Dojo

Archambeau writes here.

I love his statement that he calls it a dojo because it a semi-serious name that shows he doesn't take himself too seriously.

Create Ideal Conditions / Work in Real Conditions

Set up your work conditions to be ideal, in terms of space and time. Develop your scholarly base; have all your work materials that you need on hand when you work. Sharpen your pencils.

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But don't wait until everything is ideal to start working. Work anyway, because there will always be conditions that are less than ideal in some significant respect. For me, for example, I often don't have the book I need on hand. I could be more organized, but I am not. Somehow I out-publish people who are much better organized because I don't let things like that bother me and I don't make excuses for myself.

Bibliography

If you really had a good bibliography for a project, you could just read the bibliography and know what you had to say. You could have a room with all those books and articles and you could complete the project without ever having to leave the room. Of course, for me the bibliography doesn't take shape until the project itself is complete: it is in flux until the last moment.

Perfect Conditions

My wife claims that needing the perfect conditions to write is gendered-- that (at least some) men can work anywhere and not worry about it, whereas (most) women need ideal conditions before they can write. This might be the case, I don't really know, but then it would put men at a competitive advantage--given that less than ideal conditions are more frequent. On the other hand, if women optimize their working spaces more, then that would give them some edge. What do you think?

Coffee Shop

The coffee shop is a good space to write, a third office neither home nor university. My personal choice is to leave the computer behind and work with pen and ink, but sometimes I do bring the laptop. I like being away from the computer in a separate space.

Ideal Conditions

Imagine your Platonic ideal of your working conditions. The perfect chair, the perfect pen, the perfect lighting and temperature. Unlimited time without distractions and perfect concentration.

This exercise might be useful in two ways. First of all, you will be able to see that your present conditions are not perfect, but they might be changeable in small and large ways. Go ahead and change a few things that might be already in your power. Next, realize that excellent work takes place in less than ideal conditions. Some people like the way music or ambient noise tugs at concentration; they might enjoy shutting out a chilly room from their mind. So "ideal" might not even be ideal.

Learning from Disaster

After my recent apartment fire i have had an opportunity to reflect. I realized that I was selling myself short by having an apartment where I wasn't fully settled, where I didn't feel I really lived. When I refurnish my new apartment I will furnish it better and make it into even a more ideal work space--and insure it this time. Perhaps I didn't have renter's insurance because I had the habit of not keeping anything expensive or valuable there. As I gradually acquired a few nicer things over the past few years I didn't change my attitude toward the place, and hence did not purchase insurance.

The Personal Library

The personal library is an essential part of one's scholarly base. It shows the relics of scholarly projects past, side issues that have occupied one's attention, theoretical trends. For me, the core of the personal library is primary texts, many of them purchased in Spain on numerous trips since 1979. I have many review copies, books I've taught from, personal gifts with the poets' dedications.

What I have to do now is organize my books better, make sure they are all in a few select places and more or less ordered.

Finitude, Part 2: Space

In Part 1, I asked you to reflect on when your writing will happen. Today, I want to talk about where. There is a really stupid sense in which this question needs to be answered: what door can you close and keep closed for two or three hours each day? Is there enough quiet there? Is there enough light? Is there a place to plug your computer in? But pause and think about that last question for a second. Maybe it's not even a computer you write on. Maybe all you need is a well-lit room and the paper you like, as Mordecai Richler said. The answer is personal, but it needs to be answered: where exactly are the words going to get written, i.e., in what room and onto what "page".

Your writing "space" can therefore be too open in two senses. First, you may have too vague an idea of where your body will be sitting when you are scheduled to write. You solve this problem by securing a quiet room in the house or relying on your colleagues to respect the closed door of your office. The second sense in which your space may be too open has to do with where in your text you will be working. You close this space with a good working outline of your writing project and by making some decisions about how big a project it is (a chapter, a book, a paper). You can carve this space up into sections, and further into pages, even words (a standard journal article is about thirty pages or 8000 words). You end with a two-part question: Which pages will you be filling out today and in which room will you be sitting? Don't expect to get any work done on a blank page in an open space.

Ideally, time divides not into days, hours, and minutes, but into tasks. (History is everything that happens.) And space really divides into facts, not things ("the world is everything that is the case," as Wittgenstein taught us), and claims, not pages and words. You should organize your work around tasks that articulate claims, not merely hours and days spent filling pages with words. But remembering that that is, in one sense, what you are doing, will help you appreciate your finitude. And this, if you'll pardon it, will allow you finish something.

