Some Things I’ve Been Focusing My Energies on of Late

Well, as those who used to follow my MySpace blog and then my BlogSpot blog know, I have not been doing any personal blogging for a while. To put it simply, I’ve been too damned busy with non-blog efforts and with other blog efforts.

First off, I’ve been running a blog-journal, As It Ought To Be, with Matt Gonzalez. Now, as it turns out, Matt was a hero of mine before we became friends and collaborators, so this makes me super happy. It also increases my busy-ness level quite a bit, as I am now producing two new blogs a month for the site and soliciting articles from people and then editing them or rejecting them.

I’ve also been blogging for Absinthe, a translation journal, though much less regularly. I plan to do more there in the near future. Whereas my work at As It Ought To Be provides an outlet for my political thinking, Absinthe allows me an outlet for my thoughts on European literature and translation theory/practice.

I’ve also been taking five classes here at the University of Illinois, where I am in my first year as Illinois Distinguished Fellow. My plan is to pound out the PhD in 2 years of coursework and 2 years of dissertating. This ought to prove mindnumbingly difficult. And time consuming.

I have also been working diligently on Joshua City, the po-mo/sci-fi novel I am co-authoring with Raul Clement. I have been writing new stories, poems, and essays. I have been working on some new translations, my best to date, I think. Oh, and there is a new issue of Mayday I’ve been working on with the incomparable David Bowen. Oh, and I’ve taken on the task of reviewing books in translation for an Inside Higher Education online.

Anything else? Let’s see….yes, I am volunteering at The Red Herring now, where vegetarian food is made, community workshops are held, leftist politics in general are promoted, and live music occasionally occurs.

Anyway….this is the personal update to why there have been no personal updates. I am slammed 10-12 hours a day and am looking for yet more to do. Sometime soon, I might start looking for a social life, and I did spend this past weekend in Chicago hanging out with some awesome people, which I plan to do more often in the coming months. But for now I am happy with a limited social life and a burgeoning work life. That might change sometime in the near future, but until then, look for me not on my personal blog sites talking about myself, but rather look for “me” in my work elsewhere.