Sphinx

It’s Reading Week – or, as various people have sagely commented on the Twitter, At Last I Can Catch Up On Sleep Get Ahead With My Teaching Prep Write Those Reviews Comment On Postgrad Drafts Spend Some Time With Family Do A Bit Of Reading Finally Get Some Research Done Hey Where Did That Go Week. And that’s in a normal year. This autumn, I imagine I’m not the only person who has found the switch to online teaching and the constant worrying about students thoroughly draining, absorbing every minute of the working day and disturbing every night – with the result that I both need to sleep for a week and have a list of overdue commitments that is at least twice as long as usual.

I seem to have spent much of this year reassuring myself, or demanding reassurance from others, that at some point I will start feeling like myself again; capable of sustaining ideas beyond ten minutes or so, able to manage several different things at once, having a degree of confidence in what comes out of my mouth. With the teaching, I think it’s starting to get there, as I get used to the technology (and get into the swing of adapting my technique every bloody week as the proportion of in-person and online students shifts) – though it remains difficult not getting any sense of how things are going from the faceless blobs on Zoom or the masked people in the room (when there are any); talking into the unresponsive void, all too often I feel that my words are becoming hollow and aimless, and everyone has actually switched off and gone to do something more interesting and useful. But it’s a lot better than it was at the start of term.

With research, I think things may actually be getting worse. Partly, this is a function of the fact that the ‘to do’ list gets no shorter but more and more of the things on it become due or overdue, hence suppressed panic. Partly, the external context feels increasingly overwhelming; it’s not just that things keep getting published that I have no time and energy to read, but that innumerable seminars and conferences, which in the past I would have happily ignored if I knew about them at all, are now all online, and some bit of my psyche clearly feels I ought to be viewing them and stokes the guilt that I simply can’t face it – what, you think you’re too grand to pay attention to what young researchers in Italy or Newcastle or China are doing? Shame!

And partly my generally terrible research/writing practices – an excessive reliance on ‘feeling in the mood’, which requires a couple of clear days of faffing about before inspiration starts to stir, until I get into the final quarter of a project when suddenly I can engage with it in odd hours – are even less suited to pandemic conditions than they are to normal academic life. And my fragile-at-the-best-of-times self-belief is definitely missing the regular confidence boost of a successful class as a reminder that, yes, I can occasionally articulate ideas in a coherent manner.

As I keep asking myself, is this the new normal? I can’t get used to this lifestyle… Obviously I’m not the only person to be having such reflections, though others seem to be a bit less morbid about it. In the spirit of assuming that current developments support one’s prior commitments, people who have been arguing for ‘slow scholarship’ as an alternative to the relentless pursuit of mounds of hasty publications and grant applications have claimed the pandemic as clinching proof that we do need a new approach. On the contrary, someone else argued earlier this month in a piece that I now cannot find, what we actually need is fast scholarship, as we all have much less time than we did, and resources are likely to be stretched in future, so we need to do more with less.

As I remarked at the time, what we really need is short scholarship. As Buffy remarked of a course on ‘Introduction to the Modern Novel’, “I guess that means I’d have to read the modern novel? Isn’t there an introduction to the Modern Blurb?” So, articles of no more than 5,000 words, fewer books, more focused arguments, and greater validation for the medium of blog posts. And tweets. And why can’t all these proliferating online workshops be done as recorded presentations with asynchronous discussion boards, rather than implicitly demanding that we all organise our lives around them? But above all, surely this is the cue for the triumphant return of the short but engaging essay as the key form of scholarly publication?

Well, apparently not; just at the moment when it might have established its status as timely and indispensable beyond any dispute, Eidolon has announced that it’s shutting up shop. I am still deeply pissed off about this – and one of the reasons is the sense that I’m not allowed to be. Of course I’m enormously grateful to Donna Zuckerberg for having put her energy, creativity and other resources into creating and sustaining Eidolon, and of course there is no suggestion that she should continue whether she likes it or not, regardless of cost, because the rest of us demand it, or because of a claim that we need this journal.

But the idea that, because Donna doesn’t want to continue, Eidolon must cease to be strikes me as entirely wrong; it suggests that it was never anything more than her pet project, the academic equivalent of an eighteenth-century enlightened monarch patronising some philosophers and musicians for as long as it amuses them. I don’t think that’s what she ever had in mind – and I don’t think it’s what occurred; on the contrary, by creating this space, Donna fostered the emergence of a distinctive style of scholarly writing and engagement, a loose community of like-minded people, that transcended her example or influence. Yes, an Eidolon under someone else’s leadership might well change in the course of time; isn’t that better than leaving it as no more than a museum piece to be reduced in due course to being seen as a mere reflection of its cultural context?

As Donna’s short essay suggests, we might hope for the emergence of new publications to fill the gap. But they are going to have to start from scratch in building an audience and a reputation – and will face a peculiar double-bind in trying to negotiate their relationship with Eidolon, balancing claims to continuity with assertions of change for fear of being dismissed as a pale, derivative epigone (yes, a post-Zuckerberg Eidolon might have faced similar accusations, but to a greatly reduced degree).

Well, assuming that the need for short, engaging, polemical, well-written, serious yet fun essays about the relationship between classical antiquity and the present isn’t likely to evaporate any time soon – still more in the era of pandemic – then somehow this will have to happen. Anyone out there got any energy?