Barnet Council's amazing attempt to criminalise blogging...

.. is reported by 'Liberal Conspiracy' here.  This would be another blog put out of business if they succeeded in making this claim stick.  I can think of at least one distinguished professor of medieval history who might side with them.  In the meantime, expect more cutting edge posts about my enormously interesting private life, my family and about the cat from down the road...

The Malaise of US University Education: Anthony Grafton Writes

Here is a very good piece by Anthony Grafton, which ought to ring a number of alarm bells for all of us toiling on this side of the pond and watching the things which Grafton thinks safeguard the advantages of our system being placed under threat.

Sadly, the line-break after "At every level of the system, dedicated professors are setting students on fire with enthusiasm" creates an unfortunate image...  The line-break above makes it even worse...

The Marchfield: A query

Do any of you know if there is any link between the Frankish military assembly of 1 March, the 'Marchfield' (GT Histories, II.27: campus martius) and the Roman campus martius?  One is a place, the other a date, but both are 'the field of Mars', both military assemblies (of sorts).  Just coincidence?  All help gratefully received.

Professor Grumpy's Ten Top-Tips for Academic Writing

Many of my friends, I know, have difficulty with the writing process.  I, by contrast, can churn out the verbiage as easily as scrambling eggs.  So here are some tips that those confronted by academic writer's block might find useful.  It might, I know, appear arrogant to set these out but - hey - you know me; I am arrogant!  Nonetheless if they help, they help.

Tip 1: The Word processor is your friend

This is the meta-tip, if you like.  I am lucky in that I guess I was part of the first generation to write their PhD thesis on affordable word-processors (thanks to Alan Sugar for that if nothing else) - an Amstrad* PCW 8256: the size of an old cathode-ray telly with a memory (hell, without even an internal hard-drive) a tiny fraction of that on my lap-top today.  I know fine (and productive) scholars only a few years older than I am who typed their theses and whose writing processes are still profoundly influenced by that - hand-write a draft, several drafts, and work over them before typing it up.  By contrast I soon internalised the beauty of the word-processing, er, process - which is to say that you can bang out the words to create text as easily as anything, and always go back reshape, cut, paste, delete, move to another file, and so on.  Create text and treat it as clay: that is my advice.  In other words, use the word-processor to create a lump of about the right size that you can shape and re-shape later on.  Similarly, do not get attached to your words.  Cut and paste, or delete with abandon (there is a further tip, no.8, below, to ease the pain).  Once you have cranked out the right quantity of 'clay' in roughly the right shape, you can trim, refine and shape it to the exact form you want.

Tip 2: Have a plan

OK: this one isn't at all original.  But have a plan anyway.  For myself, in line with the above, I only start with a very general plan of the points I want to make and in what order.  Someone (Helmuth von Moltke, I think) said that no plan survives first contact with the enemy; my experience is that no writing plan survives first contact with the keyboard.  My plans tend to evolve with the writing process.  I am also blessed with the ability to think clearly (which helps writing quickly, but ought not to be confused with the latter) and to keep a lot of stuff in my head.  Nevertheless, of course it matters to have a plan and the better the plan the better the process.  That is always true.  As the Revised Annals put it in describing a Frankish defeat: 'since the approach went badly, badly went the battle.'

Tip 3: Write 500 words a day

This is my other major tip.  Write 500 words a day - as the first thing you do.  Just churn out 500 words.  Remember you don't have to keep any of them in the long term.  They don't even have to be factually accurate; at this stage it doesn't matter if you can't remember whether what you're saying is 'right' if the notes you have to hand don't have the right information (see below).  Don't get interrupted - just write.  Get yourself a pot of coffee (or tea), sit down and write 500 words.  If you are on a roll, or have more time, write more, but do not use that as an excuse to write less the next day.  Building up a bit of 'excess fat' is good in case of emergency, to ensure you can average 500 a day, but work that out after you've been forced to miss a day.  In a week and a half to two weeks you will have an article's worth; in three weeks or so, a chapter.  And so on.

Tip 4: Don't foot-note as you go

Related to Tip no.3, do not, on any account, foot-note as you go.  This is the academic writer's displacement activity.  This is understandable; there is (and I know I ought to get out more, but still) nothing as satisfying to an academic, in the creative process, than an impressive and impressively laid-out foot-note, but ignore its lure!  If there's something you really think you'll forget, of course, add a general note (in brackets or as a foot-note) but if you get involved in proper, conventional foot-noting, you will grind to a halt.  That stuff comes later.

