Notes on a Novel

I posted this elsewhere recently, but I was discussing it with a friend today and realized that much of it has some debt to ideas that emerged while reading Dan Barber’s On Diaspora. I’m thinking here in particular about his articulation of reverse causation. These days I’m far more interested in novels & poetry than I am philosophy, but I don’t think this latter day interest comes at the expense of philosophical influence. Perhaps the following post (in the form of a letter to a nameless recipient) bears this out.

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Dear __________,

I apologize for the gaps between our correspondence. And though it will serve as no adequate excuse for such silences, your informant told you correctly: I am currently writing a novel. Or, if not writing, dwelling on the writing of a novel. Or, if not a novel, something whose ambitions are matched only by its remaining largely unread.

I’m holding out hope I can make my minimalistic plotting work. As you know very well, I’m far more interested in consequences (and the responses to consequences) than I am plots, which tend to be too forward-focused and linear for my taste. Consequences realign not simply our perception but our experiences of the past, as much even as they create an imagined future. Dare we go so so far as to say that the present is spent mostly negotiating the indistinguishable boundary between responding to these things past and anticipating those things to come? If this is so, could it be said further that consequences are a violence in & against the occurrence of the moment?

Would this actually work? My fantasy freshman comp course

When I went to college, the standard writing instruction was a two-course sequence known as freshman comp. I mercifully tested into an experimental one-semester “honors” comp alternative, but as a TA in the English department, I became very familiar with the standard approach, which I believe to be broadly similar to how freshman comp is typically implemented. The first semester taught “writing as such,” and the vehicle was primarily the students’ own personal experiences and reflections. The second semester taught more of the skills required specifically for college writing, including more argumentative papers and research papers — usually all on self-chosen topics.

I don’t think there are many people who would strenuously defend this approach to freshman comp, even though — and correct me if I’m wrong about this — it appears to be a kind of “default setting” for initial writing instruction at many institutions, particularly less selective ones. I’m going to throw out one possible change that I think may be helpful, and I look forward to my readers telling me why it couldn’t possibly work.

Musings on teaching writing

When I was in high school, our writing instruction included a lot of exercises in “the writing process.” Rather than simply turning in a final product, we were required to follow a series of steps that our teachers took to be exemplary in some way — this basically consisted of brainstorming, outlining, rough draft, second draft, and final draft. I’m sure the method was helpful for some people, but I and many of my peers found it to be an artificial series of hoops. Between the rough draft and final draft, nothing substantial would change, aside from perhaps correcting spelling errors or altering wording here and there.

I do appreciate the spirit of this exercise, but where I think it goes wrong is in not teaching students how to think about writing parts of things.

Writing Your Reading

Yesterday I spoke to a good friend of mine about the post I wrote this week about Robert Walser’s short story “The Battle of Sempach.” Well, actually, I’d just happened to ask him whether he’d read the story, which he took, not unfairly, as an invitation to comment on the post. He told me something that, I will admit, made me a little defensive, but as time passed, spurred some thought & maybe some further exercises in the same vein as that post. Basically, the upshot of his response to the post — I’m still unsure if he liked the story, which remains the issue for me — was that I’d kind of copped out in the end by not explaining adequately what I found interesting about the story. (This is a common critique of my posts, btw, and one to which I submit without ever actually changing my blogging behavior.)

Don’t misunderstand: I’m not writing this post now to use the power of the bully pulpit to rag on my unnamed friend. He remains a friend and one whose comments on writing in general that I value. But I do wonder: why this need for commentary? Do engagements with a story or text, philosophical or fictive, have to explain it, let alone be dolled up in such a way that our explanations are described as  “interpretations”? Is it not possible, I think it is, to burrow into our reading by way of our writing, and come out with something that is unavoidably interpretive, but perhaps less explanatory than exploratory? A kind of wandering that doesn’t take pictures or souvenirs, and that collects only dirt in the shoes and burs in the socks.

The trouble with TeX

I am involved in a Twitter discussion about this classic article about why one should eschew Word processors and instead choose to use a markup language like TeX. The basic argument is that creating a text is and should be a separate task from typesetting it, but programs like Microsoft Word spuriously combine the two. The result is crappy typesetting and a constant distraction from the document’s logical structure to how it looks.

