Category: In other words

socializing

I’ve been thinking about the social ties that connect us to our scholarship.

Last week I was at the annual Shakespeare Association of America meeting (or #shakeass13, as it was lovingly hashtagged), a conference that I’ve been going to every single year since (have mercy on me) 1994.1 It’s a great conference, in part because it is organized around seminars: the bulk of the work of the meeting happens in seminars in which participants circulate papers in advance; there are also paper panels, with only two or three happening concurrently. The result is a conference with a lot of room for active participation and common conversations. It’s invigorating, and that’s one of the reasons I keep returning.

Another reason is that I have a huge number of friends and colleagues that I only ever see at SAA. I’ve been going for a long time, I keep meeting more and more people, and while I’m lucky to work at a place that has a lot of Shakespeareans passing through, most of my friends I only see at conferences. This isn’t surprising news for anyone who goes to things like this: the social element of conferences is much of what makes them wonderful (or exhausting, if you’re an introvert). And the format for SAA is really great for socializing—not only is conversation built into the seminars, the conference even ends with a dance. (Thank you, Malone Society, even if I never actually go.)

But this time, I’ve been aware of how much social ties are built not only into my favorite conference, but into my life as a scholar.

I trained as scholar focused on modern productions of Shakespeare. I wrote a book on the subject, edited a collection, presented at conferences, published articles, all on aspects of Shakespeare and performance. I did that solidly from the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s. And in the process, I met great people in the field, people I enjoyed collaborating with and being friends with. But then, around 2006, I started retraining myself as a book historian, thanks to the program I started on the subject at the Folger. And with that came blogging, and tweeting, and going to conferences, and even publishing. And in that process, I met a new crew of collaborators and friends.

What this means is that when I go to SAA, I find myself pulled in two directions: do I want to be at sessions focused on book history or at ones about performance? That experience of being pulled in different directions will be familiar to any scholar who is interested in more than one thing. But what I had not fully appreciated before this most recent experience at SAA was how much of the intellectual tugging went hand-in-hand with a social tugging. Sure, we all find ourselves socializing with the people with whom we share intellectual interests. That is the pattern I just described above. But what I recognized this time is that it works in the opposite direction, too: my choices in who I was socializing with generated who I wanted to share my intellectual energies with.

Here’s what I mean: the socializing I did at this conference tended, primarily, to be with my performance studies friends, and it jump-started my brain so that I’ve now got new questions and possible projects bubbling away. Talking with R and A and S, among others, made me want to continue those conversations by thinking about fragments and travel and how we experience, share, and archive theatrical performance. I was interested in those things before, but my drive to sort them out is connected to my drive to continue to hang out with these people I like. I don’t want to hang out with them so that I can better work out these questions that are bugging me; I want to work out these questions so that I can continue hanging out with them.

Obviously, my entire intellectual life is not driven by who shares my love for food and drink.2 I’ve got another project bubbling that doesn’t come out of any socializing impulses, and it’s a great one, and I chose my collaborator not because he’s someone I like to hang out with, but because he’s the right person for this project. And obviously what I get out of conferences isn’t only seeing my friends; I heard some really exciting papers in Toronto and that’s what really made it a great conference. (Let me tell you, I’ve been to other conferences that have been good social scenes but when it’s built around lousy papers, the whole experience brings you down.) But the connections between who I like to be friends with and who I like to talk shop with are not accidental. One of the delightful things about moving into a new field of scholarship has been that it introduced me to not only to exciting new ways of thinking about texts and books, but that it connected me to some really interesting and fabulous people. I love that.

But I’m now realizing how much I miss my old field, too. Yes, I know I can do both and that I could even combine book history with performance studies so that one foot is planted firmly in each realm, and I do try that. But let’s face it, that’s also exhausting and since my work explicitly pulls me towards book history and material text, that’s where I’ve gone. I’m not going to stop thinking about those things. I’m too embedded both intellectually and emotionally in the book history world (see some of you at SHARP in Philadelphia?) to walk away from it. But I’m going to let my love for performance stay in my life, too, and I’m excited about that.

