Productive Time vs Baggy Writing Time

I haven't been posting since term started, because I've been busy. Which is a very nothing word, particularly in the modern world of today - I've just been reading lots of books by Barbara Ehrenreich, including her lovely Bait and Switch and Bright-Sided, in one of which she talks about the way that academics have elevated the idea that 'busyness' is a virtue to almost religious levels. And I do try to resist that; I'm not sure why working enormous amounts of unpaid overtime and donating extra surplus labour to an institution should be seen as morally worthy.

So what I really mean by 'busy' is that -- well, okay, actually I do mean that I'm working quite a lot of unpaid overtime. But! More interestingly, I also mean that I'm occupying two quite different kinds of time/flow -- neither of which are very congenial to blogging. I'm trying to finish my book by the end of January, which is pretty tight, given that I'm teaching three units this TB and supervising three PhD students, and then there are various other demands on my time - grant applications, bits of organizing for the Desiring the Text conference, mentoring, personal tutoring, lots and lots of meetings (as well as being a member of two departments, a School and a Faculty, all of which are having lots of meetings at the moment to talk about The Situation, I'm also on one Committee, two Boards, and a Steering Group). What I'm trying to do at the moment is get all my non-writing work done on the three days a week when I have teaching scheduled - Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday - in between my six hours' teaching, two 'consultation hours' (drop-in for students) and two hours at the weekly Classics departmental research seminar. Which is making for a really, really busy start to the week - to the extent that if I have a whole hour and a half continuous unscheduled time, I jump on it gratefully and (eg) write a 50-minute lecture on The Divine Comedy or bang out a 3000-word 'Case for Support' for my AHRC grant application. So it's tiring, and to some extent it has those rewards of high-productivity in (I get to cross lots of things off lots of lists very fast!), but the thing is that it really just isn't enough time, which means that I'm having to do a slightly faster, shoddier job on lots of things. Which is hard to take, sometimes, because like many women academics I'm a bit of a Hermione Granger, and I really hate not doing everything perfectly; I hate looking less than competent in front of colleagues and students, eg because my Powerpoint for a lecture is ugly and last-minute (or because I forgot to bring it altogether), or because I need to be chased up by everyone for everything because I'm working right down to the wire on all my deadlines (and, it has to be confessed, letting the less strict ones drift right past me). Which is a low-grade waste of everyone's time and energy, I know. But the thing that I'm realizing is that learning to get by is a skill in itself. I could call it 'prioritizing', I guess, and that's part of it, but that sounds like a fun thing to do, like you get a little thrill out of being ruthless and effective. I'm talking more about the other side of it - about learning to live with the consequences of what I have to deprioritize, learning not to beat myself up when I just don't have time to do a really good job.

But what all this does is buy me (on a good week, which is about four out of the ten weeks of term, when I don't have extra teaching or meetings scheduled on my 'free' days) three days for writing: Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. (Usually I am adamant about having two days off a week, but I've gone down to one day a week till the book is done.) Which is the other kind of time/flow that I was talking about: Baggy Writing Time, time where you get up and down from your chair and wander into the kitchen looking for the perfect sentence to bridge into your next paragraph, and end up spending forty-five minutes on the washing-up. Or when you realize (like I did yesterday) at 11am that you can't do any more work on Chapter Two today because you've just torn it down and restructured it from the ground up, so you have to give your undermind time to get used to that before you get to the sentence-writing part of the writing process. But part of the discipline of keeping time free for writing, I'm figuring out, is that that didn't mean I could open the rest of that day onto Productive Time, because that would throw my brain off track for the writing. (As it happened, I discovered that I had to redo the maths on a grant application very fast that afternoon, which neatly solved both problems, because it meant I Got Stuff Done that wouldn't then eat into Baggy Writing Time next week, but didn't involve having to wrap my brain around any new kind of intellectual stuff and thus distract it from thinking about Julius Caesar.)

So that's where I am at the moment: either on a weirdly Fordist kind of production-line for academics, where my time isn't my own to command because every email or knock on the door is like the next thing going past on the conveyor belt, organizing my workflow at the pace of the university machine, or on baggy writing time, where I have to protect a space for my thinking and my writing to go at their own pace as far as possible, not to be disrupted by demands from outside. Either way, it means I'm not blogging much. Normal service will hopefully be resumed in February.

