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I must really be back in blogging mode, because I feel compelled to do that most bloggy of things — explain why I haven’t been blogging. My excuse is simple: I’ve been making great progress on my aforementioned book on Star Trek, which has left me very little energy for other writing. But I’ve been mulling a post on this topic since returning from my trip to the UK. The conference — at which I delivered my first official presentation on the Qur’an — was rewarding, and the trip My Esteemed Partner and I planned around it really hit the spot, with a more casual vibe in Edinburgh and a busy couple days in London. But what really stood out to me was how energized I was by simply hanging out with my academic friends. The combination of genuine friendship, shared intellectual interests, and — crucially — unstructured time was absolutely rejuvenating. We weren’t catching up over coffee in an appointment made months in advance, we were all simply there and available and up for conversation.
I italicize all these seemingly insignificant aspects of the situation just to highlight how bizarrely rare they tend to be in my life, and I assume most of our lives. I hit the trifecta late in college, then again in grad school. Cultivating various kinds of “third spaces,” like regular bars where I at least knew the bartenders enough to have random unstructured socialization, was also a good strategy, though primarily in my grad school years (when there were a lot of other Chicago-area grad students who similarly hovered around my regular place). At times, the old independent Shimer could approximate that feel, too, as there was a critical mass of people who had common intellectual points of reference and a willingness to kill some time, but the smaller size of the current Shimer faculty and student body has made that more difficult to achieve (though I’m hopeful that can change). I assume my experience now is more like that of a typical “busy” academic, who is relatively isolated outside the classroom and at many schools will not have ready intellectual interlocutors due to the perceived need for specialization and “coverage.” Often conversations among colleagues at the same institution will veer toward the shared topic of office politics, which can be cathartic but is not rewarding in the same way.
When we got home, I brainstormed with My Esteemed Partner about how to cultivate something similar in my normal life, and we came up short. Realistically, I probably need to wait for those recharge moments at conferences — or maybe I should plan to head to Berlin next year, so that I can have ready access to (apparently) every American academic in a humanities discipline. Yet it seems like a sad commentary that the settings that appear best positioned to provide that kind of intellectual community instead wind up dividing and exhausting us, so that we don’t have any energy to spend our rare free moments together on anything but venting impotently about the institution.
Part of the problem, surely, is that we haven’t read and thought about the same things. That is definitely crucial to my friend group, as to the conference itself. (The structure of the conference brought that home, as there were two “streams” with very different backgrounds and interests, so that it became very difficult to have productive conservation with the whole group.) That doesn’t have to be a static “canon” — I have definitely picked up things simply because people I admire are reading them and I want to keep up. Specialization and the demands of scholarly productivity seem to militate against the formation of that kind of open-ended sharing of interests in many cases, as do heavy teaching and administrative loads. I’m exceptionally lucky, as so often, in the Shimer setting, because we have all read the same evolving core body of texts, and hence I can always redirect the inevitable office-politics venting to something more worthwhile, at least for short bursts. But often even people in the same small department will not have that kind of overlap.
And of course there is the sheer issue of time, especially as so many of the young academics who most hunger for this kind of contact are starting families. I don’t know what to do about that other than to suggest potentially radical changes in our living habits — let’s start a commune! — that I myself don’t actually want to do. But it does seem like there’s still room to rebuild some of the social habits and casual third spaces that collapsed in the pandemic. For instance, I notice that the culture of riding the train together has fallen by the wayside among my North Central colleagues who live in the city — maybe it’s worth making more of an effort to aim for the same train home? I don’t know! Or I could just hang around in the local Irish pub on “if you build it, they will come” grounds. That’s it — I’ll do that. Problem solved!
928px-_The_School_of_Athens__by_Raffaello_Sanzio_da_Urbino
akotsko
My last post feels like a lifetime ago, along with the positive hopeful attitude it reflects. The end of the the semester is always a sprint, but it has become much moreso now that I have taken on a faculty governance role that entails participation in faculty meetings and Board meetings. I feel drained, exhausted, and irritable. But soon it will be over, and I will be able to experience my first “normal” summer in many years — uninterrupted stretches of time to devote to activities primarily of my own choosing. Between the pandemic, buying a house, and then doing a ton of travel, this hasn’t happened in a while. Other than the pandemic, all of those things were net positives for my life, yet they didn’t represent the kind of recharge and regroup I’ve thought of as a normal part of my annual routine.