So consider this my paean to the value of friendships and the ways they inspire us to be better scholars. And a big, hearty THANK YOU to all my #shakeass13 peeps: the ones who created the silly hashtag and wore our silly t-shirts, the ones who ate and drank with me, the ones I didn’t have a chance to do more with than wave across a crowded room and the ones who let me chill with them when the rest of the conference was too much. You’re what makes being a Shakespearean fun and smart.

#shakeass13? I'd shake it!
#shakeass13? I’d shake it!
  1. Ok, I missed one year, in 1995, when it was held in Los Angeles and I was living in London, but I’ve been every other single year always. [↩]
  2. Although thank you, Fairmont’s Library Bar, for introducing me to Peat Monster, which is a goofy name for what was an entirely enjoyable whiskey. [↩]

Make your own luck

What follows is a presentation I gave at the 2013 convention of the Modern Language Association (known fondly by many of us as #mla13) in the session “How Did I Get Here? Our “Altac” Jobs.” The session was a roundtable discussion, with pecha kucha presentations, about “alternative academic” careers. You can watch the slides with my audio, or read the presentation and look at the slides on your own. My thanks to Brenda Bethman and Shaun Longstreet for organizing the panel and to my fellow panelists and to the audience for a great conversation.



“Make your own luck” (MLA 2013)

I am the Undergraduate Program Director at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a position I’ve held for six years. It’s a job that combines working in one of the premier special collections of early modern literature and culture with teaching a small number of highly motivated and curious students. This is the story of how I got here.

I did a PhD in English, researching modern feminist performances of Shakespeare. After finishing, I was fortunate to get a two-year teaching postdoc, and after that, a one-year research postdoc. At the end of that, I got married to someone who had a job lined up in a Washington DC law firm, and so we moved and I started my life as an independent scholar.

I spent the next year writing my book at the Folger. During that time, I became friends with a local Shakespearean who told me that her department was looking for someone as a leave replacement. So I spent the next year teaching drama and composition at The George Washington University and the following year as an adjunct at George Mason, a job I found again through my Shakespeare friend.

Then I heard from my friend that the head of the Folger Institute wanted to take a year off. And so Gail recommended me to Kathleen, Kathleen went to write her book, and I ran the Institute for a year. At the end of that gig, another contact asked if I’d adjunct at Georgetown, covering his Shakespeare classes, and so my George-trifecta was complete.

At the end of my year at Georgetown I gave birth to my second child (I’d had the first one after my GW stint) and I spent the following year trying to catch my breath and work out how to mother two children with a spouse who was frequently traveling and parents who were aging more rapidly than I was ready to admit. The lesson I learned was that I was not cut out to stay at home.

Luckily, at that point my friend Gail, by now the Folger’s Director, hired me as a consultant on a planning grant for developing undergraduate programming in book history at the Library. So I became an independent contractor, put together an implentation plan, and then became the inaugural Folger Undergraduate Program Director, a job that I love.

I’ve used the word “luckily” to describe how I got to this place, and I certainly benefitted from luck. I live in a town rich in possibilities for Shakespeare scholarship, and I know people who led me to temporary jobs and to my current career. And for a long time I thought of how I got here as a product of luck.

But another way to think about luck is to see it as the residue of design. I wasn’t simply lucky. I worked hard—persistently and creatively—to be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that might come my way. I didn’t always know what it was that I was working toward, but I was working nonetheless. So here’s another version of the story of how I got my job.

While I was turning my dissertation into a book, I submitted an excerpt to Shakespeare Quarterly. My article wasn’t accepted, but I had a nice correspondence with the editor and our paths later crossed at the Shakespeare Association conference. That editor was Gail Kern Paster, and when I moved down to Washington DC, we were both regulars at the Folger and we would chat about our research.

Because she knew my work, she recommended me to fill in at GW. Because I knew the Folger as a reader and program participant, had administrative experience from grad school, and was an active scholar in Shakespeare circles, I was a good fit for the Institute. By this point, I’d come to know the Folger’s culture and resources and that of faculty, students, and administrators at three of the area’s largest schools.

I’d built a network of colleagues across Washington DC and across the Shakespeare community. When the Folger needed to hire someone who knew the Library and local schools, who had the administrative skills and the intellectual breadth to set up a new program, I met those needs. It wasn’t luck that I got my job, it was years of hard work.

