Category: General

Writing a book is hard. Converting a PhD dissertation into a text which people might want to read for purposes other than assessing a candidate’s worthiness for being given a PhD is possibly harder than writing a book from scratch (this is supposition on my part and I will not be held to it in a court of law), given that there’s a strong temptation to keep as much of the original text even though a lot of that text could be described as “functionally written for the purposes of being given a PhD” (that’s me quoting me, by the way).

At the moment my hands are cold, which seems particularly unfair, because it’s my birthday and I thought by the age of thirty-six I’d be living in insulated housing. I mention this because it’s a complete non sequitur designed to move from one problem to another. Because the other problem with converting a thesis into a book is the constant feeling that most of it is written, when, really, it isn’t. The dissertation gives me a nice structure to work with, and the arguments are all developed, but the book should say/do more than the thesis, otherwise, for the reader, what’s the point?

So, in order to say/do more, I have, over the last two months, been reading and rereading a significant (and hopefully representative) proportion of the academic literature on conspiracy theories. There are things to be said about that literature, which hopefully I will be able to express more verbosely than what I am currently doing, which is shouting “Why are you so confused?” whenever I look at my database of reference materials.

What I can say is that my new reading of the literature confirms some of my previously expressed worries, thus giving me more citations to illustrate said concerns. On occasion, I even have found a nice turn of phrase which supports some argument I had already made. ((Sometimes these turns of phrases are things I could never have read prior to the thesis being submitted (mostly because they post-date September 2011), and sometimes they are things I could have (and in one case, should have) read but I never got around to it. Not because of laziness (well, not necessarily because of laziness), you understand. There’s only so much material you can read before you have to start writing.)). All of which is nice and feels remarkably like work, even though the writing I am currently doing is really cut-and-pasting my notes in between sections of the old PhD.

One benefit (of many, probably) to having a nice (and peer-reviewed) structure to the book already in place is that it’s easy to work out, approximately, where new material should go and where to place these nice turns of phrases. With the exception of three chapters (of eight), the book is mostly readable. Sure, there are moments where the text becomes heavy with quotes sans much in the way of commentary, but those moments will, in the next six months, become largely indistinguishable from the rest of the text.

However, therein lies the danger, once again, of the dissertation being the backbone of the book; it’s mightily tempting to write the new sections in the style of the old (a style which is dry and lacking in excitement; a style which is perfect for a PhD but lacking in the kind of joy you might expect of someone’s first book).

Which leads to problem number three. Because I wrote my dissertation in TeX I have an awful lot of hashed out text in my thesis, some of which are the ancient ruins of great ideas whilst others are the degenerating results of badly chosen paradigms. Some of the hashed out material is material I never got around to finishing, a lot of which turned out to be tangential to the goal of completing a succinct, snappy PhD. I have been resurrecting some of these lost ideas, which at first felt good, until I started finding the comments from my supervisors.

Like any good scholar, I keep a record of feedback on my work. Should I want to revisit something, then I can quickly learn why I might have discarded the idea in the first place. Some of the tangents in my PhD have associated hashed out notes from my supervisors and, frankly, the experience of reading those pieces of feedback are (not always) associated with a visceral feeling of the last few months of finishing the PhD, when I just wanted to roar constantly:

“WHY DOES NO ONE APPRECIATE MY GENIUS!”

Like any good scholar, I should appreciate criticism. Outside of my PhD work I can take criticism with grace and just a little charm, but the memory of those last few months of being a PhD candidate still loom large and those comments, helpfully left in by past-Matthew, rankle current-Matthew so much that I have decided to leave them in place for future-Matthew to deal with.

Which kind of makes me out to be (even more of) blight on my own existence, doesn’t it?

…then so is the Prime Minister.

This story, from our great and glorious news paper, the New Zealand Herald, reports John Key as saying:

[Kim Dotcom] is a well-known conspiracy theorist. He has never ever found a piece of evidence to support that.

