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).

Minute particulars

Someone was recently asking me to write a post about time management and writing, it is something I should weigh in on: but I am not always a good role model, to say the least. I like the part where I read and think and get a first draft down on paper as a speaking script, but it is not as enjoyable to turn it into something publishable: I am pleased with this essay, but also full of self-reproach that I did not turn it into an article shortly after I first wrote up the basic material in 2006!....

(This essay may also be the first publication in which I have cited Facebook crowdsourcing as a scholarly source.)

Available through JSTOR now, anyway: "The Minute Particular in Life-Writing and the Novel."

"Now Casanova's memoirs"

On reimagining biography. Makes me want to read both the book described here and John Lahr's Tennessee Williams biography....

(Thinking quite a bit about annotation as I am - slightly to my regret, as it is causing much procrastination - drafting a proposal for funding to integrate some electronic annotation tools and digital close-reading tutorials into my introduction to the major course for next year....)

(Also thinking seriously about making 2015 the year of reading mostly nonfiction except for novels I am truly eager to read?)

Essentials

I might have to leave the rest of the packing for the morning....

Catch-up

There were multiple factors, I guess, for unusually prolonged radio silence here: the ongoing siren song of Facebook and Twitter, which I like less than blogs but which offer a watered-down version of the same satisfaction for very little effort (they leach my minor thoughts!); the fact that I have been training a lot, which means frequent posts at my other blog; grumpiness about mild boredom accompanying the final push to revisions on my long-overdue article, which I finally sent out at the end of last week (woo-hoo!). I don't like blogging when I'm in low spirits; I prefer to wait for the return of exuberance.

But I am in a good mood again, having a rather glorious time developing the syllabus for my introduction-to-the-English-major class in the fall and only regretting how fast the summer is slipping out of my hands!

I have a letter of recommendation to write today, and on deck a dissertation to read and remarks of some sort to prepare for this event Tuesday (must reread Mansfield Park this weekend!). The syllabus is still going to take quite a bit more work, and I am scaling back expectations for what else I'll be able to get done before I leave for Cayman at the end of the month.

(The four tenure letters are going to get written in Cayman, as they are not dependent on library access, whereas the syllabus really must be done this month, not least because I teach in tandem with seminar leaders who need to have my draft in order to decide what they will add in supplementation.)

Have been out and about quite a bit: saw Elena's Aria Sunday night with friends and had a delicious bite to eat afterwards at Kilo (the most divine meatballs I have ever eaten!); dinner Monday night with friends at the equally sublime and surprisingly affordable Hakata Tonton in the West Village. Those are both restaurants I am keen to go back to.

Light reading around the edges:

I enjoyed the most recent two Laundry novels so much that I went back and reread the first three. I had forgotten that the first volume held both the initial novel and a truly delightful novella (the contrast in tone between the two is appealing). These books are perhaps not for everyone - BUT if you have any mild interest in the intersection of cold-war-era spy fiction, civil service satire, computer programming and the coming of our new squid overlords after the manner of H. P. Lovecraft (i.e. if your fantasy alternate career is "government-employed computational demonologist"!), you will find them absolutely perfect.

Also: Stav Sherez, A Dark Redemption (the Africa material is rather shoehorned in, and I found the twist at the end preposterous, but otherwise really quite good); Karin Slaughter, Cop Town (very good, almost unpleasantly so - a dark and engaging read); Lydia Netzer, How To Tell Toledo from the Night Sky (not sure about this one - too much whimsy and metaphysics for my tastes - but she is certainly a remarkable writer); Taylor Stevens, The Catch (I could do with about 50% less of the drama around the main character's past, but in every other respect I love these books - only thing that approximates the pleasure of a new Jack Reacher novel!); and a novella by Seanan McGuire writing as Mira Grant, The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell. I love these books of hers, and I am also keen on the trend whereby electronic publishing lets prolific authors publish interim installments without having to work up the energy for a whole new novel-sized chunk.

Also picked up used copies on the street of a couple favorite books of childhood, the first of which is as good as I remember: Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth.