Despite what I’ve just said—what I firmly believe about how I came to this #altac career—it took me a long time to believe that I hadn’t just accidentally lucked into it. I’d never intended to do this line of work. I’d intended to be a tenured faculty member; I spent years on the job market trying to get a job like that. But I didn’t.

Because of that history, among other things, it was hard for me to see the planning that had gone into my good fortune. Because I didn’t get what I thought I wanted, I didn’t think I deserved the thing I’d gotten. As some of you no doubt know, it’s really hard to come out of an unsuccessful job search without feeling like you’ve failed, that you’ve fallen short.

In my case, that feeling was exacerbated by the shape my family life had taken. My low-paying jobs were made possible by my spouse’s high-paying job, and while I was grateful, I also felt like a kept woman. Add to that the problem that his career wasn’t highly relocatable, and that once we had kids, it was not going to be practical for me to live apart from them.

With only part-time work coming my way and small children to raise, I squeezed my teaching and my writing into the hours I had childcare and spent the rest of my time playing and teaching and coaxing my kids to eat and nap and use the toilet and make friends and give me kisses, and while I loved my family, I was exhausted.

How grateful I was, then, to have a real job! How fortunate to be dealt such good luck! Gail Collins, in mulling over Hillary Clinton’s wide-ranging and impressive career to date, with its twists and turns from despised to beloved, wrote that she has played the cards she’s dealt. That’s one way to look at it. But I prefer Hillary’s answer:

“I choose my cards. I choose them. I play them to the best of my ability. Move on to the next hand.” There’s nothing particularly wrong with seeing yourself as the beneficiary of good fortune, except for its flip side: if you got where you are by luck and then your luck dries up? You’ll never get anywhere again. You’ll never be more than your spouse’s appendage.

My point here is that I might not have been actively planning my #altac career, but I was keeping my eye open for opportunities to learn new skills and to meet potential colleagues. The years I thought I was nothing but lucky were the years I was unhappy and insecure. Once I realized my own strengths, I knew I could succeed at other things I wanted to do.

Here’s one thing I went on to do: I knew the Folger needed to do a better job explaining the scholarship we do in publicly accessible terms, and I knew that I could do this. Since my job with the Undergraduate Program was ¾ time, I had ¼ of my time I was willing to use to start a new blog for the Library. And I so convinced them to hire me to start The Collation.

Whether you’re looking for an #altac career or you’re not, my biggest piece of advice to you is not to wait for a giant hand to point you in the right direction. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re not going to see signposts leading you there. You need to make your own luck and trust that you’ll recognize your place when you arrive.

a new contributor’s contact!

In my last post, I discussed the contibutor’s contact I had been presented with for a chapter I have in a forthcoming collection. It was much more restrictive than I liked, including requiring that I ask them before I reuse my material in my own future publications and not allowing for any digital repository use at all. After emailing my editors and the publisher, and going through some back-and-forth, I’m happy to say that they presented an alternative contributor’s contract that I’m willing to sign!

Here are the key details in how this happened for those of you who might be contemplating this sort of negotiation:

I let my volume editors know that I intended to do this. I’m not sure they entirely understood my objections (one pointed out that he’d already put his contribution on his institutional repository; I didn’t counter that that didn’t seem permissible according to the terms we were given). But they also expressed willingness to pass my concerns and proposed amendment on to the publisher. After that informal exchange, I sent them a formal email detailing my concerns and attaching an amendment that I based on the CIC guidelines so that they could forward it to their contacts at the publishing house.

The initial response I got from the publishers was not encouraging. It laid out in fairly defensive language why their contract was structured the way it was, the reasoning having mostly to do with protecting their financial investment (“we can only publish this because we’re counting on multiple years of sales to break even and that won’t happen if there are free bits floating about!”1 ) but also expressing concern that any agreement they made with me couldn’t take precedence over their contract with the volume editors. But they also asked for clarification on what exactly it was that I wanted to be able to do.

So I sent the following response:

I have two primary concerns, both stemming from the fact that my contribution is my intellectual property and the result of a lot of time and effort into getting the substance of it right.

