Starting on Saturday, I began blogging a summer-work-week in the life of an academic — specifically, me.  We are now up to day 5.  The goal is simply to show — in as much detail as I can — precisely what I do in the summer. Indeed, if all academics who have a blogs did this, perhaps we could put to rest once and for all the myth that professors “have the summers off.”  Well, it’s a nice thought, anyway.

Wednesday, 16 May 2012

12:00 – 12:44 am.  Posted yesterday’s chronicle, and then realized that I’d failed to include a song.  Added the song.  Shared the post via Facebook & Twitter.  Composed the above.  Watched the first five minutes of Isao Hashimoto’s Time Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion since 1945.

Educational, elegant, and alarming.

12:45 – 1:45 am.  Prepared for bed, read another chapter of Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?  Why can’t I seem to get to bed before midnight?

1:45 – 8:00 am.  Ah, sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, the death of each day’s life.  And so on.

8:00 – 8:25 am.  Got up, did jumping jacks, stretched, checked email and Facebook.  Answered one professional email.

8:25 – 9:10 am.  Ran 4 miles & at playground en route did chin-ups (still only one set, due to hand) and upside-down push-ups.  (See Saturday for explanation of upside-down push-ups).

9:10 – 9:30 am.  Read email, checked into and responded to Facebook.  Read “Revenge of the Liberal Arts Major” — good news for English and other Humanities grads.  Hat tip to Libby Gruner.  And thanks to Gwen Tarbox, read publisher Weldon Owen‘s amusing (but also mostly accurate) chart, “How a Book Is Born.”

(Click for slightly larger image.)

9:30 – 9:45 am. Email: professional correspondence.

9:45 – 10:15 am.  Post-running exercises.  Abdominals and modified push-ups (due to wonky left hand, done on fists instead of on palms or on weights).  Also answered one professional email.

10:15 – 10:45 am.  Breakfast!  Also business phone calls.

10:45 – 10:50 am.  Aggle Flaggle Klabble!  Watched brief video clips of my 13-month-old niece, Emily.  My sister just sent ‘em!  ♥!  Which reminds me: dear readers, watch for a new installment of Emily’s Library in the next week or so.

10:50 – 11:00 am.  Made doctor’s appt for a physical on Monday, at which time I will also inquire further about left hand (I did get it checked out after the accident, but it’s recovering more slowly than I’d like).  The 10-minutes’ time here, incidentally, reflects the need to coordinate my schedule with Karin’s (since we share a car).  I would bike to the appt., but the left hand still isn’t up for biking.

11:00 – 11:50 am.  Shower, shave, dress.  Also answered one business email, and wrote two more (both re: Complete Barnaby).  So, let’s say 25 minutes to ablutions and the other 25 to work.

11:50 am – 12:35 pm. Back to the comics/picture books essay!  Edited & revised what I did last night, added some new examples.  Oh, and a little more business email.

12:35 – 1:25 pm.  ”Lunch break!  Lunch break!” (as Lucy says in A Charlie Brown Christmas, when Snoopy arrives with his supper dish).  Also finished Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?  It is, as her mother says near the end, “a metabook.”  It’s as much about Fun Home as it is about her mother.  It’s more interior than Fun Home, which (for me) in part accounts for the many references to Virginia Woolf.  While Fun Home will continue to be taught in undergraduate and graduate classes, Are You My Mother? will more likely appear in the graduate seminar, as a companion piece to Fun Home.

1:25 – 1:40 pm.  Some business correspondence.  Also, Jules Walker Danielson sent me a link to this Rolling Stone snippet, which includes the following video.  At 1:42, you will hear rapper El-P say, “Rest in peace, MCA.  Rest in peace, Maurice Sendak.”

How many children’s authors get name-checked in popular songs?  There are several examples in which Dr. Seuss makes an appearance (R.E.M.’s “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight,” O.C. Smith’s “Little Green Apples,” to name two).  A moment like this suggests the degree to which Maurice Sendak is embedded in our cultural consciousness.  His passing is a major event, acknowledge not just by fans and friends, but people from many walks of life.  I think, too, that, taken together, these many tributes tell us what Sendak signifies in the popular imagination.  (See my page of artists’ tributes, the New York Times‘ collection of artists’ tributes, The Comics Journal‘s page, and then the links at the bottom of this page.)  I should write about this.  We children’s literature people need to organize a panel on Sendak for the 2014 MLA (the 2013 MLA is already set).  Someone needs to edit a collection of essays on him.  Me.  Or if someone else is already doing this, then I need to contribute to it.

1:40 – 2:24 pm.  My mind is on Maurice. Kristy (from The Comics Journal) has just sent me the marked-up version of my Comics Journal essay (I adapted and abridged it for my TCJ obituary.)  I’d asked to revise the piece in light of his passing.  Since I am thinking about him, I decide to do this now.  Such a genius, such a loss. In his honor, I’m listening to Mozart’s Wind Serenades (K.375 & K.388) as I revise.  During this process, was interrupted by two different telemarketers.  Are their charitable organizations that respect donors’ rights to privacy?  If so, I’d be interested in learning who they are.

2:20 – 2:24 pm. Updated Sunday’s blog post with small parenthetical & responded to my sister’s comment on same.

2:24 – 3:24 pm.  Revised TCJ Sendak piece.  Listened to Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet K.581 (“Stadler”), Quartet K.378, and Trio for Piano, Clarinet and Viola K.498 (“Kegelstatt”).  Sent it back to Kristy at TCJ.  I think we can now call it done, at last!

3:24 – 4:30 pm.  Back to the comics/picture books piece, starting with a brief analysis of the Krauss-Sendak collaboration I’ll Be You and You Be Me, and then on to Will Eisner! Chris Ware! Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich! Crockett Johnson!

4:30 – 4:35 pm.  Watched the (brief) video of Emily aggle-flaggle-klabble-ing several times. Karin thinks Emily’s glottal sounds reflect a German influence. This seems possible, though I haven’t listened to enough non-German babies babbling to either verify or refute that hypothesis.

4:35 – 5:00 pm.  More work on the comics/picture books piece. Ian Falconer! Lane Smith! Wanda Gág! Leo Lionni! I’m quite pleased with how this piece is turning out, if I do say so myself.  Also: this is the kind of intellectual labor that I find particularly rewarding. I can (and always will) do administrative tasks, but the thinking part is most interesting.

5:00 – 5:15 pm.  Responded to a few comments on the blog.  As all of these conversations were academic in nature, I’m counting this towards the day’s total “work time.”  I note also that I’ve had a tendency to underreport work time because I often forget that the fun parts of my day (such as conversation with a colleague) include work & work-related matters, too.

5:15 – 5:35 pm. Guitar break!  Left hand is improving — able to do those E-string major barre chords a bit better today.  Played: Cure’s “Friday, I’m in Love” (and, yes, I know it’s only Wednesday), the Brecht-Weill composition “Mack the Knife” (lyrics translated by Marc Blitzstein, made popular by Bobby Darin), the Ventures’ “Walk — Don’t Run,” the Traveling Wilburys’ “Handle with Care,” and the biggest hit of the 1890s — “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Made for Two).”  Incidentally, if you’ve never heard Blur’s cover of that song, check it out.  My own version oscillates between traditional and a slightly more football-hooligan-esque (i.e., Blur-like) rendition of the chorus.

5:35 – 6:35 pm. Iced my left hand (something I also did yesterday after the guitar-playing, just for good measure), and paced around the house, thinking: if one were to edit a collection of essays on Maurice Sendak, who should be in it?  Came up with a tentative list of names, plus several ideas for a co-editor.  Also would include extracts from my interviews, perhaps at the back.  Had idea for second book on Sendak, which would go into UP Mississippi’s Conversations with… series, and thought about which interviews should be included in such a series.  Also, it’s always worth remembering that I have far more ideas than I’ll ever be able to act upon.  So, I need to be judicious in choosing my projects.  Currently, I only have one book (well, series) under contract — The Complete Barnaby.  In sum, I would like to do this, and I will make enquiries.  However, the most important thing is that someone should do this.  It doesn’t have to be me.  But it should be done.

