Showing posts with label intellectual careers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intellectual careers. Show all posts
Friday, August 15, 2014
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Tizer in the piano
A lovely bit about P. N. Furbank:
A story we haven’t quite corroborated – and which is remembered through a haze of neat gin, served alongside the sherry on little drink stands however early the hour of calling – involved Turing setting up a maths-based treasure hunt across Cambridge for Furbank and Forster to solve. The final clue depended on an electrical current being run through Forster’s piano, which Turing had filled with tizer. Another friend at the table asked whether Forster played the piano well, and Furbank said he did.This is the kind of writer and scholar I aspire to be - in fact, shortly I think I might go to the library and check out some of his books....
Blank slates
John Gray on Michael Oakeshott:
Whether Oakeshott produced anything like a coherent system of ideas is doubtful. He disparaged ideology and favoured a return to practice and tradition. But as the French reactionary Joseph de Maistre discovered when, at the start of the 19th century, he visited Russia hoping to find a people that had not been 'scribbled on' by rationalistic philosophes, only to discover a country besotted with the Enlightenment, there is no uncorrupted text to which to return: the life of practice is a palimpsest of modish and forgotten theories.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Closing tabs
Brent Cox on William Gibson. (Via Alice.)
"We know when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sleeps." (Via James Bridle.)
The shape of careers?
Eggs will pop soon!
At the intersection of my two blogs, but I found this post by Gordo Byrn thought-provoking. He lays out a minimal base fitness schedule that will let you do something crazy in triathlon after twelve weeks of training without wrecking yourself (2 x 20min strength, 3 runs at shorter of 5mi or 1hr, 3 bikes at 2 x 45 and 1 x 75, 3 swims at shorter of 1350 yards or 25min, for a total of a little over seven hours per week); I think there are close analogies in literary matters, which is to say that you need to do a certain amount of reading and writing every day and every week if you want to be able to call upon all your powers of composition intensely over a more sustained period of time - but huge output over the whole of life is not sustainable, and comes at the cost of too many other things. Worthwhile to think of maintaining base writing fitness even through times when a big writing project can't be a priority.
"We know when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sleeps." (Via James Bridle.)
The shape of careers?
Eggs will pop soon!
At the intersection of my two blogs, but I found this post by Gordo Byrn thought-provoking. He lays out a minimal base fitness schedule that will let you do something crazy in triathlon after twelve weeks of training without wrecking yourself (2 x 20min strength, 3 runs at shorter of 5mi or 1hr, 3 bikes at 2 x 45 and 1 x 75, 3 swims at shorter of 1350 yards or 25min, for a total of a little over seven hours per week); I think there are close analogies in literary matters, which is to say that you need to do a certain amount of reading and writing every day and every week if you want to be able to call upon all your powers of composition intensely over a more sustained period of time - but huge output over the whole of life is not sustainable, and comes at the cost of too many other things. Worthwhile to think of maintaining base writing fitness even through times when a big writing project can't be a priority.
Monday, April 01, 2013
The five-year plan
It's been a bit quiet round here: lots of triathlon training, and I'm trying (with only partial success) not to spend so much time online. Thought I would share this prospectus of sorts: it has served various practical purposes recently, in slightly different variations, and I think I am ready to go on the record with it.
--
My goal for the next three to five years is an ambitious book project whose working title is The ABCs of the Novel. (My initial title was the more evocative Bread and Butter of the Novel, but one too many people asked me whether I was writing about food in literature, and I realized that rather than the British “bread-and-butter,” meaning elementary or basic, the American “ABCs” would better convey the breaking-down-to-fundamentals aspect of the work I hoped to do.) My first two scholarly books are histories more than anything else, and my own critical imagination remains strongly historical in its procedures and materials. I have found myself wondering, though, what might be done in a non- or even anti-historicist mode: not so much the ‘new formalism’ as a willfully timeless and non-chronologically governed development of the insights of narrative theorists as various as Wayne Booth and Gérard Genette. I have decided to experiment with an abecedarian form something like that of Milosz’s ABCs, Raymond Williams’ Keywords or Barthes’s looser variations on that theme, with the goal of exploring the genre of the novel as widely and deeply as possible and attempting to sum up the results of what now represents about twenty-five years of serious reading on my part in the novel and narrative theory.
