Splitting nerves.

I'm writing a chapter on George Herbert. It makes an argument that--it is undeniable--relates to a (smart but very poorly written) book written by another scholar a few years ago. But I'm actually making a different set of claims. Very different--having to do with representation rather than religious history. But it's taking a lot of effort on my part to explain how what I'm arguing is distinct from what's been said because so much of religious history is bound up in issues of representation in the early modern period. I feel like I'm back in the anatomy lab, hunched over a section of forearm, working really, really meticulously and painstakingly and exhaustingly to separate out one strand of nerves from another. My early training in science TOTALLY prepared me for my scholarly career.

What I did on my summer vacation.

Just got back from several days in the tropics with the Things and Neruda. Surf. Sun. Sand. Good food. Dogs. In other words: all the great ingredients for much-needed total relaxation.

Not a bad gig, all things considered: Office Space edition

Here's where I spent most of the last two days reading and freewriting, enjoying the fruits of my labors.





Before











After

More on time-management, parenthood, and the life of the mind

Here's what I meant my last post to say:

I love, love, love to spend time with my kids. We have all sorts of adventures, which include such things as planting beans and camping and cleaning the floors and going to the library and catching potato bugs etc.

I love, love, love teaching. It jazzes me up every time I walk into the classroom. I can't believe I get paid to enthuse about poetry from 400 years ago and poetry from 4 minutes ago. I can't believe I get paid to crank up other folks' brains about the stuff I love.

Between these two adored occupations, I write.

I write poems. They happen all the time, whether I set aside time to work on them or not. (In fact, if I set aside time to sit down and Write Poems, the poems suck: heavy-handed, forced, rushed things.) Poems take time to write, but the time is snatched piecemeal. I write while I'm running, when my body is engaged fully in rhythm. I write in the car. I write while I'm reading. I write poems really, really slowly and all the time. Poems are brutally hard for me to write, but I don't need to block out hours of time to work on them. More to the point, I can work on them when I'm teaching or parenting without taking time out from either teaching or parenting.

I write criticism. And unlike poems, criticism requires blocks of time. I need to sit down and devote sustained attention to the stuff I'm reading. I need to mull without interruption, to pace the house talking aloud to myself about a concept until I hear myself find the words that best articulate the principles. I need to wrestle with a paragraph for four hours without having anyone call me to play or to wipe a butt or to feed them. It's less torturous to write criticism than poetry, but it requires scheduling. And frustratingly, three weeks past my self-imposed June 1 serious resume-criticism-writing date, between teaching and kids and various other little responsibilities that I didn't see coming, I haven't had a free hour, let alone 4, let alone an afternoon or (!) day in isolation with books and computer.

If I don't have defined time, I can't produce criticism. And I don't know where I'm supposed to find that time, given that I'm finished teaching just when my kids are finished with school. That imagined "free time" that nonacademics begrudge us academics so much--you know, the time that we're supposed to use to write the stuff that keeps us our jobs and is therefore absolutely a part of our jobs--is pretty hard to come by.

Quick checklist.

Short summer term taught: DONE.

Vegetables growing: DONE.

Kitchen ceiling painted: DONE.

Poem written in the voice of a medieval weapon of war: DONE.

Thing 1 nursed through swine flu gastro-intestinal virus: DONE.

Proofs of forthcoming article reviewed: DONE.

Two very useful works of scholarship read: DONE.

Now can I PLEASE have TEN MINUTES to MYSELF so that I can try to do some writing on this *&$%! book?!

Let me introduce you to the library.

A student is working on a final research paper for the class I'm teaching this term. S/he emailed me hir thesis, and asked if I knew any relevant articles. I suggested a couple, and then mentioned one that I thought was particularly helpful and to the point. S/he then emailed me back to say, "Okay, great--just send that article along to me, and I'll check it out."

Turning off the OCD.

Anyone have any advice? I'm thinking about the June 1 start date of the brainwork, and I realize that I have a really, really hard time leaving the dishes, or the laundry, or the bathtub, or the clutter, or the yardwork, to fend for itself while I concentrate on work. I feel like I have to get everything ELSE organized before I can tune it out. Anyone have any advice about how to just reconcile oneself to disorder and work?

