Writing – Page 6 – a sibilant intake of breath

The fine points of minuting meetings

The British comedic TV series’ Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister — as well as being extremely funny — make some acute and accurate points about politics. One quote from the episode “The Quality of Life” is an arguably cynical, arguably tragically accurate summary of the relationship between civil servants and politicians.

Today, while pondering how to interpret some specific bits of activist decision-making and analysis, I was reminded of another gem from series 2 of YPM: “Official Secrets:”

Bernard Woolley: The problem is, the prime minister did try to suppress the chapter, didn’t he?

Sir Humphrey Appleby: I don’t know. Did he?

BW: Well, didn’t he? Don’t you remember?

HA: What I remember is irrelevant Bernard. If the minutes don’t say that he did, then he didn’t.

BW: So you want me to falsify the minutes?

HA: I want nothing of the sort! It’s up to you Bernard, what do you want?

BW: I want to have a clear conscience.

HA: A clear conscience?

BW: Yes!

HA: When did you acquire this taste for luxuries? Consciences are for politicians, Bernard! We are humble functionaries whose duty it is to implement the commands of our democratically elected representatives. How could we possibly be doing anything wrong if it has been commanded by those who represent the people?

BW: Well, I can’t accept that, Sir Humphrey, “No man is an island.”

HA: I agree Bernard! No man is an island, entire of itself. And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee, Bernard!

BW: So what do you suggest, Sir Humphrey?

HA: Bernard, the minutes do not record everything that was said at a meeting do they?

BW: Well, no, of course not.

HA: And people change their minds during a meeting, don’t they?

BW: Well, yes.

HA: So the actual meeting is a mass of ingredients for you to choose from.

BW: Oh, like cooking.

HA: Like, no, not like cooking. Better not to use that word in connection with books or minutes. You choose from a jumble of ill-digested ideas a version which represents the prime minister’s views as he would, on reflection, have liked them to emerge.

BW: But if it’s not a true record…

HA: The purpose of minutes is not to record events, it is to protect people. You do not take notes if the prime minister says something he did not mean to say — particularly if it contradicts something he has said publicly. You try to improve on what has been said, put it in a better order. You are tactful.

BW: But how do I justify that?

HA: You are his servant.

BW: Oh, yes.

HA: A minute is a note for the records and a statement of action if any that was agreed upon. Now, what happened at the meeting in question?

BW: Well, the book was discussed and the solicitor general advised there were no legal grounds for suppressing it.

HA: And did the prime minister accept what the solicitor general had said?

BW: Well, he accepted the fact that there were no legal grounds for suppression… but

HA: He accepted the fact that there were no legal grounds for suppression. You see?

BW: Oh!

HA: Is that a lie?

BW: No

HA: Can you write it in the minutes?

BW: Yes

HA: How’s your conscience?

BW: Much better! Thank you Sir Humphrey.

Or, as put later by Linton Barwick in the 2009 satirical film “In the Loop“:

Linton Barwick: Get a hold of those minutes. I have to correct the record.

Bob Adriano: We can do that?

LB: Yes, we can. Those minutes are an aide-mémoire for us. They should not be a reductive record of what happened to have been said, but they should be more a full record of what was intended to have been said. I think that’s the more accurate version, don’t you?

Obviously in these cases there is a clear political purpose being served in presenting the minutes a particular way, but the problem of interpretation is intractable even with no such agenda. Humphrey is quite right to say that minutes which are not verbatim require decisions from the person writing them, and it is as true in political conversations as in talks between friends or lovers that people who take part in the same conversation can come away from it with quite different recollections about what each party tried to say and what was decided.

Growing campus fossil fuel divestment bibliography

As I have been writing drafts of my PhD dissertation, I am working in Microsoft Word for the sake of interoperability with committee members, with the intention of submitting the dissertation in LaTeX format after the defence. My footnotes are just unique identifiers to sources listed in my developing public bibliography.

In it’s way it must be one of the most comprehensive cross-indexings of academic and journalistic writing on fossil fuel divestment campaigns at universities and related matters.

It’s the sort of document it’s fascinating to imagine looking at as some sort of human-computer hybrid or hyperintelligent AI which could take it all in and cross-reference with no restrictions on the number of items it can hold in memory and compare at the same time.

The bibliography is also a valuable document because of how link rot is making many of the sources unavailable as websites are taken down and reorganized. Because of all the specialized information I have been able to collect about the movement, I have been able to find Wayback Machine archives for dozens of sources that are no longer accessible at their original locations or the URLs cited in other documents.

Another round on political opportunities

Some time ago, I wrote a new introductory chapter because my previous issue context and literature context chapters were too long. My committee said they aren’t happy with it and it needs changes, but first I should go through and revise my four core chapters.

I have nearly finished that now, with two revised chapters sent and two just needing a couple of passes to be done in the same way.

Now I have been told that the first of those revised chapters needs substantial work, and to be rewritten again into a new structure.

The only way forward is to do what they want, but it’s hard to express how exhausting the process of editing something into a ready to submit state before substantially revising it and then editing again has been.

There’s still a new conclusion to write too, so not one word of the dissertation is now finalized.

