Hoop Jumping V: ‘Piled Higher and Deeper’

This graph/cartoon appeared in this week’s Times Higher. I think it sums up the main potential danger of the PhD process very nicely indeed, which is why it (including the proclaimed “everything” level of undergraduate knowledge) made me laugh out loud.

Although “Piled Higher and Deeper” by Stanford alumni Jorge Cham seems to have taken off in a big way across North America, this is the first time I had heard of it. The www.phdcomics.com site, which explains itself here, contains lots of very funny – and highly accurate – visual and verbal material on the agonies and pitfalls of doing a PhD.

“The Lord Chamberlain’s Final Cut”

I will be giving a seminar paper entitled “HAIR, London, 1968: The Lord Chamberlain’s Final Cut” this Thursday, 4th October, at 5pm in room 3.16 of the Arts building at Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS.

Although this is part of the QMUL History Department Postgraduate Seminar Series, anyone, working under any disciplinary label – or none – is very welcome to come along. In keeping with the tone of the paper (which covers just a small part of my PhD research), I aim to make the atmosphere slightly less formal than usual. This is an attempt at just a hint of a 1960s ‘happening’. To that end, there will be much wine available. Whether that results in the degeneration of some into a tediously squiffy state – with entirely predictable consequences – is largely beyond my control (although, while the chroniclers of the Counter-Culture rarely mention it, I suppose that must have happened at ‘happenings’ too. Or maybe they truly were more ‘enlightened’ than the dominant twenty-first century London culture?) My hope is, rather, that everyone will enter into a positive, ludic, ‘Aquarian’ spirit.

I scheduled this, however, before I discovered that I have a rather intense teaching schedule on a Thursday, and that last week and next are without doubt the two most stressful and downright unpleasant I’ve had to endure since I returned to Academia. I therefore suspect I’ll need to draw heavily on all my years of Dr Footlights to physically get through it. That may mean resorting to my drugs of choice in such situations: Berocca, four-star caffeine, cigarettes, bananas and intravenous Lucozade. But the show must go on because, as some of my more senior, eh, ‘colleagues’ realise (admirably), to a large extent (when it comes to delivery, at least) ‘it’s all acting, isn’t it?’ (Maybe I should have taken them along to that casting I declined last week – because the gig clashed with my teaching – to show them what that is really all about.)

Image:  http://www.michaelbutler.com/hair/

Blogging (but not blagging) a PhD

I am entering a period of severe writing purdah. Some people can gaily knock out a thousand or more words of quality writing of a morning while juggling other commitments during the rest of the day. I can’t. I’ve tried on numerous occasions and I just can’t do it. I’m like a Baptist in this respect: only “total immersion” works. I must have the peace of mind to get it all out on paper in substantial sections with some sense of argumentative through-line. It’s all there in bits, and it’s all there in my head, but – as I once said to a particularly deluded and self-indulgent theatre director – having it ‘in my head’ is of bugger all use to anyone else.

The fact that I’ve had conferences, training sessions, teaching or archive appointments in far-flung parts of London on every single day since 4th January has been the latest major writing obstacle. Rewarding and useful though these events have been, the timing could not have been worse. I look at the diary each weekend, thinking ‘surely, surely I don’t have any more coming up?’…and I still have another week looming where I’m booked for every day. It really is enough to make a grown man weep. (It has this one.)

Although I’ve used this blog in a deliberately rather stream-of-consciousness (although hopefully not incoherent) way, I have always intended to go back through it to see which posts, citations, comments and links would be of direct use in my thesis. This seemed like as good a time as any to do so.

Pro- and anti-blogging PhD writers might therefore be interested to know that I have 5,500 words of material here in an immediately cut+paste-able format. This will, of course, be heavily cut, simmered down and re-written. But if it yields even a few K of material which survives almost verbatim in my final thesis, it will be a few K achieved painlessly – almost subconsciously. Anything related to the business of producing a PhD which can be achieved painlessly can only be a good thing for anyone, I think. So this alone (although there are other benefits) makes blogging worthwhile.

