Need some writing time...

9 September 2025: The last three days for which I set aside blocks of time to work on the Year's Work essay...it didn't happen. Including today.

Other annoying stuff just piles up and demands attention. Stuff takes longer than you think it would. And none of this "stuff" is preparing for classes or grading. 

The writing will get done, but wow...

Progress!

1 September 2025: Finally--over the past two days--I have had the time and the mental space to get some writing done on my portion of the Year's Work essay. It feels so good to be in that groove. Right now, the Twain section is drafted and needs another round of reading-through, revising, and editing. 

Next up is the "literature" section about all the non-Twain stuff. Hoping to knock a lot of that out this week. 

(Always funny to make progress on work on Labor Day, but the freedom from a regular work day makes it possible!

Day Two...

26 August 2025: Co-taught the opening session of GWST 201 today, which went quite well, as it usually does. We get the greatest variety of cool students in that course. The rest of the day flew by too quickly, with administrative and other kinds of work sucking up a lot of time. Silly me thought I'd have time for writing. Oh well--at least we've got a long weekend coming. 

A touch of procrastination...

19 August 2025: I had intended to get some more writing done on my portion of the Year's Work essay today, but ended up telling myself it was okay a) instead focus more on other little work-related tasks and b) once those were done, just not work anymore for the day. I've got, not counting weekends, about one more day of break left, so this little indulgence feels okay. 

The writing will get done--and likely much more easily when the regular rhythm of the semester kicks in. 

Making progress on the "Year's Work"

30 July 2025: I think I've just finished my last batch of reading and note-taking for my portion of the "Year's Work" essay, having made my way through The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature. Feels good to have this part of the task done. Next comes writing, of course, but that's on a little pause until my co-author and I can talk about a new approach to that task.  

Pretty sweet Sunday...

20 July 2025: I know I sometimes document days like today--posts that are basically lists of things I did. They aren't the most interesting posts, I know, but for me, they can serve as little snapshots of ordinary but sweet days. So here's one:

I got an early start with a trip to campus (my first in over a week!) to do a little work and (almost more important to me, at least emotionally) water my plants. 

It's pretty cool to be close to the end of my reading for the "Year's Work" essay. My syllabi are coming along well, too. On Friday, I accepted a new role--Coordinator of First-Year Writing--that means a course release for me, which cut that syllabizing work down quite a bit.

Once I got home, I took my walk through the neighborhood. Laughed really hard at an Extra Hot Great episode. 

From there, I was basically inside the rest of the afternoon. (Still pretty hot out there; it's been an intense summer.) I watched some TV (finished You, which was okay) and read a horror novel by a local writer. I'm enjoying it and have about 120 pages to go.

Then Amy and I saw Magdalene, a CATF play. I really enjoyed it; terrific acting, as always, and some cool ideas. From there, we had dinner at King's.

Home now and just finished a phone call with Tim. Bob's Burgers time (it continues to be my comfort show) until some more reading, bath, and bed!

We love a good mutter...

15 July 2025: "'A girl's best friend is her mutter,' observers [Dorothy] Parker, playing on the traditional notion of a girl's dependency on her mother while suggesting that she hide her defiant thoughts through the muted indirection of muttering" (57).

I don't know much about the very witty and cool twentieth-century women writers that Sabrina Fuchs Abrams writes about in her book, but it is a lot of fun learning about them. (Another text for the "Year's Work" essay...)

Work Cited

Fuchs Abrams, Sabrina. New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century, The Pennsylvania State UP, 2024.

Hoffman's brick of a book

14 July 2025: Spent some of the day working my way through an 800-page book that I need some sense of for the Year's Work essay. There is no way to "cover" everything in it--we spend about a paragraph on each work, if that--but I am grateful for skills I learned way back in my undergrad work to get a sense of a book and its arguments relatively quickly and accurately. 

