Eccentric Flower:201005/Expertise
From Eccentric Flower
Expertise
I don't know why I get so annoyed when I see A Particular Scholarly Author mentioned (hereafter she shall be known as PSH, pronounced "pish") that it takes me an hour to un-annoy myself. But I have some theories, and those theories mostly have to do with claims of expertise.
[N.B. I realized, hours after writing this entry, that the paragraph above contains a lie. I will address this lie in the next entry. It doesn't make any of the material below less valid, the problem has only to do with the chain of causality which led to it. Carry on.]
I hate claims of expertise. I was raised to believe that modesty was the only virtue I actually possessed and therefore I should cling to it fiercely against all depredations. Really. I am not a very good person. I am not especially honest, not especially charitable toward my fellow man, not especially easy to get along with, not especially industrious, et cetera, et cetera. I have no hope of good marks on most areas of the scorecard. But, by god, I can be modest about the few things I do well, and I wish everyone else would do the same.
The behavior of the best professionals backs me up. The best plumber in the city doesn't make great claims to his prowess at plumbing; he doesn't have to. The best chemists and the best physicists and the best biologists and the best geologists and the best astronomers don't toot their own horns unless their university is making them publish; they're too busy actually discovering new science and changing the world. The best people in physical and tangible professions are all out doing what they do best. The firefighters are fighting fires. The inventors are inventing. The lawyers are ... well, they're doing what lawyers do. They don't need to crow, and they don't have the time to waste on it. (Please see also related theses on general anti-advertising topics, found elsewhere in this space.)
But - and here, I concede in advance, I admit to biases (this is a warning to some of you that the next bit will piss you off) - in the so-called soft sciences, or in the liberal arts, this is difficult to do. It's not very often that you actually change the world with your findings on social media or cognitive psychology. The bits that have to do with how we think and behave, in particular, are usually fascinating, but they don't ever really accomplish much because mostly we just go on doing the same vile and ridiculous things we always do, it's just that now we understand them that much better. Analysis of the way brains work has never stopped people from doing dumb things. Analysis of the way children see the world has not reduced their tendency to be a royal pain in the ass. Knowledge of the social habits that drive criminal activity has not, to the best of my knowledge, produced any meaningful decrease in crime. We've been working on understanding the human brain since we developed language to discuss it, which is a long damned time, and yet our basic litany of vice and misbehavior would contain nothing that would surprise an Etruscan.
(Mind you, we're only just now finding out how sharp the Etruscans were, so maybe that's not a good example.)
Therefore these people doing soft work - and especially those people in new fields which are still struggling for their legitimacy, like analysis of social media - do sometimes seem to me to get very defensive about their credentials. Add this to the fact that I myself am far from sure about that legitimacy, in some cases - I told you I was going to show bias here - and often the claims to expertise of such people get under my skin and give me a rash.
It's not PSH's fault that The Economist, hard-pressed for space in a fairly short leader, chose to characterize her as a "social-media expert." But PSH's own CV, on her own page, to me has the ring of desperation. "Look! Take me seriously! I have published papers! I have appeared in important places! I R SRS EXPERT!"
And now we will take one of those sudden left turns so familiar to the ten people who read my screeds regularly, and talk about Gastronomica.
We subscribed to Gastronomica when Gourmet folded. We knew that nothing could replace Gourmet (we already subscribed to Cooks' Illustrated, of course), but we thought this quarterly, thick with words and ideas, would help ease the pain. Unfortunately, Gastronomica - while indeed thick with words and ideas - is not a pleasure to read for me. There are two basic problems with it.
First, while it is ostensibly about food, it is not enough about actual food. It is mostly about the social issues and customs and rituals and habits and fights we have about food - mostly about sociological and cultural matters pertinent to food - which is fine, I'm sure, in its place, but in no way replaces Gourmet's position, which was food pornography plain and simple. Ideas and issues are nice, but not when you really want to read about amazing ingredients or great dishes lovingly prepared and presented, in impeccably photographed and stunning surroundings.
Ironically, in the issue of Gastronomica I have been trying to get through, there is a retrospective article where various "experts" are asked to weigh in on the growing use of the term "food porn," and they pretty unanimously reject it, on grounds I consider spurious and vaguely presented. Which leads me to point two: Gastronomica, like just about every other scholarly journal I have ever read in the soft sciences, strikes me as utterly full of shit.
The reason I don't take scholarly writings in the soft sciences as seriously as I should is because I have spent my entire life being good at only a few things, and one of those things is an ability to bullshit. It has made me a formidable grader, the few times I have had the masochism to be across the desk from students, but a guilty-conscienced one: My own memories of my own skill at fabricating top-quality ten-page papers the night before they were due, out of nothing but aether and imagination, makes me acutely aware of when someone else is employing those techniques; and of course, when I am acting as The Man, I have to shut that tendency down; hence the guilt, aware as I am that I am docking someone's grade for the very same things which saved my academic life countless times over the years.
(This is not so much a problem in the hard sciences, because in the hard sciences you can only bullshit so long and then you have to start showing equations. It means most chemistry papers, for example, are utterly impenetrable to me, and yet I suspect that they are reasonably fact-based, simply because it's a lot harder to lie in an oxidation reaction than in a page of prose.)
