On procrastination in letter-writing

It was a funny convergence....

I've been writing this week under the auspices of a fourteen-day boot camp organized by the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity; my college classmate and fellow academic Julie Lynch was praising this organization on Facebook a few weeks ago, so when I got an email from the provost's office shortly thereafter saying that Columbia is now a member and that we would have free use of many of its resources, I thought I should give it a try. In fact since I am on sabbatical (and since I have long hewed to a "production of quota" method that basically is very similar to what these boot camps do) it was not really necessary, but if I am going to recommend it to others, I will always prefer to have tried it myself.

Anyway, today's writing was fun because I got to the part of my skeleton draft that includes all the material about Gibbon's habit of putting off writing important letters! He refers in a letter to his good friend Holroyd to "[t]he aversion to Epistolary Conversation, which it has pleased the Daemon to implant in my nature” (2:14), and the problem produces many very funny but also rather painful expressions of penitence and shame.

This is from a letter to Gibbon's Swiss friend Deyverdun, apologizing for a long silence: “my long silence has been occasioned, as far as I understand the anatomy of my own mind, by various reasons: during the summer it was mere idleness and procrastination: from the meeting of Parliament, when it became necessary to finish my book and to subdue America I found myself really involved in a greater hurry of public private and litterary business than I have ever known in any part of my life” (2:104).

There are a lot of good ones to Holroyd:

You wish I would write as a sign of life. I am alive, but as I am immersed in the decline and fall, I shall only make the sign.—It is made. (2:246-47)

Since my retreat to Lausanne our Correspondence has never received so long an interruption, and as I have been equally taciturn with the rest of the English World it may now be a problem among that sceptical nation whether the historian of the decline and fall be a living substance or an empty name. So tremendous is the sleepy power of laziness and habit, that the silence of each post operated still more strongly to benumb the hand and to freeze the Epistolary ink. (3:4)

And to his stepmother: “… you will be satisfied to hear that for many Wednesdays and Saturdays, I have consumed more time than would have sufficed for the Epistle in devising reasons for procrastinating it to the next post” (3:130).

No-style style

David Gordon remembers Elmore Leonard.

(B. and I just finished watching the most recent season of Justified - I really love it, I think I have to go and get the Raylan books right now. Also if you are not reading David's novels, you should be - they are The Serialist and Mystery Girl - the latter just published by Ed Park under the Little A imprint. Honored to share a publisher with David, truly!)

Too many deaths this week of people I cared about. I haven't mentioned it here, but I was fairly shattered to learn at the end of last week that my friend and teacher Gerald Moore had just died. Gerald was the inspirational coach behind the Beast boot camp, which I did off and on over the last couple years at Chelsea Piers. I loved working with him and was looking forward to taking some more of his classes once IMWI was over. He had a heart attack last year and I knew he had been having ongoing health problems, but he was only in his fifties, and leaves a young family and a lot of bereft students!

Here is the picture of Gerald with his proteges before we did the Tough Mudder race last fall - we were wearing T-shirts with Gerald's picture on them, I must dig mine out when I get home....

Production of quota

c. 1,000 words, for a total of 42,305 words.

There are 19 more days in January, if I can just keep this up till the end of the month and keep the whole shape of the thing in focus I will be looking at a full draft in early February...

(The beginning of the spring semester is always especially busy - we have six job candidates coming in to give talks in the first two and a half weeks or so of term, and I'll need to do meals with some or most of them too. Because of the MLK holiday, I only teach one class next week, on Wednesday, but Monday-Wednesday-Friday early-morning boot camp at Chelsea Piers starts on the 17th regardless: I'm in the 7am rather than the 6am class, but it's still going to be brutal, I am not at all one of nature's early risers! The alarm was set for 8:30 this morning for instance, which seemed reasonable enough, but in practice I turned it off and slept till after twelve. I suppose I hadn't fallen asleep till nearly three, so it is not unreasonable, but I prefer to be on the world's schedule rather than that of the creatures of the night...)

(Postscript: I am hoping to ride my bike down to Chelsea Piers in the early morning once the snow clears, but at least for the first week I am going to have to take a taxi, the height of decadence!)