Been pretty quiet here of late, as I’ve been grinding away at the last cluster of academic commitments on my desk, trying to get free of the backlog so I can leave the building without the waiter chasing after me with the bill, so to speak.

Along the way, there have been a number of moments when I’ve wondered why I was bothering. Another such moment arrived this morning… and in the name of saving time, I’m just gonna self-cite my own bitter toot:

As I’ve remarked to a bunch of people recently, if you’re on your way out of the door when someone kicks you in the arse, the only sensible response is to walk faster.

I’m not kidding about that post-hoc rationalisation, either; there’s a growing sense of having dodged a bullet I had fired at myself. Part of that is coming from a sense that people mostly seem to want me to repeat the most successful and well-received thing I’ve been involved with (namely the Notterdam guide). That desire doesn’t seem to be exclusive to academia, to be fair, but I’m already starting to feel like I’m “the travel guide guy”… and while I should probably be grateful that anyone gives a damn either way, the prospect of grinding out clones of that same idea for a living is not hugely appealing.

Which is why I took some comfort from this quote from Milton Glaser, collected by Austin Kleon in a suite of quotes about artistic style, and why one should not worry about it:

“The way to professional accomplishment: you have to demonstrate that you know something unique, that you can repeat, over, and over and over until ultimately you lose interest in it… The model for personal development is antithetical to the model for professional success… Whenever Picasso learned how to do something he abandoned it.”

—Milton Glaser

This is not, to be clear, an attempt to compare myself to Picasso. The point is that I can sense the invitation to step onto that path of professional accomplishment, and I can also feel already my loss of interest in repeating the riff that people seem to like.

I mean, sure, “play the hits”, that’s a reasonable request, I get it; but all the same, you don’t want to be faced with an audience that does nothing but yell “Freeeebiiird!” from the moment you take the stage*.

Given a large part of my quest for a stable gig in academia was founded on my wanting a sense of security that has been absent from my employment circumstances for my entire life, I guess that in some ways I’m shooting myself in the foot by trying to decline that invitation; there would surely be worse ways to make a living than making travel guides to non-existent cities for as long as there was still a market for them. But as suggested by this morning’s email—and various other such academia-as-usual moments in the last few months—the price of that stability, were it even actually on offer, would be an enduring sense that no matter how much you do, no matter how often you repeat the riff, you’ll never quite have done enough.

And so I will say this for my own benefit, as much as for the benefit of my readership here: fuck that noise. I am done with jumping through hoops, only to be told that I didn’t jump high enough, fast enough, through hot enough flames, with enough of a smile on my face.

Fuck. That. Noise.

The real work has been going undone. It’s time to go back to beating my own path. There’s so much I want to write, so much I want to think, and if instability is the price of that freedom, then instability it’ll have to be.

---

[ * — I fucking love “Freebird“, in a wholly unironic way. I hope I have never been the sort of fan who would have shouted for it all through the show, though. ]