I am struck by the high value of a simple permanent fact, like the miserable vista on which the window of one’s room opens daily….I often think that the highest destination at which a work can aim is to take on that function in someone’s life. And it seems to me that it will do it more readily if it is summary, effaced, close to formless, and if it presents nothing but facts in their purity, and no formal ideas at all.

– Paul Sietsema, Anticultural Positions 16mm film, 2009

Paul Sietsema, Anticultural Positions, 16mm (2009)

I recently encountered Sietsema’s work while in New York and found it stunning.  I have written about it in another context in connection with his deep attention to the tactility of paper.  Sietsema seems profoundly aware of the time of writing surfaces, of surface in general.  His film Figure 3 is a beautiful montage of fissures and lines within various found paginal objects.  The page represents itself through the depiction of its own worn contours.

I have not yet seen Anticultural Positions, but it is supposed to be a film of stills of the working surfaces used to make Figure 3.  It is a representation of the outside of film within a film, interspersed by a great number of blank stills.  It is intensely aware of what we cannot see, either in itself or the film it attempts to represent by way of negation.

Like Sietsema’s beautiful movie of the rough textures of his working spaces, the Bad Ideas Blog was supposed to bring into view the effaced facts of one’s work.  In place of universals, it was to show us process, variation, contingency, that things can always come out differently, the multpilicity of “simple permanent facts.”  Its aim was to lay bare the dressing and decorum of writerly life, to efface the face of books and, perhaps, to reveal some truth.

It has failed to do so.

I don’t really feel like speculating why, the reasons are either too banal or too hurtful.  It may be just too personal to experience or generate our workspaces at a communal level.  Or maybe it isn’t a bad idea at all but an untimely one or perhaps just a late one.  In any case, I have decided to cease work on it for now.  I will leave it mostly empty as a monument to itself: the failed cartography of the beyond of books, that beyond the bibliographic map of our ideas lies uncharted territory, still. I appreciate the support of those who ventured contributions.

I am still asking myself what would happen if we turned our books inside out, if we showed the cracks in our tables.

Like: “The Rise of the Novel: A Triptych.”

Or: “Germany: A Secret History of the United States.”

Or: “The Pocket Book: A History of an Extraordinary Container.”

These are just some of my favorites I dug up today.  The first was going to be a history of the novel around 1800 according to Bateson’s theory of schismogenesis: Part One: The Rise of the Novel out of the Spirit of Poetry; Part Two: The Rise of the Novel out of the Novella; and Part Three: The Rise of the Novel out of the Language of Fact.”  It would cover the novel’s three distinct identities: prose, length, and fictionality.  Good luck with that one.

Germany a Secret History was going to be about all the ways German culture informs American culture, from Pennsylvania “Dutch” to WWII emigrés.  I had the idea after reading Gravity’s Rainbow.  No one should write books for at least a week after reading Gravity’s Rainbow.

The last?  Well, a history of purses out of the eighteenth-century “pocket book.”  Too tempting to write a story of the purse as a story of the book.  Both are in some sense also about the personalization of highly commercial objects.  Plus, I’m obsessed with pockets in literature.  I suspect in the hands of the right cultural historian this could still be a bestseller (you get a free copy with the purchase of every Luis Vitton kind of thing).  I can hear the Fresh Air Interview now: “I became fascinated by this term “pocket book” for women’s purses and I started to look into its history…” Then again, maybe not.

Top those.

Andrew’s post on The Time of Bad Ideas struck a chord with me, and I wanted to write about how striking a chord is one of the ways in which bad ideas can turn good. Andrew wrote about how ideas need time to incubate, effort to articulate, and an audience to appreciate them. I’d add that ideas also need to be in good company. Just as a bum note in one chord can become the keynote of another, an idea that looks bad in one context can come into its own in another.

Here’s an example. A few years ago I got really interested in the private diary that Byron wrote in 1814, not long after he moved into The Albany in London at the height of his fame. Byron hardly ever produced private writing of this kind, writing that he didn’t intend to share with anybody. In the diary, he describes declining to see visitors who call on him, refusing invitations to parties, burning poetry that he’s written, and sometimes going for days at a time without food. I was convinced that rejecting food, company, and poetry were part of the same nearly pathological response to the pressures of celebrity culture. They were all attempts in different ways to reassert control in a life that seemed to be spinning out of control.

I needed to link these ideas with a reading of Byron’s poetry, and so I looked closely at The Bride of Abydos, the verse narrative that Byron was writing immediately before this period. I spent ages trying to link Byron’s private writing in the journal with his public writing in the poem, and I developed some ideas about power structures, gender and the gaze in The Bride of Abydos. But could I make the whole thing hang together? No I could not. I was starting to think that I had not one but two bad ideas on my hands.

