Tag: sabbatical

Reading Rebalance

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

A drizzly Sunday mid-February. Woke up to onomatopoeia percussing in downspouts out the window. “Good news. At least they’re not frozen solid any more.” I expected that feeding and watering the chickens first thing would be slipperier, which before I ventured out with the watering vessels detoured to listening karaoke-style to Paul Simon’s 1977 Slip Sliding Away and then to Little Richard’s 1957 recording, Slippin’ and Slidin’ (Peepin’ and Hidin’), an associative path unfolding from the difficult to track down Simon quotation in which he says, “I didn’t originate that title. It came from that Little Richard song Slippin’ and Slidin’,” slip sliding owing to slippin’ and slidin’. Mo crowed. By that point I was filling the water carriers and delighting in the chickenicity implied in Little Richard’s parenthetical, peeping and hiding. Moments later, imagine what a changed chore it was to find that each footfall held without trouble, a better than expected grip in the mud-ice-grass trivium.

Among the rewards of a sabbatical, aka research leave, aka duty off campus is that I have made it a point to reclaim studying; with a little bit more time than usual, studying fans out again. It is possible for these few months to chip away at a bigger writing project, to hold a scatterplot of meetings each week (usually with grad students), and, to lay out a mosaic of readings purposefully juxtaposed. Read for accidents, surprise angles. With a little bit of time, eclectic reading totters again; its balance otherwise, in entrained semesters, is prone to tilting heavily toward the necessary, pragmatic, and bureaucratic anchors for professional attention.

Past few days a rewarding zigzag has come from clicking along in PDFs of Meg Sweeney’s Mendings (2023), Roland Bathes’ Mourning Diary (1977), and Tim Ingold’s 1993 article, “The Temporality of the Landscape.” Sweeney’s book is helping me think about gone noting and about the personal-theoretical in familial memory work; it’s a marvelously visual book, too, and at 47k words helps me gain a feeling for the scope of my current project. Ingold is (maybe?) jogging some of the earliest motivations for worknets when I drafted that 2015 Composition Forum article and plotted its rationale using Lines: A Brief History (2007). I will have occasion early next month in Cleveland to say a few words (as “prespondent”) about worknets, about what I imagined they would activate in service of reading in service of research design beyond the typical ramp-ups to literature reviews. The gist of this is that worknets promote reading expectant of wider and weirder flight paths; literature reviews are prone to formulism, IMRAD-pleasing, over-torqued to function. Which is another way of saying a generous comparison will take more time and nuance; I tend to be nap time! with lit reviews. What was the last unforgettable lit review you read?

The Barthes reading is just because I hadn’t read it before. It’s a fast read because it amounts to 262 pages, 14k words or so, of translated notes, journal entries, and introspective asides. They’re diaristic, abrupt, reflective in a manner of ritualized self-noticing. How am I doing? How am I doing now? Richard Howard, translator of several Barthes books, wrote in the afterword about how the entries served as warm-ups, as RB would cut paper into quarter sheets, then type the date-stamped missives as an exercise, perhaps, to shift from the underlayment of private grief to a more readerly register—although, that said, Henriette is unavoidable in his other writing around that time, late 1970s, Camera Lucida and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.

I highlighted sixteen passages, some as small as words or even symbols, like the Φ on p. 177, with a footnote that RB used the phi as a symbol for photograph in Camera Lucida. The highlights glowed brighter in the second half as can be seen in this highlighted contact sheet, where just over half of the sixteen annotations landed on or after p. 200.

Figure 1. Highlighted contact sheet, or the sixteen annotated Mourning Diary pages.

Here are a few of the corresponding passages, which I will end with because the afternoon is a’slipping.

July 18, 1978

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

August 18, 1978

To share the values of the silent dailiness (to manage the cooking, the cleaning, the clothes, the choice and something like the past of objects), this was my (silent) way of conversing with her. —And this is, her no longer being here, how I can still do it.