As the book is not yet written, it still has a near-magical luster for me (see Samuel Johnson’s lament for “the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer”): it will be composed of entries that range from 250 words at the shortest to about 6,000 words for more substantive essays. Sample topics include fundamentals about first- and third-person narration, epistolarity, the Pamela-Shamela controversy and narrative epistemologies, the problem of authorial revision, the whys and wherefores of an ongoing communal failure in eighteenth-century studies to supersede or replace the narrative of the ‘rise of the novel’ offered by Ian Watt some fifty years ago, and the emergence of a set of conventions for the notation of human gesture in prose (Sterne and Diderot both loom large in that story). The book will also include brief and highly selective accounts of such topics as the prose fictions of the ancient world and of Japan c. 1000 C.E., romance, fiction and the counterfactual mode, Dostoevsky’s doubles, Tolstoy’s style, theories and histories of the novel by Lukacs, Henry James, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Fredric Jameson et al., and a host of other topics.
Alongside this perhaps hubristically ambitious book, I hope to assemble a couple of associated smaller-scale projects: a collection of essays more tightly focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction (this will include pieces I’ve already published as well as some new writing composed especially for that volume); and a short book on Richardson’s Clarissa, directed towards teachers, students and others who would like to read this dauntingly long novel and are not sure how to embark on that project. My other associated dream project is to write the introduction for a new trade edition of Clarissa, preferably published in an attractive three-volume format something like 1Q84; there are few things I would like more in life than to get that novel into the hands of a wider audience of readers.
As far as the essay collection goes, I envisage a volume that would reprint these four already published pieces along with four or five new ones composed specifically for the book and with a view to providing a good range of coverage (possibilities might include essays on Haywood, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Burney). These are the essays I’ve already written: (1) “Austen’s Voices,” included in Swift’s Travels: Essays in Honor of Claude Rawson (Cambridge, 2008), considers some fundamental points about the first- and third-person forms of narration that Austen inherits from her eighteenth-century predecessors, especially the prose satirists, and modifies radically according to her own vision and priorities. (2) “Restoration Theatre and the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” forthcoming in Tom Keymer’s Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 1: Origins of Print to 1775, sets forth a simple-minded but provocative hypothesis about what eighteenth-century prose fiction might owe to the forms of notation for bodily action that were developed in the dialogue and stage directions of Restoration comedy. (3) “Reflections on the ‘minute particular’ in life-writing and the novel” (under revision) asks some similar questions about particular detail as it functions in realist fiction and eighteenth-century life-writing, (4) The chapter on Austen for the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to British Literature, edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr. and colleagues.
--
My goal for the next three to five years is an ambitious book project whose working title is The ABCs of the Novel. (My initial title was the more evocative Bread and Butter of the Novel, but one too many people asked me whether I was writing about food in literature, and I realized that rather than the British “bread-and-butter,” meaning elementary or basic, the American “ABCs” would better convey the breaking-down-to-fundamentals aspect of the work I hoped to do.) My first two scholarly books are histories more than anything else, and my own critical imagination remains strongly historical in its procedures and materials. I have found myself wondering, though, what might be done in a non- or even anti-historicist mode: not so much the ‘new formalism’ as a willfully timeless and non-chronologically governed development of the insights of narrative theorists as various as Wayne Booth and Gérard Genette. I have decided to experiment with an abecedarian form something like that of Milosz’s ABCs, Raymond Williams’ Keywords or Barthes’s looser variations on that theme, with the goal of exploring the genre of the novel as widely and deeply as possible and attempting to sum up the results of what now represents about twenty-five years of serious reading on my part in the novel and narrative theory.