The first is that I want to be able to reuse my contribution in my own work without asking for prior permission. If I want to expand this contribution into a longer article or if I want to incorporate it into a monograph that I am writing, I will of course credit its original publication in XXXX. But since this is my intellectual property, I do not want to cede the right to reuse it in my future publications.

My second concern is that I want to be able to reuse the text of my contribution and share it on my own or an institutional repository so that I am assured of continued availability and its being part of the scholarly conversation. I understand that Publisher  has made a financial investment in the publication of the book, including this contribution. And I would agree to an embargo period in which I do not share the text of my contribution. But I do not see the availability of the text of my contribution as an impediment to the collection’s marketability, especially given what I know about Publisher’s preference for collections in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed, some studies have suggested that making parts of a book, or even an entire work, available freely online have resulted in higher sales, with the free samples functioning as a marketing platform for the entire work; Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence (NYU 2011) is one example of a work that has much higher sales than anticipated in part because the availability of the work online has driven interest and generated sales. More importantly, while I see making parts of  the text of a book available online for free as generating interest in and sales for the book, I also see it as a way of protecting my own intellectual investment in this work. Should Publisher no longer be interested in distributing this book, or in my contribution to it, I need to still be able to have my work be part of the scholarly conversation. My being able to place a copy of my text in my own or an institutional repository ensures that my own investment in this piece is protected.

And then I waited. Their response, when it came, was essentially, “Hey, it turns out that another division has something that says nearly exactly this!” The key, apparently, is that I was dealing with the textbook division, which did not have provisions to handle this sort of permission, but the monograph division did.

Here’s what the new contract includes:

  • specific permission to reuse my piece in my teaching and to distribute to colleagues for their personal use (though not in any systematic way);
  • specific permission to reuse my piece after publication and pending notification to the publisher in other works I’ve prepared that are not direct competitors to this one;
  • and specific permission to post my pre-copyedited piece on my website or an institutional repository as long as I’ve notified the publisher; there is no embargo before I can post my piece.2

So, yay! This is hardly groundbreaking, but it lets me do what I want to do, which is archive my text here and to potentially reuse it in my grand collection of my writings (which, you know, is surely imminent). Keep your eyes open for when the book is finally out in print, when I’ll share my piece here. And then prepare to be so excited about it you’ll go out and buy a copy for yourself and ask your library to buy it too!3

My take-away from all this is as follows:

  • Always ask for what you want. They can’t say no—or yes—until you do.
  • Be clear about what you want. I found Paul Fyfe’s comment on my last post helpful in this regard.
  • Know what your exit point is. I knew what I was prepared to negotiate on and where my line in the sand was, which took the anxiety of negotiating out of the picture.
  • Be polite and persistent. If they don’t say yes on your blanket request, spell out precisely what you want to be able to do and ask if another division might have an agreement that is suitable.
  • Finally, ask for help from your colleagues! I am hugely grateful for the recommendations I got here and on twitter on how to go about this. And I’m extra hugely grateful for my conversations with Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who was really generous in helping me work through this.

And one plea to all of you: Ask for what’s in your right to have. Please do this. And please tell us about doing this. Scholarly publishing is in a world of change right now, and we are all finding our way. My experience is that most publishers are finding their ways just as much as most authors are. The more we work together and share our experiences, the more chance we all have of finding a fair way forward.

 

 

  1. n.b.: This is not an exact quote. [↩]
  2. It’s worth noting that this is a contract with a UK publisher and that copyright in the UK is assumed to remain with the author, so that was never really something I had to battle over. [↩]
  3. One small note: I hadn’t named the publisher while this was happening because I believed that was going to make negotiating in good faith difficult. But I’ve linked to the forthcoming collection and, really truly, I believe it will be a good one. [↩]

working with a contributor’s contract

6 July update below

So, on top of everything else I’m dealing with at the moment, I just got an email requesting a super fast turn-around on a contributor’s agreement for a chapter I wrote. The book collection has already been accepted and is already in production—it’s really not clear to me how things got this far along without contributor’s agreements being worked out. But it has. So here’s my situation: this agreement sucks. It leaves the contributor with no rights. It doesn’t even let me republish my own work in, say, my own monograph without asking the publisher for permission. Here are the key details:

  • “Author grants to the Publisher for the full term of copyright and any extensions thereto, the exclusive right and licence to edit, adapt, publish, reproduce, distribute, display and store the Contribution . . . in all forms, formats and media whether now known or hereafter developed (including without limitation in print, digital and electronic form) throughout the world”
  • Author grants to the Publisher the exclusive right and licence “to translate the Contribution into other languages, create adaptations, summaries or extracts of the Contribution or other derivative works based on the Contribution”
  • “The Author shall only be entitled to republish the Contribution with the Publisher’s prior written permission which shall not be unreasonably withheld, and provided that, when reproducing the Contribution or extracts from it, the Author acknowledge and reference first publication of the Contribution in the Work.”
  • “The Author irrevocably and unconditionally waives the Author’s moral right as provided in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to the extent the Publisher reasonably deems necessary to allow the Publisher to exercise and license the rights granted to the Publisher under this Agreement.” update: This sentence is preceded by one in which the Author asserts moral rights, so it looks as if I’m not being asked to waive all my moral rights, just the ones the Publisher wants me to. (I am, crazily, reading a bit more on what “moral rights” might mean by speed-reading the Act referenced and linked above.)

Yup. I don’t even know what that last point means, but it doesn’t sound like it’s in my favor.

What’s not in this agreement? Any statement that the Author retains copyright over her contribution or that she has any ability to store her work in an institutional or personal repository. I’ve put up a pdf of the whole agreement here, with details blacked out, in case you’ve never seen one of these before and are curious. And if I’m missing something even more horrible, do let me know.

Here’s my question to you, dear readers: How should I proceed? I don’t want to sign this. Ideally, what I want, is an agreement that lets me post my contribution on my own repository (aka, this website) and to reuse my own material in any collection of my own writing that I may put together. What can I realistically get? Probably the latter point, maybe some version of the former point, with some sort of pre-print provision and perhaps after some period of embargo.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick went through something very similar to this and was able to negotiate a better agreement by using the CIC Author’s Copyright Contract Addendum. My inclination is to try a similar approach. My first step is going to have to be letting my volume editors know that I’m doing this. I don’t know that they’re going to be happy, given that the ball is already rolling on this. And I don’t want to delay the book that they’ve been working so hard on for so long (they first got in touch with me in 2008 when they started mulling it over; I think I got my draft chapter to them in the spring of 2011). On the other hand, I just can’t bring myself to sign this as is, and it’s a publisher that I’ve already had unhappy dealings with so I’m happy to wrestle over this.

I’d welcome any suggestions you have if you’ve done anything along these lines, and I’ll keep you posted on what happens!

UPDATE 6 July 2012

I’ve just emailed an addendum based on the CIC one linked above to my editors to pass on to the publisher (the only real change to the CIC addendum is the 4th point):

  1. The Author shall, without limitation, have the non-exclusive right to use, reproduce, distribute, and create derivative works including update, perform, and display publicly, the Article in electronic, digital or print form in connection with the Author’s teaching, conference presentations, lectures, other scholarly works, and for all of Author’s academic and professional activities.
  2. After a period of six (6) months from the date of publication of the article, the Author shall also have all the non-exclusive rights necessary to make, or to authorize others to make, the final published version of the Article available in digital form over the Internet, including but not limited to a website under the control of the Author or the Author’s employer or through digital repositories including, but not limited to, those maintained by scholarly societies or funding agencies.
  3. The Author further retains all non-exclusive rights necessary to grant to the Author’s employing institution the non-exclusive right to use, reproduce, distribute, display, publicly perform, and make copies of the work in electronic, digital or in print form in connection with teaching, conference presentations, lectures, other scholarly works, and all academic and professional activities conducted at the Author’s employing institution.
  4. The Author retains copyright and asserts her moral right of paternity in the Contribution. The Publisher is prohibited from subjecting the Contribution to any derogatory treatment as defined by the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act of 1988.

