Writing strategies: The Hot Mess

I'm currently pursuing this strategy tonight to finish a research article that needs to be submitted ASAP.  I'll let you know how it works out.

Step 1: Get home from the office as soon as classes are over.

Step 2: During Step 1, lay hands on some of the chocolates that your colleague has thoughtfully laid out in the kitchen area.  Justify this to yourself by remembering that you have a grueling day of work ahead.

Step 3: Spend the next four hours dealing with unexpected personal drama that saps your energy.

Step 4: Wolf down your lunch at some point during Step 3.

Step 5: About an hour later than your caffeine addiction would require, brew yourself a fresh cup of coffee.

Step 6: Fuck around on the internet for an hour or so, because you just cannot deal.  Not now.  No.

Step 7: Pour yourself a stiff drink for the dual purposes of enjoying a Friday afternoon pick-me-up and numbing your mind to all that other shit that keeps you from focusing on work.

Step 8: I forget what eight was for.

Step 9: Write a blog post whining about how hard writing is.  (Meta, right?)

Step 10: Pour a second drink, crank up the music, and return to the goddamned writing.  Revise it into motherfucking brilliance.

This is the plan of a responsible grown-up, isn't it?

Everything has changed — or has it?

I need to get my ass in gear for the upcoming Big Giant Pseudology Conference, and my abstract has become a stumbling block.  My (semi-)brilliant idea for a presentation that I concocted last winter is now out of date, in some ways.  Research Country's irritating habit of not freezing in historical time Brigadoon-style means that some of the assumptions that drove my abstract are no longer factually accurate.  (Although they were when I wrote it, I swear to you!) 

BUT...has everything truly changed?

(Ominous and portentous rumblings on soundtrack)

The key observation to draw out in my presentation should really be that my original analytical point is even truer now than it was then, even though some of the surrounding historical architecture has altered somewhat.  The cast of characters has changed a bit, and there's been a classic reversal of fortunes narrative in the works, but the way that people think about Important Research Stuff has not really changed at all.  I'm using this state of affairs to write a paper that offers the same analysis while cleverly swapping out a number of concrete examples, or shifting the emphasis from one bunch of stuff to another.  It isn't a bait-and-switch, folks, it's just cutting-edge research!

I kind of knew this before, but it actually didn't become crystal-clear to me until I sat down and thought it out here, writing this blog post.  I guess I should go and write that paper, now that my thinking is clear(er).  Thanks for serving as my sounding-board!

The self-loathing never ends

I got the verdict on the article I submitted this summer: revise and resubmit. This is good news, I know, and yet it has made me mope for days.  It's hard for me to remember, whilst staring at the entire list of suggested revisions by both reviewers, that I am not obligated to do all of them, nor any one in particular, but rather those which I think are good ideas and feasible within a reasonable amount of time.  Instead, I went to bed in a deep funk last night, excoriating myself for being a fraud of a pseudologist* who would never properly understand theory and would have to read for six months at a shot to grasp what everyone else already knew.

In short, my academic self-loathing returned the moment I read the critiques.

Really, I was in the same headspace today until I consulted a colleague about it, and zi assured me that R&R was definitely good news, and that it's just a matter of talking with my editor and figuring out what needs to be done and what needs to be politely refused, based on what I want the article to be.  It all feels astonishingly like grad school, which especially surprises me because the form of the correspondence of this R&R resembles the revision process for my book manuscript far more than any dissertation chapter I ever drafted.

Do other people feel like this when they receive an R&R on a journal article?  Am I actually responding in part to the thorny matter of my research statement for my job applications?  To my general anxiety that I won't land a job this year?

And of course, to pose the question is to provide the answer.  Of course my reaction is influenced by all of those scary existential questions of what I will do for a living a year from now.  I'm genuinely curious, though, whether or not other people temporarily despair when they receive an R&R, rather than celebrate not being rejected.

*How's that for meta?

My research statement

Dr. Koshary's Research Statement

My current research project takes several bodies of study and magically twists them into beautiful delicate rainbows of cutting-edge theory on which unicorns gambol and shit publication-ready articles for top-flight journals. Okay, seriously, that's so not true. I have no fucking idea what my research is now. Straight up. Lest you think I'm being modest, let me walk you through it.

I just finished writing a book. Do you hear that? I just wrote a motherfucking academic monograph. It's in copy-editing at Reputable Academic Press at this moment. I sent in the revised manuscript to RAP mere weeks ago. The only journal article I have moving through the system right now is based off part of that same book. This book has consumed my scholarly attention for the last several years. GIVE ME A GODDAMNED BREATHER. 

Oh sure, I've got some vague ideas here and there for my Next Book. They're only slightly better fleshed-out than my vague ideas about how I'd most like to die, or what I'd say if I somehow won an Academy Award. If you ask me to explain the theoretical basis for my Next Book, I will fucking hurt you.

The real pain in the ass for me is that all of my most interesting ideas operate on the assumption that I can/will go back to Research Country for some more extended field research. That's all well and good when things are stable in RC, but stable is right out the window nowadays. For the first time ever, I am seriously worried that the paper-pushers in RC will not let me back in. Let's just say that they're a little paranoid right now, and the scuttlebutt I hear is that even pretty innocuous research projects now draw closer scrutiny and more skepticism from the kind of very scary people that I hope never to encounter. This is not to say that I'm some covert saboteur; the point is that I wouldn't be all that surprised to see RC essentially forbid all foreign researchers from entering the country, even for ostensible tourism vacations. I may not be allowed to do anything that interests me professionally.

So yeah, I can tell you this or that idea, but there's no more substance to most of it than water-cooler chitchat. I also happen to think that this description also fits a fair number of the high theory pieces that people jack off to nowadays, but of course, if you're really so interested in what those insufferable fucking douchebags at Theoryfart University babble about, I really doubt I'd have any chance of landing a job at your institution anyway.

