Right now I have
Article for Cambridge Companion to Modernism, on FGL.
Article for Oxford Companion to FGl: Lorca in English translation.
The Musical Legacy of Federico García Lorca. A book on that topic.
My plan is working M-F. on these three things.
The 2 articles are 8,000 words each.
The book will be 5 chapters, averaging 10,000 words each.
That's all I got.
Fussy writing is done with an eye to not make a mistake. A fussy writer might distinguish between continual and continuous, maybe. There is nothing wrong with a little bit of fussiness, but some writers think in terms of shibboleths. "I will never use the word thus or hence," they might think. I don't use these words very much, but I don't want to mostly be on the defensive when I'm writing. Most of the customary shibboleths are kind of stupid. Avoiding them won't make me a good writer; they are more like talismans that I think might offer some protection against the accusations of not being a careful writer. We were taught to write "Lorca, however...." instead of "However, Lorca...." What's important is being able to choose, though.
Pretentious writing: I am adopting a pose, "interrogating the conditions of ..." The jargon itself is the point: it me you in the club with others who share that vocabulary. It's not even fussy, doesn't rise to that level, because it isn't attuned to fine distinctions or the avoidance of mistakes.
What I like right now is fancy writing. What I mean is that each word is the right one, the sentences are balanced and flowing. I don't repeat that many words, because each paragraph brings me something new where the words will be different. I can avoid pretentiousness, not worry about fussiness.
I like to begin with things that I can control; things that I don't have to ask permission to do. Now that I am Professor Emeritus my degree of freedom is complete. There is no job review any more.
The first freedom in academic research is in the choice of topic. I can choose any topic that I want, and take any possible approach. I cannot control how interested other people are, or how my work will be received. I can think about things outside of my control, but I cannot change them. My topic happens to be "Lorca and Music," and I am studying the poet's musical activities and posthumous legacy.
After that, one thing under my control is the standards I set for myself. How clear do I want my writing to be? How tightly organized? What amount of knowledge of the raw subject matter is necessary? How granular is my approach? How interesting or original do I want my scholarship to be?
I can also ask more specific questions. Do I want sign-posting, jargon? How do I balance granularity of knowledge with the capacity to communicate to audience who doesn't have that degree of interest in minutiae, while at the same time being rigorously accurate?
Most people will say they want all of this! This is great, but there is a usefulness also in making all of this explicit and intentional. Write it out as a list. Prioritize your goals. For example, some papers will not be as original: they will present interesting synthesis of knowledge already available.
(Probably if your standard is high, then you will get further in the review process for publishing articles. If a journal has a 5% acceptance rate, you want to be in top 10% in quality to give yourself a good chance of getting a "revise and resubmit." You don't hear people complaining about papers because the language is not vague enough, or the organization is too coherent. Usually, reviewers will respond warmly to competence.)
The next freedom is the freedom to live up to your own standards. For example, at one point I taught myself to write better. At another stage, I taught myself to write better again. I did research to improve my granular knowledge of the subject matter. Articles I wrote that were not up to my own standard were rejected. Some were up the standard of the field, in that they were published, but possibly mediocre from my own perspective.
Envisioning the standard is the main step. That will allow you to figure out how to achieve it. Without the standards in place in your mind, though, you will be lost.
Is a callous part of me? I lose some dry skin yet feel none the less.
***
I feel less Angst than Bronk that things have no meaning.
***
I was a scholar not a poet. The decision was made for me.
***
Who made the comedians the experts on your town?
Surrounding the Jason Arday case, there are huge areas of deception, inconsistency, fraud, plagiarism, exaggeration, embellishment. It is not just a question of plagiarism, but of an entire back story that kept changing shape. This not a question of one or two lies, but of a pattern of shifting narratives.
The result is that it is impossible to have any degree of confidence in any claim made by Arday, or claim made on his behalf by others. Some things in his memoir may be true, but why would anyone have any confidence in any of it? Even a seemingly innocuous detail could be false.
It would take a rigorous forensic process to sort out the lies and deceptions. At the same time, we're told that Arday was subject to far too much scrutiny!
The first point is that half the people are going to be below average, in any given endeavor. There will be a lot of people clustered in the middle, on any bell curve, as well. If your definition of mediocre is below average, then that will be half. If your defintion is "middling," then you will get a substantial number.
The second point is that mediocrity is defined contextually, by people already engaged in doing something. So a mediocre second-baseman will look mediocre compared to others in the same league, but still be better than anyone who couldn't play in the league in the first place. He had to have risen to that major league level even to achieve "mediocrity."
Mediocre is pejorative adjective, that seems to mean "middling," but has come to mean "bad" instead. The connotation has usurped the denotation. This is because it is only used when something doesn't meet expectations for excellence. On a tenure committee I was on everyone was judged excellent by their departments, to the point that calling them "very good" was almost insulting, and caused heated debates. That is because rhetorically speaking nobody can be below average, even though we know honestly that there is a middle and a bottom to the curve, not just a top.
When I hear the phrase "mediocre white man" I don't think of myself. Nobody does. Only other people are mediocre. If I object to the phrase, then I sound defensive.
I have been reading some of the takes on the Arday case.
1) Andrew Gelman is a statistician and expert on scientific fraud and malfeasance. He has no problem with the obvious fact that Arday is a fraud:
"Actually, it’s worse than that. Cambridge was informed about Arday’s research fraud three years ago, but the university first refused to investigate the problem, then last year when a news story was about to come out on it, they sicced lawyers on the newspaper to suppress it.
So, here we go again. Jason Arday, like David Agus, did not live up to his part of the bargain. Society gave him status and he returned the favor by lying all over the place."
2) Jason Stanley is a philosopher and purported expert on fascism and propaganda. He doesn't look closely at Arday's actual research, but concludes that since Arday's articles have some citations, that Arday must be a legitimate scholar after all. But of course, if they were plagiarized and fraudulent, then the number of citations wouldn't matter.
3) Henry Giroux blames big factors. Systemic colonialism, systems of power:
"Arday’s death must be understood against a wider culture of cruelty and dehumanization, one nourished by systemic racism and by a social order organized around greed, dispossession, hierarchy, and profound inequality. This is a system in which the legacies of colonialism have not disappeared but have been absorbed into institutions, cultural assumptions, and structures of privilege that continue to determine who belongs, who is protected, whose failures are forgiven, and who is subjected to relentless scrutiny."
Every thing's to blame except actual humans taking actions. It's all structures and systems doing the work, the bigger and more pervasive, the more explanatory power.
4) John McWhorter views the problem as one of assuming that black intellectuals are mediocre anyway. If you accept that, then you will hire a black professor as a token and not care about the quality:
" Compared with some other examples of the genre, Arday’s mendacity and incompetence are especially stupefying. But he is nonetheless a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue."
Every one of these responses is completely predictable by the commenter's particular vantage point. Gelman is an expert on fraud in academia, especially in the social sciences. McWhorter is black linguist who has come out against wokeness, Stanley is a philosopher who has branched out into rather superficial political commentary, Giroux is an expert on critical pedagogy.
Maybe my response is predictable as well. My reaction to each of these takes is a foregone conclusion. I will have more to say about Giroux later. How can an academic culture so cruel and hierarchical also align itself so perfectly with Giroux's own ideological position?
