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Category Archives: story of my life
thanks for not being a zombie
task list on steroids
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!
a ghost is born
According to Pitchforkmedia, Wilco is about to head out on tour in support of their new album A Ghost is Born, which you can listen to in its entirety online. They are scheduled to perform in Manchester (UK) on July 14 at Manchester Academy, a venue I passed twice a day last summer as I trekked between The Verdene and the John Rylands University Library. I should, in fact, be in Manchester on July 14 and will probably be staying only a short walk from the venue. So while their show in Columbia (MO) was cancelled, it looks like I’ll get to see them after all.
In other music news, I recently purchased Loretta Lynn’s new album, the Jack White-produced Van Lear Rose (iTunes), largely because I liked what I heard when she performed “Portland, Oregon” on the David Letterman show recently. I’ve picked what I think are the four best tracks (iTunes iMix), if you want to give her new music a try.
This morning we leave for San Francisco, where we will be staying at the Hotel Rex. Apparently, we will be close to Lawrence Ferlinghetti‘s City Lights Bookstore, a landmark of American literary history. It’s been twenty years since my last visit to the city. My junior year of high school was spent in northern California, a beautiful part of the world. Unfortunately, it was one in a string of bad years: four schools and three countries in four years. That was a long time ago, though.
William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition will be coming along as airplane reading. The very first page features this particularly nice passage:
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct, that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
The aforementioned graduation present will be, as Sheri suggested, cash.
my 12″ world collides with the real one
It’s kind of strange, in a good way, when my 12″ world collides with the “real” one.
- Recognizing someone from the coffee shop.
- Realizing I was at the grand opening of the new location for Hammerpress at the same time as my favorite KC comic artist.
- Running into Heidi at said grand opening. We were standing next to each other for a good thirty seconds before I realized who I was standing next to. I would not have even known about Hammerpress were it not for Heidi’s post and comment on the place.
- Singling out Brady Vest, Hammerpress proprietor, from the others in the impressive crowd because I’d seen his picture online in the Pitch article. We talked very briefly about the possibility of his involvement with one or more of my classes next year. Mr. Vest is very cool. I am a dork.