アメリカ観察記断章。長らくすごした学内寮を出て、隣町に引っ越した。大量の本を積んだ車を移動図書館のようにしてそこらのコーヒーショップを渡り歩いている。金がないので外食は控えているが、多少は食べる楽しみが欲しいのでコーヒーのお供にドーナツ屋…

What do you do with student papers and bluebooks? I have a few boxes full of such things and there's no available space for keeping them any longer. However, as I imagine throwing them away into a dust box and they would get smeared with d…

Very often I find myself extending already extremely verbose footnotes to monstrous lengths. And I take great pleasure in digressing from the main argument, freely dropping the titles of a huge amount of books and articles I consulted, scr…

At the last stage of writing/editing, I'm dismayed to realize, finally, that multiple projects are going on in my drafts and they should have been pursued separately. Now it's clear that my drafts need be sorted out into two groups, one fo…

drinking, writing, revising, making another glass of bourbon at 6:30...

Writing makes me hungry and thirsty in a very strange way. After infinitely writing and deleting same paragraphs and moving them around and finishing about ten pages, I feel my throat dry. I kept drinking water, coffee, and tea, but they c…

How could you compress 250+ pages into a chapter-length draft? I first made a shorter version by eliminating from the original draft theoretical sections which I could move to the intro and other chapters. I then deleted redundant sections…

He had a castration dream this evening, and surprisingly it gave him some strange relief. He could remember that he experienced physical pain and visceral horror in the dream, but such negative affects immediately disappeared when he woke …

drinking, reading, and copying passages in preparation for writing later today. i'll soon fall asleep when i can't drink anymore.

My dissertation is written in caffeine, in earl grey and cardamon tea and instant coffee, but the hidden truth is that it's written more in bourbon, scotch, rum, gin, vodka, sake, beer, wine, and a few other spirits I swallowed over sleepl…

Lost and disoriented. So much so that I could not come back to the intro chapter which is already almost perfectly outlined. So, today I decided to take up the translation I discontinued months ago. I ended up spending 8 hours to translate…

In three days 65 pages grew to 80 pages and naturally split into two files. The first half (50 pages) is basically done. The second half (30 pages written in full sentences, 10 pages yet in bullet points) should be done today. Really crazy…

Okay, it looks that I've finished 300+ pages last three months. What began as a chapter expanded to more than 200 page-long what I don't know. Another chapter I started a week ago is now growing monstrously, reaching 65 pages and certainly…

I spent three hours to write a draft for a five-minute presentation on my pedagogical experience, and it's not yet done...

Updating a CV is terribly boring and time-consuming. I already wasted precious afternoon hours, which I usually keep for writing a dissertation chapter, by excavating old files and folders (physical and electronic, stored in a local laptop…

Need Your Help! I have severe pain around the back of the neck these three days. I'm okay for half a day. But after five or six hours of reading and writing, the neck begins to pain, so painful that sometimes I couldn't even sit or stand u…

Perhaps this happens to everyone of us who's writing a dissertation, but doesn't it make you somewhat mentally unstable to sit for a quarter of a day, copying texts you're hoping to comment on, typing and deleting, drinking cups of coffee,…

Every 15 to 20 mins afternoon nap I take these solitary months results in terror. An alarm rings, I stop it, and intense sensations assail me; it's like an interrupted sleep condenses and compresses the whole dream content in a few seconds…

This is probably the third time that a lady, that middle-aged white lady, gave me a brochure, the same brochure I believe, which reads "TOMORROW May Be Too Late!" It says that tomorrow is too late, because you may die today and therefore n…

To which extent do we imitate our parents' writing style? Reading my father's blog, I was struck to find that my tone and diction was exactly his. Yes, we worked together for more than half a decade. I translated, he edited my drafts, and …

No night is too long with whiskey.

What I came to realize with increasing conviction is that it's not quite useful to evaluate essays by using the grading scale as we currently have. It's pretty easy to divide papers into three or four categories: A, B, C, and D. But what's…

A few weeks ago a student emailed me, saying that she's not coming to class because her family gave a surprise party for her birthday. And the same student wrote to me today that she's absent on Friday because she's going home and surprise…

Five observations on the anarchist studies conference I attended last month and why I felt I couldn't be part of it:1) It's curious that I saw only one or a few types of people there. I guess the conference welcomed a few hundreds of peopl…

It's embarrassing that a presentation proposal was accepted but no word is yet written and you have only a month to finish a draft.

I'm just curious to know whether you compose a conference presentation abstract and then begin to write a manuscript (after it's accepted) or first finish a paper and then write conference abstracts, as you find conference topics match the…

One of my students wrote (and I completely agree with this student), "I will admit that the Anteater’s Guide to Writing Rhetoric was long and boring. The book tried so hard to appeal to its’ target audience by adding in colloquial language…

In English the space/place pair is amazingly multifunctional and it's very easy to differentiate the abstract from the concrete, the conceptual from the actual, the geometrical from the geographical. Is there such a versatile pair concerni…

I was shocked to find that I'm older than Philip Marlowe. of course the attraction of Chandler for me is neither the plot nor sex and violence. i enjoy the plot as some sort of sociological case study. but what truly draws me to Chandler i…

I included narratives only and excluded Japanese texts. This list shows less my taste as a whole than a history of reading from childhood to this date. These are the books and authors that occupy peculiar places, invinting me to try differ…