All right - now that I've cleared my need for ritual procrastination, I really am going to write that letter!

Heel-dragging morning update

It is taking me a ridiculously long time this morning to get out the door for my run, the run I should have done yesterday but didn't get it together to do then at all! It is still grotesquely humid, but much cooler than yesterday, so that's something....

The fourth of July makes me grumpy, from a strictly personal point of view - the library is closed, and there is less interesting news than usual on the USian part of the internet. On the bright side, as it is a holiday I feel justified in blowing a large chunk of morning and midday on exercise - will hope to get in a few good hours of work on the wretched article revisions (which are enjoyable now that I am actually immersed in them, only I am waiting on some BorrowDirect sources that are delayed because of the holiday!) later on in the afternoon.

A few tabs to close:

King Lear with sheep! (Via John Kuhn. Amazingly reminds me of the exhilarating brief moment when I thought the Clydesdale Hamlet at Busch Gardens was going to feature a production of Hamlet performed by gigantic drayhorses - it was one of those fantastical glitches. Ditto, in a weaker version, my onetime quest for the Penguin Euripides....)

The reading habits of tennis players.

Jordan Ellenberg on the summer's most unread books as glimpsed by Kindle highlights.

A really nice piece by Mark Halliday on Kenneth Koch.

The Yale Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson! I have something exciting coming up next year, by the way: I need to write a really good talk for this (it is going to be a good chance to delve into my battle-of-ancients-and-moderns project, which I think I haven't yet written about here as I am trying to stay focused on the still-unwritten Ten-Week Clarissa proposal - Johnson is not directly in that one, but the question of textual editing and commentary looms large throughout, thus Spinoza and other recent dipping into Grafton on Poliziano etc.)....

(Also excited that I have two rewarding minor work trips coming up in the fall - I like the feeling that my career is enabling me to have interesting travel experiences I wouldn't have otherwise: Dublin, for this year's edition of the Swift symposium conducted at the Deanery of St. Patrick's Cathedral; and Paris, in December, for a dissertation defense. I am excited about the latter for various reasons, one of which is that I will finally be able to go and get a cupcake at a bakery I have long admired from afar!)

TK

Alas, I am increasingly resigned to the fact that if I work incredibly hard from September to May, June is always going to be a bit of a wash work-wise! It is regrettable but I don't think there is a great deal to be done about it, especially when I also always want June to involve large amounts of exercise.

That said, I am ready to kick off what I hope will be an extremely productive July....

Having cleared from the desk what is for once not an overdue reader report on a journal article, I am facing a happy week with only two major responsibilities.

First, I need to revise the article I got back with reader comments in AUGUST, should have dealt with then but have instead had stressfully on my to-do list for, oh, let's say about TEN MONTHS (relatively minor revisions, but it was a complex set of reports - two from primary readers and two additional ones from editorial board members, one of whom clearly felt that the article was pernicious in every aspect and offensive by dint of its very nature!). It also needs some library work in the matter of correcting to appropriate scholarly editions, which meant it couldn't be done in Cayman, the place where I am usually better off in the matter of uninterrupted work time. Anyway, I am saying it here for accountability (I am not I suppose, on the continuum from procrastination to not-procrastination, especially an offender, but when putting-off does coalesce around a particularly undesirable task, it coalescesces mightily!) - it will be done by the end of the week, sooner if I have any control over the matter.

Second, I need to plunge into the complex but exhilarating task of drafting my syllabus for Literary Texts, Critical Methods, the one required course for undergraduate English majors, which I am teaching this fall for the first time. Here is the description - it is very open-ended, my colleague E. has been teaching a wonderful version of it but contemplation of his syllabus has told me I want to do it entirely differently - I will probably be canvasing for suggestions here over the week:

This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature. Students will read works from different genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction), drawn from the medieval period to the present day, learning the different interpretative techniques required by each. The course also introduces students to a variety of critical schools and approaches, with the aim both of familiarizing them with these methodologies in the work of other critics and of encouraging them to make use of different methods in their own critical writing.

