Collin vs. Blog

I remember a line from graduate school (Bataille, maybe?) that goes something like: the only thing worse than going completely unnoticed is to be noticed. I'm sure I have it wrong, but the gist is something to that effect.

And I recall it here because in a fairly short time, I've learned of three different courses that are using my little book, at Rowan, Central Florida, and Idaho. I'll add the other links when I can. Those are the ones I know of, anyhow.

I'm not sure what else to say, except that it's simultaneously exciting and terrifying to be a book. I asked my 601 students to read a chapter from it this semester, but mainly that was because I also gave them copies of the JAC article that the chapter used to be, as well as the dissertation chapter that was heavily revised into the JAC piece. That was the first time that I myself had read the three versions of that chapter in close proximity--it was an interesting exercise to be sure. Even more than a decade out, it's still difficult for me to read my own work. I'm hyperaware of my quirks as well as my limitations, and in the end, I find myself hoping that there's something of value to take away despite all that. I do think there is, but then I would, wouldn't I?

I've been meaning to add a quick link here to Jim Brown's comments about the book over at the Blogora, both because that was the first public mention of the book that I've seen, and because I appreciate the fact that Jim gets to the heart of one of the themes that still resonates for me, the move from object to interface.

Anyway, on the off-chance that anyone comes looking, I'm going to try to be a little extra accessible online while folks are reading LF, and if I can answer any questions, let me know. Drop me a note, FB comment, Twitter DM, etc.

Why, almost certainly. It's not as though I don't have things to say. It's just that I've found myself saying them mostly in status updates.

I need to get back to giving myself permission to simply write a few sentences. Instead of sequential tweets.

More soon.

It's been a while since I had cause to write about Sammy Sosa. Long time readers may recall that Sosa had worn out his welcome among many Cubs fans, myself included. If you glance that old entry, you'll get to see me engaging in a little sabermetrics.

What I said then was that you could see a strong downward trend in all of Sosa's stats that were quietly helpful to the team, even though certain of his stats (most notably, HRs) had remained relatively stable. Back in the halcyon days of the early 00s, the Cubs went from being a superstar (Sosa) with a team to a team with a superstar (and several budding stars in the mix), and unfortunately, that wasn't much to Sosa's liking. The word on the street is that, once he was no longer the only player who mattered, he was bound and determined to matter even less--or to matter only to himself.

This week, Sosa cemented his bid for the Baseball Hall of Shame, as it was revealed that, like Alex Rodriguez, he failed a drug test back in 2003. It's not a good thing--the constant leakage of grand jury testimony and anonymous test results is going to make catching violators even more difficult in years to come. But in this case, the leak of Sosa's name drives a final, sad, anticlimactic nail in the coffin of Sosa's career. What saddens me most is that he brought a lot of joy to Cubs fans, myself included, but he never quite understood that we were rooting for the whole uniform, not just the name on the back. Over the years, it became clearer and clearer that Sosa cared more about the latter than the former, and now, we have independent confirmation that it was that way from the start.

There's not a lot of folk, I suspect, who believed Sosa was innocent of juicing, and the announcement is small potatoes compared to many others, but still. I'd made my peace with Sosa's departure, but as a Cubs fan, I have to admit to some disappointment.

That's all.

Yesterday, our group of job market hopefuls met to review drafts of their application letters. For obvious reasons, I can't really talk about that process in much detail, although I think I can say that nearly every student who goes through this process realizes eventually that (a) such letters are more difficult to write than they first appear, and (b) the best such letters go through several drafts. The job letter is a very specific genre, one that requires most of us to unlearn (at least temporarily) some of our more cherished habits of academic prose.

One thing I was thinking about over the past few days was the question of method, or more specifically, the question of method vs. methodology. I don't think I'm bursting anyone's bubble when I say that the vast majority of us, myself included, use the word methodology when in fact we mean method. "Methodology" sounds more sophisticated; honestly, I'm not sure it's any more complicated than that. And I can't tell you the number of times I've heard people ask job candidates to explain their methodology.

