Very pleased (and surprised) by Kelly E. Hayes’ review of UFOs, Conspiracy Theories and the New Age in the most recent issue of Nova Religio. I face an uphill battle to convince most of my colleagues why the work I do is even valid in the first place, so comments like these are most welcome indeed!
With its concise prose and engaging style, Robertson’s book offers not only a compelling analysis of contemporary millennialism, but an equally compelling model of critical rigor.
It is done. Quad scripsi, scripsi.
It feels like a time of big changes. Rex is out of nappies AT LAST, so no more nappy bags or high chairs or prams or any of the accoutrements of life with pre-schoolers cluttering up my house and my life. Today is the first day of the school holidays, and when they’re done, both boys will be at school. And that means pretty much double the number of working hours in my week.
With that are three big publications in the coming six months – After World Religions (January), my Millennial Conspiracism monograph (February) and the special issue of Nova Religio on “Conspiracy theories in Alternative and Emergent Religions” (November). At the same time, it’s clear that I won’t be walking into a tenure-track job in the foreseeable future, so there’s that. 
This weekend, I’m going on a writing retreat for three days to Upland Shepherd Huts in the Lammermuir Hills – my 40th birthday present from my beloved. I will have a wood burner, a barbeque and no internet or phone. I will be attempting to finish a draft of a novel, and plan out what my next few projects will be.
I had a couple of extra shifts at my part-time job, so my partner took the kids to her folk’s house for the weekend for help and to give me time to write. Ostensibly, to finish the book. Or, you know, to get stupidly drunk and do nothing at all. I started well, but some urgent emails came in, the stress got to me, and I couldn’t work anymore. So I played Hitman: Absolution and watched Zodiac for the twentieth time before falling asleep on the couch.
Sometimes people ask me, How do you get so much done? Too often the answer is, At the expense of my health.
I went back to it the next day, feeling ill and sheepish, and managed to pretty much finish the manuscript, with the exception of the picture rights, which are still up in the air. Turns out the editor is off this week anyway.
So it’s crunch time. I am due to submit this week, but there are still a few things to do and little time to do them in. I have finished checking the references, and will make the changes to the bibliography on friday when I have access to a PC with a recent copy of Word. I need to sit down with my various folders of journal papers and bring some references up to date. I have also lost the dedications I wrote, so I’ll have to do that again. And I’ve been putting off adding a couple of paragraphs to chapter 6… Can I do all of this by 3:30 on friday? I can try!
Then I got an email saying that the Bloomsbury had put the book’s web page online. And when I saw the cover, I felt very proud of myself.
After submitting the manuscript to After World Religions last week, I had to finish my chapter for a forthcoming INFORM/Ashgate volume on New Religions and uncertainty. It was curious: having been asked to supply a short draft of around 3000 words, I was then meant to submit a version closer to 6000. The problem was that I’d kinda done what I wanted in 3000 words… I handed it in short. I like it as it is. And there’s no point in padding.
I put it down to experience. If I’d have written that 5 years ago, it’d have been 7000 words.
Then I turned forty at the weekend. Instead of a party, I invited a couple of my oldest friends for a recording session. In 10 hours, we recorded a version of Dogs by Pink Floyd and two new songs of my composition. I was too tired to record finished vocals, so I won’t share the recordings here yet, but here is visual evidence:
And yes, that’s a box of Carlsberg.
On monday morning I had two fillings.
So I’m back to the book this morning, happy, but tired. I had an hour or so of sending out emails asking for permission to reproduce various things. Then I went through chapter 6 for about 3 hours, finding an alarming number of typos. Chapter 6 was the chapter I’d had most problems with when I wrote my PhD, and so is the one I’m most concerned with improving. But also the one that’s most daunting.
Two weeks to go.
A good, solid day’s writing, if unremarkable. Managed about three and a half hours, and got to the end of chapter 2. This is good progress, as most of the rewriting is in those two chapters. There’s bits and pieces to add or change throughout, and the whole thing needs worked over for readability, but those were the biggest challenge.
On top of this, I have been powering through the other projects which have been taking up my time, and I think I’m in good shape all round. The BASR Bulletin is done, pending proofing; the problems with the IAHR are resolved; and After World Religions awaits a couple of signatures before full submission. Tonight is also the first class in my new Alternative Religions night class. I have some extra time this weekend, so I intend to power through the current draft to the end, and then put it aside for a week or so. During that time, I’ll be finishing off an overdue chapter for another book, and will try to get on top of the more mundane aspects – clearing the photographs and newspaper stories, and contacting a few of the people who are mentioned in it. This will also give me time to think what else the final draft needs.