I often leave syllabus-making until the last minute, but in this case I teach in tandem with five graduate student seminar leaders who will customize and modify the base syllabus with their own additions, so it is only reasonable that I should have it to them by mid-July at the latest. It is going to be really fun, I have all sorts of ideas percolating about what I want to do!

(After that, The Ten-Week Clarissa and some reading and thinking for my exciting next project on the battle of ancients and moderns and why it mattered!)

Miscellaneous light reading, some of it more brain-rotting than others: Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm (very good, better than the first one I think - JKR is just a real pro, great storyteller - also it reminded me of childhood favorite Thou Shell of Death); Megan Abbott, The Fever (superb - I have loved all her books, but this one has the potential to reach a huge audience, and I'm delighted to see how much attention it's getting); Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes (contemplating a short essay on King, so won't say more here, but I thoroughly enjoyed it); Charles Stross, The Apocalypse Codex (I love this series - new one out shortly, had to catch up on the previous); and finally, much worse than any of these others, Tom Rob Smith's The Farm, which I should have put aside but instead speed-read in increasing irritation - people's lives and pathologies just don't sort themselves into neat boxes like this, it is a fraud, and I hated the way the Kindle edition used huge type to narrate the mother's account!

Cole unfiltered

Emma Brockes interviews Teju Cole for the Guardian:

Art history is a passion, but some way into the course, he started to find academic writing frustrating."While doing the dissertation, I wrote two books – so both of these books are acts of procrastination. They also became acts of understanding a form of address that satisfied me, or that I found more fulfilling. I guess you're never satisfied, really. But as a writer, as a creative person, the very stringent, offensively foot-noted writing that was required to be an academic art historian lost its shine for me."

Martin/Mantel

An outtake from the wretched review that I'm still wrestling with (when they don't come out right the first time round, they often take horrible amounts of subsequent wrangling!):

I have been recommending Wolf Hall to readers impatient for the next volume of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Throne series. They share a good deal of the same source material from Tudor history, but while Martin is a good writer in many respects, especially if one disregards the language at the level of the sentence and concentrates instead on his ability to render complex human and political relationships with clarity and vividness, Mantel is a great one. She demonstrated decades ago, in A Place of Greater Safety (her 1992 novel about the French Revolution), an ability to tell large world-historical stories with the kind of imaginative precision about politics more often associated with works like Robert Caro’s biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson, or indeed with the great nineteenth-century narrative historians Carlyle and Michelet.

Closing tabs

My only complaint about this week, if it is a complaint, is that it was too full of a rich and complex variety of things!

On Tuesday I taught The Princesse de Cleves and on Wednesday, A Journal of the Plague Year. These are two of my particularly favorite books of all time, and I'm really excited about this semester's courses.

On Thursday I went with G. to see Mr. Burns, a post-electric play. The third act is brilliant and genuinely haunting - I am not quite so sure about the long first act, which seems to me to have too much of the sort of conversation that seemed fresh when we heard it in Pulp Fiction but which strikes me on the stage these days as overly rambling and a little self-indulgent. The three acts of the play take place in the near future, seven years later and seventy years later - it covers some familiar ground in terms of thinking about linguistic and cultural transformations after an apocalyptic break (think Riddley Walker or other post-nuclear scenarios), but the originality comes from the way that we see time morphing the "Cape Fear" Simpsons episode together with Gilbert & Sullivan and all sorts of other random cultural snippets, especially musical, into a postapocalyptic morality play, with Bart Simpson as familiar to modern audiences as the medieval Vice would have been to audiences many hundreds of years ago. The acting is very good, and so is the production. (Dinner afterwards at the West Bank Cafe, which is currently offering a very good prix fixe dinner - $20 for appetizer, main course and dessert. I had spinach ravioli, a very delicious skate with capers and an even more delectable lemon mousse.)

Lots of meetings with graduate students - I think I have finally reached critical mass. Also was given a brand new iPad for a major committee assignment, something that presages huge amounts of online reading.

