In a recent conversation, my grandma was impressed with how much time off I get during the summer. And it’s true. With the exception of the following responsibilities, I have a three-month vacation. What to do? What to do?
The fall semester begins in thirteen weeks. One week of that will probably involve visiting family and friends in Georgia. For the rest, I have the following task list, which I hope to refine gradually:
- Get a tattoo.
- Reading
- Orality / literacy
- Critical literacy studies
- Theorizing media in transition
- Early modern print culture
- Eighteenth-century Methodism
- Book proposal
- Article on eighteenth-century Methodist periodicals
- Article on eighteenth-centurry Methodist preaching
- Article on authorship attribution study of a particular preacher’s sermons
- Revising a few grant applications for resubmission and mapping out grant deadlines
- Three weeks researching at the Methodist Archives and Research Centre in Manchester, England
- One week at SHARP 2004 conference in Lyon, France
- Tweak the department website
- Perhaps purchase a 12″ iBook.
- Project work for Romantic Circles
- Experiment with Drupal (note this and this), WordPress, MediaWiki, PG Distributed Proofreaders.
- Work on ideas for Poetry Blam and Lit Out Loud. I’ve been experimenting with the sound editor Audacity with good results.
- Figure out if Palimpsest is worth continuing. I think it is, but perhaps with a different structure and perhaps run off of software other than MovableType .
- Prep for Intro to Shakespearean Drama
- Re-read the plays
- Watch the films
- Read Corrigan’s book on writing about film (thanks for the recommendation, Chuck!)
- Much of this preparation will take place as I complete the reading listed at the top of this entry.
- Create budget
- Year-long colloquium
- Honors section of English 225
- Academic Service Learning: Partnership with University Academy
- Honors conference in the spring.
- Digital honors journal
In short, summer is a busy time for those of us who work in academia!
That’s an ambitious but productive summer plan, G. Now that two weeks of my summer have already passed, perhaps I should plan to get a little better oprganized….
Poetry Blam sounds exciting. Have you had any new inspiration about the format? Were you thinking about a individual thing or a more slam-like community site?
Not sure if you’re soliciting opinions, but I do think Palimpsest is worth continuing. (Too cough-syrupped to actually delineate why at the moment, though.)
Chuck, I wouldn’t say I was organized, but writing everything down seems to help.
Toby, what I’d like to do with the Poetry Blam is have poets (and maybe non-poets) read their favorite poems (by another poet) out loud and talk about why they like them; subsequently, readers of the site could post their own comments about that particular poem. When I talked with Michelle Boisseau about the idea, she was enthusiastic but was worried that because writers might worry over every single word, it would take people too long to write up their thoughts. So perhaps recording a conversation and posting the audio would be a better (faster) route.
Krista, thanks for the encouragement about Palimpsest. My concern right now is two-fold. First, once someone new comes to the site, it’s not exactly easy to find older stuff. Perhaps I/we need to build some kind of directory structure for the entries. Second, after an initial enthusiasm for posting things to the site, interest from participants seems to have waned. I’m pretty sure I’m going to migrate the site to Drupal (the platform used by, e.g., Kairosnews) because it is much more open-ended about who can join and contribute.
Moving to the Public
Here’s a quick reference to Charles Lowe and Terra Williams’ article, “Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom,” included in the Into the Blogosphere collection. Among many other projects (like George, I’ve got a busy summer planned), I’…
Naming the Future
Well, the site renovations seem pretty much in hand -- things are basically working (though you should let me know if you find something that isn't), and the redirects and 404s are doing their respective jobs. So, given that, like George, …
Let me know
if this new layout is wonky. I haven’t tried it in too many browsers. After I iron things out a…