one paragraph to go

Just one paragraph to go, and then I’ll be finished with 5D and thus with the first half of the book. But now, as is so often the case for humans, I’d rather just collapse and go to sleep– sometimes finishing things is disturbing. What to do next? I actually know what I’m going to do next, but it still takes a bit of strength to throw off an unpleasant burden and put things to rest.

I don’t remember if the final paragraphs of the dissertation went like this as well; probably not, because at that point I was pushing my luck with a deadline (one of my committee members was leaving for Europe for a year on a specific date) and couldn’t afford to linger over the closing.

Back in a bit…

a quick note on acknowledgments

Incidentally, I also just wrote a brief 5-line acknowledgment for this book. There was no way to avoid it, because two people in Egypt and two in France were the ones who made this book possible, and I would be an ingrate not to mention them.

Same with Prince of Networks, where the ANTHEM people and the February 2008 event at the LSE were such a vital part of the book’s life that it all had to be mentioned at the start.

But generally speaking, as stated at the front of Tool-Being, I do not like either acknowledgments sections or dedications. I’m not saying others have to agree with me about this, but let me explain why I don’t like them as a rule.

With a book there is only one relationship that counts: that between author and reader. No one is forced to read your book, just as no one is forced to listen to your long stories in a bar. There has to be something in it for the reader or listener. This means that you cannot bore, insult, or exclude your reader. You have to address your reader as an equal in some sense. You have to care about what your readers are thinking, and you have to wonder “am I boring them on this page?” Because you have no right to bore them.

It is my opinion that dedications and acknowledgments either bore or exclude the reader, or both.

Let’s start with dedications. I don’t want to be harsh, because there have been many moving book dedications written to parents, spouses, mentors, deceased friends, and so forth. Each author has to make this decision independently; I’m just sharing my own thoughts.

There are only a few basic possibilities with dedications. They tend to be brief. Perhaps they are so brief as to be incomprehensible to outsiders, with allusions to unknown people, and in that case there is a risk of boring the reader momentarily, and I hate to do it even for a moment.

What else could you do? Dedicate the book to someone of greater authority than yourself. But this is a form of borrowed glory, and also faintly intimidates the reader, since it would imply one’s close connection with a famous author, a connection from which most readers are excluded.

You could also dedicate it to someone with whom you have a very close personal relationship. But if I were to write, say, “For Irena,” this would really just amount to dropping public hints about a love life behind the scenes, which is a form of showing off. And even if it intrigued some readers who are curious about personal lives, it would simultaneously exclude them from the privileged information. It would be a tease, basically.

If by contrast a book is dedicated to a known spouse/partner of the author, the reader is by definition shut out of that uniquely intimate relationship. Thus, a screen has been briefly set up between author and reader. (And let me repeat, I am speaking only of my own authorial preferences here, and pass no judgment on this very personal decision made by others.)

As for acknowledgments, there are two kinds: the boring and the exclusive, both of them bad in my opinion.

If it’s just a long list of 40 or 50 names without explanation, those are incredibly boring for the reader. If you want people to know they’ve helped, you can just thank them warmly or give them gifts.

But there’s another kind of acknowledgment that bullies or intimidates the reader: “I’d like to thank Harvard University, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Director of the British Library for their helpful assistance with my project. I also benefitted greatly from Jacques Derrida for lending me the use of his seaside condominium during the latter stages of writing this book.” OK, now you’re a big-time player, and most of your readers are not. A barrier has been set up.

But there are times when you do have to thank people, as in the two cases I just mentioned. In the case of L’objet quadruple I’ve tried to avoid boring the reader by being extremely brief, and tried to avoid excluding the reader from my relations with four people by adding one sentence saying “This book is dedicated to my readers, both known and unknown.” Sort of an apology for losing track of my readers for two sentences while thanking other people who really needed it.

In the case of Prince of Networks, I don’t think that opening LSE section is boring, so no problem there. The worry is that readers might feel excluded. I took care of that by inviting them to join Erdélyi’s mailing list and assuring them that he’s very welcoming.