Hoop Jumping IV: The Journal Experience (or, The Thesis vs. ‘other commitments’)

I attended a two day conference this week on “Getting Published in the Arts and Humanities” organized by Reading University, funded by the AHRC (and therefore free to attend) and held at the Institute of Historical Research. It was pretty useful, if slightly overlong and lacking firm chairmanship. There were two particularly informative speakers (about whom I may blog another time). They were informative because they talked in practical, realistic, human and humourous terms – four approaches which, I think, never go amiss in the often arcane world of academia.

A disproportionately large amount of time was devoted to the issue of writing that ‘elusive’ and ‘important’ first journal article. I had to suppress a little giggle, having just been given the final go-ahead on the final re-write of my Grunwick article that very morning. That sounds hideously cocky, but, in fact, it stemmed from a huge sense of relief at having finally got it off my hands.

I wish all academic journals had larger circulations (ie, more people read them); were cheaper (which they would be if more people read them); and were more ‘accessible’ in every way (which, by definition, they would have become if more people read them). But while we are only too familiar with the concept of ‘dumbing down’, even I don’t really have a clue what I mean by ‘accessible’ – particularly in an era when most people in Britain want to bring back the death penalty; a terrifying number of them read The Sun; many of them drink Bacardi Breezers, etc, etc… While, on one level, I would have preferred to have pitched all of my Grunwick work to a quality commercial periodical or even a broadsheet newspaper (and I seriously considered and investigated this at one point) the inevitable compromises of space and word-limit made this impossible. And the one thing I will not contribute to is further sound-bite over-simplification on a subject which has already suffered this fate far too often in the last thirty years. Indeed, one of the key reasons I wanted to research the Grunwick Dispute in the first place was to re-examine reductive mis-representations.

So, I plumped for ‘academic purity’ and went for the journal route. What did I learn, in practical terms?

Firstly, if you think you’ll do ‘just a little bit of further research to expand it a bit’ before you submit the article you will probably find this snowballing no matter how hard you try to control it. You’ll find more and more and more things that you feel you must address and try to squeeze in. You’ll wonder if you should really be writing a book rather than a journal article. (In some cases, you perhaps should be.)

Secondly, even if your work has previously been commended and you believe it is in a well-developed or even ‘finished’ state – both of which were the case with me – you will almost certainly be required to make changes to it. And then maybe some more changes. This will take longer than you will anticipate, even if the changes demanded are fairly minor. It is time-consuming. It is hard work (particularly if you are struggling to come in below the word-limit). It’s not simply about re-formatting footnotes to suit the house style (although that’s a bugger of a job too, software programme or not.)

Thirdly, you’ll have your first taste of the ‘peer review’ process. I’m told that, for almost everyone, the norm is for this to be a rather mixed experience. No matter your age or stage, you’ll feel like you’ve just got your school report card. You will think that those who compliment you are the most insightful minds in the world. You will think that those who criticize you “simply do not understand the crux of your thesis” – or something slightly melodramatic and self-pitying like that. And, weirdest of all, you will have no idea who they are. Therefore, you won’t be able to clarify for them, persuade them, or shout your head off at them (the latter only, of course, in order to demolish their minor quibbles with the intellectual brilliance of your analytical insight). You surrender completely to their ‘authority’ without being able to question the ‘credentials’ which put them in that position of authority over you. That is an extremely odd situation for any fully-grown adult to choose to submit to. In that respect the process is not one of ‘peer review’ at all. You and they are not peers. They have the power to recommend or reject you for publication. The only power you retain is the right to say ‘I’m off and I’m taking my ball (ie, the article) with me’. But unless you are supremely confident that you will get published in another journal, to do that would be to cut off your nose to spite your face. The whole experience rather infantilizes one: or it did me, anyway. I’m neither proud nor ashamed to admit that. When I was acting, I always told the company that I did not want to know when the press were in to see the show, nor did I want to read reviews until after the run was over. With the ‘peer review’ process those options are not available. But there is, apparently, no other way to decide which articles to run and which to reject. (Hmmm. Not sure about that one, but can’t come up with a better suggestion.) I had to accept it, and you will also have to.