Even so, what is tolerable in a high-school or college student is unbearable in a professional, and yet I see the same things at the latter level of play. I see a desperation to produce papers to bolster one's credentials and shore up one's tenure track, and I know that nine-tenths of it doesn't mean a goddamned thing. It's especially bad if one uses high-flown language to conceal one's vapor trail. I was reading an article a couple of days ago - I forget where - which took four paragraphs to say, in essence: "People habitually lie on surveys."
Oh, sure, there were nuances (a lot of the time when people lie on surveys, they're not doing it out of any conscious desire to deceive), but the point is that the five words I've given you in quotes in the paragraph above were a pretty obvious and easy truth - easily understood and recognized as truth by anyone over the age of eight - whereas the four paragraphs in the source article might as well have been designed to prevent that truth from being easily reached. This is what academia demands of itself, apparently.
I know many things. I would tell you what things I know many things about, but that would not fit with my idea of Modesty Above All. I could write about those things, but since I would try to write them plainly and bluntly, and since I have refused to do the years of toil, pain, and humiliation needed for a meaningless degree, it's clear that I will never achieve scholarly recognition for my insights.
Hell, I can't even get ten people to read social theory based on field observations of the way people behave in online games and worlds, even though I feel I have a long career of informed observation and have some interesting things to say on the topic. But as soon as I go there most of you stop reading. I have proof of this. Why am I not getting published? Why is PSH an expert because she discusses some to-me-obvious-as-eight-foot-high-letters-of-fire-on-the-wall observations about Facebook, whereas I can't get arrested talking about how MMORPG chatlines reveal certain key facets of human behavior?
Or, shucks, let's talk about something less useful and more fun. You want hubris? OK, here's some hubris: I know more about James Bond movies, and their fan phenomena, than you do. I know more about Sherlock Holmes, and that fandom, than you do. And I can probably write a more interesting essay on either one than you can. (In the case of the Bond films I did make a first stab at that, but it was intended to be more of a film-by-film reference than a standalone entertainment. But I could do it.) There's a Holmes essay I'd love to write making the case that it was easily the first of the internet-level rabid fandoms, and yet began a century before the internet, with a digression into The Curious Case Of The Missing Holmes/Watson Slashfic. I could write it in my sleep. But why write it? If I did write it, as evidence shows again and again and again, no one will ever see it except for the same ten people who see everything I write.
Where is my scholarly digest? Where is my book contract? Where is my Metafilter link that would send thousands of people to read my words? I can write about social media as well as or better than PSH. Where is my hugely-visited site where I talk about social theory of online worlds? Where is my fucking namecheck in the fucking Economist? Why do the BoingBoing people and others of their ilk in the full-of-themselves technorati get vast followings simply by bullshitting (often, not especially well) about whatever wanders into their minds, whereas I have been doing the same thing for over a decade without fail and no one in the world except the same damned ten people knows I am alive? What am I doing wrong?
Don't say "promotion." If you say "promotion" I will cut you. Modesty, people, modesty above all. I cannot stress that enough.
My contention is that the sin is not that I have languished for lack of megaphone, but that the people who use megaphones have been unduly rewarded. We live in a universe that persistently rewards the wrong things. The squeaky wheel should not get the grease; it should be taken off the cart and destroyed.
And if PSH is an expert on anything, then by god so am I.
Funny you mention the 007 - I have been shamelessly using the link to the Shrunken Cinema as content of the James Bond movie poster postcards I have been lately sending out.
The receivers have thanked me for the link - so you mean to imply they have been untruthful when they say they liked what they saw?
-- 20:42, 24 May 2010 (BST)
You're "publishing" your opinions and research about MMORPGs on a forum with, by your own admission, reaches about 40-60 people, max. If you want people to read and comment on and be interested in your writing, you need to write it somewhere that there's even a hope of finding more eyes.
Yes, that requires promotion (go ahead and cut me, I dare you), but the most basic level of promotion, in saying, "I wrote this, go look at it" in something more than just using Twitter, or LiveJournal, or whatever. Hell, Facebook would work for that, because it can be shared, and you can post your entire essays in a place where fans/friends can share and re-share it.
Again, you keep being annoyed because you don't have adoring fans showing up on your doorstep to see the stuff you made in the basement and keep behind a locked (or semi-locked) door. You have to try a little harder, if you want people to pay attention.
-- 20:43, 24 May 2010 (BST)
So, because you're irritated that she's successful at getting herself accepted as an expert and you are not (because she plays the game and you are morally offended by the game), you feel the appropriate thing to do is to deliberately ignore her self-identity (by capitalizing her name) and publicly delight when other people do it too?
-- 20:46, 24 May 2010 (BST)
Man, I promote myself all the time! I just don't do it where you can see it, because -- frankly -- you can't help me. I just shipped off the proofs for a Perspective article in a big-name journal that is nothing more than self-promotion. It's the name of the game in any career as individualistic as academia. It's gross, we all bitch about it, we all bitch even more about the people who are especially gross about it. But we all do it, because it's the only way to survive.
I think the difference that you perceive, that you see more self-promotion in the "soft" fields (and let's pause while everyone cringes at that choice of terminology) than you do the physical sciences is essentially a sampling error. The New York Times and the Economist are far more likely to publish pieces about social science or humanities research. Far less gets written about developments in chemistry and physics, for whatever reason.
