Writing group: Week 2 and all's well

Well, week one of Dame Eleanor Hull's writing group has come and gone, and it turned out to be just the kick in the pants I needed. I got off to a bit of a slow start, but the knowledge I had to front up to the group with a progress report meant that by the weekend, I'd managed to pull my finger out and get some things done. So, here is a quick update and some new goals for this week.

Last week's goals were to:
- Review article draft for overall argument
- Come up with an outline for my proposal and figure out a basic structure/key themes for the historiography section

What I achieved:
I managed to get both of these done. Once I went back and reviewed the notes I've got so far on the secondary literature, I realised I already had a pretty good structure for the historiography section and just needed to do a bit of refining of key themes. I've also set up an outline for the whole proposal in Scrivener (this application is a godsend for anyone who doesn't write in a linear way). I'd been putting this task off because I didn't feel like I was ready yet to 'commit' to any particular approach. This changed once I accepted that the proposal is a work in progress, it won't be perfect first-up, and I can (and most probably will) keep changing it as I go through the writing/re-writing process. At least now I've got somewhere to start.

I seriously dragged my heels reviewing the article. I don't know why. I think I'm just kind of sick of it at this point! A glass of wine and a rugby test on the telly in the background (All Blacks v. Pumas) finally made the job palatable.

Lightbulb moments:
The very act of joining the writing group and formally setting weekly goals has made me a bit more self-aware about my writing process and work habits. This week, I had a couple of days where I wasted a lot of time dithering first thing in the morning because I couldn't decide what to work on first. I think this is just another form of creative procrastination but it's one that I find particularly aggravating because generally, I really hate indecisiveness and find it emotionally draining. So, over the last few days I've started experimenting with finishing the day by consciously leaving myself a specific task to start with the next day. I've tried a few different things so far, from the relatively easy (take notes on a secondary source) to the somewhat more intellectually challenging (freewrite for 15 - 30 minutes on a question/quote/conceptual idea related to my project), and I'm still not quite sure which works best. It seems to depend on what kind of mood I wake up in and what sort of dreams I've had. Some days I dream very productively - or rather, I have a very productive little drift through that dozy zone between being asleep and being awake, wherein all my disparate thoughts seem rather magically to coalesce. On days like that, all I have to do is jump out of bed and start writing. (I'm not sure what gets me into this zone, but damn, when I figure it out I'm going to bottle it!) However, I now know that if I don't actually have to expend energy deciding what to do first, I can get going faster and maintain better momentum throughout the morning.

This week's goals:
Article
- Tidy up the draft and send it to supervisor/ co-supervisor for review. This means no more tinkering with the text but simply making it readable by putting in paragraph breaks, removing my in-text notes to myself etc.
Proposal
- Complete one thematic chunk of my historiography section
- Draft the section covering definition of terms (This may turn out to be more involved that I originally anticipated, as it is taking me back into the theory stuff.)

Writing group kick-in-the-pants: Week 1

If you've been reading here lately, you'll know I've been engaging in one of my periodic tussles with writing. I managed to get the structure of my pesky article sorted out and in the process, I got some good advice in the comments that can be summed up as 'just send the damned thing out for review, already'. Rationally, I think it's in pretty good shape, but emotionally I'm having a little trouble letting it go. (This I put down to a combination of perfectionism and the occasional crazed fear that the whole thing really is a load of pants.)

So, in the interests of moving this sucker along and getting on with a few other pressing projects (my PhD proposal not the least amongst them), I have committed myself to Dame Eleanor Hull's virtual writing group between now and December. To keep myself accountable, I'll also be posting updates and (hopefully!) progress here.

My stated goals for the 15 week writing cycle are:
1. Complete and submit the article I've been working on, which is based on part of my MA thesis and a conference paper I gave at Leeds this year
2. Complete a solid first draft of my PhD proposal (10,000 words)
3. Write the first draft of a conference paper for the ANZAMEMS 2013 conference being held in Melbourne next February. (This will be coming out of work I'm doing for my proposal.)

My goals for this week are:
1. Article - print out the current draft and review it to make sure all my tinkering over the last few weeks hasn't totally destroyed the central argument
2. Proposal - settle on an outline for the overall structure, review my main bodies of secondary literature and sketch out the historigraphical framework

Aaaand - here's what I've done so far (uh oh...)
1. Printed out a full draft of the article as it stands at the  moment (don't discount the progress this represents, given the paper-munting proclivities of my antiquated printer)
2. Started tinkering with/ re-writing yet another section of the article (but I re-read a primary source to check a detail and suddenly saw some more juicy points to be made with it)
3. Sat down to review my notes on the secondary lit but ended up watching a marathon of 'The Hills'  instead (damn you, shiny American youth and your trivial but oh-so-compelling personal dramas!)
3. Checked out beachy holiday spots to visit after the February conference (this constitutes 'research', right?)*

Okay, not the most productive start but I have until Sunday to make course corrections and check-in.

