This summer seems far away now that winter is truly upon us here in Berlin. Christmas looks like a quiet affair but I was glad that one is still possible to be able to hold on to some sounds of summer. Like this podcast episode that I worked on, speaking to Zoran Terzić, about memes, the internet, Kafka, and other marvellous beings.
The only other thing out there on the horizon is a visit to the Deutsches Literaturachiv, based at Marbach am Neckar. With the numbers at an all time high, I am mostly wondering what an archival visit can mean at this point of time, both as an exercise in research work and personally as an accessibility concern (politically and generally).
In the meantime, one waits for the week to being some answers.
It is 01:00 am. The GAPS conference has been cancelled. Things seem bleak in a way that is soul-sucking. The last few days have been difficult for precisely two reasons:
it is so hard to stay focussed on anything with a pandemic going on
it is so hard to stay focussed. Period.
We all have our ways of calming down, I am certain. It is just that with the-end-of-the-world kind of panic coming to us through our screens, it is simply hard to have anything else on your mind. This is where my partner—wonderful as he is—told me to get away from my phone. It is really hard; I know because I tried. But this also about not neglecting mental health in the time of corona. I know that Love in the Time of Corona is precisely the kind of literary pun that people would expect from nerds like us anyway, so yes, it is about ~
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CORONA
If anything, it is about controlling the ever expanding news-feed. Since I was supposed to fly to India, I was hooked on the news-feeds from Europe and India; all the while quite unsure which part of the world would ban the other first. Now it seems unnecessary to stay hooked. This is, dear reader, the time to get rid of your news-feed. Love your mental health, and not your news-feeds. So much of it contributes to your day getting a little more anxious that one would be better off without it. Use time for something else. Here is my plan to have more control of all the data I am consuming right now:
1. Call your parents. Call your friends. Maybe write a few letters. Communication is important; panicking does not help. Since my folks live a few hours ahead of CET, it is always nice to be able to get a hold of them and talk to them before they go to sleep.
2. Switch off your phone. Or set it to the most non-intrusive mode. Android phones do have the Do Not Disturb mode that I have found myself using a lot over the last days.
3. Consume things in a way where you are actually there. At the risk of sounding like an esoteric monster, here is the spiel: do things where you are doing something more than consuming things because it on the auto-play list of your streaming app. If you are watching a movie, do it. If you are staring at your half-finished proposal, do that. Just try to be there. Otherwise more information would simply exhaust you when you are getting out of the internet rabbit-hole on days like these.
Dear reader, step away from the phone. And the screen. Things will get better but for now, take care of yourself. Wash your hands, do things, read a nice book, listen to a nice podcast. Here’s Roman Mars describing things as they are.
No sooner had I realised that a doctoral degree had a lot of work than I decided to go into the strange land of project managers. I obviously did not know what counted as a good one. So I gave a few things a good try. Here goes my grand evaluation of apps and websites:
Trello was my first attempt. I had tried it before and thought that it was one of those neat Kanban things that simply work well. Alas, it was a little too neat. I am one of those people who does need a lot more motivation. And while Trello works for a lot of people, I simply started creating cards and re-organizing them to suit my procrastinating. I did not get a lot done. My issue with Trello is that it lets you customize innumerable number of cards and keeping track of them, while adding tasks and lists and descriptions just becomes too tedious. Also, because of the neat Kanban system, it does not tell me, “WORK ON THIS FIRST, YOU DUMMY!” I realised I needed something waaay more simple… which is nice because on 14th Nov, The Verge said,
Basecamp made things a lot simpler. One can create To-Do lists that independently work [I often use lists like, “Reading List November” or “Reading List December”]. But what has worked for me is the limitation of things. Basecamp Personal lets you start only three projects, so there is some amount of focus that one needs. It also prompts you questions that you can customize; I have decided that I need a very basic “What are you going to do this week?”-sort of question because I get a bit lazy without stuff like that. It also has a dedicated tab for Files and Documents which is neat. Most of all, Basecamp’s site design has definitely played its part in convincing me. I have felt good about this for the last week.
And while online things are fine, I do appreciate a good paper version of everything. The Moleskine Pro Notebook has seemed like a good idea for that. Since I will have many “projects” and tasks in my head, keeping a notebook that is separate from my other notes (German notes, notes notes, etc.) and only dedicated to research stuff has made me feel more confident that I will be able to manage my workload. It has numbered pages and to-do sections which makes my project look/seem way more organized than it is in my head anyway.
I am curious about what do academics really use to manage projects and tasks… Turns out quite a few people use Trello. But for now, Trello has become something I use only because it is easy to create a page where everyone can contribute to a list of events, CfPs, et al. I am less certain of its productivity quotient.
This Thursday (25th of April, 2019), the great Emily Apter holds a workshop at the Freie Universität. While I have listened to her great keynotes at least twice (once at a conference in Delhi and once in Berlin’s HKW), every time I have listened to her, a deeper reservoir of knowledge opens itself up for reading/research. For this workshop, I just realised that one of her big topics of the workshop itself is the work of artist/researcher Lawrence Abu Hamdan. And his work on speech and accents is quite fascinating both from the perspective of someone who feigns accents all the time and as someone who is interested in the politics of the whole thing on the other. Here’s an audio “documentary”:
On the other hand, the very fabulous Ben Maukhas written on the same exhibition/documentary – which makes for a very insightful secondary reading.
