Thursday, May 26, 2005
(9:59 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Self-Indulgent Personal Post
Yesterday, I had a day off. I did not do much during that day off, other than look repeatedly at my bank balance and various credit card balances, work through a couple chapters of my German book, and play Street Fighter II: Turbo (with little success). Late in the afternoon, I decided to put my tendency to daydream to work, developing a tentative list of courses to take next year, together with some desired courses for the following year. That went well, although I could already tell what I was going to be doing all next summer: finishing up incompletes from my ridiculous courses. Then I thought, What about this summer? Do I have much to do this summer? Turns out: yes.
- There's the blog book. I have set a really bad example for all my fellow contributors by not having written my abstract yet; that is planned for today. Then I have to collaborate with Jared to write the proposal (unless I can just slip him a 20 and he'll do it himself), then write my chapter, then work with Jared to coordinate those "bloggy conversations" in the margins.
- There's the possibility of a student-led online journal at CTS. Nothing is really for sure yet, but we had our first meeting. Ted came up with a good title for it -- Theology after Theory. Various questions such as how to convince people to write for it, how to get attention, whose attention we actually want, how big a proportion of the materials should come from CTS people, etc., were discussed. We resolved that we would have a review section in which any cultural artifact could be reviewed, and we resolved to meet again. I realized that I have been using the concept of "my Internet noteriety" to solve problems of audience and contributors in ways that are (a) unrealistic and (b) potentially alienating for other CTS students who might start to suspect that they are just being dragged into a project that's finally just a vehicle for me. So overall, it was a productive meeting, in that it helped me to see a lot of aspects of the project that I had not thought through sufficiently.
- I have to write a review of Jean-Luc Nancy's La Déclosion : La Deconstruction du christianisme. This requires me to read a rather large book, in French. Even if I'm getting to be pretty confident with French, I'm obviously still a lot slower in French than in English.
- I have to do an index for Ted Jennings' forthcoming book Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul. Last night when people were busy being impressed with my Derrida publication, I added, "And I'm also doing an index for a book with Stanford University Press!" I suppose that just to suppress the actual number of tasks I need to perform, I will note here that I also need to do some kind of work on the Derrida translation before it goes to press, at least copy-editing, if not another thorough revision.
- I want to obtain a reading knowledge of German. I'm already a third of the way through the book by chapter numbers, and closer to half by pages (not sure why that would be). I also made a major investment yesterday: a German dictionary ($5.99). I think I'm going to see this through. (Those wondering why I would bother buying a cheap dictionary need wonder no longer: first, it is highly recommended by the author of the book I'm using; second, I find it helpful to have a smaller dictionary just for reading and to deploy a larger dictionary only when one is actually preparing a translation.
- I want to make a major inroads into the Patristic literature. I have already read the major works of Justin Martyr and am close to finishing Irenaeus. I'm going to enroll for a directed study on the topic next semester, and Ted has suggested that my written work should be to develop some thorough notes that could easily be incorporated into a lecture. This makes sense, since my goal in doing this reading is to be able to teach a really good course on History of Christian Thought, and since it seems like there's so much I would have to learn, aside from just reading the texts, before I could write a paper on Patristics that would be of any use to anyone (including me).
Far from being an obstacle to achieving these goals, I'm starting to think that getting at least a part time job is going to be necessary, to avoid the time wasted worrying about money and the background radiation that translates into sloth even when I'm not consciously thinking about money. And of course, I'm also sleeping far too much -- some nights, up to eight hours! -- and I can get out of that lazy habit as well.
(But when one has this many tasks assigned for a summer, all bets would be off were one to get a contract to translate a major work in Francophone Paulino-philosophical studies. We could refer to that possibility as the so-called "nuclear option" of this summer, in that all of my free time would be instantly obliterated within a three-month radius.)
I don't regard this as self-indulgent, because like all bloggers, I am a fascinating person and every aspect of my life is fascinating to the public at large.