6:35 – 7:15 pm.  Checked into Facebook. Among other things, read Michael Patrick Hearn on Maurice Sendak at Monica Edinger’s blog (Educating Alice) & added the link (to bottom of this page). Wrote Jules back (re: the name-check of Maurice Sendak by El-P, above).

7:15 – 8:25 pm.  Read Going Bovine to Karin, watched the only Daily Show we’d yet to see from last week, watched a bit of Rachel Maddow.

8:25 – 10:15 pm.  More on the comics-and-picture-books essay.  Am I nearly done with this revision?  I might be.

10:15 – 11:00 pm.  Wrote back to Jules Danielson (again, check her excellent Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, the best blog about picture books).  Oh, speaking of good children’s lit blogs, I was delighted to see The Carrot Seed make Betsy Bird’s poll of the top 100 children’s picture books.  Sure, it should be higher than 100.  But at least it’s there!  She calls it “picture book haiku.  Not a word out of place.”  Also started to compile list of essential Sendak-books-that-I-don’t-already-own-copies-of.  And, yeah, ordered a few — all out of print — via AbeBooks.com.  At present, I own around 35 to 40 of the over 100 books he illustrated.  I don’t need them all, but it seems to me that a children’s literature scholar can never have too much Sendak!

11:00 – 11:40 pm. Back to comics-picture-books essay, briefly.  Then wrote back to Michael Patrick Hearn, whose tribute to Maurice Sendak you really must read.  Then back again to the essay.  I think it might now be done.  I’m not sure.  I want to re-read parts of Nathalie op de Beeck’s book, which I’ve left in my campus office.  I also need to compile a list of all the literary works to which I refer.  And re-read Moebius’s classic essay, which informs what I’ve written but is not specifically cited anywhere — same is true of Nodelman’s Words About Pictures.  It’s an influence, but might be acknowledged.

11:40 pm – 12:00 am.  Set up tomorrow’s post. Put some books away (books I’d been writing about). Washed dishes.  Started dishwasher.

Total work time: 9 hours, 30 minutes.

Right!  Time to conclude with a little music. From Disney’s Enchanted, here’s Amy Adams introducing (and then performing) “Happy Working Song.”  Dancing rats and cockroaches!  What’s not to like?

What, you say?  Even after reading this, there’s still not enough tedium in your day?  Well. I can help you there:

• The full “What Do Professors Do All Summer?” series (May 2012): Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, & Summertime, and the Living Is Busy (the final post).
• The full “What Do Professors Do All Day?” series (Feb. 2011): Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, & What Do Professors Do All Week? (the final post).
• Other posts tagged Academe, Advice, or Autobiography.

It’s hard to imagine that this is even slightly interesting to read, but it does (at least) make visible the work that academics do in the summer.  Or this academic, at least.  If you’re just tuning in today, I should say that this week — and this week only — I’m keeping track of what I do during the summer.  And, if I may be frank (instead of Phil?), I’m glad it’s only for a week.  Although I think it a useful experiment to undertake, I dislike living in the panopticon.  I will not be doing this again.  Anyway.  Here’s what I did today.

12:00 – 12:30 am.  Posted yesterday’s chronicle of mundanity, responded to a few comments on Sunday’s post, wrote the above and began constructing this post.

12:30 – 1:30 am.  Did dishes, prepared for bed, read another chapter of Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

7:45 – 8:05 am.  Breakfast.  Read email, checked into Facebook.

8:05 – 8:15 am.  Checked Twitter.  Read this and this.  Regarding the latter: Anita Silvey’s Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac does a great public service, educating readers about children’s literature.  Regarding the former: efforts to censor & ban literature for children interests me.  In the case of Tintin in the Congo (the earlier link), the movement to censure derives from (what I read as) a progressive impulse.   The book does traffic in racial stereotypes.  It’s not a book I would give to a child.  Yet, nor would I be willing to ban it.  (I wrote a blog post on this subject a couple of years ago.)

8:15 – 9:20 am.  Finished a Routledge report that I started last night, and sent it in to Routledge.  And started on another Routledge report.

9:20 – 9:50 am.  Hat tip to Lori Sabian (via Facebook), which led me to this orchestra flash mob, playing Peer Gynt on the Copenhagen metro.

Things like this make me glad to be alive, glad that there are such people in the world.

In addition to checking into Facebook, also wrote one professional email, and listened to a very long automated speech to try to fix my Working Assets credit card: the new card’s three-digit security code doesn’t work on the USPS website, and so I’ve been unable to use the card.  (I haven’t tried it on other sites.)  Also burned a few CD mixes for friends.

9:50 – 10:00 am.  Prepared for a jog out to the car.  (It’s on campus, and Karin and I share a car.  Ordinarily, I would bike to the gym, but left hand still a bit wonky.  Bleah.)

10:00 – 11:10 am. Jogged to car, drove to gym, worked out at gym, drove back.  Really prefer cycling to gym.  It seems silly to drive somewhere for exercise.  Makes much more sense to bicycle there for exercise.

11:15 – 11:30 am.  Drank water.  Read some email.  Professional correspondence re: Oslo conference.  Nothing yet from Eric re: Barnaby.  Expecting a list of still-missing strips today.

11:30 am – 12:00 pm.  Shower, shave, dress.  Burned more mixes.

12:00 – 12:10 pm.  Read piece on Sendak from New York Magazine.  George (agent) sent it to me.  Wrote back to him.

12:10 – 12:30 pm.  Walked down to the Credit Union (money), and then on to Bluestem to meet friend & colleague Dan Hoyt for lunch.

12:30 – 2:10 pm.  Lunch with Dan Hoyt.  Now, this is something that never (or almost never) happens during the school year.  Lunch out with a friend!  Highly unusual.  I work with a lot of great people, but we’re all usually too busy to spend much time with each other.  So, to all who wish to criticize academics for “goofing off” during the summer, feel free to use this long lunch as evidence.

2:10 – 2:30 pm.  Walked back home, read a few emails en route, and then wrote the preceding.

2:30 – 3:45 pm.  Reviewing for Routledge.  Also answered professional emails, including one re: recent scholarship on children’s lit and politics.

3:45 – 4:00 pm.  Guitar break.  Still have difficulty with E-string major barre chords, but left hand is recovering.  Played “Pretty in Pink,” “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” ”You Meet the Nicest People in Your Dreams.”  In case you don’t know that last one, here is Fats Waller’s rendition: You Meet the Nicest People in Your Dreams.  It’s one of my favorite songs, hence its inclusion on this jaunty mix from a month or so back.

4:00 – 5:35 pm.  Routledge, continued. Finished review of prospectus & chapters.  Also sent email to Eric re: Barnaby, and received reply with promise of that required info. would be forthcoming.

5:35 – 6:55 pm.  To Claflin Books to pick up some books I’d ordered.  (Whenever possible, I’m trying to buy from local bookshops, rather than Amazon.)  Other errands.  Also picked up Karin from campus.

6:55 – 7:05 pm.  Facebook.

7:05 – 8:20 pm.  During dinner prep, read more of Going Bovine to Karin.  Then, dinner with a Daily Show (from last week, & one that we hadn’t seen).  Washed dishes.

8:20 – 8:30 pm. Read email, wrote one (professional), and added New York Magazine piece on Sendak to links (at bottom of my tribute page).

8:30 – 8:50 pm. Printed some labels for & burned a few mixes. Will send these out tomorrow.

8:50 - 11:20 pm.  There’s more Routledge stuff to do, but I’m turning to something that I really want to complete this week.  Revising, expanding, restructuring an essay that theorizes the difference between comics and picture books.  It’s me at my most formalist, and it’s a question I’m very much invested in.  I’m doing a lot of restructuring, both within paragraphs (the version I gave at MLA had a more deductive structure, and the argument is clearer if I give it an inductive structure) and in the larger body of the piece (changing the order of paragraphs).  I’m also bringing in examples. For the conference-paper version, I simply showed the images up on the screen.  For this printed version, I will not be able to rely upon images. (If I can summon the energy to do so, I may seek rights for a few, but… certainly nowhere near as many as I used in the talk.)

