It's finals week, which means it's assessment time in both my classes and my work life.
You may recall that I had the bright idea, back at the start of the school year, of keeping a work diary. This I faithfully did: every day that I performed some scholarly writing or research task, I tabulated the time spent. Then each week I recorded the total.
I included the boring but necessary stuff that those of us without research assistants have to do ourselves, like schlep to the library to pick up ILL books, photocopy chapters from ILL books once they've been recalled, and run time-consuming EEBO searches to get a sense of the relative frequency of references to X or Y. After some internal debate, I decided to include time spent on fellowship applications, on the grounds that those required me to refine and rearticulate my book project in important ways, as well as conduct some preliminary research into the holdings of the relevant libraries. But I did not include reading for courses when the texts overlapped with my current research topics, nor did I include reviewing article or book manuscripts that did likewise.
So it's a little subjective, I guess, and there's no way to be precise; although I spent two years working in a law firm, the idea of measuring everything to within a tenth of an hour would have made me throw myself out a window. Therefore, I recorded nothing that took less than half an hour. Sometimes I rounded up; at other times I forgot to check the clock (or got interrupted a bunch) and so recorded my impression of how much time I'd actually spent working.
Still, with those caveats, I'm pretty happy with the results: over the fall semester my average was 12 hours/week and this spring it was just under 11.7 hours/week.
My weekly goal had been 10hrs/week, but I honestly had no idea if that was sustainable over the long haul; there have always been periods during term-time where I'm writing like a fiend, but also weeks where I do nothing. If I had to guess, I'd say that most previous semesters my average has been, at best, maybe 8 hours/week.
What this purely private form of accountability ensured was that I never forgot about my writing goals for long, and keeping a daily log made me attentive to the moments I might not otherwise have recognized as having research potential: if I had downtime during my office hours, I could print and read an article (rather than surfing the internet)--and, often, my deciding that I could commit to 30 minutes of writing or research led to my spending 60 or 90 instead.
I don't imagine that such a diary would be equally motivating for everyone; I'm a systematizer who takes pleasure in routine, who responds well to things that seem measurable, and who delights in that which can be tracked, logged, or otherwise slotted into its proper place. When it comes to exercise, I'm not inspired by grand goals, nor do I care about being able to increase the intensity of my workouts, or their length, or whatever. But I care VERY MUCH about sticking to my three days a week and about logging the stats into my fitness app.
The diary is a similar means to an end. Twelve hours a week sounds like a respectable number, but the figure itself doesn't matter; there's nothing magical about that number, just as there's nothing magical about my going to the gym three days a week and shooting to hit 70,000 steps. If the latter measures don't mean I'm ready to run a half-marathon, the former doesn't mean I'm cranking out the pages (much less that they're good pages!). Perhaps I do less in twelve hours than others do in six. But if the chief lesson that I take from being slow is that I have to put in the goddamn hours, then I need to find ways to put them in.
*
And this steady training has been good for me: I'm closing in on a draft of what I hope to be the second major publication from my book project, an essay that has required heroic/desperate amounts of research into fields I'm basically unqualified to write about (and only some of whose scholarship is in languages that I can read). At the same time that I intend to finalize that manuscript and send it out for review, I'll be in residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library on a month-long fellowship to research a different chapter of the book.
I'm unaccustomed to spending 6-8 hours a day, 5 or 6 days a week researching and writing, but that's the plan for June. And if my work diary has taught me one thing, it's the power of averages: no matter how my July and August shake out, I'm thinking my summer numbers are going to look pretty damn good.
Showing posts with label Rage for Order. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rage for Order. Show all posts
Monday, May 08, 2017
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
A place for everything means a damn lot of places
Because I'm now an old person, I spent my birthday cash on some incredibly practical, incredibly unsexy items that nevertheless sent me down some strange nostalgic by-roads. You see, I bought two more bookcases and a second 4-drawer filing cabinet to match the existing ones in my home office.
The original items have been with me a long time. When I graduated from college and moved into my first apartment, my parents took me to Ikea and bought me two full-sized bookcases (and a bed, but that's long since gone the way of all particle board), which remained my homes' most distinguishing feature for years. Initially I labored to fill their shelves. Later, in another studio apartment in another state, my expanding book collection testified to my status as a grad student. I bought two matching half-sized bookcases, wedging one in front of a radiator because I was out of wall space. That's also how my filing cabinet--a previous birthday splurge, which I guess means I've always been old--wound up next to the fridge.
Eventually the lot of us moved to yet another studio apartment, the former living room of a formerly grand Harlem brownstone. An elaborate Victorian fireplace sat in the center of the longest wall and my four bookshelves fit perfectly to either side. Around this time I ran out of space and started shelving books horizontally. Then I got my first job and the bookshelves and I moved upstate--and the acquisition of a campus office helped relieve their burden. Once again they fit perfectly along my living room's longest wall, and from the street below I could look up and see nothing but books. It was pretty much exactly what I'd fantasized about at twenty-two.
By the time we bought our first house those Ikea shelves no longer seemed nice enough to serve as our display bookcases, so we bought others, and I squeezed the old ones into my tiny home office. Now, in another house in a third state, the original four fit comfortably enough that I need new ones to fill out the room. They aren't the handsomest things, but they're big and sturdy and unobtrusive, and every time I plunk down on the floor to reorganize my bookshelves or sort my files I remember all the other times I've done the same and how consequential it felt.
I still love my books; there's a reason they're the focal point of our living room and that we removed the enormous bracket the previous owners had installed for a flat-screen t.v. And I still have an evangelical conviction that life is better when all papers are filed away tidily and ready to be retrieved at an instant's notice. But if those things remain bound up with my sense of self, they're no longer a pledge to the future--a willing of that self in to being--in the way they once were. Every new book used to feel like a statement about myself, and I can still see the angle of the late-afternoon sunlight in that first apartment as I sat on the edge of my bed and inscribed my name inside each volume, just as I remember staying up until 2 a.m. with folders and tabs strewn across my grad school apartment as I imposed order upon the miscellaneous papers that until then I'd been hauling around in file boxes and milk crates.
I don't wish to go back to a time when everything signified so very deeply, but I enjoy thinking about how continuous this self is with my younger one.
What I'll enjoy much less is moving all this crap the next time around.
The original items have been with me a long time. When I graduated from college and moved into my first apartment, my parents took me to Ikea and bought me two full-sized bookcases (and a bed, but that's long since gone the way of all particle board), which remained my homes' most distinguishing feature for years. Initially I labored to fill their shelves. Later, in another studio apartment in another state, my expanding book collection testified to my status as a grad student. I bought two matching half-sized bookcases, wedging one in front of a radiator because I was out of wall space. That's also how my filing cabinet--a previous birthday splurge, which I guess means I've always been old--wound up next to the fridge.
Eventually the lot of us moved to yet another studio apartment, the former living room of a formerly grand Harlem brownstone. An elaborate Victorian fireplace sat in the center of the longest wall and my four bookshelves fit perfectly to either side. Around this time I ran out of space and started shelving books horizontally. Then I got my first job and the bookshelves and I moved upstate--and the acquisition of a campus office helped relieve their burden. Once again they fit perfectly along my living room's longest wall, and from the street below I could look up and see nothing but books. It was pretty much exactly what I'd fantasized about at twenty-two.
Even a space alien could tell you this apartment belonged to a grad student
By the time we bought our first house those Ikea shelves no longer seemed nice enough to serve as our display bookcases, so we bought others, and I squeezed the old ones into my tiny home office. Now, in another house in a third state, the original four fit comfortably enough that I need new ones to fill out the room. They aren't the handsomest things, but they're big and sturdy and unobtrusive, and every time I plunk down on the floor to reorganize my bookshelves or sort my files I remember all the other times I've done the same and how consequential it felt.
I still love my books; there's a reason they're the focal point of our living room and that we removed the enormous bracket the previous owners had installed for a flat-screen t.v. And I still have an evangelical conviction that life is better when all papers are filed away tidily and ready to be retrieved at an instant's notice. But if those things remain bound up with my sense of self, they're no longer a pledge to the future--a willing of that self in to being--in the way they once were. Every new book used to feel like a statement about myself, and I can still see the angle of the late-afternoon sunlight in that first apartment as I sat on the edge of my bed and inscribed my name inside each volume, just as I remember staying up until 2 a.m. with folders and tabs strewn across my grad school apartment as I imposed order upon the miscellaneous papers that until then I'd been hauling around in file boxes and milk crates.
I don't wish to go back to a time when everything signified so very deeply, but I enjoy thinking about how continuous this self is with my younger one.
What I'll enjoy much less is moving all this crap the next time around.
Saturday, September 03, 2016
Scheduled up, scheduled out
My teaching schedule is the worst I've had in a decade.
I was prepared to suck up the MWF part--it is, after all, my turn to suck it up--and with two classes scheduled back-to-back in the mid and late afternoon it seemed like it might be okay. But then one of my classes didn't make, and the only reasonable class I could swap into was at 9 a.m. And if a three-day-a-week 9 a.m. class is pretty bad, a three-day-a-week 9 a.m. class followed by MORE THAN FOUR AND A HALF HOURS OF DEAD TIME is just about the worst thing I can imagine.
Actually, scratch that: the worst thing I can imagine is all of the above at an institution that has a Tuesday/Thursday common hour--a period when no classes are scheduled but alllll meetings for university business are. Meaning that, when you have a MWF schedule, you can expect to be on campus four or five days out of five.*
Needless to say, I'm disgruntled.**
But both because there's no help for it and because I find a certain amount of structure salutary, I've decided that the only solution is to schedule my work-week within an inch of its life. Last semester, when I was traveling every week and doing a graduate seminar's worth of reading on top of my regular job, I kept my shit together by laying out a clear schedule for exactly what happened when, Monday through Friday. (Then I returned on Saturday, collapsed, and did nothing for a day and a half.)
This semester won't demand that kind of scheduling, but I think it needs it: I've got a few too many plates spinning in my writing life and I've never been great at keeping multiple projects going simultaneously. Moreover, though I have a couple of hard deadlines, most of my projects are either long-term and ongoing, things no one else is checking up on, or both.
So I have a two-part plan. Because my natural preference is to focus intensively on just one thing at a time--especially if that thing is writing, reading, or grading--I need a schedule that designates and protects discrete chunks of time rather than just hoping they happen. This means corralling my shorter or more interruptible tasks into my less-productive on-campus hours (and using my least productive hours to run errands and the like).
The Schedule
Monday / Wednesday / Friday
During that huge chunk of time--almost fourteen hours!--I do all my course reading and prep (luckily, these are relatively low-prep classes) and handle administrivia. I also work on the edition for an hour or two each day.
When I get home at 5, I take advantage of the fact that I'm brain-dead but upright and go to the gym.
Tuesday
After any meetings, I work at home, reading/researching if I need it, writing if I don't.
Thursday
After any meetings, I go to the art museum library and write for four or five hours.