Memory and consiousness

Without our memories, we would be lost to ourselves, amnesiacs flailing around in a constant, unrelenting present. It is hard to imagine being able to hang on to your personal identity without a store of autobiographical memories. To attain the kind of consciousness we all enjoy, we probably rely on a capacity to make links between our past, present, and future selves. Memory shapes everything that our minds do. Our perceptions are funneled by information that we laid down in the past. Our thinking relies on short-term and long-term storage of information. Creating new artistic and intellectual works depends critically on reshaping what has gone before.

Fernyhough, Charles. Pieces of Light. HarperCollins, 2012. p. 4–5

Fry on the brain and memory

It may not be easily accessible to non-Audible subscribes, but Stephen Fry’s 12-part series “Inside Your Mind” is thought-provoking, informative, and excellent. He does a great job as a science popularizer and communicator, sharing experimental research without jargon and in a consistently accessible and engaging way.

So far, I have found the episode on memory to be especially intriguing, with the idea that memories aren’t records stored in static form like journal entries but rather ephemeral in-the-moment creations arising from the work of many parts of the brain, and neurologically very similar to imagining a future situation.

Fry associates the idea with Charles Fernyhough’s “Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts”, which I have added to my non-dissertation reading list.

Framing chapter hand edit complete

Today I continued making progress with finishing the shortened and reorganized versions of my four core dissertation chapters. Specifically, I finished my hand edit of the framing chapter, chiefly intended to split out my own prescriptive normative conclusions from analysis of the divestment movement and scholarship about it.

This is a particularly challenging task because as initially written this chapter was meant to be the normative culmination of the text, with the conclusion largely given over to wrapping up and the niceties of academic writing such as identifying areas for further work.

While it has been labourious and often dispiriting to try to re-sequence the document at this stage, I am growing confident that in the end I will be able to do it in a way that not only meets the requirements set by my committee members but which actually lays things out in a clearer and more organized way for ordinary readers.

Tomorrow I will move on to making the edits to the Word version of the framing chapter, pulling out chunks that belong in the new prescriptive conclusions chapter. It will take another effort to sequence and connect the normative chunks that have been pulled from the political opportunities, mobilizing structures, repertoires, and framing chapters, but at least that can happen after I have sent the four core analytical chapters back to the committee for their re-examination.

The target was arbitrary, self-imposed and still fairly effective

I didn’t hit my self-imposed goal of producing 50 page versions of my four core chapters by the end of January, with all comments from two committee members taken into account.

Nonetheless, the idea of the deadline served its purpose. Two of the four chapters are now done (except for a last check-through of length and successful incorporation of all committee comments as the last step before sending it back to them). I have hand-annotated the third and need about half a day to incorporate those comments into the Word version. Then I just need to hand annotate the final chapter, incorporate those changes, and check over the whole set for flow, length, and full adherence to committee member comments.

Between major progress on 3/4 core chapters and the American Political Science Association publishing my counter-repertoires section as a pre-print, this has been a good week for dissertation completion.

MPhil thesis writing in Devon, 2007

Target: January 31st

I can’t recall ever feeling as stuck with anything as I do with the dissertation. There are so many ‘to do’ items, so many of them depend on others being finished in order to be possible to complete themselves, and there isn’t any day-to-day or week-to-week pressure to keep me focused.

To rekindle the terror which is so often the basis of writing projects being completed, I have promised a 200 page version of my four core chapters edited down by the end of the month. That should address my committee’s most significant comments, and at least leave a text of the write length for any future changes.

Always tired

I don’t know exactly why, but the insomnia which has been my normal state of life for as long as I can remember has given over to what’s more like never-ending tiredness: going to bed tired, waking up tired, spending all day tired.

It may be from the loss of academic and social non-dissertation activities that give structure and variety to life, or just from the exhaustion of watching wave after pandemic wave crest and break while we collectively flounder. No doubt it comes partly from the rage of seeing the way in which we’re destroying our world, and yet our politics simply side-steps the issue as voters and lobbyists wedded to the status quo keep us cycling between political parties and leaders that match up their inadequate ambition with unserious implementation.

Maybe more than anything my own exhaustion reflects how everyone else seems to have been eroded and abraded: turning inward, turning silent. Maintaining any kind of social connection has jumped in difficulty, even though I suspect that most people could work to reduce their feelings of isolation and hopelessness by cultivating community in the ways which are possible without close physical presence.

I feel like I need something to lay down a boundary in time — or make one day or week seem different from another — to get back to a tempo of thesis work that will let me get the thing done before the university cuts me off irretrievably at the end of the year. And yet nothing of the sort is possible. I can’t reset the location, content, or cast of characters in my days, and so life feels like April 2020 made eternal.

I know it’s one of our worst human habits to develop the pattern of entitlement and resentment: growing to feel entitled to whatever good things we have happened to get, internalizing the notion that we have them as the result of merit or a just universe, and then cursing the injustice of losing it. The habit of mind we need to cultivate is that “nothing here is promised, not one day.” If we’ve ever had the good luck to experience something positive, we should see it as an unwarranted boon from a universe that is indifferent to all our notions of deserving or fairness, and if we should lose it we should hang on to the gratitude for having ever had it.

We’re all going to lose more than we can guess — maybe everything — as the full consequences of our fossil fuel civilization work their way through the planetary system. If our collective response to loss continues to be anger, resentment, and turning against each other, it’s hard to see how we will achieve the cooperation that has the sole prospect of saving us.