* By the way, any suggestions from locals or those familiar with Melbourne are welcome. Partner is thinking about coming with me and if he does, we will stay on for a week or so after the conference. Not sure whether to base ourselves somewhere like St Kilda or to hire a car and drive down/up the coast. I've heard the Great Ocean Road makes for a pretty amazing journey.

From blancmange to perfectly structured gateau

Well, after struggling with my formless blancmange of an article for a few days, I finally had a breakthrough. Exercise definitely helped get things unstuck, as I was in the middle of a fairly vigorous bush walk when my head miraculously cleared and I saw what I needed to do to tighten this piece up and get it structured properly. (Oddly, I don't really think at all when I run - it's more meditative - but I find walking to be very mentally productive. Not sure why that should be, but as long as some cerebral action is happening at some point, I'll take it.)

I thought it would be reasonably easy to get this article written because I already had a good chunk of the evidence in place, culled from my MA thesis and a conference paper. But it turns out that was actually part of the problem. In the culling and cutting-and-pasting and reconfiguring process, I also ended up bringing in two related, but ultimately separate, arguments - too much for an article, which needs to have a single central idea to drive it.

So, Argument Two (and its related evidence, juicy as it was) had to go. It was a lovely argument, sleek and perfectly formed, but it just did not fit. I find it's always painful having to cut stuff that in itself is really good (especially when I've worked  hard to make that way!) but it's been put in a safe place for future use.

Once I'd done that, everything else fell into place. I spent a couple of hours recrafting the opening few paragraphs and making some clearer links to the supporting theoretical framework, but there isn't too much left to do now. Just beefing up some of the primary material with some new sources recently discovered, and tidying up the footnotes and citations.

So there we go - from wobbly, unappetising blancmange to beautifully disciplined, sharp-edged gateau in just under a week! Mmmmm...gateau...

Fighting the writing

A recent post by undine on finding your writing mojo (I paraphrase) has got me thinking, not for the first time, about my own writing process. I have read plenty of advice on getting through a PhD thesis that basically says you need to set up a regular time to write every day and then just sit down and write, whether you feel like it or not. So far, this has been working pretty well for me overall. I've been managing to write something related to the thesis every day, even if some of it is chain of association crap or circular arguments with myself over what my central research question really is.


I'm having more trouble applying this approach to an article I'm working on. It's based on the paper I gave at IMC Leeds, which was in turn based on a chapter from my MA thesis, so the overall argument and the supporting evidence is all pretty much there but it needs refining and polishing. I have several friendly readers (including my supervisor) lined up to review the draft and I really don't have all that much to do to finish it off. But several times in the past week, I've sat down at my desk for my designated writing time and - nothing happens! Sure, I tinker with a sentence here and there and maybe do some trimming and re-arranging of the odd paragraph, but I don't feel like I'm really breaking through, if you know what I mean.* I'm not getting that sense of flow when the ideas and arguments seem to appear on the paper fully formed.


I don't know, it seems like you can force yourself to keep a writing routine but you can't force the actual writing (or at least, you can't force the really good stuff). Sometimes, as for undine, it just happens and all you have to do is go with it. I guess the trick is to figure out, as you do in competitive sports, exactly what triggers and routines you need to go through in order to get into that zone. I think I'll go for a run in the bush and have a cup of tea, and see if that helps. While I'm out, if you have any tips to get the writing flowing (as opposed to just getting yourself to sit down in front of the screen or putting words on paper) please share!



* It has occurred to me that this could mean the damned thing is done and I should just send it off already. Is my reluctance to call it good simply a species of performance anxiety? Maybe I need to join Stu's Insecure Writers' Support Group.

(Or, maybe I need to take a tip from Ms Huncamunca Butterball Jones and not take the work so seriously...)

Fourteen centuries of excruciating composition (and counting...)

I feel like I’ve been banging on a bit lately about my perception that the quality of writing amongst otherwise well-educated and articulate people has been going to hell in a hand basket. And it seems I’m not the only one to think this, as these representative samples from Clio Bluestocking Tales and Dame Eleanor Hull testify.

Regardless of whether I’m right or wrong, this particular gripe usually makes me feel just a wee bit curmudgeonly. I start to suspect the real problem may lay somewhere in the intersection between my advancing age and retreating patience, rather than in any objective decline in standards. This charming little post by Alice Rio (from Jonathan Jarrett’s back catalogue at A Corner of Tenth Century Europe) tends to confirm my suspicions. I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting the relevant chunk here, because it is just so apt. It’s from a seventh century manuscript that appears to have been written by a rather grumpy monk:

“Another text, addressed to young men who do not know how to write. I wonder that, after such a long time, my speech has in no way been followed on the page, and the borrowed writing tablets which you bring back soiled with your text, as if from dictation, are filled with the wrong words.”

I bet that after writing that, our monk got together with his mates over a pint of ale to moan about how “novices these days wouldn’t know what to do with a semicolon if it came up and bit them on the arse!”