The book's title gives you some sense of its scope and size: Perspectives on Values the Network of Satire and Humor, the Tragic and the Absurd, the Grotesque and the Monstrous, Play and Irony, Parody and the Comic Mode. I mean, come on...it's also very German--like those huge words we laugh at--in that it is about exactly what the title promises.

The author, Gerhard Hoffman, turned a manuscript in shortly before his death in 2018. Hoffman was one of the leading scholars of American Studies in Germany and, according to the book's preface, written by a former student, he transformed the field. So this text--this absolute brick of a book--is a sort of magnum opus. A team of folks helped get it into print, including Hoffman's wife (who died in 2020). 

The book is huge and sweeping and just awe-inspiring in its scope. For me, it's almost too much--too much to take in, too completely at ease with its terminology and philosophy, and overwhelming for a reader. But that says more about me as a reader. 

Yet I did my best and carved out some notes and thoughts for that single paragraph. 

I am not sure how many of his arguments will stick in my brain, but I know I will hold onto the story of the book's journey to publication. Every bit of it is quietly moving. 

"joyful rigor"

13 July 2025: Another great episode of Vibe Check this week. I loved Saeed talking about the "joyful rigor" of writing. And even segments about shows I don't watch (like Love Island) are still so interesting and fun. 

Back at it...

6 July 2025: Besides some emails, I haven't done any substantial academic work in over a week. It has felt bizarre. Got back to it today, working my way through a book for the "Year's Work" essay. Rest assured, my co-worker also reported for duty. 

Her little paw on the book prompted me to take the picture. "I'm on it," she seems to be saying, both literally and metaphorically, of course.

Almost done...

6 May 2025: A couple of days ago, I titled my post "Almost there..." I want to argue that today's post, titled "Almost done..." sounds the same, but it actually means something different in my head. In the first post, I was talking about an idea--almost having it down. I (think I) finally got it--yesterday.

Today "Almost done..." refers to a decent complete draft of the paper. I have a couple of places where I need to write another sentence or two, but I think I can knock them out on Sunday. (Tomorrow is booked from start to finish with other stuff.)

If I can knock those sentences out, that'll be the last item on my weekly "to do" list: a complete draft. (Yes, those lists are back, and that's okay.) 

It does feel a bit weird to be pressuring myself to have a solid, polished draft of this thing done in the next week or so. The conference is in November and I don't know yet if I'll have 15 or 20 minutes. But the one thing I know is that if I can get things done ahead of time--before the semester starts--I'll be happier. 

Almost there...

4 June 2025: I am in a phase of drafting my SSAWW paper where the nuanced version central idea is starting to come together. (I have a thesis, but usually there’s a more specific one lurking, waiting to emerge.) A piece just clicked into place a couple of hours ago—about a lack of authorial intention—that feels promising. There’s just one more piece, I think, and I am on the verge. 

It’s a cool place to be. The frustrating is slowly receding and the next step—a complete first draft—is coming up, Lord willing.

A study in contrasts...

2 June 2025: For the "Year's Work" essay, I spent some time this afternoon reading through a new collection of Twain's writing, a collection with a pretty cool theme and idea driving it. I was so disappointed, though, that the editor made a point of highlighting and celebrating these awful AI-generated illustrations he included. They are so janky-looking and depressing. 

Moreover, right after, I reviewed another new collection, this one structured around gathering and celebrating human-created illustrations. The constrasts between the two approaches and their results are stunning. 

And, of course, I keep thinking about the piece I read and blogged about specifically about what Twain can teach us about AI.

