The answer really depends where you are in your academic career. If you don’t have tenure yet, please make sure you have fulfilled the tenure expectations in what concerns publications before you agree.

If you are tenured, I suggest making very certain that this is a highly respected publisher and not a vanity press or some obscure outfit. If it is reputable, then the answer should depend on how much this kind of work excites you. If you love it, then absolutely, go for it. But if you prefer a different kind of writing, then don’t torture yourself.

In terms of time commitment, I suggest creating a chapter plan, deciding how long each chapter will be, and calculating how many words you’d have to write per week to be done in a year, in 18 months, or however long you can dedicate to this plan. Is it viable? Will it coexist well with the rest of your responsibilities?

I highly recommend always starting a writing project with a specific date you will finish it. Put this date on your calendar, print out a banner with it and place it in your office, and return to thinking about that date often. Humongous, seemingly intractable writing projects slide in like a song if you know with certainty when you will write the last word.

We have an accreditation commission visiting us. Today, they held an open forum for faculty to express how we feel about the way the university functions.

It was really funny because a professor would get up and say, “I’m a Distinguished Research Professor, I’ve worked here for 26 years. The administration is mishandling the university. The working environment is untenable, we are betraying our mission.”

Then a beaming administrator would get up and say, “I’m an Assistant Vice Dean for Information Technology. I’ve been here two months. Everything works great, everything’s wonderful.”

The strongest speaker was me. I mean, the Distinguished Research Professor of 26 years was also great but she cried. I was great and didn’t cry, so I win. I said everything you’ve heard me say a million times but without mentioning neoliberalism. The room fell dead silent after I spoke. Of course, then immediately two subservient women jumped up to say that it’s not true, the administration is great, we have fantastic DEI, etc.

“Ah, the strikebreaker squad is here,” I said loudly.

A great question, thank you.

“The body is not a thing, it is a situation… it is the instrument of our grasp upon the world, a limiting factor for our projects,” said Simone de Beauvoir. That is, and always was, the essence of my feminism. Women are not men. We should not try to be “like men.” We shouldn’t try to prove we “can do everything that men do.” Because we can’t. And men can’t do everything that women do. And it’s fine. We should strive for such a way of coexistence in society that makes life comfortable for both these different biological realities.

Alongside this original feminism that I espouse, another form arose. It postulates that men and women are not biological but aspirational categories. This brand of feminism does not accept that women have a different sexuality and a different reproductive schedule than men. It doesn’t accept that women are physically weaker than men. It doesn’t believe in biological sex but in gender, which is a set of traits that you can adopt volitionally. In this brand of feminism, a woman is not a person with a uterus but a person in a skirt and makeup. I have never supported this form of feminism because, in my opinion, it achieves the exact opposite of what the original feminism sets out to do. It makes the lives of women markedly worse by denying the importance of what actually makes us women. If we accept an unsexed body as the norm, women always lose. Our physicality and our reproductive system make us need civilization, society, family, and capitalism much more than men need them.

Gender feminism is anti-woman because it sees men as the norm to which women must aspire. Take the hookup culture. It’s a maximum expression of uncivilized, untamed male sexuality. Gender feminism sold it as an aspirational ideal to several generations of women. It’s gotten so that expressing the #1 female aspiration to have a husband and children has become an eccentric, downgraded pursuit. Women are supposed to want to spend two decades of their lives in a succession of hookups before they are ready to settle down. That this is utterly impossible given female physiology is not even discussed. Is it so surprising, then, that so many girls all of a sudden want to chop off their breasts and pose as men? Not even the most repressive patriarchal society has been as inhospitable to womanhood as gender feminism.

This form of feminism currently reigns supreme but it’s a fad that I hope will fade away. Then we can go back to figuring out how to make child-bearing, family, work, and life in general comfortable to men and women together. But for that to happen, we have to defeat our inner neoliberal who bristles at Simone de Beauvoir’s words about the limiting factors for our projects. We have to accept that our physical reality is absolutely a boundary for our wants and whims. We have to understand that this is a good thing and that it’s stupid to fight against it. When we re-learn to react with immediate, unpracticed positivity to the words “a limiting factor to our projects”, gender feminism will die. It is up to us whether we are ready finally to throw this perversion onto the trash heap of history.

