Academic whingeing

I have been commissioned to write a 1000-word article for an encyclopaedia.

Well, thinks I, that is not a lot of room but I think I can get it all in.

Then, having got to a draft, I check the style-sheet again.

And Lo and Behold, that is not 1000 words plus a list of relevant reading, keywords and cross-refs.* That is 1000 words including title, my name, and affiliation, references, further reading, keywords and cross-refs (though HEY! the abstract is not included in that count, WHEEEEEE!).

All of which seriously reduces the amount of wordage I have to play with and turns the whole thing into a challenging exercise in compression.

Chase, I have cut to it, and the high points of the chase at that.

Also, it's hard to tell just from the headings what cross-references will actually be in the slightest degree relevant, plus, there is a certain amount of 'Whoah: they have [entry] and haven't asked ME to do that one?' when looking at the spreadsheet.

***

How much do I concur with what mrissa has to say here about that phenomenon of small irritating inaccuracies, not affecting the main argument of what's being written about and that one feels immensely pedantic for noticing at all?

[I]n the introduction he tosses off a view of the Late Middle Ages that is frankly shallow, wrong, and dumb. It isn't important to his main point. But there it is, wrapped into the introduction, not fact-checked or actually addressed in any way, just a very common and very debunked stereotype of that period. And in some ways I feel like that kind of behavior is worse than if he had his main thesis wrong.... It's a piece of misinformation that goes down easy, that reinforces previous misinformation if everyone involved doesn't think it matters, because they were really mostly talking about something else.

So much YES. (Searching is down on DW at the moment so I can't locate my post on the virtues of nitpickery.)

This is not quite, I think, the same thing as coming across, yet again, an uncritical invocation of Victorian hysteria canards in a work of literary history, because lit people Do That Thing: they have actually Read Up The Subject, but you can predict the 2 or possibly 3 books they have read - 2 of them several decades old - and they will be unaware of other historians tearing their hair, gnashing their teeth and waving the codfish of revisionism. And no, it doesn't (at least in this case) particularly vitiate the general thrust of the book. But boy is it infuriating.

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*If memory serves, previous similar things have involved Xwordage + Yno of further readings, proportional to length of entry.

100 London Things: 18

So far I don't think I've done any churches or other places of worship.

This may be because I seldom go into churches in London unless there happens to be a concert going on (unmissable Caravaggios being thin on the ground in this fair metropolis), or because there are Just So Damn Many churches of all sorts of denominations ('300 religions and only one sauce').

But anyway, let me recommend to you for entirely secular reasons St Paul's Covent Garden, which is not only by Inigo Jones (1633), yay, set in a delightful churchyard adjacent to the hustle, bustle, poncey commercial activities, mimes and other street performers of Covent Garden, but is The Actor's Church (since 1662).

It is full of centuries-worth of plaques commemorating famous thesps, dramatists and other performers.

It also has a resident orchestra and its own theatre company.