Image: A novice monk being punished for misusing the possessive apostrophe.

Debating history-as-fiction and fiction-as-history

While I was busy contemplating the awfulness of Colin Farrell’s bleach job in the film Alexander, Magistra et Mater picked up on my post as the opportunity to ask some deeper questions about “the rising cultural importance of historical novels … [and] the uneasy relationship between the two genres of history and historical fiction.” What, she asks, “do authors or would-be authors of historical novels think that writing fiction allows them to do that more conventional historical forms don’t?”

Amongst the possible answers she poses is the ability to gain a much wider audience and therefore to sell more books than the lowly historian could ever dream was possible. The historical novelist may also have the ability to write more vividly than the historian, though I think this is debateable. Some best-selling 'historical' novelists write dreadfully clunky, lifeless prose (Dan Brown, I’m looking at you!), while some historians have the ability to sweep you along in stories that are more exciting than any fiction. Of course, the novelist also has the unique freedom to make things up when it suits them.

It seems to me that Magistra is also touching on some much bigger issues, such as those old unanswerable questions about the purpose of history and the historian’s role in society, and whether history is an art or a science. If we consider that the historian has some responsibility to reach out to the general public (and I do, because if historians don’t do this, then politicians have free reign to manipulate history to suit their own purposes), then we have to be concerned about developing the communication skills to engage a wider audience at least some of the time. I’m also of the school that believes that the way scholarly and academic history is written - the narrative approach used, the rhetorical constructs chosen and so on - is as much a part of the history itself as the research, the facts, the analysis and the scholarly apparatus.

I find it interesting that Magistra appears to make a very black-and-white distinction between being a writer of fiction and being an historian, as though one can be one or the other but not both. The creative writing that I do definitely enriches and improves my academic writing, and a number of the novelists I enjoy reading are qualified historians (have PhDs in history), so I see more overlap between the genres and skills than she perhaps does. To me, it’s a bit of a cop out to think conveying the facts in dull, workmanlike prose is enough just because the historian’s task is to write about ‘what really happened’. Yes, it’s true that most historians aren’t going to be able to come near what the best writers (of fiction or non-fiction) are capable of, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t take good writing as seriously as they do thorough research and well-supported analysis.

I also believe that novelists should not be the only ones aspiring to make us emotionally engage with the past. Historians like Marcus Rediker or Judith Walkowitz have the ability to tell what really happened with faultless attention to the scholarly apparatus, and to make us care about what happened and possibly use that knowledge of the past to help fuel change in the present. To my mind, that is an extremely important skill for historians to possess, particularly those who work on the histories of the marginal and the previously unconsidered (the poor, the mentally ill, migrants, slaves etc.). But it does open up the fraught question of whether academic history should also be serving the causes of social activism (as many historians believe - that was, after all, integral to the feminist history that emerged in the 1970s), or is indeed by its very nature political regardless of any claims to objectivity.

To write history that engages us on both the intellectual and emotional planes does not mean making things up. But it does require a more mindful approach and a commitment to honing one’s writing as a craft in and of itself that perhaps some (many?) academic historians either don’t have time for or don’t consider a core part of the job. In my experience, writing skills are often an under-rated, if not completely ignored, aspect of the teaching of history at university level. (For any history teachers/professors reading this, do you consider teaching the skill of writing in itself as part of your purview? Or is that something for the literature/composition teachers to worry about?)

Magistra is right in saying “Most of the books by academic medievalists/early modernists which do find a wider audience are either on conventional kings and battles topics or are lucky enough to have found sources/archives which contain a lot of information on a small group of people (such as the inquisition records for Montaillou)”. But in the case of Montaillou*, for example, it was not simply the unique nature of the evidence that made it such a popular work but Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s vigorous and accessible prose style, which is characteristic of the best of the Annales school. (It might also reflect a different and distinctly French view of the historian’s function in society, and therefore of what types of skills the profession requires.)

Having said all that, I confess I’m bothered when writers of historical fiction try to blur the boundaries and claim more for their creations than they merit. For example, this quote highlighted by Magistra really disturbs me: ‘As [novelist] Sarah Dunant puts it in History Today: ‘I want to sink the reader deep into the period, to say, “Have the confidence to follow me because I know what is true”'. My response to that is to say yes, Ms Dunant, you may have done in-depth historical research and ‘know what is true’, but when it comes to choosing between what is true and what is interesting or what best moves the story along, you’re going to pick the latter every time.

* This was a history of the lives and beliefs of peasants living in the village of Montaillou, in what is now southwest France, in the early 14th century. It was based primarily on the previously unexamined records of the Catholic inquisitor Jacques Fournier. Le Roy Ladurie's interpretation is profoundly flawed because he took Fournier's highly-mediated accounts as factual descriptions , but the book still stands as one of the first examples of 'history from below', which sought to expand academic history beyond the study of the lives of elites.