On weeks when papers are due, I can also squeeze in 3-4 hours of focused grading time on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Saturday
Absolutely nothing related to teaching. Ideally I'll write/read for two or three hours in a low-key way, with the rest as leisure.
Sunday
No work of any sort until 2 or 3 (we go to Mass, have brunch, read the Times). After that I might write or read for a couple of hours--or I might just take the whole day off.
One of the goals is to make weekends low-key and pleasurable, working only when and if I feel like it, on things that are sustaining--rather than feeling as if there's always something I ought to be doing.
The Log
In addition to this schedule, I've started to keep a work diary for my writing/scholarship, logging, each day, roughly how many hours I spend doing what on which projects. Again, the aim isn't to feel guilty, but the opposite: to notice and appreciate progress over time (especially on long-term projects, or projects without deadlines, or those, like the edition, where it's tough to see forward momentum because it doesn't manifest itself in word or page counts). I also hope this will be an effective way for me to remember to keep checking in on all my different projects rather than working on just one--until a deadline approaches and I panic and have to drop it for six weeks to finish something else.
This kind of itemization might stress some people out, but in the past I've found it tremendously reassuring to be able to point to concrete accomplishments--that I spent six hours proofreading textual notes, or wrote 1,500 new words, or read eight articles, or whatever. Armed with that evidence, I can feel justified in taking a day or two off. Without it, I tend to have only the haziest sense of what I've done, and it never feels like enough.
*
I'll let you know how it goes. So far, the only thing that's proving hard is the part where I get up at 7 a.m. three days a week. That part is going very poorly indeed.
-----------------
*And seriously, this is moronic. At my previous job, the English department set a Wednesday period aside for all department and committee meetings, on the principle that MWF faculty shouldn't have to come in for a fourth day when TTh faculty could just come in for a third.
**And yes, yes, I know: most jobs in the world are five days a week and nine to five and blah blah--but as one friend put it, academic labor is so intense, inflexible, and all-consuming that one of the compensations is the ability to schedule at least some of it as we like. So yeah, you get to sleep until 9. . . in exchange for teaching night classes. You get a four day weekend. . . but more than half of it is spent grading. (As the joke goes, you get to choose which sixty hours a week you want to work.)
I was prepared to suck up the MWF part--it is, after all, my turn to suck it up--and with two classes scheduled back-to-back in the mid and late afternoon it seemed like it might be okay. But then one of my classes didn't make, and the only reasonable class I could swap into was at 9 a.m. And if a three-day-a-week 9 a.m. class is pretty bad, a three-day-a-week 9 a.m. class followed by MORE THAN FOUR AND A HALF HOURS OF DEAD TIME is just about the worst thing I can imagine.
Actually, scratch that: the worst thing I can imagine is all of the above at an institution that has a Tuesday/Thursday common hour--a period when no classes are scheduled but alllll meetings for university business are. Meaning that, when you have a MWF schedule, you can expect to be on campus four or five days out of five.*
Needless to say, I'm disgruntled.**
But both because there's no help for it and because I find a certain amount of structure salutary, I've decided that the only solution is to schedule my work-week within an inch of its life. Last semester, when I was traveling every week and doing a graduate seminar's worth of reading on top of my regular job, I kept my shit together by laying out a clear schedule for exactly what happened when, Monday through Friday. (Then I returned on Saturday, collapsed, and did nothing for a day and a half.)
This semester won't demand that kind of scheduling, but I think it needs it: I've got a few too many plates spinning in my writing life and I've never been great at keeping multiple projects going simultaneously. Moreover, though I have a couple of hard deadlines, most of my projects are either long-term and ongoing, things no one else is checking up on, or both.
So I have a two-part plan. Because my natural preference is to focus intensively on just one thing at a time--especially if that thing is writing, reading, or grading--I need a schedule that designates and protects discrete chunks of time rather than just hoping they happen. This means corralling my shorter or more interruptible tasks into my less-productive on-campus hours (and using my least productive hours to run errands and the like).
The Schedule
Monday / Wednesday / Friday
During that huge chunk of time--almost fourteen hours!--I do all my course reading and prep (luckily, these are relatively low-prep classes) and handle administrivia. I also work on the edition for an hour or two each day.
When I get home at 5, I take advantage of the fact that I'm brain-dead but upright and go to the gym.
Tuesday
After any meetings, I work at home, reading/researching if I need it, writing if I don't.
Thursday
After any meetings, I go to the art museum library and write for four or five hours.
On weeks when papers are due, I can also squeeze in 3-4 hours of focused grading time on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Saturday
Absolutely nothing related to teaching. Ideally I'll write/read for two or three hours in a low-key way, with the rest as leisure.
Sunday
No work of any sort until 2 or 3 (we go to Mass, have brunch, read the Times). After that I might write or read for a couple of hours--or I might just take the whole day off.
One of the goals is to make weekends low-key and pleasurable, working only when and if I feel like it, on things that are sustaining--rather than feeling as if there's always something I ought to be doing.
The Log
In addition to this schedule, I've started to keep a work diary for my writing/scholarship, logging, each day, roughly how many hours I spend doing what on which projects. Again, the aim isn't to feel guilty, but the opposite: to notice and appreciate progress over time (especially on long-term projects, or projects without deadlines, or those, like the edition, where it's tough to see forward momentum because it doesn't manifest itself in word or page counts). I also hope this will be an effective way for me to remember to keep checking in on all my different projects rather than working on just one--until a deadline approaches and I panic and have to drop it for six weeks to finish something else.
This kind of itemization might stress some people out, but in the past I've found it tremendously reassuring to be able to point to concrete accomplishments--that I spent six hours proofreading textual notes, or wrote 1,500 new words, or read eight articles, or whatever. Armed with that evidence, I can feel justified in taking a day or two off. Without it, I tend to have only the haziest sense of what I've done, and it never feels like enough.
*
I'll let you know how it goes. So far, the only thing that's proving hard is the part where I get up at 7 a.m. three days a week. That part is going very poorly indeed.
-----------------
*And seriously, this is moronic. At my previous job, the English department set a Wednesday period aside for all department and committee meetings, on the principle that MWF faculty shouldn't have to come in for a fourth day when TTh faculty could just come in for a third.
**And yes, yes, I know: most jobs in the world are five days a week and nine to five and blah blah--but as one friend put it, academic labor is so intense, inflexible, and all-consuming that one of the compensations is the ability to schedule at least some of it as we like. So yeah, you get to sleep until 9. . . in exchange for teaching night classes. You get a four day weekend. . . but more than half of it is spent grading. (As the joke goes, you get to choose which sixty hours a week you want to work.)
Monday, January 18, 2016
Course design and creativity
After five frenzied days, I think I have both of my syllabi written.
Let's hope so, since classes start tomorrow.
All these years later, I'm still surprised by what intense, creative labor course design can be. Whenever I'm building one from scratch, I find myself convinced there must be some perfect, Platonic version out there--a combination of readings, a sequence of assignments--that will allow the topic to bloom forth, revealing its fullest meaning and potential. (And not finding that perfect form means the class will suck and fail and EVERYTHING WILL BE RUINED.)
It's delusional, I know--but sometimes, after spending a day writing and rewriting the two or three blurby little paragraphs that lay out the purpose and the big ideas of the class, I realize why I do it. Suddenly, there it is: the whole argument, the whole thing I believe, the theory I want to test that might help me make this class more than just "an exploration of X topic."
And that kind of revelation, whether or not it's connected to anything I've thought or written before, or anything I expect to write in the future, is the same high I get from writing, from research, from the kinds of discovery and meaning-making that happen when I'm alone in a little room all by myself.
*
Still, as creatively satisfying as course design is, I'm on guard against spending too much time on it; that's why I waited until Thursday, when we'd returned from our latest travels, to start working on my syllabi. Obviously, I'd already ordered the books, and I'd started thinking about the supplemental readings, but I was deliberately not letting my mind fully turn to the topic.
And it strikes me that deferring this work may be a version of "the power of procrastination" that Adam Grant writes about in this weekend's NYT. As Grant notes,
According to Grant (and the research a former student of his has done on the subject), this can be taken too far--when you're really panicked or pressed for time, you're likely to grasp at straws and throw together anything that will work--but a certain amount of procrastination, and a certain amount of time pressure, really does stimulate creativity.
In my case, I wasn't actually procrastinating writing my syllabi. I just had other things to do first, and I'm enough of a monomaniac that I can't simultaneously develop a new class and focus on my own writing. My natural preference is to focus on just one thing at a time, and the more creative the labor involved, the harder I find it to switch between projects.
But in the real world, we can't focus on just one task at a time--and though I get overwhelmed easily, I also get grumpy and bored when I don't have enough going on. So I've taught myself to manage multiple projects by parceling out my time in portions large enough to feel I can achieve some degree of immersion: four uninterrupted hours; a day; a week. Here is where I work on A! And there is where I turn to B!
Because I have pots going on multiple burners throughout, I'd like to think that some of the benefits that Grant ascribes to procrastination still accrue: even while I was working on my Milton chapter or the textual notes for my edition, I knew syllabi-writing was on the horizon. And occasionally, when stuck on a sentence in my chapter, I'd take five minutes to sketch out the reading schedule for my senior capstone, or I'd toggle over to the internet to see if there was an online version of one of my supplemental texts. So a corner of my brain was still ticking.
Greater productively through procrastination. I'd said it before, and I'll say it again.
Let's hope so, since classes start tomorrow.
All these years later, I'm still surprised by what intense, creative labor course design can be. Whenever I'm building one from scratch, I find myself convinced there must be some perfect, Platonic version out there--a combination of readings, a sequence of assignments--that will allow the topic to bloom forth, revealing its fullest meaning and potential. (And not finding that perfect form means the class will suck and fail and EVERYTHING WILL BE RUINED.)
It's delusional, I know--but sometimes, after spending a day writing and rewriting the two or three blurby little paragraphs that lay out the purpose and the big ideas of the class, I realize why I do it. Suddenly, there it is: the whole argument, the whole thing I believe, the theory I want to test that might help me make this class more than just "an exploration of X topic."
And that kind of revelation, whether or not it's connected to anything I've thought or written before, or anything I expect to write in the future, is the same high I get from writing, from research, from the kinds of discovery and meaning-making that happen when I'm alone in a little room all by myself.
*
Still, as creatively satisfying as course design is, I'm on guard against spending too much time on it; that's why I waited until Thursday, when we'd returned from our latest travels, to start working on my syllabi. Obviously, I'd already ordered the books, and I'd started thinking about the supplemental readings, but I was deliberately not letting my mind fully turn to the topic.
And it strikes me that deferring this work may be a version of "the power of procrastination" that Adam Grant writes about in this weekend's NYT. As Grant notes,
Our first ideas. . . are usually our most conventional. . . . When you procrastinate, you're more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns. Nearly a century ago, the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik found that people had a better memory for incomplete tasks than for complete ones. When we finish a project, we file it away. But when it’s in limbo, it stays active in our minds.