As the book is not yet written, it still has a near-magical luster for me (see Samuel Johnson’s lament for “the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer”): it will be composed of entries that range from 250 words at the shortest to about 6,000 words for more substantive essays. Sample topics include fundamentals about first- and third-person narration, epistolarity, the Pamela-Shamela controversy and narrative epistemologies, the problem of authorial revision, the whys and wherefores of an ongoing communal failure in eighteenth-century studies to supersede or replace the narrative of the ‘rise of the novel’ offered by Ian Watt some fifty years ago, and the emergence of a set of conventions for the notation of human gesture in prose (Sterne and Diderot both loom large in that story). The book will also include brief and highly selective accounts of such topics as the prose fictions of the ancient world and of Japan c. 1000 C.E., romance, fiction and the counterfactual mode, Dostoevsky’s doubles, Tolstoy’s style, theories and histories of the novel by Lukacs, Henry James, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Fredric Jameson et al., and a host of other topics.
Alongside this perhaps hubristically ambitious book, I hope to assemble a couple of associated smaller-scale projects: a collection of essays more tightly focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction (this will include pieces I’ve already published as well as some new writing composed especially for that volume); and a short book on Richardson’s Clarissa, directed towards teachers, students and others who would like to read this dauntingly long novel and are not sure how to embark on that project. My other associated dream project is to write the introduction for a new trade edition of Clarissa, preferably published in an attractive three-volume format something like 1Q84; there are few things I would like more in life than to get that novel into the hands of a wider audience of readers.
As far as the essay collection goes, I envisage a volume that would reprint these four already published pieces along with four or five new ones composed specifically for the book and with a view to providing a good range of coverage (possibilities might include essays on Haywood, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Burney). These are the essays I’ve already written: (1) “Austen’s Voices,” included in Swift’s Travels: Essays in Honor of Claude Rawson (Cambridge, 2008), considers some fundamental points about the first- and third-person forms of narration that Austen inherits from her eighteenth-century predecessors, especially the prose satirists, and modifies radically according to her own vision and priorities. (2) “Restoration Theatre and the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” forthcoming in Tom Keymer’s Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 1: Origins of Print to 1775, sets forth a simple-minded but provocative hypothesis about what eighteenth-century prose fiction might owe to the forms of notation for bodily action that were developed in the dialogue and stage directions of Restoration comedy. (3) “Reflections on the ‘minute particular’ in life-writing and the novel” (under revision) asks some similar questions about particular detail as it functions in realist fiction and eighteenth-century life-writing, (4) The chapter on Austen for the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to British Literature, edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr. and colleagues.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
"I was a bit insouciant"
The FT lunches with Conrad Black (site registration required): "I’m not much better than a run-of-the-mill millionaire. Maximising my wealth was never my chief thing ... But now it’s time to replenish the inventory of miniature portraits of George Washington."
Also: Philip Roth retires from novel-writing.
Also: Philip Roth retires from novel-writing.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
The ecstatic lash
I must confess that I was a little nervous about reading Maureen McLane's My Poets: it is roughly commensurate with my style book in many respects, and I was afraid I was going to find myself so thoroughly preempted and outdone that I might lose heart for my own project! However I am very happy to report that it is a lovely and intriguing book, beautifully well written and quite unlike anything I ever would or could write myself.
I found the chapters on Marianne Moore, Louise Gluck and Shelley particularly satisfying (and slightly lost patience with the one on H.D., though it is full of interesting observations), but there is much here that will interest anyone who's keen to make and chronicle an inner life of words. Am shortly going to Amazon some volumes of verse that I now have a yen to steep myself in (I especially recommend the chapter "My Impasses: On Not Being Able to Read Poetry," which made me realize I have never owned a volume of Frank O'Hara!)....
In other news, two good swim bits: portrait of the swimmer as a young writer; Britain's paralympic swimmers (FT site registration required).
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: Lavie Tidhar's steampunk The Bookman, which aficionados of nineteenth-century British literature will especially enjoy; Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan's delightful Team Human; Rae Carson's appealing The Girl of Fire and Thorns.
(The timing of publication of Deborah Harkness's Shadow of Night is opportune with a view to fast passage of my airport and flight time later on this afternoon and this evening!)
I found the chapters on Marianne Moore, Louise Gluck and Shelley particularly satisfying (and slightly lost patience with the one on H.D., though it is full of interesting observations), but there is much here that will interest anyone who's keen to make and chronicle an inner life of words. Am shortly going to Amazon some volumes of verse that I now have a yen to steep myself in (I especially recommend the chapter "My Impasses: On Not Being Able to Read Poetry," which made me realize I have never owned a volume of Frank O'Hara!)....