History and fiction: The good, the bad, the ugly and the just plain dull

Now that my university coursework is over for this year, I’m planning to spend some time over the summer doing some creative writing. Yes, I am one of those students of history who also harbours a secret longing to write historical fiction. Medieval mystery/crime fiction, to be exact. (I confess, I’m a walking cliché.) I have a few chapters written and a vague plot outline but I don’t really expect to produce anything as substantial as a complete first draft any time soon. For me, fiction writing is primarily a form of relaxation, a way of escaping the constraints and conventions of the academic and business writing that consumes so much of my time. (This blog is another such outlet, where the rules don’t apply.)

Having said that, I do take my fiction writing seriously in the sense that I’m aware of, and try to avoid, most of the dreadful clangers discussed so passionately here. Many historians find historical fiction hard to read (or watch) not necessarily because the authors may bend the facts a bit to suit their plot, but because of their tendency to have their 14th or 16th or 18th century characters act, think, and believe in thoroughly 21st century modes. Thus, you get 14th century serving wenches espousing the values of third-wave feminism and 16th century atheists who declare their rational faith in science instead of God. (The renowned French historian Lucien Febvre wrote a fascinating and very readable book, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, in which he argued that 16th century French language did not contain the words or constructs - as he put it, ‘l’outillage mentale’ - to even *think* an idea like atheism as we know it today.)

Personally, I don't mind a bit of anachronism in my historical fiction, whether literary or cinematic, provided it's well-written or well-acted and, as Maximus said, I am entertained. Topping my list of execrable historical films is Kingdom of Heaven. On paper (and barring Orlando Bloom), this film had all the elements to make for top-notch cinema. Ridley Scott, crusading knights, Saladin, a leprous king and dirty dynastic dealings over a disputed crown (Ha! I could have said ‘diadem’ there, but enough alliteration for one day)… even if you took no liberties at all with the historical record you’d have a rollicking story. I just don’t understand how it could turn out so absolutely lifeless. Poor old Jeremy Irons spent most of the movie looking like he wished he were anywhere else. Running a close second is Alexander, although it must be said that this film at least had some unintentional humour value. I laughed out loud at Colin Farrell’s appalling bleach job, which made him look like a regular at Hair Jude in Levin. And why on earth did everyone have fake Irish accents? It was like something out of Monty Python.

On the positive side of the ledger I put The Name of the Rose, which manages to pull off an almost impossible mélange of papal and royal intrigue, Aristotelian science versus ‘dark ages’ superstition, apocalyptic prophecies, witchcraft, heresy, demonic possession and a visit from celebrity Inquisitor Bernardo Gui. Oh, and there are a bunch of gruesome murders to be solved by Sean Connery, playing the kind of monk one perhaps wishes hadn’t taken a vow of celibacy. And from the land of the small screen comes my current Sunday night indulgence, The Tudors. I’m not sure how historically accurate this series is (any Tudor scholars out there care to weigh in on this?), but the extremely high production values and the quality of the writing and acting lift it out of the usual run of historico-romantic television schmaltz.

Speaking of schmaltz, I’ve had a kind of hankering lately to watch Shogun again, although I suspect my present self would probably be aghast at it’s mixture of Anglo-centric superiority and rampant orientalism. Whereas my past self was too busy being dazzled by Richard Chamberlain’s samurai swashbuckling. Ah, the early 80s, when Richard Chamberlain reigned as indisputable king of the historical mini-series. Actually, that must have been a pretty new television genre back then. Anyone know what the first historical mini-series was? My memories reach back as far as the mid-70s television phenomenon that was Roots, but was there anything before that?

Anyway, back to my obsession with The Tudors. I'm watching the third series and I’m liking the way the writers have managed to incorporate the complexities of European politics and religious upheaval during this period, instead of just doing the standard romanticised 'six wives' story. They’re not shying away from showing Henry VIII's sociopathic bullying and his anxieties about failing to measure up to François Ier in the Renaissance prince stakes, either. Also, without suddenly making Henry wear a fat suit or start dribbling, the director has managed to convey his increasing dissipation and hint at the horrors to come (which can't be easy for the crew, given Henry is played by the rather dishy Jonathan Rhys Meyers).

Incidentally, I’m no fan of the psychohistory (that is, seeking the answers to questions about complex historical change in the personality quirks of so-called ‘great men’), but out of curiosity I looked up ‘sociopath’ and found these amongst the signs listed in the DSM. If the shoe fits, Henry…

1. Inability to make or keep friends, or maintain relationships such as marriage - check. (In no small part because he keeps having his nearest and dearest executed.)
2. Apparent lack of remorse or empathy; inability to care about hurting others - check. (See under 1, above.)
3. Impulsivity and/or recklessness - check. (“Have you got me my divorce yet? Screw the pope, let’s make ME head of the Church of England!”)
4. Poor behavioural controls — expressions of irritability, annoyance, impatience, threats, aggression, and verbal abuse; inadequate control of anger and temper - Uh, check, check, check, check and check.
5. Narcissism, elevated self-appraisal or a sense of extreme entitlement -check. (But I’m inclined to give him a pass on this one. He is King of England, after all…)
6. Tendency to violate the boundaries and rights of others - check. (See under 1, above. See also, ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’.)