October 3, 1978

The profound modesty she had—that made her possess, not no belongings at all (no asceticism), but very few belongings—as if she wanted, at her death, that there would be no “getting rid of” what had belonged to her.

January 30, 1979

We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.

Dam Road – Then What Happened

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

Napjerks between naps, this sabbatical is some but not all resting pose. A privilege and a luxury of course, I’m profoundly grateful!, the sabbatical is the first for me since winter 2016, a decade ago. This time is clockfaced with transition and red-inked bleedingly with fascistic bombardments on all sides of the U.S. news. Moving is manageable and not felt to be a remarkable upheaval, at least not yet, midwinter, but awful, abhorrent stuff, the latter. I write each day, finding or losing rhythm, but sitting and making words into lines, usually in the mornings. January was a blur and has passed. Groundhog saw its shadow today so who can say how long February will last.

I’m in Chapter Four (of Five), plugging away, thirty-seven ephemeralist episodes drafted and four to go. I left the more personal set for last, mistakenly imagining them to be clearer to me. They haven’t been. It’s merely drafting, which must come with small doses of self forgiveness. I draw in the evenings. Twenty-six drawings so far. Twenty-four to go. Soft goals are ~50k words and 50 original illustrations. Earlier today a few words on hand entanglement, carrot peeling, and continuous soups reached 400-some words; enough for now. But it pulled me down the mirror hall of half-memories of Tillie and Fred’s (my grandparents’) house in West Branch, which real estate websites pin to a lazy timeline as being built in 1900 along Dam Road, a couple of miles out of town, dirt road. I guess they were only there until I was 9 or 10, since by that time Fred had died (in August 1979) and Tillie had moved to the apartment, Winchester Towers. Tillie died in September (maybe August?) 1984. I don’t remember ever going back to Dam Road after Tillie died, after her funeral, only that the division of assets was fraught, adults fighting. You’d best go outside and play, which of course I did.

Figure 1. Tillie and Fred’s (my grandparents’) house, Ogemaw County, Mich.

A few different real estate websites host undated photos of the place, though I guess most of the photos are from the last 15 years. I recognize a few things. The brick planter box next to the front door. The sliding glass door leading into the kitchen. I know the floor plan well, the smaller bedrooms, the utility room at the back, the kitchen. I wonder what remains of the early 1980s features in the yard, the trees, or the rhubarb patch. I only remember climbing the one weeping willow and white pine near the road. The willow was always being climbed by older cousins; it felt more dangerous because big kids were waiting in line or had already climbed ahead of you, all of the right setups for being shoved out of the best perching places. The pine by contrast was not in demand because every branch was covered in sap blisters. Had to be careful not to let clothing touch the sap because it was impossible to wash out. None of this is in the book manuscript other than a passing mention of the willow and the pine.

I read again over the weekend in Caitlin DeSilvey’s Curated Decay and have been thinking appreciatively about how she framed her methods for writing about a sea and storm wracked pier. Many histories are keyed to events, and keying to events spotlights the constitutive and the formidable, leaning toward progress, rebuilding from loss, and repair. Given this, how might one write from the obverse, the inevitabilities of decline and recession? How, in this, can we carry out an ephemeralist practice observant of gone-going yet not presumed to be sparring with, or against the Modernist grain of a more commonplace historiography stitched from this-then-this-then-this eventfulness? DeSilvey described storying in service of analysis, but the vignettes accept and humbly call attention to their assured incompleteness, their unfinishability. Nothing turns out. We don’t know what happened next because next hasn’t happened yet. It follows, then, that one approach to decay curation unfolds through incomplete stories, making method through scraps and fragments whose accumulation cannot add up to a complete picture but instead accepts slivering, impermanence, and loss. Ends never-ending. The epigrammatic. Vignettes ending in ellipses, em-dashes, question marks. Writer and reader shrugging in tandem, so, what then? Is that it? I want my money time back. Why didn’t anyone bother with a new roof? We used to eat whole stalks dredged in white sugar, so who exactly abandoned the rhubarb patch to overgrowth and rewilding? What fungus is growing from the split portion of the willow chipped and scattered a couple of inches deep along the fence line? Then what happened.