Lastly, if your cherished article which you believe you have burnished to within an inch of its life is, as in my case, not a section of your PhD, you’d better have a very patient supervisor who takes a very holistic view of your ‘personal development’. Unless you have the self-discipline of a Zen master, working on the article and/or other public seminar or conference papers will inevitably impinge upon the progress of your thesis. (And that’s without even considering teaching commitments, any domestic problems or periods of ill health; or all of these simultaneously.) It is less a matter of available time than a matter of available head-space. The pay-off, of course, is that you have two subjects on the go, and thus a more ‘well-rounded’ CV. The down-side is that you may not be, eh…quite as on-schedule with your PhD as Brett Holman of Airminded is (and I am pleased to hear that his progress is going so well – it sounds pretty ‘text-book’ to me!)

So, to conclude – and all of the above is, of course, only my reflections on my recent personal experiences, and all our subjects and circumstances vary hugely – getting a journal to accept an article is a much bigger commitment than “just re-working it a bit”. Whatever time you have set aside for it (days, weeks, months): double it. Then, to be on the safe side, add a bit more.

But it is worth it. You know you are going to finally appear in print. That is good news, both “for the CV” and in terms of self-esteem. You may, as I did, have a very pleasant editor and assistant editor to work and negotiate with. You may even, as I did, get a mildly pleasant surprise (thus far) over turn-around times. If you have the urge, the time and the energy: go for it. After all, everything in life is a learning curve. I’ll be better informed, better able to cope with the juggling, and able to do it all quicker the next time round. Won’t I?

Hoop Jumping III: ‘The Definitive’.

I have been prevaricating badly for several weeks – or it could, perhaps, appear so to others. I’m having terrible trouble actually making the final edit/revision/cut of a proposed article I’ve been encouraged to produce for some time. This is a revision of previous (well-received) work.

Why the delay and apparent mental block? Because I’m lazy? No, because for weeks I’ve rarely switched-off from thinking about and actually working on material for this. Because I’m a ‘perfectionist’, as the psychologists would have it? Perhaps. Because I’m more interested in the research and learning process than the ‘kudos’ of winning the approval needed to get it into print? Quite possibly. Because I don’t respond well to, or simply resent, being told to produce to a deadline? I’m really not sure about that one.

I’m writing about a relatively recent historical event which is still very much alive and contested. I’ve been in contact with several of the key surviving political ‘big beasts’. They have offered encouragement, clarification and excellent personal insights. This has been a wonderful learning opportunity for me.

It has proved, however, that anyone who thinks the personal testimony/oral history route is somehow an easy one is badly mistaken. With respect to those who work in a purely archive-driven way, dealing with live human beings is an infinitely more time-consuming way of working. They take time to respond. They also need some charming, chasing-up and cajoling. This requires emotional investment and personal contact. It is an exciting but very draining process.

It also creates a sense of debt. In this case, I have received responses so encouraging and detailed that I’ve been encouraged to make yet more contacts and go further and further with my research. Undoubtedly, all of the insights I’ve received are worth hearing, and deserve to be part of a well-rounded historical record.

That’s the problem. I’m writing a 10,000 word article – not ‘the definitive’ magnum-opus of synthesis on the subject. (That can, and will, come later.) It can only be the best I can offer at the moment. In that sense, I have to accept that it is a work-in-progress. But when, if ever, does what we do cease to be a work-in-progress?

I’ve written this post quickly a) by way of a final plan of attack and kick-up-the-bum, b) to remind myself how this felt when it happens again (which, in my case, it always seems to do), and c) to ask: am I alone in this? If not, how do others cope? What techniques and strategies do you use to avoid or break through such a situation?

Hoop Jumping II

A large part of my recent intellectual impasse is due to the H word – ‘historiography’. “I’m examining the historiography”. “I’m surveying the literature”. How these phrases make my heart sink. As grandiose and arrogant as it may sound, my function, surely, is not to praise or damn existing histories, some of which are useful and some of which are not. My job is to (attempt) to write new ones. If ‘the historiography’ was all bad I wouldn’t be working in this discipline at all. But if it was all good I would have nothing to add.

