The Open Book is a radical genre blend: it is an experimental co-memoir exploring the role of writing in academia. It contains stories about life without censoring and without distinguishing between traditional work/life domains and academic/non-academic ways of writing. This is done through discussions of conferences, research collaborations, supervision, taboo pleasures of ‘fun’ writing projects, the temptations of other work, and the everyday life encounters and experiences that stimulate academic thought and writing. Some of the main characters you will meet are researchers, their colleagues and students, sons and daughters, mothers and grandmothers, husbands (past and present), supervisors, pets, old and new friends, and creatures from myths and dreams. Some of the settings include kitchens, fireplaces, couches, gardens, universities, cars, and trains. These characters and places are all there to help examine what the above elements of an ordinary human life might mean in research and for research. Thus, it becomes possible for you as a reader to recognize the stories as both truly human and genuinely academic. This is the first book in a series of publications and projects from the Open Writing Community: a collaboration of academics from different disciplines and countries that seeks to push the boundaries of how we understand and practice academic work and writing.
Daftar Isi
Acknowledgements; A Reader’s Manual; Torn Apart and Put Together, Slowly, Clumsily, over Time; The Disappearing Body; On Bodies, Births, and Dying or When Someone Leaves But Is Still There; On the Smallest Parts and the Largest Wholes; What If Knowledge Is Also Tied to Places?; The House; House for Sale; Of Mirror Neurons and Generations of Mothers; Aftermath; Where Do We Know?; Rest, Speed, and Recovery Time; Keeping up with Creativity or When the Body Is Left Behind, on the Couch, Resting; Speed, Sleep, and Exhaustion; After-Thought for the Next Exploration or on the Fear of Not Finishing What We Started; Creative Obstructions or Pain Is Knowledge, Rushing in; On Wormholes, Long Journeys and the Dangers of Sudden Collapse; Dead Zones; Maintaining the Fire, Connecting from the Inside; The Fire; Pyromania; Comforting and Very Sad at the Same Time; Withdrawing to Reach out; Moist to Moist; Deep Dives of Thinking or Where Did All My Body Parts Go?; That’s Okay, That’s Life!; Love Note to My Suffering; Co-hatching Uncontrollable Creativity; Homework; Homework Two; For Ellen, My Daughter; To Stay with It and Don’t Run Away; The Allowance of an Event to Occur; On Having the Courage to Dig Deeper; Just Another Day at the Office; Extraordinary General Meeting; Unhooking; Unhooking Two; Why Are We Doing This?; Synchronized; The Gloves Are off; Luggage; A Sorrow That Smells Like Spring; Newborn Girl Swathed in Flag; The Things We Carry with Us; These Are Not My Roads or Zero Gravity; A Lover; On Being an Idiot, Even in Your Dreams; On Getting Drunk, Being an Idiot, Even in Your Dreams, Part Two; Sleep, Pretty Darling, Do Not Cry; Deliberately Letting Things Happen; Lean on Me; Moving on; Moving with; While My Guitar Gently Weeps; I’ve Told the Truth, I Didn’t Come to Fool You; Dangerously Big Hearts; Resonance; Soundtracks; Tell the Truth, and Listen; References.