According to Grant (and the research a former student of his has done on the subject), this can be taken too far--when you're really panicked or pressed for time, you're likely to grasp at straws and throw together anything that will work--but a certain amount of procrastination, and a certain amount of time pressure, really does stimulate creativity.
In my case, I wasn't actually procrastinating writing my syllabi. I just had other things to do first, and I'm enough of a monomaniac that I can't simultaneously develop a new class and focus on my own writing. My natural preference is to focus on just one thing at a time, and the more creative the labor involved, the harder I find it to switch between projects.
But in the real world, we can't focus on just one task at a time--and though I get overwhelmed easily, I also get grumpy and bored when I don't have enough going on. So I've taught myself to manage multiple projects by parceling out my time in portions large enough to feel I can achieve some degree of immersion: four uninterrupted hours; a day; a week. Here is where I work on A! And there is where I turn to B!
Because I have pots going on multiple burners throughout, I'd like to think that some of the benefits that Grant ascribes to procrastination still accrue: even while I was working on my Milton chapter or the textual notes for my edition, I knew syllabi-writing was on the horizon. And occasionally, when stuck on a sentence in my chapter, I'd take five minutes to sketch out the reading schedule for my senior capstone, or I'd toggle over to the internet to see if there was an online version of one of my supplemental texts. So a corner of my brain was still ticking.
Greater productively through procrastination. I'd said it before, and I'll say it again.
Sunday, July 26, 2015
The view from here
In case you're wondering what I've been up to:
Given the vast suckage of time, energy, and will to live that every move involves, this one has actually gone pretty smoothly. Our local real estate market is both flat and cheap, but we got a strong offer (breaking six figures!) within three weeks. And since our buyers are taking advantage of several first-time home-buyer programs, they wanted a slow, leisurely close--and so did we. As of a week ago, we were still holding dinner parties and hosting overnight guests.
But all good things must come to a screeching halt, and the last week kinda sucked. Moreover, the suck has a long tail: since we can't quite afford (and didn't want) to buy a new home immediately, our move will be a multi-stage affair. About 70% of what we're moving is going into storage for a year (that's what you see above) and the rest is going to our existing apartment, which will then need some serious purging and rearranging. Some of the inferior and temporary furnishing there will remain, but we're swapping in a few clearly superior items, like our bed and our dining room set.
And then there's my campus office, which includes my entire scholarly book collection and which will require a dedicated campus-to-campus trip without passing go--or, more to the point, without lugging everything first up and then down four flights of apartment-building stairs.
But that's okay! Once it's all done, it's done.
At least until next year.
Given the vast suckage of time, energy, and will to live that every move involves, this one has actually gone pretty smoothly. Our local real estate market is both flat and cheap, but we got a strong offer (breaking six figures!) within three weeks. And since our buyers are taking advantage of several first-time home-buyer programs, they wanted a slow, leisurely close--and so did we. As of a week ago, we were still holding dinner parties and hosting overnight guests.
But all good things must come to a screeching halt, and the last week kinda sucked. Moreover, the suck has a long tail: since we can't quite afford (and didn't want) to buy a new home immediately, our move will be a multi-stage affair. About 70% of what we're moving is going into storage for a year (that's what you see above) and the rest is going to our existing apartment, which will then need some serious purging and rearranging. Some of the inferior and temporary furnishing there will remain, but we're swapping in a few clearly superior items, like our bed and our dining room set.
And then there's my campus office, which includes my entire scholarly book collection and which will require a dedicated campus-to-campus trip without passing go--or, more to the point, without lugging everything first up and then down four flights of apartment-building stairs.
But that's okay! Once it's all done, it's done.
At least until next year.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Deselecting for the library of the future
The library at RU is in the early stages of a significant renovation, and right now we're in the midst of the "deselection" process--a/k/a "weeding" a/k/a "getting rid of books."
Aspects of this have been handled badly--I'll leave it to you to imagine how--but the reality is that our collections haven't been weeded in decades, and they're overdue. In many fields it's actually irresponsible to keep older material on the shelves (older = outdated, superseded, erroneous), and although that isn't true in the humanities, there are still plenty of titles that should go; there's usually no reason to keep a whole bunch of random, midcentury editions of the works of a given Renaissance poet if we also have more recent editions that are more rigorously edited and with better scholarly apparatus.
Faculty are being given the chance to review the list of deselected titles in their disciplines (and any other areas of interest), and click a button to recommend those we should keep; to the best of my understanding, everything we recommend keeping will be kept.
This sounds great, and it's certainly better than the alternative, but it's proven unexpectedly challenging. To start, there are 8,500 titles on the deselection list in English/American literature alone, and there are other disciplines I want to look at after that. In order to make headway, I've chosen to focus only on titles in my subfield--someone else can worry about James Joyce and Frances Burney--which means I'm able to get through 500-1000 titles at a go before my eyes glaze over.
Even within my subfield, though, I'm struggling with the task. Right now I'm the only faculty member in a field that spans 130 years, give or take, and that includes maybe a hundred significant authors working in a range of genres. I haven't read most of their primary works, much less the scholarship on those works. I have no idea which edition of George Chapman is authoritative, or whether an older edition might have virtues not replicated by a newer one. I don't know whether a 1965 book on Herbert is regarded as foundational. . . or a bit of belletristic bloviating. Even in the case of Milton and Donne scholarship, I know some works that I'd lie across the train-tracks to save, but certainly not all of them. That title. . . it rings a bell. . . but why? Is it actually important, or just a spine that sat in an eye-catching spot in the bookstacks in grad school?
Age isn't a clear-cut guide, and neither is press; if I have a high opinion of something by a given scholar, I usually vote to keep anything else he wrote, but the fact that I've never heard of a dude doesn't mean much, especially in subspecializations far from my own. Titles can often be a clue ("Shakespeare: A Study in Genius" and "12 Moral Archetypes in Renaissance Lyric" can almost certainly be tossed to everyone's benefit), but not always. I'm erring on the side of saving books, of course, but it's vexing to think that I'm probably keeping a certain amount of crap, including crap that may eventually make its way into my students' papers.
The real problem is that I don't know what my future colleagues will want, or my future students; hell, beyond the next two or three years, I can't even predict my own scholarly trajectory with assurance. A library collection can't just be targeted to its present users' near-term needs, and in ordering books for the library over the past eight years I've always ordered widely, focusing on topics and subjects that I know to be important even when I can't imagine needing those books myself. Even if no one at RU ever needs the book, it's available through inter-library loan, and so serves an even larger community (and performs a minor bit of advertising: whenever I get a book from ILL, I note where it's from, and I have a distinctly positive impression of certain small-college libraries as a result).
There are subject areas that currently have no specialists to review them. RU has no Germanists, and no tenure-line Italianists. Our history department is strong, but with some big period and area gaps. English is hiring for two positions this year--will we wind up getting rid of books those new hires might have fought for?
I know this needs to be done. I'm glad I can participate. But it's anxiety-producing all the same.
Aspects of this have been handled badly--I'll leave it to you to imagine how--but the reality is that our collections haven't been weeded in decades, and they're overdue. In many fields it's actually irresponsible to keep older material on the shelves (older = outdated, superseded, erroneous), and although that isn't true in the humanities, there are still plenty of titles that should go; there's usually no reason to keep a whole bunch of random, midcentury editions of the works of a given Renaissance poet if we also have more recent editions that are more rigorously edited and with better scholarly apparatus.
Faculty are being given the chance to review the list of deselected titles in their disciplines (and any other areas of interest), and click a button to recommend those we should keep; to the best of my understanding, everything we recommend keeping will be kept.
This sounds great, and it's certainly better than the alternative, but it's proven unexpectedly challenging. To start, there are 8,500 titles on the deselection list in English/American literature alone, and there are other disciplines I want to look at after that. In order to make headway, I've chosen to focus only on titles in my subfield--someone else can worry about James Joyce and Frances Burney--which means I'm able to get through 500-1000 titles at a go before my eyes glaze over.
Even within my subfield, though, I'm struggling with the task. Right now I'm the only faculty member in a field that spans 130 years, give or take, and that includes maybe a hundred significant authors working in a range of genres. I haven't read most of their primary works, much less the scholarship on those works. I have no idea which edition of George Chapman is authoritative, or whether an older edition might have virtues not replicated by a newer one. I don't know whether a 1965 book on Herbert is regarded as foundational. . . or a bit of belletristic bloviating. Even in the case of Milton and Donne scholarship, I know some works that I'd lie across the train-tracks to save, but certainly not all of them. That title. . . it rings a bell. . . but why? Is it actually important, or just a spine that sat in an eye-catching spot in the bookstacks in grad school?
Age isn't a clear-cut guide, and neither is press; if I have a high opinion of something by a given scholar, I usually vote to keep anything else he wrote, but the fact that I've never heard of a dude doesn't mean much, especially in subspecializations far from my own. Titles can often be a clue ("Shakespeare: A Study in Genius" and "12 Moral Archetypes in Renaissance Lyric" can almost certainly be tossed to everyone's benefit), but not always. I'm erring on the side of saving books, of course, but it's vexing to think that I'm probably keeping a certain amount of crap, including crap that may eventually make its way into my students' papers.
The real problem is that I don't know what my future colleagues will want, or my future students; hell, beyond the next two or three years, I can't even predict my own scholarly trajectory with assurance. A library collection can't just be targeted to its present users' near-term needs, and in ordering books for the library over the past eight years I've always ordered widely, focusing on topics and subjects that I know to be important even when I can't imagine needing those books myself. Even if no one at RU ever needs the book, it's available through inter-library loan, and so serves an even larger community (and performs a minor bit of advertising: whenever I get a book from ILL, I note where it's from, and I have a distinctly positive impression of certain small-college libraries as a result).
There are subject areas that currently have no specialists to review them. RU has no Germanists, and no tenure-line Italianists. Our history department is strong, but with some big period and area gaps. English is hiring for two positions this year--will we wind up getting rid of books those new hires might have fought for?
I know this needs to be done. I'm glad I can participate. But it's anxiety-producing all the same.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Rearranging the deck chairs
This past week I finished revising an article for resubmission: adding an explanatory or background paragraph here, bulking up my evidence there, moving some material from the text to the footnotes and vice versa. During that same week, I was also working on the bibliography for my book, which meant extracting all the citations from my footnotes, reformatting them, and sorting them into a list whose only logic is alphabetical.
These feel like totally antithetical processes. The one involves creating an effective, coherent, and convincing structure for my argument--using lots of component parts to help build something of my own. The other is a kind of disassembly: taking the blocks that helped me build my book, distilling those blocks down to a bunch of titles, and dispersing those titles so that their significance--their linkages and connections--are no longer apparent.
Doing both these things at once was strangely illuminating, for the reasons suggested in the paragraph above. Most of my writing life involves trying to make something: a convincing something, a seemingly-organic something, whose fraught and messy origins aren't apparent. I don't want the seams to show, I want to give the impression of ease and inevitability. And that, of course, is goddamn lot of work.
