Sobriquet 40.21

The following post was originally published on 3/23/08.

A long day, I'm afraid is going to have to result in a short entry. I did get the work I set out to do finished, but it took me until the wee hours of the morning to do so. Though a significant chunk of my day consisted of a six hour block of teaching this morning and afternoon, I did procrastinate a bit more than I should have this evening. Or, rather, much more than I normally regard as acceptable. Granted, I had fun playing games with friends and watching old punk rock videos, but still...

I dealt with a mild swell in dissertation anxiety this evening, as well. For some reason, I began dwelling on the amount of time I have spent/wasted so far in relation to the amount of time normally granted to a doctoral candidate to complete his or her dissertation at my university and felt the familiar pulsing of nervousness and doubt. As had happened so often already, my thoughts drifted from the task at hand to the unsettlingly unstable realm of academic marketability and professional branding. Of course, my supervisor does not seem concerned in the least and, given that she has supervised dissertations and the doctoral students who write them at this institution for three decades, I try to impose on myself the sense that I am doing at least reasonably well. But, still...

Other than that, I continue to marvel at both the amount of stuff popping out at me from The Master of Petersburg and how much more I am enjoying Waiting for the Barbarians the second time around. I realize that some of my older readers will chuckle at this statement, but bear with me here...one of the most wonderful things about getting older is that, with accumulated experience, the beauty of truly brilliant art can be better appreciated. I mean, in the six years since I read the novel, I have experienced that much more of life's richness and, accordingly, appreciate the sublimity of Coetzee's book more deeply. I can only imagine how utterly transcendent an experience reading Moby-Dick is for someone of sixty or seventy.

At any rate, I am going to sign off now. The sleepier I feel, the less confident I am in my ability to string together cogent sentences, so I will wrap this up while eyelids are light enough to hold open.

For tomorrow: More o' the same.

And, just in case you were wondering what was the most intense-sounding live performance of the 1980s, I suggest you plug "Husker Du" and "New Day Rising" into the search bar on YouTube.