Key is referring to Dotcom’s claim that the Prime Minister has deceived the New Zealand public about numerous aspects of his foreknowledge about the raids on the Dotcom/Chrisco mansion (the event which, arguably, has lead to the government deciding to amend the act which governs the GCSB).

Key is using “conspiracy theorist” here in the pejorative sense of “Someone who believes a clearly ridiculous proposition (about a purported conspiracy)”, which kind of plays to the Prime Minister’s style of denigrating people who dare disagree with him. Key could have simply dismissed Dotcom’s claims by saying “He has no evidence to support that” but he decided to play the “conspiracy theorist” card.

As I have long argued, there’s nothing wrong with being a conspiracy theorist. Any political or historically literate person knows conspiracies have occurred and some of the theories about those conspiracies have turned out to be warranted. Rather than simply dismiss such claims as being the fantasies of conspiracy theorists, we should judge individual conspiracy theories on their merits.

However, if Kim Dotcom is a conspiracy theorist (in either the pejorative or non-pejorative sense), then so is John Key, at least with respect to his theories about the opposition to his party’s new GCSB bill. Take, for example, this claim by the Prime Minister:

“By the way, very senior Labour members within that caucus understand completely the importance of national security and of keeping New Zealanders safe and the very question they might have to ask themselves if one day there was a equivalent of the Boston bombings in New Zealand would they be the very same members who would stand up and say they prevented New Zealanders from being kept as safe as they otherwise could be.”

So, Labour understands the serious of the matter but is playing a political point-scoring game? That’s a claim of conspiracy. ((It might even be a plausible one.)) John Key, by advancing such a claim, is presenting a conspiracy theory to account for Labour’s opposition to the GCSB bill.

If you want to use “conspiracy theorist” in the pejorative sense, it’s probably wise not to advance conspiracy theories of your own. That just makes you a conspiracy theorist too. Now, I’m happy for both Dotcom and Key to be called conspiracy theorists, and I’m also quite content to look at their respective conspiracy theories and make judgements about the plausibility of each. However, I suspect that if you were to tell John Key that he’s a conspiracy theorist just like Kim Dotcom, then the look in his reptilian eyes would be that of a scandalised man. I mean, he’s a sensible guy (or so it’s claimed), and sensible guys can’t be conspiracy theorists…

Except they can. In either sense.

Last night, if you wandered off K’Rd and on to Mercury Lane, you would have found a house/theatre playing host to “Ninety Seconds”, a collection of ninety-second long works by various artists, curated by Jessie McCall and Zahra Killeen-Chance.

If you had sat in the audience, then about halfway through the proceedings, you would have seen me step on stage and perform “The Insidious Design”. Given that none of you did, however, you can enjoy the next best thing (or just close this page immediately to simulate non-attendance) and watch a recording of the performance now:

Yes, that’s me gesticulating at the slideshow whilst silently mouthing my stream of consciousness.

That was the insidious design.

“The Insidious Design” was an idea that my partner in crime, #apefail, and me came up with over coffee and cake about three weeks ago.

“I’m good at saying stuff that sounds intelligent but is probably gibberish”, I said, honestly and openly to the patrons around me (some of whom must surely work for the Pork Board and thus will be engaging in surveillance upon persons like #apefail and me’self).

“And I’m a qualified sound engineer”, said #apefail.

With that, it was settled; we would combine our talents and present a faux lecture, with materials somewhat cribbed from a project we failed to get off the ground several years, a collection of Spam Beat poems, and the images largely cribbed from Wikimedia.

The result was this:

“The Insidious Design” has no intended meaning; the images were randomly selected and the decision to shift or zoom in on some of the materials was based entirely upon needing to ensure the slideshow lasted for ninety seconds. The audio design was similarly chaotic. #apefail recorded about fifteen minutes of me reading out spam, which she then edited into ninety seconds of layered sound, developed entirely independently from the slideshow. Indeed, #apefail only got to see how her soundtrack meshed with the images the night before we performed, and no tinkering was undertaken after that first melding of sound and vision.