This summer, we’re planning only one trip, to the UK, taking advantage of a conference invitation. There I will be presenting some initial research drawing parallels between the Apostle Paul and the Qur’an — which I believe to be a genuinely novel scholarly niche I’ve discovered. Before the conference, we will hang out in Edinburgh, then we will spend a weekend in London before heading back home. And then, aside from a weekend trip or two, I will be settled at home for the entire summer — a prospect I am relishing.
Obviously I have to prep for classes somewhat over the summer. For two of them, that shouldn’t be a problem. I am offering Logic and Critical Thinking through the philosophy department for a second year in a row. The first iteration was successful, and I have good notes that should make an updated syllabus the work of an afternoon. I also have the unique opportunity to teach a half-semester Honors Seminar on Watchmen, covering both the original comics and the HBO series. Reviewing those works and some of the critical literature on them should not be burdensome. Finally, I’m offering Shimer’s seminar course on logic and math for the first time — something I only wanted to take on once I had the standard textbook approach to logic under my belt. A retired colleagues has offered to work with me on that and give me some guidance in how to organize and run the class, which due to the subject matter tends to be more structured than our typical free-wheeling discussions. I’m hoping that working through some Aristotle and Euclid at first hand will lay more groundwork for me to eventually return to Hegel’s Logic — I have a book on Hegel and Aristotle pencilled in for my winter break reading.
My biggest project will be a book on Star Trek, for a University of Minnesota Press series on franchise storytelling co-edited by Gerry Canavan and Ben Robertson. I plan for it to be a relatively short work, somewhere between the length of Why We Love Sociopaths and Neoliberalism’s Demons. I am taking a somewhat unusual approach. Most scholarly overviews of Star Trek focus on the foundational moment of The Original Series and the huge popularity and cultural impact of The Next Generation, then conclude with a decline narrative as subsequent spin-offs enjoyed less commercial and creative success. Often the last nail in the coffin is the hated prequel series Enterprise, which is regarded as a total creative dead end.
I’m taking a different approach and actually starting with Enterprise, viewing it as the beginning of a new era for Star Trek — an era in which it becomes much more self-conscious of its status as a franchise, more self-referential, and increasingly obsessed with returning to its foundational moments. My chapter outline is as follows (with an intro and conclusion, of course):
The goal is to use what I call “late Star Trek” as a model for the challenges and opportunities that franchise storytelling opens up, as well as the obstacles and deadlocks that model inevitably confronts. And since this is Star Trek, I will naturally have to address the ways that commercial imperatives distort or contradict the franchise’s anti-capitalist post-scarcity ethos and the unexpected directions this famously “optimistic” and even “utopian” franchise takes its social commentary. I have actually managed to keep up some semblance of a research routine even in these extremely busy weeks, so I have some good momentum here — and it’s obviously a topic I am quite passionate about and have been thinking about a lot.
My hope is to have a full manuscript to submit by the end of summer vacation, though I don’t think it would be a big deal if I wound up taking a little longer. And because I am a weird person with a unique lifestyle, this whole process does not stress me out or intimidate me in any way. I am genuinely looking forward to it. I miss writing, and this is both a “fun one” and a labor of love. If I don’t point out the genuine artistic achievements of Enterprise, who will? Literally no one, that’s who!
And more than that, I am hopeful that this will help me continue my journey toward feeling more like “myself” after some really hard years marked by a lot of stress and uncertainty and some pretty serious burnout. Some of those things will obviously continue — I have one more year of meeting-o-rama due to this governance role, and my Shimer colleagues and I are going through back-to-back years of evaluations to finally regularize our faculty status at North Central after a long probationary period — but I hope I can regrow some resilience through a period of relative solitude and self-directed creative work.
So there you have it! Maybe not the best blog post I could have written, but I feel like I have to put some points on the board to keep up with Beatrice’s Substack, to which all AUFS readers will definitely want to subscribe.
beach-read
akotsko
As long-time readers know, about a year ago, I declared a self-imposed sabbatical from all academic work that wasn’t directly required by my job. While I created a carve-out for invited lectures, I announced that I would say no to an invited contributions to journals or edited volumes, any op-ed writing, and (especially!) any peer reviews. My only writing outlet would be the blog, which I hoped would help reconnect me to the fun of writing again.
