Household Opera

In praise of 750 Words

Thanks to a post about it on the excellent blog ProfHacker, I've become a big fan of the freewriting site 750words.com. It's a godsend for people like me who want to write more but have a hard time getting started or getting motivated. You log in and it gives you a blank screen and a daily goal of 750 words or more (about three typed pages), stores your words, and rewards you for reaching goals. If you hit the 750-word mark, a congratulatory message flashes up on the screen. If you hit it for three or five or ten or more days in a row, or write really fast, you get cute cartoon badges.

It's meant to be low-pressure, a brain-dump site rather than a place for polished writing. The total lack of any word-processing features means that I can't succumb to the temptation to mess with formatting, or go into Scholar Mode and add footnotes, or anything like that. It's just plain text, which somehow makes it less of a big deal, which makes it easier to get started and keep going. Today I used it to write my way out of an attack of paper-and-travel-planning panic by listing both the things I still have to do (which, written out like that, suddenly look doable) and scrutinizing my irrational fears about presenting the paper (which didn't hold up to the scrutiny). Other days I've used it to outline a story that's waiting to take shape in my head, brainstorm ideas for blog posts, and, if I'm in a bad mood, whine and vent in ways that I wouldn't do here or elsewhere on the open web. I'm already feeling like I'm getting out of my blogging slump.

I was skeptical at first, because I'd tried various other attempts at daily writing, ranging from pen and ink to Journler (which is nice, but doesn't push me to write in the same way), and none of them really worked. But I've been using 750 Words to get ideas for my conference paper out of my head and into sentences I can reuse elsewhere, and so far I've written 31,583 words in 33 days. When I get back from my travels, I might even sign up for the monthly challenge for August. I might finally write that short story. Or the next great campus novel. I might start turning the research into something booklike. I might even do NaNoWriMo this year.

When I was working on my dissertation and had all the time in the world, I used to write first thing in the morning, after I'd had coffee but before I'd had a shower, so it didn't quite feel like I was officially starting the day yet. And that turned out to be far and away the best way to take the internal pressure off so I could get words onto the screen every day. Now I can't spend my mornings lazing around in my pajamas, but the blank screen, the small daily quotas, and the enforced informality of 750 Words are the next best thing.

Stories I may or may not write someday

Lately I seem to have fallen back into no-blog-land even as my writing brain has been kicking out ideas right and left and every which way. There's the Material Cultures paper, for which I have so many things to say that I can already tell it'll be a struggle keeping it under the 20-minute mark. And then there are the short story ideas that keep accumulating in the notebook I carry around. First there was the subway station staircase story idea; then there was the haunted urban virtual reality modeling story that I never quite got off the ground, but still want to write someday. And lately quite a few more ideas have been suggesting themselves.

There for a while I wrote poems when I wrote anything creative at all, but now I seem to want to write only fiction, and specifically in the weird and eerie and ghostly mode. So, in the interests of getting back into blogging and encouraging myself to actually follow through on ideas once I have them, here's a list of Stories I Might Write:

• Scientists synthesize a scent (or a flavor) that smells or tastes different to different people, but induces a strange sense of déjà vu in everyone who encounters it—a certainty that they've encountered this scent or flavor somewhere important, and that there's a rich, fascinating, powerfully detailed memory attached to it, which they absolutely must try to remember, but it's just out of their reach. Some manage to remember things that never actually happened; others just wind up with an acute and inconsolable case of nostalgia.
• A character is fed up with getting email meant for someone whose address is apparently one letter off from her own, and sets out to try to contact the person. But it turns out that virtually meeting one's email doppelgänger is as bad an omen as seeing one's physical doppelgänger. (This one, minus the virtual encounter and the supernatural element, is completely autobiographical.)
• Whatever story goes with the title "Dark Archive."
• Someone finds and buys a cache of old postcards from the 1910s or thereabouts in an antique shop, all in the same handwriting. The messages on the cards seem to tell a story amid all the ordinary back-of-a-postcard remarks. I don't yet know what happens next.
• An artist's book by an unknown artist arrives, via a dealer, at a special collections library. It may be haunted in some way, or it may just have some very odd qualities. Weird and disturbing happenings ensue. (If I ever write this, it'll be my M.R. James homage. I can't resist trying my hand at the "haunted artifact" plot.)
• An invisible train car, which contains an infinite collection of books and exists in some sort of alternate dimension, turns out to be accessible on any train, as long as you know how to find it. (I got this idea after hearing how Amtrak conductors sometimes refer to the Quiet Car as the "library car." When I tweeted this idea, someone reminded me of Audrey Niffenegger's "The Night Bookmobile," which was probably also in the back of my head when I imagined the Library Car.)
• I have a couple of ideas about phantom street noises: the sounds of carriage wheels in houses on a city block that used to be a street a century or more before; the tinny off-key music of an unseen ice cream truck that only some people seem to hear on summer evenings. But no plots have materialized for those stories yet.
• A man briefly encounters an artist whose work fascinates him for years; eventually he encounters the artist again, and buys an engraving that moves him, though he can't quite tell why and it's just an image of a corner of a perfectly ordinary room. And...I know how it ends, but I don't want to reveal it, because I'd rather keep it a surprise.