In other news, two good swim bits: portrait of the swimmer as a young writer; Britain's paralympic swimmers (FT site registration required).
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: Lavie Tidhar's steampunk The Bookman, which aficionados of nineteenth-century British literature will especially enjoy; Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan's delightful Team Human; Rae Carson's appealing The Girl of Fire and Thorns.
(The timing of publication of Deborah Harkness's Shadow of Night is opportune with a view to fast passage of my airport and flight time later on this afternoon and this evening!)
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
The way ahead
I had an extremely good conversation with a career visionary today, and it's given me much to chew over, including some more clarity on thoughts about my priorities over the next couple years and what I want things to look like in ten. She had many good pieces of advice, but I will share only the most essential: don't do stuff you don't like!
(I'm still waiting, by the way, for word on the little book on style, which is probably the book dearest to my heart right now and which points the way forward to the ABCs of the novel project. Should know a bit more about what's happening with that, if only in the negative, in another month or so, and will update here once things are more definite. I am pretty sure I really am going to stop writing novels, by the way; I don't have the resources of time and attention to do it properly, and it then erodes my pleasure in other things I should be enjoying more, namely my core mission of reading and writing about books and generally living in the world of words and ideas. It would be different if I didn't have a day job - but I love my day job!)
Can't say exactly when post-school-year recovery tipped over into procrastination, but at any rate the feeling of not writing the Austen essay (I actually can't remember when I last had a stretch of days putting off doing something to that degree!) became unpleasant enough that it was finally better just to give in and get started. Got an hour of work done on it this morning before getting diverted into other trains of activity; will try for an hour first thing tomorrow, though the day itself includes a number of things that will entirely curtail writing time. I can't quite explain why I'm feeling so utterly knackered, except to say that I think the grotesque humidity might be partly to blame...
(I will be in Ottawa over the weekend and early next week, which unfortunately forestalls all work, but once I've sent the Austen essay out I need to do one more revision of The Magic Circle; I have neglected the second half each time I've revised it, it's very natural to concentrate on the opening at the expense of the later parts, and I will undertake one more revision in the hope of really addressing this and making the whole thing as good as it possibly can be. My editor is going to deserve a co-credit on this one!)
Closing tabs:
Eric Banks's racetrack classics.
Cats at sea.
Nineteenth-century scrapbooks!
Light reading around the edges: Helene Tursten's slightly humdrum but readable Night Rounds; Karin Slaughter's e-book novella Snatched (I like this format and think this particular story works well as a teaser for forthcoming series installment); two books by Mo Hayder, Gone (which has several preposterous aspects but which is so grippingly suspenseful that I almost missed my subway stop) and Hanging Hill (which reminded me what an uneven writer Hayder is - some good things about this one too, particularly in the intensity and suspensefulness of some of the storytelling, but much weaker than her best ones).
(I'm still waiting, by the way, for word on the little book on style, which is probably the book dearest to my heart right now and which points the way forward to the ABCs of the novel project. Should know a bit more about what's happening with that, if only in the negative, in another month or so, and will update here once things are more definite. I am pretty sure I really am going to stop writing novels, by the way; I don't have the resources of time and attention to do it properly, and it then erodes my pleasure in other things I should be enjoying more, namely my core mission of reading and writing about books and generally living in the world of words and ideas. It would be different if I didn't have a day job - but I love my day job!)
Can't say exactly when post-school-year recovery tipped over into procrastination, but at any rate the feeling of not writing the Austen essay (I actually can't remember when I last had a stretch of days putting off doing something to that degree!) became unpleasant enough that it was finally better just to give in and get started. Got an hour of work done on it this morning before getting diverted into other trains of activity; will try for an hour first thing tomorrow, though the day itself includes a number of things that will entirely curtail writing time. I can't quite explain why I'm feeling so utterly knackered, except to say that I think the grotesque humidity might be partly to blame...
