coldhearted scientist وداد

I

Last week I did no research, spent nine or ten days doing no research, because of work at the university level against certain features of the corporate model. There is a project to severely reduce the number of full professors on academic senate, eliminate the student members, reduce the size of the body generally, and increase the number of administrators on it. Language has been proposed for the constitution such that the body would become a kind of training corps. Senators, primarily junior people and department chairs of the future, would go to Senate meetings where administrators would give them training on our brand and message. That, according to brave new faculty from colleges other than Letters and Science, is shared governance.

This would marginalize the Senate in several ways and I am convinced it is a long term plan to reconstruct the body such that it would never vote no confidence in the administration or the Regents, for instance, and such that were it to do so, it would not be a truly representative body — although it would surely be brought out at football games, dressed in school colors, as representative when this suited the Regents and the Legislature. In my role as Senate officer I did what I could to prevent this reshaping from going through and it is the last thing I will do to save this aspect of the University. There are two more meetings to go and one more document to produce, and I will be finished.

II

It is strange not to do research, one has that something-is-missing feeling and one gets rusty. This, as we know, is my writing problem, since I was trained to believe I should be able to write without doing research. I started reading last night and I thought: the reason I cannot write things as thick as what these professors write is that I am not consistent enough in any research program. I looked at my draft text this morning and and said it was thin. Next I looked at its finished portion and said now, that is thicker.

The project for the week is the Spanish version of my abstract and it is not only a Spanish version, it is a new abstract, with new material, the second half. I sent the English version to a literary conference but I want to send the Spanish version to a sociological and anthropological conference. There I want to minimize the discussion of literature and go further into historical material and social sciences based theory. There is weight in these abstracts because they are my project design, my book design, and what I write is shaping the rest of what I do.

At the same time this is only an abstract and I do not get to obsess on it — especially since, despite incorporating new material, it is still a translation. I have to move on to actually write the piece.

III

There are three ideas I want to use or am thinking of using, and that are not in the English abstract.

1. What my student said about characters in 19th century and some 20th century texts: “Blanco, negro, pardo, gris; hijo, padre; bastardo, legítimo, heredero; ser y no ser.”

2. The issues Rama (1982) identifies for Latin American literature, autenticidad, originalidad, representatividad, are not only Latin American … they are Romantic and nationalist generally … if further complicated by the Independence situation (I need to work on these ideas).

3. Not only Latin America uses mestizaje as a basis for cultural identity; this is a Spanish project as well (see Goode, but also Cascardi and others in Mabel’s book).

3a. The last point is what I should use for this abstract. If I use the others as well, I will get an abstract which will be a complex text and poem, and also a wall or stumbling block. It will be a beautiful waterfall and pool to contemplate, when what I really need to construct is only an arrow to mark the trail. Ideas 1 and 2 are for the text itself, or for other abstracts.

Axé.