On Friday I had dinner at La Lunchonette with an old friend from graduate school who has invited me to come and speak at Tel Aviv University in May, a trip I am very much looking forward to.

On Saturday I went to Governors Island on the ferry and met up with my brother and his family at Fête Paradiso. Among other things we rode the world's first bicycle carousel.

Today I finally had time to write my race report for Ironman Wisconsin.

This coming week is very busy too, though after that I am hoping things will settle down a bit. I could use a few quiet days at home with little to do!

Light reading around the edges:

Seanan McGuire's new October Daye novel, Chimes At Midnight, which ends very abruptly but regardless confirms my impression of McGuire as one of today's great geniuses of popular fiction in the fantasy/science-fictional vein; and Gwenda Bond's lovely The Woken Gods, which entirely lived up to my very high expectations.

Closing tabs:

Open up this essay by Mark Kingwell in a new browser tab and save it to read later!

A humble plea for the bumblebee.

Miscellaneous update

I have just had rather a dreadful week due to circumstances well beyond my control (medical calamity of an extended family member, won't go into more detail than that!), and in short, the spring break that I hoped might be restorative just dug me deeper into the hole!

Last night, on a plane to San Antonio for the big annual eighteenth-century studies conference, I thought with dislike about the deep unpleasantness of flying and the unfortunate scheduling of such academic events at a time of year when I am already in any case barely keeping my head above water.

In short, I have been grumpy and glum indeed!

However now that I have actually written my paper (it was in my head, but I did not have time and concentration to get it down on the page until just this afternoon in my hotel room), I feel much less grumpy - that is good.  I remain perplexed that the institution of these conferences still has so much traction in the age of the internet (if one thousand academics each need to spend something in the region of $1,500, probably mostly reimbursed by their home institutions but often coming at least partly out of pocket, and 10 hours of travel time and an entire Wednesday to Sunday when none of their other work and life responsibilities offer any surcease, just in order to press the flesh, is that really a good use of communal resources?), but it is admittedly a very attractive setting here, and I will go out for dinner later on with my graduate students and junior colleagues from Columbia.  The conference hotel is very nice!  The metaphysical advantages of non-virtual presence, though, are surely overrated.

Closing tabs: Ed Park on Harry Stephen Keeler; Amy Davidson on the Hunger Games and counterinsurgency; at the TLS, Robert D. Hume on Michael Dobson's book about amateur Shakespeare performance.

Light reading around the edges:

A wonderful book by Will Chaffey, someone I only met recently in the wake of Carey Monserrat's death, called Swimming with Crocodiles (free for Kindle with Amazon Prime, though enthusiasm led me to purchase my copy before I realized I could get it for free!); very vivid and moving in its account of the geology and wildlife of Australia, and also a nerve-racking survivalist tale of a wilderness trek that did not make me reverse my anti-camping position (but I do wish I could go swimming with 'freshies' if not with 'salties'!);

Lauren Groff's mesmerizing and moving Arcadia, which I resisted at first but then fell into headlong (it is not relevant, but I am predisposed to like Groff's work not just because I enjoyed her first novel so much but also because her sister is a top triathlete!);

Seanan McGuire's new novel Discount Armageddon, which is full of charming and humorous details and which I thoroughly recommend if you read this sort of thing;

and an electronic advance copy of Rosamond Lupton's forthcoming Afterwards, which will sound ludicrous if I describe it to you and whose narrative premise I cannot really endorse as a matter of principle but which is certainly one of the most grippingly readable thrillers I will read this year.  It was the only redeeming feature of yesterday's plane flight, that's for sure!

In conclusion, saltwater crocodiles are almost certainly more dangerous than sharks, from a swimmer's point of view - a shark is only going to chomp you by accident (especially if you're wearing a wetsuit that makes you resemble a seal), whereas the croc really does want to digest not just your limbs but probably also your torso if at all possible.

Now I am going to go and find the business center to print out my paper....

