The Sabbatical Update

~ Clarissa

I’ve been on sabbatical for less than 2 weeks but I’ve already derived tons of enjoyment out of it. I’ve settled on a schedule where the Dr Phil Show at 3 pm serves as a demarcation line between the first half of the day that is dedicated to writing and the second part that goes to reading.

It’s a regular work day that is invested 100% into research. And just in under two weeks I have already achieved a lot: finished and submitted the Oxford talk, finished and submitted my chapter to a collection on masculinity, and have gone back to the book.

This is enjoyable on almost a physiological level. I sit surrounded by mountains of books and notebooks and achieve the state of grace. Every week I return a suitcase filled with books to the library and get a new suitcase – full back. This is all good, people.

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Published by Clarissa

7 thoughts on “The Sabbatical Update”

    1. “At this year’s MLA convention, some of the 800 panels included Session 114, offering “The Libidinal Economy of Data.” And who could resist Session 150 on “Negotiating Flesh as a Site of Memory: Reconsidering the Semantic Field of Hortense Spillers.””

      • This author is completely confused. Students don’t go to the MLA. This is a specialist convention for people who do active research in the field. Of course, the talks are not comprehensible to laypeople. They are not supposed to be. I can just imagine how much this author would flip out at a conference of dentists.

      “Students and their tuition-paying parents find such specialist jargon pompous and strangely unconnected from real life.”

      • But they never show up for the MLA. And why on Earth would they?

      “For the last two years, the main subject of discussion has been whether the MLA should align itself with the anti-Israel “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” (BDS) movement, a move promoted by the Radical Caucus and Politics and the Profession.”

      • That’s completely stupid, I agree.

      “The MLA is so mesmerized by leftist politics and jargon-filled theory that it can’t face why students are turning away and departments are shrinking (even when the MLA itself is also shrinking).”

      • The reality is the exact opposite. Every MLA hot shot donates crazy sums of money to Republican causes. Every literature prof back at Yale did as well. This idea that the Ivies are in the grip of Leftists is beyond bizarre.

      I think this fellow is simply upset that those big shots at the MLA are not giving him the time of day, so he’s just retaliating.

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  3. If I am still here I can take a Sabbatical in another five years. Although by that time depreciation will have made the Cedi as worthless as the Weimar Mark and the Zimbabwe Dollar at their nadir. I am not sure I can do much on a salary of $5 a year.

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  4. How big is the suitcase of books — day tripper, cross-country traveller, or permanent tourist-sized? 🙂

    I have to ask because I’ve had to buy a rolling backpack just so I can carry my purchases back from bookshops. Apparently the repeated leg and foot injuries I’ve sustained over the past eight years have been a direct result of my choosing to enjoy a mostly car-free life while also enjoying the pain of carrying back up to twelve kilos of books at a go.

    You’ll likely get to see my miserable choice for a rolling backpack if I haven’t grown weary of its somewhat awful build quality — I keep trying to tell myself this is only temporary, but part of me wants to get on a National Express bus just so I can make my way to London to buy a not-so-awful version …

    Productivity during this period has been far from amazing, I can assure you. 🙂

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