Could 'Wolf Hall' be historical fiction that works?

I’m chuffed Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker prize for her latest novel Wolf Hall. The book is described as a “Tudor corridors-of-power saga” that “turns the historical figure of Thomas Cromwell — Henry VIII's shadowy political fixer — into a compelling, complex literary hero.” It comes hard on the heels of the saucy television series The Tudors, high on of my list of must-watch television indulgences. In this show, everyone is gorgeous (and clean!), and even pious saint-to-be Sir Thomas More is a brooding hottie in a hair shirt and velvet breeches.

I haven’t read Wolf Hall yet, but it’s on my pile of books for the summer holidays. I know many historians find it painful to read historical novels, probably because the mantras we’ve learned about reliability of evidence and avoiding anachronism at all costs are so deeply ingrained. I’ve been interested in history since I was a child, and I’ve always enjoyed reading historical whodunits by the likes of Paul Doherty and Ellis Peters, but even I find I’m much more critical of historical fiction than I used to be.

That said, if anyone can make this work, Mantel can. She has long been one of my favourite authors, with an incredible ability to really get inside your head and make you experience being her characters. In my opinion, Beyond Black is her best book It’s about a psychic who is stalked by abusive ghosts from her childhood as she works the seedy pubs and halls of a bleakly suburban post-Thatcher England, and it manages to be poignant, funny and terrifying all at the same time. Beyond Black is one of those rare stories that linger and haunt you long after you’ve turned the last page.

But much as I love Mantel’s writing, I was more than a bit peeved by this weird opinion piece, in which she sets up a false comparison between historians and historical novelists. She obviously has little respect for and less understanding of what historians actually do and how they work, saying:

“The past is not dead ground, and to traverse it is not a sterile exercise. History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. The most scrupulous historian is an unreliable narrator; he brings to the enterprise the biases of his training and the vagaries of his personal temperament, and he is often obliged, in order to make his name, to murder his forefathers by coming up with a different take on events from the one that held sway when he himself learned the discipline; he must make the old new, because his department's academic standing depends on it.”

This makes the historical profession sound like it’s nothing more than the idiosyncratic pursuit of personal follies and academic rivalries. The way Mantel puts it, writing history is basically the same as writing fiction, though perhaps with a bit more focus on the collection of dull old ‘facts’ and less conjecture about people’s personal feelings.

I can understand that Mantel is probably fed up to the back teeth with pedantic critics pointing out errors or distortions of fact in her novels. But seriously folks, there's a whole lot more to writing history than this!

Just write, damn you!

So it seems I’m not the only one who’s engaged in a grim battle to write at the moment. Academic, Hopeful is trying to wrestle the thesis into submission. Clio Bluestocking has writer’s block (though she phrases it rather better as “I cannot get to the place where I keep the words.”). Fait Attention is writing the ‘why this happened’ chapter, and finding historical explanation is never as simple and straightforward as it may at first seem. And Notorious PhD reflects on writing as an act of defiant optimism in the face of the sterile corporatisation of education.

As for me, I got nuttin’. My word count for the day – hell, my word count for the month! – is a big fat goose egg. I can’t figure out why I’m not into full on panic mode at the moment, because I have a major essay due on Monday and no sign of even a shitty first draft yet. Oh, I have lots of notes, both in Word and scrawled on various index cards and sheets of paper (many of which are currently drifting aimlessly around the legs of my sofa. My feet are up on the coffee table so they can’t pounce on me and assert their demands to be immediately organised into their rightful paragraphs.) I even have a very detailed outline, including a bunch of quotes and citations I want to use, which is derived from a recent seminar presentation on this very essay topic.

But despite having all the groundwork in place, I’ve been finding all sorts of ways to procrastinate the act of writing. I’ve formatted up some references I have no real intention of using (for some bizarre reason, my institution does not use any of the standard citation models in EndNote but has its very own, unique-in-all-the-world reference system, so I always have to fiddle about with adding commas in the right places and other such pointless activities). I’ve read a completely extraneous book chapter that I know will add nothing to my overall argument but simply re-states information for which I’ve already got better citations. I’ve taken the pup for several walks even he doesn’t need. (Who knew ten-month-old puppies actually don’t have a boundless supply of energy?)

I’ve been alternately kicking myself around the house yelling, “just write, damn you!”, and falling into zen-like states wherein I manage to convince myself that inspiration will come when the time is right, and when it does, the words will flow “like water my friend”. Academic, Hopeful’s post backs me up with the advice, “Don't worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.” But if that’s the case, it better hurry the hell up!

Bruce Lee advises, “You must be like water, my friend.”

