b l o g o s

how writing and raising a toddler are analogous if at times conflicting efforts

About three and a half weeks ago, our toddler, normally a Very Good Sleeper, decided that good sleeping would be a 2.5 year phase, one with which she was finished. She screamed and kicked her way through bedtime; once she fell asleep, just as *we* were settling into bed or even falling asleep ourselves, she would rise up as if from a horror movie (and for us it was very much a horror movie) and prompt sleep-destroying andrenaline surges on our parts by bursting into our room and announcing she didn't WANT to go to sleep. It was horrible. We hated life. We consulted our baby-sleep bible (we are committed Weissbluthians, and believe me, this book takes commitment--the guy is a terrible writer). Anyway, the toddler section reassured us with a couple of techniques and reminded us of the importance of sticking to our routine. I doubted it. Everyone doubted it. We bickered. We withheld the iPad (she didn't care). We fielded advice--wanted and unwanted--including (commonly) that she needed to be kept awake until 9 or 10 or 11 at night. The thought made us shudder: we didn't stay up that late. So we decided to stick with the method that we believed in, the philosophy of which is pretty simple: 1) sleep begets sleep; and 2) a routine is crucial. Tonight, after several nights in a row of improvement, I think it's safe to say that Weissbluth and his horrid prose didn't fail us. She is now leading us through the sleep routine, which in recent days (in response to the sleep-deprived hell of the previous two weeks) had become even more regimented and predictable. By 6:45, magically, she was asleep. We looked at each other in disbelief. We ran for our computers.

At this point I should stop and make an important caveat, lest I step into a fray I know better than to step into: I don't wish to claim that the "sleep-begets-sleep" applies to all toddlers or babies. The point here is choosing an approach and having some patience with it. Even that doesn't work for everyone, and I'm really sympathetic to those who continue to struggle in the sleep department. It's an awful, awful hell.

Anyway, sometimes the writing we do is an analogous (though perhaps quieter) hell. It's slow-going. The time creeps. Other stuff tries to distract. It grumps us up. Sometimes we give in and depart from habit.

But a daily routine with incremental effort is still the most likely to yield results. 1) Writing begets writing. 2) A routine is crucial.

 

 

on beginning: the voice you hear may be your own

My poet-friend Erin who is working on a fascinating collection of historical poems says that she researches and researches until she starts to hear a voice in her head. As a non-poet, I heard this description with equal parts intrigue and envy. It makes a certain amount of sense, especially with persona poems, that a voice, with all its cadences and beats, would need to kind of well up before beginning. And of course it goes without saying that the voice has things to say.

For the past few weeks, I have been reading for my next chapter, rooting around in primary texts, criticism, histories, not unlike Erin when she prepares for another poem. I had one of those Days of Avoidance yesterday--the first in awhile--where I logged no time on my research. Those are probably necessary; I've always thought so anyway. Just now, while I was pouring cereal, the chapter's first sentence began to congeal in my head. And while it's neither an earth-shattering sentence nor a particularly pretty one, it's a beginning. For all my training to tag the notion of "voice" with romantic associations, it remains one of the best ways to characterize what just happened. Words started stirring. It needn't be magical or romantic, but that stirring or welling means it's time to put fingers to keys. It doesn't mean the reading stops, but it does get moved to the side for a beginning.

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.

on being edited

Yesterday I received two documents via email from the editors of a special collection on Burke and the archives. Since my co-prof and I are in the process of wrapping up a seminar on Kenneth Burke, and just this week, we ran a class on academic publishing that included some tips on incorporating archival findings into their nascent articles, I have archives--and Burke--freshly on my mind. So rather than wait until close to the deadline the editors gave me for turning this thing around, this morning I figured I'd settle in with the editors' suggestions to see just what I needed to do to make this piece a better contribution to the collection. 

And then it dawned on me: this is the first real line-by-line feedback I have gotten since I don't know when. Sure, there are reader's reports for journal submissions and book manuscripts, but sometimes those come down to cantankerous quibbling or generalizations about writing style. In the past few years, I have been doing this sort of editing/feedback work for others in the field--for dissertations-in-progress, for jr. colleagues, for journal and book submissions, for (especially) book reviews that I edit for QJS.