I'll admit I never heard of this Boyd person before today, but her webpage seems like a very normal academic's webpage. That's not especially gross. You want gross, you should look up Craig Venter, Conquerer of the Human Genome, Creator of the Artificial Cell, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India.
-- 20:55, 24 May 2010 (BST)
...you seem to know the answer to this one, but we're not allowed to say so.
Yes, if you all but drive your potential audience away with a stick, sticking with your own site requiring its own registration, not submitting essays and book proposals to mass markets, and blocking any Twitter followers who don't seem engaged for the right reasons, then yes, you're not going to have a very large readership. Public attention isn't usually a magic byproduct that comes to those who carve the perfect staff in secret; it requires engagement with the public.
-- 20:55, 24 May 2010 (BST)
Ysabel: No, I delight in capitalizing her name because I think she is being pretentious.
It is exactly the same impulse which nearly led me to write a letter to Sam Allis this morning saying, "The impact of your usage screed is greatly diminished by the fact that you apparently can't tell 'it's' from 'its.' Perhaps, at the very least, you should refrain from writing usage columns until the Globe can afford copy-editors again." Allis would have laughed it off, and it certainly wouldn't have changed anything in the state of the Globe's editing, but it made me feel a lot better. (I didn't send it because just mentally composing it was enough, in that case.)
Did I mention I am mean and petty and it's very dark in my basement? One of the few delights I have left to me is throwing stones at other people's high horses.
Patrick: The thing is, to me, this door is currently the most open that it's been in many years. And most of the sites I tend to be jealous of have never advertised themselves - they grew from word-of-mouth phenomena. How did that word-of-mouth tide get started? Where was the one Patient Zero link someplace that gave them a critical mass for their readership to snowball? In short, I think promotion is a red herring in this case. I think they got lucky somewhere.
By the by, every day more facts come out about Facebook, the sounder my instinct (which has always, always been to avoid it, even back when it first appeared) looks.
-- 21:00, 24 May 2010 (BST)
You want gross, you should look up Craig Venter, Conquerer of the Human Genome, Creator of the Artificial Cell, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India.
Thank you for this comment, which defused my angry red haze cloud in a fit of giggles and prevented me from writing, oh, at least two or three paragraphs of regrettable words.
-- 21:04, 24 May 2010 (BST)
Shmuel: Mostly the people I block on Twitter are obviously trying to sell me something or promote an agenda of some kind. Believe me, it's a very obvious difference and easy to spot. It's not my goal to discourage readers there.
My site does not require registration unless you want to post a comment. I post a locked entry every blue moon at most. It is an utter fiction that this site is under any kind of login curtain.
-- 21:08, 24 May 2010 (BST)
As long as you're aware that you're being mean and petty, I suppose that I can cope with the fact that it doesn't look from here to be particularly different than, say, calling me by male pronouns.
-- 21:08, 24 May 2010 (BST)
I also hate author bios. When they let me get away with "lives in the Minneapolis suburbs with two large men and one small dog," that's what I say, because all those things are verifiable and none of them can be mistaken for anything but bare fact. Weigh the dog: she is 11 pounds. She is small. Measure the men: over six feet apiece. Fairly large. Check the zip code. We're good to go.
The very worst thing is when people think I'm bragging about how much I know about something and I think I'm saying how little I know about it. I don't know how to fix that one except to stop talking to those people.
However.
The best plumbers in the city do not magically get business by psychic powers. If they did, they would probably hire out as psychics rather than plumbers. True, they do not hire can-can girls and boys to surround them waving feathered fans and singing praises. Their websites or their ads in the Yellow Pages are tasteful. Discreet. But part of that is that people have been trained that that is what they *want* in a plumber. If they didn't have any advertising at all, they would starve and would not be around to fix my pipes.
I understand that you are saying that the universe should be structured to allow people to quietly observe competence and appreciate it. But I don't *want* our next-door neighbor to observe our bathroom and its fine functioning. I don't *want* them to quietly and thoughtfully note down how many times we have a particular professional out to our house (if, indeed, writing the business name and number on the side of the van isn't Advertising and therefore out of bounds) and run it through an algorithm that tells them whether that's too many times (they must have screwed the job up last time) or just enough (they must have done a good enough job that we called them back for an unrelated problem). Because that's *fucking creepy*.
And so yes, my lj contained a bit of ad copy today, and I'm sorry you don't like that. I'm sorry you don't like it that people who did not give birth to me are excited about reading things I'm in the middle of writing directly due to effort I have put into getting them excited about those things. I'm not anti-modesty. Truly I'm not. I just don't see what any of the practical alternatives to complete ascetism *are* here. I mean that metaphysically: if people do not find out that you know something because you tell them or because you told someone else enough that they let you show them, how are they to find out?
-- 21:09, 24 May 2010 (BST)
By the by, I know that people find "soft sciences" offensive, although frankly I figured it would be Joy who was going to dig me on that (since Susan doesn't read here).
I would like to point out that I don't consider soft sciences illegitimate (I'd be shooting my own nose off since those are the sciences that interest me the most); it's merely the writing in those sciences that I often have a problem with.
-- 21:10, 24 May 2010 (BST)
Well, if you're right (and you seem to think you are) that your site is easily accessed, the subjects about which you choose to write are interesting, and that other people of equal or lesser talent have gained fame and fortune without any promotion at all, it must be true that there's some sort of conspiracy against you ever gaining the fans you so richly deserve.
