I wrote a book!!

It is written! It is shipped! I FEEL AWESOME.

Pity that I can't enjoy any real vacation after that, since classes start tomorrow. But you know, you roll with the punches. And honestly, it doesn't bring me down that classes start tomorrow. I have written a book. I have seen its voluminous pages neatly tucked into a Priority Shipping box and sent off to my editor. I have formally updated my CV to list the book as 'in press'. (This is the right term once it goes to copy editing, right?) I feel good, the rest of the world be damned.

So for a change, let's just have a little fun on this blog, shall we? :)

Flavia jokingly included a link to a recent post of mine as defensive citation, which just tickled me. Even if she and I worked in the same field, which we do not, she is quickly attaining the status of what my grandmother would call "a big macher," whilst I am...well, not nobody, but not much above that. The idea of someone of her status citing someone of mine defensively is frankly hilarious to me.

But her post reminded me that I have pulled off some mildly ridiculous citations in my book* that, if I'm honest, are there for one of three reasons.  These are, to wit:

1. Another scholar is more famous and powerful than I, and I don't want to make an enemy out of that person — even if hir work is all but irrelevant to mine. (This is more or less what Flavia characterized as 'defensive citation'.
2. Another scholar is a friend of mine, and I want to give them a tip o' the hat. This reason goes double if said scholar has been a friend of mine since our grad school days, or if zi directed me to some information that I found useful for the book.
3. I thought it would be fucking hilarious to get away with citing it, whether or not it truly required a formal citation.

So for more entertainment, let's play a little game of Dr. Koshary's Ludicrous Book Citations.

1. How many old friends did Dr. Koshary cite just give them a shout-out, even though their work is relatively small-scale and largely irrelevant to his topic?
a. 1
b. 2
c. 3
d. 4
e. He stopped counting at 15.

2. How many of Dr. Koshary's citations qualify as 'defensive', as per Flavia's description, and/or sucking up to more powerful colleagues likely to read the book?
a. 5
b. 10
c. 15
d. He should have stopped counting at 20, before his face turned that red.

3. Which humorous music video did Dr. Koshary manage to cite?

a. 3-Way ("You guys are still here?")
b. Iran So Far ("...But you're in New York now, baby!")
c. Jack Sparrow ("Now back to the good part!")
d. Motherlover ("Every Mother's Day needs a Mother's Night!")

4. Despite proof-reading everything repeatedly, how many mistakes did Dr. Koshary find in the bibliography after mailing the package to the Press — in fact, while he was looking at it to find material for this post?
a. 1
b. 2
c. 3
d. 4

5. After discovering the answer to Question 4, what colorful language did Dr. Koshary just bellow to himself in his apartment?
a. "Fuck me and all of creation!"
b. "Son of a bitch!"
c. "Klatu verada nikto!"
d. "Goddamnsonofabitchbastardfuck!"
 

*Unless the Press' copyeditors force me to discard any of these citations as needless clutter, I suppose.

RBOC: Proof-reading, re-formatting, and drinking

• Yeah, I know that this is not the ideal scenario, and usually one should proof-read one's work whilst sober. 
• That hypothetical goodie-two-shoes, though, can suck it. He didn't have to make sure that every last em-dash was re-typed as an en-dash.
• Or ensure that all the bibliography entries were thoroughly formatted with headline-style capitalization, no matter what Zotero did automatically. 
• (Have you ever noticed that Zotero's headline-style capitalization is thrown off by hyphenated compounds?)
• Or make sure that, even in said bibliography, every goddamned character that Zotero formatted in italics is re-formatted as underlined.
• Or figure out how languages written in non-Latin alphabets might constitute formal exceptions to any of the above, given the demands of both the Press and the Chicago Manual of Style.
• Oh, pardon me, I meant: Chicago Manual of Style. 
• OMFG, no, I didn't: CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE. CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE. CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE.  See, motherfuckers? We can handle italicization in the current technological age. What the bloody hell is the good of using one kind of font strictly to indicate that we really want to use another font? 
• F.M.L.
• I bet that this hypothetical jagoff also didn't feel obliged to do this kind of proof-reading at 1:00 on Sunday morning in order to raise the odds that he might actually ship out the entire manuscript on Monday.
• Fucksox.
• On the plus side, I bet that this hypothetical jagoff couldn't mix a Manhattan half as smoothly knee-weakening as can I. So fuck him.

