Editing academic papers... maddened with boredom, procrastinating absurdly.
I was reassured when David said to me last week, Yes, editing other people's work is so boring – given how hard-working and efficient he is, it made me feel better that he would acknowledge the annoyance of this really rather simple and supposedly stress-free task. The papers for this anthology are pretty good, but they're not the astounding and brilliant writing of geniuses – as always in academe, some of these writers have actual styles, while others just clump along dispensing information.
Most irritating are the ones that do have a style, but one that is just too cute, too chummy – since it's a book on popular music in a television show, a lot of fanspeak and journalistic cutesiness smarms its way in to the sentences. I need to be sensible, simply correct things that are unacceptable, and mostly leave the style as it is – but it's so hard to pass by certain sentences that have oversweetened knots and clumps in them, or the ones that include mildly inane mistakes of the kind that make you think, You don't know the meaning of that word, do you?
As Goldman has his Spaniard so politely suggest in The Princess Bride: "I don't think that word means what you think it means."
Editing at this level is sort of like staying at someone's house for a couple of days. Some houses – like my co-editor's, for instance – are clean and pleasant, and have lots of books and things you want to look through, or eat. Of course then you feel as though you're getting greedy (at least I do, but then I'm not good at restraining myself when faced with a plate of food, or a shelf of books, or worst of all a small dish of chocolates left casually lying about, where just anyone can get at them, day or night). But with some writing, it's more like going into a flat and saying, well uh, I'm here overnight so – hmm it's not really awful but – what's that smell from the bathroom? And is it really impossible to close the window next to my bed, with its hard mattress, all the way? Ah well... I'll try to make myself comfortable by moving this chair nearer to the light, and then maybe – oh no, I'm fine, I just....
Picky, you say. Ah, well. The price of being accustomed to certain ways of writing....
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