So the on-the-spot feedback from a colleague was hugely successful.  I asked her to do what I do with students.  I gave her a copy and read aloud from my copy and told her to interrupt me and ask questions about the ideas and expression of ideas as we went along.  I loosened up and got less attached to the words on the page and filled in the gaps in logic and significant sidelines of thought and interconnections between the sections.  It felt magical.  I stayed writing at her living room table and let her read the final bits until it was done, done.  Except for copyediting.  Oh the dreadful typos I create.  SDA has volunteered his services.  We talked through it over the weekend and he seems genuinely desirous of doing it.   Partnership and all that.  Thus its off my plate and onto his.

The weekend was mostly the Tour, and new friends, and tandem riding, and photo sorting, and fridge cleaning, and mentoring a former student…  I did look at the book review and realize I need some of the early volumes in the series before I can finish it.  That’s a trip to campus to the library.   And, I need to pick up mail etc etc.

BUT the book review is not the major goal I must remind myself.  Today’s project is to read through all my unpublished materials (or most of it) and decide what precisely I’ll be speaking about in 2 weeks time for my next public lecture.  AND, ideally what I will be submitting as a chapter of an edited volume by September 30.  They need not be the same but thing.

Facing my corpus of unpublished papers is a little like staring into a treasure chest and also into a closet full of skeletons.  I’ve been hoarding them.   Waiting for just the right moment.  Why?  Who knows!  Maybe I’ll figure that out.

My goodness it has been hard to get anything done this morning.  Late night with good friends should have meant a terrible run but unexpectedly I felt stronger and faster and happier than any previous run in the past 10 days. Spotted this adorable LittleFreeLibrary — what a great neighborly thing to do! Ran into (not literally thank goodness) a girl who I used to tutor at the public library in the first year after she and her family arrived from Bangladesh.  She was so happy to tell me that she got at 91 on the Regents this past year.  Got home to the news on DOMA.  Haven’t done much since.  

Waivering between excitement and panic on the idea of going to Turkey for 10 months.  Had a student as me to be their PhD thesis supervisor will probably do it but only once I’m back.   Okay, lets see if we can salvage the afternoon for something academic. 

Saturday morning was spent with a backache prone on the floor with a copy of a text and translation of a fragmentary author that I’m reviewing.  A portion of the work has been carried out by a very capable scholar who I’ve  only met once in the spring of 1998.  I was looking for private tuition in Ancient Greek prior to grad school.  I never did well in class based language instruction because of the dyslexia.   I made an appointment with the scholar being clear about what I needed and my goals.  He invited me to meet with him in his university office.  He then proceeded to tell me that it was impossible to do what I wanted to do and I’d never learn enough Greek in such a short time to succeed in grad school.  My mission was ignorant, arrogant, and pure folly.  He declined to be my tutor.  I left not sure why he’d agreed to meet with me.   Maybe he felt a moral obligation to tell me to cease and desist.  I try to remember that conversation every time I want to rain on the parade of some bright-eyed student with outlandish dreams and no sense of what might be involved in fulfilling them. His work is very good: there is no question of a hostile review.  I didn’t even know he was part of the project when I agreed to review the volume as his is not first author (perhaps a personal oversight).  

And all is well that ends well, I found a lovely lady at a local seminary to work with me.  And well, I’m not a linguist, but my Greek ain’t SO shabby.

We then went bookshelf hunting and celebrated a family birthday by making vast quantities of homemade fettuccine and harvested garbage bags full of swiss chard and I even fit in a run yesterday.  I didn’t know how weekend would work on the blog but this seems a not half bad approach.  I do feel guilty for taking 36 hours off of research and writing and I’m anxious that my plan is to go to another lecture this afternoon, but not all work can take place here.  I’m also anxious that my BOOK won’t be as good as the other books in the same series because all the other authors are so much more dreadfully clever than I am.  I can get over this.  Perfection is the enemy of done.  And my work is worthy of being read regardless of whether it is the best or the brightest.

I can tell because I woke up naturally and happily at 6.19 am and was home from my 2.3 mile run by 7.30 am.  I am disgustingly happy as a morning person.  I got a leisurely morning and I’m at work before 8 am. SDA and I had a  powwow discussion about our travel goals for the year last night.  We debated the merits of the shorter more intense trip (3-4 weeks on the move bagging archaeological sites and museums everyday) and the longer more residential trip that would involve steady writing routines and with the topographical experiences intermingled, say 4 plus months.    We did two months in Italy last year and it was wonderful but hard to get the right balance of routine writing/research and adventure.   Single me used to be able to go and bang out huge amounts of research/writing in a library in month.   That model doesn’t hold the same charm without my partner in life.

I also decided these edits must die.  I mean end.  This chapter doesn’t deserve more than a week of my life.

Weird, I now think of a week being five days with weekends being nearly sacred family time.  Single me used to think weekends had no meaning in the academic life: breaks came as projects allowed and as events tempted me.

Anyway.  That’s my first self imposed deadline.  Let’s see how I do.

***

I am trying not to edit these posts but my use of powwow disturbed me.  The thing about racially insensitive language is that rarely the user of that language thinks of it as such.  I’d never say ‘he jewed me down’.  I’m even uncomfortable typing it.  But I spent many years saying “jiped” without ever realizing that it slurred Roma and others identified as  ‘gypsies’.  Native American references in our colloquial speech are wider than one might think.  I used to think that the giver in ‘Indian Giver’ was the colonial oppressor who didn’t keep their promises or who tricked the indigenous peoples.   Similarly I thought an ‘Indian summer’ was called that because of how beautiful it was.  Americans use ‘Indian’ the way Romans used ‘Punic’.  Native Culture is no more a thing of the past, than Punic culture was post 146 BC.  I know damn well what a powwow is and have no business appropriating or generalizing the term.