Not-so-RBOC: Did I finish?

• I just finished writing the book. I think. I tied up the last page of the last bit reasonably well, I think. I think. Now there will be no more new words to add, but only the proofreading to do. I think.
• I am so, so ready for this work to be completed. As I've gotten close to deadline, I have found myself grinding my teeth as a nervous habit while I work. The gums around the molars of my lower left jaw are aching.
• I think I have finished in no small part because, as I ended the last paragraph, I had a feeling of 'Gee, now it all comes together!' I can see this book as a whole.
• Oh, yeah, there's still the matter of one photograph whose copyright permission I need to secure. FML.
• But once I do that, then I can proofread it and, pending any last thoughts my editor wants to drop on me, I can ship it.
• I think.

CYA citations and memes

I may well have worked the last of my citations into the manuscript this evening. To be perfectly frank, I was motivated to look into a few sources as a CYA maneuver to head off criticism that I never thought about XYZ analytical approaches.  Several pseudology colleagues of mine, who I know are going to read this book when it sees print, are more interested in XYZ than I am, and I live in possibly-maybe-just-a-little-bit unreasonable dread that they will be disappointed with my analysis and pillory me in the book reviews. (One in particular terrifies me, since zi has actually been awfully kind to me so far, and I am quietly aware that I owe hir big time.)

I've already had the realization several times over that I cannot and will not, despite all best efforts, completely thrill everyone, and that it's a bad idea to try.  And yet it's hard to let go of that grad-student-y desire to cite everything that moves!

 
But I at least feel like looking up these last few sources did me some good. I'm certainly not going to develop a new analysis for the book based on them, but I like the ideas they dropped on me, and I may follow up on them in the future.  And, more to the point, I feel – reasonably or not – like referring to them in a few well-chosen places throughout the manuscript is the equivalent of reinforcing a chink in my armor.  That's probably a really unhelpful way to view this whole process, but since I'm re-reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy again this summer, that's the first image that comes to mind. (Are you starting to think that I need to read something new?  I'm starting to think that.)

What the hell, if it works, it works.

Home stretch

I am now within ten percent of hitting my ideal word count for the manuscript. A lot of today's production was actually cutting and pasting: I had deleted some chunks of the last draft because they seemed to meander and distract from my larger points, and today I was able to see how to re-insert them in different places and contextualize them better. (I think/hope.) I also wrote some new passages here and there, so I feel good about the day's work.

Good thing, too, because I have to shake a leg if I'm going to make this deadline. I've almost finished figuring out the permission scenarios for all of the images I want to include, but I really have to discipline myself not to zone out on such relatively minor issues when I have writing yet to do. If one picture doesn't work, then another will take its place, and I will not worry. I've still got a little over 8,000 words' worth of fish to fry.  I'm still anxious about coming up noticeably short, but there are a few things I know I need to flesh out still, and then there's the chapter overview in the introduction, the preface, and the epilogue to round out.  It should be in the ballpark, at least.

But hey, 4,000 words since Wednesday!

Oenophilic observation

Humans have been fooling around with representational scratches and doodles for a bloody long time, but it's only within the last 5,000 years or so that people developed coherent drawing systems that represented spoken language.  In this sense, all of human (written) history and literature only goes back this far.

Of course, it's not as though no one said anything cool before then. Many cultures have handed down oral literature that goes back who-in-the-hell-knows-how-far. But a brief survey of the offerings reveals that precious little of this oral literature seems to have been composed in the total absence and ignorance of fermented beverages. Go ahead: I double-dog-dare you to try to find an ancient saga or epic tale that doesn't refer explicitly to wine, beer, or some other fermented alcoholic beverage.

In other words, human literary endeavor seems to have gotten started only after humans figured out how to ferment sugars into alcohol.  No beer, no epic.  No wine, no history.

Coincidence?  I think not.

Pardon me while I go off to enjoy a last glass of Burgundy.

One month

I'm down to one month before a) classes begin, and b) THE BOOK IS DUE.  I am currently attempting to power through syllabus creation so that I can put in my book orders and then restore my attention to the manuscript, which is coming along, but needs — well, just look at the progress meter and you'll see what it needs.  Can someone please arrange for a metric ton of coffee – unground, if you don't mind – to be delivered to my door?  I don't know if I'll have the strength for this otherwise.

But of course, I must, so I suppose I must.