But once a writing project is done, it's easy to forget that it isn't obvious and inevitable, and it's easy to forget the other possibilities inherent in the material. Creating my bibliography reminded me of some of those roads not taken, and also reminded me that all those other works have an independent existence. In some cases, I was surprised to discover that I'd cited four or five articles by the same author (articles on totally different subjects, in totally different chapters, and which I'd discovered separately and never considered as products of the same brain). And I was surprised to see who wound up next to whom, in the inexorable logic of alphabetical order. Seeing all those works, freed from the context in which I'd put them, made me imagine all kinds of new connections and new conversations.
*
As it happens, I'm also beginning the slow process of tagging all my old blog posts, in the hopes of bringing those into more productive conversation with each other as well. I'm as big a fan of chronology as I am of the alphabet, but after eight years I'm losing track of what's where. It's time to start moving the furniture around.
These feel like totally antithetical processes. The one involves creating an effective, coherent, and convincing structure for my argument--using lots of component parts to help build something of my own. The other is a kind of disassembly: taking the blocks that helped me build my book, distilling those blocks down to a bunch of titles, and dispersing those titles so that their significance--their linkages and connections--are no longer apparent.
Doing both these things at once was strangely illuminating, for the reasons suggested in the paragraph above. Most of my writing life involves trying to make something: a convincing something, a seemingly-organic something, whose fraught and messy origins aren't apparent. I don't want the seams to show, I want to give the impression of ease and inevitability. And that, of course, is goddamn lot of work.
But once a writing project is done, it's easy to forget that it isn't obvious and inevitable, and it's easy to forget the other possibilities inherent in the material. Creating my bibliography reminded me of some of those roads not taken, and also reminded me that all those other works have an independent existence. In some cases, I was surprised to discover that I'd cited four or five articles by the same author (articles on totally different subjects, in totally different chapters, and which I'd discovered separately and never considered as products of the same brain). And I was surprised to see who wound up next to whom, in the inexorable logic of alphabetical order. Seeing all those works, freed from the context in which I'd put them, made me imagine all kinds of new connections and new conversations.
*
As it happens, I'm also beginning the slow process of tagging all my old blog posts, in the hopes of bringing those into more productive conversation with each other as well. I'm as big a fan of chronology as I am of the alphabet, but after eight years I'm losing track of what's where. It's time to start moving the furniture around.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Rejiggering
I've been working on the syllabus for my graduate Milton class for ages. It really shouldn't take this long: I've taught five Milton courses at either the advanced undergrad or grad level over the past seven years, and I always teach more or less the same primary texts, always in a roughly chronological fashion. So what's so hard?
Part of what's hard is that I keep switching textbooks, and that means figuring out what is and isn't in each one. Some have more useful supporting materials than others, and none has exactly the same excerpts from the prose works. Moreover, a new text--without my pre-existing flags and annotations--means I spend hours trying to find the things I want.
It's also hard to pick the right secondary sources and the right number of them; I still don't have a feel for how much (and what kind) of critical reading is reasonable to expect of M.A. students. My Milton grad class three years ago was amazing, and I could've given them even more secondary readings than I did--so my impulse is to up the workload slightly from last time (as well as to replace several articles that turned out to be duds). On the other hand, my Donne grad class the following semester was much weaker and had a difficult time not only with dense critical readings but even with some of the primary texts. Since this will be only my third M.A.-level class, it's hard to know whether my first or my second was the more typical.
It's awesome having a well-designed course that's pretty much ready to go whenever I teach it. It's also awesome to design a new course from scratch. Even redesigning an old course can be intellectually stimulating. But this kind of rejiggering-without-real-redesign? Just a drag, man.
Part of what's hard is that I keep switching textbooks, and that means figuring out what is and isn't in each one. Some have more useful supporting materials than others, and none has exactly the same excerpts from the prose works. Moreover, a new text--without my pre-existing flags and annotations--means I spend hours trying to find the things I want.
It's also hard to pick the right secondary sources and the right number of them; I still don't have a feel for how much (and what kind) of critical reading is reasonable to expect of M.A. students. My Milton grad class three years ago was amazing, and I could've given them even more secondary readings than I did--so my impulse is to up the workload slightly from last time (as well as to replace several articles that turned out to be duds). On the other hand, my Donne grad class the following semester was much weaker and had a difficult time not only with dense critical readings but even with some of the primary texts. Since this will be only my third M.A.-level class, it's hard to know whether my first or my second was the more typical.
It's awesome having a well-designed course that's pretty much ready to go whenever I teach it. It's also awesome to design a new course from scratch. Even redesigning an old course can be intellectually stimulating. But this kind of rejiggering-without-real-redesign? Just a drag, man.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Duking it in dark corners
I'm teaching the comedies and romances half of the Shakespeare sequence this semester, and one of the issues that this particular batch of students has found most fascinating is the number of rulers who assert control ineffectively or unrealistically, attempting to set limits to human emotions or behaviors that simply can't be legislated. Maybe it's the fact that it's a election year, but my students seem endlessly interested in characters like the King of Navarre in Love's Labour's Lost (who pledges himself and his friends to three years of fasting, study, and isolation from women); the King of France in All's Well that Ends Well (a well-meaning but simultaneously autocratic and impotent ruler who imagines himself as a maker and enforcer of marriages); and Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure (who, among other things, manipulates characters into excesses of grief, repentance, and forgiveness).
This pattern interests me, too, though I'm less compelled by the spectacle of bad leadership than by the way that Shakespeare dramatizes the failures of self-knowledge and the mania for control that often accompanies those failures. Frankly, it's an impulse that I recognize in myself. I'm not a "controlling" personality in the usual sense of that term, but I do have a hard time letting things lie. I want to fix everything, immediately, and that includes interpersonal relationships.
Indeed, I'd say that my greatest weakness is a belief in my own rectitude and rationality--the conviction that I understand my motives perfectly, that they're entirely justified by circumstances, and that any other interpretation of my actions is wrongheaded, misinformed, or rooted in some mysterious and inexplicable personal hostility. (This admission will, I realize, come as a total surprise to readers of this blog.) As I've gotten older, I've gotten better at recognizing and curbing this tendency, and I'll readily acknowledge that my narrative of a given set of events is only partial and subjective. Still, it remains difficult for me to accept that other people might have their own, very different interpretations of events that involve me--and that their interpretations, and whatever emotions result from those interpretations, aren't wrong.
Oddly enough, teaching has been helpful in training me away from my impulse to correct other people's experiences of the world. You might think that being in a position of structural power over my students would be a license for the worst forms of this behavior--forcing my views, ideas, and methods upon others--but in fact the structure of that relationship means it's easier to recognize my students as entirely other. They're my juniors; they're at an earlier stage in their processes of intellectual and self-discovery; and I've been teaching for long enough now that I know it's impossible to predict who they'll become and what changes they'll undergo. It can be mind-blowing how different a student can be in her senior year compared with her sophomore year.
So when a student doesn't understand or agree with something I'm saying, I listen. I take his ideas seriously, and explain my own. I lay out my best case... and then I let it lie. And when a student is angry with or seems to dislike me, I don't take it personally. I get that I may be misreading her, that she may be dealing with shit unrelated to me, and that, in any case, it's not my job to get her to like me. My students' emotional responses, like their intellectual responses, are their own.
It's harder to let things lie with the other people in my life--my friends, my family, my colleagues. But until I'm appointed Duke of Vienna and find an usually fetching friar's robe, I'm working on being more laid-back. And possibly cultivating more self-knowledge.
This pattern interests me, too, though I'm less compelled by the spectacle of bad leadership than by the way that Shakespeare dramatizes the failures of self-knowledge and the mania for control that often accompanies those failures. Frankly, it's an impulse that I recognize in myself. I'm not a "controlling" personality in the usual sense of that term, but I do have a hard time letting things lie. I want to fix everything, immediately, and that includes interpersonal relationships.
Indeed, I'd say that my greatest weakness is a belief in my own rectitude and rationality--the conviction that I understand my motives perfectly, that they're entirely justified by circumstances, and that any other interpretation of my actions is wrongheaded, misinformed, or rooted in some mysterious and inexplicable personal hostility. (This admission will, I realize, come as a total surprise to readers of this blog.) As I've gotten older, I've gotten better at recognizing and curbing this tendency, and I'll readily acknowledge that my narrative of a given set of events is only partial and subjective. Still, it remains difficult for me to accept that other people might have their own, very different interpretations of events that involve me--and that their interpretations, and whatever emotions result from those interpretations, aren't wrong.
Oddly enough, teaching has been helpful in training me away from my impulse to correct other people's experiences of the world. You might think that being in a position of structural power over my students would be a license for the worst forms of this behavior--forcing my views, ideas, and methods upon others--but in fact the structure of that relationship means it's easier to recognize my students as entirely other. They're my juniors; they're at an earlier stage in their processes of intellectual and self-discovery; and I've been teaching for long enough now that I know it's impossible to predict who they'll become and what changes they'll undergo. It can be mind-blowing how different a student can be in her senior year compared with her sophomore year.
So when a student doesn't understand or agree with something I'm saying, I listen. I take his ideas seriously, and explain my own. I lay out my best case... and then I let it lie. And when a student is angry with or seems to dislike me, I don't take it personally. I get that I may be misreading her, that she may be dealing with shit unrelated to me, and that, in any case, it's not my job to get her to like me. My students' emotional responses, like their intellectual responses, are their own.
It's harder to let things lie with the other people in my life--my friends, my family, my colleagues. But until I'm appointed Duke of Vienna and find an usually fetching friar's robe, I'm working on being more laid-back. And possibly cultivating more self-knowledge.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
New office, new you
Apologies for the bloggy silence: I returned Stateside a week ago, immediately came down with a cold, discovered the back yard had become a jungle in our absence, had to assuage the needs of two cats, and decided that jetlag + headcold = awesome time to move offices. Because yes: upon earning tenure I also got a new office, one with a huge window that looks into the arms of a giant tree.
Getting tenure and scoring this particular office aren't directly related; one person is leaving, one person is coming in, and our old department chair is stepping down as our new one steps up, so there are several offices in play. Still, I enjoy both the symbolism and the ritual change inherent in the move: the office itself is only a bit better than my old one (which had a ridiculously tiny window but was otherwise spacious and agreeable), but thinking about how to organize and decorate a new space and going through, God help me, six years of lesson plans and course evaluations and administrative memos and plagiarism paperwork--and throwing out 2/3 of it and reorganizing the rest--has felt like an agreeable bit of housekeeping, an agreeable new start.
Whatever else tenure brings, occupying a new position within the department (literally!) and getting a new perspective on the world outside it (also literally!) seems like a nice way to begin.
Getting tenure and scoring this particular office aren't directly related; one person is leaving, one person is coming in, and our old department chair is stepping down as our new one steps up, so there are several offices in play. Still, I enjoy both the symbolism and the ritual change inherent in the move: the office itself is only a bit better than my old one (which had a ridiculously tiny window but was otherwise spacious and agreeable), but thinking about how to organize and decorate a new space and going through, God help me, six years of lesson plans and course evaluations and administrative memos and plagiarism paperwork--and throwing out 2/3 of it and reorganizing the rest--has felt like an agreeable bit of housekeeping, an agreeable new start.