Happy Birthday, Ursula K Le Guin

I wanted to write a long post about Lavinia for today, but I haven't been able to. So this is just to say: happy 80th birthday, Ursula K Le Guin. Lavinia is one of the most rich, beautiful, intelligent and moving encounters with Vergil since he took Dante's hand and led him into the Inferno; 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas' has changed the way I and many of my students think about utopia, literature, and the social; 'The Author of the Acacia Seeds' has done the same for language, humanity, and the limits of communication; 'The Diary of the Rose', for dream and politics.

Not even to mention Earthsea, The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness.

Like so many other people in the world, I am profoundly and unrepayably in your debt. Thank you, and happy birthday!

Things You Should All Read: Preamble

Since I started at Bristol in 2005, I've always taught a unit to first-year undergraduates called 'Critical Issues', which is one of those hair-tearing-out 'Theory In Ten Weeks' courses, which goes, like, Week 1: Feminism. Week 2: Psychoanalysis. Week 3: Postcolonialism. It's a challenging course to teach for me, because I'm one of those people to whom theory speaks with a kind of hair-raising immediacy: I remember sitting in the Bodleian Library when I was doing my undergraduate degree, reading an essay on writing in Euripides' Hippolytus which drew on the work of Derrida - the first time I'd ever come across him - and just staring at it, going But this is my life! This is my LIFE! And then I went to Leeds to do an MA in Cultural Studies and stayed on for a PhD, to work with Barbara Engh, so not only do I have an immediate I-need-this, this-will-save-me click with theory, but I have spent the last ten years working on and with and in it, so that the ideas of Derrida and Barthes and Benjamin and Adorno and Butler are just absolutely intuitively given for me now.

Meanwhile, my students have never been exposed to any of this stuff really or rigorously: some of them are repelled by it as intuitively and strongly as I was attracted, though most of them aren't - but all of them are, like, what? Things that are (now) part of my basic orientation towards the world are absolutely new and strange and profoundly challenging and difficult to assimilate for almost all of them. (And they were for me, once, of course, but I somehow knew how much I was going to get from them, so the challenge and the difficulty were exciting, not threatening.) So there's an interesting gap between me and them, which I guess is the gap where pedagogy happens, but it's been an interesting time figuring out how to measure and use that space-between.

All of which is actually tangential to my point, which is that, for some of those reasons, the unit can be quite an intense experience: it involves a kind of learning which (I hope) connects up with bits of experience and headspace and thought and affect that other units don't reach. And I think it's for that reason that I was very happy and tickled when one of my students last year asked me for recommendations of more books to read: I felt like I was being asked for a particular kind of book, books with that kind of edge to them, books that connected to and articulated those inchoate, itchy experiences and insights that mainstream culture, the most readily available formulae for reading and thinking, doesn't give you the resources to think about, to formulate, to work with and on.

So anyway, since then I've been vaguely thinking, in the back of my mind, about the books and stories that I would like to recommend. And since I've had at least one email from a student about this blog, I thought I might as well stick the list up here for future reference, in case anyone else ever asks me for it. I'll put it in a separate post from this preamble, and link it from the sidebar.

Feminism 09

I hope to be able to make it to this feminist event in London in October.

I should totally read this giant zine about what causes fic at some point. (Tony, one for you too, I think, in relation to the idea of a geek aesthetic?)

Towards an Erotics of Reception

So for a long time me and my esteemed colleague at the University of Toronto, Anna Wilson, have been putting together a call for papers for a conference next July, which is going to be about loving texts.

From my point of view, the conference comes partly out of my interest in the relationship between sex and language. They're intimately related, of course, in that language can be highly eroticized, and in that our language has some effect on (if it doesn't determine) the way we think about and experience our bodies and our sexualities. But at the same time sex and language can be understood to be completely different: language as cerebral, virtual, unreal, representative, sex as bodily, real, true, authentic, nonrepresentational: sex as an 'outside' to language and power, or sex as the site where we are most intimately engaged with language and power. That's something that's gone on intriguing me for more than a decade, and which partly explains my interest in writing about sex. (I'm also interested, as several years of my students have been mildly-to-profoundly shocked to discover, in sex as a metaphor for writing, as in Calvin Thomas's wonderful essay Must Desire Be Taken Literally? on Helene Cixous, writing, and anal sex.)