Yet.

It’s possibly to see the connections between the sound and the images, even though there was no intent to link one to the other. #apefail and me thought of “The Insidious Design” as a humorous piece precisely because there would be a series of accidental confluences of certain phrases with particular images. Our audience last night seemed to treat “The Insidious Design” as a serious work, laughing only at the line about conservatives.

That’s fine and good, though; we can hardly complain about the work not being appreciated for what it is if we also claim the work has no meaning. After all, authorial intent is damned, is it not?

#apefail and I have thought of a follow-up work to “The Insidious Design”, which would be another ninety-second piece. I hope we get a chance to perform it soon.

I’m writing a book. Specifically a trade academic publication, “The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories”, for Palgrave Macmillan.

Huzzah, right?

Yes.

So, I’ve been asked, how does propose a book to a publisher?

Well, the first thing to do is look at who is publishing what. My first choice, a trade academic publisher, had published a book I thought was a close fit with my work. I looked up who the Philosophy editor was and then, crucially, looked to see if there were any submission guidelines.

The thing about submission guidelines is that every publisher wants to see a submission which is subtly different from some other publisher. Some want you to provide detailed chapter summaries of about five hundred words a piece. Others want very short paragraphs. You’ll have to give an account of what competing publications are out there, what makes your work unique and how long the finished version of the book is meant to be.

I ended up writing five proposals for “The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories” and the only thing that stayed the same was the author bio, the name of the book and the list of chapters. Everything else got either rewritten or created from whole cloth to fit the submission guidelines.

I submitted proposals for “The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories” to three University Presses and two Trade Academic publishers (I might talk about that important distinction another time). These were not simultaneous submissions (some publishers allow that, others do not), so it took the best part of six months to go from initial submission to the book being accepted somewhere. ((“The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories” was not my first book proposal, but the timely nature of my other proposed book has passed.)) Without naming names, one of the presses never got back to me about my proposal, despite fortnightly polite e-mails to the Philosophy editor asking how things were proceeding, one got back to me a mere eight hours after I submitted the proposal to say they weren’t interested, one liked the proposal but had published something similar a year earlier and thus didn’t want to compete with their own line up (I was hoping they might think my book was complementary rather than competitive, but I was wrong), and one press kept promising to get in touch but only managed to do so a month after I had accepted terms with Palgrave Macmillan.

I can’t talk much about the various submission review processes, since in one case no one ever got back to me about it, in one case it was rejected within hours of submission and one publisher liked it but felt it would compete with another of their books (but he also enthusiastically encourage me to send it elsewhere, saying it deserved to be published; that was both annoying and gratifying). Basically, all I can say is that Palgrave were very professional: they emailed me to say they had received the proposal and that they would send it out for review. I was told the turn around for getting the proposal was about two weeks, which unluckily for me, meant that I was going to be waiting anxiously to hear back from them whilst on holiday at Lake Tarawera, aka “The Place with No 3G”.

Time passes.

I remember getting the email to say they had accepted the manuscript on the drive back into Rotorua. I had my phone in my hand the entire journey (I was not driving; I was getting motion sickness from focussing on the screen), waiting for, at the very least, the letter “E” to appear on my phone’s screen, (a promissory note that meant I could, very slowly, check my e-mails). The reception flickered on and off as we passed the Green and Blue lakes and then, outside of a sportwears store my Mother, for reasons unknown, thought I was going to buy shoes from, the internet reception on my phone sprang to life (3G!), mostly with emails from students but also with that one, crucial message.

I read it about three times before deciding my senses were not being deceived. “Mother”, I said, because I am a very formal-kind of son, “I’m going to write a book.”

“Well done. Shall we see if there are any shoes you want?” she replied.

There weren’t.