The last one is the one I most want to write. Which of them do you guys think I should tackle after that?

The Slow Food approach to scholarship

Reading Anthony Grafton's recent NYRB blog post on the impact of budget cuts on British universities (and especially the paleography program at King's College London), I was struck by the following paragraph:

There was a Slow Food feel to British university life, based on a consensus that people should take the time to make an article or a book as dense and rich as it could be. Good American universities were never exactly Fast Food Nation, but we certainly felt the pressure to produce, regularly and rapidly. By contrast, Michael Baxandall spent three years at the Warburg Institute, working in the photographic collection and not completing a dissertation, and several more as a lecturer, later on, writing only a few articles. Then, in 1971 and 1972, he produced two brilliant interdisciplinary books, which transformed the study of Renaissance humanism and art, remain standard works to this day, and were only the beginning of a great career. Gertrud Bing, E.H. Gombrich, J.B. Trapp, and A.M. Meyer, who administered the Warburg in those days, knew how to be patient. Their results speak for themselves.

If American universities weren't Fast Food Nation then, they are now, in the age of massive and permanent adjunctification. Anyone who's been reading this blog for a while knows how cynical I've become about the likelihood of any change in the situation; it's disheartening to think of universities elsewhere going the same way.

The thing is, I passionately believe in the Slow Food approach to scholarship. I believe in taking as long as the project needs. I believe in not rushing to publish every half-baked idea.* I believe quality trumps quantity. I believe in patience. I believe the two-books-for-tenure requirement (or whatever it is now) is a formula for a deluge of mediocre monographs, and this benefits no one in the end. I believe in the sheer pleasure of discovering things, of deep and thoughtful and playful conversation about ideas. And I believe in unprofitable, obscure areas of knowledge, the more impractical the better. Poetry makes nothing happen, after all. Not every human endeavor is or should be about raking in the funding as fast as we possibly can.

I would love to start a Slow Scholarship movement, dedicated to the pursuit of intellectual discovery under unhurried and convivial conditions.** But the eternal question is: how do people who have to pay the rent and the utility bills manage this sort of thing? Whether one is an independent scholar with a day job, or a faculty member trying to squeeze out X books and Y articles while serving on Z committees and grading N papers (where N = some number always greater than time allows), there just aren't enough hours in the day, either for slow unhurried thinking or for long thoughtful conversations with one's (equally rushed) colleagues—or for the preparation of amazing Slow Food dinners every night, for that matter. When people complain about the perceived elitism of the Slow Food movement, one of the things they're objecting to is the amount of leisure time it requires, which just plain isn't available to most of us.*** And I most certainly don't want scholarship to be feasible only for people with the luxury of a lot of spare time.

I don't think it would be impossible to wave the flag for Slow Scholarship; I just wish I had some idea how to make it happen. At this point, I seriously doubt academia will change itself. Reader, do you have any ideas?

* Except, of course, if one is blogging. Although my own current blogging pace is far more Slow than Fast, due more to laziness than to anything else, I'm afraid.

** After a bit of Googling, I see that Lindsay Waters called for something similar a couple of years ago. I don't think academic publishers will necessarily change things by updating their standards, though. The problem is not just mediocre writing; it's mediocre writing that people have to churn out in ever-increasing quantities in order to compete for an ever-dwindling pool of tenured positions.

*** I also want a Slow Life movement. Down with the expectation that everyone must work 60+-hour weeks to be considered successful! Up with having time to dream or think or explore or cook or stand and stare!