 

Last night I went out with friends, colleague friends.  I like them.  I care about what’s going on in their lives.  It feels relevant but it is also 95% about college matters, all the things I’m not supposed to be thinking about.  My job, not my career.  The idea of giving up much of that closeness with my friends is really sad, not to mention really hard while I’m geographically present in my beloved borough.  I see why its so good to physically escape.

Forgot to press start on the pedometer.  I’ve no idea how far or fast I ran.  Felt defeating.  Yet the run itself felt good.  Why does it matter that I can’t quantify it?

Then go a text from a colleague in town from Italy trying to make a plan.  I want to stay here and work but networking is also part of my job.  No wait.  Not my job.  It’s to the potential benefit of my career.  And I like the guy, but after five texts we don’t have a plan and my day is on standby.  Reminds me of dating.

Michael Crawford once told me that the secret to academic success is knowing what you’re going to do the next time you can take 15 minutes in the library.  My Doctoral Supervisor didn’t think much of this advice, said it was an inappropriate approach for a junior scholar.  That said, I’m not so junior any more.  Perhaps I shall dust of that advice.  I’m sure the 15 minutes aren’t to include blogging–a modern omphaloscopic indulgence.

The next 15 minutes (or more)  will be double checking Euripides references in Diodorus as my PR suggested.

 

I’m not very good at balance. I meant that to be a statement about work/life balance.  I then thought I’d go on to say something about previous writing experiences, such as how book number one was written up mostly in one summer during which I sat at my kitchen table and did not get dressed or showered until my writing was a done for the day–an effective but isolating technique.  So one of the goals for this sabbatical is to manage to be really ‘productive’ in the academic sense and not lose myself in it.  To that end I went for a run.  A short slow run.  2 miles in 22 minutes with a warm up and cool down on either side.  It’s something.

But there is another way in which my balance is bad, the walking into lamp posts and falling off curbs kind of way.  This goes back to life time of learning disabilities.   A litany I find really boring.  Being injured is really boring.  I am often injured.  It’s amazing how much damage falling off the curb can do over a life time. To work on this, I work on this:

It wobbles and thus forces me to actively engage in balancing my body as I stand on it and type this. I wonder if there is a connection between my two balance deficits. Maybe… when something has my attention only that thing has my attention.

Anyway.  The other part of the title and directly related to the physical balance issue is the dyslexia.  I didn’t learn to read until the summer after second grade and was really proficient until a year or two after that.  Writing by hand never really took off the way reading did.  This typing thing works much better for me.  That said, I truncate words, ending drop off and I lose the little connecting words.    I can re read a dozen times and my mind provides the fix and I cannot see the error.

Going through the PR edits yesterday I was actually indignant that the PR and editors were confused by my typos.  Surely they could deduce the correct meaning?  The suggestion that my errors impeded communication infuriated me.   Largely because that’s my greatest fear.

It’s not like I haven’t been told that copy editing matters.  Sure, I could blame the press or point to my collaborators, but I also know typos are my hallmark.  We’ll have to think how to address this going forward.  The academic spouse has been the long suffering victim of this yearning for a clean text in many households.  I’m not sure I’m comfortable with putting that burden on my partner.

I found a dozen plus errors in yesterday’s posts.  I didn’t correct them.  If you misunderstand me so be it.  If this is to be a low stakes, I’m going to have to be me, typos and all.

***

The photo at the top has no relevant no content relevance (just a nice spine), but is there to indicate that last night and this morning I rearranged all the books in the house in order to make room for the project specific books that I brought back from campus.  There is something shockingly satisfying to ordering and organizing books. I’d say something about a chapter on Grammar which I found amongst my partner’s books [SDA hereafter], but the edits beckon.

This blog is an attempt to have an answer to the question: “where did the time go?” It will have some content — free-writing about the material I’m actually researching and published elsewhere in a more formal manner — but mostly its about process. 

To prepare for this adventure I’ve re arranged all the furniture in the back bedroom and set up a standing desk. I brought two suitcases and one milk crate of books home from campus.  I’ve spent two weeks away from email and social media and all things academic to clear the mind.  

This morning I took out a black dry erase marker and made a list on a big antique mirror of all the academic projects to which I’m committed:

– EDITS ON A PREVIOUS CHAPTER 

– HALF DONE BOOK REVIEW

–  JULY TALK

– SEPTEMBER CHAPTER

– THE CURRENT BOOK

– FUNDING FOR THE NEXT BIG PROJECT

I then called another academic and she reminded me of a few important maxims.  “None of these projects will be finished today”  “Write something” “Pick a smaller component of one of the projects and accomplish that goal” 

The big take away from the conversation is that I don’t have to choose between working on clearing the decks, playing with new ideas, and getting down to serious work on the BOOK. 

…

At this point I went and fetched bell hook’s Teaching to Transgress.  I was looking for a half remembered quotation about the trauma of being between books and not believing the next book will ever come.  I couldn’t find it.  I appear to have read it in a phase where I was too OCD to write in my books. One of the blessings of e-books is my now wreckless abandon in highlighting and annotating books.  Instead I found her opening confession to having nightmares: “They were a response to the reality that I would be granted tenure.  I was afraid that I would be trapped in the academy forever.” 

I am so trapped.  The terrible reality of it is that I have so fully internalized the culture of the academy that I feel a burning press to “produce” rather than to think and explore.  Hopefully, for the next 410 days I’ll do a little bit of both.