mean reviewer blues
Music: Last Comic Standing
Writing for publication and the blind review process has been a frequent and popular topic on RoseChron, in part because these things are central to what I do for a living, in part because I've learned a large chunk of the readership is comprised of professors-in-the-making.
As a reviewer, if I absolutely cannot contain my nastiness when I'm reviewing an essay, I save it for the editor's eyes only. (In the blind review process, a reviewer gets to send a private, personal note to the editor and then writes something different for the author.) I try very hard never to send something personal or ugly to an author. It's unprofessional and demoralizing. If an essay makes me angry (a very rare thing), I'll let the editor know, but the author I try to shield from my ire.
Many of you are reviewers, or will be reviewers in the future. I think it's important for we reviewers to follow some sort of protocol when reviewing. That protocol will change from one journal to the next, but I think we can settle on a few standards: (a) if the essay has hope, offer constructive suggestions; (b) if the essay has no hope, be critical but encouraging of the personhood of the author; (c) always make a distinction between the author and her argument, as the two are not the same---you get pissy with an argument, but that doesn't mean the author is a punching bag; (d) if you really dislike an essay and have nothing constructive to contribute, keep it short---there's no reason to write three, single-spaced pages on how much you hate the essay.
Of course, there's an exigency: today I received a revise and resubmit from a journal that I like: Explorations in Media Ecology. I discovered this journal because Ken published in it, and I like Ken's work. I've had some chats with EME folks and would like to get more involved. Part of that involvement has been reading media ecology stuff for the past couple of years and trying to do some work in that area. Admittedly, I'm not terribly well read in media ecology, but I'm trying. Anyway, as part of this effort to learn media ecology I thought I might submit something to EME. I knew---as I warned the good editor---I probably didn't have all the relevant literature cited, but I didn't know where to go to improve the piece. He sent it out for review a year ago. Today I finally got the reviews of my piece.
The editor was helpful and gracious with suggestions for revision, as is a reviewer who apparently knew Walter Ong (I cite Ong a bunch). But the second reviewer, I think, is way out of line.
From now on, I think I'm going to make inappropriate and unprofessional reviews of my work public on this blog. It's dirty laundry, but dammit: let's stop this "cycle of abuse." Even if what the reviewer says is true, it still should not be said to the author. I know I'm not Mr. Decorum, but I read this review and thought, "what if I was a graduate student?" A beginning scholar might be really bummed out about such a letter---heck, I was when I started out. Obviously by posting it part of it still gets to me too. So, without further ado, yet another lovely nasty review of my work in italicized fonts, with my reactions [in brackets]:
This essay is written without care.
[translation, "is written carelessly"]
Its author, who has some academic background, refuses to exercise academic discipline in the construction of the work. As a result, an interesting topic remains largely uninvestigated at the work's conclusion.
The argument is grounded in a few lines from Ong and Derrida: effectively, the sound of a voice is associated with the presence of a person, and people archive because they fear death. From this we are to understand voices of the dead and backward speech.
[Uh, no. It's more like this: the presence associated with speech is ambivalent, both good and bad, and these are separated out in popular culture into extremes, which EVP and backwards masking represent respectively. The argument is for taking up the ambivalence of speech in a serious way that Ong and Derrida help us to do.]
Both dead voices and back-speech are fascinating, there is no doubt. But when I ask myself what I have learned about them, upon leaving the paper, my answer is very little. That listeners hear their mothers, or that there is a binary of good and evil in the texts---these are hardly psychoanalytically significant. Could they be significant to those unfamiliar with psychoanalytic texts, who study mass media? I don't think so.
[So far, the review is not favorable but fair.]
No fundamental question is answered in this essay---no question that is particular concern to students of electronic media. [Um, does one have to have a research question to present research? If so, why?] Instead, a couple of "really cool" phenomena are called to our attention. And "really cool" is the deepest problem with the essay, particularly when the author segues into freestyle narrative in the latter part. I leave it to the editor to determine how much license an author might be granted stylistically, given that the journal has to position itself somewhere in the academy. The author shows much more, let me say, "confidence" than I would have submitting to an academic journal when he offers a line of repetitive "S's", "T's" "O's" and "P's." I have seen that used in dimestore [sic] novels.
[It's called alliteration, assonance, or consonance, fuckwit, and the essay is deliberately playful]
Back to the more fundamental issue: what is the basic question, and why does it matter? Or will we just say that these two tidbits from Ong and Derrida are sufficient to themselves, and let us go about renaming the world around them. That is not a project I could support in the academy. I would suggest, instead, that the author begin with a problem that is specific to electronic media and expressed by these or similar phenomena. That has not been done.