Just to cover all my bases, though: unique and innovative.

Storm coming

The news of late from Research Country is fucking horrible. Never mind my chickenshit whining about how this complicates my writing, or changes my theorizations. People are being slaughtered and terrorized up and down RC by multiple oppressive forces, and it's just godawful to read the news updates and see all the photographic slideshows labeled "Warning: Graphic content that may disturb viewers." I am almost unspeakably angry at all of those forces who think that death and destruction are the way forward.  As one of my go-to historians lamented, "May God extirpate them all."

Times like this, there's not much besides music that comforts me.  This song was my jam of the day while writing, and it seems as good as anything right now.  I like how it starts out sounding ominous and scary, and turns beautiful and hopeful through each verse. Please God, may RC see a similar progression, and soon.

Writing like a Sith

After wrestling with my feelings about current events in Research Country for several days during which I wrote little, I busted out almost 1000 words this evening.  How did I do it? 

The Dark Side of the Force.  I allowed my burgeoning anger and dismay guide me for a bit, rather than more dispassionate, academic feelings.  As Palpatine once remarked, anger and fear can make you stronger.  I mean, yeah, for a little while, and then eventually you'll be overthrown by a bunch of teenagers driving an aluminum falcon, but for a few moments here and there, it proves useful.  

The trick, I think (and hope), is to rein myself in before my particular perspective on events turns into a sheer ranty op-ed.  So far, I believe I have pulled that off, but it will be interesting to see what I write over the next few days as I try to reconcile all of this stuff with my pseudological analysis of all the Damn Lies I've been working on for years.

And yes, this post was about 50% an excuse to post a link to a funny video.  Got a problem with that?

Scribd?

I'm crowd-sourcing this topic to get a survey of opinions: I'm toying with the idea of becoming a premium reader subscribing to Scribd so I can access some wonky policy papers and some medieval texts that are hard to find in print form.  (I pride myself on my catholic tastes.)  But so far, there is exactly one of each on my to-read list, and I'm not sure how much else of value to me will be on there.  I don't mind paying money for something useful, especially since some colleagues and I have just been griping about the library holdings at CBU.*  But I'd feel like a sucker paying any level of subscription fee to download two documents – although one of them is/was a full-on codex – and then find that the rest of the field is some idiot's self-published vampire novels and a bunch of dimestore romances gone digital.**

Has anyone out there in the blogosphere used Scribd's subscription service to fruitful scholarly effect?  Even if it's really only good (in my eyes) for medieval texts in RCish that went out of print 500 years ago or are simply impossible to acquire in the U.S., that would probably be worth a month's subscription to me so I could hunt them out.  And if I could look forward to downloading government and think tank papers that barely exist on actual paper, I'd be willing to do long-term.  I just don't want to throw away my money and, maybe more importantly, my research time on a wild goose chase.

* The library isn't really bad, but it isn't research-quality, either.  This goes toward a much longer post about CBU's priorities in word and in deed, but that's another cup of coffee.
** Wonder what I'm talking about?  Check out the home page.  It's not promising.

Burning midnight oil

Monday was the first day in about a week that I have felt measurably better than crap.  Naturally, I'm risking that precarious degree of recuperation by staying up late to edit my article draft, rather than get extra sleep.  Oh, fuck it, who am I kidding?  I'll get extra sleep anyway, because I'm totally going to blow off my yoga class for the fourth time in a row.  I rationalize this with the observation that there's little point in going to a yoga class when I'm physically unable to breathe through my nose for most of the morning.  So it is that I'm still at the computer at this hour, pounding water, herbal tea, and chicken soup (spiked with dill and cayenne, naturally) to stave off the late-evening discomfort of the stupid cold.

I wanted to have this second draft out the door already, but a week of illness threw off my schedule.  Now I feel the need to hustle, since the whole point of revising the draft was to get a colleague's critique on it in time to incorporate hir suggestions into the final draft I have to submit by the end of May.  I already prepared the quiz for my first class on Wednesday, and I'll be showing a film to the other class that day, so I felt comfortable taking the evening to focus on MY OWN GODDAMN WORK.  Yeah, I said it.

These revisions are kind of a bear, since the essential critique I've gotten so far is to advance the theoretical argument.  It feels much like the diss-writing process, when I'd push my theoretical arguments far enough that my brain felt like a pretzel, only to hear from my committee that I was just laying the foundation and needed to go way further with my arguments.  On the plus side, I'm excited by the direction I'm going in, and I can see dimly ahead some cool intersections with the work of some colleagues I've been dying to cite.  This article is, truth be known, the first really meaningful advance in my analytical thinking since my dissertation.  (The cool stuff that got me the book contract is much more about tangible data than the analysis thereof.)  It's quite satisfying to see a new and unanticipated theoretical intervention taking shape in my work.  That emotional high from crafting something shiny and new is primarily what has given me the energy to focus on my writing after a full day at work replete with irritated sinus membranes and an inexplicable lack of orange juice available for purchase at the café on campus.

But now it is late, and I can feel my brain shutting down for the evening.  I added a good 500 words to the draft, and I think I've figured out a way to answer a thorny potential critique of my analysis, so I'm content to call it a night.  Off to waterboard myself with the Neti Pot, and then to bed.

What's it worth to ya?: Monetizing our intellectual expertise

I've been working out my thoughts on an issue of professional ethics that has arisen recently for me, and I haven't come to any solid conclusions.  (I'll have to word this post a bit carefully to preserve pseudonymity.)  I'd be very interested to hear what my social science colleagues have to say about this. 