Meanwhile, I can't think of any appropriate song for the phrase "one month," so I'll be a cheapskate and just give you "Two weeks."

Writing like a Sith

After wrestling with my feelings about current events in Research Country for several days during which I wrote little, I busted out almost 1000 words this evening.  How did I do it? 

The Dark Side of the Force.  I allowed my burgeoning anger and dismay guide me for a bit, rather than more dispassionate, academic feelings.  As Palpatine once remarked, anger and fear can make you stronger.  I mean, yeah, for a little while, and then eventually you'll be overthrown by a bunch of teenagers driving an aluminum falcon, but for a few moments here and there, it proves useful.  

The trick, I think (and hope), is to rein myself in before my particular perspective on events turns into a sheer ranty op-ed.  So far, I believe I have pulled that off, but it will be interesting to see what I write over the next few days as I try to reconcile all of this stuff with my pseudological analysis of all the Damn Lies I've been working on for years.

And yes, this post was about 50% an excuse to post a link to a funny video.  Got a problem with that?

Writing goal jinxes

Clearly, I need to bone up on magic and ritual surrounding the craft of writing on deadline.  I made the mistake on Friday, after a good writing day, of ordering myself to push ahead to a total word count of 75000 by the end of the weekend. 

I then proceeded not to get there until right now.  Sheesh.  Do I need to consult a shaman about this stuff?  Or do I just need to stop setting myself intermediate word count goals when I have a bright-line final deadline anyway?

What jinxes your attempts to write toward a goal?  What counter-hexes protect you?  Share your sorcery, please!

Moment of selfishness

I won't pretend this is noble, but I feel the need to plead with the people of Research Country:

STOP DOING THINGS.

You have no idea the havoc you are wreaking on my linchpin book chapter.  I'm writing as fast as I can, and you are making my life harder by continuing to do stuff.  Could you all just fucking hold still for two more goddamn months?  I mean, don't try to hold your breath or anything crazy like that, but please, please stop doing interesting things for a little while.  Go read a book or do a jigsaw puzzle or something.  Maybe catch up on Breaking Bad, I don't know.  But please, just give it all a rest.  You are wearing me down to the bone.

*collapses across keyboard*

P.S. Could you please also stop killing each other?  I really feel like you're going to regret that later.

RBOC: Buckling down to summer in spite of my advancing age edition

First, the more personal, grumbly stuff:

• I had a birthday recently.  I was not happy about it.  I've never been conflicted about my birthday before, but I was grappling with the anxiety of being [insert milestone age] and not being all the things I once envisioned I would be at this age.  Fortunately, several friends, including the lovely Fie Upon This Quiet Life, took me out for cheese and wine, which made it much better.
• I'm really not so thrilled with the increasingly evident male-pattern baldness that I can see on my head every morning before I shower.  It's not a pattern I've ever seen in any living ancestor of mine.  I find myself scanning old family photographs to divine some idea of what I will look like in another ten years or so.  (The endemic genetic tendency on all sides?  Dorky.  I'm doomed.)

Okay, now for the better (or at least more academic) stuff.

• This is THE SUMMER OF SCARY WORK.  Okay, maybe not quite creature-feature scary, but it's intimidating.  I have until the end of summer to finish my book revisions whilst I plan my syllabi, one prep of which will be brand-new.  And, at time of writing, I really don't give a damn about the syllabi.  Ho hum.
• The book, now that I care about.  I've been digesting ideas for a while now without much committing them to print, but now that I've kicked out the most recent article, I have a lot more stuff to shoehorn into the manuscript.  Naturally, that doesn't fully address the critiques on my plate, but it will go some way toward that goal.
• Oh, and just in case you missed reading my anxious thoughts about employment, I'm back on the job market this fall, as I roll into the second year of my term contract.  At the moment, I have delusions that I will blast into the job market like an avenging anti-hero in a revisionist Western charging into a saloon to annihilate everything that moves.  No doubt, though, that I will soon fall back upon my more familiar metaphorical avatar of Frodo desperately clawing his way up Mount Doom before he expires from exhaustion and despair.  But hey, that's another day and another cup of coffee!
• I'm getting paid this summer!!  The pro-forma renewal letter that CBU sent me explained that my second contract year begins in July, which means I will have no paycheck gap this summer.  I am even more pleased about this than I am astonished.

The North Pole I have charted...

