I have an image of how academic writing ought to go.
Having won some time to devote oneself to it, one should write unhurriedly,
carefully and with the real possibility of discarding things that don't work.
There should, on this picture, be no sense of an outcome other than charting,
accurately, some region of the space of reasons.
But for me it is never like that. I have today got a
draft article back (“Bootstrapping conceptual normativity?”) after a lengthy
period of a year or more of review with a 'revise and resubmit' instruction
that really just amounts to the injunction to do it all rather better. With a
rare moment of insight I realised that I had to do the bulk of it straight
away, today even, if it were not to become another weight of tedious and tricky
work to do dragging my mood down later. (Oh pesky not quite finished
encyclopaedia article on McDowell! How I hate that job.) And so I have, slowing
the argument and adding mass to the key moves. It isn't quite done but after 13
hours in front of my screen I am done for the moment.
Pulling my eyes away from my computer screen just now, I cannot quite believe that the
day has just gone like that. With a kind of neutrality. Engaging, absorbing but
will-sapping work. Sucking the life, the other possibilities, out of the day at
a crazy speed. I will never do anything better or further with April 2nd
2015.
I have a glass of modest cognac and am playing a
maximally distracting acoustic CD (Neutral Milk Hotel) to try to change my
mental state from rules and normativity. Writing isn't like teaching. There is
no energy burn. And it isn't anything at all like coal mining or military
service in Iraq. But it doesn't feel good for the soul in quite the way I might
have imagined when I was 20.
