Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Who am I kidding?
I am running three research projects right now. There is no way I will be able to take the summer of 2014 off.
Monday, June 3, 2013
An additional guideline?
I am not sure that this should count as a rule or a desideratum, but my main pleasure reading during my "summer off" will be from my growing list of year of the gimmick memoirs, below.
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Ground Rules
I am going to try to take the summer off. At least “off” by
academic standards. I will hang out with my kids, exercise daily, undertake
long-postponed home-improvement efforts, and possibly take an actual vacation.
Not summer 2013. Oh no, it is far too late to plan to make
that happen. Summer 2014.
What are the ground rules?
The ground rules are:
- I will refuse all research, teaching, and service projects for the months between the spring and fall semesters.
- I am permitted to work on ongoing projects and serve students that I have already committed to.
- I will spend time on my kids, myself, and my home.
- I will blog about my “off” activities. Writing this blog does not count as being “on.”
- On the blog, I will log time spent on work email and ongoing projects that I cannot avoid.
I have been too busy working on my existing projects to follow up on my intent of explaining my plan for summer 2014: to take the summer off.
Here is an interesting discussion by faculty members of their work habits and compensation in the summer.
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
The Gimmick Memoir
We have all seen them in the
bookstores. With a pang of jealousy, we have listened to their interviews on
Terry Gross’s Fresh Air: Year
of the Gimmick books. The author sets out have an extraordinary experience
for a year and then get rich writing about it for an audience too occupied by
their ordinary lives to do something so exotic for themselves. Some are silly,
some are wise, some are profound, some exotic, and some are just entertaining. Most
of us have probably wondered we can find a way to get paid to spend a year
doing something fun, keep diaries about it, and then make a big splash in the
publishing world by tweaking our personal journal or blog into a bestselling
memoir.
Being a somewhat compulsive researcher,
I spent some time this holiday weekend researching Year of the Gimmick books.
This list was generated more than a little haphazardly. Between bouts of
cleaning up a couple of rooms in my home on the first Sunday of summer, I took
breaks at the computer, chatted with friends on Facebook, searched my memory, and
ran an Amazon.com search for “year of” books. I ran out of time before I worked
my way through the more than 2000 memoirs returned by the “year of” search. I
excluded long after-the-fact memoirs and included a few that covered more than
a year. Probably not all of the items listed below really should count. Some
are genuine memoirs rather than gimmick memoirs, written after a meaningful
experience; people do not seek out illnesses, allow their husbands to die, or encourage
a war to break out in their homeland and in order to write a book about what
they learned. No doubt a more rigorous approach would involve reading the whole
list first and then classifying them. But the “year of” narrative frame is a
powerful one, so for the sake of kicking off this project, I include them here.
Please let me know if you think
there are other books that I should include in this list.
Classics,
Well-Known authors, and Made into Movies…
Year
of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara
Ehrenreich
Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search
for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia, Elizabeth
Gilbert
Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin
Animal,
Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara
Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver and Steven L. Hopp
Operating Instructions and Some Assembly Required, Anne Lamott
A
Year in Provence, Peter Mayle
Julie and
Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, Julie Powell
One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at
Harvard Law School, Scott Turow
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
Others
in the genre…(arranged alphabetically by author, because I am just that
obsessive)
Extreme
Birder: One Woman’s Big Year, Lynn E.
Barber and Thomas R. Dunlap
No Impact
Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and
the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process, Colin Beavan
The Year We
Seized the Day: A True Story of Friendship and Renewal on the Camino, Elizabeth
Best and Colin Bowles
Project
Conversion: One Man, 12 Faiths, One Year, Andrew Bowen
A Year in the
Scheisse: Getting to Know the Germans, Roger Boyes
Ahead of the
Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School, Philip Delves
Broughton
The Great
Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle, Dan Brown
and Randi Weingarten
In the Sun’s
House: My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation, Kurt Caswell
and Rex Lee Jim
Calcutta: Two
Years in the City, Amit
Chaudhuri
The Year of
the Boat: Beauty, Imperfection, and the Art of Doing It Yourself, Lawrence W.