Some pop-music titles I envy,

and wish I could use for poems:

* I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass (Yo La Tengo)

* Man Called Aerodynamics (Guided by Voices)

* We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank (Modest Mouse)

* Hotel Vast Horizon (Chris Whitley)

* When My Plane Finally Goes Down (Mark Eitzel)

* Another Bag of Bricks (Flogging Molly)

* You and Me and the Ten Thousand Things (Peter Mulvey)

* Me, My Yoke, and I (Damien Rice)

* All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands (Sufjan Stevens)

This is not an exhaustive list. What's on your list?

Time to buckle down.

I'm three weeks away from the end of the short spring term I'm teaching right now. I've decided that I'll give myself until the end of that semester to get my head in the book-writing game.

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that a well-known scholar in another field was visiting my institution to provide a sort of workshop for faculty with projects in progress. The idea was that all the participants (7 of us, maybe?) would submit a chapter, ideally an introductory chapter, and we'd all hammer on it together, with the main of the hammering coming from this visiting scholar. I submitted what I think is a pretty complete chapter on Crashaw, because (as I explained in an accompanying email) I don't HAVE an introductory chapter yet, and if I DID have an introductory chapter, I wouldn't need the damned workshop.

But I was having a hard time figuring out what that introductory chapter would SAY. Was it supposed to be a long historical survey of exegetical commentary on my topic? That's sort of how I had been proceeding: accumulating lots and lots of cool quotations from Antenicene fathers, from freaky scholastics, from the Gospels, to lay out a historical foundation for this thing that happens in the 17th century. And I can, in fact, explain why all the issues come to a head in the 17th century, as opposed to irrupting into lyric before then. So why couldn't I work up ANY enthusiasm for an introductory chapter that did the work of establishing the historical development of an idea? I could write that chapter, but I couldn't imagine wanting to READ that chapter, and it seemed increasingly to look like a case of an introduction followed by a few chapters of "readings," in which I explained how the idea introduced in the introduction plays out in 4-5 writers. Not exciting. Not sexy. Too dissertationesque.

No wonder I couldn't get myself to write that introduction.

What turned out to be the cool thing about having someone NOT in my field read this pretty solid chapter of mine (and this relates to the conversation going on over in the comments at Flavia's about readers in other fields) is that he wasn't encumbered by a sense of the historical place of my argument, which allowed him to observe (as no readers in my own field have) that my project's priorities aren't historical. That is to say, the energy that drives the Crashaw chapter, and all the other chapters I've written for this book, has less to do with the historical development of a theological principle than it does with representation, the literal, language and its capacity to signify.

Bong! rings the giant gong in my head. Duh.

For years I've been saying, in response to folks who ask whether I'm primarily a poet or a scholar, that the two activities aren't really separable: that my poetry and scholarship work at the same issues in two formally dissimilar literary modes. And, of course, my obsession in the poetry thing is with language and representation and reading and its inherent difficulties. And I knew, vaguely, that the project I was working on involved representation and reading-anxiety, but I let myself get persuaded that a corollary issue about erotics WAS the main issue. I AM interested in erotics, but only insofar as it stands as a function of reading-anxiety, which is an argument I'm TOTALLY prepared to make, excited to make.

(I realize that I'm giving bizarre half-summaries of ideas, in my conflicting desires to both explain my great epiphany and maintain some degree of scholarly anonymity/prepublication proprietariness.)

So now I think I've found my direction, though it will require reading in a field other than the one in which I've focused my reading in the last 5 years. (Upside: the new reading'll be in English!) I feel like I've got this little bonfire starting to burn and churn in my guts, which is a good sign.

Now if I could only carve out some time to read and write.

When I had Thing 1, I gave myself a non-negotiable start-date for my diss, four months after his birth. This time, I'm picking June 1, which will give me time to get the last plants into the garden and paint the kitchen ceiling. After that date, on days when the Things are with their dad, don't even try to call or email me. I'll be working.

Revisions.

* One yucky revision:

Just boiled down my RSA paper for next year into a 150 word abstract (from a 300 word abstract). I'm not sure what it says at this point: not much, and most of it in dense, narcotic academese.

* One cool revision:

Assistant Make that ASSOCIATE Professor, baby.