The breakthrough – and looking back I can’t believe how simple it was – came when I stopped looking at The Bride of Abydos and started looking at the next major poem Byron wrote, The Corsair. Suddenly I started to notice that The Corsair was absolutely full of scenes of eating and not eating, feasts and fasts, and metaphors of consumption and abstinence. Eating and not eating were key to the delineation of the characters and the shape of the plot. And abstaining from food was linked in the poem to leadership, self-control and personal rectitude.

Now that it was in different company, the bad idea that had been causing me such headaches turned into a good idea that I could work with. I wrote an article called ‘Consumption and Control in The Corsair’, which appeared in the journal Romanticism. The stuff about The Bride of Abydos, meanwhile, ended up in a collection of essays on Byron as part of an essay called ‘The Bride of Abydos: The Regime of Visibility and the Possibility of Resistance’.

I mention this example from my own experience to suggest how a bad idea in one context can become a good idea in another context. Sometimes it’s not really the idea itself that has to change, it just has to find a setting where it’s making a real contribution. This does raise a question though: which bad ideas do we actively try to construct new settings for, which do we leave to wait for new settings to arise, and which do we abandon altogether?

After my last post on the time of bad ideas, or how bad ideas turn into good ones, I was thinking over where it is we go to get our good ideas and whether that process can sometimes be the reason for finding bad ones.

It strikes me that you could (at the risk of really oversimplifying things) boil research down into two different axes, where on the one hand you mine a particular topic and just keep burrowing.  The risk here is the famous one of knowing more and more about less and less. The other model is the foraging kind, where you set out and just start roaming, from one field to the next.  The risk here is of course that of dilettantism.

I’m a forager.  I like to wander, with my reading, my thoughts (and my feet too actually).  I like to see how things from far flung corners of a culture (whether in time or space) connect.  I often feel like this brings me to uncertain territory, beyond the boundaries of my “training.”  But I also feel like it makes it possible to find new ideas, to create new configurations of ideas, and — here’s the important part for me — it creates ideas that are more communicable.  I’m not saying there is anything wrong with mining.  But when I do it I feel like I enter more and more into my own hole — a very safe hole to be sure, but a pretty depopulated one.  Foraging allows me not just to run into new ideas, but also new people.  It seems to (though I’m not yet sure it actually does) allow for new conversations.

One of the reasons I have been thinking so much about this recently is that these two models seem to tap into a fundamental struggle that is going on within the academy, between never-ending calls for “interdisciplinarity” and the simultaneous voicing of concerns over too much specialization today.  Can these both be going on at once?  They are related in that concerns over too much specialization are just another way of calling for interdisciplinarity.  But are people “over-specializing” today?  Or, conversely, are we all “interdiscplinary” now?  Woudn’t it be more productive if we moved away from value-laden judgments and just accepted that there are different ways of producing “new” knowledge in the humanities, and that both are valuable in different ways and it is up to us to choose the paradigm that best fits our own personal curiosity?

[This post was relayed via email.  Helen DeWitt's Last Samurai was the source of the quotation that inspired me to create both the Booklog and the Bad Ideas Blog.  Here is her response. - Ed.]

It’s hard to know what to say.  Of course, yes, sometimes something is taken out because it just looks wrong.  But it seems to me that what’s more common is to see a range of equally valid artistic possibilities, all of which cannot be realised simultaneously.  Monet’s versions of  Rouen Cathedral are an obvious example, Warhol’s Marilyns another; music offers countless examples of variations on a theme.  Sometimes an element of a book seems to need to be a book or story in its own right, with full development of the possibilities it seems to suggest. (Roughly.)   It seems as though seeing a range of fully developed possibilities would give one a better – understanding is the wrong word, but one would apprehend, maybe, the aesthetic choices of any particular entity better from seeing some of the alternatives. (So an interest in alternatives is also not the same thing as a love of the fragmentary or the provisional – not that I don’t love them, but it’s something different.)

So I might be able to make some sort of contribution, but the fact is I don’t think very much about bad ideas.

No, despite the sound of its title, this post isn’t a murderous attack on this blog. Rather, I want to use this post as an opportunity to reflect on vulnerability in the academy. Since the announcement of this blog, I have mentioned it to a number of colleagues and friends to mixed responses. While all like the idea, only some consider the possibility of posting. I haven’t yet encountered anyone like those to whom Andrew refers who are reluctant to post for fear that their bad ideas would be taken over by someone else and turned into a book; instead, those that don’t want to post mainly suggest that at this point in their careers they simply aren’t willing to expose themselves and reveal their shortcomings, even in a post that ultimately shows that their shortcomings aren’t really shortcomings but strengths in disguise. This has made for some interesting conversations.

