Alas for Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe, one of the greatest of science-fiction writers, has passed away. His work was subtle and superb. Wolfe wrote paragraphs you could lose yourself in, like a labyrinth, and come out a changed person on the other side. He thought profoundly about what story-telling means as few other writers have. He was honored inside the genre and sometimes outside it, but deserved far more honor in both places. Any account of 20th-century American literature that omits Gene Wolfe is incomplete.

There are many places to start reading Wolfe: his novella "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," and his epic masterpiece The Book of the New Sun. But I would put in a word for the short story "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories," a meditative story which, depending on how you look at it, depicts neglected boy losing himself in a book of pulp science fiction or a book of pulp science fiction entering a boy's abusive environment to salvage him. It's the title story of the hilariously-named collection The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. (Wolfe also wrote "The Death of Doctor Island," which won the Nebula, "The Doctor of Death Island," and, somewhat later, "The Death of the Island Doctor.")

"The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" was part of a famous and ghastly faux pas. The Nebula Awards MC, Isaac Asimov, actually announced at the awards banquet that "Island" had won that year's Nebula for Best Short Story, and Wolfe stood up to accept the award before Asimov realized that Wolfe was the runner-up. "No Award" had won for Best Short Story that year. If that sounds to you a bit like the story about Pynchon, the Pulitzers, and Gravity's Rainbow, both stories are from the same era and feature profound, boundary-pushing work. As I said, Wolfe was never honored enough, in his parish or out of it.

Here are just the first two paragraphs of "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories":

Winter comes to water as to land, though there are no leaves to fall. The waves that were a bright, hard blue yesterday under a fading sky today are green, opaque, and cold. If you are a boy not wanted in the house you walk the beach for hours, feeling the winter that has come in the night; sand blowing across your shoes, spray wetting the legs of your corduroys. You turn your back to the sea, and with the sharp end of a stick found half buried write in the wet sand Tackman Babcock.

Then you go home, knowing that behind you the Atlantic is destroying our work.

Godspeed, Mr. Wolfe. You wrote in something far more durable than sand.

cross-posted from Dagblog. All comments welcome there, not here.

My First Short Story in a While

As previously mentioned, I have a new short story out this month: my first in 21 years. I am very happy about this. And, as promised, here's a taste and a link to the full piece. I hope you enjoy it.

The thing that broke your heart was, he could still fly. Nothing else to call it. There he was in those silly clothes, going wherever he pleased and not falling, as if gravity were just some tired social pretense and he’d grown too old to bother. But it wasn’t the same.

Writing Short Stories, Then and Now

I used to write short stories. Then, for many reasons, I stopped writing fiction. Today I had my first story published in more than twenty years. (It will be posted on the web in two weeks, and I will link to it then. If you can't wait, the issue's for sale here.) More stories may be along; we'll see. If it takes another twenty-one years, I'll have something to look forward to in 2039.

It's a little strange returning to an art form after two decades away. One of the things it means is that in my old stories, no one has e-mail. Most people didn't. Or cell phones. Any temptation to dredge up old pieces is held at bay by the fact that they've become historical fiction.

So what else has changed?

Electronic submissions have made the business of sending out stories easier, and vastly sped up response times for science fiction markets. I loved the ritual of going to the post office, and I enjoy an occasional return to that, but in the old days after stories went in the mail you had to put them out of your mind for at least a couple of months. Now you sometimes get a response in less than a week. Sometimes it's still months, of course, but things are more efficient.

(Literary magazines are still as slow to respond as always, or slower. Budget six months for a reply and be happily surprised if you hear back within three.)

The small cool science fiction magazines I used to love, with their tiny press runs, have largely been replaced by cool online science fiction magazines. That's a useful change, especially in terms of how many people potentially read a story. I didn't have many links to share in the old days. I'm back to being a fiction rookie again, trying to break in just as I did when I was younger, except that rookies today get to play for bigger crowds.

I am now older than my characters. In my twenties, my typical science-fiction narrator was about 45 years old. I had real storytelling reasons for that: one way to write about the future is to use a character who's old enough to have lived through the key social or technological change, and who remembers how things were before. On the other hand, I used a middle-aged protagonist at least once in a straight-realist story, so I don't know what I was thinking. My go-to protagonists are still middle-aged, but now I don't have to imagine what that's like. A 45-year-old narrator might just be me with marginally better knees. And maybe some of the emotional tone I was reaching for as a younger writer, the rueful complexity I associated with my elders, is nearer to my midlife grasp. At least I'd like to think so.

Fiction writing is no longer my vocation. I've learned there's something else I'm better at. I will never know how well I write either scholarship or fiction, because that's something you can never know about yourself. But I know which one I write better. The best thing I have ever written is a scholarly article about Shakespeare, and so is the second-best thing. Ten years from now, that will still be true. If I had been asked twenty-five years ago whether I'd prefer to be a better fiction writer or a better Shakespeare scholar, I wouldn't necessarily have chosen the way it's turned out. But no one gets asked. It's great luck to feel any vocation as a writer, and I'm grateful. It feels like ludicrous good fortune to discover I can still publish in a second field, years after leaving it behind.

Knowing that fiction won't get me anywhere means I don't have to worry about getting anywhere with my fiction. I can write short stories because I don't have to make a living from them. It's no longer possible to make a living writing short stories. Even commercial markets (and I should say Apex Magazine has been both fair and generous) won't pay a month's rent or mortgage in America, and no one can sell a story every month. But my stories don't have to pay my rent. Neither do I need to use stories to get attention for my novel, or worse yet my unfinished novel, or get myself an agent. If I write a novel, I'll try to get it attention, and probably an agent too. But right now the point of my stories is to be the best stories I can make them. If I end up writing a novel, the point will be to create the best novel I can. There don't need to be other reasons.

I suppose this is all to say that my ambition is to write fiction with "a professional's skills but an amateur's goals." But I lifted that phrase from the scholarly article I have coming out next month. I'm better at some things than others.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

For Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin was my hero. Urusla K. Le Guin is my hero still. She is gone from this world, and only her words are left to us. Those words are marvels.

I remember driving to a college interview with a copy of The Dispossessed on the passenger seat beside me, in case I arrived too early. My first computer password, at the beginning of college, was an anagram of her name. I remember reading The Dispossessed again when I moved to California, to console myself to the strangeness of the new planet where I found myself. And The Dispossessed is on my bedside table again, tonight.

For the last two falls I have been teaching my graduate students The Left Hand of Darkness. Last fall, I realized their edition had a typo, a crucial, meaning-changing typo, on the novel's last page. I went through my house looking for other editions to compare. It turns out I had five.