I also had to thank Bruno and Chantal Latour, who did contribute an awful lot to the physical writing of the book. Of course, the danger is that it just becomes a form of attaching oneself to a greater celebrity while excluding the reader from that same attachment. I dealt with that by invoking the fact that Latour started helping me when I was a completely anonymous, unaccomplished fresh Ph.D. Instead of addressing the reader from Latour’s dining room, where they might not feel invited, I address them from the crushing obscurity of a Chicago apartment ten years ago. And there’s nothing in that to intimidate the reader in the least.

Anyway, that’s my own approach to the problem. Others might and do reject it, but I think it is vitally important to treat the reader like an honored guest, not like a failure excluded from a party of luminaries.

Composition of Philosophy. July 31 (A).

The post title above says July 31 (A) because I’ve only finished off the difficult Section 4D so far. I’ll give a final report after finishing 5D, which will end the first half of the book on July 31 as hoped, leaving all of August to write the more difficult second half.

Chapter 4 took a total of 4 hours, 44 minutes (how appropriate) from zero to completion. That chapter also happens to be on the fourfold, but I swear I didn’t do that deliberately, or even know it was coming.

In any case, this yields the following statistics so far:

Introduction- 1:06 1,982 signes
Chapter 1- 6:31 24,713 signes
Chapter 2- 3:50 24,587 signes
Chapter 3- 4:36 24,293 signes
Chapter 4- 4:44 24,436 signes

As you can see, I’m doing well with length. These chapters are all just as long as they need to be: just under 25,000 signes apiece.

The tricky section 4D came together as soon as I remembered the constraints! That’s been the major lesson reinforced by this exercise: writing, like thinking, means recognizing the constraints of a situation and finding ways to open doors and windows nonetheless.

In the case of 4D, I was simply expecting to do too much in less than one thousand words. I was trying to outline difficult theoretical problems that are already going to be covered in the second half of the book in considerable detail. That having been recognized, 4D was reframed more in the spirit of “easing the reader toward what’s coming,” and once that phrase came to mind it only took and hour and fifteen minutes to finish off that previous beast of a section.

5D won’t be as tough as 4D, and of course now I am highly motivated to bring this stage of the project to a close.

In the next post a few hours from now, I’ll have some general reflections about the past couple of weeks. My initial impression is still that the actual writing hours were fairly efficient, but there were surprisingly few such hours per day, certainly far less than the norm for me during writing periods.

The reason that came to mind earlier was “I just haven’t been into it; I’ve done my best in forcing myself to move along despite being strangely not in the mood to be doing this right now.”

There’s a bit of that, sure. I came back from England unusually tired, and the summer can mess with sleep schedules. But now I think it’s more something else… Namely, the act of miniaturizing ideas is exhausting. You all know the length constraints on this project and the reasons for them. I’ve had to compress a lot of ideas into these first five chapters, and have had to compress most of the chapters far below their initial length.

And I’ve come to realize that, despite the great value and hopefully great outcome of this exercise, it is extremely tiring. You have to choose your words very carefully, and risks have to be taken with cutting certain transitions and user-friendly language. The Montfort/Bogost Atari book keeps coming back to mind because I am most identifying right now with those programmers who had to use every trick in the book to create interesting, playable games for a surprisingly weak machine.

More specifically, I identify with those programmers they discussed who had the unenviable task of porting known arcade games to the Atari. There were already numerous fans of Space Invaders and Pac-Man in the arcades, and the poor souls who had to do those games for the Atari had to recreate them using far feebler hardware. In the case of Space Invaders it worked well; in the case of Pac-Man it was rushed (just 6 weeks!), and generally viewed as a terrible failure.

