I greatly enjoy the luxury of being able to spend a long time on a single task like this, being able to chase down ideas without losing the thread. That is something I'm rarely able to do while I'm teaching.

Reflections on this article-in-progress: despite an auditor's request, last year, that I submit a tidied-up version to a journal on whose editorial board he serves, I am glad that I'm taking the time to expand it to what I want it to be. I don't want to let it expand indefinitely, but I do want to do my "right" version of it, not my quicker-and-dirtier conference-paper version. I did expect the process to be shorter and easier than it is proving, but even though I'm still kind of in-the-middle-of-a-mess, with stints of outlining alternating with stints of free-writing and note-taking, I can see the pony starting to take shape under the heap of manure. I can see that there's progress, and I'm interested in what will happen as I continue my work.

A few years ago, I would have seen yesterday's insight as a suitable paper in itself, perhaps for a conference paper, perhaps a note somewhere. And that would not have been a bad thing, but I think making it part of a bigger argument is a better thing. I'm learning to be not just a better writer, but, I hope, a better thinker, and that is deeply satisfying. This is why I have workaholic tendencies, and am not very good about "real vacations," and have trouble explaining to non-academic friends why I don't want to take advantage of my "time off": this work is more "fun," for me, than most of what other people understand as "fun." I mean, if you offered me a good hike followed by a hot tub and a Bellini, I'd be there, but since there's nothing I consider good hiking within several hundred miles of here, I'm really happy to get up at the crack of dawn and surround myself with books and papers for hours. It's way better than going to a stupid movie or an over-loud party full of people I don't know who want to talk about what was on TV last night.

One of the key elements in what makes it fun is the time I have for it, since I'm not grading, not meeting classes, not showing up for committee meetings or reading piles of stuff to prepare for said meetings. Trying to do research in little snippets of time among other responsibilities is much more stressful, and I find it hard to shift gears from one thing to a very different kind of thing. Along with learning to be a better writer and thinker, I'm learning what kinds of work I can do in difference circumstances. This is along the lines of advice that Tenured Radical says she got from Paul Fussell: if what you can do is read, then read. If you have a day that can be spent on skimming the critical literature on a new topic, then do that. It's actually easier for me to spend 15-30 minutes between classes generating some prose on an interesting question I hope to answer in a conference paper than it is to read in that sort of a time slot. The work I achieved today would have taken me a week in term time.

Anyway, tomorrow I really do have to go to campus and take care of a lot of bureaucratic things, along with a raid on the library, and some teaching-related things like recommendation letters that I could do at home but hope I can get done at school. I'm still going to get up early and do my 6-8 a.m. stint, starting with translation-polishing, I think. Then Friday I'll be back to my usual routine, and I'll have to think about how to leave work wrapped up in such a way that just a couple of hours a day will suffice over the weekend. I actually don't like taking weekends completely off. One day, maybe; more than that, and I lose too many threads.

1376 words

2011-06-07T11:15:00.002-05:00

I sat down to work on an outline for another sub-section of the writing project, but wound up writing about ideas on that topic that I hadn't thought of before. I will have to see who else has written about one of these ideas. It connects so obviously to a Well-Known Motif that I'm sure someone else has done the connecting. I can't help thinking, however, how very cool it would be if this were to be a new discovery. Which it won't be. But I'll leave the disappointment till tomorrow, because I need to go on to do some reading and noting for the conference paper. Or maybe day-after-tomorrow, because I have to go to campus tomorrow, and that will eat time.

Oh, and I'm done with the thousand lines of translation. I can return to the beginning and start polishing. That's the hard part.

Starting out well

2011-06-06T12:30:00.003-05:00

After reading all the comments here, I decided I should listen to Trevelia, Notorious Ph.D., and myself, and get myself onto my Ideal Schedule. Ideal Schedule has the added advantage of being good jet-lag-reduction preparation for my trip to England: if I'm going to bed at 3:00 a.m. Greenwich time, and getting up at noon there, it's a little easier to adapt than if I were going to bed at 6:00 a.m. Greenwich and getting up in mid-afternoon.

Even if I manage to shift back to 2:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. in the last few days before I leave, there will still be jet lag. It just isn't so cruel as it might be.