I have blogged in the past about the debts I owe to Le Guin as a writer, and those debts have only matured as I have:

I no longer know how many times I have read The Language of the Night.  [I]t was my first example of how to write an essay about a piece of fiction. More importantly, it was my first model of an essayist's prose, and I could not have had a better. Le Guin's prose, lucid and evocative, as clear and as complex as running water, still gives me my sense of what a paragraph or a sentence ought to be.

[snip]

I was all too slow to be aware of it, but this is the truth: I am trying to write like Ursula K. Le Guin. I am always trying to write like Ursula K. Le Guin. This is no less so because I do it without thinking of it; it is only more so. .... She is the essayist I wanted to be when I grew up, and she is the stylist whom I, having grown up, would like to be. ... In the middle of my life, better late than never, I am obliged and honored to acknowledge her as my master.

She was a late bloomer, who published her first novel the year she turned 37, and her first undeniable masterpiece, The Left Hand, the year she turned forty. That has always been a lesson to me.

She was an American Taoist, a real one, in a country where many who profess Taoism are deceiving themselves. She had no space for self-deception; the Tao, after all, is about dispensing with illusions. Her perspective was unblinking and undeceived, looking straight at truths most shy from. Many would call such a perspective cold but, precisely because she was so free of illusions, her viewpoint was astonishing warm. She wrote fantasy, but never trafficked in or tolerated the everyday lies and fantasies that our society breathes. Her novels took you to another planet, where you found yourself facing the truths of human nature that you shied away from every day.

She was fearless. She could not be intimidated. And her craft was profound.

I am thinking of her husband tonight, Charles, to whom she was married for decades, and who clearly served as helpmeet to her in a way that men of his generation expected of their wives and not themselves. Le Guin wrote, again and again, of deep monogamous bonds, the pairing for life, in a way that has to be, in part, a profound tribute to her own partner.

I would take, gladly, another year or two or five of her words, of whatever she was able and willing to share. But she had already written her last novel, and knew it. When she no longer had the physical stamina to write a novel, she faced that truth. Her accomplishment is complete tonight. She has already achieved more than anyone could ask.

Ursula Le Guin did not believe in heaven. She found the idea of an afterlife suspect. So all that remains of her tonight are her words. They will always be there if you want them. Let me say what a comfort they can be.

cross-posted from Dagblog, where all comments are welcome

Praise for the Foremothers

This is how it works: men and women do things - write books, build institutions, start movements - that change your life forever, and the men get into the history books. The women mysteriously fall out of the story, over and over. How many times have you heard or read the words, "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to be free"? How many of you can name the writer off the top of your head? That's what I'm talking about. As Virginia Woolf put it, "Anonymous was a woman." Men learn to make their debts to other men public, to make a virtue of acknowledging what they owe their forefathers, and to forget what they owe women.

I like to think of myself as pro-feminist, and I was raised by a woman who had a badge and a gun. But when I list the writers and teachers who have been influences on me, the women somehow get left out. I don't do it on purpose, or know that I am doing it. No one is ever explicitly taught to do that, but somehow in our time and place it keeps happening.

If you asked me which teachers in college had been the greatest influence on me, I would have named two younger men, early in their teaching careers. That is true as far as it goes. Those teachers were obvious role models for me, and bits of their old teaching personae still show up in my classroom. If you asked me who my senior role model was when I was an undergraduate, I would have named a particular eminent man, a beloved and revered figure who was nearing retirement. But while I still think of that professor with affection and reverence, his influence on my own teaching is virtually non-existent. There is no trace of his pedagogy in my classroom. When I was nineteen, under the spell of his charisma, I thought that I would follow his particular specialty myself, but that has not been the case. I stopped studying his field even before I had graduated.

On the other hand, until about five years ago I would not have singled out the influence of the very senior female professor, the person I have blogged about as "Professor V.", who taught the introductory lecture classes for the major. It wasn't until I had finished a PhD, found a job, written a book, and achieved tenure that I began to reckon with her deep and pervasive influence on my scholarly practice. I use some intellectual tools and approaches that Vendler herself seems to think of with dislike or indifference, but there remains a baseline of critical practice that Vendler herself laid down, a bright thread of her influence that runs through the way I read poetry no matter how many other, less Vendleresque, threads I weave. And that level of influence is only more striking because Vendler only taught me intro in a lecture class with hundreds of people. She has never known me as anything but an 18-year-old face in a 10-am crowd. But even her lessons for beginners had an influence I will likely never shake off.

But to be honest with myself, Vendler was not the first woman to have an intellectual influence on me. It is only that, like many other men, I have unconsciously dropped the female influences from my intellectual autobiography. The first book of literary criticism I ever bought, which I bought for myself as a high school student, was written by a woman. The first scholarly book I ever bought, the first book with footnotes, was written by a woman, too. It was Jane Ellen Harrison's Mythology (bought, I think, in the gift shop of the Boston Museum of Science), a book that was probably too erudite to be on the kid's shelf where I found it, but I doggedly read that book and the endnotes too. Partly because Harrison got to me so early, before there was even any intellectual radar to get under, I still have a soft spot for her particular approach to Greek mythology, the so-called Cambridge Ritualist school.

If my childhood interest in mythology led me to Harrison's scholarship, my teenaged interest in science fiction led me to my first book of essays about literature. It was Ursula K. Le Guin's The Language of the Night. Like the Harrison book, it turned up randomly in a gift shop aimed at the young, offered among books it only superficially resembled. Maybe because those books dealt with fantasy or fairy tales, and maybe also because they were written by women, they were offered to young people without much thought given to how challenging those books might be. Le Guin, like Harrison, slipped through the lines because she was being underestimated.

I no longer know how many times I have read The Language of the Night. And while it was not the full-dress academic literary criticism that is part of my job today, it was my first example of how to write an essay about a piece of fiction. More importantly, it was my first model of an essayist's prose, and I could not have had a better. Le Guin's prose, lucid and evocative, as clear and as complex as running water, still gives me my sense of what a paragraph or a sentence ought to be.

I am occasionally complimented by other academics for the clarity of my academic prose. That of course is just what people say when they are being nice to me, and we are still talking about academic prose. I can never really know how clear my own writing seems to other people. But clear writing is, at least, something I value. The most obvious influence on my scholarly writing is my main scholarly mentor, my famous doctoral advisor and his own famously clear and jargonless prose. That is certainly true in itself. He is a great influence on me, and I became his student because I valued many things his work embodies. But I did not meet that mentor until late in my twenties, when I already had a degree in creative writing from another university. Other influences had shaped my writing long before I met Stephen. If I had asked about those influences even a few years ago, the first name I likely would have said is Orwell's, and that's not untrue either. Orwell's essays, and perhaps especially his newspaper columns, have been important. But until the last few months I think I would not have mentioned Le Guin, and she may be the most important influence of all.