11:20 pm – 12:00 am.  Checked into Facebook, and read Jon Scalzi’s excellent “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.”  It uses video games as a metaphor to explain privilege, and it does so brilliantly.  Hat tips to Jonathan Beecher Field and Laine Nooney.  At this point, I think we should also add that Paul Karasik’s Master Class in Comics Narrative looks fantastic.  Thanks to Bridgid Shannon, watched this recent piece, in which Maurice Sendak talks about Melville, Blake, comics, “the strangeness of childhood,” and why his favorite books (of his own) are all considered “inappropriate.”

Total work time: 7 hours, 25 minutes.

And… concluding with a song.  Was hoping for the Pogues’ “Tuesday Morning,” but couldn’t find a YouTube video I liked.  So, we’ll go with the classic Dropkick Murphys number, “Workers’ Song.”

If you found a day’s work in (my) academic life to be of little interest, then it’s hard to believe that you’d want to read any of these posts:

• The full “What Do Professors Do All Summer?” series (May 2012): Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, & Summertime, and the Living Is Busy (the final post).
• The full “What Do Professors Do All Day?” series (Feb. 2011): Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, & What Do Professors Do All Week? (the final post).
• Other posts tagged Academe, Advice, or Autobiography.

The week’s ongoing experiment in trying my readers’ (or “reader’s,” singular?) patience continues.  In a (possibly misguided) attempt to make academic labor visible, I’m documenting how I spend my days during this first week of summer, when academics are allegedly “on vacation.”  Here is day 3.

Monday, 14 May 2012.

12:00 – 1:55 am.  Caught and fixed a few typos in yesterday’s post.  Responded to some Facebook stuff.  Also responded to kind note from comics scholar extraordinaire, Prof. Charles Hatfield.  Whenever I have questions about comics, I always turn to Charles.  Washed some dishes, put others in dishwasher.  Prepared for bed, read another chapter of Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

1:55 – 8:00 am.  Sleep.

8:00 – 8:31 am.  Rose, 50 jumping jacks, stretched.  Posted link to yesterday’s post on Twitter.  Checked into Facebook as well.

8:31 – 9:15 am.  Ran 4 miles.  In playground en route, included both upside-down push-ups (see Saturday for explanation) and chin-ups, without further injuring left hand.

9:15- 9:20 am.  Turned on sprinkler to encourage new grass.  Also removed some brush/weeds that I’d been meaning to remove.

9:20 – 9:50 am.  Inside.  Drank water.  Checked Twitter.  Gary Groth has posted an excerpt from his forthcoming (in The Comics Journal) interview with Maurice Sendak.  Must read this after finishing exercises.  His description of Maurice as “gregariously grumpy” is exactly right.  Wrote two professional emails, and one personal one (to my sister).

9:50 – 10:20 am.  Post-running exercises. Did abdominals, as per usual.  For the first time since injuring my left hand, experimented with push-ups.  The only way I can do them is to make a fist, and use my fists to hold me up — but the fists aren’t quite as resilient a structure as flat hands or hands holding onto weights. I could not do the usual number: muscles capable, but left hand starts to spasm (& so I stop).  Disappointing, but at least I’m doing these again.

10:20 – 10:50 am.  Breakfast!  Also responded to some people on Twitter.  Took a second look at the NYT‘s collection of artists’ tributes to Maurice Sendak.  Art Spiegelman, Tomi Ungerer, Marc Rosenthal, Bob Staake, others.  Here’s Spiegelman’s.  (Click for a larger image.)

And check out the others artists’ work on the Times‘ page, too.  Have added this and Michael Rosen’s tribute (hat tip to Susan Marie Swanson on Twitter) to collection of links at bottom of my tribute.

10:50 – 11:30 am.  More business correspondence, including following up with Eric Reynolds at Fantagraphics.  Having received updated meeting notes from Lori Cohoon, I also updated the Children’s Literature Association MLA liaison’s report & sent the new version into Kathy at ChLA.

11:30 – 11:35 am. Wrote back to my cousin, Caro.

11:35 – 11:50 am. More  business correspondence, including note to Jeff Smith’s assistant at Cartoon Books.  So great we’ll be able to use (in our article on Moby-Dick and Bone) pristine images from the artist himself.  Thanks, Kathleen!

11:50 am – 12:20 pm.  Shower (& shave & dress) at last!  (The problem of checking email before finishing exercises means that I also end up answering it before showering.)  Listening to Fake Natives’ Fake Natives.  Local band influenced by late 1970s / early 1980s new wave.  Good stuff.  Check out title track and “West Is Best” for starters.  After seeing them last Friday, I promised the lead singer that I’d send him a mix of Robyn Hitchcock — I think he’d like Hitchcock.  Need to do that.

12:20 – 12:40 pm. Business correspondence: good response from Eric at Fantagraphics. I’m finding out ways I can pitch in to help move The Complete Barnaby Vol. 1 more swiftly to press.

12:40 – 1:20 pm. Lunch!  Also read another chapter of Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?… which extended my lunch for another 10 minutes or so.  I think the chapter “Mind” is where this book is really coming together for me — and not just because it makes extended use of the plexiglass dome in Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book (!).  One of my tasks for this summer (I would like to say “for this week,” but let’s be realistic, shall we?) is posting a sampling of my Seuss students’ “Sighting Seuss” projects.  Really interesting work.

1:20 – 2:00 pm.  Barnaby-related correspondence.  Also, revised that ChLA-MLA liaison report yet again.  Oy.

2:00 – 2:30 pm.  Personal-professional correspondence.  Well, in truth, this one is more personal.  But Jules Walker Danielson (who runs the BEST picture book blog, Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast) is one of my children’s lit buddies.  And music buddies!  Speaking of, during this time period, also burned that Robyn Hitchcock mix for Dan (lead singer of Fake Natives).  Gotta burn Jules a mix, too.

2:30 – 2:35 pm.  Prepared to leave for campus to attend meeting.

2:35 – 2:50 pm.  Walked to campus.  Wish my left hand had recovered enough to work the bicycle’s brakes.

2:50 – 4:30 pm.  Arrived 10 minutes early so that I could get a seat.  Meeting: “Special Session of the Faculty Senate: Faculty and Unclassified Salaries. How Do We Align Salaries with 2025?”  Room was packed.  Excellent turn-out from faculty and staff.  At Kansas State University, we receive no cost-of-living raises, and only get merit raises when there’s money (last one was 5 years ago).  In January, we did get an across-the-board 2.5% raise — which President Schulz described as a de facto “cost-of-living raise.”  But that’s a one-time event.  In sum, the meeting was to address the long-term salary compression problems faced by those who work for the university — a side effect of the nationwide movement to privatize erstwhile public higher education.  (Kansas State University receives 23%-24% of its budget from the state.  The legislature and governor prefer an indirect tax on the students — in the form of tuition increases — to keep the university going.  Kansas favors tax breaks for businesses and the wealthy, and increasing the costs that everyone else has to pay.)  The meeting was worth attending, and our President is an effective administrator and communicator.  However, whether anything will come of this discussion remains to be seen.

4:30 – 4:45 pm.  Walked home.

4:45 – 5:30 pm.  Wrote the preceding, undertook more business correspondence (including Barnaby/Fantagraphics and invited talk in Missouri next spring), & sent off FINAL version of that liaison report.

5:30 – 5:50 pm.  Personal correspondence.  Quick note back to Jules Danielson, & note to my mother.

5:50 – 6:50 pm.  Routledge editorial work.  I have been meaning to get to this all day.  I became editor of Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture series last June, which is proving to be more time-consuming than I’d anticipated.  I think I was last caught up on these in… March.

6:50 – 7:15 pm. Read Going Bovine to Karin during dinner preparation.

7:15 – 8:25 pm.  Watched last night’s Mad Men: “Dark Shadows.”  Also read this and this.  I love learning about the research that Matthew Weiner & co. build into the episodes.  The New York Times piece that upsets Pete was a real article.  Oh, and if you enjoy the “Inside Mad Men” pieces, here’s the one for that episode (with, yes, spoilers).