Anyway, I got to my desk by 6:00 a.m. local time, and today I have outlined another mini-essay section of the Summer Submission Project (suspiciously easily: will this one break down when I go to write it?), done some translating, begun to assemble bibliography for the better-read-fast conference paper (including putting in ILL requests), and taken some notes for the Pedagogical Project. That's an excellent day's work. Now it's time to stretch and exercise and enjoy a summer's day for awhile, before it's time to cook dinner and watch some cycling. And remember to go to bed early. That's the hardest part of the Ideal Schedule. I wish I could do without sleep, but that never works for me.

I'm hoping to get all the mini-essay chunks outlined this week. Also to finish 1000 lines of very very rough translation, and begin the polishing process. There must be more reading and note-taking. Much more. Starting tomorrow.

Summer writing

2011-06-04T16:32:00.002-05:00

Anyone in the ADM/Notorious writing group probably figures, based on the number of comments I made yesterday, that I was procrastinating again. But I actually did quite well yesterday, despite a fair amount of surfing and comment-refreshing as group members posted their first-week results. I really like the amount of detail and interaction we're getting there.

Before specifying what I did yesterday, I want to list the projects I'm working on or involved with this summer. And I rather regret that it is a list: I have this problem with trying to do too many things at once, and I keep trying to stop taking on too much, so that I can finish stuff instead of perpetually moving on to the next thing before the last one is done. But I keep having ideas! And sometimes other people like these ideas. And I'm excited about all of them. So here we are:

A) Conference paper (not for Leeds; a different conference). Very cool manuscripty-readership thing. Must become an article at some point. Or maybe part of a book chapter. Lots of reading to do for this one, rather fast and soonish.

B) Essay from last year's conference paper, the one I've told the Notorious/ADM group I'm committing to finishing this summer. This is a fun idea, and when it goes well, I like working on this one. I am in the throes of organizing, which is sometimes agonizing and sometimes (when I work something out) very satisfying.

C) Translation project, as part of a team; related to some of the reading for (A). This is going to be a massive, years-long undertaking. But it's something I really strongly want to do.

D) Pedagogical project, also as part of a team, this time with an old friend who is an illustrator. I provide the text, friend does the pictures. Some sort of short rough version to be tested in my fall courses.

So I really have my work cut out for me, because this doesn't even include the old "Current Project" (call it E) that needs to get finished (um, maybe in the fall?) or the putative book (because I have been trying to finish and submit both (B) and (E) before turning my full attention to the putative book) or the fellowship application I'd like to write in hopes of having a year to devote myself entirely to the book. I keep having to remind myself that I have, in the past year, finished, submitted, and corrected proofs for two (short) pieces, so I can finish things, I can! We're also not mentioning other conference papers which I have been asked to give next year, although I'm thinking about topics for these—overlapping topics, to help a little with the work-crunch problem; and this work, too, would eventually become part of a book chapter.

Yesterday, then, I did a chunk of translation. I love starting with this when I sit down to work, because it produces an obvious, discrete "thing I have done" and warms me up for other writing. Then I worked on organizing a section of (B) as a mini-essay. I took a piece of paper and divided it into these sections: topic, thesis, main points, support from text, critical support, historical support. I started filling in topic, main points, and support from the text (which overflowed its box). Then I added the last two kinds of support (some of which is presently in the form "look in Books X and Y for stuff on this topic"). After staring at all this for awhile, I came up with a thesis.

Then I critiqued the thesis: it didn't actually indicate what the organization of the essay would be. I wrote down the ways it might go, and stopped for the day. Maybe I haven't totally mastered the five-paragraph essay, or maybe the problem is that this is really a seven-paragraph essay.

This morning, shortly after 7:00, I started again. The question was, organize around clear concrete ideas or around more complex and abstract ideas? I went with abstract, and re-wrote the thesis accordingly. Then I outlined the mini-essay, using the concrete ideas as illustrations of the more abstract points. I think I have a good outline now. I even have a conclusion that will function as a transition to the next mini-essay.

So, should I repeat this process for each of the sub-sections, so I get an outline of the entire essay, or should I write this mini-essay first, then outline the next one? It would be satisfying, I think, to have a chunk drafted. But it might be easier to see what the whole thing looks like, and fix possible organizational problems, if I do all the outlining before starting to produce coherent prose.