It’s gotten to the unexpected point where the theory of evolution is described in the press as a far-right conspiracy.

One of the most popular neoliberal tricks is making one person do the job that was formerly done by two or three people. The administration of my university announced that it will merge Foreign Languages and English to save on my Chair’s salary. From now on, the Chair of English will do for free the work I previously did for pay.

I’m entertained by this idea. My department teaches 10 languages and administers a large lab. There are contracts, scheduling, hiring, all sorts of things I manage. The idea that somebody outside of the department who has no idea how any of this works will be able to do my job in addition to her already full-time job is bizarre.

It doesn’t sadden me to leave Chairing a year earlier than I planned. It will mean a cut in pay but a lot more free time and an enjoyable experience seeing the administration make an idiot out of itself. I feel bad for the Chair of English but it’s on her if she agrees to this arrangement.

If you have some time this Saturday afternoon, I highly recommend reading this long article about a bout of collective insanity that descended upon a small town in Illinois. Overcome with rage as a result of two relentless years of BLM propaganda, the town’s residents hounded two innocent children and their families.

A story of adults persecuting two very young children for absolutely no reason is painful to read. Two years of harsh lockdowns and racial hysteria in the media took away the capacity of the residents of Evansville, Illinois to put some brakes on their emotions. We should look at this as an important cautionary tale. I keep repeating that when we allow ourselves to become a raging maw of emotion and need, things go poorly. That’s why we are encouraged to emote and have no self-control.

Let’s read this important story and calm down already. Let’s all calm down or we’ll turn into the residents of Evansville.

One of the main topics of nineteenth-century literature is the burning need to have children. The middle class was coming into existence, capitalism was being born, and the middle class needed to transfer its wealth to the next generation. That’s why it was crucial to have the next generation. Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son, Clarín’s His Only Child, and Galdós’s Fortunata and Jacinta are great examples of such books.

Before, the aristocracy was obsessed with having an heir. But now, all of a sudden, it wasn’t just the aristocracy and the peasants that formed the society. A new, rapidly growing, suddenly literate and increasingly propertied group of people appeared on the scene. A whole cultural apparatus sprang into existence to entertain and express this new large group. The novel, which suddenly became massively popular, spoke to and for this new middle class. Marriage and children, the main vehicles of transmitting wealth, became the main topic. There was suddenly wealth to transmit and a belief that this was a situation that would continue in the future.

Today, the economic conditions that necessitated a large middle class no longer exist. The form of statehood that made it possible no longer exists either. The middle class is getting eroded by this change. A few members of the former middle class are moving upwards, into the newly formed transnational, cosmopolitan elite. The rest are moving downwards, into an undifferentiated mass of superfluous people. They are not much needed by the economy. They are definitely not needed in a way that would let them acquire some kind of property that they  would want to pass down to heirs. Instead of a necessity, having children becomes a status symbol for the elite and a severely limiting, near-heroic feat for the former middle classes.

There’s no longer the same kind of need for workers. Consequently, there’s not the same kind of need for children. That’s the world of post-work.

I think that the Fulbrighters are funded by the State Department, no? We definitely had no impact from the Department of Education closure but we did earlier from the State Department cuts.

But yes, there was a possibility of an interruption in payment for the Fulbrighters back in early March. I got interviewed by everyone and his brother. Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, St Louis something. Since then, the Fulbrighters have been paid in full for March and April. I had several possible scenarios for getting them paid, so there was no chance they wouldn’t.

I had several venues of financing lined up in case the State Department didn’t come through. Used the press coverage to bludgeon the administration into wanting to pay anything to make it go away. Then a very kind person offered to donate money to cover the shortfall. Thank you, kind person, if you happen to be reading.

In short, all of my people got paid and would have gotten paid no matter what. Please appreciate my great modesty in not writing anything about any round of this drama. I’m only mentioning it now because I was asked.

Good news! You can now see the 30 most recent comments in the sidebar. I can make it up to 60, so let me know if the current number is insufficient.