cold discipline for solo travellers
From the category archives:
The days are filled with writing, of a purposive, industrial kind, as well as the usual demands of course materials and curriculum. I feel at times as if all the skills of my erstwhile liberal arts education are being mobilised in a way that’s untypical. Academic arguments typically gain their urgency under the pressure of deadlines functional rather than industrial and have consequences somewhere along the professional/individual borderline, unlike this sweep more institutional.
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I am not much enamoured of my lyrical gifts at the moment, but am writing my way through the funk in hope of producing something that’s less, to my reading, jejune. I can’t think of a better solution (ignoring the cheap seats’ solution which is always, stop for a while).
It is my hope that Giovanni’s readers’ results may vary.
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Ten years ago I wrote a novel, for which I had positive feedback both from my reader-commentator locally and from the publisher who rejected it.
Eighteen months after that I spent another eighteen months rewriting the story, to the extent that it was a different novel with mostly different characters, settings and events. This was also rejected, again in a kindly manner, by the same publisher and by the agent whom I shopped it to thereafter.
A little under six years ago I got an assessment for the manuscript, along with some excellent advice, and began rewriting, again with extensive points of difference, perhaps a year after that. The voyage to that point was accounted for in this article in New Zealand Books.
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I honed my essay writing and editing skills on Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare and Katharine Susannah Pritchard at a time when I didn’t expect to use them for anything except the most esoteric of pursuits. My explanation to my students of these skills’ value has never pushed much beyond these boundaries, except to say that if you are well-trained in writing and editing, you can turn your hand to most writing tasks, including those of future employers that you can’t imagine yet. The primary function for me, however, of the ability to write and edit has been for my own enjoyment, with the latter, more recently, also for sale in the service of others’ work. [Hustler's aside: my business welcomes your recommendations and referrals].
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A little while ago I asked what I should do with my tumblelog. I’d given up on the limited formatting and code mismatches that came with syndicating its poems and idle frippery to these pages and decided to keep all my musings in a single source. Since then, tumblr itself has continued developing its particular character as a perpetual scroll of site-themed scraps, images, small reflections and aggregates. In this, I’ve started to go with the flow once again, aggregating there my links from delicious, digg, and flickr, along with this site and the White Mist, and also occasionally using the “reblog” option to circulate what I like elsewhere within the tumbled network. The last of these activities relies on reading more widely the tumbled sites of others, and this is proving a further strand of leisured amusement (not least the prevalence of sites that, following on from this one, including “fuck yeah” in their title).
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My employment in my current position began in June, eight years ago, when I was grateful to have a job, a salary and a desk to call my own. Indeed, I still am. Since then I have taught continuously for anywhere between thirty-six and forty-five weeks a year, running parallel to, but not in sync with, the wider university’s teaching schedule. In the early start-up days, this included teaching from April to October with no non-teaching time, thanks to two overlapping twenty-four week programmes. In October there was one week’s break and then straight on until Christmas. In 2002, my first year full-time on the job, I went more-or-less mad. I had an office to myself behind the covered bike-stands, which was a fairly grim view but offered privacy for when I needed to cry between classes. You get the idea.
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I see this morning that Deborah is leaving The Hand Mirror. I wanted to note what I think has been a significant contribution of hers there, cross-posted from her own blog, and that is the Friday Feminist series.
I came to feminist theory at university, where the reading I did for my literary studies subjects ranged across some of the thinkers and writers cited by Deborah, along with others. It was that sense of having a written heritage–some of it difficult and contentious–that enabled me to define my own thinking, amorphous though it remains.
Feminist theory has also, I think, given feminism legitimacy in the academy by virtue of being published and citable. There’s research involved in collating these extracts and I hope Deborah will continue to do so at her own site. This explanation of her intent is also helpful.
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One of the reasons I have such energy for writing here at the moment is as a kind of proof-positive against my perpetual fear: that my professional and voluntary roles at Concrete University will drain my energy reserves and leave me unable to do anything except work, eat dinner and go to bed early. The present time of year, in which I am between semesters (we run on a slightly different calendar from the undergraduate university proper) is a time in which such a worry seems to flourish. So there’s a defensive element to my prose, getting as much down as possible so that when the time crunch comes I won’t feel I wasted it when I had it. (The final chapters of my manuscript could benefit from the same kind of fidelity, it must be said.)
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Simon at South America Bidsta has an interesting post on the relationship between the positioned individual and the ethnographic research they produce, noting drily that in “any other science, you might just call this ‘being transparent about one’s methods’”.
The post contains the challenge to reproduce the researcher’s exercise: to “write down ten things about ourselves–personal, political, demographic, academic or philosophical, that give an idea of who we are and where we come from, and that could influence how we carry out our research”. This challenge catches my attention for a number of reasons at present. The main one of these is that I am involved in a group research project at work to which I am not contributing in the way I anticipated I would be able to contribute. Tasks which I complete with ease in literary and cultural studies I find myself almost paralysed by in educational research. Furthermore, a misconceived sense of responsibility towards my research partners also seems to retard the pace of my work. (This is not to say that a sense of responsibility is in itself a bad idea, but rather that there’s something about the way in which I’m experiencing it that’s askew.)
So I’m up for completing Simon’s exercise with the slant that it’s a good time to reflect a little on how my own positioning as a researcher is affecting my contribution to this research project: I’m completing tasks quite different from those I thought I would when the project began.
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20 March, 2010
in commentatrix, in Aotearoa, writing & research
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