I think it — worked? While I was still a little tentative and insecure with the talk on Star Trek I gave at ACLA, I was much more confident and engaged with the talk on neoliberalism I gave this past week. I’m also working actively on the research for my forthcoming Star Trek work, which I’m finding energizing and productive rather than indimidating and draining. I’m looking forward to having a normal-for-me summer — one academic conference parlayed into a vacation with My Esteemed Partner in early June and then a wide-open summer for writing.
The real indicator that my brain is healing, though, was the way I spent my morning: book shopping. The Seminary Co-op has been an intellectual lodestar for me since late college. The amount of student loans I had forgiven under the public service program this year was likely approximately equal to what I spent there over the course of grad school. During the pandemic, when the store was struggling and they asked for donations, I actually gave a substantial sum. This was shortly after the death of Ted Jennings, and when I mentioned my donation to My Esteemed Partner, I spontaneously said, “I already lost Ted, I can’t lose the Co-op too.” Yet over the past couple years, going there felt stressful and exhausting — almost guilt-inducing. Every book stared at me from the shelf as an accusation and a demand for more work. The joy of browsing was gone. I remember taking an out-of-town visitor down there, thinking it was the ultimate academic’s escape, then realizing that I had made a mistake and couldn’t cope.
Today, I had a couple specific titles in mind and, having one last day more or less free from obligations before the end-of-semester sprint, decided to combine my cafe work routine with book shopping. I checked a few things off the to-do list in the outdoor area of the nice cafe adjoining the bookstore, then went shopping shortly after they opened. I found my ultimate purchases early on, but I lingered over the front table and new releases, before wandering to various haunts.
On a deep dive, I will usually hit the Islamic studies area pretty thoroughly, swing through philosophy, and then see where my curiosity takes me. This time around, I considered picking up a volume of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature or Aesthetics but passed on them — too expensive, plus they’ll keep. No one is going to be snatching them off the shelves any time soon. If forced to choose, I’d probably have preferred Philosophy of Nature, due to how often old-timey science figures into my teaching in the Great Books program. (I was astounded at how helpful my teaching of the history of chemistry proved for Hegel’s Science of Logic.) Maybe next time! This time, I wandered to the Classics section, browsing to see if they had a particular student’s edition of Virgil’s Aeneid about which I’d heard good things — in other words, I was feeling ambitious about language work, which hasn’t happened in a long time. I combed through the medieval studies section, to see if they had particular titles by Bynum and Le Goff (they did not). The Soviet history section was right there, so I gave it a look as well.
This was my most expansive and leisurely shopping trip in years. I picked up my purchases — Agamben’s new one, When the House Burns Down, and Anna Gryzmała-Busse’s Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State. I thought about popping over to the Regenstein to see if they had any other recent Agamben works in Italian that I could browse, but decided I already had the requisite PDFs and the bureaucracy of getting in would be annoying. Instead, I made my way to Powell’s (pictured above). I hit similar targets — Classics (right by the entrance, of course, as a crowd-pleaser/impulse-buy for the Hyde Park set), philosophy, Islamic studies, then Judaic studies and general theology. I considered a translation of Hegel’s lectures on logic, but decided that they, too, would “keep.” In theology, I found one of my long-time white whales: Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age, which is super expensive new but was $10 (marked down so sharply because of what appeared to be 20 pages with some markings in pencil). This was a once-in-a-lifetime find, so I had to act immediately. Having picked up that weighty tome, I reasoned that my bag was already pretty loaded down and decided to call it a day.
This type of trip used to be a weekly occurence for me in grad school, if not more. I didn’t buy things every time, but I did pick out targets, visit familiar aspirational volumes and sections, and basically daydream about all the things I could explore. Losing that sense of joy over the past couple years frankly scared me. I wondered if that part of my life was over and I should just become a full-time assessment coordinator or something. Having it back today felt exciting — I felt like myself again, in a way I haven’t in a long time.