I think the analogy is a good one. Compressing the existing ideas of all my published books into 70 double-spaced pages is about as tough as porting Space Invaders to the Atari (I won’t mention the Pac-Man port, because I want this one to turn out much better than that). Every possible trick has been needed to make those ideas leaner and crisper than they are in my existing books, so that they can fit into a small space, and still without losing anyone (most French readers won’t know the first thing about any of my writings).

In any case, I’ve never had to do anything like this before, and I think I was condemning myself too harshly on the “number of hours per day” front. Every time I finish revising just one of these sections (and they’re only about 3 pages apiece), I have to crash on the couch or go out for a coffee. It’s that demanding.

By contrast, with normal projects it’s possible to rip out 20-25 pages on a good day. Not with this one.

See you in a few hours, with a report on the finale of this stage of the project.

another good reason to make cuts

Despite my earlier plans, I stayed awake to revise section 5C, just because I felt like it. Though the section was initially too short, once I worked on it a bit it ended up far too long.

I dealt with the problem partly by moving some of the material to 5D (a better fit for it anyway) and partly by cuts.

One of the things I noticed while doing so is that a great deal of cuts can be made simply by removing timid qualifying phrases from sentences. Even though I have a conscious dislike for such phrases, it was surprising how many of them were still present in my sub-final draft of this section.

It’s generally a good rule that you should either say something or not say it– a rule that affects not just qualifying phrases, but also scare-quotes and parenthetical phrases, as well as many footnotes. (I have to admit to usually ignoring footnotes in books: if the author can’t see fit to work a point into the main text, then how vital can it be? It breaks up the flow of reading to keep looking away at footnotes. I’ll usually scan the footnotes lazily unless I have a specific interest in the topic at issue.)

In any case, the straitjacket of my word limit on this project forced me to dump such garbage phrases as: “Now it might seem to some readers that…” I might have kept those in place if not forced to remove them by the word-count, but the style is now much improved by dumping them.

However, I am not a fan of ironclad stylistic rules such as “never use the passive voice.” Rules need to be broken in special cases.

Current Book Statistics:

Just two sections remaining.

*completed so far: 61 pages

*time elapsed: 23 hours, 17 minutes

I’m estimating 68 pages and 26 hours as the final statistics for this first half of the project.

Composition of Philosophy. July 30.

A few days ago I broke my usual rule of “no reading philosophy while writing philosophy” to dig into Suárez a bit more. Today I’ve been breaking it to read Whitehead, and am glad I did so. Process and Reality is really one of the great books of recent philosophy. One of the things Whitehead does better than Heidegger is to interrupt his argument occasionally to offer general reflections on the nature of philosophy, and I’m always sympathetic to what he has to say.

Today was a bit slow on writing again. I revised two sections only, which means that 4D, 5C, and 5D all remain to be done. 5C and 5D aren’t too difficult, so I may be able to polish them off first thing in the morning and still have time to finalize the more difficult 4D.

The difficulty with 4D, in a nutshell, is that it’s a smaller piece of the puzzle than I realized a month or so ago… Instead of four key topics to discuss, there are exactly ten, and I need to figure out how to localize the four I had isolated previously (they do belong apart from the others, but now seem to be a variant of a more general problem rather than a fundamental solution in themselves). At points like this, one often lacks even the right terminology, and so you end up having to choose a few new terms.

There are a couple of possible dangers with that exercise. One is that terms are never entirely innocent, and the ones you choose suggest all sorts of resonances with other topics that might not actually be related to the one on which you want to focus.

Another problem is that you don’t want to proliferate terms past a certain point, because philosophy is about simplifying, and you don’t want the reader to see nothing but a laundry list in any given chapter; you want to show the simple elegance of a problem, and proliferating terms can sometimes be just a stopgap measure when you haven’t quite grasped a problem in its simple elegance yet.

I often think about the situation in particle physics before the Standard Model was finalized in the early 1970’s. There were hundreds of particles discovered by the end of the 1950’s, and physicists reportedly had to carry laminated cards to remember what all of them were. It’s certainly better than pretending that all those particles don’t exist, but it’s also not the sort of situation where any branch of human knowledge wants to remain for long. (The cataloguing of diversity is only a first step, it seems to me. Even if you are identifying thousands of new flowers in the mountains, you’ll want to group them into families to help manage the data. In philosophy that’s even more evident.)

