Fencing Bear at Prayer

I have too many thoughts in my head, some of them need to come out. In the last several days, I have heard papers on magnificence and monsters, statues and stuff, teaching and the trivium, and then some, all of them now swirling around in my head in a great maelstrom of equal parts inspiration, impatience, and fury, while I wonder how on earth I will ever have time to write even a fraction of the things that I can imagine myself wanting to write, never mind say. My voice is so tired after all of the conversations that I have had when not listening to talks, I know that I have been pushing it too hard. Pushing and pushing and pushing, wanting to shout so many things that I want people to hear and having no way to magnify my voice enough to drown out the nonsense that I hear other people saying. I don’t know which annoys me more. All the limp and ultimately self-destructive arguments about why we should teach the humanities (as if teaching the arts of expression and thought should n...

Okay, right now I am feeling really ticked off at BlogPress. It keeps dropping my posts into the ether. It is a terrible app, don't buy it. It dropped the last post which I tried to upload because it interrupted the upload to ask for a customer rating. Well, BlogPress, you suck. Except I am still using you right now because trying to write directly into Blogger on my iPad is even harder. I suppose if you want (and, as a crappy, hyper-finicky app, can tell when people are complaining about you), you can just make this post vanish rather than posting. But I hope that you don't. I hope that you let me share my thoughts about what it is like trying to pitch your work to editors and how scary that is. How fake it feels to be talking about books that you have thought about writing, when you know very well that ideas are a dime a dozen and why should any editor believe that what you are describing has any hope in heaven or hell of seeing the light of day as an actual manusc...

And I was worried that no one would be able to buy my book at the conference. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad Location: Timber Ridge Dr,Kalamazoo Township,

So here I am for the first time in I can't remember how many years. I think five, but it could be six. Certainly, I haven't been here since I started blogging, so at least four. It makes me feel not old exactly, but wistful. Wistful for all the times that I came here when I was a graduate student. Wistful for the excitement that I used to feel at the thought of seeing so many colleagues and friends. Of hanging out with my tribe. Of belonging. Which, ironically, I actually do (belong, that is) in a way that I could only dream about when I was a graduate. So why do I feel so disconnected? Partly, I know, precisely because I haven't been here in so long. But I have seen many of the people here in other contexts, so it isn't as if I have been completely out of touch. Quite the reverse, in fact. And yet. There is something missing now that I had (or seemed to have) back in the day, back when the only dream I had was to become one of the professors whom I use...