As I have mentioned before, I'm a pseudologist of Research Country, specializing in the subfield of Damn Lies.  Most of the time, few people outside my discipline really give a toss about Damn Lies, but a whole big lot of people are very much interested for one reason or another in RC.  This means that, once in a while, people outside the academy seek out my colleagues and me to consult our expert knowledge and opinions.  These people tend to be in a) government, b) journalism, or c) 'consulting firms'.  I can't say I've actually fielded calls from anyone directly in government, but the latter two have certainly sought me out over the last few years.  Infallibly, so far, these people want me – even expect me – to let them pick my brain for free.  The few journalists I actually agreed to speak to, with one exception, have not even acknowledged talking to me in their published pieces, let alone identified me as "Dr. Koshary, a researcher in..."  I was kind of hacked off at this, and even more so at the half-assed and uncomprehending way that they wrote up what I told them.  I decided last year to stop talking to journalists, since they seemed not only totally ignorant of their own subject matter, but unwilling even to get my name out by acknowledging that they had to speak to someone more informed than they.

[Slight tangent to clarify what comes next: the Big Union of Pseudologists is currently engaged in a thorny debate about moving to open access for the journal articles we publish, partly due to a hue and cry raised over the apparently lousy deal we signed with a huge academic publisher.  One of the arguments made in favor of BUP moving away from that publisher is that it uses us as free labor to create its journals, then makes us pay for the privilege of accessing our own research publications.  A corollary argument in favor of open access is that, if our expertise is going to be exploited for commercial ends that do not truly benefit us, then we should at least be paid like the experts we are.]

More recently, a 'consulting firm' contacted me and asked for a long telephone interview, emailing me in their request a stunningly long and complicated list of questions.  Had it come from a student, I would have guessed that someone was trying to sucker me into writing his master's thesis for him.  The nature of the request was, as I read it, asking me to tell them a lot of stuff that I mean to publish in my book and articles — stuff that, without meaning to brag, only I can explain.   I was alarmed to imagine a scenario in which I talked so much to the press or the, uh, 'consultants' that my original ideas and insights came to seem commonplace without ever having been associated with my name.

It put me off, but I wasn't sure if I should treat this optimistically as another way to put my name out there in some level of public intellectual discourse.  I asked the opinion of a well-published colleague, giving hir the name of the consulting firm, and asking if I should demand name recognition in the project and/or financial compensation as an expert consultant.  Zi wrote back saying that, since it appeared that this firm primarily did consulting work for the government – meaning the spooky, shadowy side of the government, which we pseudologists tend to view with well-founded trepidation – zi would advise against it; zi would have told me to go ahead and do it, if it had been a non-profit organization.  As zi put it, it's always good to get your name out.

I respect the hell out of this colleague, but I have to say that this response didn't exactly satisfy me.  Think about it:

• To all appearances, the firm wanted to pick my brain privately, via telephone, so that it could then turn around and represent my (hard-won!) expertise as theirs.  And, of course, they're doing it for profit, although, honestly, I can only guess precisely who the pertinent clients might be.  
• You can get your name out with G-men just like you can with anyone else.  Maybe more so, if what you say ends up being in Congressional testimony or some such.  (Perhaps not so much, in this case, but that's a possibility in other scenarios.)
• At the risk of sound like a mercenary, I didn't ask my colleague if this firm looked 'innocent' and NGO-like.  I asked if I should demand money.  The less innocent the firm is, in fact, the more it seems appropriate to me that they not act like speaking to them should be an act of charity.

The only thing I can think of in my colleague's mind is that, if this project were put towards some U.S. government meddling in the affairs of RC, and my name were somehow attached to that project through the interview, I could become a persona non grata within BUP.  I can't argue with that, but that is technically a different ethical matter from compensation.  In any case, though, since this concern is valid, I responded to the firm that I preferred to speak through my publications.

(Cover-my-ass/I'm-an-idiot admission: I was actually so intrigued with the possibility of presenting myself as an expert consultant whose time was worth real money that I completely forgot to look carefully at the nature of the firm.  Upon closer inspection, my colleague was absolutely right: I don't want to be caught dead anywhere near the kind of clients that this firm tends to take on, even if I were well paid.)

For an opposing viewpoint, I just ran across an announcement by another very serious and well-published colleague, in which zi declares quite plainly that zi does not give expert consultations for free to anyone but other scholars and non-profits.  Not that zi is greedy, to my knowledge: zi is a very busy person, and has published plenty of good stuff that anyone can consult with little effort.  Since hir time is valuable, zi isn't about to faff around repeating what zi has already said in print.  And, if a journalist wants an interview, then this colleague has a whole list of prerequisites: at least a little familiarity with hir scholarship, an explanation of the purpose of the article, the journalist's CV, etc.  Basically, the point comes across that this person is not sitting around by the phone wishing someone would call to validate hir; zi is an active researcher at an R1 institution, and has better things to do than coddle someone who should be doing their own work.  If you're so hot and bothered to speak with the expert, and you intend to make money from your work, pay up.

These colleagues are equally distinguished researchers in pseudology, and both are tenured professors at very fancy R1 universities.  Neither outweighs the other, in my mind.  But, if I'm honest, I prefer the second approach.  The first colleague's advice only makes sense to me if these petitioners actually write my name into their work as a scholar they consulted, and so far, no one has really done that.

On the one hand, charging a consultation fee would be a more honest recognition of my place in the system as an intellectual worker, one whose time can be spent in more or less remunerative ways.  On the other hand, this idea arguably flies in the face of the whole concept of open access to scholarship.