Whatever else tenure brings, occupying a new position within the department (literally!) and getting a new perspective on the world outside it (also literally!) seems like a nice way to begin.
Friday, February 03, 2012
Feeling the rhythm
Every semester, in my Shakespeare class, I begin with two weeks on metrics. Partly this is a way of doing something productive on the first day of class, but it's also a way of establishing, early on, that our course is going to involve attention to sound and language, not just plot and character. I think that I teach it well and most of my students respond gamely, but there are always a handful whose response is hostile puzzlement. They seem equally displeased by the restrictions of metrics and by the fact that there isn't always a single right answer: they sigh, loudly, when we're scanning a poem in class and I acknowledge that a particular foot could be either a spondee or an iamb--or just possibly a trochee, depending on how the neighboring foot is accented.
I sympathize, of course, and I tell them that my ambition isn't for them to become expert scanners, but just to understand that meter can affect meaning and to be familiar with some basic terms. But I also tell them that if they do it enough, or simply read Shakespeare aloud enough, they'll come to feel the rhythm instinctively, even recognizing when a word must have been pronounced differently in Shakespeare's day because the logic of the meter demands it. Iambic pentameter isn't something Shakespeare imposed on his plays; in a culture of sonnet-writing and theatre-going, it was just the back-beat of daily life.
Still, it takes a while to fully inhabit any rhythm. This semester RU has shortened all its class periods in order to add another period to the day and to free up more classroom space: we've gone from 60 minutes to 50, from 90 to 75, and from 195 to 165. Such changes are tough. I went from 75 minutes at INRU to 80 minutes at Big Urban, and then the next year to to 90 minutes at RU, and both those changes were disorienting. Even five extra minutes threw my rhythm off, and ten felt impossible; I was always running out of things to do, or dragging on a discussion past its natural life in order to fill time.
Over the years, though, I've come to love the 90-minute period, especially in my Shakespeare classes: we can do real and detailed scene work, have a free-wheeling general discussion or two, and even fit in a quiz or talk about administrative matters. I was totally in control of those 90 minutes, and losing fifteen of them feels like a disaster. It's not about content, it's about rhythm. I don't feel a 75-minute period in my gut the way I do a 90-minute period, and so I'm slow to cut off one discussion to move along to the next.
I'm off my game and I hate it. These new periods feel clunky and awkward and totally unnatural. But I suppose that I'll grow into them eventually--and that my brain and body will come to respond as they do to da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum.
I sympathize, of course, and I tell them that my ambition isn't for them to become expert scanners, but just to understand that meter can affect meaning and to be familiar with some basic terms. But I also tell them that if they do it enough, or simply read Shakespeare aloud enough, they'll come to feel the rhythm instinctively, even recognizing when a word must have been pronounced differently in Shakespeare's day because the logic of the meter demands it. Iambic pentameter isn't something Shakespeare imposed on his plays; in a culture of sonnet-writing and theatre-going, it was just the back-beat of daily life.
Still, it takes a while to fully inhabit any rhythm. This semester RU has shortened all its class periods in order to add another period to the day and to free up more classroom space: we've gone from 60 minutes to 50, from 90 to 75, and from 195 to 165. Such changes are tough. I went from 75 minutes at INRU to 80 minutes at Big Urban, and then the next year to to 90 minutes at RU, and both those changes were disorienting. Even five extra minutes threw my rhythm off, and ten felt impossible; I was always running out of things to do, or dragging on a discussion past its natural life in order to fill time.
Over the years, though, I've come to love the 90-minute period, especially in my Shakespeare classes: we can do real and detailed scene work, have a free-wheeling general discussion or two, and even fit in a quiz or talk about administrative matters. I was totally in control of those 90 minutes, and losing fifteen of them feels like a disaster. It's not about content, it's about rhythm. I don't feel a 75-minute period in my gut the way I do a 90-minute period, and so I'm slow to cut off one discussion to move along to the next.
I'm off my game and I hate it. These new periods feel clunky and awkward and totally unnatural. But I suppose that I'll grow into them eventually--and that my brain and body will come to respond as they do to da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Unpacking my library
I'm finally mostly unpacked, one of the last tasks being the organization of my library. I actually have fewer books to unpack this time than when I moved five years ago, since hundreds of books now reside in my on-campus office. However, without all my Early Modern books and my teaching books and my theory books (and with many more rooms in my home!), the task of ordering and bestowing the remainder is even more of a puzzle.
We don't have a room that can serve as a dedicated library, and I've taken a smallish room--the beautiful, sun-filled sleeping porch--as my office. My books might all fit in there, if I crammed bookcases against every available wall, but that doesn't seem to make sense; aside from the size of the room, there's no point in having Don DeLillo and August Wilson, much less Helen Fielding, hanging out in my workspace. In theory I could keep leisure reading in one place and scholarly reading in another, but that division isn't absolute. Is the Odyssey research, or leisure? How about Jonathan Swift? Or the Romantic poets (whom I hate, will not read for fun, will never need for my research, but need to keep as part of my library)? And what the hell do I do with my collection of books on jazz and Old Hollywood? Or my two dozen books on contemporary religion?
Since I'm by nature an organizer and a systematizer, I'm haunted by the belief that there's some perfect way to organize my books: easy and rational but also intellectually coherent. I know that this isn't so--and that whatever I do with my books, within a few months I'll be accustomed to where everything is and the underlying organization won't matter--but I still want to do things right.
So I sit on the floor, surrounded by books, interrogating them: what are you? How do you matter to me?
The organizational method that I continue to find the most satisfying is chronological. So with the exception of a few special or set-aside collections, everything else gets mixed together: literature and history, philosophy and social science, starting with the writings of the ancient world and continuing up through last year's best-sellers. The idea is that my bookshelves will chart patterns of intellectual and aesthetic development, influence and response--and for the most part they do. Still, chronology doesn't solve all my problems. Should Gibbon go next to Catullus, or next to Johnson? Does an author with a long career get all his books shelved next to each other, or should they be interleaved with those of his earlier and later contemporaries? Should national groupings be respected? (It might be reasonable to interleave works of Early American literature with those from 18th C. Britain, but what about continental Europe? Should Choderlos de Laclos and the Marquis de Sade really be next to Charles Brockden Brown?)
It's a pleasurable task, though, for exactly these reasons. I enjoy finding six totally dissimilar novels published within a year or two of each other, and thinking about the different issues and movements they're in conversation with. I like seeing which patterns emerge, and what different patterns I can create if I shuffle authors into a slightly different order, or place them in the context of an epochal event like WWII.
But then, that's how my brain works; I may have a rage for order, but I'm more a lumper than a splitter.
How do the rest of you solve your book organization problems?
We don't have a room that can serve as a dedicated library, and I've taken a smallish room--the beautiful, sun-filled sleeping porch--as my office. My books might all fit in there, if I crammed bookcases against every available wall, but that doesn't seem to make sense; aside from the size of the room, there's no point in having Don DeLillo and August Wilson, much less Helen Fielding, hanging out in my workspace. In theory I could keep leisure reading in one place and scholarly reading in another, but that division isn't absolute. Is the Odyssey research, or leisure? How about Jonathan Swift? Or the Romantic poets (whom I hate, will not read for fun, will never need for my research, but need to keep as part of my library)? And what the hell do I do with my collection of books on jazz and Old Hollywood? Or my two dozen books on contemporary religion?Since I'm by nature an organizer and a systematizer, I'm haunted by the belief that there's some perfect way to organize my books: easy and rational but also intellectually coherent. I know that this isn't so--and that whatever I do with my books, within a few months I'll be accustomed to where everything is and the underlying organization won't matter--but I still want to do things right.
So I sit on the floor, surrounded by books, interrogating them: what are you? How do you matter to me?
The organizational method that I continue to find the most satisfying is chronological. So with the exception of a few special or set-aside collections, everything else gets mixed together: literature and history, philosophy and social science, starting with the writings of the ancient world and continuing up through last year's best-sellers. The idea is that my bookshelves will chart patterns of intellectual and aesthetic development, influence and response--and for the most part they do. Still, chronology doesn't solve all my problems. Should Gibbon go next to Catullus, or next to Johnson? Does an author with a long career get all his books shelved next to each other, or should they be interleaved with those of his earlier and later contemporaries? Should national groupings be respected? (It might be reasonable to interleave works of Early American literature with those from 18th C. Britain, but what about continental Europe? Should Choderlos de Laclos and the Marquis de Sade really be next to Charles Brockden Brown?)
It's a pleasurable task, though, for exactly these reasons. I enjoy finding six totally dissimilar novels published within a year or two of each other, and thinking about the different issues and movements they're in conversation with. I like seeing which patterns emerge, and what different patterns I can create if I shuffle authors into a slightly different order, or place them in the context of an epochal event like WWII.
But then, that's how my brain works; I may have a rage for order, but I'm more a lumper than a splitter.
How do the rest of you solve your book organization problems?
Friday, May 13, 2011
The archival imperative, redux
I'm starting to pack up the apartment I've lived in for the past five years, and though I have plenty of stuff that needs to be purged, the real problem is my compulsive commitment to paper.
I have a four-drawer file cabinet that's full of paper. Until a few days ago, I had nearly as much paper outside as within it (and that's not counting what's in my campus office). All this paper was well-corralled--in labeled folders, with each folder filed in a drawer, box, or wire organizer--but it struck me that I could probably winnow it down to a more reasonable volume.
Some of it was easy to get rid of, like the folders containing ancient utility bills, credit card statements, and records of oil changes for my car or rabies shots for my cats. But such household files amounted to less than one full drawer. The other stuff was. . . trickier. I had four linear feet of correspondence, dating back 18 years; a file of ephemera such as postcards, fliers, and pages torn out of magazines (label: "Schwee"); every goddamn piece of mail I ever received from my graduate program, including a complete set of letters announcing my TA assignments; and a whole raft of carefully photocopied and organized general-interest articles from places like The New Yorker.
An earlier version of myself obviously thought that I would need all these things someday--and "need" more than "want," for I experience this impulse as being about good record-keeping more than about preserving sentimental souvenirs. Sure, I have three shoeboxes full of old playbills stored atop my kitchen cabinets, but I go through them at least a few times a year, trying to figure out if I've seen a given actor before, and in what role. But with the passage of time, some of my mini-archives become mysterious even to me: I don't know why I thought I'd need an article about McKinsey & Co., or another about divorce laws in Louisiana. Yesterday I found, within a larger storage box, a shoebox with three newspapers and four magazines, all of them dated within days of September 11, 2001. The front page of The New York Times from September 12th is, I suppose, a historical artifact. But what did I ever expect to do with it?