8:25 – 8:35 pm.  Professional correspondence — which, like all such correspondence, is partially personal.

8:35 – 9:00 pm.  More Routledge work. Also snuck in a tiny bit of professional correspondence.

9:00 – 9:10 pm.  Added this Mo Willems piece to my Sendak links (at the bottom of this page).  Hat tip to Jules Danielson.  Also added this reminiscence from Alec Baldwin.

9:05 – 11:05 pm.  Routledge work, which is: reading sample chapters, proposals, & writing responses to same.

11:05 – 11:45 pm.  Checked into Facebook, read Libby Gruner’s Sendak tribute, which I’ve added to my Sendak links (bottom of this page).  I think it will take all of us children’s literature people quite a while to work through the loss. It’s so huge, so vast.  Immeasurable, really.  Also looked at these beautiful sheet music covers by René Magritte from the 1920s (HT to Bill Genereux).  Magritte is one of my favorite artists.  Never seen these before.

11:45 pm – 12:00 am.  More business correspondence, all Barnaby-related.  Some connected to volume 1, and some connected to volume 3.  (It’s a 5-volume series, & the goal is to publish 1 per year.)

Total work time: 7 hours, 45 min.  Main problem today was all of that email.  I predict a decline in email volume tomorrow, during which I will get up to date on Routledge stuff, and get cracking on this piece theorizing comics and picture books — needs to be restructured, developed, etc.

Concluding with a song.  Predictably, it’s New Order’s “Blue Monday” (1983).

If you found this tour through the mundane to be alarmingly bland, then I suspect you’ll want to avoid:

• The full “What Do Professors Do All Summer?” series (May 2012): Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, & Summertime, and the Living Is Busy (the final post).
• The full “What Do Professors Do All Day?” series (Feb. 2011): Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, & What Do Professors Do All Week? (the final post).
• Other posts tagged Academe, Advice, or Autobiography.

Continuing what I started yesterday, I’m continuing this week’s chronicle of what a professor does in the summer. As noted, it’s an attempt to make visible the work that academics do when most people think we’re on holiday. So. If you found yesterday’s post dull and yet slogged through it anyway, then you’re in luck: today’s post will continue to be disappointingly mundane.

Sunday, 13 May 2012.

12:00 – 1:15 am. Tooled around a bit more on that mix, started dishwasher, washed dishes-that-don’t-go-in-dishwasher, checked in on Facebook, prepared for bed.  Read another chapter of Fun Home.

8:00 – 9:30 am.  Watched CBS Sunday Morning, in anticipation of seeing a tribute to Maurice Sendak.  The show did a brief piece on three people who died this week: Nicholas Katzenbach, Sendak, and Vidal Sassoon. Too brief, but they got Sendak right, noting that he didn’t uphold the romantic ideal of childhood.  I checked into Facebook & Twitter. I read Maria Nikolajeva’s family chronicle (part 1, part 2, part 3). I think these chronicles have a particular interest for me because my own family is diasporic: my immediate family lives in New England, Mexico, and Switzerland; extended family (cousins, aunts & uncles) in South Africa (mostly), England, California, and Australia (though, to be honest, I’ve long since fallen out of touch with the cousin in Australia). I read pieces on Maurice Sendak by Steven Heller and Shirley Hughes, and updated my links of Sendak tributes (at the bottom of my own reminiscence).  Read Anita Silvey’s piece on Kevin Henkes’ Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse. So glad she does this blog.  For Mother’s Day, posted (on my blog) a clip of Bruce Springsteen dancing with his 90-year-old mother (planned weeks ago, when I found the clip). Speaking of Mother’s Day, today’s Cul de Sac (a repeat from 2008) is great, as always. On list of books I need to get: The Mighty Alice, the latest Cul de Sac collection.

9:30 – 9:40 am. Read Sunday comics.

9:40 – 9:50 am.  Answered email (academic).  Found notes Lissa and I made (back in January) for our Oslo Keywords talk.

9:50 – 10:50 am. Actually wrote up and turned in my ChLA-MLA liaison report, thanks to Lori Cohoon’s meeting notes.  (Thanks, Lori!  And thanks to Jennifer Miskec, who sent them to me.)  Also, more email.  And spent a few minutes fiddling with that mix I mentioned last night.  And made plans to talk to Lissa re: Oslo Keywords talk this afternoon.  So, mostly but not entirely work during this period.

10:50 am – 12:00 pm.  Finished mix, burned it, made label. In the shower, I came up with a promotional idea for the bio of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss.  Have proposed this idea to press; we’ll see what they say.

12:00 – 12:30 pm. Wrote personal emails. Added another Sendak link to my reminiscence (at bottom of page).

12:30 – 1:35 pm. Lunch. Also caught up on the last 2 weeks’ worth of daily comics. The Kansas City Star runs 2 pages of comics, but I sometimes fall behind.  Usually, I catch up on the weekend, but last weekend was too busy, evidently.

1:35 – 2:05 pm. Nap.

2:05 – 2:30 pm.  Spoke with Lissa Paul re: our Oslo Keywords talk, and friendly conversation, too.  My work conversations tend also to be conversations with friends — which makes it hard to separate work from non-work.

2:30 – 2:55 pm.  Wrote up description of our Oslo talk, and sent it to Lissa for review. Also responded to my sister re: visiting her (& Michel & my niece, Emily!) prior to that talk. I booked my ticket for a day later than she’d advised me to. (To arrive in Zurich on a Friday, one would need to lave Kansas on a Thursday. D’oh!) I seem highly accident-prone in booking international travel. I once arrived a day late to a conference in Japan because I forgot to factor in the fact that I would be crossing the International Date Line.

2:55 – 3:15 pm.  Spoke/typed via gmail chat with Jennifer Hughes. This was mostly friendly conversation, though we did talk a little bit about our article on Moby-Dick and Jeff Smith’s Bone. We finished revisions last weekend (it was accepted with revisions by The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics), and have been waiting on permission from Jeff Smith.  That was granted (thanks, Jeff!), and now his assistant is preparing to send us the images we’re going to use — this will ensure that only the best quality images of his work appear in print.

3:15 – 6:00 pm.  Professional correspondence — though, here, too, these colleagues are also friends.  So, though it’s correspondence with more of a “business” purpose, it’s also friendly.  Also, in my capacity as ChLA-MLA liaison, sent in to the Children’s Lit Association’s Kathy Kiessling the ChLA MLA Call for Papers 2013, edition.  Reviewed copy-edited book review for South Atlantic Quarterly — it’s of Eric Tribunella’s Melancholia and Maturation, which is really good.  My review (which says that & more) will appear in SAR … well, I don’t know when.  Fall, perhaps?  Received Lissa’s comments on our description, and sent it off to Nina Christensen (one of the conference organizers).  I’ve never been to Norway before, and am looking forward to going.

6:00 – 6:50 pm.  Phone call to Mom.  Happy Mother’s Day to all you mothers out there!

6:50 – 7:00 pm.  Checked Facebook.

7:00 – 8:00 pm. With dinner, watched last week’s Mad Men: “Lady Lazarus.”  Also folded laundry and watched the extra “Inside Mad Men” bit (it comes with the iTunes subscription).

8:00 – 9:30 pm. Watched this week’s Sherlock: “The Hounds of Baskerville.”

9:30 - 10:45 pm.  Folded & put away laundry.  Finished weekly email to family that I started at around noon.  Called United to see if I could make my August flight a day earlier, in order fix my mistake.  I can.  Annoyed at myself for being an idiot (costs me a couple hundred bucks to make the change), but this is the better option — the trains I would have had to take instead would be comparably expensive.  Perhaps someday, I will learn how to use these travel websites.  (True, on that day, I could save myself further money by just hitching a ride on the nearest flying pig.)  Also read Tim Goodman’s analysis of the Mad Men ”Lady Lazarus” episode.  And worked on this blog post.

