Here is further academic counteradvice: the reason I dislike academic advice is that it is about speed, about how to wring more out of the day and out of yourself. I just spent about three hours revising someone’s M.A. reading list, formatting it, sending it off, finding their question (I had written it, but could … More De la vitesse
When I was in high school I had a mild eating disorder but I could not maintain it in college. I worried about it though, thought I should get it back, felt that without it I was falling down on my job in some way. In graduate school I became yet more concerned about not … More Le café
That overwhelmed feeling. You have to take control even if according to the authorities you should drift, as well as permit engulfment. That isolated feeling. The only answer is to create an R1 bubble around oneself and live in it. This takes some effort. I am addicted to this song, House of Stone. The adjuncts are … More mardi
The objects which the monastic rules assigned to monks for meditation had the task of making the world and its drives repugnant. The mode of thought which we pursue today comes from a similar determination. It has the intention, at a moment wherein the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes … More Afsnit ti
It is possible to live yet better, in my case largely by not staying up so late and going running more regularly. Yesterday, though, I planted trees along the Bayou Teche and went swimming. The ride along the levee was beautiful. Then I looked I at my citation statistics for annual review and realized that … More Sunday meditation…
At last I understand academic advice: it is not advice at all, it is a speech act undertaken to police the norms of academia. This phrase was invented by one of my reader-friends, who noticed that the Tenured Radical was upset today with Sarah Kendzior for speaking clearly, and not in the terribly indirect way … More On “policing the norms of academia”
It is soon, and I do not have time to write it, but I must do it right, and it is designed as a way to start in on my LASA paper. I think I will use my ERIP paper and write a cover letter for it, essentially, that moves it ahead. What I am … More The next paper
(It is possible to live yet better.) I woke up thinking of the career diagnosis test I took last night, which told me I should be, most obviously, a neuropsychologist, and if not, a psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist, a sociologist or a political scientist. It did not say I should not be what I am, … More The morning in review
Philology was, however, also understood in very different terms, not as an empirical study of a limited field, but as a speculative undertaking oriented toward deep time and distant things. In “We Philologists,” written in 1874, Nietzsche registered his contempt for most philologists, whose work impressed him as an absurd combination of inconsequentiality and hubris. … More On Philology
…is appreciated. It is possible to live yet better. I love my job because I am barely teaching to any aspect of the language requirement and thus, barely using any textbook-company generated books. I am severely traumatized, I am told, by the language requirement courses here and the politics around them. I know I was … More The endless winter sun
coldhearted scientist وداد 