I was all too slow to be aware of it, but this is the truth: I am trying to write like Ursula K. Le Guin. I am always trying to write like Ursula K. Le Guin. This is no less so because I do it without thinking of it; it is only more so. Her style is the ideal against which I am measured in my own judgment. She is the essayist I wanted to be when I grew up, and she is the stylist whom I, having grown up, would like to be. My fiction shows less of her influence, and is the poorer for it. But as an essayist I am and remain her apprentice. She has never met me, nor I her. But she has left her mark on everything I write. Her influence has only grown stronger, further from the surface and deeper in the structure, as my writing has matured. In the middle of my life, better late than never, I am obliged and honored to acknowledge her as my master.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

J. K. Rowling Is Wrong About Her Own Books

So, J. K. Rowling has told an interviewer (the actress Emma Watson), that she paired off the wrong characters at the end of her Harry Potter series. Instead of marrying Harry's right-hand girl Hermione off to his left-hand boy Ron, Rowling has decided that she should have married Hermione to Harry himself. So, Rowling concludes, she was wrong when she wrote the books. In fact, she's wrong now.

Almost anyone who's taken a college literature class has been told that figuring out the author's intentions isn't the point of reading a book, that the author isn't the final judge of what the work means. That claim sounds weird to lots of people: of course the author gets to decide what the work means! She wrote it! Professors just don't have any common sense! [Cue jokes about pointy-headed academics who believe in the "death of the author."]

But it's not just a pointy-headed theory. It's common sense about the way books work. And Jo Rowling has given us a perfect example. The books don't mean something different because she's changed her mind about them. They don't get better or worse because of how she feels about them at a given moment. The book is the book. She wrote those books, but now they are their own thing, and she doesn't get to tell you how to read them.

Rowling's current claim is that the Ron and Hermione match, which she painstakingly builds up over the seven books in the Harry Potter series, is motivated by her own "personal" desires, rather than by artistic considerations:

"I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfilment. That's how it was conceived, really.

“For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione ended up with Ron." 

What that sounds like, as far as I can tell, is that Rowling paired up Hermione, a character who fairly clearly represents an imagined version of Rowling's younger self, with a character whom she initially based on someone from her own early years. If I've got that right, Rowling sees the Hermione and Ron relationship as a story of her adolescent self getting a boy who got away. Of course, only Jo Rowling herself would read these characters this way, since none of us read Ron as Sean Whathisname that Jo Rowling had a crush on in sixth form. Why would we? We have no idea who Sean from Sixth Form is, and we don't care.

More the the point, although Jo Rowling might have intended Ron and Hermione as wish-fulfillment versions of Young Jo Rowling and Her Teen Crush, the characters aren't actually Young Jo and Teen Crush. They're independent characters. The reader figures out who Ron and Hermione are from the things they say and do on the page. There is no Ron or Hermione separate from the Ron and Hermione on the page. They don't have any other existence. They're characters in a book.

Now, if Rowling says her reasons "have very little to do with literature," that suggests that marrying those two characters off is an artistic mistake. Rowling is saying that her books would have been better books if Hermione married the main character in the end.

But Jo Rowling doesn't get to decide this either. She wrote the books she wrote. The rest of us decide if they work or not. If Rowling wants to persuade us that her ending stinks, she has to make an argument for that just like the rest of us.

Would wedding bells for Ron and Hermione have been better? It would certainly have been a more obvious ending: main male character marries main female character. And some people have clamored for that on the internet since the nineties, because they feel it's a story-telling imperative that Male Character #1 pair off with Female Character #1. But it's hard to feel that adding yet another cliche would improve the Harry Potter books. The problem with these books isn't that their points aren't too obvious or on-the-nose.

It's much easier to argue that Rowling's actual ending works quite well. The three main characters end up as part of a large happy extended family, with Harry marrying Ron's sister. It's a classic Dickens conclusion. And it creates a nice structural completion. The main character is an orphan who is repeatedly depicted as longing for a family. (At one point, the character looks in a magic mirror that shows you your heart's fondest desire. What he sees is himself surrounded by hordes of relatives.) In the first book, he's hapless and alone at the station where he's gone to catch the school train, and he gets taken under the wing of Ron's family. (It's worth pointing out that we meet Harry's future wife in that early scene, before even Hermione has been introduced. The book is setting things up already.) In the last scene of the series, Harry is putting his own children on the school train, surrounded by his in-laws and his old school friends. The character has what he's been shown to want most: he wished to be part of a family like Ron's, and now he's a member of Ron's family. And his own children have their parents to put them on the train, as he did not.

It works, because it's a decent story. "Orphan gets family" is more specific and interesting than "hero gets girl." The hero always gets the girl. It's also nice to see the boy hero actually, you know, form a genuine friendship with a girl. That the Harry Potter books don't girlfriendzone the female lead is a point in their favor. And it's also pleasing that the main female character is allowed to have a marriage where she will be the senior partner. But most importantly, the ending works because it's structurally satisfying. The last scenes of the book recall earlier scenes and rhyme with them. Structure is one of Rowling's best things.

Rowling now objects that the Ron and Hermione match lacks "credibility," meaning they wouldn't be a good couple long-term. But that's just silly. The one thing you learn in a college English class before "the author isn't always right" is that characters are not real people. What's going to happen to Ron and Hermione in the future after the book ends? Nothing. They only exist in the book. If Jo Rowling belatedly decides that they're maritally incompatible, so what? She depicted them as happily married in the last scene of the last book. Jo Rowling now imagines them as growing estranged and needing marital counseling. I imagine them growing more compatible as one of them matures and the other learns to live with his more benevolent quirks. I mean, that's what Jo Rowling's actual book suggests. Who am I going to believe? The person who put the words on the page? Or the words on the page themselves?

Rowling is talking about the characters in terms of psychological credibility. But the characters don't actually have independent psychologies. They're parts of a story. And the Ron and Hermione characters are structurally paired for hundreds and hundreds of pages. The plot provides the ending that it has prepared the readers for. Rowling complains that it was "the plot as she first imagined it" but it's the plot as she actually executed it, and she executed it pretty thoroughly. She started laying the trail of breadcrumbs for the Ron and Hermione ending from the start of the series. She didn't drop even a crouton on the Harry-loves-Hermione trail. The thought is never presented as crossing either character's mind. Providing a different set of romantic pairings would require her to rewrite all seven books. It would be like saying "I think Pride and Prejudice ends wrong. Elizabeth should be with Bingley and Jane should be with Darcy." Effecting that change would require you to change the whole book, start to finish.

If Rowling wants to rewrite her entire series to have a "better" ending, I'm sure her publisher will indulge her. But that doesn't mean it will be better. George Lucas re-edited Star Wars to reflect his second thoughts, but the rest of us are free to prefer his first version and most do. Han shot first, whether George likes it or not. He's the creator. He's not the decider.