-- 21:13, 24 May 2010 (BST)
The thing is, Mrissa, I don't have a problem with word-of-mouth. I love word-of-mouth. It's really the only form of promotion I don't find distasteful, and I can't shake, deep in my head, this idea that in a perfect universe word-of-mouth should be enough. The good people would get recommended and the bad people would fail, and we would all have white hats and black hats and I am right and you are right and all is right too-loora-lay.
Incidentally, I didn't even parse your entry as containing advertising. (I assume you mean the Carter Hall entry.) Talking about one's own work in one's own journal is not advertising. Is it?
(Hm. I suppose that raises the question of why I do find Boyd's CV - talking about her own work on her own site - obnoxious. I suspect I know the answer, but it's not very pleasant.)
-- 21:18, 24 May 2010 (BST)
Re: I think they got lucky somewhere.
I agree that luck is a factor, but less than it seems. It's the old "I worked twenty years to become an overnight success" thing. There are ways of preparing one's work to maximize the effects of a lucky break before it happens, and of nurturing it once it arrives. As opposed to salting the earth in advance and then stomping vigorously on any plant that seems like it might take root.
(I love you, Columbina, and I mean that, but you're a frustrating person to be friends with sometimes.)
-- 21:19, 24 May 2010 (BST)
Patrick: Even I am not insane enough to think it conspiracy. However, on my weaker days, and this is certainly one of those, I'm more than willing to ascribe it to plain dumb luck.
-- 21:20, 24 May 2010 (BST)
First of all, I think I can probably find you 50 "social media experts" in Austin by swinging this cat over here. Maybe more depending on where I swing the cat. The term is beyond bullshit and I mistrust anyone who applies it to themselves. So I think that's almost irrelevant to other people who are called experts or who have to promote their areas of expertise.
I write in public, promote my writing on various, er, social media, and write very well. I still rarely get more readers than you do. Slackerwood is a site that frankly, looks like it draws more traffic than it actually does, and will never turn me a profit -- I will always be in the hole for it. Even when we write clever and unique things we don't get the links and traffic I want. Even when we write dumb things, we don't.
So everyone fussing here about how you need to promote yourself and self-advertise and blah blah blah? I'm supposed to agree with them. But it isn't doing jack for me. I'm a good writer who isn't afraid to say it to a lot of people and it STILL doesn't help.
So if you want to be modest, be modest. Unless you write in a trendy, hipster-y, snarky way, manufacture controversy, or have the right connections, it may not matter.
[Posting this very quickly before I decide I'm being way more cynical than is good for me right now.]
-- 21:21, 24 May 2010 (BST)
But, Shmuel, that's the thing: To me it seems that whatever salting and stomping around I might have done (and I feel I've done less than you all seem to think I have, but that's another story) is not germane at all, because to me the whole matter feels totally out of my control.
I feel like, Person A sets out a plate of cookies and Person B sets out a plate of cookies, and neither puts up any signs or announces the cookies or anything, they both just set out the plate of cookies and go back inside. The next day most of B's cookies are still sitting there, a little worse for wear now, and A's cookies are not only all gone but there's a crowd outside her house waiting to see if she'll make more.
If it cannot be demonstrated that either A or B is a notably worse cook than the other, then what explanation am I to look for here?
-- 21:24, 24 May 2010 (BST)
Slackerwood is a site that frankly, looks like it draws more traffic than it actually does, and will never turn me a profit -- I will always be in the hole for it. Even when we write clever and unique things we don't get the links and traffic I want.
Oh, see, this is kind of depressing, because between that and your Cinematical stuff, I have been a wee bit jealous of your exposure. I'm sorry to hear it.
-- 21:27, 24 May 2010 (BST)
Well, if Plate A's cookies are lying on a nice plate with a fancy napkin beside an ice-cold glass of milk and Plate B's cookies are sitting on a plate next to a note saying, "I'll bet nobody will bother to taste these cookies, and if they do, they probably won't even have the common decency to say 'NOM NOM NOM,' because other bakers have it easier than I do," I'd be willing to bet there's something more than the universe's fickle finger of fate at play here.
-- 21:32, 24 May 2010 (BST)
Ah but I don't do that. I put the cookies out and then I go inside and peek out through the curtain while secretly thinking that.
You must understand that I continue to maintain that the places where I simply set out words without comment - e.g. the stories, the long essays - are to me a very separate place from the journal. I try not to mar those with my own doubts.
I realize that right now that doesn't hold much water because virtually everyone who sees the other words I put out comes in through the journal. But that isn't the world I wanted, and in a perfect world people would be reading the stories or some of the longer-form projects a lot more than they ever come here.
-- 21:39, 24 May 2010 (BST)
Admittedly, sometimes the answer has to do with the type of cookie you are offering. And in fairness, Slackerwood offers cookies that are meant to appeal to a limited number of people (ancho fudge with Texas pecans, perhaps), whereas that other plate over there has chocolate chip cookies, which more people want. Sometimes the other cookies are more comfortably familiar, sometimes the plate is on a table that is easier to reach, sometimes the right person has spotted those other cookies and not yours.
My point, made in an overly bitter manner, is that it's not as simple as "promote it more" and sometimes that has its own hazards. I would never post an essay in its entirety on Facebook because of the risk that Facebook might decide it therefore owns the essay. There is no one easy solution, and my bitterness stemmed in part from everyone making it sound like all you have to do is toot your own horn and readers will flood out of the woodwork and shower you with attention and possibly riches.
