Default to bum

When I am not looking at my cv or directly engaged with writing something, I tend to default to bum. If I have a bad day or week or month or season, with less than ideal productivity, I tend to think of myself a lazy. But, even though I might appear lazy if you followed me around for a few days, I believe I am not. I have the Lorca and Me book almost finished, am well along the way with the Things to Do to Poems book, and with Lorca: The Musical Imagination.  I did abandon some other projects, it is true. But my five published books is more than respectable, even apart from the contents of my files of unpublished things. I have three books of poetry I could publish, if I had a publisher, and I have taught myself to write music.

It is curious, though, that I have to get out my cv in order to convince myself of this. My default state is to consider myself to be somewhat of a bum. I wonder why that is so. I do hate arrogance, in myself and others, so perhaps it is out of mistaken fear of that. Perhaps it is because people are not constantly heaping praise on me. Of course, that would be pretty ridiculous too. We aren't supposed to need constant approbation. We are supposed to be content with extremely sporadic or perhaps nonexistent positive reinforcement for our efforts, and it seems childish to want more than this. Perhaps I am extrapolating from my low salary about my status in the university, or exaggerating my own numerous failings, which are far more visible to me than to anyone else, I'm sure.

In any case, through meditation I've learned to be curious about emotions. If you are feeling an emotion you have to examine what it feels like in the actual body. What is it like? Also, you become aware of an emotion almost before it arises. This does not prevent the emotion from manifesting itself, but it helps.

Arrogance (ii)

What we call arrogance is not an overestimation of one's abilities, but rather an attitude of puffing-out-the-chest. For example, I might overestimate the quality of my musical compositions. I might think of them as B+ level when they really deserve a C-.  But arrogance is not a simply overestimation, but the attitude that follows from it.  I know people who overestimate their own scholarship without being arrogant about it. We might simply say that they are making a mistake in one direction or the other. Excessive modesty about one's musical compositions would be a mistake in the other direction, but wouldn't be an attitude of "humility" per se. In other words, it might not be accompanied by any particular attitude of self-abasement. Suppose my compositions are "really" at the B+ level, but I rate myself as a C- composer.

What defines arrogance or humility, then, is not one's self-estimation in relation to the truth, but rather an egotistical attitude in one direction or another: arrogance or self-abasement. I also think that humility is as much of a matter or the ego as arrogance. Both are ways of putting the self in the middle where it doesn't belong. The question is not how much talent I have, but how good the actual song turns out to be.  

Also, of course, arrogance is a perceived quality. One can feel that ego in another person, as in one's self. It is almost palpable.

Also, you want to project some degree of ego, or the thing itself will not work, in many cases. Think of a way a conductor projects mastery and confidence. Or a boxer or baseball pitcher, or someone in a position to take control of the  classroom.  You wouldn't welcome a false humility in the surgeon about to cut you open. Part of psychological health is to project a modicum of arrogance, then.

Feeding the Ego

I have a book review to do. The person does not cite me (when he might have???). Although the book will get a good review from me, it will be with less relish. I don't think that he had to cite me, but he might have. I think, egotistically of course, that the kind of ideas that I develop, and that he might have cited, would have benefitted his approach and made his book smarter. It is a smart book in its own right, though, so I have to be fair. Ah well...

(Do you think a book on translations of modernism between US and Spain would cite me, or not?)

I also have a tenure case to do. The person does cite me favorably, and I am favorably inclined to his work. He not only cites me, but makes me sound smart in the process, giving enough of my own words to make me sound that way, and using my point to make another good point of his own. And he does it more than once. This is not the perfunctory, cover-your-bases citation that we perform so often, the citation that only shows that you are aware of the work, that people will expect you to cite it so you do.

What is even more gratifying, is that he cites something that I forgot I had written (not the book but the particular analysis of a poem).

Why should I even need these ego boosting events? Normally, we work long hours writing a book, or several books, and we only hear sporadically about whether anyone likes or appreciates them, or knows why they are good. The institution treats scholarship as items on the cv to be counted. Your colleagues know that you have published, but they work in different fields.

My personal non-academic friends don't read my scholarship. I had an interesting conversation once with some acquaintances, people I see often, in which we were talking about how much we read. At some point, I had to say: do you know what my profession is?

So yes, as far the adulation and ego boosting: bring it on!    

Got Prose?

