b l o g o s

the act--and art--of reviewing

Josh has just posted an excellent entry about time and reviewing in our field, and judging from the lengthy comment I left there, that entry pushed one of my buttons.

JM and I were hanging out with a colleague recently, and the colleague, a seasoned scholar with lots and lots of publications, mentioned in passing that it's getting to the point where it's faster these days to take a book through publication than it is a journal article. Think about that for a minute.

Unfortunately, it's not an exaggeration. I want to register a plea, not to peer colleagues, or colleagues who have been in the field longer than I have, but for colleagues who are just now, or have not yet, started their first jobs, who are only now beginning to receive requests to review. Chances are if that is you, you have waited months and months (and months) to receive word about a journal submission. You are, as a result, under the impression that this is how things go in the field, and so when you get your first, second, and third requests to review for journals, you take your time. You are, after all, overwhelmed with work. And this is, after all, the norm.

I'm writing to you to ask you to PLEASE not think that way. Let's put a stop to this trend. It may well take a long time for an article to go from submission to print, but let's not let it be because reviewers are dragging.

Journal reviewing is important work, work that maintains the quality of scholarship in the field. And those who agree to do it ought to be committed not just to maintaining or elevating that quality, but also to a principle of timeliness. And people ought to do this not for the sake of their own careers and reputations (but there is that, and I ranted over at Josh's about it so won't repeat those points here)--but more importantly in the field. Now my presumption is that all rhetorical scholarship is timely, and perhaps that is a faulty assumption. But there are articles that lose something--exigence, relevance of examples--if they are left too long to languish. And Josh cuts to the vital issue of timeliness in his post--the exigencies of tenure and promotion. But there is also an issue that tracks right back to quality: the issue of helping scholars to improve their work--and pronto. If someone submits something weak and is left for nearly a year without feedback, then they are most likely continuing to work on more pretty weak scholarship. But if they got some considered feedback after, say, six weeks, that is presumably less wasted time. In other words, ideas themselves ought not be left to languish.That goes for good ones too. Why make a fascinating idea/method/approach wait any longer than it needs to to get out into the world? Making A HUMAN takes less time than making a journal article, for crying out loud.

One of the main criteria for selecting editors (apart from vision, intellectual leadership, and all the rest) ought to be: is this person willing to be a pain in someone's balls? Can ze squeeze a review out of a slow-ass person?

It's very likely that a large majority of reviewers get their reviews in on time, but too many accumulated anecdotes point to a band of rogue reviewers who are by turns forgetful, irresponsible, or (my favorite) too exacting. ("I need to spend a little more time with this essay." It's not YOUR article, and your brilliance, while handy, is not THAT central. While scholars might benefit from 8 single-spaced pages of feedback 18 months later, chances are a couple of pages synthesizing the issues and making useful suggestions for revision or new directions in a month would be VASTLY more helpful. Stop kidding yourself and get the damn thing in.)

In any event, there is probably more to be said here--like the issue of overburdening responsible reviewers that I also mentioned at Josh's--and we have ALL suffered from recalcitrant reviewers. But to those early in your careers, and if I'm lucky, anyone else in the field: let's all approach reviewing as the thoughtful and timely art it ought to be. 

I wish it were that easy--to beg people to be reflective about time (their own and others'), but as long as such unreasonable waiting remains something of a rite of passage, slow reviewing is likely to continue.

shifting logistics

I joined a dissertation committee a few weeks before the defense, and at two weeks out, I decided to try only reading the dissertation while nursing to see a) if such a thing were possible, and b) if so, how far I could get. N has one or two long sessions in the morning, and a long one at night. I started reading the dissertation about eight days ago, and this morning I finished it. Writing comments was sometimes challenging, and I'm not sure the comments are always legible, but reading one chapter at a time on a clipboard helped. I took notes and wrote questions on my iphone and then emailed them to myself. It's a perfect time, really--everything is quiet; I'm (usually) alert. The well lit room and the cushy glider rocker helped too. Next up for nursing reading: Sh*t My Dad Says. Immanuel Kant, the subject of said dissertation, would be proud.

where there's a dissertation there's a whippet

2010's first--and perhaps only!--entry in an ongoing series.

here, here, here, here, and here are some of the others.

on hosting

This November I'll be doing something I have never done before: "hosting" an interview, kind of talk-show style with a pretty large audience. This is exciting to me because it will be fun to be part of something kind of biggish, and also to be playing a supporting role (to the celebrity I'll be interviewing).