10:45 – 11:25 pm.  Thinking about my graphic novel class in the fall, read Michael A. Chaney’s “Is There an African-American Graphic Novel?” in Stephen Tabachnick’s Teaching the Graphic Novel (2009). The only book I’ve read that might “qualify” is Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro (2008). Chaney mentions four books I need to read before ordering my books for the fall: Ho Che Anderson’s King; Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin, and Kyle Baker’s Birth of a Nation; Lance Tooks’ Narcissa; and Dwayne McDuffie and Robert L. Washington’s Static Shock.  The books by McGruder and Tooks are out of print.  King is in print, but only in hardcover.  The descriptions, on-line, look excellent.  This article also led me to Christian Davenport’s discussion of black superheroes.

Looked at some other essays in Tabachnick’s book.  Also emailed Charles Hatfield (who, incidentally. wrote the opening essay in Teaching the Graphic Novel) re: the essay-length version of my contribution to his “Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books” panel.  It’s on the docket for this week.

11:25 – 11:40 pm.  Answered some queries re: the Children’s Literature Program.  People want to know whether we have a doctorate or an on-line version.  We do not have either.  Usually, I answer these queries within 24 hours, but — since all were asking for something we cannot provide — I’m a bit tardier than usual.  One query was from a few days ago, but another was from April 26.  What happens is emails to which I can offer a helpful reply get priority; other, less urgent ones, get buried in my in box.  This is not an excellent system, I admit.

11:45 – 12:00 pm.  Logged into Facebook, answered professional email via Facebook — friend putting me in touch with possible book-promotion event this fall.  Need to follow up again with Fantagraphics: Until I have a definite date on The Complete Barnaby Vol. 1, it’s too early to schedule anything.  Really hope that they manage to bring this book out by September (they’d originally said June, but delays in finding strips have slowed the project down).  If this book and the bio. can come out more or less at the same time, then there are potential cross-promotional opportunities.  If they don’t, then there aren’t.  Also checked Twitter.  Watched this lovely short (3-minute) animated film:

Believe it or not, it’s a student project.  Hat tip to Rebecca Coffindaffer on Facebook.

Total work time: 5 hrs, 40 min.  Not the most productive Sunday I’ve ever had, but I’m OK with that.  It’s been a busy term.

In conclusion, here’s today’s musical number: the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday” (1967, written by Carole King & Gerry Goffin):

If you found this exercise in educational exhibitionism to be unbearably tedious, then you’ll also want to miss:

• The full “What Do Professors Do All Summer?” series (May 2012): Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, & Summertime, and the Living Is Busy (the final post).
• The full “What Do Professors Do All Day?” series (Feb. 2011): Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, & What Do Professors Do All Week? (the final post).
• Other posts tagged Academe, Advice, or Autobiography.

For a week in February of 2011, I blogged exactly what I did each day — the goal being to show precisely how academics spend their time. Starting today, I’m beginning the summer edition of the same experiment. From today through Friday the 18th, I will publicly keep track of how I use my time as a Professor of English at Kansas State University… who is ostensibly on “summer vacation.”

My motive? Professors often hear, ”How nice that you get summers off!” It is true that we do not teach in the summers — if we elect not to teach, and there are plenty who do teach.  One gets paid for teaching, and if you’ve received no raise in (for example) 5 years, then that’s a way to pick up “extra” money.  I elect not to teach, and instead continue the unpaid work of service and research.  I say “unpaid” because I do not receive a salary from the university in the summers. But I do other work.  And, since I gave my last final yesterday, today would be the first day of my summer.

Saturday, 12 May 2012.

12:00 – 12:45 am.  Preparing for bed.  In bed, started reading Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012), which is great — and, incidentally, connected to my field (I teach and study children’s literature and comics/graphic novels).

12:45 – 8:00 am. Asleep. First time I’ve gotten over 7 hours of sleep since — well, since the previous weekend.  Night before, I only got 4 hours.  5, the night before that.

8:00 – 8:15 am.  Up, checking weather.  Light rain.  Run or not?  While dithering over that question, checked into Facebook.

8:15 – 8:30 am. 50 jumping jacks, pre-running stretches, dressed for running.

8:30 – 9:15 am.  Ran 4 miles (I’m not very fast), during which I also stopped at a playground for a set of what I call upside-down push-ups (keeping body in plank position, head facing up, do chin-ups on bar close to ground) and one set of chin-ups.  Especially pleased about the latter: it’s the first time I’ve been able to do them since injuring my left hand in a bicycling accident on the 1st of the month.  (I seemed to have pulled/bruised some muscles in the hand. It’s recovering, but slowly.)

9:15 – 9:30 am. Drank water, read email, wrote the preceding.

9:30 – 9:45 am.  Post-running exercises.  Restricted myself to abdominals. Since injuring left hand, have been avoiding the push-ups.  Think I might be able to manage them again, but am wary of exacerbating injury.  Decided to reintroduce them after Monday’s run.

9:45 – 10:00 am.  Breakfast!  Also read Gail Collins’ “The Anatomy of a Jokester” (found article via Facebook feed, HT to Toni Tadolini).  Though Mr. Romney changes his political positions with the shifting political winds, I think he may be telling the truth when he says he doesn’t remember bullying people in high school.  People on the receiving end of power remember acutely the injustices done to them; powerful people can more easily forget the injustices they inflict.  The bullied have longer memories than the bullies.

10:00 – 11:30 am.  Shower, shave, dress, recycling, lamp, talk.  To explain the last half of that, despite its population of over 50,000, Manhattan Kansas has neither municipal trash service nor recycling pick-up.  We (as do most residents) pay an independent company for trash pick-up, but take in the recycling ourselves.  ”Lamp” = “took in lamp to be repaired,” and “talk” = “chatted with Karin, who had returned from graduation” (as Dept. Head, she is obliged to attend).

11:30 – 11:35 am.  Answered email (business).

11:35 am – 12:45 pm. I intended to finish grading my last finals yesterday (this final took place yesterday afternoon).  I did start grading them, but I instead got involved with other business (professional emails & my blog, mostly).  So, first task is to finish this last set of finals.

12:45 – 1:40 pm. Brought in supplies (purchased by Karin), read to her from Libba Bray’s Going Bovine, which is just entering its “road trip” phase.  If you haven’t seen the trailer for this book, you should go and watch it.  With lunch, we caught up on the Colbert Report — Wednesday’s episode.

1:40 – 2:40 pm. Lissa Paul and I are invited speakers at a children’s literature conference in Oslo, late August.  I’ve been meaning to buy my plane tickets (for which the conference will reimburse me) since… February.  Assisted by Karin, I’ve got the tickets, which also includes a visit (prior to the talk) to my 1-year-old niece and her parents (in Basel, Switzerland).  Always a challenge plotting travel from Manhattan Kansas to, well, to anywhere.  Also contacted conference organizer with my travel, and tried to see if Lissa and I had made notes for a description of our talk (it’s on Keywords for Children’s Literature, which she and I co-edited).

2:40 – 3:00 pm.  Checked into Facebook, read about Gov. Brownback’s plans to bankrupt the state, allowing him to further cut funds to public schools and social services. Also read this great piece on a company that makes toys based on children’s drawings (hat tip to Brian Herrera).  Couldn’t find notes for talk, so dropped Lissa a line re the talk description.  Emailed my sister re above-mentioned travel plans.

3:00 – 5:20 pm.  Resumption of grading.  Music: Buddy Rich Quintet & Max Roach Quintet’s Rich vs. Roach (1959).  Those drums keep me awake and focused!  Also listened to a “Different Rhythms” mix-in-progress of drum-based music.  And finished grading.

5:20 – 5:40 pm.  Calculated final grades, entered final grades, checked them, and then submitted them for this.  (Turned in grades for other two classes on Thursday.)  Also helped Karin cart in the groceries.  So, excepting the odd complaint, that’s it for the term!  I’m hoping there are no complaints, but — since the gradebook is electronic — students have been this week kvetching about their grades, sending me emails.  Perhaps that’s gotten it out of their systems.  I don’t know.