My editor seems a bit baffled but supportive, so we’ll see what happens next! I did also send a separate email requesting that all contributors to the volume have the opportunity to receive this addendum. I’ve seen one reply-all email that suggested that person was happily signing and returning the publisher’s agreement, but I don’t really know how the others feel. And I do think that, as Monica comments below, that if more of us actually read these things and understood their implications, we wouldn’t sign them so often!

UPDATE 8 July 2012

While we’re waiting, some links to similar adventures:

Martin Paul Eve is asking Taylor & Francis to let him use their more author-friendly agreement instead of the standard boilerplate. They have this option hidden away in their arsenal already, so I’d guess this will go well.

Jeffrey Pomerantz wrote up in full detail his engagement with Taylor & Francis for a better agreement for a journal article he co-wrote. He ends up, after much back-and-forth, being offered their License to Publish form, rather than the Copyright Assignment Agreement, but it still includes an 18-month embargo before a post-print version can be posted. They end up withdrawing their article from the journal, and posting it openly as a Google Doc.

Jason Mittell, as he notes in his comment below, wrote about his experience two years ago with a contribution to a collection to be published by McFarland. It sounds pretty badly handled on the publisher’s part—they refused to speak to him directly, so all the negotiations had to pass through the volume’s editors, putting them in a pretty wretched position—and the upshot is that Jason withdrew his piece.

I’d read the PomeRantz piece last summer, and then forgot about it in my current flurry of activity. I’m sure there are other accounts out there and I’d love to hear about them. I have heard from many folks that challenging the boilerplate contracts hadn’t occurred to them or that they didn’t know where to begin that conversation until reading accounts like these.

traces of my dad

Arnold Werner, 1938-2007 (self-portrait)

When I was a kid, my father wrote a weekly column for the student newspaper at Michigan State University, where he taught. “The Doctor’s Bag” ran in the State News for six years, from 1969 through 1975. It was eventually syndicated and ran in 50 campus newspapers, with a circulation of around 600,000. What this means, in part, is that when I was little people used to ask me if my dad was “The Doctor’s Bag.” (That’s how they used to phrase it: Is your dad “The Doctor’s Bag?”) I had no idea what the column was; I just knew he wrote it. At some point, I gathered that it was a medical advice column answering students’ questions about all things health related. It wasn’t until I was an adult and Dad sent me copies of the entire run of the column that I sat down and read them.

I can hardly begin to describe how much I love those columns. I love them for what they reveal about college life in America in the early 70s. The questions students asked! They’re what you imagine—a lot of questions about sex and drinking and drugs. But there’s more to them, too, like the struggle of living in a dorm that has more people than your home town. The overwhelming impression you get, reading them all through, is how much they didn’t know, and the pent-up longing to ask someone who will take them seriously and give them real answers. I suppose if I’d read them as a kid I would have been horrified that my dad talked about this stuff, but you know, he was a psychiatrist, so it’s hardly like I didn’t expect him to talk about everything under the sun. As an adult, I’m impressed with how deftly he answers their questions.1

column printed in the 1975 SUNY Albany student paper
letter from 1970 printed in the Stony Brook Statesman

I love them, too, for the window into my father’s personality. They are both funny and earnest, just like he was. They lecture sometimes and joke at other times.

letter from 1972 Doctor's Bag

And they’re amazing for the controversies they raised. Honestly, reading the columns now, it’s hard to appreciate what the scandal is. But people wrote letters in complaining about them. The head of Albany’s Student Health Services complained:

a mild letter to the editor

In June 1970, a couple of Michigan legislators attacked his columns on the House and Senate floors for being “almost indescribable filth” and were outraged that they were being published at a public university. Think of the taxpayers! In 1973 the editor of a student paper was suspended for having printed both disrespectful pictures of Santa Claus and for running my dad’s column. Apparently a mother of a student once sent a letter to my dad chiding him to “think of your own mother before you put these letters in;” little did she realize that Dad did think of his mother and often mailed his column to my grandparents. (They were only disapproving when he appeared in the National Enquirer.)