‘Reading is the enemy of writing’, says a certain Professor at Queen Mary (not, I should add, in the History department). How right he is. There comes a point when, having surveyed as much of the existing territory as is possible, one then has to move on, confident that what is relevant has been assimilated. I’ve yet to develop the confidence to know when I’ve reached this point. I’m not a natural rebel, and can be hamstrung by my own ‘conscientiousness’. I’m not good at ‘winging it’. I tend to slog on, trying to absorb it all, worrying that I may have missed something vitally ‘canonical’, until I reach a point where, frankly, I’ve sickened myself and my head is about to explode. Part of the make-up of those who revel in academic ‘Hoop Jumping’ is an almost orgasmic reaction to the word ‘historiography’. I, on the other hand, react to it with a sense of (non post-coital) depression. The Educating Rita definition of ‘What is Historiography?’ simply has to be: historians talking to historians about other historians. And yes, most of them are White, Male and Dead – although I’m never quite sure which ones. It all smacks of a Hierarchy (if not a self-perpetuating oligarchy), an Establishment, a Canon – which is, after all, what some of us are unashamedly seeking to challenge, and perhaps, at least in part, to smash. But even in the relativist, multi-culturalist, supposedly egalitarian and multi-vocal new millennium, this is dangerous talk: one will be labelled “An Old Leftie” or, worse still, what the culturalists would term “The Other”.

In order to be accepted by The Profession (as historians nowadays, like estate agents and hairdressers, love to call themselves) one has to submit to its discursive norms. This has proved as true as in my experience with the musical and theatrical Professions. One has to gain entry into the tent in order to then be able to piss all over it; or, at the very least, to re-arrange the furniture. This ‘entryist’ line is a tricky one to walk alone. Inspiration and support are required. To paraphrase Benjamin Britten, once one has learned the rules of Western harmony and counterpoint one can break them all – but only after they have been learned. Likewise, actors, despite what they may say on chat shows, very rarely subscribe to the polar opposites of The Method, or the Old School dictum of ‘learn your lines and don’t bump into the scenery’. They develop a system, a (lower-case) method, which works for them as individuals, and varies according to the role/project in hand. A bit of this and a bit of that; an eclectic cross-section of influences, plus the unashamed influence of personal experience (when it is relevant) – these are what fuse into an individual ‘voice’, in whatever field one is working. Don’t they?

Well, there is some real hope, in the contrasting and uber-canonical voices of Raymond Williams and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. FFN provides, for me, both realism and vindication:

“History, in short, has multiplied; indeed, it has exploded. The work of professional historians has never been as multifarious…Above all, the numbers of professional historians have exploded with the expansion of higher education. The results have been mixed. They include the curse of over-specialization: historians dig ever deeper, narrower furrows in ever more desiccated soil until the furrows collapse and they are buried under their own aridity…Deeper in the public arena, we seem to have forgotten how to influence debate and policy on the leading issues of the day…History is the most open and accessible of academic disciplines. Everybody can do it – indeed everybody does do it, because everybody has experience of the past and all people have privileged access to the sources of their own stories. It requires no special training, except in modest skills which any literate person can easily and quickly pick up without help. There are good reasons for being a graduate student in history, but the acquisition of peculiar professional competence, or of esoteric or hieratic knowledge, is not one of them…As well as including all people, history should include all disciplines. If I remember correctly, my reason for becoming a historian was the sheer voracity of my interests. Unable to choose between the disciplines which attracted me, I fixed on the one which included a little of all the others.”
F Fernandez-Armesto, ‘Epilogue: What is History Now?’, D Cannadine (ed.), What is History Now? (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp.149, 150, 152.

Williams famously wrote:
“I can work in these general fields only to the limit of my own interests, and do not suppose these to be ideally complete. Indeed I have already risked an extension and variety of themes will beyond the limits of any kind of academic prudence, for what seems to me the good reason that there is no academic subject within which the questions I am interested in can be followed through; I hope one day there might be, for it was quite obvious from the discussion of Culture and Society that the pressure of these questions was not only personal but general.”
R Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), pp.ix-x.

This is often interpreted as the clarion call which launched the discipline of Cultural Studies, from which I firmly believe all in the Humanities can learn an enormous amount. However, given that Williams was, in fact, a Professor of Drama, I prefer to adopt it as a manifesto which allows the moulding of any discipline to the task in hand, not vice versa. This discipline of ‘History’ is where I’ve landed. It is mine now, as much as anyone else’s. I’ve been allowed into the tent. The primary objective for 2006 is, therefore, some major spring-cleaning. Let’s see just how far ‘academic prudence’ can be stretched: how much ‘the one’ can be made to include ‘a little of all the others’.

