News of Absolutely No Interest to Academics Who Read or Write Blogs; or, Really, When I Say "Uninteresting" I Mean It

Deep in the heart of Irvine an index finger hovers over the "Submit" button on the MLA's online Special Session proposal page.  He owes it to her and him and him to press it.  But he can't. 

Scott: Must . . . press . . . submit.

Scott's Nagging Fears: Don't do it!  It's not perfect yet.

Scott's Beleaguered Practical Side: The deadline's tomorrow!

Scott's Nagging Fears: Press that button and it's over.  No more revision.  There's always tomorrow.

Scott's Beleaguered Practical Side: There certainly is.  But Scott should spend it finishing his chapter, not agonizing over the parallelism of a clause in his proposal.

Scott's Nagging Fears: But they will hate him for his faulty parallelism!  They will laugh unto tears and without cessation for months until they die painful dehydrated deaths!

Scott's Beleaguered Practical Side: No, they won't.

Scott's Nagging Fears: Yes, they will.

Scott's Beleaguered Practical Side: No.  They won't!

Scott's Nagging Fears: Yes.  They will!

Scott's Beleaguered Practical Side: NO THEY WON'T!

Scott's Nagging Fears: YES THEY WILL!

Scott: Will you two zip it already?  I'm going to hit send. 

Scott's Nagging Fears: No, you won't.

Scott: Yes, I will.

Scott's Nagging Fears: No.  You won't!

Scott: Yes.  I will!

Scott's Nagging Fears: NO YOU WON'T!

Scott: YES I WILL! (presses "Submit")  Ha!

Scott's Nagging Fears: You're gonna regret that.

Scott: Maybe . . . but wait until word gets out about this panel.  It will be the talk of the blogosphere for hours. 

Scott's Beleaguered Practical Side: You tell 'em!

Scott: No one will have anything else to talk about.  They'll all wish they could be in Philadelphia next December!  They'll go out of their way to make sure they're there for THE GREATEST EVENT IN BLOGOSPHERIC HISTORY.

Scott's Beleaguered Practical Side: Yeah!

Scott: Yeah!

Scott's Nagging Fears: Like this changes anything.  They all still hate you . . .

Comments

[N. Pepperell]

Ack! Sounds very familiar...

I've just personally spent the entire day revising and re-revising *two paragraphs*. Mind you, these two paragraphs seem to have spawned their own cottage industry of footnotes along the way - but hey, if every word doesn't have its personal annotated qualification, someone might conceivably miss the fact that I am completely and hopelessly OCD about my academic work - and we wouldn't want to leave them with a shadow of doubt about this, given that I'm writing this paper to circulate to someone who will be considering hiring me in a few weeks...

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Oddly, I enjoy writing footnotes more than body paragraphs. Developing other people's arguments; citing critical histories and debates; discussing minutiae; &c. If I were a gimmicky sort my dissertation would read "Scott is so right.[1]" and then proceed as an endless array of footnotes, footnoted footnotes, footnoted footnoted footnotes.

[Belle Lettre]

"Deep in the heart of Irvine..."

Irvine has a heart?

I say that with love.

I've grown to like footnotes, but I still hate the legal citation rules for "supra this" and "but cf that." I tend to let things go when I hit "submit," praying that the student editors of the various law journals will be scarcely better readers than I am a writer. Once an article is accepted, months of revision will follow even if I turn in my "final" draft. I was a student articles editor--it's no fun trying to tell a professor that s/he's grammatically incorrect. Professors tend to resist statements of authority by 24 year old law students. I imagine it will be less fun to be told so when I become a professor.

You unfortunate fools with your well-respected peer-edited journals. If your journals were student-edited like law reviews are (weird, huh!), you could just blame people like me and your nagging fears could be assuaged. Just pass the buck!

I'm feeling a mite better, so I thought I'd drop by. Apparently, you, AW and I are all sick. I think there's a conspiracy afoot to spread germs through cyberspace.

[N. Pepperell]

A major source of my income during college was proofreading, and a fair amount of that was for 50-something professors. I could generally sell the strictly grammatical suggestions - you could always save face for them by saying things like, "Oh, I *always* do *that* when I'm in a hurry too", etc. The bigger problem was when you felt there was something fundamentally wrong with the structure of a paragraph or article - then you took your life into your own hands...

I had one regular proofreading client who, when we got to this stage, would always lash out with the most bizarre, psychoanalytically charged invectives about my subterranean hostility that drove me to invent problems with his text to undermine his self-confidence and sabtoage his academic career. And then he'd come back the next week as though none of this had happened, and ask what I thought of the changes...

But I have a disproportionate love of footnotes, as well - they provide a means of expressing all variety of associations that occur while I'm writing, serve as capsule descriptions of things I might write in the future, and talk to a wide range of audiences other than the one I'm addressing in the main piece. And I don't feel the need to be as obsessively strict with them as I do with my main text - so they can meander around a bit and use an associative structure that I would always edit out of my main draft, but that it always easier for me to write...

[T. Scrivener]

Don't worry, cast that uncertainty aside. you can rest soundly in the knowledge that I hate you and I hate parallelism.

[Bill Tozier]

"They'll all wish they could be in Philadelphia next December!"

Everything up until that sentence was rife with familiar realism.

[Matt]

Whoa. Does this mean that bitchphd is going to be shedding her pseudonymity?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I was wondering how long it would take before someone noticed that. (And yes, she gave me permission to say that. Well, she gave me permission to post the abstracts if the panel gets accepted, which amounts to the same thing.)

[Matt]

Hey, I'm always happy to pipe in with an utterly predictable comment.

But, like, wow.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I'm hoping it'll be the event of the MLA. How could they not accept the panel? If they don't, I'll cry.