-- 22:39, 24 May 2010 (BST)
In an interesting synchronicity, the long-form blog post I saw before coming here was from Ben Rosenbaum, talking about science-fictional views on monetary and non-monetary economies. Well, about more than that, too: [1]
As I read them, your posts about promotion, work, avocation, and pay are all hammering away at that last question: could we be organizing and rewarding ourselves some other way?
Or, you know, I'm reading you idiosyncratically.
I am deeply, deeply hurt[1] that you don't consider my much-avowed interest in your MMORPG writing enticement enough.
[1]I'll live.
-- 22:50, 24 May 2010 (BST)
"Ah but I don't do that."
Either you do so do that, or there's a problem with the underlying metaphor. I vote for the latter.
Warning: bluntness ahead. I may come to regret this, but here's what I really think.
You rather insist that you'll only be willing to accept success if it comes on your own terms in the way that it ought to "in a perfect world," rather than working with the world as it is. To choose your example, if the goal is "get people to read my stories," and the journal seems to be the most effective route for doing so, then somebody else might conclude that the more refined goal of "get people to read my stories without going through my journal" is counterproductive. A more effective goal might be "how do I nurture this and get more people to come by my other project and funnel them toward the good stuff?" Or possibly even, "okay, people seem to like the journal best... can I work with that?"
(I can't imagine Jonathan Coulton wanted to achieve fame through a cover of "Baby Got Back." A.A. Milne's childrens' stories were a minor sideline. Cupcake Stop in New York is expanding like mad... and was started by a law school graduate who couldn't find a job in his field. Eduard Khil might have chosen to take umbrage at becoming "the Trololo Man" after a distinguished career spanning half a century. Look into 100 public success stories, and maybe two of them will consist of the success coming in exactly the way person had planned. On the other hand, most of them will consist of the person embracing their opportunities as they come, and adjusting to the new reality. I would submit that to then look at the success story and say "hey, they did it!" misses much of the point. [There are people who refuse to bend and some do have the satisfaction of living their lives exactly the way they like... living modestly, in obscurity. It's a fair trade, and one I'm inclined to myself, but do recognize that it is a trade.])
I'd rather not dwell on the stories vs. your journal, because it's not an example I would have chosen. I'd rather choose Mei Hua. It ought to be a book. I'm convinced it could be a book. But it won't be, and while I can't read your mind, I'd guess that the reason falls somewhere around one of the following categories:
- You're convinced that having the hubris to get this published would mean setting yourself up as an expert on Chinese, which you're not.
- It's not the sort of thing you want to be published for (or put more work into); you want recognition for your fiction, and you don't see how one just might be a steppingstone to the other.
- You don't consider it an important enough work for anybody to value. It's too easy to write -- after all, you did it -- and therefore nobody else should consider it worthy of publication.
- You've experienced the initial burst of joy in finishing the first draft, and working on the next draft would be too tedious.
- You feel the publishing game is rigged, and you don't want to succeed by playing it. You only want publication through merit, perhaps via an editor happening upon your site.
- You feel the publishing game is capricious, that you're unlucky, and that the odds are too low to bother playing.
Possibly it's not one of these, but some other internal obstacle I'm not thinking of offhand. But I'm sure that there's at least one reason, and that it's one that's of your own making, some way in which whatever would be needed to expand this into a proper book and get it before a mass audience wouldn't fit into the master plan for how you want to live your life and the platonic ideal of how you'd like to be recognized.
And this is frustrating, because you are a talented essayist. You're good at analyzing any number of topics and explaining them clearly and engagingly. Mei Hua is one of several projects you've worked on over the years that I've felt could be commercially successful (though it is, I think, the best prospect of the bunch)... and none of them have gone anywhere. There's always some reason, and it's always either an internal one or a projection. Whenever you go off on a rant about how you don't value things you find easy to do but envy those who are good at the things you find hard, I can't help but notice that you're really bloody good at the kind of writing I like, but you don't do anything with it, outside of sometimes posting it on the Web and peering out from behind the curtains. And even that would be fine -- all of my writing these days consists of tweeting about YouTube videos and American Idol (and, apparently, upbraiding friends at too much length) -- if you didn't then turn around and lament the fact that nobody ever comes to call. But you can't have it both ways.
-- 23:07, 24 May 2010 (BST)
Iain:
The Curious Case Of The Missing Holmes/Watson Slashfic
...You don't look very hard, do you? Or are you talking about something specific, and not your typical "Watson, I need you! Blowjob now, good sir!" type of story? (God wot, after the movie, it's pretty much littering the landscape, what with the apparently not much submerged homoerotic aspects, and the pretty pretty of RDJ and his magnificent abs.)
(Hey, everyone else is going after the interesting stuff, I had to do the low-hanging fruit that remains.)
(Also, you don't get to say that your login system isn't an obstacle until it figures out what a goddamn perpetual cookie is.)
-- 23:16, 24 May 2010 (BST)
Shmuel: Actually, for Mei Hua, only reason #4 applies, although I have suffered through all six of those at various times with various works. The labor involved in getting those blue character images the way they needed to be was horrendous. Also, I'm honestly not sure how one would go about pitching that sort of book, or where. Barring that, I agree with you - it might very well be the most marketable thing I've ever done.
