“So what are you doing to distract yourself and stimulate your mind?” asked a friend on a recent Zoom call. My reply was “well, I’m rereading some classic cancer books.” Feel free to judge my mental health harshly, but it’s working for me. I’ve finished Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. …
Continue reading “27 Dec Cancer Crawl: old cancer books: Susan Sontag Illness as Metaphor”
..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 …
Another guest post at ProfHacker on this always-timely topic.
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 …
Continue reading “And now, an academic paperback for over $1500”
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 …
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 …
I can see I’m going to have to up my game. Since my last post, I’ve had a small bevy of media appearances, which I have dutifully Tweeted and Facebooked, but between travel and too many deadlines, I’ve not posted them here. I can now see the advantage of that whole Tumblr integrate your online …