Now that I feel the icy, sepulchral fingers of professional development on my pseudological shoulders, I figured I should start pushing myself to work a little faster by putting up meters for my progress on the two big writing projects of the moment.  I'm also trying to exercise again, since I've gotten pretty sick of the spare tire I've grown in recent months.  (And since I just bought a year membership at the local gym, I might as well go and get my money's worth.)  Wanna know how all of my efforts to write, edit, or get to the gym today have gone?  Consult Ms. Holiday.



Ugh.  Some days it feels like there was no point to waking up at all.  At least it's happy hour now.

What is your academic (class) identity?

Get a comfy seat, I'm posting a thought piece.  I've been thinking about the project of identity construction in which academics engage.  Class is no small matter for anyone in American society, even if we like to pretend otherwise.  I'm starting to wonder if we academics don't repeat in microcosm the general American tendency to misinterpret our own class status — that is, not just in general society, but within academic society.

For decades, it was a truism that many, if not most Americans preferred to identify themselves as middle class, no matter how they looked to outside observers.  I have a suspicion that this tendency might fade a bit in the next few years, now that the U.S. economy seems to be contracting on a more sustained level and the differences between haves and have-nots become much starker to people who hadn't noticed such stuff before.  But anyway, my point is that academics of my acquaintance often mirror this historical tendency by thinking of themselves as just getting by in the system, when in fact they're doing much better than a great many of their colleagues elsewhere.  (Just take a look at the, uh, exchanges that break out between tenure-track and adjunct faculty all over the academic corner of the internet.)

All of the foregoing is just to frame my thinking.  What really captures my attention is that this tendency seems to start way before we land our first jobs.  I recall a lot of this identity construction underway back in grad school.

In stereotypical fashion, I was an upper-middle-class college student who thought I was merely middle-class.  Alma Mater U., much like the high school I had attended, did relatively little to challenge this self-perception, since a fair number of my peers came from flat-out wealthy families next to which I really did look petit-bourgeois.  Sure, I knew people from truly poor families on full-ride scholarships, but that only bolstered the idea that I was in the middle stratum. My awakening as to where my family was positioned on the national scale – as opposed to the rarefied world of my hometown – took some time.  But after a few years, it started to sink in that I had a lot more class-inflected advantages growing up than most people could claim.  The mere fact that I had been only vaguely aware of what AMU cost my family per year suddenly meant something to me one day, after years of it meaning nothing to my conscious mind. 

And then I went to grad school at Dear Old University, a huge comprehensive state school.  There, I began to understand on a deeper level that I was not only privileged growing up, but that some of my new peers wouldn't even see a meaningful distinction between me and those rolling-in-dough rich kids from college.  (Even though I certainly did.)  It hit me that, judged by my friends who had graduated from various state universities or more obscure liberal arts colleges, or who had had to pay their own arduous way through their college educations, the fact that I had gone to AMU meant that I could not possibly call myself middle-class with a straight face.  It must have sounded to them like the Eddie Izzard bit where some fabulously wealthy aristocrat modestly acknowledges, "I'm...comfortable."

But here's the curve ball: as I moved through my graduate training at DOU, my self-perception altered downward.  I was clearly not living the rich and easy lifestyle, and after a few years, I became one of those grad students who chafes to open his undergrad alumni magazine and read about his former classmates graduating from medical school or selling a hedge fund for Croesus' fortune.  I was keenly aware that I didn't have money, and that I was training in a field that would not make me rich.   (Not by American standards, at least.  Globally, we're all the 1%, yadda yadda.)

Plus, I was comparing myself to my colleagues at Ivy League graduate programs who seemed to enjoy access to unlimited funding and a great deal of mentoring.  DOU guaranteed me a few years of funding, but not a full ride by any means.  Since most of that funding was in the form of TAships, we were encouraged to put them off as long as possible by winning external funding.  I got accustomed to writing grant proposals to support myself as a matter of course.  I began to feel – go right ahead and laugh if you want, since it is laughable – like DOU was the mean streets of some impoverished urban neighborhood, and the Ivies were the graceful suburbs of affluence.  In other words, I started to fantasize that I was a working-class academic.  I told myself that the blessing in disguise of being at a school with limited funding was that I was forced to become proficient and prolific at grant-writing.  (Understand that I'm blushing slightly as I write these lines.)  I told myself that I would come out of this a better academic worker than my Ivy League colleagues who – as I imagined to be the case – were simply handed opportunities on a silver platter in grad school and consequently were unaccustomed to churning out grant proposals to be read by unfriendly eyes.  I told myself that DOU would make me tougher and more of a survivor than the 'rich kids' at Harvard and Yale.