As Sabbaticals End

/ Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 4 minsI return to campus tomorrow, May 2, following a research leave that relieved me teaching and service responsibilities at EMU during Winter 2016. The four month leave allowed me to put the finishing touches on a collaborative monograph and to get the other book I have contracted with the WAC Clearinghouse #writing series substantially closer to a full draft. At the start of the sabbatical, the introduction and first chapter were already sent off, in the editor’s hands (these amount to 57 ms. pages). Over the past four months, I submitted three more chapters, which amounts to 129 ms. pages. I still have some work to do on Chapter Five, which I plan to send by the end of May, and Chapter Six, which I’ll turn over by the end of June. With that, a full draft of the monograph and then on to other things. I just turned off my email autoreply, and I’ll be in Pray-Harrold 613M tomorrow for most of the day, doling out numerous emails related to scheduling for this year’s first-year writing sections. Before the leave officially officially concludes, I wanted to capture a few impressions about the sabbatical, its accomplishments, and its occasional struggles.

  • Winter 2016 was only the second semester in 18 years that I didn’t teach a class. And the summer ahead, which is filled with administrative responsibilities, will be only the second summer in 16 years that I won’t be teaching a class. These patterns crept up on me; as I counted them and as I write them here, it seems like too much. I understand better than ever before the risks of burnout (or call it boredom, disinterest, complacency, checking out, whatever), and I have realized this winter how precariously close I have been to shrugging off many of the priorities I held when I started began down this career path during doctoral work.
  • As this was my first sabbatical, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect about work rhythms. The nearest I’ve come to having this kind of time to devote entirely to scholarship was all the way back in 2008 when I was working on the dissertation. A sabbatical takes some getting used to, and I suspect this is especially true when the leave is taken from a quasi-administrative post, such as directing a first-year writing program. The interim director and associate director did a fine job, as far as I can tell, but the hand off involved a fair amount of leading communication, pointers to where various documents were stored, how to handle everyday operations, and so on. Likewise, as the return from sabbatical approaches, there has been in uptick in email, requests for scheduling various things for the first half of May. I’m not sure I was especially well prepared for the fuzziness of transitioning onto sabbatical and back off again, particularly as relates to this administrative work. And the lessons about how to transition on and off more gracefully, although they are fresh with me now, probably won’t be especially helpful when my next sabbatical comes around.
  • I’m reasonably pleased with my productivity on sabbatical. I didn’t travel much–only a couple of out of town trips, primarily for conferences and an invited talk and workshop. I asked around, and some colleagues said things like, “don’t expect to get anything done during the first month” and “remember to rest.” These were helpful reminders, and now looking back, I suppose I could have worked harder and gotten more done, but I am more or less still on track with the timeline for the book, and I don’t at all have the sense that I squandered huge chunks of time.
  • Sabbaticals are isolating and on some days very strange. This much free time? I worked out. I read a few books that don’t have anything to do with my writing. I shitted around. Watched TV. Cooked. Dabbled at home improvement stuff. I regard most of this as run of the mill and routine–nothing here I would describe as radically transformative. The bouts of isolation got me thinking a lot more about social balance, about how much of my social world is constituted by work interactions, conversations with colleagues who are also friends. But sabbaticals are socially bizarre in that people want to leave you alone and respect your time, which is at the same time, of course, estranging from familiar routines and conversations that can prove supportive or generative. At one point I considered trying to convene some kind of writer’s group, but after talking to another colleague who was sabbaticalling at the same time as me, I decided better of it. No need to attempt to be a social leader at the same time my purest focus should be on the book’s development.
  • I can’t say yet whether I am fully restored, recharged, rested, and ready for what’s ahead. I jump back into the directorship of the first-year writing program, and while I was away there were a handful of institutional changes that make my return cautious insofar as I can’t quite tell how some of these questions will settle out (most of them relate to labor; who teaches composition as well as how composition sections are weighted for equivalencies). I thought long and hard beforehand about extending the sabbatical for four months through September 1, the start of Fall 2016, and while I could have chosen this alternative, by returning early I am able to earn additional pay in the summer months and continue as director.

