As we know, it is economic crunch time. And the amount I am required to contribute to the retirement system is now 11% of my monthly check, as opposed to 8% heretofore. And this money goes directly to Wall Street.
The cost of groceries has never been a serious factor in my economic problems, but now it is. I have become truly miserly, saving every grain of rice and distributing Pine-Sol equivalent and dish detergent by the drop (I should be doing these last two things anyway, for the ecology).
Still, on weekends, I continue to drink papaya juice with orange. You should, too. For every person, take two very juicy oranges and juice them. Put the juice in the blender with about the same amount, by volume, of ripe papaya chunks. Whirl it.
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It is very beautiful today and I should be doing yoga, fishing, shopping, discovering interesting things in the countryside, walking, buffing and detailing the car, sewing my clothes together, reading, or writing, but really I am cleaning the deck so I can oil it. It is amazing how much mold you discover on things once you start scrubbing them.
After oiling the deck I will paint the fence, and then I will start caulking and priming the outside of the house and shed so that I can repaint the parts of these which have been scoured by too many hurricanes. I had the whole exterior of this house painted in early summer, 2005, but you would never know it. I have rotten siding, popping nails, disintegraing steps and a sagging fence. It all has to go.
I also want to put a new layer of gravel on the driveway and especially the garage floor. (The neighbors have poured a concrete slab but I like the old time feeling.) I want to put up a tall fence between myself and those neighbors, so as to screen my deck from the view of their very active driveway. I am a great bourgeoise.
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Speaking of writing – I think we have established that I do not have a problem with it. I have been thinking, however, about what I would say in response to books like Robert Boice’s Professors as Writers. I have said he does not speak to advanced or difficult issues and assumes that everything is fine except the writer. Boice’s writer either has nothing to say, does not like to write, or does not how to set up and maintain a writing program.
That is to say that in Boice’s world, the writer is not or is not yet a writer. Boice’s professors are like English 101 students. Now, writing problems are usually 101 problems reappearing at a more sophisticated level, so a refresher version of English 101 is never a bad thing. But it is my contention that professors’ writing problems are often not writing problems at all. To look at them as such obscures the issue at the very least, and can compound it in damaging ways.
If I had time today I would write a post toward my anti-Boice article, entitled IT’S YOUR RESEARCH PROGRAM, STUPID. I have a research program and I always have had, but I have not always defended it. You have to treat your research program with respect, no matter how much power those who say it should be different appear to have. I have wasted a great deal of time trying to get myself to write things I did not want to write, and trying to repress my own research agenda.
Writing has never been difficult for me, but insisting upon the integrity of my research program has always been very difficult. That is where I need to put in attitude-changing work. This problem has and has had to do with being in un-privileged and discriminatory situations. I do not believe Boice understands these.
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More on writing: I notice that a lot of people now who arrive with finished M.A.’s also know already what their dissertation is going to be on. They take courses and work on their exams, but in their free time and during vacation months they are also working on their dissertation. This is very practical.
I wonder whether it would be possible to do things this way, as a student: take your courses on related themes at least, publish all the papers, and then gather these together, with a few modifications, as your dissertation. With a few more modifications it is your first book, and you accomplish all of this while in graduate school and on the job market, before you ever start the tenure track, and all while making timely progress to degree.
Or is this what people do now? Am I, in my Maringouin backwater, merely unaware of it?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Papaya is the one thing in the world I cannot eat. I think I must be allergic to it–I can’t even tolerate the smell.
I have that reaction to cashew flower and juice. The nuts are fine, once dried and so on, but the fresher cashew products come from the mouth of Hell as far as I am concerned.
But, everyone else: it’s the orange that makes this version of papaya juice or papaya licuado so great. Instead of water and sugar, orange juice!
Lucky you! I can eat neither papaya nor orange. On top of that, cashews make me break out in an itchy rash.
When we get home we’re going to paint, redo the floors, etc. Alas, such activities bore me, although I like things fixed up.
On your other topic: I agree with you that it isn’t the writing that’s the problem. Yes, you always confront the English 101 thing, just at higher levels of organization. But it is the research that needs defending.
Along this line of thought, I’m continuing on my project about the politics of academia, and here are some things I have discovered:
These days PhDs have to project themselves as professional in every way, right from the beginning. It’s essential, if research is one’s first priority, to be ready with published work, more work in the pipeline, and a book based on one’s thesis. It is also essential to find a position at a research oriented land grant university. These are the places where research comes before undergraduate education.
Clearly, a huge problem is finding oneself in the wrong place, not realizing until it is too late the dire consequences of commiting to an institution that is the wrong fit for what one wants to do.
It is fascinating to study these matters without having a stake in them. They are so anxiety provoking that I could not think straight about them during the period when I actually had an interest in getting a doctorate.
It has become clear to me, too, that I never really had a chance! In fact, it amazes me that I got as much as I did, considering.
“It is also essential to find a position at a research oriented land grant university.”
This is really true and it is also where, in my experience the MOST attention is given undergraduate education. In SLACs professors are basically babysitters, and in private research universities it’s the instructors and the tenure track people pre-designated not to get tenure who teach the undergraduates.
In land grant universities that aren’t research oriented, the same things go on as go on at the private schools, but everyone has less money and the students aren’t academically prepared for college.
Wow – don’t I sound depressing?!
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I was always told I was unemployable and there were no jobs, but that only a Big 10 or an Ivy job would be tolerable. This was not good professional advising, to say the least.
Professional in every way – more like *corporate* in every way and *sorority-like* in many. I keep getting in trouble for being *too* professional, not cliquish enough, etc.
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I wish I had the money to really fix up this house.
I think Boice is designed to help people who are really not burning to write anything but know they must in order to keep their jobs. Most people who are burning to speak to an audience do so. Note: this is not a subscription to a “only romantically-inspired geniuses write” theory, just that I think there are a lot of professors out there who would rather not write at anything like the pace that is required for tenure in many places these days, and Boice is the solution. As he says, if you write a page every day in a month you will have thirty pages.
I have also heard of campuses where they pay for a Boice seminar directed at mid-career faculty as a means of “jumpstarting” them.
That page a day theory, I taught it to my dissertation group before his book was published. I learned it from taking freshman composition, where we had a week to write a 6 page paper and I had other classes and obligations and needed to think about what I was writing anyway, so wrote a page a day rather than 6 pages at a stint.
As I keep saying, Boice is fine if your problem is that you don’t like to write or have never established a rhythm of it. His being touted as THE solution is the problem. The reason I myself got so blocked for so long is that people kept shouting BOICE at me on projects that had little to do with my own research program. I had to say “I don’t know how to write” and “I don’t want to write” and “I must write anyway” instead of admit the truth which was “I am dying to write something else and my mind keeps wandering to that project, not to what you have assigned me.”
I also had to say “I do not like to write” which is not true, and which was a hurtful thing to have to repeat to myself, instead of “I am not interested in being a professor in my current circumstances.”