I'm also someone who loves books, writing, language, someone who writes fanfiction, someone who gets crushes on books and authors and characters, and someone who teaches literature: so I'm also interested in the way that whole messy range of responses to texts and writings gets cut up and organized institutionally. Me, I feel like writing within a fictional universe and writing an analytic essay about a book are both ways of loving texts, but I know lots of people think that analysis and love are opposed (cf this really beautiful poem by U A Fanthorpe), and that intrigues me too, not only for what it says about literature but for what it says about love.

So I'm really excited to be organizing this conference: not only will I get a chance to talk for a whole day to other people from around the world who are interested in love and desire as modes of making textual connections, but it's going to be the basis for an application for a Research Network grant, so hopefully there will be a whole series of research events on this theme. In the short term, though, I'm particularly delighted that Carolyn Dinshaw (whose book I blogged about here) has agreed to be our keynote speaker. I'm excited to meet her, and to start what I hope will be an ongoing conversation with her and with everyone else who participates!

Here's the Call for Papers. There'll be an official web page for the conference at the University of Bristol website soon, and I'll let you have that link as soon as I can, but in the meantime, please pass on the news to anyone who might be interested, and feel free to link to this post!


DESIRING THE TEXT, TOUCHING THE PAST: TOWARDS AN EROTICS OF RECEPTION

A one-day conference co-organized by

The Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition & the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto

University of Bristol, 10 July 2010

Keynote Speaker: Professor Carolyn Dinshaw, NYU

CALL FOR PAPERS

In reading Cicero's letters I felt charmed and offended in equal measure. Indeed, beside myself, in a fit of anger I wrote to him as if he were a friend and contemporary of mine, forgetting, as it were, the gap of time, with a familiarity appropriate to my intimate acquaintance with his thought; and I pointed out those things he had written that had offended me. (Petrarch, Rerum Familiarum Liber I.1.42)

Love, desire, fannish obsession and emotional identification as modes of engaging with texts, characters and authors are often framed as illegitimate and transgressive: excessive, subjective, lacking in scholarly rigour. Yet such modes of relating to texts and pasts persist, across widely different historical periods and cultural contexts. Many classical and medieval authors recount embodied and highly emotional encounters with religious, fictional or historical characters, while modern and postmodern practices of reception and reading - from high art to the subcultural practices of media fandom - are characterized by desire in all its ambivalent complexity. Theories of readership and reception, however, sometimes seem unable to move beyond an antagonistic model: cultural studies sees resistant audiences struggling to gain control of or to overwrite an ideologically loaded text, while literary models of reception have young poets fighting to assert their poetic autonomy vis-a-vis the paternal authority of their literary ancestors.

This conference aims, by contrast, to begin to elaborate a theory of the erotics of reception. It will bring together scholars working in and across various disciplines to share research into reading, writing and viewing practices characterized by love, identification, and desire: we hope that it will lead to the establishment of an international research network and the formulation of some long-term research projects. In order to facilitate discussion at the conference, we will ask participants to circulate full papers (around 5,000 words) in May 2010.

We now invite abstracts of 300 words, to be submitted by email by 30 November 2009. Abstracts will be assessed on the basis of their theoretical and interdisciplinary interest. We particularly welcome contributions from scholars working on literary, visual and performance texts in the fields of: history, reception studies, mediaeval studies, fan studies, cultural studies, theology, and literary/critical theory.

Some ideas which might be addressed include, but are not limited to:

* Writing oneself into the text: self-insertion and empathetic identification
* Historical desire: does the historian desire the past?
* Hermeneutics and erotics
* Pleasures of the text, pleasures of the body: (how) are embodied responses to the text gendered?
* Anachronistic reading: does desire disturb chronology?
* Erotics and/or eristics: love-hate relationships with texts

This conference is part of the 'Thinking Reciprocity' series and will follow directly from the conference 'Reception and the Gift of Beauty' (Bristol, 8-9 July 2010). Reduced fees will be offered to people attending both conferences.
If you have any queries, or to submit an abstract, please contact one of the conference organizers:

Dr Ika Willis (Ika.Willis@bristol.ac.uk)
Anna Wilson (anna.wilson@utoronto.ca)