writing a book is sui generis and psychologically weird

Ludwig Wittgenstein's dying words were supposedly, "I would have loved to have written a work of philosophy consisting entirely of jokes.  The problem is, I had no sense of humor." 

I realize that these last words aren't nearly as awesome as Oscar Wilde's "Either that wallpaper goes or I do!" but they do have the advantage of exactly describing the philosopher in Winter.  And it's freaking cold in Oklahoma right now.

Philosophy Through Video Games [which you can pre-order here (note that amazon mistakenly lists the book as being by me, as opposed to me and Mark Silcox; this will be fixed)] is going well, but the February 1st deadline is looming very large.  I've hit a stride and am now working as hard as I ever have. Mark and I want this book to be really good.

Whenever you work really hard at something creative, you always wonder who will really avail themselves of it.

Academic articles are on average cited one point five times, and one of those times is by the author of the article citing her or himself in another article.  Given that a few classic articles are always cited so many times, this means that the overwhelming number of academic articles are never cited by anybody other than the author.  This is much worse than only ever being praised by your mother.

I hope what I'm about to reveal isn't like that time I drunkenly showed a member of the media the secret philosophers' handshake in a New Orleans bar, but the deep dark secret truth is that the overwhelming majority of academics don't really read much in their field unless they are teaching a class on the topic or some external reviewer tells them they have to cite the article in question.  This is probably a necessity, because if you really tried to read the hundreds to thousands of articles on what you are writing about, all the other thoughts would cloud out any creative idea you might have.  So I don't mind that so much.  It's notwhere near as hideous as the disturbing percentage of academics who don't read novels. If aliteracy can now be this rampant among college professors, there is probably no hope for humanity.  But I digress.

With extraordinarily few exceptions, the only way of getting your work thought about is by giving papers at tons of conferences.  I'm not complaining, but this has hurt my career due to three personality flaws I possess: (1) my not being very good at networking (my rock star hearing is just too bad to have decent conversations in APA related stuff, and any of my friends (people I actually love) can tell you that I'm an atrocious e-mail correspondent), (2) my hatred of contemporary airline travel (since the sadistic jerks in charge of this country made the seats and seating area murderously small and began criminally overbooking the flights and overcrowding runways, every aspect of flying in these United States is physically and psychologically revolting; read latest developments here), and (3) once I've figured something out to my satisfaction, I want to move on and think about something else (so I don't enjoy giving papers on areas in which I've already published, and I find that giving the same paper multiple times prevents me from doing new work).

I'm not complaining!  I'm very happy at L.S.U. and very lucky to have tenure there, and I don't begrudge the success of my good friends (e.g. Roy Cook and Joe Salerno) who have skill sets that allow them to write great philosophy while simultaneously having philosophical adventures all over the world.

This being said, if the book gets bad reviews or doesn't sell well I'm going to be pretty extremely bummed out.  I don't know why a book is different.  I'm very happy making music (free MP3s here) just to commune with the muse and have a blast with Emily.  I don't care that the recorded stuff is so distasteful/unpleasant to people.  The thought that Lester Bangs is in Heaven rocking out to my work is consolation enough.  Likewise, with articles I'm very happy to write just to get myself closer to the truth.  Somehow while working myself ragged on this book with the Martian landscape outside, I want more though. 

This is almost certainly gods-punishment inducing hubris.  As long as I don't wind up on a dungheap or poking out my own eyes, I'm O.K. with that.

Comments

[Charles H.]

I thought Wittgenstein's last words were "Tell them I've had a wonderful life"?

Anyway, I refuse to believe that someone who summed up philosophy as the task of turning disguised nonsense into patent nonsense had no sense of humor.

[Jon Cogburn]

Well the supposed last words are pretty funny to me, and then even more funny for the resulting performative contradiction.

[diedjaceFah]

comment2, soma cruz http://morphee-challenge.fr/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1388#1388 soma dentist 794514, mexican somas http://anti-virus.nrox.net/viewthread.php?tid=184 top sites for online soma s22093, soma carisoprodol carisoprodol http://www.strelok.info/forum_eng/showthread.php?p=99019#post99019 fly northwest airline soma dvz910, pay pal order soma http://www.shdyz.com/viewthread.php?tid=3030&extra=page%3D1&page=2 website for ohio band som