Now having listed these few notes, they re-read to me as banalities, though not as too banal to post, if only so I can return to them in a few years when I put in for another research leave. And I think I will. That is, I know people who swear they don’t want or need a sabbatical, but as I have been reflecting on this time for the past ten days or so (the reprieve window of repatriation and conserving effortfully to make the most of what remained), I regard this time as invaluable to my well-being, to my research and scholarship, and to my sense of reinvigorated responsibility as a tenured professor. It surprises me a little bit that I am both excited to return to campus and that I got as much done as I did. I suppose that in itself is as much conviction as anyone can have about a sabbatical’s worth.

Thirteenth Days

/ Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

Sabbatical’s rhythms have taken much getting used to. Early-day starts, writing from 6-11 a.m. worked okay for a few days. Then a headcold stuffedcold, a couple of blergy-meh days through which I could justify holding close the couch’s cushions. So supportive a couch. And into the most recent week, work obligations, trips to campus almost every day. Snowslop given to rain-washed-snowslop has thrown sideways all outdoor running routines (NNSA: Need new shoes, anyway); the campus pool will have me any time I will have it, and I managed to splash across a half mile or so Thursday evening before Is.’s basketball practice at St. Luke’s–the first practice of the season. 

But the writing, even as it’s happening, it’s the sort of textural consistency of the second half of a bag of whatever brand corn chips, recognizable even if registering as too predictable and familiar and constant a flavor–academic writing wanting ghost pepper salsa (face-melting, January-melting heat to go along with). Sabbaticals have a binge-like quality and I’ve noticed the sharp shift in a sociality (around writing) that offers solitude and awayness as amenable to productive foci, rhythms, and attentions. Writing group? Yeah, maybe.

Not sure I can say with good-enough accuracy what the accumulative wordcount is right now. A chapter is developing, probably just under 5k words in, with the second half’s sections more conceptually clear to me because they accord well with recent conference presentations on turn spotting. And the digital installation–the motion chart–has been in sight for several years now; it wants more data fed into it, but that’s doable, amounting to a few more coding sessions. Not that the explanation of its methods and its making, much less the analysis and focal examples require the extra data. The motion chart wants it, is all.

And the week was also punctuated by settling the details for a talk at MTSU in early March, a talk and workshop, both, which I’m looking forward to with the right ideas, the right energy. Disciplinary Discourse Networks 1984/2014, the title a play on Kittler’s epochal media archaeology. And not that I will have time to develop the threads to Kittler in any especially explicit ways, it’s enough to make the theoretical nod, especially as it gets at methods, modeling, and eras in disciplinary emergence: discourse communities flourished in the 1980s because structuralism (including infra- and post- prefixed -structuralism) was especially upset and churning. Much more to this distinction, more than I’ll labor through here (or in the talk, for that matter); suffice it to say that we’re readier than we’ve been in some time to create the simple visual models that accord with insights into disciplinary discourse networks–semantic, bibliographic, affinity-based, choric, career-emplaced, and so on. And particularly for newcomers, I hope growing compulsions toward depth and complexity fetishism (qua ecology fascination-asms) don’t entirely occlude these simple visual models and what’s especially generative in what they do, the framing they provide, the footings they sponsor, and so on.

Second Days

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

Second days of sabbaticals. I’ve known only one second day: today. The fifth. As worklike as day one, with the exception that digressive minutiae are more appealing than before–trimming fingernails, sweeping the floor (not that it needs it but for that one speck of mud maybe, which spotted me spying it as the tea kettle took its sweet time steaming from audible boil to pressure-sent whistler). Trim and sweeeeep. Then back in the chair to do office-chair office chair things. Ever nonmagical, more stylistically cumin than cayenne.