On the one hand, I wonder if treating my expertise as monetarily as well as intellectually valuable would impress upon petitioners that I am not a monastic who cheerfully labors in poverty.  No one would dare call up, say, a Wall Street recruiter or i-banking executive and expect a gratis master class in business — unless, of course, that recruiter is a woman, who must then pointedly refuse to give away her intellectual stock-in-trade.  Why should we academics allow laypeople to treat our expertise any differently?  (Especially when we usually carry a lot more student loan debt than most i-bankers you'll ever meet!  Lord knows I could use the extra money.)

On the other hand, I am a long way off from being as important and recognized as these two.  Can I even attempt the paid consultant approach at this stage of my career, just a few years out of school, with no tenure-track position, no book in hand yet, and no major research articles in publication?  Would I (or any other comparable colleague) look like an arrogant bozo by demanding to be paid for consultations?  And either way, is it a good idea?

Sigh...as usual, I can see both sides of the issue, leaving me in Tevye's position at 2:50.

Reading; and, refusing burdens

Moria has a great new post up at her place, observing that too much writing and not enough reading can lead to a discomfiting sense of distance and confusion about one's own material.  I'm feeling that hard right now, in fact.  I've been having one of those weeks in which I tried to re-work the journal article I'm revising now to serve as my conference paper at the Big Giant Pseudology Conference, and instead found that this is a futile endeavor: the one will not translate into the other.  Now that I've admitted that, I have about four and a half pages of talk drafted, with more soon to follow.  It's a good thing, too, because I am increasingly aware of how staggeringly ignorant I feel of my own subfield of pseudology – basically, I identify as a Damn Liar specializing in Research Country – at the moment.  A new Annual Review of Pseudology article came out covering the recent developments in my subfield, and it freaked me out to read through that and its bibliography and see all these pertinent, interesting-looking books and articles that I'd never fucking heard of.  I can honestly say that this didn't happen much to me three years ago, when I was writing my diss; there was little on either Damn Lies or Research Country that I hadn't read, and less that I hadn't heard of.  The volume of research published just in the last year blows my mind; how has this stuff not come to my attention before a freaking Annual Review article collated all of it?  And, of course, the thought immediately comes to me: I can't finish writing my book until I've read all this stuff!  Wrong, wrong, wrong, I know.  But it's kind of unsettling to me how quickly I can become ignorant of the latest work after just over a year of full-time teaching.  I may need to start typing reminders into my calendar to check the various journals for new articles.

*                *                  *                  *                  *                 *

Meanwhile, I'm having a moment of hesitation that would astonish Fie Upon This Quiet Life, given how vociferously I have argued in favor of being mercenary and self-interested as an early-career academic trying to climb the ranks.  A student of mine has asked if I would oversee hir independent study next semester, and I haven't actually said no yet.  Let me list the pros and cons:

Pro:

• Zi is whip-smart and fun to teach.
• I have some specialized knowledge in short supply at CBU that makes me a more obvious candidate for the job than most other professors zi knows.  If I say no, then zi may be unable to pursue the independent study.
• I feel unusually sympathetic toward this student, since zi has confided to me that zi has been having a difficult time due to some of the interpersonal politics of the university.

Con:

• My specialized knowledge is still not ideal for the job, and I am sure that zi is asking partly because the prof who would be a natural is never around, wrapped up in other business.
• While I am deeply sympathetic to the student's unhappiness, I also recognize that I cannot alter that situation, and if zi continues to rely on me as a confidante, I can do no more than be a friendly ear for hours at a time.  Seriously.  Zi could go on indefinitely, I fear.  Often when I have other work to do.
• This is flatly NOT MY JOB.  No one is going to give me a course release for this independent study.  No one is going to give me a salary bump to compensate for the lost time.  And certainly no one else will do the supplemental research for my book while I'm mired in extra grading and advising.
• For real, people, it's NOT MY JOB!  I'm a two-year hired gun here, albeit kindly treated and more or less a full voting member of the department.  I refuse to be burdened like a pack mule without either concomitant job security or financial compensation.
• And finally, as cruel as it sounds, it's just not my job.  The student isn't even a pseudology major; zi is just taking a course with me.  Someone from Stu's own department really needs to be stepping up to the plate to advise hir, instead of letting hir cast about like this.

Really, I suppose my mind is made up, and I'm just stalling on sending an email disappointing a favorite student.  Sigh.

In-the-flesh writing group report

Today, I did something I haven't done since I was a grad student: I met up with some colleagues at a café, we took out our laptops, and we worked on our individual projects, but with the support of the group to push us on.  I'm the new kid in the writing group, so I was introduced to a new approach to these things.  We set a timer for 45 minutes, and we worked in absolute silence for that time — no chit-chat or internet permitted.  (They granted me a waiver on the latter point so I could look up submission guidelines at a few journals.)  When the time period ended, we took a ten-minute break to talk, compare notes on things, and get another cup of coffee.  Then the cycle repeated itself.

And it fucking worked.  For me, at least.  I began to draft the journal article that Whirlwind was nagging me to create.  Better yet, when I hit a wall in my analysis and couldn't figure out how to demonstrate that my ideas were not merely interesting data but theoretically relevant as well, my colleagues discussed the problem with me.  They drew out details by asking me some questions about the nuts-and-bolts stuff, and then they totally surprised me by pointing out that an answer I gave them essentially constituted a theoretical counter-argument to a well-known book in my field.  And boom, I gained a theoretical intervention to undergird my empirical observations.

I am actually excited about drafting this article now!  And, for that matter, about continuing to participate in this writing group, even if that means I'll be spending anywhere between five and seven hours each Saturday working.  Lazing around on Saturday afternoon is generally more fun than working, but I just can't argue with good writing results.

RBOC: First week pandemonium

I feel like it's bad form to just throw post after post of random bullets of crap on the blog, but there are times when you can't get it together to do more than note everything flying at your head.  (And then duck.)