Now. The bulk of my preparation is going to be a lot like my preparation for teaching a graduate seminar. To wit:

1) find out all I can about the special guest. This will involve reading interviews and books the person has written, and it will even involve--yes--watching some game footage.

2) come up with some good questions that I'd like to hear this person respond to and that others might find interesting. 

3) generate a thematic order for sets of questions so that we don't meander all over the place or misuse time, and so hopefully there is some kind of narrative arc or at least sensible segues.

Additionally, I will also do these things:

4) remember that this interview is not about me at all, but rather I am facilitating. (this, along with the preparation above, I'm hoping will help with nerves.)

5) try to find some interesting photographs or other visuals to direct questioning/audience eyes. My impression is that my interlocutor is a little on the humble side so this might be appreciated. And I will welcome them as cues.

6) start asking people who they admire as interviewers/hosts and why.

So maybe yall can help me with #6. Who is your favorite interviewer or host, and what qualities do you think make them do a good job?

summer worky plans

If I've learned anything about myself in the past decade or so, it's that I tend toward overly ambitious plans, each summer, each semester, each week, even each day. But they are only slightly overly ambitious. Just enough to keep things from seeming paralyzingly impossible, but more than I can accomplish so that I can always conjure up a wee bit of self loathing, the fail-proof spur to a quasi-productive day or week.

The problem now is that I know my own tricks. And the other problem is that my daily life has changed so radically that I have lost my sense of what is too much and what is too little. Some days the victories reside in answered, typo-free emails. So I'm trying to be even more reasonable than ever.

I'm working on a book chapter for a historiography collection, and I'm lucky to have an excellent co-author on that piece, someone who plans a little like I do. We've both been augmenting and grooming this piece by turns for a few months, and it's starting to take shape. That piece will get done. (Do you hear that, co-author? Yay.)

Then there is the contribution to the companion to propaganda that I agreed to write. I probably should have said no to this request, but it had just the right mix of elements--a finite task, a challenge to stretch myself beyond where I normally work, a terrific pair of editors, the chance to bring rhetoric to a larger table--that I said yes. I hope I don't regret that.

There is a book review I asked to write on a sport and rhetoric collection, mostly because I'm curious about the collection itself, and also because I just plain like to write reviews. 

And finally, there is a short--very short--piece on animals that will be part of a forum in Philosophy and Rhetoric. I have lots of ideas for that one.

Of these four (seemingly) tidy tasks, the last one is the only one related to the research that I really want to be working on this summer. And once the other three are finished, I have vowed not to commit to any writing- or research-related task unless it funnels directly (or nearly directly) into the animals book. 

The summer stretches before us, but two months will move with unsettling speed. Rereading this list, I see that some of this work will probably spill into the fall semester, but I'm going to try my damnedest to prevent that from happening. Which means I need to get going.

conferencing with baby (after)

RSA remains something of a blur--of handshaking, of elevator waiting, of waving, of hurrying, of attempts to extract myself from welcome greetings and to do so with some modicum of grace. With the possible exception of the nonhuman rhetorics panel, I feel like I was barely able to glide across the surface of the conference.

One of the authors in (I believe) Mama PhD--or maybe I read it on the  blog by the same name--mentions the enthusiastic reception of babies by senior men colleagues. At RSA I noticed this phenomenon too. It was fun to watch them get all googly-eyed. Really everyone was super nice about the bambino, but more than one generationally senior man pulled me aside to tell me that "this" [gesturing or referring to N] was "important work."

N also became the occasion to meet and chat with other conferencing mothers, many of whom left their children at home because they (the babies) are a little older. One such woman wanted to hold N because she left her baby at home for the first time. Others told me eye-popping stories about conferencing with babies when they were graduate students. I traded birth stories with my peer colleague KH and provided cell-phone pictures on request.

These were all new ways of relating for me and added a new dimension to my conference. The Bean pulled me away from usual conference habits, some good some bad. For example, since there isn't much to do in a hotel room with a sleeping baby, I slept really really well, and we ordered LOTS of room service, whereas I typically spend conferences sleep deprived and in large groups looking for food. More than once I had to excuse myself from conversations people struck up while I was making my way toward--or waiting for--an elevator to rush up and feed N (see previous post about what happened to the expressed milk). Relatedly, I had to check my phone for texts and messages more frequently than I would have liked, and I missed more than JM would have liked (sorry honey!). 

All of this kept me at the surface, and barely. Even so, to go from talking about dolphins and lions in ancient texts to N grinning in her little monkey t-shirt was awesome in its own not-so-surfacy way.