This risible fantasy actually served a purpose: it kept me from despair when I was toiling on my grant proposals, and later on my dissertation.  It provided a bit of comfort during some hard times.  It also reminded me that I needed to treat academia as the dog-eat-dog world it really is, and that I would have to be both aggressive and tenacious about seeking out a living.  I daresay I underestimated how much every academic needs to do this, but it's hard to see past your own nose when you're absorbed in the lonely, isolating work of diss writing, and living as cheaply as you [believe you] can manage because your funding has fallen through.

But now, just a few years later, I look back at this self-identification stunt and shake my head.  Just as I was oblivious to my class position in college, I was oblivious to how good I had it at DOU even at the worst of times.  Let me list the ways:

• I entered graduate school without any student loan debt from college.  'Nuff said.
• DOU is hardly podunk: it's a good – one might even say great – state school with more money than most of its peers, and, the gripes of my professors and classmates aside, it truly is an R1 institution with some world-class researchers and facilities.  (Oh, to access that library again!)  My colleagues and I were deeply privileged to study with those people, in those places, with that stuff.
• I never felt exiled to the edge of civilization, like so many do at, say, Compass Directional State University.  DOU-Town was really a fabulous place to live, even (or especially) for twentysomethings with limited budgets for entertainment.  It was not a harsh existence.
• I managed to eke my way through nearly a decade of graduate study with only a modest amount of student loan debt.  Sure, I'll be paying it off for twenty years, but I don't fear that monthly automatic deduction the way some people do.
• I hardly ever consented to share a dwelling space with a roommate, because I value my privacy, and I was able to find spaces cheap enough that I could foot the rent bill myself.  Granted, that last apartment in DOU-Town was a cockroach-ridden shithole, but still.
• I never had to take up a full-time job that jeopardized my ability to move through my program.  
• I never suffered from a catastrophic illness that forced me to take off years at a time to recover.  
• I was never responsible for the welfare of a spouse, or children, or infirm relatives.

In totality, it looks like I was beginning to associate sustained hard work and frugality with impoverishment, rather than what they are: commonplaces of most people's lives.  I was playing misery poker as misery solitaire.

I'm trying to keep all of this in mind so that I can properly appreciate the tub of butter I've fallen into at Cute-as-a-Button University.  And, perhaps, so I don't take it too seriously when my (tenured!) colleagues here start to complain about their overworked, under-appreciated lot in life.

So, tell me, friends: what is your academic class identity?  How did (does) your graduate training affect your self-image as a classed body?  How does that image stack up against the wider world of higher education?  How hard did you laugh at this post, based on your own experiences?

May I please—oh, bite me.

I would like to observe that hunting down potential copyright holders so that I can request permission to use their images in my book is really fucking annoying.  Is this is an aggravation for most other disciplines, or even for other pseudologists?  As it happens, most of the images I want to reproduce are publicity photos of one kind or another, some of them created by companies that may no longer even exist, for all I know.  And all of them, I'm willing to bet, don't expect to earn one red cent on those photographs.  The photographs aren't the product; they advertise the product.  I didn't even get these photos from any original source — I downloaded them from the internet.  They lack absolutely any identifying data in most cases; I'm lucky if I can even determine the parent corporation behind any particular image. 

The whole stupid business feels like looking for a needle in a haystack.  But in my case, the needle may not actually exist, the haystack on which I should be focused might have been eaten already, and the farmers who own the relevant haystacks don't give a good goddamn about me and my book anyway.  Oh, and since some kinds of images can be reproduced without formal permission as fair use, I should add that I could find out by the end of the hunt that I never needed the fucking needle in the first place.

Can't believe I have wasted an entire workday dealing with this idiocy.