I don't think you were too blunt.
Iain: Well, The Curious Case of the Paucity of Holmes/Watson Slashfic Compared To Just About Every Other Major Pairing of Fictional Characters in the Universe didn't have the same ring to it.
However, you're right, the movie has changed everything. I was strictly referring to pre-movie status.
-- 23:48, 24 May 2010 (BST)
Astute readers will note that I have removed a name in the above entry. This is not for concealment purposes (I didn't remove her name from your comments, for example), but because a conversation with Ysabel has made me realize I was not honest with myself about some of my motivations. I'll address this in the next entry, but I don't know if I will finish that before dinner, so I'm letting you know here that there is More To Come.
-- 00:00, 25 May 2010 (BST)
The codfish lays ten thousand eggs, The homely hen lays one; The codfish never cackles, To tell you when she's done; And so we scorn the codfish, While the humble hen we prize; Which only goes to show you, That it pays to advertise.
-Anonymous
I'll likely have more to say after to wade through the comments.
-- 01:20, 25 May 2010 (BST)
Joy:
I'm jumping in before finishing reading the comments - something I NEVER do - to say I was just talking to a colleague about why our students have such a hard time understanding that they need to be precise in their language when writing exam answers and papers in our classes. I think it partly stems from the fact that my particular science tends to use everyday words, that people think they understand the meaning of, in a particular way. Not to be jargony, but to be precise. And if you don't get that - don't get that we have defined concepts, and theories, and that there just happens to be an overlap in our everyday language use and the official terms for these things - you can end up being pretty loose with your words in a situation where it can hurt you.
But back to being kind of pissed off. Not at the soft, but at the idea that just because you know something is obviously true that somehow you might not have to test it scientifically to prove it. You might think doing the science of the thing is a waste of time, but seriously, plenty of counterintuitive things turn out to be true, and plenty of intuitive things turn out to be false, and that is the whole reason for actually having, oh, a fucking scientific method.
-- 02:30, 25 May 2010 (BST)
I don't recall saying anywhere in here that the soft sciences didn't call for the scientific method and full rigor.
-- 02:34, 25 May 2010 (BST)
Joy:
Also, the reason you don't see chemistry/geology/etc written up in some kind of advertising, engaging manner in lay (or lay-ish) articles - the reason you don't see them tooting their own horns, as you put it - is because the average person is way the hell more interested in why they think and behave the way they do, and not why rocks and rivers and chemicals behave the way they do. The hard sciences don't toot their own horn unless they are forced to publish, but the soft sciences do? You have got to be kidding me. (And also, everyone is forced to publish. Science is public. If you don't publish, people do not know about your work. If they don't know about your work, you might as well have done it on another planet.)
-- 02:35, 25 May 2010 (BST)
Iain:
Iain: Well, The Curious Case of the Paucity of Holmes/Watson Slashfic Compared To Just About Every Other Major Pairing of Fictional Characters in the Universe didn't have the same ring to it.
However, you're right, the movie has changed everything. I was strictly referring to pre-movie status
Well, of COURSE there's a paucity, pre-movie. Every other high-volume slashfic combination comes from either movies or television, not literature. The definitive Holmes films, such as they are, are very nearly from our grandparents' time; the definitive television series (the one with Jeremy Brett) was not only pre-internet, but was on PBS, AND, what, 30 years ago? (...Suddenly I feel positively antique.) For whatever reason, littrachooor doesn't get the same sort of fandom, even though individual works may have far larger overall audiences -- I suppose because a lot of slashfic is about the actors involved, even if using the characters means that you get to pretend it isn't.
-- 02:38, 25 May 2010 (BST)
And indeed, I do.
First, a question: Is MMORPG as much a part of the social media phenomenon as Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn/Twitter, etc.? I mean, I know about all of those, even though I don't have accounts on Facebook or Twitter (and the MySpace one I was talked into by a friend who posted all her art there; I use it for nothing else). But other than from you, I never hear about MMORPG, and have even forgotten what the initials stand for (I can't shake that idea that the last three should stand for Rocket-Propelled Grenade). I realize this may simply be a function of my living, as usual, in the ProfRobert-o-Centic Universe, but is there even 1% as much demand for written criticism/scholarly analysis of MMORPG as there is for what I perceive as more pervasive social media?
Add One to Shmuel's points: You're Arthur Sullivan, aren't you? Well screw the symphonies and embrace the topsy-turvy, I say.
-- 02:40, 25 May 2010 (BST)
Joy:
Wow, we must have completely different filters, because I don't see her page as tooting her own horn. At all. But then, I've been indoctrinated.
-- 02:45, 25 May 2010 (BST)
Joy:
Or rather, I mean tooting her own horn with unnecessary tootingness. It doesn't seem particularly braggy to me.
-- 02:46, 25 May 2010 (BST)
Joy, I think I just plain don't like her. Which is very odd because I have never met her, and also I've read a fair bit of her work and it seems sound (even when I flat-out disagree with her, like her recent weblog post where she argues that leaving Facebook over its recent bad behavior is a pointless thing to do).
What I concluded in a long IM chat with Ysabel - and which will be in the next entry that I don't have the energy to write tonight - is that my reasons for rejecting her are very odd, odder even than usual for me.
