20150730.0641

I am still at work on the freelance order that came in yesterday. In fact, I am still working on the reading. Normally, I would be quicker about getting it done, but delays in other work ate into the time I would have spent on freelancing, and Ms. 8 is doing a passable imitation of a glazed donut, so I have had to devote my attentions otherwise than reading through what is (so far) an excellent novel and plotting the response to it that I will sell for money I can use (but probably less than it is actually worth). Thoughts in that line occur to me even now; there is one avenue of inquiry that suggests itself immediately, given the novel's setting and characters. I will save them for the work, however; I do not want to make the mistake I realized making about Go Set a Watchman, posting to this webspace the germ of a paper I really ought to have fleshed out more and sent elsewhere.

That last comment prompts questions about posting my "literary" musings here. As a still-aspiring academic, one who is still searching for a stable position at a college or university in the hopes of having access to materials needed to further human knowledge and the time in which to do it,* I am in a position that obliges me to develop new knowledge and understanding, detail the processes through which I arrive at them, and send the reports thereof out into the world. "Publish or perish" is the adage commonly used, although for me and for the many, many others who languish off of the tenure track, "publish or be stillborn" is more accurate a description, as we are hardly born into "real" academic careers (and the longer we remain among the precariate, the less likely we are to be delivered successfully, if the metaphor is to be followed so far). It is a commonplace that work submitted for publication must not have appeared in prior publication; there are exceptions, of course, and conference papers are often reworked into journal articles and scholarly monographs, but aside from such constructions, what is submitted for review and distribution is supposed to be new and original work. Posting commentaries that can themselves be reworked into short papers (and I am under no illusions that what I post here serves as the beginning of books to be written) works against that. What I post here, I likely cannot develop further and expect to receive credit for it.

That suggests that I should use this webspace only to make comments that I have no desire to follow in other places. It suggests that this webspace be used only for the leavings of real work--and that has unfortunate implications that insult those who read what I write here. For if this is only to carry the scraps of other work I do, well, to whom and to what are table-scraps usually given? But I do not regard my readers as dogs under my table or as rummagers fit only to rifle through garbage in the search for sustenance...

*A common complaint about the professoriate is that professors teach little. They are hired primarily to work to develop more knowledge about humanity and the world humanity inhabits. The teaching is, at least for the professoriate, usually secondary. Making new knowledge and positioning it such that others can use it take time and effort. Teaching takes up much of the same time and effort; rarely can a person do both as well as they need to be done at the same time.