The Commuting Academic

I work in one place and have my family in another--a five-hour commute. This has posed special problems in my work habits, since I lose 10 hours the weeks I drive back home, have my work materials scattered between apartment, office, house, and car, and have conflicting demands on my attention. I'm surprised I am able to get anything done at all, but I think I have managed to develop some efficiencies out of the very difficulties that beset me. When I have to stay weekends at my job, I get a lot done. I plan the week efficiently so I don't have to bring a lot of work home when I am away from the office. I use the five-hour drive to come up with new ideas. I am less neurotic about having to have every book I need at any one time. If there's a book I need that's 300 miles away, I just work around the missing material until I have a chance to get it.

In short, a less than ideal situation does not prevent above average scholarly productivity.

The Messy Desk as Self-Sabotage

I think the title of the post says it all. Imagine a clean desk on which there are materials only for the one task to be accomplished today. The cluttered desk clutters the mind itself.

I'm probably a bad offender here. The uncluttered desk is not something I've mastered, but something I'm now incorporating into my work habits.

'Shedding

'Shedding is woodshedding, the kind of lengthy and obsessive practice that musicians put in to get where they have to be.

I don't want to be the kind of motivational speaker who inspires a crowd to believe in itself and then disappears. Once the excitement of the inspirational speech fades, the audience is pretty much where it was before. Motivation is more in the daily grind of the woodshed more than in the single flashy performance. Academia is a brutally competitive profession, where enormous effort goes in to just getting the kind of job where scholarly writing is even possible. Don't "believe in yourself" in some abstract and meaningless way. Believe in the power of the shed.

Anyway, Modern Drummer magazine has regular a feature on drummers' sheds, their practice spaces. I'm not one who depends over much on having very well-appointed spaces, but the optimal organization of space and working materials can really make a difference for a lot of people. I think time takes precedence over space, because if you can allot a small amount of time to organize your work space and voilà.


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Thomas in the post directly below talks about the relation of time, space, and stupidity. He really gets the principles I am outlining in this blog and makes direct use of them in his own writing and his coaching of other peoples' work. I have learned a lot from him and I think you will too.

Time, Space and Stupidity

First let me say that it's a thrill to be asked to contribute to the blog of such an exemplary scholar. I remember when Jonathan first started sharing his motivational tricks over at Bemsha Swing, and I always liked the, well, stupidity of them. As Jonathan explained,

Basically, you don't need to be particularly smart to follow them, and many might sound silly or very, very obvious. Also, many of the tricks discussed here will not be original with me. The idea is to take care of the mechanics of organizing time and space in order to free yourself to do your writing. Often times that will mean tricking yourself out of certain cognitive habits that are holding you back.

Indeed, most often the obstacles to writing, at least in an academic setting, are not all that deep. Too often we cultivate an illusion that something other than a lack of brute discipline and basic orderliness is holding us back. That illusion of philosophical depth, that famous "difficulty" of "the problem of writing", is a very formidable one. It can't always be dismissed with a simple call to order. But perhaps there is a way both to respect and to transcend some of our philosophical pretensions in that pregnant phrase "time and space". Let's see.

Gilles Deleuze begins his discussion of stupidity by pointing out that "Kant's idea of inner illusion, internal to reason, is radically different from the extrinsic mechanism of error" (Difference and Repetition, p. 150). When we are stupid we are not just making cognitive mistakes, not just engaging in errors of judgment. What we are doing is nothing less than "not thinking". What could that mean? Well, for Kant, really thinking, really applying concepts, meant subsuming experience under the transcendental categories of "pure reason", and the most transcendental categories of all are, of course, time and space.

But what if your time and your space is a horrible mess? What if you never have an hour to yourself to sit down an focus on your research? What if you have people coming in and out of your office at all hours of the day? (Or what if you don't even have an office?) What, in short, if you are yourself moving haphazardly through time and space? Well, then you can't think. You become subject, if you will, to an intrinsic mechanism of error. Frankly, you become stupid.

Now, to suggest that you would have to do something very intelligent to stop being stupid would be to beg the question. Fortunately, there are a number of sufficiently stupid tricks that can help you get your act together, to rise above the stultifying conditions that are famously making academic life miserable for everyone from freshmen to professors. Such tricks, of course, are only the seeds or spurs of new cognitive habits, new ways of thinking. Let's think of them (if we can) as stupid ways to transcend stupidity.