But all that said, the following key points from my screed still stand: 1) I really do have a problem with a lot of scholarly writing which seems designed to obfuscate, not clarify; 2) I really do have a problem with claims of expertise, even when the person making the claim is actually an expert; 3) I really do have a problem with anyone promoting their work or their expertise. I don't claim these things are rational, and you folks have offered many good reasons why they're not. But too bad. They still bother me.
The issue is that I do all my shopping by either prior reputation or trial and error. I buy brands and products I've never heard of, sure. If they're good I buy them again - and again and again, until my needs change or the product ceases to exist (sadly, usually the latter comes first). If they're bad, I never buy them again.
I have been buying one and only one brand of jeans for twenty-five years. The jeans in question have only been advertised once or twice, sporadically, in that time frame. I happened to try them once and they were good and they fit me. I have tried other brands of jeans since then, but no others fit me as well. If I ever found a brand that fitted me better, I'd switch to it.
I want to shop for politicians and interesting prose and ideologies and computers and lawyers and everything else in my life that way. Good trial counts for a lot; personal recommendations count for a lot; long-term experience of the product counts for a lot; and no one ever, ever advertises a damned thing to me or to anyone else.
Modesty Above All.
Robert: As anyone who observes the temperaments of the two heroes of Topsy-Turvy can tell you, I am not Sullivan. I am Gilbert.
(Watching Gilbert in that movie is often painful to me, not because of the similarities, because that's no news, but because it makes me feel sad for what my wife puts up with.)
Lucy Gilbert (Kitty): I should rather like to be an actor, upon the stage.
Gilbert: An actor?
Kitty: Yes. Wouldn't it be wondrous if perfectly commonplace people gave each other a round of applause at the end of the day?
[she claps enthusiastically]
Kitty: Well done, Kitty! Well done!
-- 03:01, 25 May 2010 (BST)
I think a big part of the reason you're not more famous is because you've constantly sabotaged yourself. I would hold up Mouth Organ as an example. That seemed like it was really starting to do well... And then you abruptly quit and took down the archives. I don't remember your reasons for doing so, only that it struck me as a terrible idea at the time.
You seem to have set some goals that make it all but impossible for you to succeed. You want to post stuff online, but then never promote it online AT ALL and hope that a few people will randomly stumble across it and tell everybody they know. But even if that happened, it wouldn't be enough to get you a large following. Trust me, a few links on Boing Boing or Metafilter aren't going to turn your life around.
Some months back I had a web thing that briefly attracted a flurry of attention. It was on all the big sites and for a week or so I was getting hundreds of hits per day. (Not thousands. Hundreds. Being featured on Boing Boing won't make you an overnight superstar.) Then it got old and people forgot me again, the next week I couldn't buy a freaking link. The only way to get popular and make it stick is to work hard, keep producing good stuff, and relentlessly hype what you've got. If you want anybody to hear about you, you HAVE to hustle, you HAVE to be pushy and get your work out there, you HAVE to toot your own horn, even if you feel like an asshole for doing it.
I understand envy, all too well. There are freelance writers I started out with, people who simply were not as good as I was, who now have book deals and get interviewed by Jon Stewart. It was maddening to watch them zip past me, maddening to work so hard and get as much acclaim as I did and still end up freaking broke and obscure, while other people got rich and famous based on luck and smarm. I don't envy their talent. I envy their smarm. I envy their ability to hustle and ass-kiss and do all of those other odious things. Because in this world, you either do that stuff or nobody will ever hear of you.
-- 03:06, 25 May 2010 (BST)
I do find it interesting which threads turn into a referendum on my performance. I'm trying to find the place above where we took a turn down that all-too-familiar alley. It's not that I mind, but sometimes I think it's the only discussion that ever happens around here.
Ursula, believe me, if you'd been behind the scenes you would have realized that mouth organ's time had come. It was not sustainable. It was out of juice. It could possibly have been kept alive with the addition of other writers, but no one would have been crazy enough to do that for free. It was such an exhausting experience that even contemplating opening the archives so that I can repost them gives me the heebie-jeebies. There were Wednesday nights during the end of the mouth organ run when I was wondering whether it would be easier to infect myself with the plague than to write a column.
I think you're probably right about the relentless need to promote. I have already determined that I will never do that. It's the resolving myself to remaining obscure part that I'm having continual trouble with. If my brain would only shut up and go dull, I wouldn't have any of this trouble.
-- 03:23, 25 May 2010 (BST)
I don't presume to speak to your personal personality -- it may well be Gilbert, though I doubt Nonelvis has been passively pressuring you for a child. My comment was directed only to your writing. You disdain the essays that so many of us enjoy reading the way Sir Arthur disdained his light opera music. Your "I R SRS FIKSHUN RITER!!! is just like his "I R SRS KOMPOZER!!!" except his srs kompozishuns were crap, and your stories aren't, but you won't promote your fikshun, and around we go again.
Plus, you're all pervy like Sir Arthur, not a sexophobe like Schwenk. [Big Kiss, Mwah!]
-- 03:38, 25 May 2010 (BST)
I'm trying to find the place above where we took a turn down that all-too-familiar alley.
That'd be the fourth section of the main entry, wherein you inquired as to why other people get all the recognition while you don't.
(Mouth Organ would have been my Exhibit B, actually.)