• I kind of feel like I will never again hear good news from Hometown.  This past week's bad news was so out of left field that I hardly knew how to process it.  I'm used to two or three different kinds of bad news from home, but I discovered a new kind this week.  Fuck.
• I feel like I'm clicking into the brute survival mode that got me through my last semester of dissertation writing.  For months now, I've been laboring with the unhappy sensation that accomplishing everything that I have to do might kill me.  Somehow, I have transitioned into survival mode, which feels more like I am going to accomplish all this even if it kills me!  Once again, it is life during wartime.
• This means that I suddenly feel more capable (because I have to be so), and therefore a little less tragically depressed.  I can actually laugh to myself, rather than cry at the fact that one of my students emailed me in confusion, upon learning that zi could not buy books at the library.  Just when you think you've heard it all...

Now, for the more positive bullet points:

• My Pseudology of Area Studies course seems to be off to a good start.  I scared away a few students who admitted to themselves that this class wasn't for them, which means the total registration now stands at fourteen: excellent size for seminar-style discussions!  I rather suspect that almost none of my students will do the reading for the next session, even though I went to some lengths to point out that this stuff is heavy-duty.  (That was one of the scare tactics.)  I've accepted that most students need to feel some heat under their asses to start studying for real, so they will likely find out this week what it feels like to sit in dead silence, waiting for someone who actually read the piece to say something.  Like I told 'em, I can outwait them.  And if that doesn't tell them to study, the quiz they'll have to take this week should drive home the message.
• I'm getting a little detached and less emotionally invested in the success of my students in Introduction to Pseudology.  This makes me happier.  Most students in that class take it to knock off a distribution requirement, and they don't really give a fuck.  I'm going to teach those classes, do them well, and not lose sleep about how they do.  I've made the syllabus easier than last time, and the tests are fucking jokes, so I rest easy in the knowledge that passing the course will be pretty easy.  Those who want to learn something for real will do so, and the rest should be able to slide by with little trouble.  I've made my peace with that.
• I was planning to forego conferences for this year, since I was so wrung out (and broke!) from last fall's double-header.  But this morning, I got an email from a senior colleague inviting me to join hir panel, which zi and another colleague are organizing.  Both of them are heavy-hitters who have written crackerjack books that I have not only read but studied closely.  And the theme of the panel is on one of the big theoretical topics I've set myself to develop from my field research!  After catching my breath at the thought of how much money I'll have to spend to go to this year's Big Giant Pseudology Conference, I admitted to myself that I'd be a damn fool to pass up this invitation.  I'm psyched at the thought that I might get to sit on an invited panel alongside scholars I admire, and pleased (albeit a little scared) that this means that I must attack this paper with a lot more theoretical rigor than I devoted to the one I gave last year.  
• Speaking of research as well as life during wartime, today is one year and a day after I began one of the strangest, scariest adventures of my life.  But an adventure it remained, for me, and led to some fondly remembered times with some old friends and some new friends — Shedding Khawatir and her husband foremost among the latter.  The whole business, as vexing as it can be to analyze professionally as a pseudologist, is going to shape my career for years to come.  Now that I listen to the song I keep name-checking, I'm a little stunned to recognize some lines as things that have actually happened to me.  The sound of gunfire off in the distance, I'm getting used to it now.  I've got some groceries, some peanut butter, should last a couple of days.  Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock, we blended in with the crowd.  I hope I make the best of all this.  I hope my friends back in Research Country do, too.  Al-sawra mustamirra, y'all.

This ain't no party; this ain't no disco; this ain't no foolin' around.  The war is on.