 

The great W. H. Auden decided late in his career that some of his famous early poems needed to be improved, and that some should never again see the light of day. When rewrote his poem "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," he was mostly right; the rewritten lines are better poetry. When he decided that "Spain, 1937" should never be published again, he was wrong. "Spain, 1937" is a great poem, whether Wystan likes it or not. He doesn't get to tell the rest of us not to like it. The author gets to write the book. But that's the end of her job. She has to leave the reading to us.

cross-posted from Dagblog

In Praise of the Late Term Paper

It's that time of year again, or actually one of the two times each year, when semesters end and bleary-eyed college professors scale mountains of ungraded papers and exams. One of my friends claims that he can track the academic calendar by the crescendo of professors griping on Facebook and Twitter about bad papers, worse excuses, and outrageous examples of student entitlement. Some of this is necessary foxhole camaraderie, some of it verges on the unprofessional, and some does a lot more than verge. Too many lame papers and excuses will put most people in an ugly mood. But I want to give two cheers to one group of students who never get any love at this time of year: the students whose papers are late because they take the assignments seriously.

I like an on-time paper as much as the next person. Meeting deadlines are an important adult skill that students should be learning. Of course, I admire the excellent students who always do their best work by the stated deadline. That is intrinsically admirable. And when every student is late, it becomes impossible to help any of them; the greatest obstacle to rescuing students from their last-minute emergencies is the sheer number of other last-minute student emergencies. 

But all that said:

I've read some papers in my time that should have been late. I have read papers that have been turned in on the due date or earlier but that the writer hadn't even begun to work on seriously. Oh, those papers were presentable enough. They weren't full of comical errors. There was nothing to quote on Facebook. The margins were correct. But the papers were nothing. The writers had done as little work on them as they felt they could get away with, and avoided most of all the labor of thinking hard about anything.

Some of those papers would have been good papers at a lower level. The writers just stuck with what had worked before, handing in a polished introductory-class paper in an advanced class, or a meticulous high-school paper in a college class. Faced with the problem of an assignment that explicitly demanded a rather different paper, some worked tirelessly to misconstrue the assignment and find some loophole that would justify writing a simpler, more familiar assignment. And then, hoping for extra points, the writers handed those easier pieces of writing in early. They preferred to be judged on promptness rather than thoughtfulness, and many of them reasoned that there was no more room to improve their essays, so spending a few more days won't help. The saddest part is, they were right. They had set themselves elementary writing tasks, using skills they mastered years before, and executed those tasks well. It is like watching a high school senior filling in a coloring book, or listening to a forty-five-year-old playing "Chopsticks" on the piano. There is no way to do those tasks better, which is why I did not assign those tasks in the first place.

Those are the most demoralizing papers that I read. The mess and chaos of students trying to write something that they are not yet quite capable of bringing off does not bother me. But the orderly, sealed-off neatness of a paper that refuses to learn or grow makes me ask myself what I'm doing in the first place. That refusal is polite but insistent and unbendable. And sometimes the only thing that breaks through that stubborn insistence is a grade that makes the student upset.

On the other hand, some of the students who do accept the assignment and try to do it honestly find themselves struggling. They are trying to work out new skills, in response to new demands, and that doesn't happen on a predictable timeline. The work is messy. Progress is non-linear. So sometimes the deadline rolls around while the student is still up to her or his elbows in wet clay, trying to find the piece's shape. Those students aren't late because they're lazy. They're late because they are working hard. Giving them a few extra days to complete an assignment is productive, because they will use that time productively. Their papers will genuinely be much better a few days after the deadline than they could have been on the appointed day. An extension leads to a better product.

Not that every student who needs such an extension will ask for one. Some do not feel entitled to one, and some students will simply abandon an entire class in despair because they don't have a paper written on time. Of course, the same class will contain some squeaky wheels who are trying to get themselves as greasy as possible, and who will have no qualms about asking for all kinds of special arrangements. Some of the more demanding students prompt eye-rolls, but the only real harm they do is distract the professor from the students who are suffering in silence. It's important to shake your head clear at the end of the semester and look for the students who are in danger because they haven't asked you for anything. Many times, those students are the ones who generally enjoy less privilege in their daily lives: more likely to be the first in the family to go to college, more likely to have gone to a troubled high school, more likely to find tuition a major burden. Those students don't expect to get any breaks because they usually haven't gotten any. They read the rules in your syllabus, which some of their more affluent classmates simply view as initial negotiating positions, and take those rules seriously. If they can't meet a deadline, they just assume they're done for, because that's consistent with their previous experience. The only way to persuade them differently is to show them differently, and you can't wait for them to come to you.

Dead Man's Name Tag

I've been away at an academic conference for nearly a week, leaving blog posts unfinished, e-mail unanswered, and campus office untenanted. I had a wonderful time with a bunch of scholars and actors at the American Shakespeare Center's reproduction of Shakespeare's Blackfriars playhouse. (If you'd like to see some excellent theater, a trip to see the ASC's company in Staunton, Virginia, is a great idea.) But I also bumped up against a small problem that's began to follow me wherever I go professionally: the problem of my (real) name.

I am not the only Shakespeare scholar with my name. That's not surprising. My real name is quite common, not "John Smith" but a dirt-common first name with a vanilla-ethnic surname, so I bump into nominal doppelgangers all the time. I've gotten other people's phone calls and in one memorable case another person's subpoena. For years I went to a father-son barber shop, right across the street from my workplace, where both barbers shared my name and the younger barber, the one who cut my hair, even shared my middle name. So I wasn't surprised to discover that there was an older Shakespearean with my name, someone who began university teaching while I was still in grade school. And I knew what to do about it.

I have always been careful to use my middle initial in my academic byline, especially in my publications but also when registering for conferences, so that conference programs and name tags identify me as "Cosimo P. Cleveland." This is the simplest (and likely the only) way to differentiate myself from the earlier scholar who published as plain "Cosimo Cleveland" or, occasionally, "Cosimo T. Cleveland." Using the middle initial feels a little fussy and overly-formal, and it wouldn't be my preference in an ideal world. I certainly don't introduce myself with my middle initial when I'm shaking hands; in fact, I use a less formal nickname, equivalent to "Cozmo" or "Coz." But leaving the initial out of my byline would be sloppy and disrespectful. It would also verge on filial disrespect for my own father, a published spy novelist whom we can call "Cosimo C. Cleveland," but there's not much chance my work will be confused with Dad's; books by that Cosimo Cleveland tend to be about fearless Mossad agents and books by this one tend to be about Elizabethan actors marking up their scripts. In any case, the middle initial is on my book and on all my published articles so far, so there's no changing it. My byline is now my byline.

But when I go out in the professional world, that fussy little middle initial has been increasingly dropping away. The problem isn't that people confuse me with the other Cosimo Cleveland. The problem is that he's getting erased from history.