5:40 – 6:10 pm.  Re-read some of Maurice Sendak‘s books: Where the Wild Things Are (1963), Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water (1965), Alligators All Around (1962), What can you do with a shoe? (words by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers, 1955), How Little Lori Visited Times Square (words by Amos Vogel, 1963).  Recently, I decided that I should, over time, collect the Sendak books I didn’t have.  A couple of months back, I picked up a used copy of Marcel Aymé’s The Wonderful Farm (1951, though my copy is a 1994 reprint): that’s the first book he illustrated for Ursula Nordstrom, who would be his editor for so many of his greatest works.

During this period of time, I also responded to a professional email.

6:10 – 7:10 pm.  Read Karin Going Bovine during dinner prep.  Watched a Daily Show with dinner.

7:10 – 10:10 pm.  To the movie theatre for… The Avengers!  A clever adaptation.  Joss Whedon‘s script supplies ample wit, and his direction brings the action.  SPOILER ALERT: I want to read the death of the fan (Agent Phil Coulson, played by Clark Gregg) as a comment on the fans who’ve threatened to boycott The Avengers over Marvel and Stan Lee’s poor treatment of those who actually created the work.  You know: Kill the fans!  But I suspect I’m locating themes that Whedon didn’t weave into it.  The film was a great example of its genre.  I wouldn’t say that it fully overcame the limitations of the contemporary superhero film, but it did a fine job working within those confines.  Whedon understands the characters, their relationships, and gave Black Widow a real role in the film; she was an equal with the other Avengers.  Oh, and since I teach and write about comics, I could officially count this as “work”!  Ha!  Often, I think that the lack of a boundary between my professional life and personal life can be a problem.  In this instance, I’m actually quite delighted.

10:10 – 10:30 pm.  Wrote the preceding and watched the CBS Sunday Morning profile on Whedon.

10:30 – 11:15 pm. As liaison between the Children’s Literature Association and the Modern Language Association, I was asked to send in a report (to the former) this past Monday — the beginning of exam week, likely the busiest week of the term.  The other cause for my delay is that I no longer have time to execute my duties as well as I would like: I manage to get all essential stuff in on time (i.e., MLA deadlines are met), but I’m otherwise just too overwhelmed.  When I started in 2007, I could keep up.  Now, I find that impossible.  Unfortunately, my term as liaison doesn’t end until 2013.  BUT my larger point is: I worked on the report.  Tried and failed to locate my notes from the meeting; have contacted Executive Committee of MLA Children’s Lit Division, since they will have meeting notes.  I’ve asked if I can step down before 2013 (when my term ends), but I’ve been told that I cannot.

11:20 – 12:00 pm.  Wrote up some of the preceding (I’ve been keeping track all day).  Noodled around on a mix.  I make mixes for fun.  This one is a gift for a friend.  (Ain’t sayin’ who!)

Total work time: 6 hrs, 40 min.  I didn’t include The Avengers, but I did include ten minutes each time we read Going Bovine, and the re-reading of Sendak.  Thinking about and reading children’s literature (& culture) is my job.

For the previous “What Do Professors Do All Week?” experiment, I used a children’s book for each day of the week; this, time, I’ll include a song.  Here’s the Godfathers’ “Birth, School, Work, Death” (1986)

If you found this post tedious, then you certainly won’t enjoy:

• The full “What Do Professors Do All Summer?” series (May 2012): Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, & Summertime, and the Living Is Busy (the final post).
• The full “What Do Professors Do All Day?” series (Feb. 2011): Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, & What Do Professors Do All Week? (the final post).
• Other posts tagged Academe, Advice, or Autobiography.

The main problem with Chronicle of Higher Education blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley is not racism.  The main problem is her intellectually lazy, sloppy “journalism” that cherry-picks examples in order to “support” uninformed opinions.  In her recent piece, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations,” she reads the descriptions of dissertations by five recent Ph.D.s in Black Studies from Northwestern University.  Based on this exhaustive study of the field, she concludes:

If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

I understand why people call her racist: as commenter chuckkle notes, Ms. Riley “makes definitive evaluations of academic research without having bothered to read it…. She is clairvoyant, and can judge it in advance.  The Queen has delivered her verdict, judging it in advance.  There’s a word for that: prejudice.”  In other words, Ms. Riley’s type of casual generalizations also underwrites racist thinking.  However, Riley’s primary problem (as a writer, at least) is less her susceptibility to the bigot’s false assumptions and more an entire way of reasoning that makes her vulnerable to all sorts of unproven ideas (including many varieties of prejudice).

Based on her Chronicle columns, Ms. Riley appears to lack the ability to reason.  Indeed, should she happen to come across this blog post, I humbly suggest that she might begin her reeducation at the Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacies website.  There, she will learn about the fallacies of relying on anecdotal evidence (say, relying upon five dissertation descriptions to represent an entire field), personal incredulity (because Ms. Riley cannot understand the field, it therefore must not be true), and false cause (assuming, for instance, that having a black president means that racism has been solved).  Her response to the criticism is classic tu quoque: instead of engaging with the criticism, she just turns it back on those who accuse her.

Ms. Riley’s inability to sustain reasoned argument is troubling, but the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s decision to employ her is baffling.  Plenty of bloggers play fast and loose with facts or succumb to logical fallacies.  But why would a publication that covers higher education wish to grant a platform to a person who seems to have learned so little?

Update, 7 May 2012:

• The Chronicle has asked Ms. Riley to leave its blog.  Editor Liz McMillen explains why.

One of the many pleasures of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010) is its evocation of the thrill of research. As he traces the history of his family’s netsuke (small Japanese ivory and wood carvings), de Waal describes great-great-great grandfather Charles Ephrussi’s art-collecting in nineteenth-century Paris as “‘vagabonding’ … done with real intensity”:

Vagabonding was his word. It sounds recreational rather than diligent or professional…. But it does get the pleasure of the searching right, the way you lose your sense of time when you are researching, are pulled on by whims as much as by intent. It makes me think of the rummaging that I am doing through his life as I track the netsuke, the noting of other people’s annotations in the margins. I vagabond in libraries, trace where he went and why. I follow the leads of whom he knew, whom he wrote about, whose pictures he bought. In Paris I go and stand outside his old offices in the rue Favart in the summer rain like some sad art-historical gumshoe and wait to see who comes out. (72-73)

That’s exactly right. Writing a biography — or, truly, intense research of any kind — is detective work. It’s extremely absorbing, getting a lead, following it to a new source, finding connections between lives and ideas. You are on a quest, and you must keep going until you finish!

But dedication to the quest also takes its toll. As Charles McGrath reports in today’s New York Times Magazine profile of master biographer Robert Caro, researching and writing the third volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson had taken so long that Caro and his wife went broke. She sold their Long Island home, found them a cheaper apartment in the Bronx, and got a teaching job to help pay the bills. The biographer — obsessive, driven, seeking every last detail — often depends upon a patient, supportive spouse. It’s no coincidence that my forthcoming biography, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature, is dedicated to Karin. Who else but one’s partner would put up with such fanatical devotion to a book?

This process recalls a line in a recent Times Higher Education piece on academics: “the idealised academic has no ties or responsibilities to limit their capacity to work.” This is equally true of the biographer. For both the professor and the biographer, there is no boundary between life and work. Your life is your work and your work is your life. Or, in the case of the biographer, your work is someone else’s life.

I’m not arguing that one’s work should be all-consuming, though I would note that Caro’s work on LBJ and Edmund de Waal’s absorbing family history are both excellent because each writer is so very thorough, obsessive, and meticulous — in both the research and the writing. McGrath notes that Caro and his editor Robert Gottlieb “argue about length, but they also argue about prose, even about punctuation.”  As Gottlieb says,

You know that insane old expression, “The quality of his defect is the defect of his quality,” or something like that? That’s really true of Bob [Caro]. What makes him such a genius of research and reliability is that everything is of exactly the same importance to him. The smallest thing is as consequential as the biggest. A semicolon matters as much as, I don’t know, whether Johnson was gay.

