A hatful of HBO

There are many times when I love my job, and right now is one of them. Why? Because this evening I start re-watching The Wire. As research.

As mentioned a few posts ago, I have begun my research term, and believe me when I say I have my work cut out for me, considering I come up for tenure and promotion in September. My writing habits tend to be stress-inducing at times like these, as I tend to jump from project to project, advancing them all more or less in parallel towards completion, rather than working on them serially and knocking them off one by one (as sane people tend to do, or so I am told). As a result, I have a cluster of papers all close to being done and I need to sit down with them over the next month and get 'em finished.

Always Be Closing. That will be my motto for the next four weeks.

Why one month? Well, mainly because at the end of May I am yet again packing myself into my trusty car and trundling off to London, ON to spend the balance of the summer with Kristen. Once there, I want to have the pesky uncompleted articles off my plate so I can focus on putting together a proposal for a book on HBO, and the preliminary writing thereof.

Hence The Wire re-watch. This will be an evening pursuit while I spend my days grinding my current crop of articles to completion. And then Deadwood. And then The Sopranos.

Did I mention that I love my job?

All this is by way of giving fair notice that you'll likely be seeing posts about all this over the next while. This blog has become, among other things, a place for me to think out loud, as it were—as evidenced in the zombies post and the one on Richard K. Morgan that attracted the attention of the man himself. And I've just started drafting something on The Wire and the logic of counterinsurgency.

You have been warned.