Cosimo T., who got his first job teaching college a quarter-century before I got mine, published much less than I have. This isn't a reflection on him, and certainly isn't a reflection on me, but an indication of how much our profession changed between his generation and mine. Professors hired in the seventies did not publish nearly as much as professors must today, because professors then were not expected to publish the way we are today. I published more articles before I got tenure than Cosimo T. published in his entire career, not because I am smarter or more industrious than Cosimo T. was, but because one of the requirements for me to get tenure in the 21st century was to publish more than Cosimo T., who taught at a somewhat better school than I, published over his three-decade career. If I hadn't out-published him by the end of year five, I would have been fired. This is true everywhere. All academics of my generation have to produce much more research than the older generation did. Those are just the facts of our business.

And, unlike Cosimo T., I have published a book.  That's partly about generational expectations as well. But it means, inevitably, that more people have heard of the younger Cosimo than of the elder. So they don't necessarily see the point of my fussy little middle initial, except as something pointlessly fussy. They don't see it as differentiating me from the other Cosimo Cleveland, because they don't know there ever was another Cosimo Cleveland.

So I unfailingly send in my conference registration paperwork as "Cosimo P.," but sometimes I show up and open my program to find "Cosimo Cleveland" on the schedule. Not always, of course, but twice in the last month.  And I get a name tag identifying me as simply "Cosimo," so that I have walked around a conference hotel for a long weekend wearing a retired man's name, and now, I have come to fear, a dead man's name. I googled the other Cosimo Cleveland this morning and saw an ambiguous reference to his death. But when I search "Cosimo Cleveland Shakespeare obituary" google just gives me a bunch of links that refer to myself. "You've totally eclipsed that guy," one of my conference friends told me six months ago when I explained this problem. "Everyone who talks about 'Cosimo Cleveland' means you." But being part of someone else's eclipse, even unintentionally, is not a good feeling.

And while I can usually insist on the middle initial in print, I can't make people remember it when they cite my work. It's very common to leave out middle initials by accident, or to misremember the initial, when writing footnotes. I've made both mistakes myself, meaning no disrespect to the scholars I was quoting; before I had any work of my own to footnote, I had not thought about why people might prefer a specific form of their names. (I apologize to those scholars here, and will happily do so again in person.) There's no great conspiracy at work, but the error is clearly related to the earlier Cosimo falling out of academic memory. If my name were Stephen X. Greenblatt, I would not be having this problem.

There's no way to insist on the middle initial or to make any kind of fuss when it gets dropped. That wouldn't revive Cosimo T.'s reputation, but would surely give Cosimo P. one. All I can do is to scrupulously use that initial myself, because the fact of that earlier career deserves to be acknowledged. History is part of my work. If I spend much of my time trying to retrieve lost details four centuries gone, I should not consent to forgetting the recent history of my own guild. And as someone who will die someday, I find it sad to see another person's life being forgotten. Devouring time may blunt the lion's jaws, but it is also devouring the memory of one Cosimo Cleveland, a dedicated teacher and scholar, and in due course it will come for me. There isn't even malice involved. People simply stop knowing. The name tag hanging around my neck in this or that hotel ballroom gives no testimony to that earlier Cosimo's work or life, but I have to read it as a reminder: memento mori.

cross-posted from Dagblog

How Much Do You Have to Write to Stay Sane?

Flavia has a post about her writing process, with many thought-provoking comments from her readers, and Dame Eleanor Hull posts a great deal about the academic writing life. I find that I can't give a clear account of my writing process right now, if by "writing process" we mean my composition process. But I have learned, through difficult trial and error, that I need three things to keep my writing going well:

1. Something accepted but not yet in print.

2. Something submitted but not yet accepted.

3. Something new that I'm actively working on.

I know these sound like results, or productivity targets. But I don't think of them that way. The goal isn't necessarily to have x amount of work accepted in y amount of time. When I do manage to have all three of these things at once (and I certainly have not always done so), they operate as a security blanket. They allow me to write, because they keep me from worrying about my writing.

Having at least one article in press, one out for review, and one on the boil, when I can manage that trick, keeps me from obsessing about the response to any individual piece of writing. Otherwise the danger is that too much energy goes into worrying about one specific piece. That's not healthy because no one piece of writing defines you as a writer, and not healthy because the things you're worried about are beyond your control. If you're an academic writer, your articles can get swept around in the unpredictable weather of peer review, or becalmed for months and months at a journal that's going through organizational problems. You can't control that. Once it gets published, people will read it or not, like it or not, cite it or not. You can't control that either. And while you're working alone at your desk, you can lose your way worrying about whether or not what you're doing is any good at all, meaning whether anyone will like it. Anyone who's written a dissertation knows how easy it is to despair over a piece of writing that you've spent too much time working on by yourself.

But if something's out in the mail and something else is in press and something is getting worked on steadily at my desk, it's a lot easier not to worry about the one in the mail, or pin too many hopes on the piece you have coming out next summer. And it's easier to let the thing you're working on be itself, and let the worries about venues and reviews come in due time. Most of all, no single thing starts to feel like the barometer of your success. Yes, some things, especially the book you're working on, are more important. But having more than one piece of writing at various stages is, at least for me, a wonderful psychological buffer.

My three-things rule is especially suited for academic writing, where it takes months for a response to come back after submitting an article, and often a year and more between acceptance and publication. But fiction writing works on the same schedule, and literary fiction perhaps a slower one. Literary magazines can take more than six months to give you any response. The other reason to try to have pieces in various stages of acceptance, submission, and preparation is that you can not afford to stop working for the three to four months it takes to hear back about each piece. When an article or a story is out the door, you need to work on another article or story. You don't have that many months to waste. And if a fiction editor takes a pass on a first story but asks to see another, you had better have another story, better than the first, to show her.

You're not a writer because you have one story you're proud of, or one article you think is important, or even one book manuscript that you hope will win some prize. You can't afford to let your sense of yourself as a writer be tied to the fate of that one piece as it tries to find a home. Or maybe you can. I certainly can't. I need to feel that if I'm a writer, there's more where that came from. If I approach my work that way, I can afford setbacks to this or that particular piece, and you have to be able to afford the setbacks if you want to write because sooner or later they're coming.

Writing is a public act performed in a private place, something you do alone at your desk for the widest audience you can manage. If you give too much weight to what other people think, or give too much weight to your own private anxieties, you will have trouble writing at all. You give up hope after too many rejections in a row, or begin undermining your work in a misguided attempt to give people what you think they want. Or you will wrestle with yourself endlessly in private and pin yourself, never putting anything in the mail because it's never "finished" and never finishing anything because you refuse to show it. Either way, you get lost, and the work suffers. Staying sane enough to write means positioning yourself somewhere between your inner voices and the outside world, where you are able to listen to both clearly, because you need to listen to both, but where neither gets the last word.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Stockpiling Books

I've been buying a lot of books this summer. That's not "a lot of books" by the usual standards, because I've always been a better-than-average bookstore customer. Lately I've been buying a lot of books even for me. But I haven't been buying them to read. I've been buying books to write.