I've always assumed that my mania for paper-keeping dated from my first years of college, when my work-study job was deep in the bowels of the rare books and manuscript library. But although that's certainly where I learned to file correspondence properly (pages unfolded, with the envelope slit to enclose the open card or letter), I discovered last month that this compulsion long predated my arrival at college.
My parents, you see, are selling their house--the house they had built almost 40 years ago and that I grew up in, and when I was out west in April they had me go through some of my old stuff. I knew that I had a bunch of papers in a box in their basement, but I wasn't prepared for what greeted me. Apparently, at some point around age twelve, I started preserving everything I'd ever written: the three books I wrote at age eight. The wacky-ass homework assignments I produced in my early teen years (I have no idea what the actual assignment was that inspired me to create a fake police case file, complete with hand-aged manila folder--but I'm pretty sure it didn't ask for that). And, God help me, the two novels that I started around the same time: hundreds of pages apiece, one a boarding-school novel, the other an attempt at an adult thriller. That box held the complete creative oeuvre of young Flavia, organized chronologically. It wasn't small, and it was full.
I don't think I ever believed that I was destined for greatness--my archival impulse has never been about preserving material for future Scholars of Flavia. But I suppose the impulse is at bottom a sentimental rather than merely a practical one: I might need that. I might want that. And when I do, I'll know exactly where to find it.
So although I did make a major purge, reducing my collection of files by some 40%, I'm still attached to a number of things whose value I can't explain. Yes, of course I kept all my diaries, all my correspondence, and every essay and short story I ever finished. But I also kept those TA assignment letters, and the notes from my DGS on the first draft of my dissertation prospectus, and the letters of welcome from the university where I taught for a year as a lecturer. Maybe in another five years I'll be ready to let those go, too. But right now, I want them. They connect me more solidly than my memories alone to the past and to the person I was then.
I have a four-drawer file cabinet that's full of paper. Until a few days ago, I had nearly as much paper outside as within it (and that's not counting what's in my campus office). All this paper was well-corralled--in labeled folders, with each folder filed in a drawer, box, or wire organizer--but it struck me that I could probably winnow it down to a more reasonable volume.
Some of it was easy to get rid of, like the folders containing ancient utility bills, credit card statements, and records of oil changes for my car or rabies shots for my cats. But such household files amounted to less than one full drawer. The other stuff was. . . trickier. I had four linear feet of correspondence, dating back 18 years; a file of ephemera such as postcards, fliers, and pages torn out of magazines (label: "Schwee"); every goddamn piece of mail I ever received from my graduate program, including a complete set of letters announcing my TA assignments; and a whole raft of carefully photocopied and organized general-interest articles from places like The New Yorker.
An earlier version of myself obviously thought that I would need all these things someday--and "need" more than "want," for I experience this impulse as being about good record-keeping more than about preserving sentimental souvenirs. Sure, I have three shoeboxes full of old playbills stored atop my kitchen cabinets, but I go through them at least a few times a year, trying to figure out if I've seen a given actor before, and in what role. But with the passage of time, some of my mini-archives become mysterious even to me: I don't know why I thought I'd need an article about McKinsey & Co., or another about divorce laws in Louisiana. Yesterday I found, within a larger storage box, a shoebox with three newspapers and four magazines, all of them dated within days of September 11, 2001. The front page of The New York Times from September 12th is, I suppose, a historical artifact. But what did I ever expect to do with it?
I've always assumed that my mania for paper-keeping dated from my first years of college, when my work-study job was deep in the bowels of the rare books and manuscript library. But although that's certainly where I learned to file correspondence properly (pages unfolded, with the envelope slit to enclose the open card or letter), I discovered last month that this compulsion long predated my arrival at college.
My parents, you see, are selling their house--the house they had built almost 40 years ago and that I grew up in, and when I was out west in April they had me go through some of my old stuff. I knew that I had a bunch of papers in a box in their basement, but I wasn't prepared for what greeted me. Apparently, at some point around age twelve, I started preserving everything I'd ever written: the three books I wrote at age eight. The wacky-ass homework assignments I produced in my early teen years (I have no idea what the actual assignment was that inspired me to create a fake police case file, complete with hand-aged manila folder--but I'm pretty sure it didn't ask for that). And, God help me, the two novels that I started around the same time: hundreds of pages apiece, one a boarding-school novel, the other an attempt at an adult thriller. That box held the complete creative oeuvre of young Flavia, organized chronologically. It wasn't small, and it was full.
I don't think I ever believed that I was destined for greatness--my archival impulse has never been about preserving material for future Scholars of Flavia. But I suppose the impulse is at bottom a sentimental rather than merely a practical one: I might need that. I might want that. And when I do, I'll know exactly where to find it.
So although I did make a major purge, reducing my collection of files by some 40%, I'm still attached to a number of things whose value I can't explain. Yes, of course I kept all my diaries, all my correspondence, and every essay and short story I ever finished. But I also kept those TA assignment letters, and the notes from my DGS on the first draft of my dissertation prospectus, and the letters of welcome from the university where I taught for a year as a lecturer. Maybe in another five years I'll be ready to let those go, too. But right now, I want them. They connect me more solidly than my memories alone to the past and to the person I was then.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Death by paper
Apologies for going AWOL; a perfect storm of out-of-town guests, an out-of-town trip of my own, and the collation of fifty bazillion documents for my reappointment file conspired to keep me away from all you lovelies.
Regional U has both a three-year and a five-year review, the latter preparatory to going up for tenure in year six. The idea is to be able to make any last-minute interventions if the candidate isn't quite on track for tenure--or just put together a crappy file. It's a procedure that I heartily support, though it's also a pain in the ass: one three-ring binder constitutes a teaching portfolio, with tables of evaluation scores and grade ranges, sample syllabi and assignments, class observation write-ups, a statement of teaching philosophy, and anything else notable. The other binder holds copies of all the candidate's publications, fellowship award letters, book contracts (and/or correspondence related to same), along with a C.V., the past four years' annual reports, and narrative statements about research and service.
Basically, the application is an extremely long, heavily annotated C.V., with exhibits.
But although I was cursing the process for most of the long weekend that I spent revising and re-revising my tables of contents, printing out endless PDFs, and running back and forth to Staples to buy exhibit tabs and document sleeves, it's nice to have a tangible reminder of all the things we do that seem to melt into air: classes taught, papers given, thoughts thunk.
I found this to be especially true for my teaching. I have a C.V., after all, to remind me of everything I've published, and offprints stashed here and there. But tabulating all my evaluation scores and grade ranges, and deciding which assignments and handouts to include as representative samples of how I teach--that mysterious thing that we're always doing and thinking about without fully understanding--made me realize, with a start, that I actually do have a teaching profile and philosophy. There are things that I've decided to value and emphasize, across all my classes, without really knowing or planning it.
Better still, I like the teacher who emerges from these documents. She seems kinda awesome. Awesomer, in fact, than I am. (But maybe she'd be my friend?)
Regional U has both a three-year and a five-year review, the latter preparatory to going up for tenure in year six. The idea is to be able to make any last-minute interventions if the candidate isn't quite on track for tenure--or just put together a crappy file. It's a procedure that I heartily support, though it's also a pain in the ass: one three-ring binder constitutes a teaching portfolio, with tables of evaluation scores and grade ranges, sample syllabi and assignments, class observation write-ups, a statement of teaching philosophy, and anything else notable. The other binder holds copies of all the candidate's publications, fellowship award letters, book contracts (and/or correspondence related to same), along with a C.V., the past four years' annual reports, and narrative statements about research and service.
Basically, the application is an extremely long, heavily annotated C.V., with exhibits.
But although I was cursing the process for most of the long weekend that I spent revising and re-revising my tables of contents, printing out endless PDFs, and running back and forth to Staples to buy exhibit tabs and document sleeves, it's nice to have a tangible reminder of all the things we do that seem to melt into air: classes taught, papers given, thoughts thunk.
I found this to be especially true for my teaching. I have a C.V., after all, to remind me of everything I've published, and offprints stashed here and there. But tabulating all my evaluation scores and grade ranges, and deciding which assignments and handouts to include as representative samples of how I teach--that mysterious thing that we're always doing and thinking about without fully understanding--made me realize, with a start, that I actually do have a teaching profile and philosophy. There are things that I've decided to value and emphasize, across all my classes, without really knowing or planning it.
Better still, I like the teacher who emerges from these documents. She seems kinda awesome. Awesomer, in fact, than I am. (But maybe she'd be my friend?)
Saturday, July 03, 2010
The big picture
I'm on record, on this blog, as not being much of a systematizer or theorizer. I've never been a top-down thinker, and neither have I had much of a knack for synthesis.
I've had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I know myself to be a good detail person. I'm a patient accumulator of data, a subtle close-reader, a relentless reviser, and someone who's content to fuss with something she thinks might be important--though she can't say why!--until its significance gradually comes into focus. But on the other hand, I'm not a quick study. I don't speak well or persuasively off the cuff, and I have a hard time framing or even understanding the larger significance of my work. Those aren't merely superficial skills (although in some people they are); they speak to intellectual agility and intellectual depth.
So I've spent a lot of time both envying and deriding people who are systematizers. I've been impatient with theorizers for being bad on the details and suspicious of theory itself for being too totalizing.
It comes, therefore, as a bit of a shock that all I seem to want to read right now are some major systematizers. I'm happily splashing around in Freud and Weber and Nietzsche, Lacan and Derrida and Jameson.
I'm not sure what this is about. Maybe it's about filling in some gaps in my education, or taking my studies in a new direction. Maybe it's about searching for a new and better language for my own ideas. But I do think it has to do with my nearly being done with the work I began in grad school, the project that was once my dissertation and is now a very different book. I'm a much better thinker now, and a better synthesizer. Along the way, it's become clearer to me that the point--the utility--of a particular theoretical model doesn't depend on its being right in all its details, applying to every situation, or answering every question.
Also? I'm having MY MIND BLOWN. On, like, a daily basis. And maybe that's its own justification.
I've had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I know myself to be a good detail person. I'm a patient accumulator of data, a subtle close-reader, a relentless reviser, and someone who's content to fuss with something she thinks might be important--though she can't say why!--until its significance gradually comes into focus. But on the other hand, I'm not a quick study. I don't speak well or persuasively off the cuff, and I have a hard time framing or even understanding the larger significance of my work. Those aren't merely superficial skills (although in some people they are); they speak to intellectual agility and intellectual depth.
So I've spent a lot of time both envying and deriding people who are systematizers. I've been impatient with theorizers for being bad on the details and suspicious of theory itself for being too totalizing.
It comes, therefore, as a bit of a shock that all I seem to want to read right now are some major systematizers. I'm happily splashing around in Freud and Weber and Nietzsche, Lacan and Derrida and Jameson.
I'm not sure what this is about. Maybe it's about filling in some gaps in my education, or taking my studies in a new direction. Maybe it's about searching for a new and better language for my own ideas. But I do think it has to do with my nearly being done with the work I began in grad school, the project that was once my dissertation and is now a very different book. I'm a much better thinker now, and a better synthesizer. Along the way, it's become clearer to me that the point--the utility--of a particular theoretical model doesn't depend on its being right in all its details, applying to every situation, or answering every question.
