Absences

You ask why I don't write.
But what is there to say?

It's always a challenge for university instructors, staying afloat from late October to late November. The assignments keep coming in, there's the labour of reviving your old understanding of your material while also continuing to make sure your old understanding remains somehow relevant, the annual cycle of administration has gotten seriously underway.

And then something like Occupy Wall Street happens: there's something every year, always something, though OWS kept me more excited and intellectually busier outside my usual working area than most past ... distractions? Can I call them that? I blogged a little about Occupy, and I read a lot, and I tweeted back and forth quite a bit. It's taken up a surprisingly large portion of my thoughts over the last month, though I'm not sure what it's going to mean to me as time goes on, and the camps come down.

And my Twitter account got hacked, and I got into a TwitterSpat with someone claiming to be a grad student at the London School of Economics. His point (and I use that term loosely) was that cuckoldry is the male equivalent of being raped (actually saying it more than once), which ordinarily I would simply have mocked as inane, and ignored as trolling, except that he was claiming the support of evolutionary psychology, so game on, "nature" boy.

And I reread books for current courses and for student supervision, and I sampled books for future coursework.

And I finished an article arguing that the BC forest industry is quiet about climate change for underlying ideological reasons connected to a frontier-ish ethic unique to the Pacific Northwest that's most easily explored in BC novels about logging: a startling number of moving parts in this project, so while the article's done, I'm painfully aware that I have to keep going with it if I'm going to make sense of it all.

And probably most important of all was this little project, in which I spent a whole lot of time and energy critiquing, commenting upon, and suggesting changes to my employer's Strategic Plan (what the brilliant Joe Bennett long ago taught me to think of as a "planny sort of plan"). Now that the comment submissions deadline has passed, I'm probably going to let that project relax a bit. Maybe I'll go back to the existing plan, see how the promises lined up with what was delivered, but we'll see how time works out.

And also, you know, life and stuff. I'm gradually coming back to this blog.

These nail-parings
bore you? They explain my silence.
I wish there were as simple
an explanation for the silence of God.

(This post is book-ended by the opening and closing lines of RS Thomas' poem "Correspondence." It's wonderful, and it's posted here by a fellow Thomas fan.)