Writing projects: update and non-update

So. Instead of being Insanely Productive Writing Month, November has turned into a cage match between my NoNaShoStoWriMo story and my embryonic Material Cultures paper project. The latter has been winning; the former is stalled out and sitting forlornly on my hard drive, waiting for a month when I can give it my undivided attention. It's been a long time since I wrote fiction, and I've gotten self-conscious about it, too aware of when I'm veering into genre cliche, too worried about the depth of my characters and whether certain plot elements are overly contrived. It was more fun when I was a teenager and would have an idea for a story and just write it without fretting over it. Just sign me up for my "I Never Finish Anyth" t-shirt.

On the other hand, the paper proposal has led to a couple of really, really interesting trips to the John Hay Library at Brown University, and to a collection of 19th-century American poetry anthologies and verse commonplace books of which I've barely scratched the surface, but I've already found the makings of a fantastic project. Months ago I started thinking about the anthologization of minor poets, and then earlier this fall it occurred to me that it would be useful to have some actual data about which poems appeared in which anthologies, and when. Maybe, I thought (flashing back to data modeling and entity relations diagramming from my first year in library school), I could start building a database to track the movement of poems from one anthology to another and the rise and fall of poets' reputations.

I soon realized that the database side of the project would be massively labor-intensive, though I still want to do it. Preliminary WorldCat searches turned up tons and tons of forgotten anthologies, many of them geared toward classroom memorization and recitation. At which point I remembered that I'd written a bit about memorization practices in 19th-century America in the coda to my dissertation, and I started wondering if there were differences between the poets most often memorized and the poets most often featured in other kinds of anthologies. At the same point I also discovered that the Hay Library's Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays includes a huge collection of 19th-century poetry anthologies. And off I went on the train to Providence, an hour or so away, delighted that I could actually research this so close to home.

On my first visit, I noticed that quite a few anthologies were constructed more along the lines of the commonplace book than what we think of as the standard anthology format. "Hmm," I thought, "I'm interested in commonplace books too. I wonder if there are any here?" And sure enough, there turned out to be a big, endlessly interesting collection of 19th-century New England commonplace books as well.

So now my project involves comparing the formats and content of commonplace books and anthologies, with a focus on poetry; I'm going to argue that each of these types of collections reflected the other.* And I'll probably tie it back to my earlier research on memory, because stocking one's memory with useful quotations and worthy sentiments is a constantly recurring theme among the anthologists. And, if you can't tell already, I'm really excited. Here's hoping this project won't turn into another for the Never Finish Anyth Archive!

* I found an absolutely amazing manuscript poetry collection complete with an introduction (with copied-out quotations on the power of poetry) and an alphabetical title index. And another, apparently by a Harvard student, with cut-out engravings pasted onto the front and back endpapers and a section of poems by "Professor Longfellow." And another in a beautiful copperplate hand with lots of little decorative rulings and flourishes (and the occasional manicle) after each poem. And another with an index of first lines. And that was just on the first visit!

NoNaShoStoWriMo update the first

As day 4 of NoNaShoStoWriMo (explanation here for those of you just tuning in) draws to a close, my as-yet-untitled story stands at a commanding...1101 words! At this rate, the end product may turn out to be more of a short-short than a short story. My mantra, for the time being, is "You just have to get a draft done." Also, in the words of Neil Gaiman's helpful NaNoWriMo pep talk, "One word after another."

Some initial observations: Journler is working out quite well for this project — automatic word counts, for one thing, and I've set up a separate linked file for story notes, into which I'm dumping relevant images, like pictures of apartment buildings in Chicago, where my main character — first name Lucia, last name as yet unrevealed, profession: computer scientist at a made-up university — lives and works. I haven't yet quite worked out what neighborhood she lives in, but I'm leaning toward somewhere around Wicker Park or Bucktown or generally in the vicinity of Logan Square.* A small nugget of Plot depends on what El or Metra line she takes to work, and I'm waffling a bit about where to put her workplace as well, but I at least have a sense of the beginning and the middle, if not, at this point, the end.

So far, my favorite line is "What the hell are we going to do? We can't just say to the [fictional name] Foundation, 'Please don't continue this project because it's making ghosts appear on street corners.'"