I realize this achievement may be fragile and I have no plans to push myself too hard, especially given that I still have a very busy last week of classes and finals week (along with many, many meetings) between me and summer vacation. And I also realize that I need to be very deliberate about what I take on in the coming year, especially since I’ve committed to a book project for this summer — a short one, and a fun one, but still a book! I’m well aware I could relapse, but for now it feels like the worst of my burnout is behind me, and when I think about how my normal trajectory would have been to dig myself deeper into that for the sake of a few more superfluous CV lines or $250 checks, it makes me understand how unsustainable my pace has been for a long time. But still — it worked! I’m back, baby! Kotsko is good again — awooo….
Powells
akotsko
It’s time for that oldest of blogging customs: explaining why you haven’t been blogging. This moment is especially fraught since I didn’t declare that I was taking “a hiatus.” My readers are feeling tense, abandoned. Didn’t Adam say he was back? Wasn’t he taking a whole big sabbatical from writing, all so he could blog again? What happened?
A lot has happened. Interesting things have happened in class. I’ve read good books. I’ve had illuminating conversations with friends that sparked my thinking. I’ve watched TV shows and movies and gone to concerts. I even noted with interest that a prominent figure in my field wrote a widely-shared article that divided readers! But not even my appetite for ill-advised controversy could rouse me from my blogological slumber.
It’s not a lack of material that caused this unannounced hiatus. Rather, it is the fact that having a full-time job turns out to be a full-time job. My teaching schedule this semester is demanding — I’m teaching an 8am class that is also much larger than my typical Shimer classes, then doing two more courses back-to-back after that. This schedule requires me to get up at 5:15am, which is hard even for a morning person like me.
I’ve also taken on a faculty governance role. In principle, the duties should be simple: I’m chairing the committee that assesses applications for sabbaticals (the real kind) and internal grants. My experience with governance at the old Shimer and my research profile make me a good fit for the position. Our main work amounts to two bursts of activity — basically assessing two piles of applications — and it’s interesting and rewarding, since I get a window into my colleagues’ research. And it’s kind of cool to be more of a public figure on campus. Now that I have to address faculty meetings, everybody knows my name! Amazing.
The implications of being chair, however, are considerably more. I am ex officio member of three committees — the Steering Committee (which plans faculty meetings and coordinates activities among the elected faculty committees), the Academic Advisory Committee (which brings various deans together with the elected faculty committee chairs), and the Board of Trustees Liaison Committee (which also entails observing a meeting of one of the Board subcommittees during the three annual Board meetings). All of this sounded great and doable to me — I’d be getting an inside window on the institution, just like at the old Shimer! But it turns out to be a lot of meetings for someone who has been strongly meeting-avoidant for the last several years — especially since a major leadership search has generated even more meetings! I recognize that it is an honor and a major responsibility to be included in all these processes, and I take my role in all these settings seriously. But wow. Yeah.
To some extent, I’ve also done it to myself, because I started to think — what is something that I could do as chair that wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t me in that position? How could I make my mark? I had the wise idea to start an internal speaker series to highlight North Central faculty’s research. Thankfully, another faculty member was thinking along similar lines and volunteered to do essentially all of the organizational work — but I effectively assigned myself even more meetings. Good meetings! Interesting meetings! We had the first one, and I learned a lot and enjoyed myself and felt like I connected with old faculty friends and made new ones. But still. More meetings!
I am committed to a two-year term and anticipate that next year will be more manageable. I’ll be more experienced with all the processes, for one, and there will presumably not be another major leadership search of that scale two years in a row. The speaker series will either fizzle out or become more routinized. In fact, even now things are slowing down a bit — I don’t have any meetings or any extra trips to campus planned this week outside of teaching! At the same time, the unofficial sabbatical is starting to wind down — I have three speaking events coming up, and I’ve found time to do research toward the long-deferred book on Star Trek that I plan to draft this summer. All of these things, I suspect, will make me feel a little bit more like myself, easing me back into the routine of research and writing.
Not much of a sabbatical from most people’s perspectives, I bet! You could even argue that it made very little difference, since I wouldn’t have had much time to take on more writing in any case. But the fact that I wouldn’t have had time very much does not mean I wouldn’t have taken it on. What the public declaration did for me was commit me to say no to things for the foreseeable future, until I could reach the point I’m at now — namely, where I actively look forward to my return to writing, instead of (as was the case as recently as winter break) dreading it.
So yeah.
Office Space Printer
akotsko
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