Academic Publishing II: Of Proposals and Editors

by Moriya Vanderhoef

Last week’s lecture sponsored by the Center for 21st Century Studies was highly informative and had many moments of amusement pop in at unexpected, but very welcomed moments. The three lecturers, John C. Blum, Michelle Caswell, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, were all very personable and approachable. This had to be my favorite lecture of the semester! As an aspiring academic, I thought this lecture doled out very important information on the steps someone has to go through to get an article published in a journal or a book published and made available to the public. There were golden nuggets of advice, such as, “It has to leave your computer for your work to ever be published and finally declared finished,” which seems simple, but that is the brilliance. How many students, whether an undergraduate, master’s or PhD, remember that the most important step is putting your work out there to face public opinion and stimulate discussion? I know I often forget this fact and a little nugget like this is just what I needed to remind me of it.

While I could go on and on about what a fabulous lecture the Center offered this last Friday, I thought I’d offer a few highlights of some of the advice doled out which I thought everyone would enjoy and appreciate.

For Articles:

-Volunteer at journals by offering to review books or articles. I had no idea that this was an option and when they mentioned that you often get to keep the books you reviewed I wanted to shout,”Sign me up!”

-1/3(!) of all articles submitted to journals do not have a thesis. If you want your work to stand out, put a clear, concise, well-explained thesis in your article. Frankly, this statistic surprised me. Its hard to imagine how one would write anything which is coherent and readable without a thesis.

-When you are turned down (and everyone is rejected, so roll with it), take the advice the readers gave, follow it, and resubmit it to another journal. Here is yet another piece of simple, yet brillant advice.

Books:

-Today, no publisher wants a full manuscript, so send only a prospectus which follows the publishers exact guidelines. Another surprise! I was unaware that there was a change (not that I knew much about the old process of manuscript submission), but find this change environmentally friendly as well as friendlier for the submitters’ pocketbooks, as fewer copies have to be made of the manuscript.

Grants:

-What makes you a great academic writer may not make you a great grant proposal writer. The two types of writing take totally different perspectives and answer different questions. I have no clue how to write a grant proposal, but think perhaps a class on how to do so should be required for just about everyone to graduate, as there are many fields and businesses which could profit and grow from having this knowledge.

-Grants are about the tension between risk and security. To improve your chances of getting the grant you’re applying for, you ought not to have a subject too far out of the mainstream research community, but if you show you know your field, understand it, and wish to push the envelope just enough to be innovative, then that softens the risk your research poses and ups the chances that you’ll get the grant you are applying for.

Party like it’s 1969: the Center celebrates 40 years

by Willy Dintenfass

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Center for 21st Century Studies. To acknowledge the occasion, the Center sponsored a symposium called C21: celebrating 40 years. The event, which was co-sponsored by the Dean of the College of Letters & Science, featured speakers Kathleen Woodward, Herbert Blau, and Victor Greene.

The symposium was something of a family affair: Woodward and Blau are married, and their son Dick Blau and daughter-in-law Jane Gallop (who introduced the elder Blau) are both UWM faculty. In a less conventional sense, the occasion exuded familial tone. A slide show at the beginning chronicling the Center’s 40 years was met with amusement as Center fellows and employees came face to face with past fashion choices.

After brief introductory remarks, Kathleen Woodward presented her lecture, “Inexhaustible Feelings: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions.” Woodward was the director of the Center for 19 years (a span that Dean Meadows referred to as the “indoor record”) and portions of her talk–a defense of the incorporation of personal experience and emotion into academic discourse–alluded to her tenure here.

Herbert Blau’s lecture “The Free Trade of Appearance: Historicizing, Hybridizing and Decentering the Real,” moved from the personal to two very different realms: the cosmological and the subatomic. Ostensibly an interrogation of historical practice (the kind performed by “history historians” as Blau termed them), the amount of time spent in space and on a particle level hinted at Blau’s first field of study, chemical engineering. At an event earlier in the day, Blau claimed Henry James as a major formal influence on his work, and at times the Jamesian nature of his sentences was liable to leave you lost two digressions back. Blau primarily seemed to be arguing for the pursuit of history as an art.

Victor Greene, a Center fellow in 1973 and 1974, led the audience through a timeline of events leading up to the conception of the Center and through its early years. Greene read a number of humorous pieces of correspondence that highlighted the academic politics that made the birthing process of the Center less than smooth. More seriously, Greene helped emphasize the goals of the Center from the beginning: to provide a space for collaborative, cross-disciplinary research and study, in an environment sheltered from some of the other distractions of academic life.

At C21, Kathleen Woodward and Herbert Blau presented lectures that demonstrated two of the numerous and diverse lines of inquiry encouraged by and pursued within the Center for 20th/21st Century Studies. Between shots of bulky shoulder pads and unwieldy-framed glasses on the slideshow commemorating the first forty years of the Center, we caught glimpses of past guests like Stuart Hall and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and couldn’t help but be excited about the next forty.

A Life of Curiosity: Lunch with Herbert Blau

by Willy Dintenfass

In conjunction with the Center’s commemorative event, C21: celebrating 40 years, guest speaker Herbert Blau lead a brown bag lunch discussion with a small group of undergraduate students. The talk was ostensibly to be about Samuel Beckett–the students had been reading Beckett, on whom Blau is considered an authority–but in fact it took a much more fluid shape, focusing as much on Blau’s remarkable life as on Beckett’s.

An “intellectual, and proud of it,” Blau is known for an enduring curiosity and love for ideas. “When I know what I think I’m just not interested,” Blau remarked at one point, and this attitude may in part be responsible for his wild trajectory. Growing up in Brooklyn, Blau wanted to play ball, either football or basketball. As he tells it, it wasn’t until he realized he wasn’t going to be able to play sports professionally that he began focusing on academics, earning his first degree in chemical engineering. Blau was ready to head off to MIT when he heard about an army friend who’d written a play and received a fellowship at Yale. Blau decided to write a play, ended up writing two (one entirely in verse), and he too received a fellowship. Blau, who had never before seen a play, soon grew bored with what he regarded as predictable theater. This boredom would ultimately drive him to found and direct three important theater groups: The Artist’s Workshop in San Francisco, the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York, and the experimental theater group KRAKEN.

Although Blau recounted his experiences casually, pausing for bites of salad between anecdotes, the students in attendance were inspired and impressed, by his resume (he came to be friends with Beckett over the years), but also by his confidence. Several students asked questions trying to discern the source of it, but Blau, for whom it seems to be simply a fact of life, couldn’t say.

In his crankier moments Blau would chafe slightly at the implication that Beckett has exerted some huge influence over his life’s work. He claimed Shakespeare as a bigger influence, saying that he still has a tendency to “think Hamletically.” (Later he would refer to Hamletic thinking in part as “springing past inaction into action,” which, given the ending of The Unnamable–‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’– also seems somewhat Beckettian.) Nevertheless, one story in particular illustrated the power of the combination of Beckett and Blau.

In 1957, Blau and his colleagues staged “Waiting for Godot” at San Quentin Prison. The production was a success, and inmates founded their own theater group, which Blau worked with over the years. One member, Rick Cluchey, was originally imprisoned without parole for armed robbery and attempted murder. Through his work with the theater group, he was eventually awarded parole and ultimately pardoned. Cluchey developed a close relationship with Beckett himself, and has gone on to act in a number of Beckett plays.

Herbert Blau once wrote, “Art changes nothing but at least it changes that.” This was not the impression he left upon the students in attendance at the discussion, who afterwards seemed to feel that art has the capacity to change a great deal.