Also? I'm having MY MIND BLOWN. On, like, a daily basis. And maybe that's its own justification.
Friday, November 28, 2008
The archival imperative
For my freshman and sophomore years of college, my work-study job was in the university's rare books library. The actual tasks I was assigned weren't challenging--I paged materials, reshelved them, and worked on photoduplication orders--but it was entertainment enough for a nosey and bookish 19-year-old. I'd wander among the stacks and pull out illuminated books of hours or slivers of papyri just to gape at them, and I'd do my photocopying very slowly indeed, reading as much as I could of Ezra Pound or Edith Wharton's letters and trying not to drop the boxes in shock when I came across another American writer's hokey but very nude photographs of teenaged boys.
In the long run, this job turned out to be a useful introduction to archives and archival work. In the short run, it made me an object of mirth among my friends as I started adopting some of the library's organizational systems for my dorm room.
Take my correspondence files. I was once a serious letter writer, and up through my late 20s I still routinely wrote and received longhand missives. (These days it's dwindled mostly to cards--albeit sometimes with substantial notes inside--and at best a few letters a year.) Inspired by the manuscript collections I worked with, I started filing my correspondence the way they did in the archive, and I continue to do so today: I slit the envelopes along three sides, unfold the pages or splay open the cards so that they lie flat, and use the envelope as a loose jacket or clip around the relevant pages. Then I order them chronologically within file folders labeled by correspondent and alphabetized by last name.
I suppose it's a little eccentric to treat these letters--some of them going back to when my correspondents and I were 16--as if they deserved the care accorded to Pound's or Eliot's. However, not only is this the maximally efficient way for me to organize and refer to my correspondence, but it also encourages as healthy and non-sentimental an attitude as it is possible for the kind of person who hangs onto all her letters to have. Sure, it's lovely to take out the missives of an old friend and see her handwriting and familiar stationery. But keeping her letters in a file cabinet implies that they are, ultimately, historical and biographical records rather than objects to fetishize.
When it became clear that my ex and I weren't getting back together, I printed out all the emails I'd saved for one reason or another over the years, deleted the electronic copies, and interleaved the printed versions chronologically with the cards and notes I'd already filed. Then I wrote a terminal date (2001-2007) next to his name on the folder tab, slipped it back among the 30 or 40 other folders in the drawer, and rolled it shut. It felt like an agreeable bit of housekeeping: I wouldn't be stumbling upon shoeboxes of letters under the bed or stay email messages when I wasn't expecting them, but neither would I live to regret shredding or burning or deleting those items in a misguided attempt at "closure." If I needed them, they'd be there--along with hundreds and hundreds of letters from the more important and more enduring people in my life.
I'm pretty certain that none of my correspondence will be sought after by scholars of the future, but I have a mania for organizing and historicizing my own life: hence that box of old journals I lug with me every time I move, those files and files of letters--and, I suppose, this blog. Perhaps it's a disease peculiar to academics.
In the long run, this job turned out to be a useful introduction to archives and archival work. In the short run, it made me an object of mirth among my friends as I started adopting some of the library's organizational systems for my dorm room.
Take my correspondence files. I was once a serious letter writer, and up through my late 20s I still routinely wrote and received longhand missives. (These days it's dwindled mostly to cards--albeit sometimes with substantial notes inside--and at best a few letters a year.) Inspired by the manuscript collections I worked with, I started filing my correspondence the way they did in the archive, and I continue to do so today: I slit the envelopes along three sides, unfold the pages or splay open the cards so that they lie flat, and use the envelope as a loose jacket or clip around the relevant pages. Then I order them chronologically within file folders labeled by correspondent and alphabetized by last name.
I suppose it's a little eccentric to treat these letters--some of them going back to when my correspondents and I were 16--as if they deserved the care accorded to Pound's or Eliot's. However, not only is this the maximally efficient way for me to organize and refer to my correspondence, but it also encourages as healthy and non-sentimental an attitude as it is possible for the kind of person who hangs onto all her letters to have. Sure, it's lovely to take out the missives of an old friend and see her handwriting and familiar stationery. But keeping her letters in a file cabinet implies that they are, ultimately, historical and biographical records rather than objects to fetishize.
When it became clear that my ex and I weren't getting back together, I printed out all the emails I'd saved for one reason or another over the years, deleted the electronic copies, and interleaved the printed versions chronologically with the cards and notes I'd already filed. Then I wrote a terminal date (2001-2007) next to his name on the folder tab, slipped it back among the 30 or 40 other folders in the drawer, and rolled it shut. It felt like an agreeable bit of housekeeping: I wouldn't be stumbling upon shoeboxes of letters under the bed or stay email messages when I wasn't expecting them, but neither would I live to regret shredding or burning or deleting those items in a misguided attempt at "closure." If I needed them, they'd be there--along with hundreds and hundreds of letters from the more important and more enduring people in my life.
I'm pretty certain that none of my correspondence will be sought after by scholars of the future, but I have a mania for organizing and historicizing my own life: hence that box of old journals I lug with me every time I move, those files and files of letters--and, I suppose, this blog. Perhaps it's a disease peculiar to academics.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Classroom redecoration
Virtually all the classrooms at RU consist of tablet desks arranged into front-facing rows. I've never loved this layout, but it's worked okay; my classes are still relaxed, smallish, and discussion-based. More to the point, it hadn't occurred to me to tinker with what God and the institution gave me.
I came to discover, though, that most of my colleagues do rearrange their classrooms, usually into a circle. At first this struck me as a tremendous hassle and waste of time--and circles are also a little too kumbayah or AA-meeting for my taste--but I couldn't deny that I'd rather teach to a room where most of my students could see each other.
So this semester I decided to experiment: I had my students move their desks into two concentric semi-circles, leaving me, as before, perched atop the instructor's desk. Since I have more desks than students--and since I'm fussy and anal-retentive--I do have to arrive five minutes early and sling some desks around myself to produce an arrangement I'm happy with, but in the cozy little room where I teach two classes back-to-back it's not a big deal, and the improved discussion dynamic is worth it.
My night class, however, is a problem: I have 28 students in a narrow, deep room with some 60 desks, and it's almost impossible to fit them into an orderly shape without leaving extra desks marooned in the middle of the room. The first few weeks I kept pushing desks around, trying to solve this geometrical puzzle, and making brisk fun of myself in the process. "God!" I'd say to my students. "I hate this! These extra desks totally stress me out!"
They'd laugh and try to help--but the room just didn't seem to permit the arrangement I wanted.
Then this past week I arrived early to find eight or ten students already seated in a small, tidy horseshoe with an abbreviated semi-circle just behind it. "Oh!" I exclaimed. "That's beautiful!"
Then I noticed that fifteen or twenty extra desks had been stacked up along the back wall, out of the way. "Wait," I said. "Did you guys do all this?"
They nodded, with smiles I couldn't interpret--but I have a hunch they decided that it's easier, all around, just to humor the crazy lady.
I came to discover, though, that most of my colleagues do rearrange their classrooms, usually into a circle. At first this struck me as a tremendous hassle and waste of time--and circles are also a little too kumbayah or AA-meeting for my taste--but I couldn't deny that I'd rather teach to a room where most of my students could see each other.
So this semester I decided to experiment: I had my students move their desks into two concentric semi-circles, leaving me, as before, perched atop the instructor's desk. Since I have more desks than students--and since I'm fussy and anal-retentive--I do have to arrive five minutes early and sling some desks around myself to produce an arrangement I'm happy with, but in the cozy little room where I teach two classes back-to-back it's not a big deal, and the improved discussion dynamic is worth it.
My night class, however, is a problem: I have 28 students in a narrow, deep room with some 60 desks, and it's almost impossible to fit them into an orderly shape without leaving extra desks marooned in the middle of the room. The first few weeks I kept pushing desks around, trying to solve this geometrical puzzle, and making brisk fun of myself in the process. "God!" I'd say to my students. "I hate this! These extra desks totally stress me out!"
They'd laugh and try to help--but the room just didn't seem to permit the arrangement I wanted.
Then this past week I arrived early to find eight or ten students already seated in a small, tidy horseshoe with an abbreviated semi-circle just behind it. "Oh!" I exclaimed. "That's beautiful!"
Then I noticed that fifteen or twenty extra desks had been stacked up along the back wall, out of the way. "Wait," I said. "Did you guys do all this?"
They nodded, with smiles I couldn't interpret--but I have a hunch they decided that it's easier, all around, just to humor the crazy lady.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Breaking in the teaching text
I'm back home for less than a week before heading off for a conference abroad, so today I made a fly-by trip to the department to excavate my mailbox. Crammed up to the top of the cubbyhole were packages and packages of books. Some of them made me squeal with delight, while others (duplicate copies, style manuals) got promptly tossed on a lower shelf. And then there was the edition of Donne's poems I'd ordered for my new fall class.
Shit, I thought when I unpacked it. What the hell was I thinking?
Actually, I know what I was thinking: I was thinking that we'd be doing enough Donne to need a complete edition, but not enough that it was worth ordering the best possible text, or one with scholarly essays, or anything like that. The best possible texts, of course, tend to be more expensive, and in the interests of student budgets--and making the least amount of money purchase the greatest number of books--I chose a $10 edition with decent footnotes from a reliable publisher.
It's a perfectly good edition. The problem is that it's not an edition I've ever taught from before, and it's definitely not the ($15) edition I ordered for my upper-division class this past spring and conscientiously read through and marked up for pedagogical purposes.
Because here's the thing: like most people, I have certain texts that I teach regularly, and parts of my classroom shtick are pretty consistent from semester to semester. Sure, I may spend more or less time on a particular scene or issue, depending on the course, but some passages I talk about or have my class work through nine times out of ten--and it's useful to have my underlinings, bracketings, and brief marginal notes from all those previous classes to guide me or give me additional inspiration. (Why are those six words underlined? Oh! there's an interesting pattern of imagery there. Maybe I'll bring that up if discussion goes in the right direction. What are these little arrows for? Right! they indicate mood shifts. Etc.)
I'll also admit that I don't re-read every text every time I teach it; there's just not enough time, especially those weeks when I have two sets of essays to grade or an article deadline. I don't feel bad about this, but I don't feel bad, in part, because I'm able to rely on teaching texts that serve as their own lesson plans, mapping out my various interests and obsessions and my prior pedagogical strategies.
But even when I don't just forget the importance of sticking with the same edition, as I did in ordering the Donne volume, I seem unable to teach from the same text as reliably as I'd like: sometimes I get dissatisfied with a particular edition; sometimes it's that a revised edition is put out and I'm forced to upgrade; but just as often it's that different classes demand different editions.