It may have been ill-advised for me to take on this project during the same month I'm using to pull together a paper proposal for Material Cultures 2010 (of which more in a future post), but I figure that if all the switching back and forth between brain hemispheres doesn't drive me nuts, it might help. We'll see how it goes. (Which is another of my mantras for this month.)

* I haven't lived in Chicago since I was an undergrad, and I lived in Hyde Park the whole time. Research for the Chicago-related parts of this story keeps tipping over into "ooh, look at that beautiful vintage apartment!" procrastination.

On trying to get some research done, or, Revenge of the zombies

Every research project I've ever undertaken (of the kind intended to lead to something publishable, anyway) has tended to fall into a distinct series of stages. It goes more or less like this:

1) Initial idea, followed by exhilaration as several interesting data points and/or previous ideas and/or previous research investigations dovetail in an unexpected way. Glee. Maybe even some jumping up and down.

2) Initial research. Hey, not too many people have written about this already! Maybe I've got a shot!

3) Oh no. Someone else has already written the exact thing I wanted to write. Well, bugger.

4) Renewed determination. Surely I can contribute something to the discussion? Renewed research along previously uninvestigated avenues.

5) Discovery of less obvious questions still worth asking. Cautious optimism.

6) Masses of further research.

7) Writing.

8) Procrastination.

9 through 11) Repeat 6 through 8, in whatever order, as necessary. Somewhere in there, discovery that there really is an argument to be made, after all.

12) Finishing the thing and sending it off.

I'm working on a conference paper proposal due at the end of next month, and I'm still at 4, which bugs me because I was hoping to be at least at 5 or 6 by now. On the other hand, I'm off to Providence this weekend to do some digging in the special collections library at Brown, which I'm hoping will at least start to get me there. In the meantime, I'm fighting off a particularly fierce attack of impostor syndrome. ("It's not your field!" says my brain. "What makes you think that a bit of library school coursework in book history and a Ph.D in the literature of a different country and time period make you qualified to talk about 19th-century American poetry anthology publishing? Even if it's accepted, you'll be unmasked as soon as the Q&A starts!" "Shut up," I say to my brain. "I'm trying to figure something out here, and you're not helping." "But it's not your field!" my brain shrieks again. Repeat several times over. Stupid brain.)

I used to feel like this when I writing my dissertation. The difference between then and now is that now, my future livelihood and professional identity don't depend on my pulling this project together. The only things at stake now are an interesting conference travel opportunity, a nice extra line on my CV, and, even if the conference opportunity doesn't work out, a fun side project to work on, which in turn means less sitting around wondering vaguely whether I shouldn't be doing something more interesting with my spare time.

So why is the zombified corpse of my grad-school-era neurosis still staggering around? Do I have to break out the flamethrowers and chainsaws to make it stop, or what? Any suggestions on zombie-slaying would be greatly appreciated, from those of you who've tackled this type of zombie before.

Introducing NoNaShoStoWriMo

I have a longstanding track record of intending to participate in NaNoWriMo and then never actually participating. Every year, usually in spring or summer, I tell myself that this year I'll do it; and then November rolls around and I haven't a single idea that could turn into a novel.

But this year I have an idea for at least a short story, if not a full-on novel: the 3-D city modeling story idea that I blogged about last month. And I'm kind of itching for an excuse to make myself write it. Several of us in the Twitter/blogosphere—Rana of Frogs and Ravens, Jill of Writing...or Typing?, and myself—have been talking about using November as a month to write something of roughly short story length; and because it's only a three-person venture so far, we provisionally called it NoNaShoStoWriMo, or Not-National Short Story Writing Month.

Depending on how the story goes, I'm planning to blog my progress intermittently, or at least tweet word counts, and at the end of the month, I'll see what I want to do with the results. If any of you, Readers, want to join in, go for it!

Incidentally, there's also a sweater-knitting NaNoSweMo (or NaSweKniMo) project for knitters. But between the sweater I'm already trying to finish, the shawl I'm knitting for my mom for Christmas, the socks I'm making for one of my knitting groups' sock charity auction effort, and a handful of other projects, there's no way I could actually start and finish an entire sweater in November. Unless it were a sweater for a small dog. (And I think dogs in sweaters look ridiculous.)

