Random thoughts, academic edition
I confess to thinking about academic things as something of a distraction from other things.
1) It's useful to remember that one may learn something useful from the most unlikely of places. The quality of the scholarship is more important than the supposed "seriousness" of the topic, however you want to define that. (I'll admit to being biased, not just because I write quite a bit about fiction that could charitably be defined as aesthetically displeasing, but also because the most interesting and helpful work in my field of late has not been about canonical works.)
2) It's no problem whatsoever finding humanities scholarship that my undergraduates can understand. In high-end journals, even. Most of it is not difficult to read. I know that all the cool kids these days think that everyone writes in Middle High Theory-ese all the time, but really now.
3) I could be wrong, but I suspect that Notre Dame has made more money on Book Two ($39) than Ashgate did on Book One ($80-$110). Perhaps because people can afford Book Two?
4) It's very difficult to write a syllabus for freshman comp when the university hasn't populated the course yet (the students don't enroll themselves). Spring comp courses often don't reach capacity, which means that a syllabus geared to a class of twenty-two students, with all the necessary workshops, computer lab days, &c. laid out, will not work very well for a class of seven...
5) Speaking of which, I wish advocates for mobile tech in classrooms would remember that some students are not likely to have the tech (hence the need to reserve computer lab days). Digital stuff is great, but only if there's money to do it.
6) A colleague and I were discussing how much of our work was going into edited collections. I noted that this was already an issue when I was working for Modern Philology, nearly twenty years ago: we spent the year biting our nails about how few submissions we were getting, not about being buried under a slush pile. (This is not a nostalgic memory, needless to say.) A non-contributor told one of the editors that if they had a guaranteed place for an article, why would they want to put up with the kind of hassle that is now recorded on the Humanities Journal Wiki? (Which, I'm pleased to see, has many nice things to say about ModPhil. We did copyedit people within an inch of their lives.) As it stands, although I've got an article that I'd like to start making the rounds before the end of the year, my next three articles have all been commissioned in advance (one for a digital publication, two for books). Has anyone else found their publishing agendas slowly shifting to collections instead of journals?