I just sat down and wrote a few paragraphs of fluent, almost final prose, this morning, almost 500 words in a little more than an hour. This is what we do; as scholars we are professional writers, and we can write. Now granted, that is fast even for me, but I simply knew what I wanted to say and said it.

There will be struggles in writing, but they will be less melodramatic the more you write. It does get easier with experience and it should, or it is like no other activity known to humankind.

I think we do ourselves a disservice when we overdramatize the writing process. It is not particularly painful when we take most of the ego out of it. What makes it difficult and fraught is the constant self-doubt or need for self-affirmation.

   

My Weaknesses

I am irascible and unkempt

Given to lust, pride, and despair

Leaving behind piles of books wherever I go

A bad piano player & worse singer

Pedantic and self-involved, harmful to the environment

My weaknesses are visible to the eye

There is no point in concealment

Others are kind, though,

Ignoring my flaws a lot of the time

And even admiring my one good quality:

I am a non-violent man

Cordoba & Arrogance

Bound for Córdoba in the fall to give a talk at a modernism conference. But chance, it is in English. It will be called "An Elegy for Lorca Studies." I almost said a "Requiem for Lorca Studies."

These cities first came into my consciousness as names of automobiles. The Seville is a Cadillac. The Granada a Ford, and the Cordoba a Chrysler, so each of the big three Detroit companies had an Andalusian city car, with the connotation of luxury and Southern exoticism or Latin charm. (There was also a suburb in my town called Rancho Cordova.)

***

Kenneth Koch has a one-page play about the death of Lorca in Seville. This is too funny because everyone knows Lorca met his death outside Granada. Americans can't seem to get anything right about Lorca. Whether this error is deliberate or not I have no clue. It's almost not funny enough to be joke, but too obviously wrong not to be.

***

I just decided that I will also be big-name expert on Lorca's theater, leveraging my position as one of the main Lorca poetry scholars. How can I decide this? That sounds pretty arrogant, but all it would take is for me to write about the theater as well. It's not as though theater is so esoteric that it would take me five years to train myself in it. There are good scholars doing work in this area, and I think I can do work that is of comparable quality.

***

There's a beer I order sometimes called Arrogant Bastard. There is a useful humility and a harmful humility. The same way, there is a useful confidence as well as a useless form of confidence which goes by the name of arrogance.

Useful humility: you know that you can make a mistake, that you don't know everything, and that other people have strengths that are not yours.

Useless humility: the kind that makes you unable to perform. Suppose you were trying to do some absurd bicycle trick flipping over five times. You have to think that you can nail it or you will kill yourself. Of course, you still might kill yourself. If you can't envision yourself doing something, that you won't be able to do it.

Useful confidence, then, is the secure knowledge that you have the tools to do what you want to do. It should almost be factual: I have this much time on my hands, this knowledge of the subject-matter, this particular ability to understand and analyze, etc...

I heard Julia's summer audition tape recently. I told her that she made it sound easy, like she was playing it how she wanted, without struggling to get to a higher level. She said people told her she played "like she didn't give a shit," meaning not a lack of effort or engagement, but a kind self-confidence. There were minor imperfections but in the context of a fluent flow of notes.

Useless arrogance is mistaking your own excellence for some deep-seated superiority. An ability to do something well is just that, and nothing more. It doesn't make you better than someone else, just better at doing that one thing, that you can do better.

***

On the other hand, I think everyone should find something to do as well as possible. Why do we place such a high value on people who can do something better than someone else? The race may not be to the swift in every case, but sometimes it is. Sports is entertaining not just because of the entertainment value of the action, but because people really like to experience the struggle for excellence, whether directly or vicariously.

Ego

Almost all unpleasantness in research* is due to the interference of the ego voice in your head. Worrying about whether you are smart / talented / erudite enough. Whether you deserve (on some existential level) to be doing what you are doing. Any shortcoming in a sentence you just wrote, any frustration with a sentence that took you too long to write, becomes evidence of unworthiness. No wonder people suffer writing block and chronic procrastination. Who wants to be subjected to that inner voice every day!

If I see a flaw in something I wrote yesterday, I think to myself: "oh, I used the same word twice in the same sentence, let me change that." Not: what a bad writer I am, I should just give this up.