Over the last two years, I have been steadily squirreling away books I need for the book I'm writing. Every scholarly book is built out of earlier books, in pretty visible ways. If you want your book to say something new, rather than just parroting what has gone before, you're actually going to need to build it from more books, not fewer. If you read shallowly, you'll end up saying what everyone else said. If you have a question that someone else hasn't asked, you'll have to dig for hints and clues and small pieces of evidence through dozens-to-hundreds of other books that were after different questions. If people don't already know (or think they know) the answer to your question, there's going to be a lot of research.

(Fiction is also built out of earlier books, but less obviously. A novelist or short story writer can only create something that seems fresh after she's read and digested hundreds and hundreds of other works of fiction. If you've only read a dozen novels in your whole life and then try to write one yourself, what you come up with will sound appallingly close to one of those dozen. You will sound like someone trying to imitate your favorite writer, and it will basically be fanfic. You probably won't even realize how close you are to outright plagiarism. It takes a lot of reading to get a sense of all the possible moves you can make in a story and to digest a bunch of different influences before you stop trying to sound like someone else and start trying to sound like yourself.)

Now, you can't research an academic book without an academic library and inter-library loan. But writing requires keeping a bunch of other books handy for a long stretch of time. You'll have to root back through those books repeatedly to check one thing or another, and won't necessarily foresee exactly what you'll need to look for day to day. So after a certain point, depending on the library for those books becomes either inefficient or anti-social. You need to be able to check facts as you write. You can't always be stopping short and making out a list of things to look up on Monday. On the other hand, the more useful a book is, the less fair it is to hog the library copy while writing something that takes years to finish. You don't want to be the guy who's had the standard biography of Milton out of the college library since 2008.

So, I've spent the last two years buying a book here and a book there, as I happened to find things on used-book shelves, building up a small collection of books I knew I would need for the project I've been researching. Over the years I spent writing my dissertation and then turning it into my first book, I collected a bunch of specialized monographs and reference works I needed for that project. Because my second book takes a different methodological approach, I have to accumulate a new section of my personal working library.

But over the last six weeks, the buying has picked up intensity. Instead of buying a couple of books every month, I've purchased a couple of dozen since May. Part of that was opportunity, the result of visits to used-book stores while traveling with my spouse or of finally seeing things at a good price on abebooks.com. Every individual book was a good or excellent bargain, at least five or ten times cheaper than a new book from a university press. But I bought a lot of them, including multi-volume sets, more than enough to make me reorganize the shelves in my study. I've walked into bookstores and walked out with a box, more than once.

This newly serious book-buying feels like part of a new intensity in the writing process. The work is picking up steam, and so the reading and fact-checking have to keep pace. The preliminary phase of research and drafting is done, and now I'm starting the first really serious push. If I can sustain it, that push will take the next two years or so. During that time, I will have to work on lots of other things beside the book, but it will be the central project and there should be periods of fairly intense and sustained writing. I need a solid core of particular reference material in my writing space in order to keep momentum, need to be able to put my hand on exactly the volume I want at a specific moment in order to keep from slowing down. Assembling the books I need is like stockpiling supplies and equipment for the long push. I'm tooling up.

How this big push actually turns out won't be clear until it's done. At the moment I feel like the next two years will be the central and crucial part of the writing process. But I might be further from the end than I think. It's hard to know exactly where you are in the process of your second academic book, because the experience of writing your first book doesn't give you a clear road map. Writing that original, started-out-as-a-dissertation book is a torturous and often backward process. You start out with a few seminar papers and some ideas, and try to bootstrap them into a dissertation; because you've never written a dissertation before, you have to figure out the rules of that genre as you go, and often piece out the actual, workable structure for that document fairly late in the game. Then you've got a book-like object called a dissertation which you have to reverse-engineer into another, very different piece of writing, an actual publishable book. That process frequently demands more unexpected and sometimes radical restructuring, even very late in the game. The final version of my book was written almost exactly backwards: most of chapter four had been written first, followed in order by chapters five, three, two, one, and the introduction. While I would always recommend writing the intro last, and while I do plan some late tweaks to chapter one so that it sets up the rest of the book smoothly, that's not generally a writing process I want to reproduce.

This time I started with a clearer structure and a clearer plan. Putting a book together the hard way will teach you to appreciate how they're put together. So the sequence of writing might be more straightforward this time around. But writing a book in such a necessarily chaotic and haphazard way doesn't give you a feel for how a more normal version of the process goes, or where you might be in the process. You learn how to do it, and you learn that you never want to do it this way again. Writing the first book is about getting across the finish line alive. Writing the second book is about learning how writing one is actually supposed to work. Or at least that's my story right now; I'm sticking to it as long as I can.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Blogging Like Chaucer

cross-posted from Dagblog

I love academic bloggers. Academic bloggers worry me sick. And the bloggers who keep me up at night are the ones who have adjunct or alt-ac jobs but are trying to move to the tenure track. Some of those people are using blogs and social media to advance their careers in ingenious ways which I would never have foreseen. But others seem, at least from my vantage, to expect or hope that their online work will help their career in specific ways that it will not and cannot. Being online can help an academic career. But it's important to be clear about what it can help and what it can't.

Last week a blogger at Inside Higher Ed, a person who has a prominent and well-established online platform but teaches off the tenure track, wrote a post about her frustrations on the job market and her sense that no amount of professional achievement would be enough to get her a tenure-ladder job. There was a brief kerfuffle, with various unhelpful comments on her original post and one great and insightful response post by John Warner. But the issue I would like to highlight is that what she calls her "rather high-profile blog," a gig writing for Inside Higher Ed two or three times every week, did not tilt the job market in her favor. There, I think is the key lesson. Even blogging from terrific, high-profile platform was not enough.

[A few important caveats here: 1. The IHE blogger's larger point that in this market you can do everything right and still not get a job is absolutely true. There are far more qualified people than there are jobs, and so qualified people go without. Everything else I say should be read with that larger problem in mind. 2. I have no intention of commenting on the IHE blogger's specific case except for the fact that blogging seems not to have served her as a job credential. She's not asking my advice.]

But here's the big takeaway:

You can't blog your way to a tenure-track professorship.You simply can't. Even a gig at IHE or The Chronicle for Higher Education is not enough. That doesn't mean blogging is not professionally useful to you. It means you need to be clear about what it's useful for.