There’s the additional danger that a small set of terms can feel like oversimplification for the sake of rigid manageability.

For all of these reasons, I often feel myself pausing a bit whenever confronted by diversity in need of organization. Organizing a chaotic diversity is one of the things I most enjoy doing, but you want to make sure you’re doing it the right way.

Composition of Philosophy. July 29.

While supervising the work of the painters (who did an excellent job, though it took much longer than expected) I was thinking about section 4D. And I’m still thinking about it, so today was a light revision day. All I revised was the brief introduction to Chapter 5. That’s only 1 page, and took a total of 20 minutes from zero to final draft.

That means that it’s taken 19 hours and 56 46 minutes to get to page 53 of the final draft.

Another statistic: each minute of writing has yielded 13.5 words on average, which isn’t bad. That means that each sentence of the book is taking about 1 minute to create ex nihilo.

What now remains to be revised are the following sections: 4D, 5A, 5B, 5C, and 5D.

Tomorrow I again need to be at the Embassy at 8 AM to pick up (I hope) the new passport and walk it over to the old AUC campus to start processing the new Egyptian residence visa for it. This means that I can’t make it a late night tonight, so all I plan to do before sleeping is make a very thorough list of all the things that need to be fixed in the Chapter 5 rough draft, which will greatly speed up the process of finalizing that whole chapter.

4D is the hardest section of the whole first half of the book, so it may be the one that is revised last, out of order.

Composition of Philosophy. July 28, 2009.

I’m now finished revising through Chapter 4, Section C. That leaves only Section D to go before Chapter 4 is completed.

Statistics So Far (on completed sections only)

Total time elapsed= 19 hours, 26 minutes
Length= 15,773 words (51 double-spaced pages)

So far I had been disappointed at my speed on this project, but now it’s looking like the actual writing time has been reasonably efficient. 50 finished-and-revised pages in less than 20 hours is pretty good– no speed record for me, but solid and respectable. I certainly couldn’t have done it at any time prior to a couple of years ago. A more just criticism would be that I’m not writing enough hours per day. That’s certainly true, but I simply haven’t been in the mood much of this time, and have had to force myself sometimes to work on the project.

The cause for this is starting to seem more and more like travel fatigue. Now that I’ve begun to readjust to Cairo rhythms, it has become much more enjoyable to sit at the computer and write. Moreover, these first 50 pages are close enough to their finished state that the book now has a reality and a personality. The initial zero and infinity that haunt the outset of any project are long gone in the present case. On July 15 I had nothing but outlines, but now, on July 28, I have a book-like mass that is starting to feel like the real thing. Once you have that, motivation skyrockets.

It’s only 6:30 in the evening in Cairo, but I have decided not to revise 4D tonight. That’s partly because I’m supposed to read and comment on an administrative report, but also because 4D is important enough that it deserves a full day’s work, despite its short length of 3-4 pages. This is the one section where I can’t yet decide between two options on a specific question, though a decision is very close.

I have to hang out at home tomorrow and supervise a quick painting job… The upstairs neighbor seems to have had a leak of some sort, and both bedrooms have had paint crumble away and fall to the floor in recent weeks. It will be nice to have 4D to chew on while stranded at home.

Assuming 4D is finished tomorrow, that gives me July 30 and 31 to finish Chapter 5. One day should be enough, but I have two if I need it, to meet my new goal of having the first half of the book written by the end of July.

What then?

