In the past two weeks, I've done the following:
Continued working my way through Donne's sermons
Re-read old notes on Donne's polemical prose
Read a couple of articles on Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler
Read a couple of articles on early modern science and manuscript culture
Made some revisions to an essay on Merchant of Venice
Thought about Foxe's Acts and Monuments
Thought about All's Well that Ends Well and Jacob and Esau
Looked through some notes on Browne's Religio Medici
Read the first book of Bede's Ecclesiastical History
In case it's not clear, most of those things aren't related to one another. I find myself working on five or six discrete projects, but none in a sustained way. It's possible that this is just procrastination from the primary task I intended to focus on--that Donne chapter--but I'm also finding, for the first time in my life, that I'm enjoying doing a million things at once.
As I've mentioned before, I prefer to be a monotasker, especially when it comes to my scholarship: I like to focus on a single project until it's done (or, at any rate, until I reach some logical or necessary stopping point). Short-term projects can interrupt, but when they do, I focus on that project until it's done, and then return to Project A. The idea of having a whole bunch of half-written articles--or conference papers that I hadn't yet developed into articles, or extensive research that hadn't even graduated to the point of being a conference paper--has always seemed about as appealing as having a bunch of cars up on blocks on my front lawn.
But here I am, having fun. I'm not sure if this is just the result of being on sabbatical and having more freedom to dabble and draw connections across disparate texts and subfields (because it turns out? most of the things I've been doing secretly DO relate to each other!) or if this, too, is a way my temperament has been shaped and changed by academia. Scholarly time is slow and long, and maybe if we're to be sustained by this life--after the monomaniacal focus on What Comes Next that determines one's progress through grad school and tenure--we need lots of disparate projects, pleasures, distractions.
I'm just theorizing, and who knows whether I'll continue to feel this way. But it's good to realize that the world won't stop spinning if I take my eye off it, and to know that I'll probably even finish most of the projects I've started. . . eventually.
4 comments:
Years back, on my sabbatical, I discovered a whole new approach to my research work. I've managed to hold on to some of the benefits of that period, when time away from the classroom & campus obligations gave me a chance to introduce some balance into my working/researching life.
Could that - gasp! - be one of the intents of sabbaticals???
Belle:
Yes! Absolutely. A friend and I took our pre-tenure research leaves at the same time (several years back), and we spent a lot of time reassuring each other that leaves were about being a whole person and having time for things other than the specific research project we'd outlined on our applications (in my case, those things involved buying a house and planning a wedding, in addition to revising my book and drafting a new article).
A year or two ago I heard an interview with Alice Waters in which she mentioned that she pays her chefs an annual salary, but they only work in the restaurant for six months at a time, and then they have six months off. Partly this is because the pace at a restaurant is so brutal and the burn-out rate so high, but it's also to allow them to do the equivalent of research: go to other restaurants, visit farms and food suppliers, try out new recipes, investigate new cuisines.
Totally sane. And something all labor and/or brain-intensive professions should adopt in some form.
It isn't great, but you might enjoy reading Howard Waldrop's "God's Hooks", which may be the only fantasy story starring Izaak Walton and John Bunyan.
Withy:
Thanks! I'll have to check it out.
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