A bad idea that is a bad idea because it is far too ambitious isn’t really a “bad” idea, it’s a good one that lacks a possible context in which it can be worked out (like a five year sabbatical) or an appropriate context in which to publish it. On the other hand, there are bad ideas that start as good ideas only to be trumped by the archive or contradicted by convincing arguments made by others in the secondary literature. And nobody (save perhaps at a late night drinking session after a successful conference paper) wants to admit to those.

And why not? Mainly because they make us look stupid and no up and coming, ambitious young scholar wants to do that. The confession of ignorance is a luxury afforded to senior scholars with a c.v. full of award-winning research and other sorts of commendations—at such a summit of achievement, all manner of bad ideas can be conceded with impunity.

Now, I don’t say this to complain or to wish that it was otherwise, but rather to suggest that so much of being an academic—whether it be in the classroom, at a conference, or in the pages of a learned journal—involves an unwillingness to concede ignorance, while at the same time so much scholarly research and learning serves only to underscore just how little one knows and how much there is to learn (something like the paradox where the more one knows the more one knows how little s/he knows), which is perhaps why so many academics that I talk to confess to feeling like a fraud most of the time.

Which brings me to my point: to acknowledge a bad idea can be a way of revealing a good idea (in the same way that we’re trained to turn the supposed revelation of weakness into a convincing demonstration of strength, something like that classic interview scenario where the candidate is asked to acknowledge areas for improvement in his or her scholarship and the response is that he or she works too hard), but there are other kinds of bad ideas that are such because they reveal some sort of ignorance in the scholar that has them: language skills that aren’t as polished as everyone assumes them to be or a lack of awareness of secondary literature masquerading as an obvious mastery of it. We’re all guilty at some point or another of letting colleagues assume that we are aware of the intricacies of an argument that we to ashamed to admit not having read and other such sins of omission. So what happens to those sort of bad ideas? My sense is that no one is likely to air them in this forum—if only because they are not the kind of bad ideas that get put in a folder somewhere or put in a file on our hardrives, or given as a conference paper. No, more likely they are in the files that get deleted or the folders that get thrown out.

Several people have written me off-blog commenting how their reluctance to post is due to the fact that there is a feeling they have that their bad ideas often simmer (or incubate) for a while and then become the source of good ideas.  Who would want to post a “bad” idea that then suddenly turns up 5 years later as a book title! Or worse: a book title by someone else (because you gave away your bad/good idea).

I really like this idea of the bad idea turned good because it gets at the generative nature of ideas we publish — they start in some form, we do something with them short of publishing them (put in a folder somewhere, create a file on our hardrives, give a conference paper), and then we think about them.  And don’t think about them.  Somewhere between this time of attention and, importantly, inattention, we rediscover an idea that now seems “good.”

I’m wondering what belongs to that process, how bad ideas turn good.  I have a whole list of them on my hard drive and occasionally I go back and look at them.  Many still strike me as bad (I mean really bad), but every so often one will just jump out at me and will find its time.  But how?

One very short answer is that sometimes ideas just need to find an audience.  I recently took up an old idea I had been wanting to work on for a while on the history of the illustrated ballad, from broadside to early photography.  It sat and sat and sat, until one day I saw a cfp for an edited volume on the illustrated book.  I knew my idea’s time had come so I leapt.  It didn’t turn into a “good” idea either (if ever) until I had spent considerably more time thinking about it.  And maybe that’s another answer: bad ideas turn good when we finally commit to writing them.  It’s only at that point that we do the hard work of putting them into form.

For a while when I was writing my Ph.D. thesis, I had this quote up on the wall by my desk. It’s from The Natural Way to Draw, by Kimon Nicolaïdès: ‘the sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes, the sooner you can begin to correct them’. It was consoling as I rewrote yet another draft. When Andrew started this blog, I thought of that quote again, because it seems to point to something about the nature of bad ideas, and their importance.

Most aspiring intellectuals, I think, are more likely to have too many ideas than too few. Today I was helping a graduate student to polish her thesis proposal. Her proposal was certainly not short of ideas: it was bursting at the seams with them. The skill she needed to master wasn’t having good ideas, it was telling the good ones from the bad ones, and then working out how to fit the good ones together.

This is related to what Andrew calls ‘burying the lead’. Sometimes that’s the definition of a bad idea – it’s the thing that’s burying the lead.

