Papers and Blog Posts and Rants, Oh My!

As is readily apparent to friends and strangers who have read my Debblog posts, I’ve taken a summer vacation. 

Reasons?  First, it’s summer (duh!) – time for hiatuses from workaday activities (particularly if one’s yearly schedule is predicated on an academic schedule, and even if such schedule-bound activities are now completely self-generated).  Second, writing about Donald Trump, week after week, is debilitating. I’ve done that for a year. Although there are always new permutations on the madness that is the Trump campaign, my vocabulary for reacting to the gilded yeti’s stupifications is pretty much exhausted.  Third, I’ve discovered that short-short commentary (my weekday cocktail hour rants) satisfy my urge to weigh in on what’s happening now. 

As if department:  if Trump actually read anything, it would be easier to comment about/confute him. But he’s an information-free candidate, which makes it harder to write anything more trenchant than ‘he’s an idiot – a dangerous idiot.’

What have I learned from substituting week-daily rants for more extensive blogs?  For one thing, many ideas that I could have spun into longer (equivalent of, say, four typed pages) commentaries can be addressed adequately in a generous paragraph. (This is a general observation/argument I floated many years ago, suggesting that bloated M.A. theses serve little purpose and that a single, publishable article would be more useful.)

For another thing, and one that’s a bit surprising to me: what I miss most on retiring from academia is writing papers, proposals, chapters, articles, books.  I LIKE spinning an inchoate idea into a more precise, longer-form argument or condensing it into a proposal.  I really thought I’d most miss students and teaching. But I’ve been lucky enough to maintain fantastic friendships with many former students, and honestly, my last couple years as a professor were rather discouraging, as class members increasingly relied on quick and shoddy googling, if not downright plagiarism from the internet, rather than honest (even if maladroit) wrestling with ideas and texts.

Yet writing per se remains a pure pleasure.  Having a reaction to a book, or a political speech, or an artwork, or a family story – and grappling with how to convey that reaction in words, and often in research-informed words – is so damned fun.

Percy Bysshe Shelley ruminating on – himself? – in the Baths of Caracella.

I’ve never subscribed to the Romantic myth of the suffering, alienated writer.  Most writers are engaged with the world, and happily interact with others’ words and ideas and, yes, requests.  I started writing professionally as an ad writer (when I was seventeen); there’s no better schooling that writing is not ‘all about you,’ that it’s about your audience, your clients, your publishers (plus you, and your pleasure in plying your craft as deftly as you can). 

Thus I keep writing, in a variety of forms, some of which in a way now mimic academic writing tasks (as in:  a proposal for an interesting-to-attend conference is due in two days, so come up with something pronto = you’ve committed, to yourself, to write a thoughtful blog post every week [or a daily rant], so come up with something pronto). 

Re other motivations, and family stories: my mother would refer to ‘Beta baths’ as a quick wash up of armpits and private parts.  For decades, my sister and I thought the phrase referred to prostitutes’ hasty ablutions, but it actually referred to the Beta Theta Pi fraternity’s (c. early 1940s) reputation for personal slovenliness.

There are other motivations for writing, of course.  Some of what I write concerns family history, addressed because it’s good to have an accessible record of the stories that oral transmission may not capture in any permanent sense.  Other things are mere bagatelles, written for amusement (of readers and, perhaps more honestly, of myself).  Maybe some blogs or rants are just solipsistic demonstrations that I still have (I hope) the mental acuity to write something comprehensible and interesting, about whatever topic presents itself.

Risking redunduncy for for the sake of emphasis, I’ll keep writing, in one form or another (look for blogs to resume after Labor Day). You actual or would-be writers out there: write!