Tip 5: Check it all afterwards

This, of course is the indispensable corollary of the 500-words a day 'clay-creation' scheme.  Once you have your basic text, then you can go through footnoting and checking the facts etc.

Tip 6: (Really) Check it all afterwards

Check it all afterwards.  E.H. Carr said that 'accuracy is a duty, not a virtue'.  We all make mistakes but there's no point writing stuff quickly if it all turns out to be, in technical jargon, bollocks.  Remember this epigram of Professor Grumpy (based on one about composers): 'Good historians are slowly discovered; bad historians are slowly found out.'  I know of one book about Carolingian society which garnered great praise and prizes when it appeared, largely by virtue of the fact that it parroted all the choice interpretations of the 'the Bucknell Group' (which de facto and whether it likes it or not, is broadly equivalent with the British early medieval historical establishment), except from the one reviewer (in the AHR) who bothered checking it.  Sad to say, every factual statement that I have checked in that book is wrong - not 'interpreted in a questionable way' but wrong (just plain wrong) in the sense that the documents cited don't actually say what they are claimed to say.  We all make mistakes, but, a: there are degrees of mistake (from the irritating betise - saying the passage is in Gregory of Tours' Histories Book 6, chapter 3, when it is actually in Book 3, chapter 6 - to the unforgivable - saying that a document comes from Paris in 693, when in fact it is from St Denis in 694 and then getting the contents inaccurate), and b: there are  limits to the acceptable number of such mistakes.  You don't want to acquire the reputation for being routinely unreliable.  Let that be a lesson.  Festina lente (once you've got your basic text done).  However, all this still makes the overall process quicker than checking and foot-noting as you go, not least because you can do it all in one solid block of time (when you have such).

Tip 7: Edit and re-edit

Once you have your text, you can edit - and re-edit.  No text ever suffered from being polished.  No text ever suffered from being shorter, either.  In my experience you can always lose 10% of a draft just by stylistic changes.  I am always struck by how flabby my first drafts are and by how much repetition and needless extra argumentation there is.  So cut it!  Don't be afraid to lose whole sections or to move chunks around to see whether they work better somewhere else.  But this is always better done- and easier, once you have a basic text, generated as above.

Tip 8: Create a 'dust-bin'

This is to ease the pain of cutting stuff, especially those nice (or catty!) comments or phrases or bits of argument or evidence that, in the end, aren't necessary to what you are writing. You do have to be ruthless here so I ease the pain by creating a separate file as a 'dustbin' - a file to which I paste such 'nice bits' as I cut from the main piece, allegedly for use later. They have titles like 'Barbarians Dustbin' etc. Although I almost never do use these shavings for anything else, the fact of saving them up, makes me feel better about hacking them out of my original text.

Tip 9: Put some music on

I always find that the composition or creative process is easier with some background music.  However - and here is my top tip - make it something without lyrics (either that or songs that are such old standards that you don't even have to think about the lyrics to).  Jazz and classical music are my favourites in this role, but nothing too 'demanding'.  Kind of Blue, the later oeuvre of Bob James, and Faure's Requiem have all served me well over the years...  (as have many other pieces which I am too embarrassed to mention).

Tip 10: send it off

Here is something else that I have long been way too bad at.  Once you have polished and foot-noted and checked, send it off to the journal.  No point sitting on it.  Readers' comments are usually helpful, whether or not the piece is accepted. and if it is rejected, then make the changes you think can usefully be made to improve the piece and send it somewhere else.  Don't (as I have done) stick it in a draw, go into a decline and forget about it.  I sat on my piece on the Preface to Gregory of Tours' Histories Book V for maybe seven years after an especially mindless reader (I know who...) rejected it from Speculum (thus for about ten years after I first gave the paper upon which it was based!).  Don't do that.  It's stupid.  And I should know.

*  Alan Michael Sugar TRADing (for those who don't know).

Worlds of Arthur

I heard today that Oxford University Press will publish my next book - Worlds of Arthur: The History and Archaeology of Britain After the Romans.  I am (needless to say) delighted about this and look forward to working with them on the project.