Incidentally, I agree with you about scholarly writing being designed to obfuscate rather than enlighten. It's one of the many reasons why I'm not in academia anymore. But I don't think this is confined to the soft sciences, and I don't really blame those in academia for writing that way; it's pretty much compulsory. (It's partly convention and partly a lexical marker carrying the message "I Am A Serious Academic And This Is Serious Research" rather than a deliberate attempt to deceive, I think... but then I have my own issues here.)
-- 03:41, 25 May 2010 (BST)
Plus, you're all pervy like Sir Arthur, not a sexophobe like Schwenk.
Shows what you know.
-- 04:09, 25 May 2010 (BST)
I'm *reasonably* certain Gilbert wasn't published in "Best British Erotica, 1881," but beyond that observation, I'm not touching that with a 10-foot samurai sword.
Add One to Joy: YES! I have the same issue with my law students. Words in the legal profession, other than the Latin ones, are usually common, but in law have very precise meanings. "Liable," for example, does not equal "Guilty." One of my challenges is to get my students to understand the precise meanings and to use them properly. "The trial court erred," and "the trial court abused its discretion," mean different things and connote enormously important distinctions in how a reader (such as an appellate court) will construe what comes next. One of the things that helps is explaining that we are now using words in the U.S. Legal Discourse Community, which is different from, say, the U.S. Sociologist Discourse Community or even the U.K. Legal Discourse Community (where "judgement" has two "e's"). It's harder, in some respects, than learning a new language, because you think you know what the words means, but you really don't.
One further digression before the melatonin kicks in: I like to play a little game with my 1L's, where I try to guess what majors/careers they had before they came to law school. Engineers and hard scientists are easy -- fact after fact after fact after fact, marching with no leavening connectors. Social scientists are easy -- lots of "we have reviwed the following materials, and upon careful consideration of each of the relevant statutes, cases, and scholarly commentaries [continue in the vein for another half page] we have reached a conclusion [which we won't tell you about until page 10]. English majors are easy -- lovely, too-long prose.
This one woman student, one of my night students, I tried to play the game, but I'd never read any style like hers. It wasn't bad (or, I should say, it wasn't any worse than anyone else's), but it was . . . different. At our conference, I asked what her day job was. She said she was a bartender. So now I know how bartenders write!
-- 04:25, 25 May 2010 (BST)
One more thing, re: Also, I'm honestly not sure how one would go about pitching that sort of book, or where.
I'm pretty sure I could help answer that. Should you ever decide you do want to go for it, let me know.
-- 04:58, 25 May 2010 (BST)
Iain:
[Mouth Organ] could possibly have been kept alive with the addition of other writers, but no one would have been crazy enough to do that for free.
Yes, that would have been why, when you asked a few people if they'd be willing to contribute, at least two of them said, "Why, yes, sure", without expecting to get paid. Which may or may not have been a bad business move on everyone's part, but it was certainly asked and answered on those terms exactly.
I do find it interesting which threads turn into a referendum on my performance. I'm trying to find the place above where we took a turn down that all-too-familiar alley.
Oh, about the time you mentioned Mei Hua, which seems to be a pretty much guaranteed flashpoint. And talking about valuing modesty in today's world is also pretty much guaranteed to frustrate, especially since the world has never valued it the way you seem to think it should.
(...Why in the name of sanity is MediaWiki giving length warnings about a page that's 43k?)
-- 16:08, 25 May 2010 (BST)
Getting people to write for your publication for free does not actually decrease the amount of work you will spend on it. Sometimes, it makes it harder. I miss mouth organ too but as someone who is now essentially chained to a website that needs daily work (and has few rewards), I can sympathize perfectly.
Y'know, some local media consider Chip a go-to person to interview for certain tech-related issues about which he is very knowledgeable, but I have never heard anyone call him an expert, nor does he call himself that. "Expert" sounds a little like self-exaggeration. He is quite able to promote himself for the work he wants to do, and promote the projects he supports, without using buzzwords like "expert" and "social media" and worst of all, "rock star." So while I don't believe in modesty, I don't think you have to be smarmy in order to be successful. At least, I devoutly hope not.
-- 16:18, 25 May 2010 (BST)
Col, comments have gone on from here, but I do want to say this:
If "here is what this book is about and why you should want to read it" is not advertising, there is no advertising in the field of publishing. And I don't think either of us believes that.
-- 19:36, 25 May 2010 (BST)
That's fair. I guess that doesn't bother me the same way because, y'know, it's books. Or something. We all know how consistent my standards are!
-- 19:47, 25 May 2010 (BST)
Columbina:
Two Clarifications
1. I really do seem to hate anyone being called an expert on anything, even when they are. I've been published just enough to know I have a problem with bios. It bothers me in author bios to claim competence at anything. If I did have a piece on MMORPG phenomena appear somewhere, I'd have to insist the author's note read something like, "___ has been watching the online world for a long time and may have learned a few things about it." That strikes me as pretty much the maximum reasonable extent anyone can claim. Never pull the long bow.
2. The user list here has 40-some people. I suspect about 20 of those check the site semi-regularly; ten of you can be counted on to have seen what is posted here within 48 hours of my posting it. If we really want a test of "people who know me casually and have indicated that they are interested in occasionally seeing what I write," the ultimate test is probably the people I allow to follow me on Twitter, where I block any name which seems to be uninterested in actually reading what I have to say - and which seems to have hit its natural limit at about sixty people.
-- 20:34, 24 May 2010 (BST)