*grouch*

RBOC: New year edition

• I'm doing my best to maintain a social life over winter break, so that I don't cloister myself in my apartment and get all weird and stir-crazy.  Mixed results so far, but at least I occasionally get to hang out with Fie and her family.  Fun to start the new year with some good old-fashioned hang-out sessions.
• Speaking of Fie, I can't believe that teh internetz still have not commented at all upon this photograph.  The sheer cuteness has overwhelmed all of you, hasn't it?
• I am righteously sick of planning my spring syllabi.  Can't these things just work themselves out? I'm starting to feel dread when I sit down at my computer and see my unfinished syllabi sitting there.  More than anything else, it's planning out the day-by-day schedule that irritates me.  It's not how I conceive of the material I teach, but I guess it's hard to avoid doing this for the students' sakes.
• Reading what I just wrote above makes me realize that a vision of my own private hell is a split consciousness in which half of me is my professorial self, and the other half is me when I was a junior in college.  Both halves would deserve the other, I fear.
• Might as well admit it: I'm fussing with my syllabi partly to procrastinate from working on my manuscript revisions.  I need to get my head into that game for real, now that we're into January and my winter break no longer feels like an endless Siberian hibernation.
• The thermostat in my apartment appears to be partly a theoretical construction.  I am always a little cold nowadays, and as a result, I have become obsessed with acquiring woolen clothing.  I'm trying to convince myself that I've already bought all that I need, especially now that the clutch of crew neck sweaters has arrived.
• To continue with obsessive acquisition, I recently indulged in a small online shopping spree of goods relating to my vainest, geekiest interest: nice shaving gear.  I'm getting to know a little badger-hair brush that I acquired, and I have a slightly larger one on the way.  I'm also currently working my way through a sample pack of aftershave splashes and colognes, all of them variations of a particular scent that I like.  My life may be an unending stream of chaos and confusion, but damn it, I will confront all of it with an amazingly smooth, close shave, and smelling good.  (I finally grok my female friends who just don't feel capable of leaving the house until they have applied their lipstick and mascara.)
• Unless some more deals get worked out in Congress soon, I expect to be paying more in taxes this year.  Please remind me not to buy any more shaving stuff until I settle on an aftershave.  And maybe a cologne.

Reading; and, refusing burdens

Moria has a great new post up at her place, observing that too much writing and not enough reading can lead to a discomfiting sense of distance and confusion about one's own material.  I'm feeling that hard right now, in fact.  I've been having one of those weeks in which I tried to re-work the journal article I'm revising now to serve as my conference paper at the Big Giant Pseudology Conference, and instead found that this is a futile endeavor: the one will not translate into the other.  Now that I've admitted that, I have about four and a half pages of talk drafted, with more soon to follow.  It's a good thing, too, because I am increasingly aware of how staggeringly ignorant I feel of my own subfield of pseudology – basically, I identify as a Damn Liar specializing in Research Country – at the moment.  A new Annual Review of Pseudology article came out covering the recent developments in my subfield, and it freaked me out to read through that and its bibliography and see all these pertinent, interesting-looking books and articles that I'd never fucking heard of.  I can honestly say that this didn't happen much to me three years ago, when I was writing my diss; there was little on either Damn Lies or Research Country that I hadn't read, and less that I hadn't heard of.  The volume of research published just in the last year blows my mind; how has this stuff not come to my attention before a freaking Annual Review article collated all of it?  And, of course, the thought immediately comes to me: I can't finish writing my book until I've read all this stuff!  Wrong, wrong, wrong, I know.  But it's kind of unsettling to me how quickly I can become ignorant of the latest work after just over a year of full-time teaching.  I may need to start typing reminders into my calendar to check the various journals for new articles.

*                *                  *                  *                  *                 *

Meanwhile, I'm having a moment of hesitation that would astonish Fie Upon This Quiet Life, given how vociferously I have argued in favor of being mercenary and self-interested as an early-career academic trying to climb the ranks.  A student of mine has asked if I would oversee hir independent study next semester, and I haven't actually said no yet.  Let me list the pros and cons:

Pro:

• Zi is whip-smart and fun to teach.
• I have some specialized knowledge in short supply at CBU that makes me a more obvious candidate for the job than most other professors zi knows.  If I say no, then zi may be unable to pursue the independent study.
• I feel unusually sympathetic toward this student, since zi has confided to me that zi has been having a difficult time due to some of the interpersonal politics of the university.