Well, first I need to proofread three old article drafts so that I can send them out to journals to be refereed. These have been on my plate since May, and I haven’t had the time to get to them. Where do all these articles come from? Usually they are invited lectures that I revise to fit the print format. And how do you get invited to give lectures? By publishing things that people enjoy reading. This is one of those examples of Levi’s principle that “the more you write, the more you will write.” It’s a lot harder to go from zero published articles to five than it is to go from five to thirty, strange though it may sound. People have journal issues to edit. They have anthologies to fill. If you’ve published a few good things, complete strangers will start to contact you from the blue, asking you to contribute to their journal or their edited volume. I was deep into my thirties before I had published a single legitimate article (two books had come first) but now I’m somewhere above 30 if you count published, in press, and pending articles and book chapters.

Why would I want to write so many? Because, each one expands my mind in some way. Did I mention the Gore Vidal line before? Supposedly he said: “never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.” Without commenting specifically on that piece of advice, I definitely subscribe to the maxim of “never pass up a chance to give a lecture or write an article or book.” These are the best ways to force yourself to think. The notion of thinking as being a private dialogue of the soul with itself is not, in my opinion, a correct notion. Situations are your co-authors. If you turn down an invitation to write something or speak somewhere, it’s like jilting a unique co-author who will never come calling again.

I have some ideas about how I will handle the endgame of the book in August, but will leave those thoughts until later in the week.

Composition of Philosophy. July 27.

Though I’d planned to take today off on the book, I did in fact revise Chapter 4, Section A, but am now feeling the effects of having had only 90 minutes of sleep last night for various reasons. I’ll give a longer report on Chapter 4 and its progress tomorrow. One of the remaining three sections is too long, the others are too short.

more Comp. of Phil. statistics

Finished so far in final form…

Introduction. 1 hour, 6 minutes.

Chapter One. 6 hours, 31 minutes.

Chapter Two. 3 hours, 50 minutes.

Chapter Three, 4 hours, 36 minutes.

Totals:

16 hours, 3 minutes
41 pages
12,622 words

[ADDENDUM: There are now 9 sections remaining to be revised in the first half of the book, 3 of them too long, 6 of them too short.]

Composition of Philosophy. July 26.

Chapter 3 is now completely revised. Other than 3C, a terrible bear that would have bored or lost the reader in its initial form, this was not an especially difficult piece of revision.

From zero to final draft, Chapter 3 took 4 hours and 36 minutes.

Total length in signes is 24,293, so it’s still going well on that front. (I should be averaging just under 25,000 signes, or characters including blank spaces, for each of the ten chapters. Better to be slightly under than slightly over, because final revisions always tend to add clarifying words more often that they subtract superfluous ones.)

The most recent target of having a polished final draft of Chapters 1-5 by the end of July is now so within reach as to be nearly inevitable, barring sudden illness such as swine flu, or some other unforeseen crisis. There are five days remaining to revise the final two chapters, and though 4D and most of 5 will be tough, five days should be plenty.

I have business on campus tomorrow, and hence may decide that tomorrow is worth a simple day off to recharge the batteries. It depends on how I’m feeling.

I’m glad I read the Montfort/Bogost book on the Atari, Racing the Beam, at the beginning of the month (a lot has been packed into July– it feels like ages since Bogost & Co. were in Cairo).

The main theme of that book was the clever programming tricks required to design playable games for a piece of hardware as surprisingly feeble as the Atari VCS really was. Read the book if you’re interested in hearing all the examples, but one of the funniest is that the “neutral zone” in Yar’s Revenge is a visual depiction of the software code itself, a brilliant memory-saving idea that also had a suitably ominous visual effect.

With this book I’m in a similar position to Atari programmers or weapons miniaturizers. Never have I packed this many of my ideas into a mere 70 double-spaced pages (the final 70 pages will be largely new material that none of my readers have ever seen before). Many of the cuts have been painful, of the order of: “my God, will the argument even make sense if I remove that step?”

But more often than not, compression and allusiveness can be made to work. This book is certainly going to have a very rapid pace, like a high-speed film of a horse running. But though I wouldn’t wish to write every book this way, it’s a fascinating exercise. And I’m having to invent a lot of “Atari programming tricks” to pull it off.