Enough rumination for now. As of 9th January the Independent Research Proper begins, and this site will revert to a 1960s/70s smorgasbord. Ready or not, it is now time for nothing other than what the funding bodies would love to hear me call My Original Contribution To The Field.

Hoop Jumping I

This is the first of an occasional series of posts on the academic, personal and regulatory demands which are placed on MPhil/PhD candidates. This can, of course, only reflect my own experience of the day-to-day nuts-and-bolts of Actually Doing And Getting That PhD. These ‘Hoop Jumping’ posts will be unashamedly subjective, reflective, ruminative; sometimes optimistic, sometimes bitter – but undoubtedly cathartic. They may strike some chords with others going through similar experiences in the cathedrals, theme-parks, morgues and play-houses of academia around the country and the world. They may be of interest or use to no-one other than me.

But at the end of the first term and start of the second, where am I on the enthusiasm/progress/wisdom-of-starting-this-whole-endeavour scale? How does is it all feel? How can I fix what doesn’t feel good? How can I maintain what does? How can I cope better with jumping through the academic, regulatory hoops and deadlines which appear in my path, offering little help – and often hindrance by the bucket-load – in getting on with the job I am being funded to do?

I will offer one major piece of advice to anyone considering starting a PhD in the Humanities: don’t waste a moment of your time, let alone any of your money, on the plethora of “How to get/Should I do a PhD” books. Some are more intelligent and intelligible than others, but that’s not the point. The simple fact of the matter is this: if you need to read them you are not ready to do a PhD (and perhaps never will be). They stress only two key points: i) find a supervisor with whom you believe you can develop a productive working relationship ii) research a subject which engages you. Ye gods! Which ill-informed sadomasochist would choose to enter into PhD hell for a minimum of three years without both of these as prerequisites? Yet large numbers do. Numerous last-minute funding opportunities in an unknown university, working on a research topic of little interest to the candidate, with a supervisor they’ve never met (and will probably rarely meet) can be grasped every October. Or there is, for some, the ‘self-funding’ route – effectively, buy a PhD.

For my part, the idea of a candidate scrabbling after the letters DPhil at all costs – and an institution cynically helping them to do so – is utterly abhorrent. I couldn’t do it, but many can, which is why so many pointlessly microscopic theses are churned out every year by ‘Historians’ whose wider hinterland is non-existent. Regardless of their chronological age, many of these people are, in terms of their wider emotional and intellectual development, little more than children. Many have never functioned outwith the education system. Some never will. Many never want to. But by god, do these people know how to jump through academic hoops – which they should do, as the heart-breaking fact is that their objective is, or becomes, nothing other than getting a PhD in Getting A PhD. This term has made it abundantly clear to me that I am not one of them. Sometimes I envy them. For about five minutes.

I spent six months agonizing over whether I should even embark on a PhD. I did not jump at the first flattering noises which were made in my direction; nor should anyone, because they’re really not as flattering as they may sound at the time. All they signal is recognition of a basic level of competence. They do not signify the start of a glittering career, less still any interest in the proposed candidate as an individual – let alone a fulfilling and happy life. We should never forget that much of the life of the contemporary academic consists of getting ‘bums on seats’, be they undergraduate, postgraduate or research. That’s not cynicism, it’s reality. From the first moment I allowed myself seriously to entertain the thought of further research, I was adamant with myself and others that the right supervisor and research area were utterly essential to me. This first term has proved me absolutely correct on both of these counts.

I should, therefore, be celebrating these two achievements. I’ve made good progress in clarifying precisely what I’m going to be addressing in my thesis. And I’ll be saying little more about my supervisor other than that he has rarely put a foot wrong in relation to me so far. His is brilliant at his job, generous with his time and, in general, a bloody good bloke (see Trench Fever.) So I’m optimistic on those fronts.

But what else is there to deal with? Why the pervasive sense of frustration? And should I be panicking that I feel such frustration already? More to follow.