Lucky Jane

On my way to the office this morning (cos I’m trying to avoid getting sucked into and enraged by the Sotomayor hearings, though I wound up listening to them at the office and getting enraged, anyhow: Jeff Sessions, your disingenuousness makes you sound so dumb that it vindicates the Senate Judiciary Committee that blocked your appointment to the federal bench in 1986; and Ricky Gervais, citing the judicial equivalent of Rate My Professors as “evidence” of Sotomayor’s “mood[iness]” totally ruined your “Lindsey Graham” act), I overheard a pair of students whose conversation made me wistful.

Here it was Tuesday morning, and already they were planning their weekend. What initiative! But here’s what made me wistful: he turned down her invitation for Thursday night, because he has a fifteen-page paper due Friday morning (summer school, you see), so “Thursday night’s gonna be busy.” Their voices trailed away, but I did hear him say that he hadn’t started the paper yet.

As I continued to my office, I sort of envied the young man who didn’t seem at all troubled at the prospect of writing fifteen pages in three days. Sure, they might suck, or be plagiarized, in 14-point Courier, with 2″ margins, but even so, that’s a hefty chunk of verbiage. Yet when I was an undergrad, back in the early 90s, I spent all-nighters during which papers came together as if by themselves, their progress accelerated and intensified by adrenaline and caffeine. This ease, this exhilaration, came to a halt in the middle of my third (and last) year of college: I started really scrutinizing every word, every nuance of syntax, each transition, even patterning motifs throughout the paper as it developed its argument. I didn’t know it at the time, but this abandonment of abandon meant that I was bound for grad school.

Every now and then, I still get to relish a bout of undergraduate writing. My last article proceeded that way, in fact. Since I had nothing better to do on a Friday night, I spent an all-nighter fleshing out the skeleton of my argument, transcribing the evidence I had on hand, paraphrasing evidence I was thinking of using but didn’t have on hand. Without even printing the thing out, I was able to see the argument whole, and to move paragraphs about accordingly.

Of course, I had been brooding over that article for almost a year, reading, reading, presenting part of it at a conference, reading before I ever cracked open my computer. It was as if I were just docilely fulfilling an assignment.

Indeed, I learned the power of the assignment just last spring, while I was in the throes of my third-year review, when a group of students who were supposed to be leading class came to my office for help only a week before they were to fulfill their duties. I expressed worry that they wouldn’t have time to prepare adequately, but they didn’t share my worry. In fact, they seemed practically mellow, even confident. Incredulous, I blurted out, “How do you do it? It takes me days to figure out what I want you to learn.” (Bear in mind that I am not in the habit of freaking out my students; as I said, my brain was addled by my review.) One of the students put her hand on mine and explained that, by giving them specific goals and guidelines, I had already done most of the hard work. I love my students.

After this revelation, you’d think I’d figured out that the panacea for writer’s block is just setting assignments for yourself. Not so fast.

Today I received an advance copy of the PoshBritU Companion to What Lucky Jane Generally Studies, a fat volume that contains the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. I feel queasy just looking at it. It counts for nothing on my annual reviews, except maybe service to the profession, and—as my senior colleagues are fond of saying—no one gets tenured on service. But I wrote it because a friend asked me to write it. After this ordeal, I’m not sure we can remain friends.

The piece is literally much like an undergraduate paper—a freshman paper of “throughout literary history”-type badness, except of course that it must concisely and clearly present a lot of logically organized information. PoshBritUP had given me a ten-page list of formatting guidelines, rules for citations, a 5000-word limit, and so on. In other words, it was an assignment on, oh let’s say, “Death in Anglophone Poetry.” The real topic is comparably universal, only not so commonly studied, and I am baffled to be considered one of a handful of experts on it.

Writing this thing was excruciating. With no limits on nationality or time period, I really was writing about death poems “throughout literary history.” I had to refresh my memory on every poem I knew about death, and to learn just as many that I had never seen before. And thanks to the British Empire, there are lots of Anglophone literatures belonging to cultures whose attitudes toward death vary wildly. With only 5000 words to work with, I would have to write in synecdoches. Deciding what not to write about was harrowing. It took me a month to decide on how to organize this beast. Because I’m much more comfortable writing in 7000 to 10,000-word stretches, I kept going over 5000 words.

But I did finish it. When I sent it to my (former?) buddy, I was tempted to sign off, riffing Sylvia Plath’s too-oft-quoted “Daddy” (hey! a poem about death!), Buddy, Buddy, you bastard, I’m through. But I refrained. Now I have this big shiny book that I can’t stand to look at. And you know what? It will probably be the most widely read thing I ever write.

Tomorrow I think I’ll work from home, while listening to the Sotomayor hearings. I’ll try to contain my rage.