Con:

• My specialized knowledge is still not ideal for the job, and I am sure that zi is asking partly because the prof who would be a natural is never around, wrapped up in other business.
• While I am deeply sympathetic to the student's unhappiness, I also recognize that I cannot alter that situation, and if zi continues to rely on me as a confidante, I can do no more than be a friendly ear for hours at a time.  Seriously.  Zi could go on indefinitely, I fear.  Often when I have other work to do.
• This is flatly NOT MY JOB.  No one is going to give me a course release for this independent study.  No one is going to give me a salary bump to compensate for the lost time.  And certainly no one else will do the supplemental research for my book while I'm mired in extra grading and advising.
• For real, people, it's NOT MY JOB!  I'm a two-year hired gun here, albeit kindly treated and more or less a full voting member of the department.  I refuse to be burdened like a pack mule without either concomitant job security or financial compensation.
• And finally, as cruel as it sounds, it's just not my job.  The student isn't even a pseudology major; zi is just taking a course with me.  Someone from Stu's own department really needs to be stepping up to the plate to advise hir, instead of letting hir cast about like this.

Really, I suppose my mind is made up, and I'm just stalling on sending an email disappointing a favorite student.  Sigh.

Contracted

My editor contacted me.  The press is giving me the book contract.

I may be too shocked to be elated just yet.  I think I'm going to go home and mix myself a nice drink whilst I ponder the minutiae of deadlines and back matter.  Meanwhile, I'll let Daler Mehndi do the crazy ecstatic dancing for me.  Now, where did I leave my satin robe and turban...?

Gotta crank 'em out

As the job cycle begins anew, I've got one eye on the pseudology jobs, just in case I see a good one to go for.  There are a few out there, so I'm keeping my CV updated and dusting off my Interfolio account.  And of course, I need to keep my letters of reference current.  That led to calling most of my letter-writers today just to "make sure that they got the link."  While talking with Dr. Whirlwind, zi of the impressive CV, zi said in a slightly lowered tone of voice – which I heard as "Heed what I say now" – that I needed to get serious about putting out some journal articles.  (I don't have any in a major journal.)  Even with the book manuscript that I hope will someday soon be under contract, zi said that all the book could do was buy me some time; one way or another, I have to apply myself to getting some articles out.

In pseudology, at least, it can take years to get an article into print, so this process could take every bit as long as bringing my book to print.  Whirlwind's suggestion was to take a few of my drafted book chapters and re-work them to play around with theory – almost as experiments, really – and send them out.  And, as absurd as it sounded to me, zi recommended putting them on my CV as soon as I send them out as "submitted."  This sounds odd, but it corresponds with Flavia's advice to me to play up everything that I can at this stage of my career, when I literally have nothing significant in publication and need to demonstrate somehow that I can be taken seriously.

Of course, Whirlwind is speaking to me from the vantage point of a very ambitious researcher who has achieved hir goal of full professorship at a bona fide R1 institution.  As I have mentioned before, I have my doubts that I want to follow that exact career path as an academic.  But I don't doubt that even crunchy-granola liberal arts colleges will take the liberty in this godawful job market of judging job candidates partly on their publication credits.  Journal articles have been literally the last thing on my mind within my recent professional development, and I guess that I have to stop letting that slide.

Good thing I'm about to start attending a writing group with some colleagues tomorrow.  We'll see what hours of caffeine and fear of public shame will do for my productivity on a Saturday.

Frazzled: the run-on

OMG I am so tired that I can barely focus my eyes right now but despite that I am drinking an after-work beer at my desk because I'm underslept from trying to work on my syllabi and tone up the response to my readers' reports and all of that was sort of thrown off to the side last night because I had to change my cell phone number because it used to belong to some cheap thug and I was getting scary text messages and so now I'm underslept and had to go to a workshop on campus this morning and don't get me wrong the workshop is actually through Wednesday and then I have another workshop to go to on campus for Thursday and Friday for which I'm even less prepared and all I really want to do right now is finish my response and then think cool thoughts about my upper-division syllabi but I can't really do that right now because I'm a little stressed out because my entire back from my hips all the way up through my shoulders and neck is sore from helping Fie Upon This Quiet Life do a little preparatory moving and also I'm totally stressed out because my car's electrical system is slowly going on the fritz and my car title is totally fucked because the bureaucrats in Godforsaken State fucked up the odometer reading and now I'll have to get a notarized document and mail off the title certificate so that they can send me a corrected version if they feel like it and so until then I'm driving around Cornstate with expired license tags from Godforsaken State and a broken headlight cover and apparently as of last night a burnt-out turn signal and as if that weren't enough my dishwasher is on the fritz for real and I half-suspect that my leasing company will have to replace the whole damn thing so I guess it's good that I've built up so much experience in hand-washing dishes because that's what I'm still doing until they get around to that and that decreases my energy not only to cook but to worry about the subtleties of pedagogical method that this workshop is exploring and as if that weren't enough to fray my nerves I learned this morning that a family friend has died and that creates a lot of unpleasant unbloggable problems for my family so enough about that but at least I suppose I have my own health and I'm slowly figuring out my syllabi although I have four freaking days at the end of the semester for my Intro to Libel and Slander for which I literally have nothing fucking scheduled because I will have completely run out of things to say and again I must remind myself that life really could be a whole hell of a lot worse and hey I guess I've had much worse problems than my new-found difficulty in juggling schedules to go out with the sudden and I mean really sudden and unanticipated rise in women who want to go out with me and hell I suppose that if I have to take the constant low-level risk of driving with expired license tags in a dodgy car in order to have a dinner date when my work life is in overdrive and the unbloggable anxiety is rising once again then I'll just have to do that and be content that my social life is suddenly quite interesting.