Paint colors

2011-06-03T18:22:00.002-05:00

Why do so many people whose houses are on the market around here have the walls painted such dull, sludgy, light-eating colors? The most appetizing is biscuit-beige, but I've seen a lot of pale slug green, medium khaki, dull-as-dirt brown, and similar shades that I find ugly as sin.

Oddly, we have not been in a single house with a red dining room, when (from what I can tell from many walks in the area) every third or fourth house has a red dining room. Sir John says that people with red dining rooms don't feel like selling their houses.

If I were trying to sell a house, I'd probably paint all the walls ivory, magnolia, or similar pale, unexciting color that could easily be painted over.

If I were moving into a house, I'd be getting paint in clear, pale, cheerful colors, for the most part: sunny yellow, robin's-egg blue, peach, maybe lavender. And then bright orange in my study, where it would just peek out as an accent from behind bookcases and file cabinets.

I simply cannot see why anyone, anywhere, ever, would want to live in a slug-colored room.

Not an interesting post

2011-06-02T12:32:00.002-05:00

I got un-grumpified by taking a few days off and doing some very fun things with Sir John and old friends; I even got an idea about how to strengthen the argument in the essay that is taking too long to finish (oh, wait, that's all my essays, ever). But now I'm feeling very anxious about all the things I have to do now, today, this week, this month, this summer. I planned to get right to work yesterday: one two-hour chunk on the essay, one two-hour chunk later in the day on the Next Thing. And then more and more things kept occurring to me that I Urgently! Had! To Get Done! and so instead of doing them, I spent the day reading a new-old sci fi book that I had picked up in the days off (new to me, in a series I enjoy, but out for at least a decade) and humming "la la la can't hear you" every time anything reminded me of the To Do list.

So today I am going to try to Suck Less, because it isn't going to get any earlier and I can at least keep from making it worse.

Wearing my grumpy boots

2011-05-26T13:10:00.003-05:00

I am supposed to be working on an essay that I hoped would be finished in, oh, say March. For awhile, back there during the semester, I was working on it with some diligence, but somewhere around mid-April the press of grading and committee work took over, and writing ceased to progress.

But I'm back to thinking about this essay and how to make it a coherent piece, building from a conference paper, a lot of post-conference notes about what else I wanted to do with it ("post" meaning, here, not just immediately after but over the course of months), and a messy sort of annotated bibliography arranged not by date or alphabetically but by where checking other people's footnotes sent me next.

It's time to start a new document, with a new organizing principle. Okay. This one actually seems like it falls into several related-but-discrete segments. This is very nice, because I can think of each segment as a five-paragraph essay. Yeah, yeah, I know, we all dump on that form, but it's a form I know I have mastered; and if some of those sections are actually 6 or 8 paragraphs, that's fine; and there will be a revision stage (a stage? if it's just one I'll be lucky) in which any 5-graph clunkiness gets refined and developed, and the whole essay gets smoothed out into a coherent whole.

That's the plan. We all know about plans.

I talked myself into sitting down to write one of those essays this morning, through all the reluctance ("the five-paragraph essay is a joke, everyone will know I'm a fraud if I construct my work this way, and what if it doesn't go well, then I'll really feel like an idiot if I can't even write the sort of essay high-schoolers do for timed exams, maybe I should just go clean the linen closet so I can feel like a procrastinator instead of an idiot") and got a piece of paper, because I felt like writing on paper rather than on the computer.

First I wanted to look at the spreadsheet that has all the references to Topic A in Author Z, so I could remind myself where the Topic A references appear in this long text. This spreadsheet was a nice mindless piece of work, compiled with reference to a concordance, that I did last year sometime.

It's incomplete! I thought I finished this months ago. There was a table, in WordPerfect; it became unstable, so I converted it to Word; then I realized I could do a spreadsheet, and figured out how to turn tables into tab-separated text that could be easily imported into the spreadsheet; and I remember finishing this thing. But it's not finished. Did I remember finishing with a particular chunk? Unclear.

At any rate, I'm back to converting text (and adding tabs manually to some, because of the whole problem with instability and multiple word-processing programs) and pasting it into the spreadsheet. It won't really take that long. And maybe it's a good task for a gray day right before a long weekend that I'll be taking off, anyway.

