Productivity low

I have very many exciting things to be getting on with: a fabulous paper to write for Monday, which should give me a head start on an article I'm hoping to send to a swanky journal. It's based on an idea I've been lecturing on for years, and have partially written up in a form that hasn't seen the light of day yet, for reasons outwith my control, and as it's the first time I've ever been invited to speak somewhere abroad, I'd very much like to do a good job for them, so that the organiser doesn't reconsider the wisdom of paying for my flights and accommodation. When I come back, it's not long till the first of two very exciting conferences I've got lined up in fairly quick succession. All of this should be well within my capabilities, and the version of this paper I'm giving should be written up by now, but I seem to be having a fit of tiredness and have just resorted to a half-hour nap in the office in the hope that it would improve matters. It has a bit, but I do hope the tiredness goes away very soon.

Suitably chastened, and amused.

This morning, I received a package sent by a very kind retired colleague with whom I sometimes have lunch, and to whom I'd given a script copy of an article that's due out a little later this year. Having read it, he called me to give me feedback, and the package, containing a book on writing with directions as to the chapters that best explained his meaning, was his follow up to that call. It is kind of him to give me feedback on the piece, and he's entirely correct in suggesting that I need to spend more time on drafting and redrafting my work. I don't, in fact, tend to draft at all, but only spend too much time thinking, and then write slowly, and with too much linearity. It worries me, and I'm currently trying to use Scrivener in order to break myself into it. I'm also rather pleased that he felt the ideas were good, even if the expression is in need of refinement. Next week I'll meet him, and he'll advise me about what he feels needs work within the piece. This is helpful because, although the piece itself is currently in copy-editing, and I won't be the neurotic contributor who insists on changing an accepted piece for aesthetic reasons, I am due to revisit the subject for a conference in summer, and will take what he says into consideration. I'm amused he didn't imagine I'd be offended, and I'm not, since my attitude to criticism sometimes veers worryingly close to the masochistic: I take a slightly perverse pleasure in having my suspicions of my work confirmed, and it's more reassuring to have something constructive to build on than to meet the slippery surfaces of praise. If I agree with his judgement, I'll write something else, rather than tangling with the piece as it stands. But I'm also irresistibly amused that this is the same piece of writing a peer-reviewer described in positively glowing terms: the critical feedback will be useful, but the satisfaction of all tastes is a task best not attempted.

Commonplacing

And once you’re writing, you forget about yourself: it’s all about the words on the page. They need to take on their own character if they’re going to have their existence and survive. I think that’s what form is about.
                 Alan Gillis

Commonplacing

Of all things of thought, poetry is closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art; yet even a poem, no matter how long it existed as a living spoken word in the recollection of the bard and those who listened to him, will eventually be 'made,' that is, written down and transformed into a tangible thing among things, because remembrance and the gift of recollection, from which all desire for imperishability springs, need tangible things to remind them, lest they perish themselves.


Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Commonplacing

...to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.
                                                         Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

Irritating writing tasks

Relieved to have finally finished one of my more detested writing tasks, a job application I've been procrastinating over for really rather a long time. It should be getting easier, but I always seem to make heavy weather of them, and the reasons for that aren't dissimilar to the reasons I post here pseudonymously: I've a rather idealistic perception of what I do, and it goes against the grain to market either myself or my research interests. This is counter-productive, since job acquisition is clearly necessary to actually staying in academia, and high-mindedness is not a particularly helpful quality in relation to this kind of writing. I should, and will, suck it up, and though I know that there's a recurrent debate surrounding pseudonymity in the academic blogosphere, I am glad to have an outlet for some of the ideas and experiences surrounding my academic work that doesn't serve a pragmatic purpose in relation to my CV. This is the anti-job application end of my work-related habits, and it's good to have, even if it's been rather neglected of late.

Further good news

I heard this week that the article I spent rather a lot of the autumn writing, and that I feared might, in fact, be bonkers, as been accepted with no changes, for a wonder. And the reviewer said kind things about the writing, as well as the argument, which really pleases me. Increasingly, I'm finding that my experience of writing is easier and more pleasurable, but also considerably more alarming, as I've moved away from tracing out the details of how the argument fits in with everything else ever published on the subject, to focusing on setting out a line of thought as clearly as possible, acknowledging where that argument is made possible by others' work. I'm sympathetic to Denise Horn's account of chaffing against the structures of the kind of academic writing that's typically involved in producing a PhD thesis, but this doesn't feel like un-academic writing to me - it's frightening because it's more ambitious, and because it exposes the lines of what I want to say without the painstakingly constructed web of authorities I used to hide behind. It still produces a lot of footnotes, but they don't seem to weigh the writing down in quite the same way. The results seem to be working out better in terms of peer review too, which does a lot to reassure me that it isn't self-indulgence, but a more effective way of working, and of taking responsibility for that work.