November is Binge Writing Month

..and I don’t actually need to binge write. I need to finish. I have no idea why people pick November for this, but there are NaNoWriMo and NationalThesisWritingMonth and AnyGoodThing. All of these wonderful initiatives seem to be good for writers and help them solve problems. Unfortunately, they don’t solve problems that I have as …

And now, an academic paperback for over $1500

So I went to Amazon to pick up Constance Classen’s The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch, which I’m looking forward to reading.  This is what I found:   While I’m definitely interested in picking up the book, and while it is clearly eligible for super saver shipping, this is the first over-$1500 academic …

Winter Break Reading

Looking back over the last six months of so, I have spent relatively little time reading completed books that weren’t either for teaching or directly related to something I was writing, or for something like a review of a tenure dossier.  Of course, I read lots of incompleted books: dissertations, drafts of books, books being …

2013 Academic Plans

1.  Refuse requests for “to spec” writing.  I did five essays like that in 2012 and while each one was a pleasant diversion from my main research agenda, the sum total–alongside grant applications–have taken me too far from the work sitting on my hard drive waiting to get out.  I won’t declare bankruptcy on existing …