(I will be in Ottawa over the weekend and early next week, which unfortunately forestalls all work, but once I've sent the Austen essay out I need to do one more revision of The Magic Circle; I have neglected the second half each time I've revised it, it's very natural to concentrate on the opening at the expense of the later parts, and I will undertake one more revision in the hope of really addressing this and making the whole thing as good as it possibly can be. My editor is going to deserve a co-credit on this one!)
Closing tabs:
Eric Banks's racetrack classics.
Cats at sea.
Nineteenth-century scrapbooks!
Light reading around the edges: Helene Tursten's slightly humdrum but readable Night Rounds; Karin Slaughter's e-book novella Snatched (I like this format and think this particular story works well as a teaser for forthcoming series installment); two books by Mo Hayder, Gone (which has several preposterous aspects but which is so grippingly suspenseful that I almost missed my subway stop) and Hanging Hill (which reminded me what an uneven writer Hayder is - some good things about this one too, particularly in the intensity and suspensefulness of some of the storytelling, but much weaker than her best ones).
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Of book readers and book writers
My friend Rebecca Steinitz has written an interesting and moving column on what it feels like to go from being a lifelong reader to becoming the author of a published book, and how an academic career left behind may be more continuous with subsequent choices and experiences than it seems at the time.
Friday, September 23, 2011
English-minus
At the Guardian, Michael Hofmann on David Bellos's cleverly titled new book Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. I must confess that I am very eager to read this book, and that a copy of it appeared magically in my mailbox a few days ago: not sure quite when I will get to it, but soon I hope.
Robert Harris's new novel sounds appealing also, but it is not published in the US for many months more...
Robert Harris's new novel sounds appealing also, but it is not published in the US for many months more...
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Five-year planning
I did indeed email BOMH to my agent at the end of the day yesterday. Very glad to have it off my desk for a while! It will inevitably need further rounds of revision, this is the way of book-writing, but I'm pretty happy with it for now and will be interested to see what comes of it.
(When I was first starting out, I fantasized about big offers and huge corporate publishers, but now that I have published one novel with a small independent press and two with a corporate behemoth, the small-press option is looking pretty good to me again! What I am most hoping for, with this book, is an editor who loves it and who will be able to follow through on that commitment by securing strong in-house support: the book will then have to take its chances in the world, of course, and I think it is too intellectual and peculiar a tale to end up with monstrously large sales, but one of the most painful things about publishing The Explosionist was that my absolutely brilliant and wonderful editor - from whom I learned a huge amount about novel-writing and story-telling as we worked together on revisions - was laid off a couple weeks before the official publication date. The marketing group saw a bunch of lay-offs at the same time, and I don't think I'm breaching any secrets when I say that though the subsequent editor I was assigned is herself an extremely talented and inspiring editor, someone I'd be very happy to work with again in future on a project of her choosing, the in-house support and marketing for that pair of books was basically negligible! I will very much hope not to end up in that sort of situation again on either of these next two books I've got in the pipeline [i.e. BOMH and style].)
Every time I write a novel, by the way, I say I will not write another one! I don't know that I feel it quite so strongly this time as I felt it after the last one (that time I was mostly suffering from tenure-related fatigue plus the dispiriting knowledge of the likelihood of little support from the publisher as far as selling the book went). Novel-writing remains a uniquely interesting way for me to work out a question or problem and think through a set of issues, and ever since childhood I have secretly felt that there is no other worthwhile activity than novel-writing, or at least that there is no substitute for it in my life.
And yet everything to do with publication and book promotion seems deeply unsatisfactory and uninteresting to me, and there is an increasing suspicion in my mind that it is hardly worth writing the book if one is not going to put some decent further additional chunk of energy and dollars into promoting it. This is what I don't know that I really have time and vim for: surely that time and energy are better spent doing perhaps unstimulating but more deeply necessary work like writing student letters of recommendation, evaluating manuscripts for journals and presses, writing tenure review letters, etc.?
In other words, I have a strong inner need to write and to teach, and will always be doing both of those things for love rather than primarily for money (of course one must earn a crust!), but when it comes to the less immediately gratifying set of secondary responsibilities, I have some pretty time-consuming ones that arise from my 'real' job, and the book promotion stuff is always going to feel to me (let's say) tertiary rather than even merely secondary!
