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 …

[Crickets Chirping]

..and that was 2012.  Sorry for the silence here.  I’ve been lax about posting links to interviews and other media appearances here (doing so instead on twitter and facebook) — which is bad because a blog is a much better archive.(1)  It’s also not enclosed inside someone else’s proprietary scheme (let us not speak of …

Baby’s First Quebec Election

This comes a little late but sobeit.  Tuesday we voted for the first time as Canadian citizens.  We’d registered a couple weeks back, and the volunteers there assumed that as Americans we would expect fancy electronic machines.  They warned us, “it’s very old fashioned.”  And it was: we arrive at the polling place (a short …

Feature or Bug? Ebooks roll out later

Authors–especially academic authors–should always be happy when people want to read their work, and flattered by desire for access. And so please consider me flattered: thanks for reading and thanks for caring enough to tweet about it. But since Steven Shaviro’s comment mirrored my own confusion about a month ago (and has been making the …