"not a labor of exposition so much as a labor of discovery"

22 May 2025: Getting started in earnest working through the articles and books for the “Year’s Work in Humor Studies” that I am once again co-writing, beginning with the Twain stuff. I found myself really into Bruce Michelson’s piece about what Twain can teach us about AI. Here’s a long passage that I enthusiastically marked up (setting up Michelson’s point that Twain is a writer work turning to on this topic): 

“Utterance that matters to us is not a labor of exposition so much as a labor of discovery. We become who we are, we construct and furbish our own consciousness by struggling for the right words; and the result—again, if we are lucky—is not just felicitous utterance but deeper and richer inner life. The kind of writing that matters is never a low-engagement process of fitting discourse together like pieces from an IKEA flat-pack. The effort of revision, of ruthlessly interrogating ourselves on relationships between each possible utterance and the next, is not a tidying up but a telling of a story— in some dimensions always a fiction—of one’s own mind in motion, describing or implying cognitive and emotional journeys with more poise and clearer steadier direction than the actual jumps, backtracks, and flashes from which presentable thinking might (thanks to these private struggles to find the words and the order) eventually emerge. Which leads to at least one collateral paradox: though veteran teachers may see a measure of truth in my attempt here to describe these dynamics, they also recognize how difficult it can be to convey it, given the imperatives and longstanding practices embedded in how American colleges and universities normally teach the production of passable expository prose” (4-5).

Work Cited

Michelson, Bruce. "Mark Twain Legacies in the Dawn of Gen AI." The Mark Twain Annual, vol. 22, 2024, p. 1-20.

"all kinds of magic in the world..."

16 May 2025: “There are all kinds of magic in the world…And the sort of magic that ensures that when someone has decided that they would like a cat, a cat finds their way into their life” (59).

Working on some more notes for my SSAWW paper and came across this quotation that delighted me the first time I read Not Quite a Ghost. (I alluded to the book's cat in this post earlier this week.)

Makes me think of these two, who bring me so much happiness.

Work Cited

Ursu, Anne. Not Quite a Ghost. HarperCollins Publishers, 2024.

"Return need not be regression"

13 May 2025: “Power, too, can be adapted—that is, destabilized, disrupted—and again both memory and mutation, theme and variation are at work. Return need not be regression” (Hutcheon 175).

Thinking a lot about Hutcheon's work on adaptation--particularly this idea--as I conceptuatlize my SSAWW paper, about a YA book inspired by Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." 

Work Cited

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2013. 

"there should be a cat in every book..."

6 May 2025: Started working in earnest on my SSAWW 2025 paper today, which included revisiting this charming interview with Anne Ursu, whose YA novel, Not Quite a Ghost,  I am writing about. Hard to disagree with her on why she added a cat to the book: "I did have to have her discover a cat because, I mean, first of all, there should be a cat in every book, but also, she needed something to interact with." 

SSAWW 2025!

22 April 2025: (Once again trying to start the day with a positive post!) I realized this morning that I hadn't stopped to really feel good about an email I got yesterday: my abstract for SSAWW 2025 was accepted. I am delighted to get to work on a weird little paper about a YA book inspired by "The Yellow Wallpaper." It should be a fun summer project. And SSAWW is in Philadelphia, one of my favorite conference cities (with a nearby Vogel bonus). 

When it works...

16 April 2025: Long but good day, starting with an ENGL 102 conference when a frustrated and overwhelmed student came in. Just didn't know where to go next with her essay or why it wasn't working. (These are real "I got this!" moments for me, so I was ready.)

So, we got to work. By the end? 

"You unstuck me!" she said. 

Felt great. 

(And happened a few more times today!)

"like wearing shoes that don't fit..."

8 April 2025: One cool experience this semester has been working with English 102 students who are athletes and seeing them write about their sport in language that reveals their deep knowledge of it. I love seeing them slide into a discourse they know so well. 

Today I was working with a soccer play on her essay on the use of VAR. She is opposed to it, for reasons that are not exactly logical, but still quite compelling, philosophical, and just interesting. At one point, she used a "fancy" word ("elucidate") and it kind of delighted me, so I commented on it. I think she thought I was teasing her or calling her out on it. "Sometimes when I use a word like that," she said, "I feel weird about it...like I'm wearing shoes that don't fit." I insisted that I understood, but she used it right and shouldn't feel weird.

The cool analogy she used--"like wearing shoes that don't fit"--has been on my mind on and off all day. I eventually realized that for a soccer player, that similie carries some extra weight.