#AcWriMo 2021

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Through some dark magic that I don’t understand November begins on Monday, which means that it is once again time for #AcWriMo. Looking at my archives, I first came across the idea in 2012 (don’t read the post, it is awful) and have used it as a way to think about my writing every year since 2018.

Inspired by #NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in which authors aim to write a short novel in a single month, #AcWriMo aims to fulfill similar objectives of setting goals, establishing writing habits, and building writing community for academic writers.

All of these are very appealing to me, but, even when I set goals like I did last year, I have not yet successfully participated. In truth, November just falls at a bad time in the academic calendar for establishing writing habits.

It starts at a point in the fall semester when my grading load has peaked, my pre-prep has been exhausted, and my energy has reached a critical low.

It ends with a holiday week when I either need to travel or just want to curl up and sleep.

Although I had hoped that the stability of a full-time job would give me more space to write, that has not yet been true. Last year my part-time schedule was particular conducive to my writing habits. I only taught in the afternoon, which meant that I could almost always afford to spend part of the morning at my computer even when I had course prep or grading. The several years before that were more hit-and-miss, but I could make time more often than not, particularly at the start of the pandemic.

I have found this semester harder.

One of the questions I ask the committee when I interview for academic jobs is whether there is a tradition of reading each other’s work in the department. This question is designed to further signal that I an active scholar, but it also allows me to gauge what sorts of support the department has for research and whether there is a healthy department culture.

When I interviewed for this position the chair of the committee, now my faculty mentor, laughed and asked who has time to write. The department members have research profiles and some publish a substantial amount, but his cynicism reflects how much time it takes to invest in teaching, mentorship, and meetings. Given that the sheer number of courses I am teaching is lower than in the past few years, I think I underestimated the time commitment the transition would take, particularly when considering that I am adjusting to the classes as they are taught here, planning for future semesters (a welcome change, if I’m being honest), and participating in programs for new faculty.

Even when I can leave my work in the office, I rarely have energy to write when I get home in the evening. Granted, this is not unusual for me. I discovered years ago that my best writing happens in the morning and I rarely try to write anything more substantial than a blog post at night because any investment won’t be worth the return. Better to spend that time with my partner.

(For similar reasons I try to monitor my exhaustion levels: I do a lot more doom-scrolling social media when I’m tired. I have been doing a lot of scrolling recently. The current state of the world isn’t helping, either.)

The truth is, I actually feel reasonably good about what I have managed to accomplish this semester, I have just also accumulated a not-insignificant number of writing commitments. I am in good shape for most them, provided that I can recover a writing routine soon, but I regret to say that for one of these commitments I have become the sort of academic I told myself I never would be. The order management monitor is blinking a furious red on that one. I think of the pieces I owe in terms of the monitors at McDonalds that track how long it takes to assemble outstanding orders, maybe because I spent several years after college working in the quick-service industry.

However, there is a simple, selfish reason why I want to use the coming weeks to re-establish regular writing habits. There are certain things I need to make sure that I feel balanced. Reading fiction is one, alongside exercising and baking bread. Writing has joined this list. As recently as three years ago, I hemmed and hawed about whether I enjoyed writing, but the answer at this point is clearly yes. Writing is the mental exercise that accompanies my daily physical workouts, so getting these exercises in only intermittently has take a toll on my emotional state.

I did such a poor job of meeting the ones I set last year that I am hesitant to set goals this year. Even by my low standards, it was a poor showing. I want to write a lot of pieces this month, but I also know that I have little sense of what is attainable and a bad habit of working on whatever catches my attention at a given moment. In other words, saying here that I am going to write a certain number of things this month will have little effect on whether or not I write them. As a result, I am trying something different this year.

My goal this month is to be more attentive to how I am spending my time so that I can use more of it to write. That’s it: a month-long meta-cognitive exercise. The only accountability I am assigning myself is a single post each weekend on writing. These posts might be anything on that topic, but I expect that they will be variations on a theme rather than simple recaps—if only because I would need to explain what I am working on for such a recap to be at all meaningful and I am often hesitant talk about works-in-progress in this space.

To be honest, I don’t know how this experiment will go. Possible outcomes range from tapping into a well of discipline that results in significant progress on academic projects and a flurry of posts here, to only being able to focus writing on more frivolous projects like the paper I shelved a while back uses Britney Spears songs as subheadings, to discovering that I simply can’t muster the energy to write despite my best intentions. The answer will likely change by the day, so the question will be whether I can stay on schedule with modest gains more days than not. Tune in next week to find out!

