Prestige scholarship
No, not that kind of prestige. I mean the kind you find in Christopher Nolan’s movie of the same name, based on the (quite good, quite different) novel by Christopher Priest. Wherein—and here I’m spoiling it—a magician so committed to entertaining audiences and to defeating his competitor uses a kind of real magic, or outlandish science, to make a copy of himself each night, drowning the old man and watching from afar. Why does he do it? Why go to such lengths? Because, little does he know, the trick performed by his competitor, in which he seems to be in two places at once, is a con: he’s not one man but two; identical twins. That’s why he, the competitor, appears to be so superhumanly productive, so supernaturally capable of bilocation. He does exist in two places at the same time. Because he’s not one person. He’s two.
That’s the way I feel about people I think of as super-scholars. There are many of these on offer, but I’ll use Timothy Burke as an example for now. The man writes a daily Substack, almost always with a word count in the thousands. He reports continuously on the books he’s reading, the New Yorker articles he’s reading, the peer-reviewed journal articles he’s reading, the comic books he’s reading, the genre fantasy he’s reading, the novels he’s reading, the Substacks he’s reading—and more. In addition, he reports the dishes he’s cooking, the video games he’s playing, the photos he’s editing, the book manuscripts he’s drafting, the syllabi he’s re-writing, the institutional meetings he’s attending. Oh, and he has a spouse and children. Oh, and he teaches classes; something he’s apparently well regarded for.
Reading him isn’t masochistic for me so much as uncanny. He belongs to this (in my eyes fictitious but clearly all too real) tribe of academics and journalists who appear never to sleep, only to consume and produce, consume and produce, without end or exhaustion. Do they speed read? Are they lying? Do they refuse to close their eyes except for six carefully timed and executed 20-minute naps every 24 hours? Are they brains in vats operating their bodies from afar? Do they have assistants and researchers doing the actual work that comes into my inbox every single day of the week?
No, I don’t think so. They’re really doing all of it. It’s them. No tricks.
Well, except the one. Like Alfred Bordon in The Prestige, there’s more than one of them. Sometimes twins, sometimes triplets; occasionally more. Nothing magical. No futuristic science involved. They just don’t want us in on the secret. Which I get. I wouldn’t either. The result is marvelous, even unbelievable.
It’s prestige scholarship. It’s the only explanation. Good for them.