Academia is strange this way. We spend the first parts of our careers receiving more feedback than we give (obviously there are exceptions, like writing groups, etc.), and then once that first book is published we find ourselves squarely in the realm of giving far more than we receive. I by no means want to discount the importance of my "first reader" JM, who sees and helps improve everything before it leaves this house, nor do I want to discount colleagues who have lent a pair of eyes on chapters or articles-in-progress. In all, though, what we have is a pay-it-forward model that I have usually not given a second thought to.

Until this morning. This morning I find myself giddily--that's right, giddily!--plotting changes my editors requested and reworking sentences they have marked as trying to do too much. The piece is getting the benefit of two pairs of eyes, and the result is the most informed, thoughtful, and smart comments I've received since my dissertation advisor combed through my limp-along chapters some years ago. And I'm only now in a position to really appreciate the kind of time it took to offer this feedback. My essay has been in the hands of two very talented and knowledgeable in-the-field colleagues, and I couldn't be happier with or more grateful for their labor.

hopes for july

Lots of stuff is happening this month. I have a number of writing commitments that I need to get going on honoring, and two will dominate July. The first is a conference paper (ISHR in Montreal) that will also be the foray into my book. Ideally I would have liked to be culling that paper from a chapter draft, but moving has intervened, and I will instead be posing questions and positing theories more than I will be offering any fully-formed set of research results. Even so, it's exciting to have my head in that next book, albeit preliminarily.

The second is a piece for a collection on Burke in the Archives called (tentatively) "Historiography by Incongruity." This piece is kind of the underbelly of my recent book--stuff that I've been thinking about, like how so much fascinating archival material doesn't make it into histories we write because that material documents a darker story or some sort of failure or a research "dead end." I want to do a little reading on archive theory to get myself going on that one, and maybe poke around in some new archival material, since I am now within a mile from the KB papers.  

Then there's a course that I'm directing, a really cool new honors course that combines oral, written, visual, and digital communication. I met with the technology folks on campus to talk about the technology piece, instructional support they can offer, and available resources, and they BLEW ME AWAY. As in, they are assembling a team of technology specialists (one from the digital commons group, another from instructional design, and more) to help with this course. The its guys told me about these "whispering booths" (podcasting studios) that they have installed in labs around campus, and how some of them are mobile. Crazy. I left that meeting a) thinking I need to amp up (even more) the technology ambitions of the course, and b) knowing how glad I am to be here.

There's some other stuff I've committed to for the fall, but I can't think about that right now. Draft of conference paper in 8-10 days, and a sizable chunk of the collection contribution in 21 so that I can take it with me to Montreal, these are my hopes.

_moving bodies_ is out

a month early!

(clicking the image will take you to the amazon site)

how bellyache?

"All tangled. But how bellyache? If I were untangled today, I'd be tangled again tomorrow. But it's all worth trying to understand and formulate--and one should try to write a tragedy about it so that he'll be cleared for writing a farce. Half the time I'm quite gloomy--and then I suddenly feel that it really is a privilege to go through the mill, whereat I favor maintaining the same rules that had proved discomforting."

- Kenneth Burke to Malcolm Cowley, January 4, 1929

here is something i'll be writing about this week.

 
Giorgio de Chirico
Cavalli in Riva al Mare 1934

"and there may even be animals among them."*

This week I started on another article--working through a backlog here--on Burke and nonhuman animals. To this end, I have reread a bunch of Burke, taking notes whenever animals pop up. So far in Permanence and Change, I have made notes about chickens, a trout, grasshoppers, an eagle, horses, birds (more generally), a fox, a lion, a lamb, a cow, mosquitoes, apes, termites, a rabbit, and an old hen. Oh, and lots of dogs, including Schopenhauer barking like one.

*KB, Attitudes toward History 65

file under makes me excited to work on my next book even though it's not really all that related to it.

these hair designs strike me as rather greek. hat tip to mar. for more, go here. happy weekend, everybody. i'm going for a run (in a simple ponytail).