Why I Can’t Write: A Collection (of Excuses)

Posted on by Josh Nudell

A few evenings ago my partner wandered into my office and saw that I was sitting at my computer writing a blog post. I have been writing less than I would like lately, but I had found myself starting to pace after dinner and figured that getting words out of my head might help put me at ease. I have written before that I find writing meditative, after all. But writing is also an anti-social behavior that means not spending time with her, so I asked if she minded if I ignored her for the next hour or so.

“Writing seems to be good for you,” she responded.

I spent that night writing, but also wanted to reflect on the reasons why I don’t write.

I have no strong feelings on an issue. This was always my issue when writing to a prompt in high school writing contests. This is different from not knowing how I feel about a topic: when I am interested in a topic I just need to start writing to find my voice (and my thesis). When I am not invested in a topic, writing feels like an exercise in pushing mushy peas around a plate until I’m dismissed. If I am not invested in what I’m writing, then why should I expect anyone to read it? And thus begins a circle.

On the other end of the spectrum, I struggle to write when I have too much to say. Sometimes this means that I am too invested in a particular topic, sometimes it means that I just have too many thoughts all jumbled together. The solution here is often either writing more as thought to card my thoughts like a jumble of wool or trimming the topic into manageable chunks, but sometimes I just have to let the topic go.

I haven’t read enough. In my academic writing, this is perhaps the biggest sticking point. Writing without having done enough reading is a futile exercise in my experience. This is not to say that I need to have read everything before starting to write, but I can’t write cold. I can vomit words on the page as a way of articulating my initial thoughts, but that writing is functionally meaningless. More often, I find myself staring at that accursed blinking cursor at a loss for where to begin.

The most common reason I haven’t done enough reading is that there are times, particularly during the semester, when I am busy. There is always something else that needs to be done, so I jealously defend my writing time. However, that is easier (if not easy) to do for long-term writing projects than for writing whimsical blog posts on the writing process or keeping a regular journaling habit.

When I get tired I get distractible, and when I get distracted I can’t write. I have developed numerous strategies to help me focus over the years—logging off social media, setting concrete blocks of writing time, writing in the morning, music and headphones, etc. —but they don’t always work. For instance, I have had a harder time convincing myself to get up early to write during the pandemic, but I also struggle to string together sentences in the evening after I finish teaching and have recently resolved to more seriously protect my weekends for rest with the idea that I will be able to better write (and teach) if I’m not exhausted.

I am worried someone else said it better. At basically all times, no matter what I am working on. One of the (not)joys of experiencing depression and anxiety is the perpetual fear that whatever I am writing is going to turn out to be a steaming pile of shit. (Pardon the language.) The specific fear changes—that my ideas are stupid, that my writing is bad, that someone else already said whatever I’m trying to say and did so much more brilliantly and insightfully.

Sometimes I don’t feel well. Among non-debilitating ailments, headaches are the worst because that is the body-part I am using—usually—when I write, but all manner of physical ailments interfere with the process. Hunger is another one. I can write on an empty stomach if it is first thing in the morning, but if my stomach starts to rumble I need to address that before I can focus enough to write.

Listing reasons why I can’t write has always struck me as though I’m aping Goldilocks or assuming an “artistic” temperament where I can only work when the conditions are just right. But I also believe that anyone who declares that they are able to write most of the time is showing their privilege. That is, the statement announces that their financial, emotional, and physical conditions are almost always in the right place to be able to write. They still have to address distraction and writing still takes discipline, but it is worth acknowledging that there are a myriad of reasons why someone isn’t able to write at a particular moment.

My hurdles are mild compared to those faced by a lot of people, but they are still hurdles. Acknowledging that is the first step toward overcoming them.

Remembering Bourdain

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Content Warning: this post includes references to suicide.

Anthony Bourdain took his own life a little over three years ago, prompting me to write a teary reflection of this man who I had never met. In this post I reflected on what Bourdain meant to me, a single face in the crowd of fans. I pointed to his apparent success in the middle age of life and beyond and to the spirit of warmth and humanity that seemed to emanate from this acerbic man even when purveyors of hate seemed to be winning.

Anthony Bourdain had the capacity for all of these things, to be sure, but I was eulogizing Tony the TV character.

Retrospectives about Anthony Bourdain’s life have started to emerge this year. Morgan Neville’s documentary Roadrunner dropped first in July, followed by Laurie Woolever’s Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography in September, and Tom Vitale’s memoir In the Weeds in early October.

While I have not read Woolever’s volume, the other two pieces, both of which I consumed last weekend, paint a more complicated picture.

