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.

Quality Time

The problem is almost never "not having enough time" in purely quantitative terms. Rather, it is that the time one does have is low quality--tired, low-energy time, interrupted or fragmented time. Think of a month--720 hours--in which you must at some point complete a task that requires 24 hours. It would seem a simple matter to find 24 hours somewhere amid the 720, but it is not always so.

The main factors are time of day, continuity, and appropriate space. In other words, you must find some good quality hours when you aren't exhausted, won't be interrupted, and can be in an appropriate environment.

Jumping over the pond (iii)

If you are considering moving (partially) into a new field, as I am, you'll have to think systematically about what this would entail. As I took inventory of my scholarly base in Latin American poetry, I found some strengths and quite a few gaps. I came up with a list of questions that looked kind of like this:

Who are the major scholars in this field? What journals publish the most (or the best) articles in this field? What are the dominant modes of writing about poetry? What are the main narratives that these scholars put forward and share as a group? How do their ideas relate to larger debates within Latin American Studies? To what extent is the field divided into national sub-fields (Peruvian poetry, Chilean poetry, Mexican poetry) or into critical industries devoted to major authors (Neruda, Vallejo, Paz)? Is it a field that doesn't know itself, in that scholars working on one part might not know poets from other national traditions? Is it valid to see Spanish American poetry and Spanish poetry as parts of a single, transatlantic tradition, as some have argued? Who would be in a position to make this kind of judgment? Are the Spanish American poets best known in Spain also those are best known in their own countries or across the continent as a whole?

How does the success of the Latin American novel beginning in the 60s effect the status of poetry? How about the dominance of cultural studies generally? What kind of dissertations have been written over the past 10 years in this field?

And so on. Even to be able to formulate a list of questions involves a certain amount of knowledge, or at the very least an approach to finding out more about the field.

Now suppose you aren't moving into a new field, but simply trying to stay abreast of your own. Now, instead of just a similar list of questions, you would have some answers too.

Pride and Humility

How much pride should you take in your work? I think there is nothing wrong with normal human emotions of satisfaction (I got an article accepted in a good journal), or self-confidence (I believe myself able to write a good article). If you read something you wrote some time ago and genuinely feel surprised at how good it is, that is an honest emotion too. Without positive emotions the work gets a lot harder to do.

On the other hand, thoughts like "I've reached a certain point in my career when I should have my articles accepted automatically," or "things I don't know about must not be that important" cross the line into arrogance. It should be easy to distinguish beneficial pride from an ugly sense of entitlement.

With humility, the same distinction applies. Helpful humble thoughts might be: "I would like to do some work in Latin American poetry, but I really have to do a lot of reading first." Or "So and so has a quality in her work that would like to emulate, but I am not at that level yet." Harmful humility takes the form of negative thoughts like "I'll never master this material."

Oddly enough, arrogance sometimes goes together with those destructive negative thoughts. In other words, the same person who might have unhelpful negative thoughts might also have an equally unhelpful cockiness. By the same token, there is no incompatibility between realistic thoughts of pride or confidence and a realistic acknowledgment of one's weaknesses.

The key is being grounded in reality, testing your beliefs about your ability by what you actually are able to accomplish. Entitlement and self-abasement are equally unattractive qualities, leading to the syndrome Fish examines in many of his essays.

Scholarly Self-Loathing

I have extraordinary contempt for most academic attitudes. They seem to me—this is in a way a touch of genius—simultaneously self-serving and self-defeating. They're self-defeating because they are designed finally to make sure that you never get or achieve what you say you want to achieve, and they're self-serving because in a way that failure is the goal which, when achieved, allows academics the platform of high and lofty complaint they so love to occupy.

Stanley Fish

This blog is really about not being self-sabotaging and self-serving all at the same time. My attitude is that one should value scholarship deeply and strive to do it at the highest level, rather than speaking of if as something contemptible that we only do for professional advancement. When you really think about professional advancement, its purpose is to allow you do do more scholarship.

I think the problem is worse in Department of English or other literatures where the fashionable attitude of denigrating literature has led to a strange paradox of people devoting their lives to something they claim not to care about that much. Someone said of the Duke English Dept once (Fish's old dept.) that it was a group of people united only by their common hatred of literature.

So an essentially elitist activity--the study of literature at the graduate level--has to be justified by its political utility, and this political utility derives from the fact that the elitism is a self-loathing one and thus serves the interests of the common man by implication. The fact that humanists are both privileged--to be able to do what they do at all--and underpaid (in relation to years of experience and education) allows for this cycle of self-defeating yet self-indulgent attitude.

Exercising the intelligence at the highest level and encouraging, teaching others to do the same needs no apology, no political alibi. It's simply a valuable thing to do and that's it. Making the object of study the works of John Coltrane, Mark Rothko, or Lorine Niedecker requires even less justification. Studying and preserving the most valuable products of the human intelligence, while doing no harm to any animals in the process. What could be more transparently beneficial than that?

Deliberative Practice in the Humanities

Deliberative practice is the kind that makes you improve in whatever activity you are engaged in. It is practicing smart, with a self-consciousness of what it will take to improve.

This kind of practice is easier to implement, however, in music or sports. In academic work, the activity itself seems much more diffuse, and it thus seems harder to define what "practice" would even mean. While I sometimes find myself using sports metaphors when thinking about my work, these have their natural limits.

At the same time, the diffuseness and complexity of scholarly writing make deliberateness all the more important. There are more elements to consider than in learning, say, to hit a ball with a stick, but we need to have that same kind of focus and concentration. I would argue even more so.

Cultivating Qualities

At various times of your professional life you'll be concentrated on cultivating certain qualities in your self. Tenacity or humor, erudition, flexibility. Maybe just dogged persistence. Right now the quality that I am most interested in is receptivity or disponibilidad, the ability to really hear what the text is saying, to be open to its music and tone. To not be closed off to as much, to as many styles. It's part of my general affection for acute self-awareness. I have to fight constantly against my own narcissism.

Anyway, the point here is to decide what particular qualities you want to cultivate and do so self-consciously.