RBOC: Arrival in Cornstate

• I now live in Cornstate!  Seriously, some of these stereotypes of an abundance of maize in the Midwest have some truth to them.  It's everywhere.  The city I live in isn't necessarily defined by corn, but the state at large sure is.  Hence that particular pseudonym.  I'm still working on one for the city.
• Many thanks to Fie Upon This Quiet Life and her husband for putting me up for the night in their swanky, sophisticated digs!  (Not kidding.  It's awesome.)  I was so tired out after a day of cleaning and driving that I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow — even though there was a big portrait of William Shakespeare staring down at me from the wall.
• Fie and partner also served me a scrumptious dinner when I arrived.  One of the featured dishes was, of course, corn.  :)
• It's fucking hotter than a fucking motherfucker.  I continue to despise this heat wave, and global warming in general.  It's bad enough having to haul around boxes of books while sweating buckets, but I'm actually more irritated by having to drive around the area to one furniture store after another, looking for cheap yet not-so-crappy furniture, while the sun beats down on my car and me.  It doesn't help that these stores are all in strip malls, either.  Strip malls are not friendly places.
• Neither are big-box stores.  Blech.
• One the one hand, I'm going to move again in two years, so I can't really purchase the most beautiful, durable, heavy furniture around — I really want to limit myself to stuff that I could conceivably haul away with me.  On the other hand, I'm reaching a point of stubborn, bourgeois refusal to buy the cheapest, flimsiest stuff available to spare myself money and time.  Bourgeois consumption appears to be a progressive syndrome.  
• I'm making the best of this tendency, though.  By forcing myself to comparison-shop, I found a wonderful, lower-back-friendly bed for less than half of retail price.    
• I also bought a discontinued model* of office desk at a big discount.  Since that would require a $100 delivery charge obviating the discount, I figured that I could get a cheap piece or two of living room furniture.  After searching exhaustively with a very patient salesperson, I found a decent enough sofa-loveseat combo for $500.  It's not the leather upholstery that my inner contemptible bourgeois fuck craves, but it looks nice anyway.  With all of that delivered in one go, it's a good deal. Won't have any of it until next week, but such is the way of furniture shopping.
• On top of all those needs that keep me driving around in the heat, I won't have internet access in my home until next week, either.  My office at CBU isn't air-conditioned right now – I think they turned it down low on the assumption that no one would be in the building until August – so it's not exactly a pleasant workspace.  After hauling a ton of books into that office, periodically wiping the sweat from my face so I wouldn't drip on the texts, I was not inclined to stay there to work.  Guess I have to keep café-surfing for another week.  
• And work I must!  I have to give my (potential) editor a formal response to the reader reports by tomorrow.  Yikes!  Gonna be a heavily caffeinated evening.
• Did I mention that it's hot?  How hot is it, Koshary?  Weeeeeelllll, it's so hot that the cover of the left headlight on my car fell off the goddamn car last week before I left Ghosttown, after the adhesive holding it in place melted.  I am not making this up.  I didn't even realize this was possible.  I was frankly astonished that I made it all the way to Fie's house without some wayward dragonfly zooming into the exposed bulb and exploding it.  Gotta find a VW dealership next week and see about fixing this.

*Extra chuckle for you all: the store discontinued the model because it sold poorly in comparison to other office furniture sets: it has a metal frame supporting the wooden top, and true bourgeois consumerist fucks disdain anything other than a pure wooden desk.  Suckers!!