Beyond providing a helpful context for my own battles with Walter (my editor for the bio), this explains my own process to me. It’s not just about perfectionism. It’s about getting it right. And everything matters: Structure, word choice, punctuation, which detail gets retained and which one gets cut.

Caro had to cut 350,000 words from The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. He tells McGrath sadly, “There were things cut out of ‘The Power Broker’ that should not have been cut out,” and then shows him “his personal copy of the book, dog-eared and broken-backed, filled with underlining and corrections written in between the lines. Caro is a little like Balzac, who kept fussing over his books even after they were published.” It would be an understatement to say I can relate to that. Though I had to cut far fewer words from my biography of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss, there were things cut that should not have been cut. And I’ve seriously thought of marking up a published copy (due this September) to fix those omissions, or infelicitous changes in phrasing introduced during the copyediting (the copyeditor was unusually fond of passive voice). In looking at the proofs, I thought: Why did I allow the excision of Johnson’s favorite book, George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody?  My main reason was (and is) the fact that I can include it — and its satirical style’s influence on Johnson — in one of the afterwords for the 5-volume The Complete Barnaby. It’s hard to let this go, and I’m fortunate to have the luxury to hang on a bit longer. As de Waal writes near the end of his book, he has the feeling that he should “Just go home and leave these stories be. But leaving be is hard” (346).

Most of all, when reading Caro or de Waal, I think: my God, I wish I could write like them! I’m not in their league. Indeed, my league couldn’t find their league on a map. Describing the motorcade in Dallas on 22 November 1963, Caro writes,

Lyndon Johnson was far enough behind the Presidential limousine that the cheering for the Kennedys and the Connallys — for John Connally, some of it, for his onetime assistant, who had become his rival in Texas — was dying down by the time his car passed, and most of the faces in the crowd were still turned to follow the Presidential car as it drove away from them. So that, as Lyndon Johnson’s car made its slow way down the canyon, what lay ahead of him in that motorcade could, in a way, have been seen by someone observing his life as a foretaste of what might lie ahead if he remained Vice-President: five years of trailing behind another man, humiliated, almost ignored, and powerless.  The Vice-Presidency, “filled with trips . . . chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping . . . in the end it is nothing,” as he later put it. (“The Transition,” The New Yorker, 2 Apr. 2012, 35-36)

Masterful.  I favor tighter sentences myself, but his epic style works well with his subject. We readers know that, in a few moments, President Kennedy will be assassinated; later that day, LBJ will become president. And Caro knows we know. So, he allows our knowledge to inform the scene, and instead focuses on creating Johnson’s (likely) experience at that moment — enduring the relative powerlessness of the Vice-Presidency.

De Waal writes lyrically and with great insight into what it means to be human. Early in the book, he observes, “Melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus. And this netsuke is a small, tough explosion of exactitude. It deserves this kind of exactitude in return” (16).  Later, he considers his great grandparents, in Vienna, in the early 19-teens.  The “more assimilated Jews [the great grandparents] worry about these newcomers,” he writes: “their speech and dress and customs are not aligned to the Bildung of the Viennese. There is anxiety that they will impede assimilation.” At the end of this paragraph, de Waal concludes, “Maybe, I think, this is anxiety from the recently arrived towards the very newly arrived.  They are still in transit” (188). Describing his grandmother’s decision to burn letters from her mother (in part, he suggests, because they may mention the great-grandmother’s lovers), de Waal confesses, “There is something about burning all of those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? … Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. Losing things can sometimes gain a space in which to live” (347).

This is the big conundrum of the researcher. To throw out or to keep? I tend towards the latter. (If I throw it out, I might need it later.) But de Waal is right: being encumbered by research (books, articles, photocopies from archives, etc.) grants one little space to live. Further, the time required to sustain research affords little time to winnow out and throw out. It’s hard to manage your archives and move forward with the next project — to say nothing of grading, teaching, editing, committee work, or, say, having a life.

So we keep things. However, as Robin Bernstein observes in her Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011), things are bearers of stories.  And, as de Waal notes, “It is not just that things carry stories with them. Stories are a kind of thing, too” (349).

They are. And they’ve been on my mind because — for any of my readers who may be in or near Manhattan Kansas next week — I’m giving a talk on this very subject, at 4pm, Tuesday, April 24, in the K-Sate Student Union’s Little Theatre.  The title is “Collaborating with the FBI, Reading Other People’s Mail and Taking Children’s Literature Seriously: Tales from Writing the Biography of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss.” Free and open to the public. My talk will run about half an hour. There’ll be lots of stories.

I don’t enjoy flying, but I do like traveling. There is pleasure in being somewhere else, in experiencing a different city or country. All that is taken for granted in daily life cannot be taken for granted — and this is especially true when in another country, when the food, language, and culture differs in varying degrees from one’s own. Prior to dinner, the Swiss have apero, a kind of extended meal of hors d’ouvres. In a Japanese restaurant, shoes get left at near the doorway, and hands adjust to eating with chopsticks instead of a knife and fork.  But even in one’s own country, cities are not identical. Normal, Illinois (where I am flying from, as I write this) has three independent record stores on the same block, and a superlative used bookstore — with lots of children’s books — on the same block. And I ran along a trail I’ve never run along before.

When traveling, daily work does not vanish. The draft of the panel proposal must be edited and rewritten, via a series of email exchanges with a colleague at another university. The invited talk itself must be timed, polished, cut, honed, rehearsed.  Emails from students, colleagues, editors, and others require answers.

But all of this work happens out of context, in a different space — on a plane, in an airport, at the hotel lobby, in the back of the taxi, in the hotel room. Because it is happening in different locations, it acquires a slightly different flavor, even a greater sense of clarity.  This sharpness of perception may derive from the simple fact of being somewhere else: because they are unfamiliar, surroundings demand more attention, perhaps heightening attentiveness more generally. It may also derive from urgency: being a conference attendee or invited speaker creates a daily schedule that reorganizes time in ways that cannot always be anticipated.

I like that, though. And, since I’m almost always traveling for business, I enjoy the interchange of ideas — in the Q+A session of the talk, or the conversations over dinner, after the panel session, and so on.  During the past few days, talking with Jan Susina, his wife Jodie Slothower, their son Jacob, my former graduate student Elizabeth Williams (and other University of Illinois grad students, faculty, and families), I’ve learned about lots of books and articles I need to read: Theories of affect, collections of comics, young adult novels. Beyond that, there are ideas that lodge in my subconscious, emerging later, sometimes long after I’ve forgotten the source.  At some point, I’ll ask Jan to elaborate on the connections he sees between Paul Klee and Crockett Johnson.

Though academics work long hours (as I’ve documented elsewhere) for less compensation than we’d like, I feel privileged to have a job in which I get to learn, share what I’ve learned with other people, and learn from other people.

Combining these intellectual exchanges with the displacement of travel brings the experience of learning into focus, sustains a degree of clarity absent from my workaday life, prods me to keep moving forward into new areas.

And it’s especially nice when someone else picks up the cost! (I pay for most conference travel myself, but I’m coming back now from two invited talks, both of which were covered by the host institution.)  So, thanks to the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of English (especially Marah Gubar), and to Illinois State’s Department of English (especially Jan Susina and Roberta Trites), and to everyone who hosted, chatted, came to the talks or otherwise participated.  It’s been a great few days!  Until next time!

One wonders if David C. Levy came by his ignorance naturally, or whether it’s a state of mind that he has cultivated carefully over the years.  His piece in the Washington Post is so poorly informed that I suspect ignorance may simply be something with which nature has endowed him.  He claims that “Happily, senior faculty at most state universities and colleges now earn $80,000 to $150,000,” that faculty don’t work in the summers (according to him, we work only “the 30-week academic year, which leaves almost 22 weeks for vacation or additional employment”), and bases his ideas for expanding our workloads on the notion that we work roughly 40 hours a week.

All of these claims are false.  I recognize that this is an opinion piece, but shouldn’t the Washington Post provide some basic fact-checking?

1) Faculty salaries vary widely by discipline.  I don’t doubt that a senior faculty member in Business may earn between $80,000 to $150,000.  That’s very very rare for those of us in the Humanities.  I am a senior faculty member (tenured, full professor) in English at a state university, and that’s more than I make.

