Hiatus

Right now, part of my teaching load includes a brand new, theory-heavy seminar in modern and contemporary rhetorics (exciting but demanding week in and week out). I'm also editing a collection whose drafts will be coming in over the next 8-14 weeks, revising an article for that collection, writing another article, preparing a conference presentation, putting together my third-year review file, and beginning a long-overdue workout regimen. Among other things.

In short, the next 2-3 months are looking so swamped that I think it best to take a short break from the blog (or, more accurately, to continue the de facto break that started in December). I'll be back after the semester has ended.

See you in the spring.

Priorities

1. Obviously, the blog hasn't been one lately. But I've been getting in some great family and travel time as well as quite a bit of productive research-related reading and course planning.

2. Even though I still have a fair amount of tweaking to do to my Intro to Composition Studies syllabus (for new Ph.D. students), I spent an hour and a half today making sure the course banner was just right.

3. I could stay at the office and work more this evening, but it's pinot noir night at the Thursday tasting.

I'm outta here.

Diablogism

It's summer.

I'm at the office less and at home more. I'm mowing, sanding furniture, fixing up the guest room, grilling pineapple-ginger pork chops. What I'm not doing is reading other blogs. At least, not much, and certainly not with the frequency or breadth I maintain during the school year.

No surprise there. What is a surprise, though, is how much my blog writing appears to depend on my blog reading. While last summer was my first full summer as a blogger, I spent it moving twice (once to Chicago for an interim home base, and then a second time to Ohio) and house-hunting, so blogging was virtually predestined to be very light. But now, with no such ado in my life, I still find myself posting relatively sporadically. It occurs to me that one reason, and likely the main one, is that I am not nearly as regular an inhabitant of the blogosphere as I would be normally. I don't mean to suggest that I only blog when I am directly reacting to a post by somebody else, though that is sometimes the case. Rather, I mean to say that, whether you believe in such a thing as thinking like a blogger or not, for me I have to be immersed in a thing--or, at least, this thing--to feel it (in the pop-metaphysical sense). That is, I have to read others' blogs to be able to truly inhabit my own.

I suspect the same is true for many, and probably most, bloggers. But I wonder how true it is. That is, I know my blogging is usuallty dependent on this pretty straightforward dialogism, but I wonder what other kinds and degrees of dialogism there may be and how they may inform different blogging practices (dare I say different blog-writing processes?).

Any thoughts?

Forecast: Intermittent Blogging

While I certainly won't do the disappearing act I did last summer (when we moved twice and prepared for new jobs), I will likely only be blogging sporadically at best over the next couple-to-three weeks. With the end of the semester, summer travel plans, and various deadlines, things will just not be blogging-friendly around here for a while.

And speaking of deadlines, because we were only recently able to get our cfp into certain journals, Rick and I have decided to accept proposals for our project until June to give those journals' readers a fair chance to respond. FYI.