My promotional energies, this next time round, are really more likely to be centered on the little book on style than on BOMH. I've been thinking a lot over the last year or so about longer-term career stuff (I think it is a natural process of post-tenure reexamination), and it's come clearer to me what my priorities really will be over this next stretch.
I have a major and ambitious academic (or rather let's call it intellectual) project in its early stages, the ABCs of the novel book. Pushing that forward will be a priority, and I'll probably try and get outside funding for a year-long sabbatical of the residential-fellowship sort sometime in the next couple of years.
I'll continue to do bits and pieces of professional reviewing as they come my way, but I won't seek out a huge amount of it: it's not particularly lucrative, the short-term deadlines kill me when they fall during a busy teaching semester and the enjoyment-to-stress ratio is deeply unfavorable!
What I'd really like to do more of is speaking engagements. Guest lectures (distinguished or otherwise) at colleges and universities of course, but also speaking on literature to a wider range of different kinds of audiences: it would take a while to build this up as an actual income stream, lots of that sort of engagement doesn't necessarily come with dollars to speak of, but I think it is better suited to my core interests and concerns than trying to do a lot more reviewing.
(I have had some fun invitations in the last couple weeks: I'll be lecturing on Gulliver's Travels to the students in BU's core class at the end of November, and on Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year to the students in Siddartha Deb's Introduction to Fiction class at the New School in the spring. Both will pay honorariums, plus travel expenses in the case of the BU one, and I have a deep sense of the rightness of this sort of activity as fitting well with my core values and priorities! I think I am only an average reviewer, I bring to it fluency as a writer and a fully developed critical voice and of course a wide knowledge of literature but I do not feel it to be my particular metier, just a sort of side competency that arises from other things that are my true core strengths. But speaking about literature to an audience, bringing what's on the page really alive in terms of language and ideas and cultural contexts: that's my real thing!)
Anyway, I do have a simple and I think quite effective plan to help some of this happen: even if I only get very meager dollars for both books, I am going to do whatever it takes to retain the excellent Lauren Cerand in her capacity as independent publicist! With the style book and the notion of building a broader audience for literary speaking engagements as the primary mandate, and the novel as part of the bigger picture but not the central priority.
I am teaching two new classes in the fall, one an undergraduate seminar on Swift and Pope that I know will be huge fun (it's a new rubric for a class, but I've taught a lot of the individual works before, especially the Swift stuff), the other my own version of the MA seminar we require of all of our incoming graduate students. That was an interesting chance to think about what I assume as the fundamentals of my own discipline; I'll probably write a separate post on that, or perhaps even paste in the readings I ended up choosing.
I find myself with little desire to get extremely strongly engaged in the professional organizations for my discipline (MLA) and subfield (ASECS), though some presence in both is a basic component of my responsibilities as a faculty member at Columbia; I am more interested, I think, in questions about education as they affect my home institution, and I would guess I would be much more likely to move in the direction of dean of undergraduate or graduate education than to be the editor of a major journal in my field or the head of a professional organization like ASECS. Surely it will be the case at some point during the next stretch of my career, too, that I will serve as Director of Graduate Studies for my home department! Now I am in the realm of indiscretion, but I am currently protected against huge institutional service requirements by the fact that my salary is so low that I cannot in good faith take on a job like that without a significant raise, and raises are not traditionally given in academia as a consequence of that sort of a commitment (it is assumed that some release from teaching is a sufficient compensation); raises only come from outside offers; QED if someone asks me to do something huge and I say "I only can say yes to that if you raise my salary at least 20K," it is effectively the same thing as saying no!
It is one of the great benefits of getting older that one comes to know oneself much better than is possible at age eighteen. If I assess what I've done in the last ten years, I would say that I have done well on the count of working hard and getting a lot done, but that my own impatience to be always doing something has led to inefficiencies and often wasted effort (i.e. a preference for writing the next book rather than sinking additional resources in trying to get people to read the previous one): the notion for the next few years (it is a project of midlife!) is to consolidate and build, not so much to forge out in completely new directions.