RBOC, End of Research Edition

• Dr. Crazy has a great post about the ways that grad school affects most of us on a long-term traumatic level.  Spoiler alert: the best line is the final one.  "Summation: critical thinking is a motherfucker and it will fuck your shit up."
• I'm having a little trouble keeping my mind focused on writing at the moment, because I'm going home in just a few days.  I'm dawdling on packing up everything, which is stupid, because a frequent issue for researchers doing long-term study in Research City is how to transport all the stuff they acquired.  Last time I did this, I had to go so far as to buy a humongous new suitcase, a situation I'd like to avoid this time.  But I won't know if I need another suitcase if I don't start packing everything now.  Crap.  I hate packing.  At least I have relatively few books to transport this time.
• Did I mention that I'm having trouble focusing on my writing?  I think I did, right before I veered off into the suitcase issue.  So yeah, it's a little hard to write, with all kinds of exigencies around to deal with.  I'm just barely engaged with the online writing group, since I have trouble remembering to check in.  Lack of routine makes these things more difficult, you know?  And since I'm trying to multi-task my book manuscript and two separate journal articles, as well as struggling to keep up my field notes, writing everything that I should be writing at the moment feels like herding cats.  (Oh, and thanks to Anthea for introducing me to a seriously funny commercial featuring professional cat herders!)  Still, I'm slowly making progress on all fronts.  Slowly.  Once I have a little time to breathe in the States – and that will be a pretty short window of time, I have to admit to myself – I need to bang this shit out.  The mostly-developed article needs to be polished up and submitted to the target journal, and I need to get a dirty, ugly, functional first draft of the book manuscript on the scene so I can structure a convincing book prospectus and tone up the MS itself.  As always, I struggle with drafting perfection versus drafting a draft that can then be improved.  Sigh.
• I've pretty much finished my research here, just because I'm running out of time and whatever I end up with is inevitably a kind of synchronic snapshot of Research City at a particular historical moment.  But wow, so much is still going on!  If I expanded my field notes to track everything going on in the region, rather than RC and its associated country, I'd die of starvation while trying to finish the field notes for a single day.  Interesting times we're seeing over here.
• The 2011-2012 job hunt has already begun!  (Sob!)  My success at scoring a VAP in early May allowed me to push the job hunt out of my mind entirely for...let's see, counting the days...thirty-nine days.  Yep.  That afterglow fades, don't it?  Universities have begun to post their want ads for positions to start in the Fall 2012 semester, so I'll have to keep an eye on this stuff all summer.  I wonder: is there any point in bothering my soon-to-be-colleagues for letters of reference?  I can't imagine what they could say about me before they have worked with me and gotten to know me a little, so I assume that they only reasonable path for the early applications is to call up my erstwhile professors and ask them for an encore performance for Fall 2011.  My thought is that, by the wintertime, when I'll have been teaching for a semester,  I should really switch over to tapping colleagues, my department chair, etc.  I'll look foolish if I'm employed somewhere and still calling upon former advisors from several years ago for recs, won't I?
• Lady Gaga continues to colonize my brain.  I resisted for a while, but she's devilishly persistent.  I started loving at least some of her music a while ago, as I have mentioned on a few occasions.  I also admire her politics, which helps a little: lots of famous people make little feel-good statements about this or that to curry favor with the public, but not a lot of celebrities are willing to take a serious economic penalty by pulling out of an endorsement deal with a company they consider oppressive.  I'm a harder sell on her videos, though; I'm not a huge fan of big, weird music videos that turn upon images that have no purpose other than to call attention to themselves.  I find it slightly unsettling, really. 
  I'm kind of surprised, then, that I'm starting to dig the video for Born This Way.  In some ways, I can't even explain why, since it's very much of a piece with her other videos: images of the monstrous, the self-consciously freakish, the reality-bending.  But something clicked for me here, and I'm perfectly willing to admit that it may be because I am irredeemably tethered to text, and I didn't get the aesthetic until I became familiar with the lyrics to the song.  Somehow, though, that did the trick: the monstrous, the freakish, the surreal, mixed in with the plain old gender-bending, the androgynous, the queer.  And then I got it.  Gaga is taking drag as a broad-based visual metaphor, expanding it to include a wide variety of costumes and roles that (please forgive the scare quotes) "aren't real."  Look at that get-up of hers as the tuxedo-clad corpse — that's a serious genderfuck costume as well as a serious Halloween costume.  And Halloween itself, as I once heard someone observe, is "the only holiday with a distinctly gay feel to it."  Whoa, is someone working on this?  I'd love to read an article on this stuff!
• I think I just spent more time crafting this blog post than I have spent so far today working on my professional writing.  Have I mentioned that I'm having trouble focusing on my writing lately?  Well, I am.

RBOC - Busman's holiday

• I sincerely, deeply despise the website for the Worldwide Association of Registered Pseudologists (my primary professional organization).  It takes fifteen fucking minutes just to log in, because the website is that poorly designed.  For this I have to pay $150 dues each year?  I guess it's something to know that our annual fees support the very worst web programming money can buy.  
• Also, making us register and pre-pay the registration fee for the annual conference just to submit an abstract?  Tacky, WARP.  You are fucking tacky pieces of crap.  I bet the officers on the executive board insist on cash bars at their house parties, too.  WTFever.
• Part of my irritation with this stuff is that I had to hurry up and do it at the last minute take the opportunity to get it over with while I'm on vacation.  I decided to take a few days off to relax and enjoy myself in Vacation City, another locale in Research Country.  It's on the ocean, and there are tons of fresh seafood all around, and the weather is beautiful.  I find something tonic in being close to the sea.  It makes me happy just to walk down the street and see the blue-green expanse along one side.
• Know what else makes me happy?  Seeing total jerks getting what they deserve.  The former authoritarian leader of RC, recently relieved of his position, has now been 'detained' for questioning.  It's not possible to use such delicate language for his sons, though: they've both been imprisoned during the corresponding investigation into their dirty business.  How about a round from the Singin' Brakeman for them poor fellas locked up in the hoosegow??

A good day

Nothing big, really.  But after spending a few days feeling somewhat down on myself, it felt nice to wake up, write a page or so of the manuscript, paste a few pages from the diss into the same for further editing, and then zip across town for an unexpected and highly useful research interview.  I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to productive.  I like seeing the manuscript growing day by day, rather than week by week or month by month.  Gotta make this a habit.

In for a penny, in for a pound

Now that I'm back in Research City, I have no intention of leaving again until my postdoc finishes.  This is what I tell myself whenever I feel a twinge of fear from watching the news, reading the news, or, as occasionally happens lately, witnessing the news occurring.  One can only evacuate so many times in a season, right?  The fact that my fellowship is still going on at all, and that I'm able to live in my apartment and move around my neighborhood at will is enough all by itself to make being here worthwhile.  Even if other parts of town were intermittently too dangerous to venture into from time to time – and that really isn't true for me as yet – I could always hole up right here, concentrate on writing, and still do something valuable for my professional development.  It'll take more than, um, a number of violent deaths and hints of more serious violence to come to make me up and go.  Especially when I just re-stocked my liquor cabinet at duty-free!

Without getting too much into the issues here, there's some genuine nastiness afoot in RC nowadays, and not all of it can be blamed on the bad old regime stirring up trouble.  I'm sure they are, but as any pseudologist worth hir salt can tell you, people do not do what they do solely because malevolent, shadowy forces manipulate them into doing it.  And a lot of people around here, despite their generally sound analytical instincts, are forgetting that fact in their intense desire to pin the blame on the bad guys.  Grimly ironic, considering the divide-and-rule tactics the former government here pursued for decades. 

What I think I'm seeing in RC nowadays is one of the less savory effects of a political revolution: a bunch of not-so-great opinions and prejudices that were repressed from public airing in a number of ways are now being blared aloud, along with the more constructive opinions and ideas.  The line from I, Claudius comes to me: "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out."  They're hatching, all right.