Corporate-speak and the violence of abstraction

Aaagh!! I’ve spent the last few days on a writing project for a corporate client. This work pays well, but sometimes it certainly takes its pound of flesh, as I discovered today after an exhausting meeting with the business owners to review content for their website. Now, they hired me and agreed to pay me the big bucks because they recognise my ability to communicate with people in writing. They agreed to provide me with a brief on what they wanted to say (okay, their ‘key messages and talking points’), and leave the final decisions on editorial content and style to me. So, I was more than a little peeved when they returned my pages littered with changes.

It wasn’t so much the way they’d altered my active voice to passive voice (what is it that businesses find so compelling in that?), or replaced my plain English with paragraph-long sentences full of incomprehensible jargon. No, it was the way they’d replaced my references to ‘people’ and ‘teams’ with the truly execrable ‘human capital’.

Yes, ‘human capital’. Possibly one of the most offensive, dehumanising expressions in common use today. Just one little consonant and a vowel sound away from ‘human cattle’.

So there we sat, tussling over the changes. I began by trying to keep my outrage in check. "Human capital is a very abstract term, it’s HR company jargon," I said. They said, "It makes us sound global and up-to-date". (Sound global?? What the hell does that mean?) I said, "Wait a minute. You’re supposed to be talking about people you like and value here. Why would you describe them in a way that is so dehumanising?" They dug their toes in.

And then, dear reader, I’m afraid I lost it.

Yes, I delivered a heated little lecture on eighteenth and nineteenth century labour practices and the human exploitation that fuelled the rise of capitalism. I said that ‘human capital’ was an expression slave owners probably would have used had they been cunning enough to think of it.

I stated my belief that the only people who could think this term is acceptable are those who’ve been privileged enough to never have experienced the dreadful, trapped feeling of being ‘owned’ by an employer. Either metaphorically, because you have no choice but to put up with dreadful employment conditions if you want to survive, or literally. I pointed out that slavery may have been abolished in the western world but it still, shamefully, exists elsewhere.

I may have mentioned Irish indentured servants. I definitely channelled E.P. Thompson (via Marcus Rediker) and railed about ‘the violence of abstraction’.

In the end, I couldn’t tell if they were contrite or just convinced I was a bit mad. I hope I’ve opened their eyes, even if only a little bit. But I wonder if I’ll still have a job tomorrow?

Textual interventions and medieval mashups

Social media expert Chris Brogan has a post up this week reflecting on the “next media company” and the transformations of traditional media being rendered by Web 2.0. In this new world, content is no longer delivered via a one-way relationship to a passive audience, but is produced, reproduced, added to and changed by many different reader-writers. In this process, publication is merely the first step rather than the last. Signification is ever evolving and morphing, and meaning is inherently unstable and slippery, as it is in all texts. (I use the term ‘text’ here in the sense that literary theorist Roland Barthes expresses it, wherein everything that is interpreted comprises a text, not just the written word.)

As I read Brogan’s post, I had a distinct feeling of déjà vu. It all started sounding like the process of copying, recopying, annotating, excising and interpolating that was integral to the production of medieval manuscripts. Anyone working with these texts must get to grips not only with their primary content, but with the acts of erasure, addition and change (both deliberate and inadvertent) carried out by each hand they passed through. The annotations that mark the margins of these works – both words and images – tell their own stories and serve their own ends. Each new encounter between text and reader generates new interpretations from a variety of perspectives (geographical, temporal, cultural, political and social), subtly shifting meanings or even rendering new meanings that directly conflict with the original writer’s purposes.

Take, for example, The Book of Margery Kempe. Probably written in the early 1430s, this is widely regarded as the first autobiography in vernacular English. It purports to be the story of a moderately well-off Englishwoman’s transformation from conventional wife and mother into edgy religious mystic, after a spiritual crisis sparked by the birth of her first child. Both its creation and its reception – by contemporary audiences (as reported by the author herself) and by later readers – have been the source of perennial controversy. Margery claims to be illiterate, so is the book actually the creative product of male scribes? Or are these priestly scribes a cover, which she uses to shield herself from charges of heresy or to claim a spiritual authority which was elusive for women in the Middle Ages? Is the Book a work of authentic religious mysticism? A subversive social and political commentary on Lancastrian England? Or the ravings of a woman suffering post-natal depression and ‘feminine hysteria’ because she can’t fit herself to the traditional stereotype of wife and mother? (It won’t surprise you to know that the latter interpretation has been depressingly common amongst male scholars.)

The treatment of the text itself has been integral to the many ways it has been interpreted. In 1501, the printer Wynkyn de Worde included extracts in a devotional work aimed at lay readers. Because only the least controversial passages were reproduced, religious scholars and historians who based their interpretations on this version dismissed the writer as a conventionally pious and not terribly interesting person who could certainly not be classed a mystic or spiritual leader (not least because she was a married woman and a mother, and was therefore unable to claim the state of virginity that conferred authority on other female mystics).