By the ‘good’ ideas in this context, of course, I mean those that could successfully be inserted into the scholarly debate around a particular issue or period, author or text. In a characteristically knotty essay on ‘Theological Integrity’, Rowan Williams says that ‘Having integrity […] is being able to speak in a way which allows of answers’. To have intellectual integrity of this kind, you have to join a conversation, which means connecting what you have to say to the existing terms of the conversation, and learning the conventions of the genre in which you’re speaking so that you can be answered. Utterances which do not fit the conventions or which fail to articulate themselves with the existing terms risk being simply ignored by the established participants in the conversation. We call them ‘bad’ ideas.

Mastering the conventions of a genre is indispensible, but the real excitement lies in breaking the rules. Alexander Pope put it like this: ‘Great Wits sometimes may gloriously offend, / And rise to Faults true Critics dare not mend’. Joining the debate is good, but changing the terms of the debate is even better. The trouble is that genuinely innovative ideas risk seeming eccentric or even incomprehensible if they stray too far from the existing terms of the debate.

Learning to tell the good ideas from the bad ones is crucial intellectual skill. We need to have lots of bad ideas to help us learn this skill. But we also need to learn how to recognize when ideas that look bad at first can actually be the real game-changers, the ideas that don’t just contribute to the debate, but transform it.

I confess that this is my first blog post ever, so apologies in advance for any wacky formatting or violations of generic convention.

I’ve been thinking over Andrew’s invitation and I think my bad ideas fall into four broad categories:

1)  the overly analogy-driven, in which, early on, I realize that there’s a structural similarity between what I’m working on and something else that someone else has already described and I get a sort of tunnel vision that tries to fit everything into that analogy.  I’ve taken to calling this my “salmons in both” strategy (after Fluellen’s reasoning in Henry V that Macedon and Monmouth are “alike” because there are rivers and “salmons in both”).

2)  the insufficiently articulated umbrella, in which I have various explanations of a bunch of disparate phenomena that I’m convinced somehow go together (though I can’t yet really say how) and so I cobble together something either too vague or too monolithic as a means of justifying my putting them together at all.

3)  the overly eager to please, in which I set out to demonstrate the far-reaching wisdom of someone I admire.  I have a tendency to develop intellectual crushes and often when I’m smitten with someone, I seize upon a passing remark he or she has made and attempt to turn it into the key to all of the mythologies that I’m currently working on.  There’s a Mary Brunton (I think) novel in which a character automatically imitates whichever heroine she’s most recently read.  I recognize the temptation.

4)  the overly jam-packed, in which I have so much cool evidence that I bury a promising idea in further examples and cf.’s.  I like to think of this as my Arcades Project approach, but I suspect it’s really a much less glamorous kind of antiquarianism.

At least for me, none of these are exclusive to the writing of books (indeed, I’ve engaged in all of them in both book and article writing).  And I doubt they’re exclusive to me.  But, since Andrew’s soliciting confessions ….

David Brewer

I thought I would turn the chapter/book question around.  Instead of asking how one might rethink the genre of the chapter that underlies the taxonomy of the book, what about asking the question of whether chapters need books.  In the same way that “the album” is dying out as the standard bearer of distribution for the music industry — due as much to the individual pricing of songs as to illegal downloading — we might ask whether the unit of the book is less than the sum of its parts.  Should publishers be making book chapters available online for a lower price than the cost of books? Would someone pay $9.99 for a chapter?  (For another take on these questions in a commercial context, see Ted Striphas’ reflections at The Late Age of Print.)

I’ve been thinking about this for my next book where my opening chapter has suddenly become quite long, but not long enough to be a book on its own.  It occurred to me it might make a great “booklet”, a kind of small-format print on demand product that could be bought instead of, or in advance of, the whole book.  On the other hand, perhaps it makes more sense to go the way of numerous smaller chapters at a lower price, so readers can really slice through a book in a more personalized way.

I know this sort of thing is hard for authors to swallow (Nabokov once made a famous derogatory quip about a student who was very proud about *not* reading a book in the order that the author intended – hah he snorted).  And it also seems to run counter to a theory of “the book.”  Albums may just be the sum of individual tracks.  But books, so we like to think, embody something bigger when taken together, a larger argument or story that cannot be condensed in a single chapter.  The sold-off chapter just starts to seem like that other scholarly genre, “the article.”

Then again, maybe it’s time to think of new relational structures of ideas that are in some ways bigger and smaller  than the book — smaller in that each chapter is more independent, bigger in that our writing adds-up to a larger universe of ideas that would exceed the (usual) space of the book.  How might such looser connectivity be made visible to readers?