Workspeed, the Big Other, and the Midcareer Funk

by KARL STEEL

My (first) book came out in 2011, the product of a dissertation that took some 4 years to write. Time to degree was slower in those long ago days of the early oughts (at 1999-2007, I was average), but what I have proudly, certainly delusionally remembered, mainly, was that the book - a deeply revised version of my dissertation, with a creaky chapter on hunting swapped out for a new chapter (my favorite, in fact, on resurrection theology and anthropophagy) - saw print when I had only just slipped past halfway through my tenure clock. Fast. I thought this was normal.

St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 30, c. 800, Ecclesiastes 12:12

It's now been 6 years since that other book, and much longer still since I first submitted the manuscript for review (2009!), and I've been worried. To be sure, I've banged out articles and reviews in the intervening years, and I've learned to write somewhat coherently without the constant intervention of dissertation supervisors and household writers far more able than I, but the book? Where is it? It may be stupid to say this in public, but not long ago, I sent two chapters to my favored press for an advance contract, and now it seems it's being sent out for review. Depending on how the review goes, that may be good, but it feels slower than it should be.

Or not! Who's your point of comparison? What's normal? What's acceptable? At a book party recently, which was for one author, two books, I told the writer that they wrote a book each time they rolled out of bed (and sometimes, I suppose, they roll out of bed twice, for exercise); they complained about one of their presses - the party wasn't supposed to be for two books -- then laughed at their slowness compared to a couple other colleagues. Joanna Ruocco has five books coming out next year. She writes fiction, but still. Then I think of Kathy Lavezzo, with 11 years between her first and second book; Carolyn Dinshaw, since 1989, one book about every ten years; I think too of a dinner companion at my big medieval conference, a great scholar, whose first book came out in 2010, and who's still working away at their Book Two; another long conversation with another academic, much and deservedly admired, who started their job the same year I did, who came out with a book not long after I did, and who may be close to finishing their Book 2. All these people are great. And so on.

It's perhaps possible to be Jeffrey Jerome Cohen or Adam Kotsko or Sara Ahmed, though they themselves also likely wonder if it's possible to be them. Certainly none can be for themselves what they represent to others. The Big Other's Always Barred: your idol is worried too. But it's not necessary to be them, even the worried versions, to be a Worthy Writer.

It's possible too that I worry about these things because my brain is sometimes addled - it moves fast, it likes to burrow, it often flitters chickadeelike from one short writing piece to another, it tends to wreck itself orthographically and solecistically - and because I worry about class: without the fancy or bourgeois childhood that I inaccurately, I'm sure, imagine most other academics to have enjoyed, a childhood of long conversations with their parents and schoolmates about Lucretius, in Latin; I'm certain that my scholarly life is a decades-long scramble to make up for what I missed by missing these first, necessary loquelae.

It's possible that this is all Grade A foolishness, but I'm sharing this here in case I'm someone's Big Other, and letting you know I'm worried, that I'm finding my way past it, and I hope you are too, and hoping, if possible, that we can get more enjoyment from this thing we love.