At present, I think the little voice in my head fretting about a second evacuation is just paranoia.  I already feel cowardly and substandard enough as it is, having evacuated once.  Even so, I'm trying to keep my ear to the ground for hints of a larger wave of violence and anarchy, since those are really the only things that can scare me away.  (Besides total open-ended lack of internet; I'll admit it.)  It's tougher than it used to be: several important news channels that broadcast in RC-ish are currently blocked, or at least aren't getting through to my satellite dish.  That makes me even more dependent on the internet — and I think you can all figure out why that is not necessarily comforting.  But I'm hopeful that this paranoia remains just that, and I can spend the next few months occasionally reminding myself to stay calm while continuing my research unmolested.

And don't even get me started on coffee.  I brew my coffee at home in a French press, and since I returned to RC, there's no goddamn whole coffee to be had here, and there's no ground coffee coarse enough to use in a press.  (For those not in the know, espresso-ground coffee is too fine for the press filter, and ends up clogging it.)  The place near me that sells coffee beans that it can grind to order told me today that they won't have any for sale until the end of the month.  Holy caffeine withdrawal!  I may have to take a taxi out to the other roaster I know of, several miles away, after I call to confirm that they have beans in stock.  Meanwhile, I swallowed my pride and bought a small container of Nescafe to see me through.  Hard times, people. 

On a thematically related note, I notice that the US and its allies are still dithering about how to respond to the mounting violence and flat-out insanity on display over in, uh, Gonzo Country.  While it's hard to watch people struggling to liberate themselves from an oppressive dictator with long odds of success, I at least understand intellectually why not much is happening: in for a penny, in for a pound.  It's not easy to commit to a no-fly zone over GC without implicitly committing to later ground warfare.  Could we do that?  Sure.  But is it a good idea, in the wake of the clusterfucks we made for ourselves in Iraq and Afghanistan?  Maaaaaaaybe not so much.  Unintended consequences have loomed large in those arenas, and now the US is once bitten and twice shy.  (Er, twice bitten and thrice shy?)  The PR effects are hard to gauge, but surely the US government now recognizes – I mean, Christ, they must have picked up on this by now, right? – that they are not playing in the big leagues when it comes to public image work in a big swath of this region, and they tend to let others define the politics for them, and then they play catch-up belatedly and, more often than not, unsuccessfully.  Sending in troops to depose a dictator in a country full of Muslims whose sole major industry is petroleum and whose system of government would have to be re-built from the ground up...well hey, what could possibly go wrong? 

All of this knowledge, of course, doesn't make me feel much better that my country is basically telling a bunch of very brave and very endangered people in GC, "We salute you, we respect you, and you sorry bastards are on your own here.  Lotsa luck!"  The emotional pull of seeing people risk their lives to free themselves from tyranny is, no doubt, part of why an entire wing of the discipline of Pseudology is devoted to intellectually aiding activist movements.  I've never been in that wing, for various reasons, but I certainly understand the impulse at moments like this.  At best, the US is stuck in a no-win PR situation, but those people rising up against their ruler may be trapped in a far worse no-win situation, barring a miracle.

RBOC: Return to Research Country edition

• It's good to be back in RC.  I feel methodologically and theoretically energized by it, even after just a few days.  (Not least after taking in some of the downtown scenery of Research City!)  I think I was languishing professionally in Evacuation Country, even as I managed to crank out some job-application materials of various sorts.
• I had an awesome, inspiring conversation yesterday with a very smart and accomplished colleague; I wouldn't at all mind being like hir when I've grown up (more).  By the time we parted company, I felt ready to take things on.  Do things.  Accordingly, this morning, I submitted an article I've been drafting for longer than I'd care to admit to the one of the top-tier Pseudology journals.  I really don't know if it's ready for anything more than a revise-and-resubmit, but fuck it.  Time to dig into this stuff, instead of agonizing over it inside the echo chamber of my head.  If nothing else, it forces me to put that article away with a clear conscience, and focus on the new one I'm drafting now.
• My crazed, I-am-unstoppable burst of energy was sapped this afternoon when my landlord stopped by to collect the rent, and insisted that I find the money for February's rent, too.  I kinda knew this would happen, but it's still aggravating.  No one paid me for February, I will have you know.  I'd like to blame RC for withholding my money with one hand while demanding I pay up with the other, but that's really not an accurate assessment of the situation.  My money doesn't originate with RC at all, and in any case, I'm pretty sure that my lease contract contains no amnesty for "evacuation in case of revolution."  If I have to, I can pony up the back rent from the money I have in hand, and I can eke it out for the rest of the month, but I'm not happy about that option.  Then again, the mere mention of this complaint is probably going to make Shedding Khawatir's blood pressure shoot up, so maybe I should just heave a sigh and suck it up.  It's rough sledding trying to save money as a newly minted academic.
• At least, if I can't get my landlord to give up on getting his money – I know, just putting it down in black and white makes it sound totally insane, right? – I can retain the legal authority to ride his ass about the slow-moving repair jobs he should be on top of.
• It actually makes me feel a bit better to remember that the annoyances of dealing with such logistics may just be the price that I pay for an extraordinarily rare Pseudological opportunity.  My data is going to serve me well, and I suspect that, if I write quickly and effectively, the articles (...and books?) that I turn out will be of more than the usual level of interest to colleagues.  It already seemed to work in my favor for my job talk, although of course that remains to be seen for certain.  I need to start pounding stuff out: strike while the iron is hot, damn it!

Can't stop won't stop

Know where I'm going next week?  Research City.  Know why I'm going?  Because I'm a motherfucking pseudologist, that's why.  And, to be fair, because I caught a lucky break with the workability of my postdoc's administrative office.  That the admins are on the scene again and have our back for getting back to our research helps a lot.

