New Plan for the Summer

I decided I would do one major thing each month. For May, I've accomplished my goal, finishing an article. For June, I want to finish the revisions of this article that is giving me a bit of trouble. Now, however, instead of just doing that, I will also reconvert that article into a chapter on María Zambrano. I always mistake difficulty for time. In other words, I have a slightly more difficult task, so I think it is going to be very time-consuming. It is not. I've already made enough headway today to think that it will be just a matter of a few days. Of course, what makes a difficult task time consuming is that we avoid doing it. Aha, that's my stupid motivational insight of the day.

For July, instead of Claudio, I will tackle that major chapter on Lorca. July will be the freest month, since Julia will be at music camp. I will be going to Spain, but that is just for a week or so. That will count as my vacation from writing.

Schedule Every Hour

The advantage of scheduling every hour is that you get to see exactly where the time goes. It might seem excessively restrictive, but you can schedule leisure and relaxation too, schedule yourself in such a way that you are not working during a certain hour. You could schedule an hour for listening to music. I'm going to start doing this beginning Monday morning, since I've felt a little unmoored since the semester ended. I've gotten a lot done, but I'd like to be even more savvy about my use of time.

This is not just about getting more done, but about freeing time to do other things that you might enjoy doing. Scheduling seems to restrict time, but it actually frees it up quite a bit and eliminates guilt about not always working. This technique will also help you do things you've been forgetting to do, exercise and meditation if you're anything like me.

Hour-long blocks are useful, because they make for handy units of measurement in which a significant amount of music-listening or house-cleaning can be done. Whenever practical and possible, try to do something for at least an hour and avoid multitasking as much as you can when you first start using this technique.

It's Not About the Housework

The purpose of the experiment about how many household chores I could get done was not really about the housework. I wanted to see how much an hour of doing things like that amounted to. I know what an hour of reading is, 40-100 pages depending on what kind of reading it is. I know how many graduate papers I can read and comment in an hour (2-3). I didn't know how many things I could do around the house before the timer rang.

It's also about uni-tasking, the idea of just concentrating for one thing for an hour without doing anything else, with no distractions. Many significant things fit into one-hour segments. Excercise for an hour, that's plenty for a day. Spend an hour talking on the phone with someone--that's a significant conversation. It takes an hour to cook dinner if you are making something not too basic. You have 16-18 hours when you are not sleeping, so it ought to be possible to get a lot even in 4 or 5 of those hours, between exercise, work, etc...

Collegiality

Collegiality is a sticky issue, because if two people don't see eye-to-eye, which of them is being uncollegial? A lot of us have intense, difficult personalities, might not be naturally easy people to get along with. When conflicts arise, it is hard to know who is to blame (for example, between two people who are both somewhat difficult.) There might also be legitimate differences in opinion / ideology that make things more difficult, or difficult work conditions. If the administration puts the squeeze on a department, some might react by siding with the administration, while others might legitimately resent them for that. I have friends in various departments who don't like other friends of mine, even when all parties concerned are dedicated professionals. I also don't know if I would be as good friends with certain people if I shared a working space with them.

The problem with using collegiality as a criterion for promotion is that the largest burden should fall on the senior colleagues. In other words, if a junior colleague is perceived as uncollegial, often that is in reaction against treatment by the senior colleagues. They shouldn't be able to mistreat the person and then turn around in call the same person uncollegial for fighting back. I remember that feeling that the senior colleagues are not on your side, and since I got tenure I've tried very hard not to be that guy. I am still in the position of judging the untenured people, and every one knows it, but usually if a senior colleague positive then junior people will not go out of their way to make enemies.

In short: the senior colleagues should set the tone. Some conflict should be expected; not everyone is going to like everyone else. You shouldn't take sides in other departments unless you have an extremely good sense of what's actually going on.

Summer Simplicity

All I have to do this summer in research is accomplish one major thing every month. May, it was the article I just turned in. June will be revisions on another article. July, a chapter on Claudio Rodríguez. In August, I want to finally get that chapter on Lorca done. For some reason, I've been avoiding that, mainly because there's a lot of pressure to make that chapter the most impressive, longest part of the book. Otherwise I can't call the book What Lorca Knew anymore. It would have to be "what Lorca and some other people knew."

None of these tasks I have to accomplish from scratch. What I need to do is finish things that I've started. Like most people, I'm better at starting than finishing.

Comp Studies (ii)

I found an excellent article by Nancy Sommers. "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers." (College Composition and Communication, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 378-388). The way I found it was to look on JSTOR for the most cited and accessed article in this journal. I feel I am reinventing the wheel a bit here, because I'm sure everyone in this field already knows this article. But since most readers of this blog are not comp specialists, I thought I would share what I learned.

Student writers (freshmen, sophomores) saw revision (a word they didn't actually use) mostly in a thesaurus mode. It was a matter of replacing individual words with others and eliminating repetitions and redundancies. The also checked their writing for rule breaking, making sure there were no prepositions at the end of the sentences, things like that. They had been taught certain mechanical rules in high school and thought of good writing as the avoidance of mistakes.

In contrast, experienced adult writers (journalists, academics, etc...) saw their revision as a process of searching for their argument. They were much more active in revision, moving parts of the essay around, eliminating or merging paragraphs. The way these writers talked about their work was very similar to the way I think about my own writing and revision.

Obviously, the implication here is that student writers have to be taught to think of their work in these more sophisticated terms. That they don't automatically think of their writing and revision in this holistic way.

Old Work

I rarely read my old work. Even my very recent old work. Once it is published, I never want to see it again. One of the last thing I have to do in an article I am now writing is to find page references from a few of my own publications, and I have postponed that very simple task, simply because I don't like to look at my own published work. See my name in print? Yes, that's wonderful, but I never want to rest on past achievements or look my old mistakes in the face.

When I do read my old work, I am surprised that it still holds up fine. Even things I wrote 20 years ago seem great to me. I guess I am always afraid of finding something that is gong to embarrass me, even though that rarely happens. In some cases, I wonder how I could have been so intelligent when I was so ignorant. In other words, I know that I didn't know basic things back in the day, but the arguments are still valid and ingenious ones. I stand by them.

The Ku ScholarWorks has been useful, in that it has inspired me to look at some of my old work. I am particularly interested in authorial voice and style. When I look at what I wrote, I can have forgotten what I wrote, but generally I still recognize the self behind the words. It is still me, even if it is making arguments that I wouldn't make today. As I also discovered, I was not a bad writer, even though I think I have improved now. Sure, I can pick on myself on small details, but I had prose even then (20, 22 years ago.)