Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

I'm hoping to start writing regularly again, particularly beginning work on my first nonfiction book. It's been a long time coming. I've written numerous chapters/articles, blog posts, poems, a few failed book proposals, and other miscellanea but have never finished a longer work, unless you count the dissertation. Of course, numerous health challenges in the last few years have dampened this dream. My hands feel better after using wrist braces for my carpal tunnel, but I cannot type like I once did. They still hurt and are shaky. I've been having brain fog and a stuffy headache from the forest fire smoke. I feel like I'm moving in slow motion. I'm posting this for support and motivation to get back to it. I want to find the strength and energy to keep going. I miss writing the way I used to since it has been part of me for as long as I can remember. However, I made it into work for so long that I'm trying to find the fun again, along with the ability to phy...

It snowed a lot this weekend. Safely ensconced in the house, I spun records and created my annual weird music Christmas mix. It was just the break I needed, neglecting student papers, dissertation rewrites, and the outside world. I drank a few beers and brass monkeys, while getting down to the business of distraction. Here's to the new year! It is certainly on its way. Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas-"Ain't No Hole in the Washtub"

When I was younger, I always had a lot of optimism, despite my penchant for periods of morose pondering. I fretted and worried about everything, yet I always had the belief that everything would work out as I envisioned. As I get older, I'm not so sure that I even want things to work out quite the way I planned. I've spent a number of years in academia pursuing my PhD in Film and American Literature, and I am extremely close to defending my dissertation. The entire document is now in the hands of my committee. My dissertation director and former professors have all been an immense help in this process. Soon I will be editing the final manuscript and preparing for the defense, which will hopefully be in February or March. Then, I can start the interminable process of revising chapters for possible publication. Right now, I also have a chapter to finish for upcoming publication in an edited collection. This year I also took a position as a full-time instructor back in my ol...

I'm still plugging away on my dissertation, which keeps getting moved back but will surely be defended by this spring. Then, I hope to return to a regular schedule of blog posts. I am currently teaching five courses and trying to finish up, as well as work on revisions for journal articles, etc. Life is busy.

I've been trying to write more. For the past year, I have mostly been working on my doctoral dissertation on true crime and little else. Every once in a while I work on the ongoing novel or a poem or a short story. I write a daily to-do list that always contains a blog post along with job applications, abstracts, and the perpetual expected pages of revision. I seldom get to it, but I usually finish about half of my list. Today I am working on procrastination by listening to a live Drive-by Truckers set from Charlotte in 2004. It is pretty damn good in short. Maybe I will get around to reviewing it one of these days. In preparation for this post, I looked through my pictures because I hoped that I could blog about some outdoor photos I took. No such luck today. A shortage of funds and time has kept me indoors, slaving away over text I wrote a year ago and sending in abstracts to journals that will undoubtedly reject them. But that is the life. I will be posting some pictures soon ...

I haven't been blogging much or doing other writing because I am currently revising my dissertation and feeling the gloom of being in school for so long with no glimmer of light at the end. I've been in a perpetual dark hallway, bumping and bouncing off the walls, feeling sicker than ever as I look for academic jobs, while trying to get published. Many days I feel like I have zero skills, zero prospects, and zero opportunities. I'm not getting any younger, and there are times when I feel like I have made some very regrettable mistakes. Yet I also know that this is what I want to do, so I'm going to finally get the dissertation done. Then I can think about paying back student loan debt and moving on into the light. Music has been my saving grace as always. Coming off of a two week sinus infection, I reloaded my MP3 player and put it on shuffle only to be hit with a barrage of old country songs, mostly of the trucker persuasion. I have been spending tons of my time li...

Each summer I rack up an amazing list of wasted opportunities, unproductive mishmashes of scattered writing, files full of mindless ramblings all in search of effectual copy. I write a lot and read even more in order to continually perfect my game, but fall under the weight of the work, ineffectually stumbling back months later and wondering where to begin. As writers many of us fall into this pattern, putting work down never to return to it or never able to quite pick up where we left off. Summer is the time for me to supposedly catch up, but life always gets in the way. Even my blog posts trickle recently as dissertation chapters take all of my time. Fiction and essay writing are relegated to brief meanderings as I focus all of my attention on one never-ending project. While I just finished my dissertation introduction, so now I plan on writing more, updating old posts and returning to music, film, comics, and the essayistic scene of the crime instead of dropping in every once in...