Ideal cities, ghostly cities

A team of computer scientists at the University of Washington is creating 3-D virtual models of cities (Rome, Venice, and Dubrovnik, for starters) using nothing but downloaded images from Flickr. As they explain:

In this project, we consider the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day.

I'm fascinated by the play between particular and abstract here: the hundreds and hundreds of tourist snaps people take in the Piazza San Marco, and the process that identifies what all those pictures have in common, sifting out the changing quotidian details of weather and pigeons and passers-by. The results are beautifully ghostly, and remind me a little of those ideal cities* that Renaissance painters sometimes invented.

When I read about this project, I immediately saw possibilities for a short story, half speculative fiction, half ghost story, maybe with a bit of New Weird in the mix: someone is working on a project of this sort only on a larger scale, and starts finding odd little blips, or inexplicable clouds of points, or something just very slightly off, in certain unobtrusive corners in the model: a dead end of a narrow street, or one side of the interior of a church, or a shadow that shouldn't be there next to a fountain. And they realize that they're seeing something that's barely visible in individual photographs, but when all the images are fed into the reconstruction, it turns out they've called up...something. Which then, perhaps, begins to appear in the real world. I don't know how it ends, but I want to write it.

* That second painting is my favorite thing in the Walters Art Museum. A poster of it has accompanied me from apartment to apartment for years.

Readings to bring back the muse

I was on the phone with my mother last weekend and she asked if I'd written any poems lately. Um, no, I had to reply, and it bothered me more than a little. Not only am I not writing anything creative, I'm not even in the kind of state where language feels inherently interesting. I used to get into that state a lot more often, if my commonplace book is any indication. I've been wondering how to get it back; this list, a compendium of Things That Might Get Me to Write Again, came out of that wondering. It's mostly for my own future reference, but I thought I'd put it out there in case any of you are interested. So, herewith, my to-look-at list:

• Anything with (relatively) unfamiliar language: the language of knitting made me want to write poems when I first encountered it, as did the language of systems analysis during my first semester of library school.
• Poets' commonplace books and notebooks. There's a good collection called The Poet's Notebook that I've been revisiting lately.
• Writing exercises. Perhaps it's time to dust off my battered old copy of The Practice of Poetry, or look again at Charles Bernstein's writing experiments.
• Books on city design, architecture, and urban planning. It's partly my ongoing spatiality obsession, but something about books on the relationships between streets or buildings or rooms make me want to write. Must find a copy of Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language at some point (because what I want for myself is another kind of pattern language).
• Books that link poetry with visualization in interesting ways. I'm reading Jill Stoner's Poems for Architects (hat tip to Jane Dark for the recommendation), and the way she turns villanelles into cross-sections of buildings makes me want to run out and do the same thing.
• Overheard conversation. I should spend more time surreptitiously eavesdropping.

What am I leaving off this list that ought to be there?

In which an extracurricular project coalesces

Remember that idea I had for a project dealing with Dracula and information technology some months back? I think it may turn into an actual article, or at least the makings of one. I'd been thinking, over the winter break, about which of my various research ideas (some library-related, some more literary, some, like this one, in-between) that I might want to pursue in the new year, and the Dracula project suddenly started calling to me. I've been using some of the downtime before spring semester starts to pull together a bibliography, and I'm rereading the novel with a steadily increasing level of interest in what it has to say about documents and their circulation.

What's intriguing me right now is the parallel between Dracula's self-replication (by making more and more vampires) and the replication of documents by everyone else (by copying, transcribing, and typing out in triplicate). Dracula himself is a sort of oral register of Transylvanian history. The very last paragraphs of the novel call attention to the scarcity of "authentic" documents, e.g. handwritten ones, among the fictional archive of records out of which Jonathan Harker claims to have assembled the narrative. Lots of people turn out to have already written about Dracula and the telegraph, the phonograph, and other communication technologies of the 19th century, but I think there's something I can add.

I keep having to remind myself that even though I'm not by training a Victorianist, the great advantages of being an independent scholar are not having to produce at the speed of the tenure clock (and hence more time for research into new subject areas) and being able to work on whatever one wants to. If something good enough to publish or present comes out of it, I'll be very pleased; but it's also a nifty project that unites a bunch of things I'm interested in—history of the book, technologies of writing, supernatural literature—but haven't really had a chance to write about yet. It may take a while to finish, but I'm remembering just how much fun a good research jag can be.