Delay, deferral

From Johnson's "Life of Pope," on Pope's Iliad translation:

When we find him translating fifty lines a day, it is natural to suppose that he would have brought his work to a more speedy conclusion. The Iliad, containing less than sixteen thousand verses, might have been despatched in less than three hundred and twenty days by fifty verses in a day. The notes, compiled with the assistance of his mercenaries, could not be supposed to require more time than the text. According to this calculation, the progress of Pope may seem to have been slow; but the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.

On procrastination

I should have fallen out of bed this morning, donned cold-weather running garb and headed straight out the door for my long run, but in truth it just seemed too gray and chilly to bear! I know I warm up quickly once I'm out there, but temperatures in the 20s do give me a problem with asthma, so it was not wholly rationalization that I decided coffee and breakfast and work would be preferable, and that I would run once it had warmed up a bit...

The crucial thing for me to have a productive morning is not to while away the hours on the internet, so I withstood the temptation to turn on the computer and instead had a morning of massive and useful productivity while lying flat on my belly in bed (I find the horizontal position more conducive to thinking than any other): I finished marking the assignments from my drama students (good thing too, as I also have a full set of papers from my other class to comment on for tomorrow), I finished reading a very good book (I have a 1600-word review of it and one other - finished that one earlier in the week - due on Friday), I finished rereading Dryden's All for Love and wrote my lecture for tomorrow.

Still have to reread The Sorrows of Young Werther and deal with that other set of essays, but I will have no time later for grading later as I am meeting my Texas brother and his family at a Brooklyn beer garden mid-afternoon. I can read Goethe on the subway, but an early morning of frenetic work will be in order tomorrow, I think, because the most important thing now is to get out the door for that run before any more minutes spill through my fingers...

Closing tabs

The fact that I have read three of these five books about running (FT site registration required) makes me wonder whether that is because I am obsessively bookish or just obsessed with running. Simon Kuper is too hard on Murakami here, I think (I loved that book, though admittedly I am the perfect target audience for it), not at all too hard on Liz Robbins and quite right, too, about Christopher McDougall's Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. At first I was a little wary of McDougall's facetiousness and certain journalistic habits of chapter-structuring, but it is really a wonderful book, in the writing as well as in the subject matter - this one is strongly recommended if you have a serious interest in the physiology (especially the biomechanics) of distance running and/or the history of endurance sport. I read it in one sitting the other night, and wished it were longer.

Another book I read with absolute delight and in one sitting was Lee Child's latest Jack Reacher novel, Gone Tomorrow. I went so far as to have it Amazon Primed (along with Charlaine Harris's Dead and Gone) to my hotel in Florida so that I could read it on the plane home - I was cracking it open in the Orlando airport, and pretty much the next thing I knew, I was turning the last page as the plane began its descent into LaGuardia. Lee Child is a genius of light reading - in fact, I am hoping to channel a little of that genius as I inject some superior thriller-type pacing into my sequel rewrite...

Also: Rebecca Goldstein's The Mind-Body Problem, which I bought some time ago without quite realizing the extent to which it would fall under my self-imposed ban on reading academic novels. One year post-tenure, my disgust for such books has worn off - I needed a small light entertaining paperback to take with me on the subway the other day, and in fact I polished the rest of it off later that night with considerable enjoyment. It is an appealing and engaging novel, with some funny similarities to Fear of Flying; though I will say again that the academic novel I am most wanting to read is Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals, forthcoming in October (hmmm, maybe someone has an ARC for me?).

Other things that have struck me over the last couple days:

Nancy Drew as childhood role model for female Supreme Court Justices.

"Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future" (a review of Giles Foden's Turbulence, which it looks to me I should pick up a copy of in England in July - ditto Jake Arnott on the fictional lives of Aleister Crowley).

"Five crosses and the Rasmussen factor": belief in the overriding power of the female line in horsebreeding continues to characterize twenty-first-century American breeding practice...

Finally, Christopher Ricks very much likes Stanley Plumly's Posthumous Keats, and Oliver Sacks is speaking about hallucinations and the life of the visual brain on Wednesday at 5pm as part of the "Narrative Medicine Rounds" - might be that I should temporarily slip out of the coils of sequel-revising and triathlon training and go to that one...