Blogging and other social media serve academics by bringing you to other people's attention and building your professional network. It works largely as publicity for your other work, and it widens your potential audience while strengthening your connections. (I, like many bloggers, mainly do this for non-professional reasons, but this is a fair assessment of blogging's professional benefits. And because academia is a small world, you can get most of those benefits even with a pseudonymous blog.) The most successful academic bloggers I can think of, such as Tenured Radical and Historiann, are productive bloggers who've built up a strong community of readers and commenters on one hand while also maintaining a steady output of strong scholarly writing on the other. Their blogging works as what military types call a "force multiplier" for their other work, making their scholarship more effective by drawing more audience attention to it.

What blogging never does is substitute for other academic writing. It doesn't get counted as scholarship. It does not serve as an employment credential. (If you wish to argue that it should, I can't help you. I'm interested in describing what is, not what ought to be. If you wish to argue that someday your blog will be recognized as cutting-edge scholarship, I would point out that "someday" will be too late.) This distinction doesn't pose a problem to science bloggers, or to most social scientists or historians, where the difference between a journal article and a blog essay is usually self-evident. But it can be tricky for people who work in literature or cultural studies, who can be tempted to blur the distinction between writing scholarship about new media and doing other writing on new media platforms.

Blogging functions for today's academics much the way that poetry functioned for poets like Chaucer or Spenser, which is to say that you can't actually make a living at it but it can help you make connections for other jobs. Chaucer's poetry only served him economically or professionally by building his reputation at court while he looked for various civil-service gigs. Writing The Canterbury Tales was a good way to get a customs or weights-and-measures gig. Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar led him to a career as personal secretary to important noblemen. Making a living off the books themselves was out of the question for both men. Poetry might have been their true vocation, but it wasn't their actual career. It was simply grease for their career. If you are an academic blogger, the same is true of your blog. You write it for personal satisfaction and to express various interests and for the pure joy of making something. The exposure it brings might also help your career. But it won't be the main driver of your career. The exposure only helps if you have other credentials to bring to the table.

Consider, for example, the Chaucer blogger himself, who writes "Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog," and tweets as "LeVostreGC." He's an inventive, sophisticated, and hilarious user of social media who also holds down a junior-professor job as a medievalist. He's even published a selection from his blog as a book. But that book isn't going to be his main source of income. It didn't get him his job, and it won't get him tenure. What is has gotten him is attention from other literary scholars, whom he has impressed and made laugh. (He is very, very funny.) And people in our strange little profession know who he is, sooner than they likely would have otherwise. So being Chaucer the blogger is a bit like being Geoffrey Chaucer the Ricardian poet: it's not a living, but it does help you in your day job.

For an academic, blogging is the writing you do to get attention for your other writing. Blogging, even with my open-secret secret-identity, means that I'm more likely to be on some people's minds, and that they're more likely to come to one of my conference papers, glance at one of my articles if they see my byline, or read a review of my book. And I have professional friendships that are largely kept up through the blog and other social media. Blogging helps to get and keep you on people's radar. It's a good thing to do. But it only serves to assist your other work.

In Praise of the Writing Binge

When I got my first job, I also got a book of advice for new professors. It gave me some sensible-sounding advice about writing. Avoid binge writing, it said. Write at regularly scheduled hours and keep each session brief. Too many graduate students are used to writing in crazy binges, the authors said, rather than developing steady writing habits. Faculty had to learn to write all the time, and also had to learn to STOP writing even if things were going well. And I tried to take that advice seriously. I have always believed in good writing habits and deplored the way graduate school undermines those habits. I drank the no-binge Kool-Aid with a smile, in an appropriately moderate serving. But that advice is fundamentally wrong. If I had kept following it, my career would now be a smoking ruin.

Writing binges are things of wondrous beauty. I can't do without them, and all the work of which I'm most proud was done in flagrant violation of the no-binge rule. Part of that is simply who I am as a writer. I will never be a 45-minute-a-day writer, just as I will never be an early-morning writer no matter how much I would like to be. (I am a nocturnal writer, and that's that. Every attempt to become a virtuous early-bird ends up wasting a morning and leaving me too sleepy to work later when I'm feeling productive.) But more importantly, some things cannot be written at all without some form of binge. You cannot build them out of six hundred brief sessions, any more than you can train for a marathon by running two miles a day. Some pieces of writing demand the writer's full attention in a way that cannot be kept up forever. They require weeks or months of intense focus to complete, after which the writer goes through a rest period, working at a more relaxed pace and paying more attention to tasks that have been put off during the most strenuous writing.

Now, the book that advised me to write in brief, regular sessions could itself have been written in a number of brief, regular sessions. Its structure was simple, its prose was not complicated, and neither really were its ideas. Likewise, those books that tell you how to write your novel in one hour a day could have been written in one hour a day. But you can't actually write a good novel in one hour a day any more than you can drive from Boston to Los Angeles in one hour a day. Doing it that way is not efficient. Neither can you write a book of complicated or original scholarship in nothing but short sessions without losing the thread. To sustain a complicated argument over hundreds of pages requires sustained focus.

Obviously, you cannot write anything so complicated in a single sitting. This part of the no-binge rule makes sense. Procrastinating until the deadline arrives (or passes) and pulling an all-nighter is obviously counter-productive. So is banging out three 25-page term papers over a week and a half, as the semester system requires many graduate students to do. That is not a writer sustaining focus. You need to give a project your attention for the full time it needs. Otherwise, it's like trying to drive from Boston to Los Angeles in a single go without stopping.

I spent six weeks in the middle of this spring semester on a writing binge. It wasn't a frantic graduate-school-style binge, and it couldn't have been. I can't drop everything else and hole up in my study for days. I continued teaching and grading and going to meetings. I continued my weekly multi-state  commute to see my spouse, and continued paying attention to my spouse. I continued cooking the meals. But I arranged things during those six weeks to clear all the time that I could for writing. I set aside that time in large blocks. And I made getting my writing done during those six weeks my priority. There were no deadlines but the ones I set for myself, and the recognition that I could only keep my window of time open for so long. The results were excellent; I completed a few projects that had been almost-but-not-quite finished for seemingly forever, and then finished a monster article that I had been wrestling with for over a year. Working on that article in short, manageable stints had inched along like a glacier, taking a step back for every two steps forward, and every time I was forced to set it aside and deal with something else I would lose the thread. (Of course, spreading out the work on the articles over such a long period ensured that work on it would be interrupted repeatedly, that I would have to work on something else or have a week with almost no writing time.) In fact, the fragmentation of the writing process was damaging the piece, fragmenting its structure as the months went by. But a sustained six-week march made it into a unified whole for the first time, and got it out the door.