Today is the 5th anniversary of my father’s death. I miss him. I’ve written before, glancingly, about him in a post on the intangibles of books. I have some of his childhood books, complete with his name carefully inscribed on the inside cover, and I cherish those books, even when I have no desire to read them. Those books are a connection to him. And when someone you love is gone, you need to find connections.

inscription on inside cover

The last years of his life were not good ones. He had cerebral palsy, and while it didn’t really interfere with the bulk of his life—he was an avid biker, faithfully doing the DALMAC ride from Lansing to Mackinaw, even once as 4 days of 100-mile trips—it made his old age miserable. Well, I say old age, but I really mean his 60s, which is not very old. He was only 68 when he did, both much too young and after too much pain and suffering.

excerpt from Parade magazine, 1974

I am glad his death has receded enough that I can remember the joy of his life rather than the pain of its end. And I am glad that there are traces of some of that life still online. The digitization of college newspapers means that some of my dad’s columns are available for all to see, along with this Parade magazine piece about the youth of 1974, and, weirdly, a 1996 Weekly World News piece on “how to blow your stack without looking like a butthead!” I’m glad, too, that you can find some of the results that came out of a workshop on cerebral palsy and aging that we held in his honor. There’s a piece from Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology and, if that’s too long, a slide set on the subject.2

There’s much of his life that isn’t out there—his photography, his hobby of rebuilding old cars, his bicycling, his woodworking. And his other psychiatric work, the stuff that got published in academic journals, is locked up in their hands (though your library might have a copy of the psychiatric glossary he edited for the APA in 1980). His columns, too, are probably still owned by the syndication company (someday I’ll retrieve his papers from the lawyers and see what his contract stipulated). The bits and pieces of the online traces of my dad add up to someone who is kind of him, but who isn’t all of him. And there was so much of him when he was alive.

It wasn’t until he died that I began to appreciate the staggering challenges of all the stuff we leave behind. There are his newspaper columns, thousands of photographs and negatives, the records of his life. Dad was a pack rat, which makes the task more challenging. And he was enough of a public figure that it’s hard to resist the feeling that someone somewhere might find this material interesting. Not for what it says about him, but for what it says about the times he lived through. Those Doctor’s Bag columns are full of nuggets. At some point, I’ll do something about that. If I was a researcher in the history of medicine, or the culture of mid-twentieth-century America, I’d find useful material in there. And there’s more, too. Maybe someone would want to know this story: My dad volunteered for the Vietnam War after he’d completed med school, but the army wouldn’t take him because of the cerebral palsy—he limped and certainly couldn’t run. And what happened a few years later? They tried to draft him, but he said no: you didn’t want me then, you can’t have me now. I have all that documentation, because that’s the kind of thing he saved. What do I do with that? Is that just family history, or does that mean something to someone else?

I don’t know what the answers to those questions are. Maybe I’ll just hang onto everything until it’s my kids’ turn to deal with it. Is that what happened to all those old books we have in libraries? The immediate family couldn’t bear to get rid of them and so they hung onto them until finally they because old enough to be wanted beyond the family? Maybe. At some point, I suppose, these things either won’t mean anything to anyone, and they can be tossed, or they will be become interesting through sheer survival through the ages. Maybe it doesn’t matter which.

I’m grateful that he wrote these columns and that I can still read them. I’m grateful that he had enough pride in them to save them and to pass them on to his daughters. I’m grateful that he loved us as much as he did, and that when it was time for him to die, that we were there by his side. He taught me how to write, how to use a camera, develop negatives, and print film. We argued about my curfew, butted heads because we were both stubborn, and watched Battleship Potemkin together. I loved him dearly. And I miss him a little bit less when I come across the traces of his life that have been scattered across the world.

2nd row, 2nd from the right

 

  1. These are crappy images: screenshots of pdfs of microfilmed papers. Sorry. [↩]
  2. This is a bit of an aside, but the cerebral palsy is a bit of a touchy subject for me: most research has focused on kids with CP, but you know what happens to a lot of those kids? They grow up, and then you’ve got adults with CP. As my dad grew older, his mobility decreased and the pain increased. There was no clear research to give him answers as to why this was happening, and the big CP foundation was not particularly interested in his overtures. He was just alone in his pain with no clear sense that any lessons were going to be drawn from it. So if you’re a CP researcher, or someone who has CP, or someone who knows someone who has CP, think about this and support researching into aging and CP. [↩]

SQ issue on Shakespeare and performance

I am thrilled to announce that the special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly that I guest edited on Shakespeare and Performance is now finally in print! That issue went through an open peer review at MediaCommons, and I will be writing something more about that process and experience.

