cool new software

I've found some Cool New Software!  Which should enable me to waste WEEKS re-organizing my notes into absolutely perfect, multiply-cross-indexed little notelets, which I imagine as being something like chiclets, all perfectly lined up, alphabetized, cross-linked, and absolutely everything but, you know, actually being an article.  Brushing, combing and massaging your notes, that's the ticket to endless weeks of happy non-productivity that somehow feels as if you're getting something done.  Without actually, you know, getting anything out the door ...The new software I refer to is Circus Ponies "Notebook" (only for Mac, I think).  I found a blog, "Organizing Creativity",  that gave a two-step process for automatically turning all your research into articles without human intervention of any kind, or that was my hopeful reconstruction of what he describes.  Essentially, he takes all his notes in "Notebook",  whose strengths he describes here, and also uses "Notebook" to produce a detailed outline which includes all of the secondary literature he will be referring to, with links to those notes.  (The strength of "Notebook" is that it automagically produces multiple links and cross-indexings). Then he uses "Scrivener", of which I'm already a huge fan, to actually write the article., with the "Notebook" file open beside the "Scrivener" window. He has another post here that discusses how to use Scrivener to write dissertations, or any lengthy project.

Image viaWikipedia

One touch I particularly liked is that he suggests that you use checkboxes in your outline.  Why?  So that once you've actually written something, you can check it off, and the text will grey out, and you will feel happy because you are accomplishing stuff.

Until now I had thought of "Notebook" and "Scrivener" as essentially duplicating each others' functions - or, at least, largely overlapping.  But "Notebook" does seem to keep everything much better organized than "Scrivener" does.  Though, I have to say, all this really produces is that illusion of control to which writers are so prone to succumb.  Surely "control" (of the subject, of the literature, of the whatever) is not the highest virtue to which writers should aspire?

However, the hell. For now, I can play with my new software, and pretend that I will soon have control! really! Control of eVERYTHING I'm supposed to have read!  And then it will magically all turn itself into finished texts! While I sleep!  Circus Ponies will mate with Scriveners and produce studious little centaurs of polished pieces, which will gallop off to publication in happy frolicking herds. I can dream.

Related articles

• Scrivener: Not Just for Novels

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• Scrivener Review

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• Giving Scrivener a Try

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• Scrivener: Love it or Hate it?

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• To Scrivener or not to Scrivener?

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• Scrivener - Writing the old way is crazy (all-things-andy-gavin.com)
• Review: Literature and Latte Scrivener 2.0.2 (macworld.com)
• Scrivener Hits Mac App Store (themactrack.com)
• Meet the love of my life: Scrivener! (angelikadevlyn.wordpress.com)

Still missed

Had a dream about Mac Wallace last night; or rather, a dream about him being dead, which he has been for a year and half now.  I miss so much our conversations.  He was always sure I had something to contribute, always wanted to hear what I was working on, and never put it down.  I didn't realise until he was gone how rare that is for me or how much I relied on it.  I only talked to him once or twice a year, but it leaves such an emptiness that I can't anymore.  Colleagues matter so much, even at long distance.

Humanities are cost-effective

English: The Humanities Center on the sixth floor of the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Turns out Humanities is the only part of a university that actually turns a profit. Humanities students are also a gold mine for the society that funds their production, because we are so much cheaper to train, and start out at lower wages, but over the course of a lifetime we get paid as much overall as sciences grads, and therefore pay as much in taxes. So there's a huge net profit to the society over time, and the university even while it's training us.

But university administrations and/or their corporate/political masters continue to think that we're the weak sisters, the luxury.

grieving

I was teaching Herodotus this morning and was unexpectedly overcome with grief; had to stop for a moment before I could go on.

My friend Malcolm Wallace, my undergraduate professor and mentor at the University of Toronto, died unexpectedly two weeks ago. His health had been uneven but he seemed to be better, and it came as a surprise. He was up at his family cottage at the time. He retired a year ago.

He was the one who taught me Greek. He used to reschedule a make-up lesson when I skipped a class, which embarrassed me enough that I stopped skipping classes, eventually, something that never happened with anyone else. He was the one who believed in me and thought I had talent and could do something with it. He's the reason I'm a professor now, instead of a lawyer, or an editor somewhere. He had an enormous influence on my life.

We corresponded through graduate school, that is, when I was in graduate school, and after I got my job out here we used to meet for coffee or lunch whenever I was in Toronto, for the last fifteen years at least.  At the very least I would call him. The last few times I've been in Toronto we haven't gotten together. I usually have the kids with me and it's hard to get out of the house for an hour, I have to impose on someone else to handle child care so that I can get away, and it's enough of a burden on my parents that I haven't always done it. So I last saw him last year. He had been ill on and off for the a few years before that - he had an attack of encephalitis after a bout of flu, several years back, and it took him a long time to recover. But the last time I saw him, more than a year ago, he was in excellent form; he was his old self again. We talked for nearly three hours, about all sorts of things. It was great to see him himself again. I meant to call him this summer, but I was only in Toronto for a day.

When I heard he'd died I found myself in tears on and off for two days. I wanted to phone him to make sure that it wasn't true. I still want to.

Teaching Herodotus today, it all comes back again. He was the one who taught me Herodotus; it was his specialty. He taught me how to think about Herodotus, and that Herodotus was worth thinking about. There is really nothing I know about Herodotus that he didn't teach me. Whenever I read anything new about Herodotus I would phone Mac and we'd talk about it. He was usually skeptical. I can hear his voice.  

And now I can't call him.