How People Really Think

I'm not sure what I mean by this phrase. What is the way that people really think about things, deep down, as opposed to what they claim to think? For example, most people might claim to think that canonical authors are just there, in the canon, for completely contingent and arbitrary reasons, and that in theory everything is equally valuable. Yet try to explain your work on a non-canonical author and there is quite an effort to be made justifying such an enterprise at all! You must prove that your author is worth studying, important in some way, and it's a hard sell.

People claim to value complexity, but they really like simplistic thinking deep down. They are more sentimental than they claim, more apt to substitute proxy values for more substantive ones, more attached to idiosyncratic shibboleths and fetishes, along with collective idées reçcues.

By "people" here I mean academics. The connection between this and SMT is that you have to constantly anticipate the way people really think, because that will determine how they will react to your work.

The Detailed Plan

You should have a detailed plan of when you will finish the book-length project that you are always writing. Basically, this is a list of chapters with dates of completion. There is no way that you will actually follow the plan in its first incarnation. Instead, you will be constantly revisiting it, changing dates backwards and forwards, realizing that c must be written before b, or f before e, that g took you less time than you anticipated. I'm always revising my plan, especially at the early stages when the identity and order of chapters is much more fluid. Today, for example, I shifted the focus of an unwritten chapter and that threw the order of everything else out of whack. I had to find a way of keeping the Lorca chapters together even though the argument places Lorca at several separate places in the book. I came up with a new plan, which is more or less this:

Preface (Finished January 1)
Acknowledgements
1. The Paradoxes of Spanish Intellectual History (March. 30)
2. Zambrano, Valente, and Counter-Reformation Poetics (Begun. Finish by April 30)
3. Play and Theory of Lorca’s Duende: Nation and Performance (June 30)
4. Lorca and Contemporary Spanish Poetry: Absence and Presence (Oct. 30)
5. The Persistence of Memory: Antonio Gamoneda and the Late Modernist Habitus (finished)
6. Las ínsulas extrañas: The Latin American Connection (Aug. 30)
Apocryphal Postscript (Nov. 30)
Bibliography

Final ms.: Dec. 31, 2010.

It's probably not going to happen this way. I'm sure it's overambitious. On the other hand, allowing too much time for each chapter is not advisable at this point.

To Do List

The To Do List should only include important, significant tasks. You might keep another daily list for picking up the dry cleaning or checking a particular book out of the library, but you should have one list that includes only things that are really major. You don't want to give yourself the false impression that you've been hugely productive just for having done a lot of littler things. Here's mine for Feb. / March, with an asterisk denoting completion. Items are listed in order of when I'd like to get them done or firm deadlines that can't be missed. You'll notice that there are four grant applications here. I'm investing some time in that rather than writing the project itself.

I spend some time virtually every day working on the list itself. In other words, re-ordering, prioritizing, adding items, striking through things I've already done, and figuring out easier components of these items that I can take care of earlier than expected. For example, an abstract for the MACHL conference could be done this weekend or even between classes tomorrow, even though the deadline is not impendingly urgent. The time spent on the list is not wasted, because it motivates me to get things done a bit earlier. It's a bit like packing a suitcase more efficiently by placing small items in outside compartments.

Annual Performance Evaluation.*

Spain trip.*

GRF: write*

GRF: print* and submit by Feb. 4

Final revisions for Ullán article.

NEH Seminar application

(First draft completed and sent to NEH, January 20*)

Submit abstract for MACHL conference by end of February

March 5: International Travel Grant Deadline

1st Chapter of Modernism book: March 30, self-imposed deadline

Cultural cooperation grant. April 1

Primary Texts

The return to primary texts is always refreshing, when I have been away from them for a while. The one thing that makes the biggest difference in a literary critic is how much really good reading has taken place--having read, and read well, a lot of the primary works.

Think of it this way: you could gain a kind of instant expertise simply by reading every significant work by a major author over the course of a month or two, and ignoring the secondary literature altogether. This is a valuable shortcut, since the secondary texts are going to make for much less efficient and rewarding reading.

From the Inside Out

After my PhD, I might have been an expert on the one author on whom I wrote my dissertation: Claudio Rodríguez. Since he wasn't yet considered a major author, I was a specialist in a very minor-seeming thing. After some more articles and my second, book, I was maybe an expert on modern and contemporary Spanish poetry. Still maybe a specialized sub-field, but a little broader and to this date my principal professional identity.

My aim for a long time has been to expand my areas of expertise from the inside out. The Lorca book gave me specialist credentials in contemporary American poetry and Comp Lit, maybe on translation theory... Now I'm moving more in the direction of intellectual history, and also writing a chapter in my coming book on Latin American poetry. I'm teaching a course on jazz.... All of a sudden (in other words, over the course of 30 years) I have gone from being very narrow to being relatively broad. Of course, some of these things are long standing interests. It just took a while to write about all the things I was interested in.

There's a lesson here. Be a specialist first and then expand the area in which you're a specialist in a coherent way. Go from being a narrow specialist to being a broad specialist, one who knows a lot about a significant chunk of something. I still don't see the point in being a generalist instead of a specialist, because a good specialist will eventually acquire a lot of knowledge as sh/e expands the terrain of specialization.

Native Speaker

You may or may not be a native speaker of your discipline. If an Ancient Sumerian showed up at the department of archeology, the field might be revolutionized: imagine the elementary errors that would disappear.

Thinking Like a Poet

If you are a literary critic, then you have an edge in scholarly writing because you are already highly attuned to writing. Your specialty is taking apart texts to see how they work. If you are a specialist in poetry, then you can explain every detail of writing at the highest level--a poem by Lorine Niedecker, say. Your own writing will never be that good, but at least you understand the principles involved.

I don't really trust a literary critic who can't write or a geometer with a shaky hand. (A cartographer who gets lost on the way to the mall.) Such a critic has not learned to think like a poet.