- I AM A SUBJECT OF RESEARCH.
- That Empirical seminar, despite my continuing fear of quantitative methods AKA math scares me, was really the most fun I had in PhD school, I think.
Black Sparrow, y'all. It is the kitchen of my heart.
Anyway.
Now, we're all familiar with the #shelfie by now--posts of artful piles of books, either to promote (as John Scalzi often does), to brag about book swag, or simply to materially demonstrate how much work we're doing. And that's fun. In more recent times, however--I think, just in this past year in Iowa--I've been doing something different. I've been snapshotting book pages.
I think this is the first one (as far as Instagram shows me), posted on June 5, 2014. I remember having a moment of pride, being able to decipher a string of crazy theory words. Also, I do not know which book this was, and I didn't stop to record it. I was in the weeds of #writeordie, though--this would have been right as I was finishing my dissertation.
The next time, I was at the AP Reading in Louisville. I didn't know anybody, so I spent my evenings (after eight back-breaking hours of scoring AP Language exams) wandering around town and reading in odd places. For this one, I was at a hotel restaurant eating Derby pie, and reading the latest by my dissertation chair, award-winning thinker Thomas Rickert.
I did another one the next day, though this seemed like the best way to save the quotation without hanging onto the entire magazine.
Then there was a long interval in which, to be fair, I was moving and graduating and starting a new job. Not a lot of time to contemplate reading. So the next proper book picture was on October 19.
And then December 30, which was about when I started really reading books again.
In January, this was mostly for outrage.
And January 13, where I really began to embrace book pictures as a thing that I do.
There are tons more in my Instagram profile, of course. But it's sort of fun to think about, if I do a qualitative analysis of my own Instagram. What am I valuing in these pages? What am I trying to highlight? Who is in my imaginary audience, and why do I think they'd find these pages interesting? Sometimes it seems like I want to converse with somebody, but sometimes I just want people to read a cool thing I just read.
Books, y'all. They are the best.
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