Tried to write with some background music, but that was a Johnny J.R. Cashbust. Too distracting, Cindy. What is truth? No earthly good for getting shit done. For the last sprint, I found some wordless Buddhist harpy strumtracks to cycle through iTunes, and that was enough songburst to get this upticking chapter to–what?–nearly a second section in. Put much finer points on a couple of phrases in the first section (stylistic cayenne!), extending it by 155 words and launched the second section with 906 words (maths: 1061). At daybreak I thought maybe I would blaze all the way through to 1500 and dust the second section off, but no, and it’s fine. Dandyfine. I’m also learning to relax about the goals, trust slow and steady and whatever draftmess piles up one day is suited to smoothing the next. 

I regard this now as a banality dispatch, but will post anyway. Oh, okay, so I worked on the book again today. That’s what sabbaticals are for. Nonmagical, butt in chair, putting down words that, truth is, range from geez have I been thinking about this for one helluva long time to geez I have no idea on earth what I’m trying to say to geez this is such an old and familiar friend, this idea, to geez is this the best register for warm-accessible reception both by newcomers to the field and by established scholar-colleagues to geez it’s happening and its taking shape is not limited to my fingerstrokes/keystrokes only. 

Occam’s Sabbatical

/ Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

Lead-up to a sabbatical, my first sabbatical, has been punctuated by many, many interactions about its beginnings (i.e., when does it officially begin?) and my optimism (i.e., are you excited?) and readiness (i.e., are you ready for this?). To the questions about beginnings, for most of the fall semester, I pinpointed December 16, the day after our department’s holiday party and after the last day of meeting for second of the two grad classes I taught. But I was still obliging various administrativa until at least December 20. And I didn’t exactly spend much of the break opening the book’s workfiles, much less reading or writing in relationship to it. 

Today, finaly, I felt like I started in on the sabbatical. I’ve set for myself this week the goal of timely rise+shining, up and coffee-pouring by six, in chair by 6:30 a.m., writing for four hours. This morning’s work session was a lot of oscillating between shaping and focusing, then generating, then shaping and focusing, then generating. I re-read some old stuff. Re-read the introduction and first chapter. And dived in for the first section of Chapter Three, set down 888 words, though I was only going for a Scrivener-count of 750. It’s non-magical writing, clunky and nowhere near as fine-tipped as my thinking, but it is a start on the sabbatical, which is pretty much all I was going for. The rest of the week I am hoping for four-hour morning work sessions in the range of 1000 words per day, aims of having Chapter Three’s rekick totally drafted by the end of next week. 

But that’s more micro-detail than I meant to put down here. I mostly wanted to note a few of the ideas that were blinking away in the margins, excluded from the writing but influencing at the edges. I’ve been thinking more about Occam’s razor and parsimony–principles of narrow-set scope. This is the razor whose edge sharpens when we invoke relevance, right? Go only with what is necessary; trim the rest. And I was mulling this over in relation to the scope of disciplinary terminology–of seeking just the right circumference for a semantic network, placing a right-sized circle around the web of language. There’s something faintly nagging at the foggy juncture between the simplifying economics of parsimony, attention, and noetic vocabularies in any given doman. Not too much, not too little; scales balancing between general and special, broad and narrow. 

I dwelt for far too long on standpoint theory, which I am not using, but which I find difficult to ignore as a means of explaining the vehicular-directional metaphors (partly) invoked with “turns.” I prefer to keep turns boiling in valences of tropology and nephology, but these nevertheless contrast sharply with perspectival standpoints, bipedal participant-observers, and careerist-professional anecdotalism rampant in contemporary discipliniography. You can see from that sentence it is just as well that I keep that ish-heap out of this chapter, no? And lastly lastly, I left in a tab the joke about the magician who was driving down the road until he turned into a driveway. I wanted to, but I didn’t. And besides, I would’ve preferred that magician turn into an A&P parking lot–anything whatever more happening than a fucking driveway.