Now that I've bought my ticket and can count down the days, I can stop feeling so much like a displaced person here in Evacuation City, and enjoy this final week as more of a proper vacation.  I'm going on a sightseeing trip tomorrow, because why the hell not?  Why not go see a few things that I don't ordinarily get to see?

I'm just a tiny bit anxious about the political situation in Research Country, which isn't anywhere near as bad as it was when I left, but could certainly be better/quieter/stabler/more democratic/etc.  But of course, this is partly why I'm going back: a lot of pseudologists would give their right arms for the chance to spend some months chronicling a period of revolutionary change up close.  I'm actually really lucky, to put it cynically, that I can get paid to do this and acquire a huge amount of data that could only be gathered at this historical moment.  This excitement balances out the fear.  I'm not a front-line guy; I don't have the temperament of a war correspondent, as I seem to recall someone else saying recently.  But between the intense desire (to say nothing of financial necessity) to complete my fellowship, my sense of obligation to my RCian friends who have been busting their asses to enact real change, and perhaps even a dash of egotistical pleasure that I will be doing for months what other pseudologists are paying through the nose to do for a week, I feel like it's time for me to step up and do it.  (Assuming, of course, that all hell doesn't break loose, a la a certain unfortunate country close to RC.) 

This also brings up a hitherto unknown issue for me in my research: my political commitments and my sympathies with one group of RCians over another.  (Anyone who has read the last month's worth of blog posts here already has a fair idea of where those sympathies lie.)  Until this year, none of that mattered at all; everyone could – and did – paint themselves as oppressed by the state in one way or another, and everyone saw me as a welcome opportunity to air complaints that they couldn't just blurt out loud in public.  Now push has come to shove, and some people have belied their early complaints by, um, taking the wrong side of history. 

Never mind what this implies about my personal relationships with some of these people; that can always get worked out somehow or other.  What comes to mind is that, depending on how certain events proceed, I may – in a very hypothetical and not-very-likely, don't-think-I'm-beating-my-breast-about-this way – find myself annoying some of the powers that be, owing to things that I have publicly said in easily traceable formats.  It would absolutely suck to blow this opportunity by being kicked out of RC by some irate functionary.  But, since I feel like the time has passed for staying officially neutral about all this, I don't see any way around the public statements.  All I can say is that I have no official voice as a foreign national, so it's not strictly my business, but I have personal loyalties to my friends who have taken great risks for their country in a way to which I, as an American, respond deeply. 

In any case, I rather doubt that I would be ejected for what amounts to posting a bunch of links and comments on Facebook.  But, since we all know now that Facebook played a more than casual role in these proceedings, it is technically possible that someone is monitoring such things, and may call me to account.  But seriously, even discussing this feels self-aggrandizing to me: I regret that I have but one Facebook account to give for Research Country!  I'm not some hipster douchebag trying to pick up chicks in a coffeehouse by broadcasting my personal sacrifices for a political cause; I'm a very junior academic researcher trying to build a career.  The point is that I am aware that my political statements now carry more weight than they used to; it's not just a theoretical exercise to run while killing time at a café.  I have a lot less to lose, and perhaps even something more to gain, from speaking my mind than have my colleagues who work full-time in RC, which is itself a curious state of affairs.  For pseudologists, who often* get very comfortable posing (unconvincingly, as a rule) as radical activists while maintaining the most conventional and conformist of professional and personal lives, it's actually kind of freaky to confront the possibility that their academic privileges and more could be rescinded for the most modest levels of political engagement.  And, maybe, a needed splash of cold water.

*Discounting, of course, the pseudologists who knowingly put themselves in serious harm's way out of their professional commitments.  People get killed doing this job sometimes.

Awesomeness

For those who have not yet finished their vocabulary exercises in RCish (late papers not accepted!), those words around the border are tyranny, bribery, strife, influence-peddling, corruption, and despotism.

It is, of course, not necessarily the end of these things.  But, if the good people of Research Country keep up the magnificent job they have been doing lately, it will be the beginning of the end.  They have been engaged in a near-textbook-perfect non-violent civil disobedience project, on a scale and scope that the country has never seen before.  (And, it's worth noting, Research Country has a looooooooooooong history.)  They have endured everything that their government could throw at them, and they not only survived but held their line.  And we, their friends, colleagues, and students, are all inspired.

What the hell, here's one more item vocab item for you: Taḥyā maṣr!  (Don't look at me like that: look it up in your texts!)

Up and down

I have high blood pressure, damn it.  I don't know how much I can tolerate of the absurdly hot and cold news that I get from Research Country, day by day, hour by hour.  I mean, none of us can!  Everyone posting on Facebook, sending tweets, or – as in the case of one or two of my associates – chiming in as experts on news programs is completely worn out and stunned and angry.  I mean, ANGRY.  It's not good for our health.  But we have trouble staying calm when the figures we see on TV (or, in my case, on my laptop) seem to be sadistically and incomprehensibly playing with the emotions of everyone who cares about this situation.  I have the distinct feeling that all of this will get worse before it gets better.

I want to chant and shout and march.  But, as Ajnabieh has remarked, my American body is perhaps not really appropriate to this context, and possibly even inimical to the things I believe in.  And besides, I'm sitting here in a Starbucks in Evacuation City, so I can keep up wifi access and overpay for lunch.  I'd just look like an unmedicated, over-caffeinated crazy here.

I maintain the hope and cautiously optimistic conviction that this will end well in the long term, but this short term is scaring the pants off of all of us.  I really have no idea how things will look in another twelve hours from now.  All of which, if I must look for a silver lining, at least seems to vindicate my decision to evacuate.  (I heard on the news five minutes ago that the road to the airport from which I flew a week ago has now been blocked altogether.  Wheee!)  What a story it will all make, though.