(That said, if interesting new opportunities present themselves, I am there!)
(When I was first starting out, I fantasized about big offers and huge corporate publishers, but now that I have published one novel with a small independent press and two with a corporate behemoth, the small-press option is looking pretty good to me again! What I am most hoping for, with this book, is an editor who loves it and who will be able to follow through on that commitment by securing strong in-house support: the book will then have to take its chances in the world, of course, and I think it is too intellectual and peculiar a tale to end up with monstrously large sales, but one of the most painful things about publishing The Explosionist was that my absolutely brilliant and wonderful editor - from whom I learned a huge amount about novel-writing and story-telling as we worked together on revisions - was laid off a couple weeks before the official publication date. The marketing group saw a bunch of lay-offs at the same time, and I don't think I'm breaching any secrets when I say that though the subsequent editor I was assigned is herself an extremely talented and inspiring editor, someone I'd be very happy to work with again in future on a project of her choosing, the in-house support and marketing for that pair of books was basically negligible! I will very much hope not to end up in that sort of situation again on either of these next two books I've got in the pipeline [i.e. BOMH and style].)
Every time I write a novel, by the way, I say I will not write another one! I don't know that I feel it quite so strongly this time as I felt it after the last one (that time I was mostly suffering from tenure-related fatigue plus the dispiriting knowledge of the likelihood of little support from the publisher as far as selling the book went). Novel-writing remains a uniquely interesting way for me to work out a question or problem and think through a set of issues, and ever since childhood I have secretly felt that there is no other worthwhile activity than novel-writing, or at least that there is no substitute for it in my life.
And yet everything to do with publication and book promotion seems deeply unsatisfactory and uninteresting to me, and there is an increasing suspicion in my mind that it is hardly worth writing the book if one is not going to put some decent further additional chunk of energy and dollars into promoting it. This is what I don't know that I really have time and vim for: surely that time and energy are better spent doing perhaps unstimulating but more deeply necessary work like writing student letters of recommendation, evaluating manuscripts for journals and presses, writing tenure review letters, etc.?
In other words, I have a strong inner need to write and to teach, and will always be doing both of those things for love rather than primarily for money (of course one must earn a crust!), but when it comes to the less immediately gratifying set of secondary responsibilities, I have some pretty time-consuming ones that arise from my 'real' job, and the book promotion stuff is always going to feel to me (let's say) tertiary rather than even merely secondary!
My promotional energies, this next time round, are really more likely to be centered on the little book on style than on BOMH. I've been thinking a lot over the last year or so about longer-term career stuff (I think it is a natural process of post-tenure reexamination), and it's come clearer to me what my priorities really will be over this next stretch.
I have a major and ambitious academic (or rather let's call it intellectual) project in its early stages, the ABCs of the novel book. Pushing that forward will be a priority, and I'll probably try and get outside funding for a year-long sabbatical of the residential-fellowship sort sometime in the next couple of years.
I'll continue to do bits and pieces of professional reviewing as they come my way, but I won't seek out a huge amount of it: it's not particularly lucrative, the short-term deadlines kill me when they fall during a busy teaching semester and the enjoyment-to-stress ratio is deeply unfavorable!
What I'd really like to do more of is speaking engagements. Guest lectures (distinguished or otherwise) at colleges and universities of course, but also speaking on literature to a wider range of different kinds of audiences: it would take a while to build this up as an actual income stream, lots of that sort of engagement doesn't necessarily come with dollars to speak of, but I think it is better suited to my core interests and concerns than trying to do a lot more reviewing.
(I have had some fun invitations in the last couple weeks: I'll be lecturing on Gulliver's Travels to the students in BU's core class at the end of November, and on Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year to the students in Siddartha Deb's Introduction to Fiction class at the New School in the spring. Both will pay honorariums, plus travel expenses in the case of the BU one, and I have a deep sense of the rightness of this sort of activity as fitting well with my core values and priorities! I think I am only an average reviewer, I bring to it fluency as a writer and a fully developed critical voice and of course a wide knowledge of literature but I do not feel it to be my particular metier, just a sort of side competency that arises from other things that are my true core strengths. But speaking about literature to an audience, bringing what's on the page really alive in terms of language and ideas and cultural contexts: that's my real thing!)