Fair enough! To all those who use TeX, I wish you nothing but the best. But I agree with Voyou that TeX does not actually solve the stated problem — instead, it adds a whole additional layer of making you learn a clunky mark-up language.

My writing routine

I am currently in a state of limbo waiting to hear my fate on the job market, but thankfully I planned ahead: I have been working on a writing project, indeed a “fun” one, namely The Love of Sociopaths, the sequel to Awkwardness. It is going pretty smoothly, as befits an idea that I’ve been pondering for over a year — and I’m also taking the reviews of Awkwardness seriously, scaling back the explicit philosophical exposition and doing more with gender, class, and race in my analyses of the various pop culture phenomena I discuss.

My writing routine has become pretty established over the past few years, and I think I’ve reached a good place where I’m able to take advantage of small blocks of time (rather than waiting for an open day to materialize, as many academics tend to do). Here are some of my main techniques:

Working in Marx’s margins

There’s a fine line, when you encounter work close to your own, between the excitement that someone else considers your little area worth working on, and the worry that they might already have written the work that you are struggling to put together. This happened for me most recently when reading Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins. As I’ve been trying to write about ways in which class reductionism misrepresents Marxism, Anderson’s detailed investigation of Marx’s writings on race, nationalism, and non-Western societies looked like it might render my gestures in that direction irrelevant. Luckily for me, Anderson’s book is actually the best sort of work to encounter, as it contains a huge amount of material on which one could build, while leaving enough theoretical space for others to do that building. Indeed, it is this combination of Anderson’s great aggregation of material with his comparatively sparse theorization of it that leads me to some thoughts about methodology for those of us attempting to construct theory through close dialog with particular texts and authors.

Research accounting

In an accounting class I took more or less at random as an undergrad, I learned of three methods of tracking the value of a firm’s inventory. The first is basically real-time, keeping track of each item as it enters and leaves inventory — naturally, this is tough to pull off in most circumstances. The other two methods are more convenient and are known as “last in, first out” (LIFO) and “first in, first out” (FIFO). Basically, you conceive of all your inventory as a kind of stack, and you either take items from the bottom or the top.

I think that these accounting methods apply to the academic life — we all tend to follow, more or less, a LIFO or FIFO system for our writing ideas. Observation has shown me that I tend to be a LIFO guy, at least when it comes to article ideas. This summer, for instance, I had planned to write up one of my backlog article ideas and then wound up coming up with a new idea related to my Global Christianity research and so wrote an article on that instead.

It may be that this post will reveal me to be completely weird and that none of you have a “stack” of ideas. For my part, I literally have a Word document called “Ideas.doc” where I write down new ideas when they reach a certain level of concreteness and delete them when I’ve done something with them. The first several entries aren’t literally in chronological order, but after the initial rash of ideas, they all are — and it does seem clear to me that I’m more likely to take more recent ideas than older ones, all things being equal.

What about you? Are you LIFO or FIFO? Do you keep a file of article ideas?

On writing about Jean-Luc Nancy

When applying for postdocs last year, my stated research project was a study of Jean-Luc Nancy. His notion of “being-with” plays a significant role in my dissertation, and I’ve also thought about doing something on Augustine’s De Trinitate that would use Nancy, so really getting a handle on him seemed like a good idea — and it was also what my advisor suggested as a next step.

As time has gone by, however, my enthusiasm for the idea has flagged somewhat, and I think it might actually be because something like a “study of Jean-Luc Nancy” just isn’t a viable project. For me, Nancy is a source of great ideas or motifs: often very suggestive, and yet always needing to be “completed” somehow. Perhaps the model for a “study of Nancy” is Derrida’s Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy, in which Nancy’s work provides a starting point and lens for a study of the philosophy of touch.

Of course, one might say the same of Zizek, and I managed to do a fairly systematic study of his work — but before beginning research for Zizek and Theology, I already had a presentiment that it would be possible to find some kind of guiding thread by periodizing his work. With Nancy, though, it seems as though it’s irreducibly fragmentary.

Interview

My friend Adam Robinson has interviewed me. It starts off with questions about Zizek and Theology, then gets more general.