The Wynkyn de Worde text was the best-known account of Margery’s experience until the rediscovery of a full manuscript copy of the Book in 1934. This manuscript was originally in the possession of the Carthusian monks of Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire, a particularly austere and spiritual house. Throughout, it is amended and annotated by several hands, of which at least two appear to be monks from the priory. Their interventions place Margery’s text into a broader framework of late medieval devotional piety and affective spiritual expression, and indicate that this deeply religious male readership regarded Margery as a genuine mystic.

In a number of cases, the second monkish commentator (early sixteenth century) interacts with and reinterprets not only the original text, but also the annotations of the first commentator (fifteenth century), effectively creating texts-within-texts. The commentators have also added their own illustrations, perhaps designed to guide interpretation by later readers. One of these is a small but detailed drawing of a tower, commonly used in medieval iconography to represent virginity. The image can be read to signify that for these monks, Margery’s own claim to be ‘a virgin in her soul’ – to have reclaimed spiritual virginity as a sign of God’s grace – was authentic and not the product of hysteria, wishful thinking or an unseemly (feminine) desire for attention.

But the added marginalia point to conflict, tension and ambiguity as well as endorsement. One commentator inserted marginal instructions for reading the text that put its chapters into a different sequence from that in the Book as originally written. He has also drawn common devotional symbols such as the (sacred) heart and the flame (of divine love) alongside passages that describe some of Margery’s more extreme and dramatic expressions of piety (which included uncontrolled crying, being struck dumb, and ‘roaring’). These drawings could be read either as signs of the commentator’s empathy with Margery’s unusual experience of the divine, or as his attempt to produce readings that filter her account through the lens of more conventional devotional practice, thus sanitising her mystical experience and shaping it to fit an accepted formula.

In the history of The Book of Margery Kempe and its many readings, we have a classic exemplar of the marginalia and annotations in medieval manuscripts – the emendations, excisions, redactions and interpolations – being as critical to producing meanings as is the central or primary text itself. The medieval reader/annotator/writer was acutely aware that manuscripts – rare and precious as they were – were communal products and their textual interpretation was an active and collaborative process rather than a matter of passive reception of fixed meanings. In this medieval ‘mash up’ of text, marginalia and images, significations were constantly being shifted, subverted, reinterpreted and recreated to fit the changing needs and expectations of diverse communities.

So all this has me wondering, is this ‘next media’ or ‘new media’ culture we're starting to engage in really so new? Or can it be seen as the evolution of very old practices that have simply been made more visible – and, it must be said, much more accessible – by a universe of new tools?

Done, done, and I'm onto the next one

That research essay I was sweating over? It’s done. After a final few days tweaking down to the exact word I wanted in the exact place in this sentence just here. Oh, and cutting a good thousand-plus words – I always write way too long and my dump file for this essay could have been another in itself. The whole process of re-writing and final editing seemed oddly… organised this time, though. I actually had time to get through four drafts. The first two were pretty choppy, but the second two were really in the world of refining ideas and crystallising the argument structure, not the initial ‘how the hell am I going to make sense out of all this??’.

I think I’m finally starting to really internalise the advice to ‘write early and often’. Normally, I’d do ALL the reading and research, and make ALL the notes first. Then I’d go back through the big pile of notes to start outlining the essay. But this time, I’ve been making notes in a Word document as I go along, sketching out the main planks for my argument (and noting what sort of evidence I need to support them and where in my big pile of notes I’ll find it), and also collecting particularly good quotes and points that I may want to develop. So, when it came time to write the first draft, I already had something of an outline to work with and I could immediately see which parts were going to be worth keeping and expanding, and which were going to get jettisoned.

So, it’s finished and I even had a couple of days in hand to do the final fiddly bits like checking all my references were properly formatted and that I’d included everything I needed to in the bibliography. Now it’s been handed in, I go into ‘doubt’ mode. Yes, I wake up in the night thinking was my argument clear enough on that point?’ and ‘oh crap, maybe that bit I jettisoned was actually really crucial’.

To take my mind off things for a few days before I move on to the next one (British Marxists or the Annales school – I haven’t quite decided yet as I find both groups really interesting), I am doing my usual little ‘junk food for the mind’ indulgence. Yes, for the rest of this week, it’s going to be OK magazine and some crap-ass reality TV. I admit that last night, I even watched ‘Rock of Love’ with Bret Michaels! Thank god for C4, MTV and the E! Channel.

A rare moment of clarity

I’ve been sweating over a piece of writing for a couple of weeks now. I’ve forced myself to spend hours in the library working on it away from the distractions of home, but after a particularly unproductive four-hour stretch yesterday, I was despairing at ever producing anything half-decent. I eventually gave up in disgust and went home to drown my sorrows in a couple of glasses of TW Black Label chardonnay (a lovely creamy, buttery number with just the right amount of oak).