Maybe it's just my own sensitivity to the terms, but I get the sense that, in recent years, we've placed more explicit emphasis in our field on "having a methodology," to the extent that we engage in a great deal of unnecessary nominalization. In other words, where at one time, folk might ask about the theories we use or draw on, that proliferation now feels to me as though it's coming under the umbrella of methodology. And I get the sense that many of us feel compelled to distinguish our projects from others on the basis of methodology rather than say site, theory, material, etc.

And yet. I don't think you can "have a methodology." For me, a method is a particular practice, one that can range from the algorithmic (coding discourse for certain textual features) to the heuristic (the application of various cultural or critical theories) to the aleatory (fun!). Nobody just uses one method; most of us blend several at any given moment. You might draw on one method to test, qualify, or nuance another. My own thought, though, is that there really aren't huge numbers of actual methods--where our projects really differ from each other is in the collection and selection of materials and the choice of particular filters (i.e., theories) to guide our practice.

My understanding of methodology, then, is sort of armchair etymological. Methodology is the study or account of methods, in the way that a graduate survey course on methods might proceed. Why a body uses method X instead of method Y is a methodological question, but the answer to a methodological question is a method, not (for me) a methodology. I don't think I have a methodology; what I have instead are a range of methods (and that range has broadened in recent years), some of which will show up in a given piece of writing.

As I was browsing around, I came across an interesting piece from a few years back, by a fellow named Eduardo Corte-Real, who suggests reserving methodology for that broader usage (the science/logic of methods), and offers the term "methodoxy" as a lighter term that replaces the heaviness of logos with the idea of teaching and/or opinion implied by doxa. I must say, I'm a little enchanted by the word--it seems to me that much of what passes for methodological discussion is in fact methodoxical. In a field like Writing Studies, we will never achieve the kind of methodological rigor found in the sciences, natural or social. Nor honestly should we want to. But there's something of that pressure that lurks behind the question "what's your methodology?" I'm not sure that we could answer that question on behalf of the discipline, much less ourselves. I like the idea, though, of methodoxy as the term that describes our field's debates over method, our own practices of blending various methods to accomplish research aims, and our processes of choosing from among the methods that are available to us.

No grand conclusion, but I may sneak methodoxy into an essay soon. And I'm going to try and keep myself honest about not saying methodology when I mean method.

That's all.

I'm a little inspired by the chapter titles of Ecce Homo this week, as my summer course prepares to dip into our pal Freddy for Thursday. And while I have to admit that the leap on my last paycheck was gratifying, I nevertheless find myself these days contending with:

My summer graduate course, which marches along at slightly faster than double-time, to fit 15 weeks of work into 6. During the regular season, I normally take downtime after I teach, to allow myself a little reflection and recharge. No such luxury during the summer. Had I not been reading today, I would be faced tomorrow with a big pile for Thursday.

Responding to essays, drafts, chapters, et al. I can't say much more about that here except to say that it got to the point this sem where I started keeping a folder in my bag devoted entirely to the stack of student work I have to respond to. I think my left shoulder is permanently lower than my right.

A slew of review work. I did both coaching and Stage I reviewing for CCCC this year, and have since received requests from at least 5 journals for work. I'm still figuring out where I feel the strongest ethical obligation in regards to that stack of work.

So, no. My semester/year hasn't finished yet. My sense is that I will be lucky to squeeze 2-3 weeks of actual summer out of the months ahead.

From Neil Gaiman:

Some writers need a while to charge their batteries, and then write their books very rapidly. Some writers write a page or so every day, rain or shine. Some writers run out of steam, and need to do whatever it is they happen to do until they're ready to write again. Sometimes writers haven't quite got the next book in a series ready in their heads, but they have something else all ready instead, so they write the thing that's ready to go, prompting cries of outrage from people who want to know why the author could possibly write Book X while the fans were waiting for Book Y.