Anyway, I do have a simple and I think quite effective plan to help some of this happen: even if I only get very meager dollars for both books, I am going to do whatever it takes to retain the excellent Lauren Cerand in her capacity as independent publicist! With the style book and the notion of building a broader audience for literary speaking engagements as the primary mandate, and the novel as part of the bigger picture but not the central priority.
I am teaching two new classes in the fall, one an undergraduate seminar on Swift and Pope that I know will be huge fun (it's a new rubric for a class, but I've taught a lot of the individual works before, especially the Swift stuff), the other my own version of the MA seminar we require of all of our incoming graduate students. That was an interesting chance to think about what I assume as the fundamentals of my own discipline; I'll probably write a separate post on that, or perhaps even paste in the readings I ended up choosing.
I find myself with little desire to get extremely strongly engaged in the professional organizations for my discipline (MLA) and subfield (ASECS), though some presence in both is a basic component of my responsibilities as a faculty member at Columbia; I am more interested, I think, in questions about education as they affect my home institution, and I would guess I would be much more likely to move in the direction of dean of undergraduate or graduate education than to be the editor of a major journal in my field or the head of a professional organization like ASECS. Surely it will be the case at some point during the next stretch of my career, too, that I will serve as Director of Graduate Studies for my home department! Now I am in the realm of indiscretion, but I am currently protected against huge institutional service requirements by the fact that my salary is so low that I cannot in good faith take on a job like that without a significant raise, and raises are not traditionally given in academia as a consequence of that sort of a commitment (it is assumed that some release from teaching is a sufficient compensation); raises only come from outside offers; QED if someone asks me to do something huge and I say "I only can say yes to that if you raise my salary at least 20K," it is effectively the same thing as saying no!
It is one of the great benefits of getting older that one comes to know oneself much better than is possible at age eighteen. If I assess what I've done in the last ten years, I would say that I have done well on the count of working hard and getting a lot done, but that my own impatience to be always doing something has led to inefficiencies and often wasted effort (i.e. a preference for writing the next book rather than sinking additional resources in trying to get people to read the previous one): the notion for the next few years (it is a project of midlife!) is to consolidate and build, not so much to forge out in completely new directions.
(That said, if interesting new opportunities present themselves, I am there!)
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
A long career
Donald Keene retires from Columbia at 88 and moves to Japan: it is an unusual and amazing story.
(I often think, for myself, that really I will need to take the next interesting and suitable job that is offered to me, should there be one, just because I fear that I will stagnate or be psychologically and professionally deformed (!) if I spend my entire teaching career at a single university; I started teaching at Columbia in 2000, that's already eleven years in one institution, it seems like quite a long time. I like it here very much, the students are unbeatable and Manhattan is the place I would choose to live above all others, and yet at some point I may need to tear myself away...)
(I often think, for myself, that really I will need to take the next interesting and suitable job that is offered to me, should there be one, just because I fear that I will stagnate or be psychologically and professionally deformed (!) if I spend my entire teaching career at a single university; I started teaching at Columbia in 2000, that's already eleven years in one institution, it seems like quite a long time. I like it here very much, the students are unbeatable and Manhattan is the place I would choose to live above all others, and yet at some point I may need to tear myself away...)
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Far from ideal
Ben Deaton on why it may be unproductive to fantasize about ideal working conditions; via Andrew Gelman, whose thoughts on the matter are also of interest.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Monday, February 08, 2010
Facts, fragility of, passim
At TNR, Anthony Grafton considers Oxford don Mary Beard's blog-to-book odyssey. (Courtesy of Ian Corey-Boulet.)
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Indiscretions
Proust, as quoted by Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method: "Hence the temptation for the writer to write intellectual works, which is, however, a gross mistake. A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price."
Monday, October 13, 2008
Trajectories
Tyler Cowen offers a great collection of links on Paul Krugman, recipient of this year's economics Nobel. Especially interesting (and potentially useful for academics in the humanities also - I haven't often seen such a cogent statement of the way one might discover what sort of thinking one is likely to do): Krugman on his own intellectual style.
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