My To-Do List
For those of you who thought that professors took summers off: my list of things I'd like to accomplish. Most of them I will. Maybe.
1) Finish article on Donne's Holy Sonnets. Submit to Claude, retired 17th-century scholar, for comments. Submit to journal.
2) Finish draft of article on Merry Wives of Windsor. Send copy to Judy for comments. Create abstract from it to submit to Renaissance Society of America conference.
3) Write article on Michael Zadoorian's Second Hand, a great Detroit novel, for possible inclusion in anthology.
4) Write article about my academic job experience -- how I actually ended up getting one, that is. For inclusion in proposed book to be edited by my colleague and cooler-than-cool guy, Chris Schreiner.
5) Write a couple of book reviews for Guahan magazine on Bill McKibben's Hope, Human and Wild and Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Teheran. (Go get them and read them. Now. They're that good.) This is one of the community service projects that I sort of fell into.
6) Swim a lot.
7) Order tickets to Korea and make arrangements to stay in a yogwan. That's a little hotel like a Japanese ryokan. If that doesn't help you, that's a traditional country inn. Like a B&B, kind of, except without the second "B" (as in "breakfast"). I'm not sure I can afford Bali this summer, so I can look at Christmas.
8) Talk to Chris about a panel for a humanities conference in Honolulu. Organize it, submit a proposal, then panic about having to write something for it. We're looking at doing a panel about teaching in the Pacific/Rim.
9) Set up class and professional website. (Watch for it, folks! It will have pix of me in all my aloha shirt glory.) Write syllabi for fall classes, create reading lists for spirng classes. Start reading for classes.
The nice thing about all of this is that my time is my own; I still get up pretty early, but I don't have to be anywhere unless I choose to. I go to the office thrice weekly, even though I don't have to, and work. So far this is working out well; the other days I stay home and read or write from there. (Thank the technology gods for The Laptop Computer.) This list sounds insane, but I already have a good jump on a lot of things, and actually, if you write a page or two a day, you'll get 150 pages of stuff by the end of the summer. Of course, whether or not it's good stuff . . .
At any rate, thus far the summer has been pleasant and productive. The weather's the usual -- bright, sunny, tropical. We're moving into the wet season, so there's more rain in the form of little showerlets that wet everything and then move on.
Keep watching this space for further developments. Nobody will be more curious than I about how much of this I actually accomplish!
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