Enjoy Your Moping

There's a lot of anguished time spent not working. If you are really stuck, then try to just do something completely different and mindless for a while rather than using your moping time moping. I find looking at episodes of The Rockford Files useful.

Memorization and Working Memory

One thing I did a lot of during my comparatively fallow, unproductive period was to memorize a lot of poetry. I picked up my copy of Robert Frost's poems from my office today to bring home, and found poems that I didn't even know I knew. I could look at them again and almost instantly re-memorize them. And I don't even like Robert Frost!

Memorizing that much changed my whole relation to my subject matter. When I say that I know a poem I mean that I've memorized it at one time, not just that I know of its existence. Insight have come from this level of knowledge, though I didn't need to memorize anything. I'm sure many scholars of poetry don't bother.

One thing memorization increases (possibly) is working memory, "the ability to actively hold information in the mind needed to do complex tasks such as reasoning, comprehension and learning" according to this wikipedia article.. I don't have any proof of that, but that's my own experience. For example, I can read an article once, then the next day look at it and write a reader's report. I remember everything that is wrong and right with it and don't even need to look back at it once I get the quotes I need for the report. I'm pretty sure my working memory was not this good even when I was younger, in graduate school.

The mind does decline in pure speed with age, but certain tasks can actually become easier.

Stupid Motivational Tricks--The Book

I'm thinking of publishing SMT as a book, a kind of "best of" collection that I would self-publish as a "print on demand" sort of deal. I'm getting sixty people a day reading this, so I'm sure there is a demand. All I'd have to do is to go through a few hundred posts and choose the best ones, organize them by categories, and do minimal revisions.

It wouldn't replace all the more systematic books on how to write and publish and manage time. I probably wouldn't earn any money doing it, but I think it would be a valuable service for people who crave this sort of stupid advice.

Olympian

[From the archives at RSL.]

It is said that Milo of Croton, the six-time Olympic wrestling champion, maintained his strength between the Olympiads by lifting a calf onto his shoulders every day from its birth. After four years, then, he was lifting an ox, and, so the story goes, he carried this ox on his shoulders right into the stadium, where he killed it with his bare hands, cooked it, and ate it.

You know where I'm going with this. How like a PhD student was Milo the Crotonian! For three years (give or take) you grow with your task until the day comes to defend your thesis. You throw the dissertation from your shoulders to the ground, deftly slaughtering it before the amazed eyes of your committee. Then you cook it, of course, and consume it with the utmost relish.

What intellectual exercise can serve as a fitting analogue? Well, from the first day of your doctoral studies, write down something you know (I mean really know) about your topic. Do that again on the second day and then again on the third. Do it every day for a thousand days (three years or so) and you will then know enough about your topic to justify your degree. You will also have written, more or less, your thesis.

Give your research a daily workout (an e-labor-ation) in writing from the very beginning. By this means you will arrive at an articulate body of knowledge just as surely as Milo achieved his Olympian strength.

Melancholy

Many creative people are also given to melancholy, to the point where we might consider melancholy itself a component of creation itself. Less than ideal working conditions, delayed or non-existent rewards, the inherent solitude of many types of scholarship, and many other analogous factors (I am too lazy to list) contribute to dysphoria. I get a little jolt of satisfaction when my work is cited favorably, when I get a spike in hits on my blog, when my articles are accepted, but these events are infrequent.

Instead of eliminating melancholy, I prefer to anatomize it, control or minimize it through conscious effort, use it and listen to its messages. What is your melancholy telling you? I argued a lot with one therapist who said that my being more productive would not make me happier. I'm sure she was correct in saying that productivity would not eliminate dysphoria, but I was right that publishing more would help me manage the problem by removing a significant source of frustration.

It seems superficial to want rewards for what we do: admiration, renown, prestige and respect, power, money. Since scholarship is inherently rewarding, it is too much to ask that it also bring such conventional rewards. Yet people (including myself) do want such things even when they don't want to admit it to themselves.

There Is Nothing Too Basic, addendum

In the season's first practice, the great UCLA basketball coach John Wooden would teach all of his players, even seniors who had won multiple national championships, the proper way to put on socks and lace up sneakers. Why? To prevent blisters ... that might cause the players to run down the court off-balance, which could then cause knee problems, then back problems.

I trot this anecdote out when I'm explaining something that my students might find too obvious. Nothing is too obvious when it comes to composing prose. You have to take care of everything.

You just can't

The late, great Diane Middlebrook (author of Anne Sexton biography and beloved Stanford prof) once told me, "You can't edit yourself any more than you can tickle yourself" -- and for the same reason, I might add: You know what's coming.

There are four questions even experienced authors cannot answer about his or her own prose, without a second set of eyes: Is it clear enough, concise enough, complete enough, convincing enough?