But grrrr. All my self-encouragement wasted. I could have avoided the little pep-talk about tackling one of the mini-essays and just happily gone back to mindless cut-and-pasting, telling myself that I was staying in touch with the project and would get back to writing next week. Undoubtedly I should just try to write a different mini-essay, one for which the spreadsheet contains all the necessary entries, but this is my version of needing a clean desk in order to work. I need to feel the data is all present and tabulated, available for consultation at any time, before I can go on with this.

It's probably Basement Cat's fault. I bet he ate the Spreadsheet Elves when they came to help out.

Updated to add: I think the spreadsheet is done now. But my laptop suffered a BSOD (actually a purple screen, on my machine) while I was working on it. My computer just doesn't want me to work on this thing. Maybe Basement Cat programmed it, too.

Basement Cat's Secret Life, again

2011-05-24T16:20:00.002-05:00

Yesterday when I was driving around with the radio on, the DJ announced that she was going to play a song requested by Basement Catski (a nickname we often use for BC): "Uprising," by Mews.

Writing and Windows

2011-05-22T10:21:00.002-05:00

This is not a metaphor, nor about software. I like big windows and lots of natural light. I don't think I noticed this so much until I spent four years, in graduate school, living in a basement apartment. In many ways, it was the nicest place I had ever lived, up to that point, but it did not get a lot of sunlight, and I came to crave light.

I rented my first post-school apartment on a cloudy day. Because the town was on a grid, I was pretty sure that the apartment's windows faced east, south, and west. I hadn't realized there was a second, superimposed grid that ran differently. The room I had selected for my study, thinking it had a western exposure, actually faced north, and I never wanted to be in it, especially on days when the rest of the place was flooded with sunlight. I didn't get much done until I moved my desk to the living room, which faced south and east.

Then I moved to an apartment that did face east, south, and west, and I loved it, even though (or maybe because) it was a top-floor walk-up. I looked out into treetops. I started the day writing in a room that faced east and south, and as the day wore on, I often moved into the living room (south) and sometimes into the bedroom (west). The windows were very large. In the bedroom, there were French windows to a Juliet balcony. They were not well-insulated, and the building had many other problems, so that on the whole, I was relieved when I left. I have never missed the boiler, or the drafts, or certain of the people who moved in during my time there. But I still miss the light.

Now I sit before a wide window. From one side of it, I can see a tree, though I wouldn't say I look out into the treetops. I look out into the neighbors' windows, actually. But this is a good, big window, surrounded by pretty colors, and the other walls are lined with books. I could use more room, and I'd be happy to have a study with a bay window so I'd have even more light . . . oh, who are we kidding, I want to work in a solarium, basically.

We have been house-hunting for awhile, but the right house has not yet appeared. This one is too big, yet with not enough storage space; that one is too small (likewise that one and that other one). We saw one I loved, but it didn't really have enough wall space for all of our books, and it had at least one feature that is a deal-breaker for Sir John. There's one that has been on the market for awhile, at which we have looked at least three times now. It has many features we both like. But I went and looked at it again this morning, thinking about morning light and what it would be like to live in that house, to get up there and make some tea and do some writing before feeding the yowling hordes, and I realized that my biggest objection to that house is that its windows are too small.

There are other things. I wish that house were on a lot that is oriented differently. I think it's stupid to put the bathroom on the southeast corner (all that lovely light potential wasted on a bathroom?). I wish some of the windows didn't get such a great view of the neighbors' walls. On the other hand, it's on a nice block, the garden is lovely, and I love the basement, which seems sort of sick when I'm all about the light. But the basement is beautifully finished, with lots of storage space. There's a useable room down there, but the basement is neither totally transformed into a family or rec room with no storage, nor is it a cavernous, dark, unfinished hole (we've seen both).

Mainly, I now realize, I'm not happy about the windows. There are plenty of them, and the bedrooms all have two exposures. But except for the living room and family room (front and back of the first floor) the windows are small. The bedroom windows are less than half the size of the ones in our current house. And I don't think I can live with that. Expanding them might be a possibility. I'm not sure how much that would cost, though I have some rough idea from simply replacing (not expanding) ours a few years ago. I can easily imagine the dust that would be generated. I'd really like to move into a house that didn't need anything beyond maybe a coat of paint.

I am totally phototropaic: I follow light around. I want my study to be a room that I want to be in. If it isn't, I won't get anything done. Spoiled? Maybe so, but it's how I am, and it would be stupid not to take that into account.