In the six weeks since that binge, I haven't been nearly as productive. I've had to pay the committee-work bills I'd deferred during the binge, and a bunch of new ones that have come due. One reason that I set my private deadline when I did was that I knew that the end of the semester would bring demands that would leave little time for sustained writing. Oh, I've written a lot over the last six weeks: memos, e-mails, reports, an application form, a questionnaire for a survey, even a form rejection letter. All of those writing tasks fit easily into routine, manageable sessions. And for the last six weeks, my scholarly writing has mostly happened in sessions of an hour or so at a time, which means not much gets done. But I'm less frustrated than I would be if I had hoped, unrealistically, to set aside the same amount of time or produce the same number of pages every week. Instead, I experience this crush of busy-work as simply a fallow period between one season of strenuous writing and the next. I have another week or two of grading and bureaucratic reporting, and then summer will have come in and it will be time to write hard again. When that new season starts, I have to be ready.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Teaching Journalism at the University of Georgia

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, basically the whole staff of the Red and the Black, the University of Georgia's student newspaper, walked out after the newspaper's Board of Directors promoted the paper's non-student "editorial adviser" to "editorial director" and gave him complete veto power over the student staff. The Red and the Black has always been a student-run newspaper, independent of the University itself, where students have final say. So the walkout is predictable and even laudable.

The final straw seems to have been a draft memo, which has been put on line by the students who walked out, which laid out the new standards, such as an emphasis on "more GOOD than BAD." (caps original) The memo is ragged, not always coherent, and spells "libel" as "liable," all of which is forgivable in a draft but maybe less so when you're pontificating about basic standards. Even less forgivable is using the word "journalism" in scare quotes when addressing student journalists. As in:

BAD
- Content that catches people or organizations doing bad things. I guess this is "journalism." I think we are aligned on Crime and "who started the year off with a police record". And that the freshman class lacks some minority demographics".

If in question, have more GOOD than BAD.

What's really striking about that draft memo is that it's very much aimed at teaching students how to create a certain kind of newspaper: a small-time local newspaper. The emphasis is on feel-good stories, running as many feature photos of readers as possible, having a generous letter column, and so on. If you grew up in a small town, like I did, you know the type of newspaper I mean. It covers Little League games and church suppers. It's a perfectly respectable enterprise. But I have to ask: if you were a student journalist at a flagship state university, would you only want to be trained for jobs at that kind of newspaper? Because, let me tell you, it's pretty hard to make a living at those places.

And this is where we run into one of the larger problems in pre-professional education: sometimes an emphasis on "practical" skills that students will be able to use in the "real" world, ends up teaching them skills that are only practical in a small corner of the world. You teach your journalism students how they do things at a "real" newspaper, but what you teach them limits them to jobs where they'll never be able to advance much. (Lots of "pre-professional" undergraduate majors teach students to do exactly one kind of job, usually a decent but not glamorous job which will keep them solidly in the lower middle class. Nothing wrong with learning to be an x-ray technician. But you have to know that x-ray technician school never takes you to any job except being an x-ray technician.)

Here, the focus was going to suit students well for gigs at the Bedford Falls Gazette or the Daily Mayberrian, but leave them unprepared to even apply for entry jobs at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, let alone the Washington Post or New York Times. Try getting a gig at one of the big places when even your undergraduate clips look like they're from a small-town daily. Here the teaching approach, however well-intentioned, strongly favors the weakest (or least ambitious) students, the ones who the teachers don't expect much from, at the price of limiting what's possible for the more ambitious students. The memo represents a shift of focus to lowest-common-denominator "professionalism," training students for jobs that even the weakest of them could probably get, at the expense of what the better students might be able to do someday.

The memo also brings up one of the constant struggles with teaching writing, or any of the other arts (broadly speaking): the tension between assigning tasks that the students are 'ready for' now and can complete successfully, on one hand, and on the other setting tasks will inevitably end up being the student's first, imperfect try.

The logic of giving assignments that the students are "ready for" is pretty obvious. They understand what they've been asked to do, they mostly end up doing a good job, and they're generally a lot happier. The down side is that they don't stretch, and if there's too much of an emphasis on students "succeeding" at things they can already do well, they don't get much better. I've certainly met students who seemed, from my point of view, to have been badly served by earlier teachers who only taught them simple tasks. Some of those students seemed totally unprepared for more advanced classes.

There are some things that are very much worth learning that are impossible to do successfully on the first try, or even the third. You have to learn them by trying them, and it can take a while to improve. One of the reasons colleges exist is to give students a place where they can have the first and third and fifth tries they need to master a complicated set of skills. Most jobs don't have a place for that. That's why an emphasis on producing a quality product at the Red and Black seems misguided to me. That's not a full education. Helping students turn out an unambitious but "successful" paper will teach them a little. Letting them turn out a flawed but ambitious daily paper teaches them a hell of a lot more. And that's what's unforgivable here: losing sight of the education.

Student journalists are supposed to care about turning out the best paper they possibly can, and as budding journalists they're supposed to focus on their readers. But the adults involved should never mistake pleasing the readers, or the quality of the morning broadsheet, with the actual goal. The world doesn't actually need the newspaper. What matters is that the students learn. A campus newspaper that makes everyone who reads it happy but doesn't force the students to stretch is a criminal waste of everyone's time.

When I teach writing to undergraduates, I go in with the knowledge that none of them are going to write anything, this semester, that anyone else would ever pay to read. Understanding this reality is one key to my job. I could assign them writing tasks that they already have the skills to do well, and everyone would feel good about themselves and I could pat them all on the heads. The reason no one would ever pay money to read those "successful" assignments is that the things the students already know how to produce are, by their nature, not worth a stranger's time. ("Oooh, look! A summary of the plot of Othello! Just what I've been looking for.")

On the other hand, I could assign the students to undertake tasks that they aren't yet capable of completing perfectly, and maybe even that they won't be able to do without two or three more tries. The results won't be worth a stranger's time to read, because even the best will have some problems and one or two will be a hot mess.  But I will read them, at least two or three times apiece, because it is my job and because what I'm interested in is not what the student wrote this semester so much as what the student might write down the road. My job is to get them further along the road, no matter how bumpy reading through any stack of assignments seems. That also means, of course, that I talk to my students about things that are holding their writing back. But when you worry mainly about "results" and "quality" you've taken your eye off the ball. You've stopped being an educator.

The point of student writing is what it does for the student. It isn't to make it easier on my eyeballs when I sit with a stack of papers on the coffee table, and it isn't to make the nice folks of Athens, Georgia happier with their morning copy of the Red and Black.  It's to move the students closer, one unsteady step at a time, to producing a piece of writing that will hold a stranger's attention and do its writer some good in the world: the writing sample for graduate school, the published story, the  portfolio that gets you hired at the Journal-Constitution or Newsweek. The "results" a teacher gets paid for worrying about aren't coming tomorrow, but years in the future. But that future, as every year teaches me, comes very fast. You can't ever stop preparing for it.