2) Faculty do work in the summers.  Some teach to supplement their income.  All of us devote some of that time to research and writing.  There are three components to the job: teaching (which includes grading, planning classes, teaching classes, meeting with students, writing recommendations, etc.), research (researching, writing and publishing articles and books), and service (serving on committees both within and beyond the university, reviewing manuscripts for presses and journals, leading programs/departments/professional organizations, etc.).  Some aspects of teaching (grading, class prep) begin and end with the school year — unless you teach summer courses.  But other aspects do not: designing new courses, revising the syllabus for a future term, reading new books so that you can improve the syllabus.  Still, it’s not unreasonable to assume that (unless a faculty member teaches in the summer) we’re doing less teaching work in the summer.

But research and service happen all year.  I do not stop reviewing manuscripts in the summer months, nor do I stop serving on committees for professional organizations.  I do not abandon my research.  Indeed, the summer months grant me precious time to work on books and articles — I’d be a fool if I didn’t take advantage of that.  At some point I need to do a version of “What Do Professors Do All Week?” for the summer months.  I guarantee you that, even during the months I am not paid (because I elect not to teach in the summer, Kansas State University does not pay me during the summer), I am working at least 40-hour weeks.  I would be willing to make this claim for my fellow faculty members, too.  YES, we do take holidays, when we can.  However, for me, at least, often those holidays are a day or two tacked on to the beginning or end of a trip to an academic conference.

3) We work far more than 40-hour weeks. During the school year, I typically work 60-hour weeks.  Indeed, I documented this fact in my “What Do Professors Do All Week?” series last spring, chronicling specifically how I spent each day of the week: Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

I’d write more about this subject, but I’m afraid I don’t have any more time right now.  And Mr. Levy, a word of advice: next time, write about what you know.

More posts on academia from Nine Kinds of Pie (this blog):

• What Do Professors Do All Week?: featuring all seven days (Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday).  This is how I spend my time.
• How to Publish Your Book; or, The Little Manuscript That Could.  These strategies have worked for me.
• How to Publish Your Article.  The “prequel” to the above.
• Not a Good Fit.  When your article gets rejected, what next?
• “You’re going to want to relax. But you can’t.”  These two sentences sum up life in academe.
• Never Say Die: A Mix for Job-Seekers.  Because you might need a little encouragement.
• Procrastigrading; or, How to Grade Efficiently.  One solution to the scourge of grading.  The main drawback is that it also involves actual grading.
• Professional Autodidact; or, How I Became a Children’s Literature Professor.  On teaching yourself to do what you didn’t study in graduate school.
• Fortunate Failures; or, How I Became a Scholar of Dr. Seuss.  When academe gives you lemons, make green eggs and ham.
• The Art of PowerPoint: A User’s Guide.  PowerPoint doesn’t have to suck.  Trust me.
• How Did I Get Here? Part I: Up from Adjuncthood.  Academic autobiography.
• How Did I Get Here? Part II: Into Professorland.  Academic autobiography, Part Deux.

            “It has been a long trip,” said Milo, climbing onto the couch where the princesses sat; “but we would have been here much sooner if I hadn’t made so many mistakes. I’m afraid it’s all my fault.”

            “You must never feel badly about making mistakes,” explained Reason quietly, “as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”

            “But there’s so much to learn,” he said with a thoughtful frown.

            “Yes, that’s true,” admitted Rhyme; “but it’s not just learning things that’s important. It’s learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters.”

— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961), p. 233

Sometimes, a press or a journal will tell you that what you’ve sent simply isn’t a “good fit.” Over a decade ago, American Literature turned down a piece on Crockett Johnson that I subsequently published in Children’s Literature 29 (2001) — the article that inspired my forthcoming biography of Johnson and Ruth Krauss. What does a “good fit” mean?  In that case, it meant that an American author of comics and of picture books did not qualify as American Literature (at least, not according to the journal’s editor).

Here is a slightly trickier case. Yesterday, eighteen and a half months after I submitted my essay “Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: Seuss and Race in the 1950s,” American Quarterly at last returned a verdict. Reject. The very helpful reader’s report recommends “revise and resubmit,” but the accompanying letter notes that the board “decided that your essay was not a good fit for American Quarterly.  This is primarily because we felt your argument needed clarification and further elaboration.”  Judging by both the report and the letter, “not a good fit” in this case means insufficient theorizing of how race is constructed — and I’d be the first to acknowledge that I’m not well versed in race theory. I did do some of that theoretical work in writing this piece, but I’m much better versed in Seuss and in children’s literature than I am in critical theory.  This is a new area for me. “Not a good fit” in this case also means (as the editor elaborates) that the argument could have been more effectively structured.

On that note, the reader’s report will be very useful to me as I further revise the essay.  To paraphrase Rhyme’s advice (in Juster’s novel), there’s much to do with what I’ve learned.  Indeed, I’m quite happy to be able to rewrite the essay without thinking “Oh, what if they like it in its original form?”  I turned in the piece a year and a half ago, and my own thinking has evolved considerably since then.  Even if the essay had been accepted, I was going to ask if I might make some revisions to it.

Any junior scholars reading this might wonder why I’ve let this essay languish at American Quarterly for so long. A big reason is that I have had the luxury to wait.  If I were earlier in my career, I would have certainly pulled this essay about a year ago, and sent it elsewhere. (As I note in an earlier blog post, it’s good to be proactive.) American Quarterly currently says that they require six to eight months simply to decide whether or not to send the essay out for review.  In my case, the journal took a year to decide to send the essay out for review — nearly exactly a year, in fact.  I submitted the essay on 31 Aug. 2010, and the editor sent it out for review on 25 Aug. 2011.  However, since American Quarterly is a good journal, since I’m a full professor, and since I have more than enough to keep me busy, I decided to wait it out. I followed up with the managing editor at regular intervals… and worked on the many other projects I’d committed myself to.

The final issue to address, then, is “If a journal deems your work ‘not a good fit,’ should you submit something else to same journal?”  The answer is “yes, if you write something that seems a better fit,” but otherwise “no.”  My answer to the question (regarding AQ) is “probably not” — but less for the unusually long delay (for which both editor and managing editor apologized) and more because I doubt that anything I’m doing will be “a good fit” for AQ. Of the sort of work I do, this piece seemed to me to be the best fit for AQ. It’s interdisciplinary, mixing history, close-reading, theory — though not well enough, evidently. But, as I’ve acknowledged before, as a scholar, I’m more hard worker than big thinker. That is, I’m persistent, I produce a fair amount, but I seem unable to write the sort of scholarship that changes the paradigm. I admire people who do that type of work, but acknowledge that I’m not one of them. So, if “best fit” (from my perspective) is “not a good fit” (from AQ’s perspective), then I’ll need to pursue other venues for my work.

And, happily, there are other venues. Generally speaking, I try to publish in both children’s literature journals and in ones that are not devoted to children’s literature. My reasons are many — seeking a broader audience for my own work, wanting to diversify, believing that one shouldn’t always talk to the same group of scholars, feeling that children’s literature scholarship should be more thoroughly integrated into academe, and so on. But, of course, some journals will be a better fit than others.

So, following the advice of Rhyme and Reason, what have I learned from this experience? (1) I’m grateful for the helpful feedback, and look forward to putting it to good use. (2) It’s useful to know that AQ is unlikely to be a good fit for me: I can turn towards (what I hope will be) more receptive venues instead. (3) Finally, it’s a cliché, but it’s also true: nothing ventured, nothing gained.  Onwards!

If you enjoyed this post, there’s at least a chance that these posts may also be of interest:

• Fortunate Failures; or, How I Became a Scholar of Dr. Seuss (July 2010)
• How to Publish Your Article (Jan. 2011)
• How to Publish Your Book; or, the Little Manuscript That Could (Aug. 2010)
• Advice from the Least Likely to Succeed (Nov. 2011)
• Professional Autodidact; or, How I Became a Children’s Literature Professor (Aug. 2011)