But for now, I want to share that there’s some really wonderful, smart, and interesting stuff in the issue and I hope you’ll take a look at it; the issue includes pieces by W.B. Worthen, Ramona Wray, Zeno Ackermann, Mark Thornton Burnett, Daniel L. Keegan, and Todd A. Borlik. Abstracts are online at the Folger and the articles and abstracts will soon (tomorrow!) be are now up at Project Muse for those who have access.

Even more thrillingly, I want to share with you one section to which I have the author’s rights, “Rethinking Academic Reviewing: A Conversation with Michael Dobson, Peter Holland, Katherine Rowe, Christian Billing, and Carolyn Sale.” You can find it linked in this post and in the sidebar on the right.

And, just because I can, here’s my brief introduction to the issue, which I hope will convince you to go check the whole thing out!

Copyright © 2011 Folger Shakespeare Library. This article first appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 62, Issue 3, September 2011, pages 307-8.

This special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly presents a wide range of writing on Shakespeare and performance. They look back to early modern understandings of Henry VIII and forward to the growing genre of performances of Shakespeare in prison. They range geographically in interest from South America to Northern Ireland and from Germany to Japan, and they examine performances mediated by print, stage practice, filmic techniques, and modern closed-circuit video surveillance. They consider the ongoing debate about the relationship between literariness and performativity, propose a shift away from hauntings to prophecies, and argue that the act of performance and the recording of performance in our written work shape both our understanding of early modern drama and the relationships we forge with other scholars and communities.

In calling for papers for this special issue we hoped to gauge the present state of the field and announce our intent to make SQ a home for a wider range of writings on Shakespeare and performance. The breadth of responses to that call confirms the continued growth and transformation of  the study of performance and its centrality to the larger world of Shakespeare scholarship. This vitality is further reflected in the depth and intensity of conversation in the comments on our open peer review of submissions.

We are eager to expand beyond the boundaries of what we formerly referred to as “Shakespeare Performed.” This issue’s “Rethinking Academic Reviewing” signals our desire to rethink the subject and practice of reviewing, while the issue as a whole represents other forms of engagement with the issue of Shakespeare and performance that might suggest patterns for future contributions.

A note about the process of putting this issue together: as is now SQ practice, we issued an open call for papers for this special issue. In response to the CFP, we received about twenty-five submissions. Of those we selected the strongest six pieces to put up for an open peer review, held online at MediaCommons. There each piece was commented on by a group of self-selected peer reviewers over a period of six weeks. At the end of the review period, authors revised their essays and resubmitted them to SQ. We are publishing four of those pieces here, along with two other essays that came in to SQ outside of the call for papers and that went through SQ’s usual double-blind review process. We are extremely grateful to Kathleen Fitzpatrick and MediaCommons for being our partners in this. We also want to thank the authors who participated in this open review, which might have felt at times like an overly exposed one. Finally, we wish to acknowledge publicly the readers who took the time to participate and comment in this evaluation. The work of reviewers is often invisible, but in this case, the open nature of the review means that we can thank them by name: Andrew Bonnell, Alex Huang, Anita Hagerman, Carolyn Sale, Thomas Cartelli, Chris Fahrenthold, Christian Billing, Daniel Keegan, Jami Rogers, J.B. Cook, James C. Bulman, Jeremy Lopez, John Gillies, Karl Steel, Katherine Rowe, Linda Charnes, Matt Kozusko, Michael Dobson, Pascale Aebischer, Paul Menzer, Peter Kirwan, Peter Holland, Lois Potter, Romana Wray, Robert Tierney, Todd Borlik, Tom Magill, W. B. Worthen, and Zeno Ackermann.[i]


[i] The essays and comments from the open review are archived at MediaCommons and are able to be viewed at http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/shakespearequarterlyperformance/. One essay has been taken down since the open review at the author’s behest.