I'm not sure that the "fan letter" is actually real, but Neil Gaiman has a nice post up attempting to debunk some myths about fan entitlement. Martin is notorious in that regard--he's published one of the best fantasy series in recent years, and in part because of its huge, ensemble cast, the books keep getting more and more complex and end up taking longer to emerge. Word on the street a while back was that the latest installment was so long that the press decided to publish it as two, which necessitated even more revision and planning. And when I say "so long," bear in mind that the page count on the four volumes I have handy are 835, 1002, 950, and 750.

The title of this post is Gaiman's elevator version of his own thoughts on the matter. Embedded in the "letter" he's responding to is an interesting point about how social media crank up the attention and pressure on writers like Martin, which is why I thought to mention it here. That, and I think it's important for all of us who write to understand about ourselves what Gaiman discusses in the excerpt above. Having gone through my own patch over the last year where I "worried that I could no longer write," it's oddly comforting to hear someone as prolific as Gaiman talk about the same thing, and to acknowledge that it's not always something that's under our control.

That is all.

Garr Reynolds shares them over at PZ, but they're worth reproducing here:

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before.
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.

There are only a couple of these that wouldn't be equally appropriate for any good academic conference.

While we're on the topic, here's an even more shocking example of editorial FAIL. Epic, perhaps.

An interesting piece of news floated across Twitterspace, and across some blogs this week: the revelation that the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was, in fact, a fake journal sponsored by a pharmaceutical company. Even more dismaying was a followup story about how Elsevier, publisher of AJBJM, has an entire division devoted to such fraudulence, the so-called strategic medical communications agency, Excerpta Medica. Over at the ACRLog, Barbara Fister has a nice post with the link to the original Scientist article that outed the journal, as well as some discussion of the information literacy implications. Long story short, Elsevier's track record with respect to integrity is not particularly sparkling.

While it's hard to imagine something similar happening in the humanities, recent discussions of a particular anti-plagiarism vendor should probably give us rhetoric and technology folk pause, particularly when you recall that the most likely outlet for scholarship related to said vendor happens to be an Elsevier journal. But I digress.

It's tempting, I think, to see this and other events as further indictments of the academy's fetishization of peer review, but I'm not sure I would agree. And I say that as someone who would really like to see other models available to us for the circulation and distribution of our work. But the fact of the matter is that problems like these have more to do with the oligopolists than with peer review per se.

I review for several journals now, and honestly, I see maybe 1-2 submissions per journal a year. I have some quality control as a result, but the real responsibility for quality lies with the editorial staff of each, the folk who aggregate the results. I've thought a bit about what it must be like for those who were hoodwinked by the press into sitting on the board or reviewing for these journals, because my gut reaction to this story was to blame the reviewers. But that's assuming that submissions actually made it to reviewers, and there's no real guarantee that this is the case. Writers and reviewers alike operate on good faith, the assumption that there's some integrity at the editorial stage. Beyond a certain size, the editorial staff cease to function as part of peer review--their function is more aggregation and facilitation. And given the kind of money involved with the oligopoly journals, I guess I'm not totally surprised at something like this.

It's shameful, but not as shameful as it would be if the reviewers for a "real" journal had been found to be accepting money from Merck (or whomever) for certain outcomes.

Hmm. I feel like I have more to say, but I'm not sure what. Maybe I'll revisit this post after I think about it. For now, though, that's all.

One of the downsides to leaving the office of Graduate Director is, quite literally, leaving the office of Graduate Director. You might recall that, upon taking the office as my own, I had the good fortune to install wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling shelves:

Well, four and a half years have elapsed and surprisingly to no one, I've purchased a book or two in the interim. While my students were examining yesterday, I started boxing:

Now, to be fair, a couple of them were already full of stuff. But that's 15 boxes so far, and the result?

And it should be noted that there is no other office in our department, save one perhaps, with the shelf space I have. So I've got a long ways to go yet before I can be said to have vacated my present office, and an even longer process of figuring out how to manage my stuff in a smaller space. Joy.

On the plus side, I'll have a window that (a) is not sealed for my protection, and (b) opens onto the outside world. So there's that.