For some, the answer is to have a lot of positive ego, but the kind of positive ego that cannot withstand criticism is really just a weak ego. Suppose I sat down and said: "I am a great writer. Everything I do is gold." Then noticing something wrong, or, worse, having someone else point it out, would be devastating. It is easy to oscillate between exaggerated positive ego and humbling negative ego. Suppose I thought every article I sent out was flawless, and editors thought differently. Then I would have to deal with crushing blows to my self-esteem every time.

Of course, sometimes I do have pleasant thoughts while writing, like: that sentence sounds good, or, I am really smart, or, so-and-so is going to like this article, or, I am getting a lot done today, or, "not many people in my field could have done this." I don't really know how to repress those thoughts. I just acknowledge them and move on in quiet confidence.

___
*The rest of the unpleasantness is having other obligations that prevent you from doing it, or poor working conditions that impose too high a cost.

Vanity Metrics

Just when I said I wouldn't be following my vanity metrics, I realized I was creating my own profile in google scholar. You can consult it it you want, by googling my name and going to google scholar. It might be better termed a humility metric, because I don't have nearly the numbers of citations I would need to justify my enormous ego.

I have 50 followers for Bemsha Swing and 49 for SMT. This means that SMT will soon overtake BS as my more popular blog, since a while back I had many more followers there than here.

It's Easy to be Self-Critical, but Hard to Turn Self-Critiicism to Advantage

Anyone can beat themselves up with a long list deficiencies. I do it all the time. Self-criticism is actually a powerful tool, if used right. The problem is that negativity is typically de-motivating, since it's hard to enjoy something that you know you are doing badly. If you aren't self-critical, though, it is hard to improve to the point that you can enjoy your writing. Complacency doesn't really get you anywhere either.

The trick is to develop self-criticism itself, the ability to evaluate your own writing and see where it needs to be changed,for example, as one of your special talents. To see that a sentence I've written is a piece of shit might be disappointing, but I can move from "this sentence is crappy, therefore I am a crappy writer" to "Boy, I am really good at finding these sentences in my own writing and fixing them before anyone else sees them." Or "I am really good at anticipating possible objections to my arguments."

As I've pointed out before, there is really no point in singling yourself out as particularly bad at things that almost nobody else is good at either. That is also a form of egoism.

Arrogance

Arrogance is perceived as a negative quality because it is associated with

A lack of courtesy to others.
The possibility that arrogance is a cover for insecurities.
A lack of self-awareness. I could be arrogant because I have a PhD, but everyone I work with does too!
Narcissism. Excessive self-involvement.
A lack of intellectual humility. An arrogant person cannot recognize that s/he may be wrong.

Yet some quality resembling arrogance is also necessary for the following reasons:

Confidence. You have to project a sense of confidence, that you know what you are talking about. Making apologies for oneself or being too self-deprecating can backfire. I remember dumbshit students taking my profession of ignorance about something at face value. I've seen people apologize first, then give a bad presentation. When you say, "I don't have these ideas very well developed yet," and you really don't, then people will be sitting there thinking, "You are right, you don't."
Honesty about one's capabilities and accomplishments. Look at your cv as though it belonged to somebody else. If you are impressed by what you see, then you should be impressed with yourself.
Ambition. It is hard to be ambitious if you are too afraid of being arrogant.

Also, you have to distrust the motives of people who call you arrogant. Are they jealous? Are they trying to hold you back or put you down? When I published in Insula as an Assistant Professor, a senior colleague, instead of congratulating me and encouraging me to take legitimate pride, made a snarky remark about my "swelled head."

So narcissism and rudeness, bad. Ambition, legitimate pride in real accomplishments, good. False humility and apologetic discourse, bad. Intellectual humility about being wrong, good.

Weaknesses

Here's some advice about how to answer the cliché interview question about yourweaknesses.

One weakness is that I'm not so good with organizing events, conferences and meetings with several components and involving the cooperation of many people and institutions. I started to late last year trying to apply to direct an NEH seminar and I just couldn't get it together. The intellectual content of the course developed very easily, but not the logistical elements. I have organized events, but it isn't easy for me.

I had a serious weakness with time management in the past. Now I'm practically a time management genius!

As a scholar, I'm probably too "narrow" to compete for jobs that want someone wider-ranging. I like small problems rather than big sweeping ones. I'm not that good at promoting myself either, in convincing others that what I do is interesting. I am too introverted for some roles.