For instance: I teach Paradise Lost all the damn time--I've taught the poem, either in its entirety or its majority, for the past six consecutive semesters in a total of nine different classes. And how many different texts have I taught the poem from, in those six semesters? Five. In Brit Lit I, I teach from the Norton Anthology of English Literature--first in its seventh and now its eighth edition. In my Milton seminar at Big Urban, I used the Hughes Complete Poems and Major Prose. Not totally satisfied with that, for my Milton seminar at RU I switched to the Riverside Milton. And then for my upper-division class this past spring, I needed, for the first time ever, a single-volume edition of Paradise Lost, so I ordered the Norton.
It was a busy spring. And I'd just re-read PL the previous semester (and taught it in considerably greater detail). So more days than not, I found myself at my desk, in the 30 minutes before class, just copying my markings--squiggly line for squiggly line, boxed bit for boxed bit, marginal comment for marginal comment--from one of the various other editions spread out before me.
I ain't proud. But I sure wish I had a scriptorium to do it for me.
Shit, I thought when I unpacked it. What the hell was I thinking?
Actually, I know what I was thinking: I was thinking that we'd be doing enough Donne to need a complete edition, but not enough that it was worth ordering the best possible text, or one with scholarly essays, or anything like that. The best possible texts, of course, tend to be more expensive, and in the interests of student budgets--and making the least amount of money purchase the greatest number of books--I chose a $10 edition with decent footnotes from a reliable publisher.
It's a perfectly good edition. The problem is that it's not an edition I've ever taught from before, and it's definitely not the ($15) edition I ordered for my upper-division class this past spring and conscientiously read through and marked up for pedagogical purposes.
Because here's the thing: like most people, I have certain texts that I teach regularly, and parts of my classroom shtick are pretty consistent from semester to semester. Sure, I may spend more or less time on a particular scene or issue, depending on the course, but some passages I talk about or have my class work through nine times out of ten--and it's useful to have my underlinings, bracketings, and brief marginal notes from all those previous classes to guide me or give me additional inspiration. (Why are those six words underlined? Oh! there's an interesting pattern of imagery there. Maybe I'll bring that up if discussion goes in the right direction. What are these little arrows for? Right! they indicate mood shifts. Etc.)
I'll also admit that I don't re-read every text every time I teach it; there's just not enough time, especially those weeks when I have two sets of essays to grade or an article deadline. I don't feel bad about this, but I don't feel bad, in part, because I'm able to rely on teaching texts that serve as their own lesson plans, mapping out my various interests and obsessions and my prior pedagogical strategies.
But even when I don't just forget the importance of sticking with the same edition, as I did in ordering the Donne volume, I seem unable to teach from the same text as reliably as I'd like: sometimes I get dissatisfied with a particular edition; sometimes it's that a revised edition is put out and I'm forced to upgrade; but just as often it's that different classes demand different editions.
For instance: I teach Paradise Lost all the damn time--I've taught the poem, either in its entirety or its majority, for the past six consecutive semesters in a total of nine different classes. And how many different texts have I taught the poem from, in those six semesters? Five. In Brit Lit I, I teach from the Norton Anthology of English Literature--first in its seventh and now its eighth edition. In my Milton seminar at Big Urban, I used the Hughes Complete Poems and Major Prose. Not totally satisfied with that, for my Milton seminar at RU I switched to the Riverside Milton. And then for my upper-division class this past spring, I needed, for the first time ever, a single-volume edition of Paradise Lost, so I ordered the Norton.
It was a busy spring. And I'd just re-read PL the previous semester (and taught it in considerably greater detail). So more days than not, I found myself at my desk, in the 30 minutes before class, just copying my markings--squiggly line for squiggly line, boxed bit for boxed bit, marginal comment for marginal comment--from one of the various other editions spread out before me.
I ain't proud. But I sure wish I had a scriptorium to do it for me.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
All or nothing
Sometimes I wonder whether I have, if not a death drive, then at least an impulse toward some of the milder forms of self-annihilation.
How else to explain the way I schedule my life?
In a typical week, I'm on campus Tuesday through Thursday and at home (or just, you know, elsewhere) Friday through Monday. It sounds like a sweet schedule and in many ways it is, especially since on Wednesdays I often don't go in until after noon. But what this means is that I am profoundly ON for several days--and those days are usually long and frantic--and then I'm OFF.
I work during the weekend, of course, but somehow most of my grading and course prep always gets left until Monday and I spend most of that day--and usually until 1 or 2 a.m.--finishing it. On Tuesday I rush to campus, where I spend nine hours (half of them jumping up and down in front of a classroom and the rest trying to be smiley and perky for my office hours or my colleagues), rush home, rush to my Italian class, inevitably have to stop by the grocery store, and finally return home at 10 p.m. looking like I've been beaten with the underside of a toboggan. Wednesday is another day of massive course prep and office hours and the occasional meeting. Thursday is a repeat of Tuesday, sans Italian.
And then? Ah, blessed freedom! Then it's all about sleeping in and puttering around the apartment and reading magazines and going out with friends. Sure, I get work done, but it gets done in the context of an essentially relaxed, unstructured day: a few hours here, a few hours there, and always with a spare half hour to check blogs or paint my toenails.
And honestly, I don't think I'd have it any other way. I love my leisurely days at home, and if the only way I can get them--or can feel I've earned them--is by bringing myself to the point of utter collapse on those other days, so be it.
Because it's not just about teaching or the exigencies of the academic schedule; I've always been like this. Many's the time I've been out all day running errands, and I'm starving and my feet hurt and I have to pee--and yet somehow I'll come up with five more things that I absolutely have to do before I go home. No, I can't get my drycleaning tomorrow--I'm out NOW! I have to get it NOW! And I need to get a ream of paper at Staples! And to swing by the drugstore! And finally I get home with a pounding headache and my hands shaking from hunger and in the foulest possible mood. . . but at least I've freed up the next day, or part of it, to do nothing.
Maybe it's that I feel the obligatory tasks must be got out of the way as soon as possible (as a kid I tended to eat my vegetables first for just this reason), or maybe it's that I have a strong reluctance to contaminate the more-fun with the less-fun.
Or maybe it's simply that inertia exerts a profound pull on me: a Flavia in motion tends to stay in motion, and a Flavia at rest tends to stay at rest.
(Speaking of which, dudes: I gotta cut this short. There's a bottle of whiskey and a DVD with my name on them.)
How else to explain the way I schedule my life?
In a typical week, I'm on campus Tuesday through Thursday and at home (or just, you know, elsewhere) Friday through Monday. It sounds like a sweet schedule and in many ways it is, especially since on Wednesdays I often don't go in until after noon. But what this means is that I am profoundly ON for several days--and those days are usually long and frantic--and then I'm OFF.
I work during the weekend, of course, but somehow most of my grading and course prep always gets left until Monday and I spend most of that day--and usually until 1 or 2 a.m.--finishing it. On Tuesday I rush to campus, where I spend nine hours (half of them jumping up and down in front of a classroom and the rest trying to be smiley and perky for my office hours or my colleagues), rush home, rush to my Italian class, inevitably have to stop by the grocery store, and finally return home at 10 p.m. looking like I've been beaten with the underside of a toboggan. Wednesday is another day of massive course prep and office hours and the occasional meeting. Thursday is a repeat of Tuesday, sans Italian.
And then? Ah, blessed freedom! Then it's all about sleeping in and puttering around the apartment and reading magazines and going out with friends. Sure, I get work done, but it gets done in the context of an essentially relaxed, unstructured day: a few hours here, a few hours there, and always with a spare half hour to check blogs or paint my toenails.
And honestly, I don't think I'd have it any other way. I love my leisurely days at home, and if the only way I can get them--or can feel I've earned them--is by bringing myself to the point of utter collapse on those other days, so be it.
Because it's not just about teaching or the exigencies of the academic schedule; I've always been like this. Many's the time I've been out all day running errands, and I'm starving and my feet hurt and I have to pee--and yet somehow I'll come up with five more things that I absolutely have to do before I go home. No, I can't get my drycleaning tomorrow--I'm out NOW! I have to get it NOW! And I need to get a ream of paper at Staples! And to swing by the drugstore! And finally I get home with a pounding headache and my hands shaking from hunger and in the foulest possible mood. . . but at least I've freed up the next day, or part of it, to do nothing.
Maybe it's that I feel the obligatory tasks must be got out of the way as soon as possible (as a kid I tended to eat my vegetables first for just this reason), or maybe it's that I have a strong reluctance to contaminate the more-fun with the less-fun.
Or maybe it's simply that inertia exerts a profound pull on me: a Flavia in motion tends to stay in motion, and a Flavia at rest tends to stay at rest.
(Speaking of which, dudes: I gotta cut this short. There's a bottle of whiskey and a DVD with my name on them.)
Thursday, April 12, 2007
"Success" meme
Okay, so dhawhee tagged me for this one: the task is to identify the five things that I do every day that contribute to my "success"--a word that I feel compelled to place in quotes, as I'm not sure that I'm exactly a frequent flyer on the success express.
But for my purposes I'll define success as whatever it is that got me a done dissertation and a pretty good job, and whatever it is that keeps me writing and submitting and publishing and presenting.
But for my purposes I'll define success as whatever it is that got me a done dissertation and a pretty good job, and whatever it is that keeps me writing and submitting and publishing and presenting.
1. Like dhawhee, I'm a list-maker, and I make one nearly every day. This isn't to say that I get everything on that list done every day--far from it--but it calms me down and helps me focus.So, uh. . . check back in two or three years, why dontcha, and let's see if those habits have actually gotten me somewhere.
2. I pile up projects. That doesn't sound like a recipe for success, but I've found that I get more done when I have more stuff to do. Take my reading group, for example: who has the time to read four scholarly books unrelated to her research in the course of a semester teaching a 3-3 load and going to three conferences? Totally not me. But because I have that obligation, I've met it. What would I have done with that time otherwise? Frittered it away on the internet or course prep.
3. Relatedly, I put off course prep until the last minute. I get my grading done promptly and I'm pretty good about getting handouts and assignments made up in plenty of time--but planning what I'm actually going to do in front of the class the next day? Best to do that at 10 p.m. the night before. Or 11 p.m. Otherwise, what need take only 30 or 60 minutes could well suck up three hours.
4. I goof off a lot. Seriously. On days when I'm working at home--and especially if I don't have plans in the evening--I get up at 10 or so, spend a couple of hours on the internet, take a shower & put myself together. . . and then putter around the apartment until 3 or 4 or even past dinnertime. I've come to the conclusion that I really need that time to be totally by myself, just doing mindless, pleasurable things, in order to free up mental space and relax.
5. In between that goofing off, though--and tending to teaching and administrative tasks--I try to get some scholarship done every day. This I always schedule in manageable chunks: two hours here, an hour there. I can work very intensely for short bursts, and if it's an especially good day, I may have two or three such bursts. What's much harder is to make myself work for 6 or 8 hours at a go. . . and in the long run I figure that an hour or two of work, nearly every day, is much better (and much more likely to happen!) than setting aside one or even two days a week that are theoretically totally devoted to writing and research.
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