Talking of After World Religions, I took delivery of the artwork this week:
What’s the real difference between conspiracists and a popularized, that is a teachable version of social critique inspired by a too quick reading of… Pierre Bourdieu…? … in both cases again it is the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the dark acting always consistently, continuously, relentlessly… I find something troublingly similar in the structure of the explanation, in the first movement of disbelief and, then, in the wheeling of causal explanations… it worries me to detect… many of the weapons of social critique (Latour 2004, 229-30).
I spent the morning dealing with other thing which demanded my attention, and I managed to get about three hours on the book in the afternoon. I went back to the start of the book and started working through it on a micro level. And today felt like hard work for the first time in the process. After the big structural changes, I am working through sentence-by-sentence, word-by-word, and each little change seems to spread out and require other changes before or after it. Other paragraphs don’t seem so neccessary any more. Reducing one section changes the balance of the overall composition. But I can see it starting to take on a different character now.
But frankly, its been a shitty week, and I’m burned out. Instead I went to toast my friend Ethan Quillen having submitted his thesis. I was supposed to go back to work after that, but I couldn’t be bothered and went to see Mad Max: Fury Road instead. It’s really something.
My first of two full days of work for this week. I got a flurry of emails yesterday and this morning regarding my IAHR panels, the journal issue I am guest-editing and the BASR Bulletin which I needed to deal with straight off this morning. But at 1PM, I managed to sit down at last to hash my way through the draft for the first time. I did all of the big structural changes needed, and worked my way through the comments I’d noted down as I read through. To be completely honest, it took me a good while to get going, and I skipped a good number of the text-level changes at the beginning, but I will pick it up there on Friday. I stopped then to do some work on my Alternative Religions class for Wednesday, and to practise for my Birthday recording session in two weeks (more on that later).
I thought you might like this, from the concluding chapter:
Millennial and alternative archaeological narratives present sweeping accounts of the present—as framed by the ancient past and anticipating a prophetic future—unavailable to those of us informed only by our socially-constructed knowledge, lacking the channelled, synthetic or experiential knowledge they have access to. For the conspiracist sees subjects inside history and society as constructs of ‘alien’ information systems in which thoughts, values, and beliefs do not originate with the subject. In contrast to the limited and impoverished ‘everyday subject’, the metaphysical conspiracist is constructed as “a perfect autonomous subject who, despite being one of the majority outside the conspiracy’s elite, remains unaffected by the conspiracy’s operations and untouched by its disinformation—unlike the rest of society” (Maton 2003, 28).
However, the accounts of Strieber, Wilcock and in particular Icke ascribe a remarkable lack of personal agency to the majority of individuals, who are constructed as a sleeping, aquiescent majority whose every thought and action is determined by the conspiratorial agents. The irony then, is that these discourses simultaneously seek to empower the individuality of the subject while disempowering the masses. In claiming to address disempowerment, they in fact remove agency from the majority and restrict it for a special class: an epistemic elect.
Now go watch David Icke on Alex Jones yesterday:
Monday was a right-off because of a Dentist’s appointment and an appointment at Rex’s soon-to-be Primary School, so I wangled myself a couple of hours to catch up today by pretending to be working at the Scottish Parliament and putting Rex in the creche. I finished my close reading, ready to start writing in earnest tomorrow.
Am considering using the following quote from Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes as an epigraph:
“Dad, will they ever come back?”
“No. And yes.” Dad tucked away his harmonica. “No not them. But yes, other people like them. Not in a carnival. God knows what shape they’ll come in next. But sunrise, noon, or at the latest, sunset tomorrow they’ll show. They’re on the road.”
“Oh, no,” said Will.
“Oh, yes, said Dad. “We got to watch out the rest of our lives. The fight’s just begun.”
They moved around the carousel slowly.
“What will they look like? How will we know them?”
“Why,” said Dad, quietly, “maybe they’re already here.”
Both boys looked around swiftly.
But there was only the meadow, the machine, and themselves.
Also, this arrived:
A slow start due to a late night watching the election results. Read Chapters 5 and 6, continuing to add items to the index. I stopped before tackling the conclusion, however, as I was utterly knackered and I had a recording session that evening, so I went for a walk instead.
At this point, I am rather happy with the manuscript, and see less rewriting than I would have thought. Some questions that are arising:
David G. Robertson 