Tom Vitale started in the editing room on A Cook’s Tour, Bourdain’s first TV show, before working his way on to the road crew and ultimately directing more than a hundred episodes of Parts Unknown, including some of the most challenging ones in Libya and the Congo. His memoir takes readers on the road and behind the camera of the shows while also grappling with his feelings about Bourdain’s death, something that happened while one of the other two crews was overseeing the shoot.

Tony was a big believer in failing gloriously in an attempt to do something interesting, rather than succeeding at being mediocre.

Tom’s story is not the glorious eternal vacation that made it to television. For one thing, every hour of television required dozens of hours of painstaking filming, most of it with Tony Bourdain nowhere in sight, to say nothing of arguing with accountants, fixers, and editors. And looming over the entire enterprise, driving it to ever greater heights was an agoraphobic, camera-shy, obsessive star. More than once Tom resolves that he simply cannot take the strain of working for him.

I don’t think I realized just how spoiled I was to work on a show where quality not only came first, but it was also pretty much the only concern.

Behind the scenes, Tom describes, Tony was a different person than the witty and eloquent person who made it on screen. He was still charismatic, but he was also mercurial and manipulative. He was showed a different side of his personality to each person, as though he instinctively knew what it would take to get the best work out of everyone. The face he showed Tom was, it seems, crueler than the one he showed others. Their relationship was combative. Tom prodded Tony to speak. Once, in Borneo, Tony attacked him. He wonders at several points whether Bourdain actually liked him.

(He ultimately concludes that, yes, he did.)

Inevitably, the story comes around to Bourdain’s suicide. The last episode they filmed together, in Bali, concluded with a funeral and Tom reflects on how both of their emotional states had frayed precipitously over the past few seasons, leading him to ask whether there was more that he could have done.

“These are some of the things I look back on that are signs that I should have seen… I think that so many things in his life were like a drug. You were like a drug to him. If somebody overdoses on a drug, do you blame the drug or do you blame the junkie?”

In a memorable scene, he also addresses the rumors about Asia Argento…by going to Italy, getting drunk with her, and asking her directly whether she caused Tony’s death. Ultimately, though, he lands on a simpler solution. Tony was an addict for whom down-time amounted to giving in to his thoughts, to his demons.

I’d learned that the truth was he couldn’t rest. Tony always needed a distraction, a project, a problem to solve. And, for better or worse, the show provided that in spades.

In the Weeds gave me a new appreciation of Anthony Bourdain. Tom’s boss — and coworker and friend — was more human than the man who appeared on television and I found the fits of anger, the fits of insecurity, and the evident exhaustion from not being able to stop all-too relatable. Likewise in how Tony, a famously verbose person, was better able to apologize with actions than with words. This is not a flattering picture, but it is a fitting one.

At the same time, what makes this memoir so good is how this different portrait of Tony Bourdain is balanced against stories from the road that allow me to look at these shows I love so much with new eyes. I have been watching the Jamaica episode that features prominently in the memoir to test this while writing this post and it is remarkable how different it is, from small tics in conversation to how often Tony is noticeably alone in front of the camera.

By contrast, Roadrunner offers a synthetic, impressionistic interpretation of Anthony Bourdain that splices together extant video with reminiscences of the people who knew and worked with him, including Tom Vitale.

(The film also includes a brief deep-fake that I probably wouldn’t have caught had I not known about the controversy in advance, but doing something so potentially scandalous for so little return seems unwise.)

The film proceeds in rough chronological order from his bursting onto the scene with Kitchen Confidential to international stardom, and then death. This structure allows for one of the best things about the show, which was to watch Tony’s evolution from a patently inept star in the earliest film from A Cook’s Tour to the confident host of the polished show Parts Unknown. However, there is another way one might describe the structure of Roadrunner: before television, the evolving television star, and after Asia.

If one of the most moving parts of the film was the outpouring of grief from the people who loved him, I found the topic of Asia Argento, who did not appear in the film, to be a sticking point.

Roadrunner reaches many of the same conclusions as In the Weeds, highlighting how Tony was an addict who threw himself into whatever his passion was and noting that Asia (as well as her fight against Harvey Weinstein) was the latest addiction. However, the film also gives voice to a number of crew members who worked on the Hong Kong episode of Parts Unknown and exhibit a hostility toward her that Ton Vitale simply didn’t have. The result is that the film seems to blame her without explicitly doing so.

It is hard to say what I would have thought about Roadrunner had I not first read Tom Vitale’s In the Weeds. The film has its powerful moments, but it was also limited by so relentlessly placing Tony front and center while both acknowledging and brushing aside that this was not where he wanted to be. As a result, I found the memoir both less flattering and more satisfying as a tribute to both Anthony Bourdain and the vision of the world he helped create.