But as is often the case, all the pieces of the puzzle miraculously fell into place while I was out today on my morning run. I took one of my favourite routes, a path that winds in and out of a dozen small rocky bays strung along a wild stretch of coastline with nothing but ocean between me and Antarctica. The weather here can be brutal, with freezing southerly gales whipped straight off the ice and the sea all roiling, evil-looking grey foam. But today, the air was calm and still held some late-summer warmth, the sea smooth turquoise and so clear I could see a couple of feet down, to the starfish and seaweed that huddle along the shoreline.

So there I was, running along (well, more like trotting), enjoying the views and thinking about precisely nothing when suddenly, the whole structure of this essay just appeared in the front of my brain, as if someone had kindly written it out for me. All those awkward pieces that seemed to belong either everywhere or nowhere found their perfect place in the overall argument and the entire thing came together in a flow that was both logical and lyrical.

Such moments of clarity are a rare gift (and it must be said, they hardly ever eventuate when I’m staring down a deadline). I wish I could figure out exactly what triggers them, but I’ve noticed that they almost always occur when I’m not thinking about anything at all, but doing something repetitively mechanical or physical.

Raison d’être

Why am I here?

Don’t worry, I’m not about to go off on some existentialist rant about the nature of reality or the meaning of life (not in this post, anyway). This is about why I’ve decided to blog, and why now.

I’ve been a professional writer in some sense for most of my adult life. I’ve worked as a journalist, an editor and a corporate communications flunky. And now, as a grad student in history, research and writing is a major focus in my life. I’ve been keeping a research journal for a couple of years now, noting down ideas and questions and recording the odd particularly well-turned phrase or paragraph for future use (“here’s one I prepared earlier!”). So one purpose for this blog is to give me an outlet to articulate some of those ideas, and hopefully, discuss and debate them with other like-minded people.

I also love fiction writing and harbour that secret ambition to produce a novel (yes, I have a number of chapters already saved on my computer and several notebooks full of wine-fuelled 3am scribblings). I hope the self-imposed discipline of blogging will get me into a pattern of writing more regularly and that this can also become a place from which I can reach out to other writers (since we tend to be a rather introverted bunch at times). I find it incredibly useful to read about how others approach the research and writing process, including (maybe especially!) how they get over, around and through the inevitable struggles and disappointments.

And, to be honest, I don’t want to become one of those people. You know, those mad old creatures that write endless raving letters to the editor and sit on the bus muttering to themselves. Like most people, I see incidents of incompetence, rudeness, intolerance, injustice and plain old weirdness every day. My immediate reaction is to start composing those outraged letters in my head, and I tend to stew over them with steadily increasing (but probably unhealthy) levels of passion or vitriol until I get the opportunity to take them out on some poor unsuspecting friend or colleague. So this will be a place where I can unleash the odd random rant as well.

Word-wrangling

Well, it’s been one of those days, writing-wise. I’ve been working on my essay on the so-called ‘Whig historians’ for my course in Advanced Historiography and at this point, I swear I have written, erased and re-written the same damned paragraph a dozen times and it still doesn’t adequately express the ideas in my head. I’m being painfully reminded of the bit in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life where she reflects on writing for eight hours straight and being lucky to have a couple of usable sentences at the end of it.

I didn’t think this essay would be easy, and indeed it is proving a tough one to wrangle into shape. But not for the reasons I initially expected. To be honest, I went into it assuming that there wouldn’t be much of interest in a bunch of Establishment white guys who’ve been dead for a good 150-odd years, and that I therefore might struggle to put together a decent critical argument for their continued relevance. I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s essays on India give a fascinating insight to how the English political and intellectual elite represented Indian people in ways that justified British colonial projects. And reading Leopold von Ranke’s conceptions of ‘Teutonic peoples’ and the destiny of the German nation is really quite chilling in the wake of WWII.

At times, too, they are just damned funny. I love Macaulay’s depiction in “Lord Clive” of pompous nouveau riche ‘nabobs’ returning from India flush with cash and making themselves unpopular as they “raised the price of everything…from fresh fish to rotten boroughs”. And Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is a delight, his wit and cynicism proving to have enduring appeal for a post-modern sceptic such as myself. I particularly enjoyed his gleeful skewering of religious hypocrisy and corruption, and snarky comments such as “the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church”.

So, I’ve done the reading, accumulated a solid set of notes and identified a number of productive themes to structure my argument, but I still haven’t quite figured out the optimal system to move from a notebook full of quotes, comments and connecting arrows and a head full of ideas to a coherent series of connected paragraphs. I find it difficult to start writing on the computer until things are pretty well advanced, preferring to work out my outlines and rough drafts on paper. Despite my best efforts, the middle stage, between the research and the final writing, always seems to deteriorate into a blizzard of index cards and scattered sheaves of paper covered in disconnected scribblings.

I’m in the middle of that paper whirlwind at the moment, but I know that soon things will fall into place (they always do) and the way forward will suddenly come to me, like a path becoming visible through overgrown scrub. If anyone has any good ideas on how to jumpstart the path-finding process, I’d be glad to hear them. Until then, I’m kicking back with a glass of Mount Dottrel Pinot Noir, a classic soft and fruity Otago pinot.