How not to work

Nov 28, 2007 at 10:43 PM
7 comments

No, look, I have to shout my little shout, and then I'll bury my little snout back in my 50 books. I hate writing papers. Why? Because I have nothing paper-length to say about any appropriate topic. I find the form impossible. What I consider serious intellectual work is fragmentary, catenary, open-ended, allusive, recursive, not MLA-formatted, not 16-25 pages in length, not spelled out in plain terms for the idle reader. You're picturing a monstrosity, and I understand this, I do. Work must get done. But nothing deserves these intellectual subdivisions, these pleasant little tracts of Times New Roman 12-point real estate with their 1.25" white picket margins, their aluminum siding hiding Gothic levels of philosophical decay. Oh let us excavate a grotto or renovate a warehouse and there build a new way of living with arts and histories and literatures and sweet heady unfinished symphonies; let us leave these New Developments in Literary Studies to those who work close by. Let the forms live and die!

There. There may be more of that left in my system. I'll keep you... all... posted...

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I think I'd rather write five four-page papers on a novel or poem than one twenty-page paper. Five modest observations are easier to defend than one thesis with five pieces of evidence. The bigger thesis invariably turns out to be less modest and more defensive. How different would lit. studies be if everyone churned out the same number of pages that they churn out now, only in smaller fragments?

I ditched academia and therefore have no right to talk about papers, but I think it's permissible to mention that I got a lot happier about writing when I started doing work that required me to say everything I had to say (often including things I'd rather not say) in 150 words or less. My former advisers, and a lot of other nobler people, would be quick to point out that this does not qualify as Serious Intellectual Work, but I've learned a lot more doing it than I ever did in grad school.

choosing a form before you have any idea what the best form would be for what you want to say is only advisable when you're already a master of the form (and probably several others). academia is like saying: 'have something to say in the form of a paper', which is like there being a special thing where they say 'have something to say in the form of a sonnet', or a grocery list, or memo, or puff-piece, or fortune-cookie fortune, AND ONLY IN THAT FORM.

i have received almost no training or forced practice in the variety of academic genres, and i resent it. all i am ever told is, 'write a paper'. this is not even all that is done, ever! and yet that's all i'm ever told to do! abstract, talk, commentary, letter, literature review, encyclopedia article, editorial report, monograph, book review... why don't teachers ever try, at all, to encourage us to try these forms? at least? they're always something outside or something for later. but if this is all supposed to be practice for becoming a scholar, then why not practice some of the things we actually need to be able to do, if not merely professionally than as an expressive adjunct to our paper-writing that might help us free up our thoughts for times when paper-writing is appropriate?

ARGH <------ extent of intellectual work i am capable of now (also comes in obscene version)

(once for a seminar paper, for a sympathetic professor, i wrote a book review for an imaginary journal. it was hard to even let myself presume the sorts of things book reviewers do when they've already got their audience and milieu and presuppositions etc. all taken care of, so that they needn't defend them or articulate them right then.)

random guess: one in ten of the talks or conference presentations i attend is evidently explicitly conceived for oral, social, sociable delivery. will no one stop this etc. etc.

also, http://www.02138mag.com/magazine/article/1763.html

Also let us start a publishing house that only prints novellas.

[זה מעולה]

Wittgenstein basically ruined dissertations for all of us.

How not to work

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