Riot Analysis

The Government's own analysis of the social make-up of the rioters, reported in The Independent today (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/official-cabinet-ministers-wrong-about-cause-of-riots-2375515.html), provides little comfort for its own 'just feral criminality' interpretation.  It will not surprise the rest of us.  The low percentage of gang-members is of less relevance than the comment that they were 'not pivotal'.  13% could have been decisive if it had formed a well-organised core.  As it is, the Metropolitan Police's dreadful, arrogant bungling of the initial (peaceful) protest about their handling of the shooting of a suspectled to a violent upsurge of suppressed resentment and frustration that, contrary to what I said before, in some respects was quite 'tactical' in its initial stages, in that it was aimed at the police who were seen as the root of the problem.

A Year in the Blogosphere

Well, it's more or less a year since I started doing this blogging lark 'seriously' (the inverted commas are obviously necessary).  And, as they say, what a roller-coaster of a year it's been.  I've shut down the blog twice, brought it back twice, come to the verge of formal complaints being sent to my university twice (once justifiably, once most certainly not), lost at least one friend, lost 99% of the respect I had for someone I had hitherto held in high esteem, quite possibly lost the chance of a job I wanted because of this blog, taken some pretty visceral abuse, and so on.  All good fun!

On the other hand I have learnt some lessons.  One is that even bastards have feelings.  Another is that if you have twenty-odd followers and maybe 100 hits a day, that (allowing for hits from people looking for something else, like Elizabeth Kostova's novel The Historian or ever-popular balding guitarist The Edge) does not mean that  only twenty or thirty people in the whole wide world read your blog.   Thus you need to be a bit more careful about what you say and how you say it.  I've also learnt that eminent historians don't always read what you write very carefully, and just how deeply-ingrained the elitist culture of the British historical profession is, as well as just how few principles are actually held by the overwhelming majority of the practitioners of said profession.  And this in response to something that I actually thought long and hard about how I wrote.

And as a result of all this I have realised that no good is going to come of me continuing to smack my head against the glass ceiling that those of us not from 'a particular socio-educational background' (you know the one) eventually run up against. 
 

All told I have managed, just about, to internalise the important fact that, as Newsthump put it, 'stuff you put up on the Internet goes on the Internet.'  Much of it underlines a lot of what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes in this very good piece about the Darker Side of Blogging (and I speak as someone who has all-too-embarrassingly-often adopted the 'drive-by' approach to internet exchange, especially when I was going through a particularly angry phase: I hope I have grown out of this, but if I had a fiver for every time I've said that, I'd have ... well, a good 35 quid by now).

But I've also made new contacts which I hope to build on in the future, and learnt a lot from discussions and corrections on this site.  I remain convinced that it is 'a good thing' for someone who has managed to get as high up 'the greasy pole' as I have (and thus has less, perhaps, to worry about) to put up one's research, at embryonic stage for discussion and for those who are interested in reading it and who might not otherwise get access to it in 'learned journals' etc.



H.o.t.E. Hits by month
Blogger seems inexplicably to think that we moved
seamlessly from December 2009 to January 2011...

I have also been somewhat surprised at the size of this blog's audience.  I don't know by what sort of factor one has to divide the number of 'hits' to arrive at the number of active readers.  I am sure that something banal must explain the recent rocketing of the 'hit-rate' on this site to 400+ a day, from all over the world, such as the url 600transformer.blogspot.com being very close to some new eastern European porn site (H.o.t.E. is big in Poland at the moment, it seems) - perhaps the 'transformer' part of the url goes some way towards an explanation - but, be that as it may, that aside the number of page-views has risen steadily to 200 or so per day.  Clicks on specific pages have increased over time as well. 


Anyway, to all of you who read this site, thank you very much for your continued interest.  For those of you who are here looking for The Edge, sorry - he is a fine player who has done well not to suffer from passive pomposity after all those years stood just to Bono's left.*  Similarly for those of you looking for Kostova's The Historian - good novel, very nearly ruined entirely by the last couple of pages.

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* Did I ever tell you about the time I saw U2 at Kidderminster Town Hall ...?  If not, you might be about the only person in the world that I haven't told about the time I saw U2 at Kidderminster Town Hall.  Anyway, basically, once I saw U2 play at Kidderminster Town Hall.  There were about 200 people there, at most.  They were good, too.