I am a horrible proof-reader. I just don't see mistakes. People have told me I'm dogmatic.

I am also prone to sloth, pride, envy, anger, greed, lust, and gluttony, not necessarily in that order.

That's just the beginning of my weaknesses, past and present. A weakness is just a *fact* about yourself that you ought to know and be able to deal with. That interview question seems hard, but I think the advice given in the link I've provided is sound. Just tell them how you worked on a particular weakness and improved, or what you are working on right now:

"I'm really working on my prose style. I am not at all satisfied with the way I write. I've had some articles accepted, and some journal editors have helped me see some improvements I could make by reducing jargon and writing more clearly."

"I'm a little bit manic and I tend to say yes to many requests for book reviews, tenure evaluations, and invited articles. In the past I've overcommitted myself and had trouble meeting deadlines. Now I've developed a more systematic approach and have learned to say more often, choosing only the requests where I can make the most difference."

Look, our jobs are multi-faceted. We are scholars, bureaucrats, teachers, writers, editors, evaluators, managers. I know a very few people who are very talented in all of those roles. Normally, however, any one individual is going to be better at some things than at others.

Narcisissm and its Compensations

Sure, everyone hates other peoples'' narcissism. That's the easy part. In my case, a feeling that I had reached a certain level that others hadn't alienated me from others in my own field. I wrote some books reviews that made me some enemies. It made it very hard for me to relate to weaker graduate students, and even some stronger ones.

Recognizing my narcissist strain, I actively try to compensate for it.

(1) Just recognizing it in yourself is the first step. True narcissists wouldn't be worried about being narcissistic. That's a problem for other people. A kind of meta-consciousness is very helpful, because then you won't be one of those people lacking self-awareness.

(2) I try to write for an audience, not for myself. A really clear and engaging style is my ideal. I read my own work from the perspective of another person, as much as possible.

(3) I find that having a poetic work of my own, one that my ego is invested in, is very difficult. It almost demands a certain narcissism. So I don't take myself too seriously as a poet. I can write a poem as good as the next person, or probably better, but I don't have a sense of my work as a poet. If I took myself seriously as a poet, I'd be twice the narcissist than the one you already know and hate.

(4) I don't take enormous satisfaction from my political convictions. I view those as pretty much a given, not something that I can take pride in. So I don't have the political narcissism of the typical Humanities Professor.

Motherfucker

When I wrote the first few paragraphs of "Musical Lorca," a chapter that I wasn't quite sure was going to work, I realized that it would be the most brilliant and inherently interesting chapter of the book, essentially the missing chapter from Apocryphal Lorca. Jonathan, you motherfucker, was all I could tell myself. You still have it. You can still do it better than anyone else in your field.

How Do I Do It?

I really don't know how "I," the human being Jonathan Mayhew, is able to turn into "I," the scholarly writer of the same name. I really don't know how I do it. I've often gotten into trouble assuming someone else can do what I can. I can easily imagine myself not being able to do it, or losing the ability to do it at some point. When I'm sitting here not writing, the ability to write a book seems almost as improbable as being able to mount a flying trapeze.

Underestimating Myself

Ego adjustments have to go in both directions. Being too arrogant is a flaw, but I've found that I also tend to underestimate my accomplishments. I might look at someone's cv, for example, and see it as wholly respectable, even though mine is three times more impressive. In other words, if I just look at my cv as though it were someone else's, I am really impressed by myself. Looking from inside my own head, however, I am not all that impressed. In real life I'm just a schmuck.

Ninguneo

Ninguneo means being ignored, more or less. Scholarship can be lonely, and when an article falls into the black hole of never being cited, it is kind of depressing. I was sick of my dissertation topic so I didn't keep up with the scholarship on it. Today, however I found a pretty nice citation of my work from the late 1990s that I had missed:

Conviene sin embargo recordar aquí el trabajo crítico más original y exento con relación a los debates relacionados con la poesía social, de Jonathan Mayhew, tanto "The Dialectic of the Sign in Claudio Rodríguez's Alianza y condena" [...] como "The Motive for Metaphor: The Rhetoric of Social Solidarity in Claudio Rodríguez's Conjuros." Un discurso satisfactoriamente enjundioso , en buena medida bajo la tutela intelectual de Frederic Jameson, que supera la pesada dialéctica falaz del compromiso y la consigna partidaria en nombre de una más profunda solidaridad ética.

