Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

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 ...

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...