[Ok, this is much more helpful. And I admit this is a problem with the "essay," which is actually a bridging sort of chapter in the book in process. So the "ta-dah" comes at the end of the previous chapter and in the next one. So I gotta reframe the essay: fair enough. I don't agree one always has to be solving a problem to write "for the academy." It's clear this person has an idea of what is appropriate academic writing . . . that does not include performative writing, which is intellectual vacuous to his or her mind . . . . ]
Could we suggest instead that the cases themselves demand explanation? Not in my opinion. The cases provided are either fictitious or anecdotal. I do not believe there is a serious community looking for an answer to the meaning of Raudive's book [Breakthrough, a book in which this dude documents the voices he discovers by recording dead-air and listening to it really hard], nor the movie White Noise, nor the lyrics of Robert Plant. On the other hand, the voice that speaks to George Walker Bush is very important to all of us. Thus, it would be possible to find a case with such compelling significance that it would crave attention; and the strength of such an essay would largely be determined by the importance of that question. On this occasion, however, I don not see a question that matters in this sense.
Is there, then, something theoretical that we can learn by virtue of the way that this author answers this question, as insignificant as the question might be? That is what I was hoping as I started the essay. But I grew more and more disappointed as I recognized that I was being carried along through an intellectual tour de force, performed by what appears to be the darling of a graduate program, who is [sic] yet to develop a sense of disciplined scholarship ([a footnote here] I use this expression because the author dabbles in scholars and scholarship, in the manner of one who fared well in the general game of fact-fetch that is played in college classrooms. I do not feel that I am reading a scholar who has seriously read anyone). I do gain a sense of who are the "smart" people with whom this author has become acquainted, as well as some of the "smart" ideas they had. But I am still waiting for something insightful and informative about the forms of electronic speech referenced at the outset.
[Yeah, this is the particularly obnoxious paragraph. I don't claim to be a genius; I claim creativity. I think I am creative---that's my skill set. Anyway, though, what gets me about his paragraph is that the reviewer seems to think I am a graduate student. What if I was that grad student trying to publish? This would be totally demoralizing. It's really a nasty thing to say to anyone, but especially someone who is training for this gig.]
I am particularly disappointed with the author's jump between non-fiction-writing and cinema, as if the two universes could be directly compared. Raudive is an historical author, Raymond Price is a theatrical character---it is inappropriate to construct an analysis as if the one could offer support for the other. Perhaps, the screenwriter, not the character, should be examined, but even that would strain the comparison. On the other hand, a thorough investigation of vocalic culture should produce some actual cases of significance and merit that could be examined. Again, the author must either abandon or discover a commitment to this project, because scholarship takes time.
[This book has been in process for three years; it's my fault the reviewer doesn't see what comes before and after; it's my fault I didn't frame the analysis to answer the "so what?" question. Even so, the choice of examples is not "quick"]
I am also disappointed with the author's general tendency to convert scholarship into storytelling and extended quotes. If we look at the percentage of this essay which deals in nothing other than statements made in other essays, it seems to me, again, that there is a problem. It is a sign of something, when a paper has so many indented paragraphs.
[Uh, yeah: it's a sign I know basic punctuation. All paragraphs should be indented. By five spaces. Or a tab set to five spaces. Perhaps s/he means offset citations?]
Finally, many years ago I read a line to the following effect, "You write with flare, to show your breeding. But easy writing's cursed hard reading." While this authorship is certainly a performance, it falls short when flare is set aside and content is sought. I caution this author to take the act of scholarship more seriously. The pubic intellectual is also a public trust. Neither an academic's career nor an academic's writing exists solely for that academic's pleasure.
[Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I think if I took my scholarship seriously I would have left the academy my first semester as an assistant professor. The values in contrast here are so deep and revealed in this last paragraph . . . I wish my scholarship had that sort of influence---"the pubic trust!"---ha ha haaaaaaaa!!!!! My take is this: curiosity and pleasure in the quest should come first. The rewards of making a statement that somehow lasts for perpetuity are few and go to even fewer. Owing to my interest in popular culture, my scholarship has a five year window of interest at best . . . the act of scholarship, consequently, is saying something that will make someone go, "huh!" now, not a century hence. I'm not so arrogant to think I have anything to say to that future person. My work is shit (in the good sense), and that's ok.]