García Berio, La forma interior: la creación poética de Claudio Rodríguez, p. 70.

And that's not the only citation to my work in this book. So maybe I shouldn't complain so much about the ninguneo. I have been, in fact, very fortunate that my work has been recognized in Spain and cited with some frequency, especially since my work has appeared about 95% in English. I've had other cases where someone bases their entire argument on my work but cites me only for a minor point--and that's in the US.

Enjundioso means substantial, vigorous. I was never inlfluenced by Jameson, that I know of, but I'll take the compliment anyway. I supersede the tiresome dialectic of social commitment in favor of a more profound ethical solidarity. My work is the most original on this topic.

Speaking from Authority

Speaking from authority raises some difficult problems. What if you don't have authority (yet)? You still need to project a sense that you know what you're talking about.

Authority does not come from the ego, but it is a projection of ego, in some sense. You have to have enough confidence to hold the floor. A pianissimo should not be weak. It can still be a strong, confident musical phrase. The fact that one's knowledge is limited does not mean that one's authority is nonexistent. Qualification of degree of certainty does not necessarily decrease authority.

Kramer's dojo (ii)

When I was first entering the field I thought it was mediocre. I saw established people giving plot summaries in conferences. I had internalized a certain standard by working at Stanford and through my own reading, and I did not find that standard at work in the field I was going to enter. I'm sure that arrogant attitude cost me some potential friends. I knew that I didn't know everything; in fact, I knew I had a lot left to learn, but I also knew it would be pretty easy for me to get a foothold in the field without knowing all that much yet.

I always wanted to set a standard for my field. I just wish I had known how to do it as a younger person without all that arrogance, without the Kramer's dojo syndrome.

I'm still trying to shed some arrogance and anger.

Ambition

I've had a secret ambition for a while: to be the greatest ever reader of poetry.

Now, this is a kind of absurd ambition, obviously, because what would that even mean? How would you even know if you were such a thing? Even if it were possible to be such a thing, what makes me think that I could ever do that?

Yet there is a hidden purpose in this absurdity. First of all, much as I disagree with a lot of the criticism of Helen Vendler or Harold Bloom, it is obvious that they spend a lot of time reading with a deep sense of engagement with what they are reading. So the idea of emulating that--without even wanting to agree with anything in particular that they say, or even with their general approaches, is a worthy ambition.

Secondly, just to be able to define what it would mean to be a great reader is useful. A great reader would know at least a few languages well enough to have a deep engagement; would have a sense of historical depth (not read only poetry of the last 30 years, or even the last 100 years); a great ear for verse in at least a few languages; would have "gone to school" with many, many poets, reading them exhaustively and obsessively; would have a fairly wide-ranging set of tastes, in the plural: would not like, say, only a narrow tradition of poetry in a single language; would have read a great deal of translations of poetry, and have a keen sense of translation itself as an art-form; the great reader would also have some dislikes or areas where interest in not so strong, some fierce resistance even to poets that might seem unquestionably worthy of attention. A great reader would also be able to talk and write articulately about what has been read, would be a good judge of literary criticism... And so on...

You see the possibility that the concept of being a great reader can open up.

How Do You know You Can Do It?

I lot of self-help type advice advocates a positive attitude, just thinking you can do something. But how do you really know you can do something? Maybe you can't and the advice to have a positive attitude, an empty optimism, will be next to useless.

So how do you know you can do scholarly writing?

In the first place, you might not have a realistic notion of how hard or easy it really is. If you think of it as easy, you might get into trouble by being overconfident. On the other hand, if you think of it as impossibly difficult, you'll never get anywhere.

It's something that a lot of people do, and it's not very difficult at the lowest levels. Publishing a graduate student seminar paper in a second line journal, for example, is not infrequent. On the other hand, rising to be one of the top scholars in your subfield is fairly difficult.

So it's a matter of breaking things down, reverse-engineering top articles in top journals to see how it's done; evaluating the state of a field to see who the best people are and how they got that way. In my case I could see that there were a lot of crappy to mediocre famous scholars in my field, so it was simply a question of putting in the work to do it better. I would automatically be at least among the top few simply by reading more and better and writing it up.

We've all known academics who aren't very smart. We've all met academics who are so intellgent that it hurts to even think about them. The thing is, you don't have to be in the latter category to achieve what you need to.