Cheek
My Year of
the Racehorse: Falling in Love with the Sport of Kings, Kevin Chong
Educating
Esmé: Diary of a Teacher's First Year, Esmé Raji
Codell
Candy Girl: A
Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, Diablo Cody
My Jesus
Year: A Rabbi’s Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith,
Benyamin
Cohen
The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling, Quinn Cummings
The Diary of a Nose: A Year in the Life of a
Parfumeur, Jean-Claude Ellena
Buzz: A Year
of Paying Attention, Katherine
Ellison
Year of Biblical Womanhood, Rachel
Held Evans
My Year
Inside Radical Islam: A Memoir, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
The Slippery
Year, Melanie
Gideon
Tea and Bee’s
Milk: Our Year in a Turkish Village, Karen Gilden
and Ray Gilden
Mirror,
Mirror Off the Wall: How I Learned to Love My Body by Not Looking at It for a
Year, Kjerstin
Gruys
Salaam Brick
Lane: A Year in the New East End, Tarquin Hall
Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from
Home, Susan Hill
My Year with
Eleanor: A Memoir, Noelle
Hancock
The Year of
Yes, Maria Dahvana
Headley
A Year in The
Maine Woods, Bernd
Heinrich
Reflection on America’s Great
Loop: A Baby Boomer Couple’s Year-Long Boating Odyssey, George and Patricia Hospodar
Mousetrapped:
A Year and a Bit in Orlando, Florida, Catherine
Ryan Howard
A Dog Year:
Twelve Months, Four Dogs, and Me, Jon Katz
Orange Is the
New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, Piper Kerman
Counterclockwise: My Year of Hypnosis, Hormones, Dark
Chocolate, and Other Adventures in the World of Anti-aging...,
Lauren Kessler
Shirt of
Flame: A Year with St. Therese of Lisieux, Heather King
365 Thank
Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life, John Kralik
Solitude:
Seeking Wisdom in Extremes: A Year Alone in the Patagonia Wilderness, Robert Kull
The
Year of Living Biblically, A. J. Jacobs
Any of Jennifer Lancaster’s memoirs,
including My Fair Lazy: One Reality
Television Addict’s Attempt to Discover If Not Being A Dumb Ass Is the New
Black; Or, A Culture-Up Manifesto; Bitter
is the New Black: Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered
Smartass, Or, Why You Should Never Carry A Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office;
and Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist’s
Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the
Answer; The Tao of Martha: My Year of LIVING; Or, Why I’m
Never Getting All That Glitter Off of the Dog
Teaching in
the Terrordome: Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach for America, Heather Kirn Lanier
Not Buying
It: My Year Without Shopping, Judith Levine
Cycling Home
from Siberia: 30,000 Miles, 3 Years, 1 Bicycle, Rob Lilwall
Freeways to
Flip-Flops: A Family’s Year of Gutsy Living on a Tropical Island, Sonia Marsh
A Year in the
World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller, Frances Mayes
A Year in
Marrakesh, Peter Mayne
Honeymoon in
Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran, Azadeh
Moaveni
A Child’s
Walk in the Wilderness: An 8-Year-Old Boy and His Father Take on the
Appalachian Trail, Paul
Molyneaux and Asher Molyneaux
Cop in the
Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District, Peter Moskos
Japanland: A
Year in Search of Wa, Karin
Muller
My Freshman
Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, Rebekah
Nathan
The Year I
Saved My (downsized) Soul, Carol Orsborn
The Wishing
Year: A House, a Man, My Soul , Noelle
Oxenhandler
Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting, Michael Perry
Halfway to
Each Other: How a Year in Italy Brought Our Family Home, Susan Pohlman
Wade Rouse’s various memoirs, including It’s All Relative: 2 Families, 3 Dogs, 34
Holidays, and 50 Boxes of Wine; At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in
Search of the Simple Life; and Confessions
of a Prep School Mommy Handler: A Memoir, but excluding
America’s Boy, which is lovely but
was written long after the fact.
The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying
to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read..., Gretchen
Rubin
Tolstoy and
the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading, Nina
Sankovitch
True Notebooks:
A Writer’s Year at Juvenile Hall, Mark Salzman
Launa Schweizer, Home Away: A Year of Misapprehensions, Transformations, and Rosé at Lunch
The Heroin
Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star, Nikki Sixx
Dinner with
the Smileys: One Military Family, One Year of Heroes, and Lessons for a
Lifetime, Sarah Smiley
Secret Sex
Lives: A Year on the Fringes of American Sexuality, Suzy Spencer
Three Among
the Wolves: A Couple and their Dog Live a Year with Wolves in the Wild, Helen Thayer
Welcome to
Biscuit Land: A Year in the Life of Touretteshero, Jessica Thom and Stephen Fry
Paris, My Sweet: A Year in the City of Light (and
Dark Chocolate), Amy Thomas
See You in a
Hundred Years: Discover One Young Family’s Search for a Simpler Life . . . Four
Seasons of Living..., Logan Ward
The
Quarter-Acre Farm: How I Kept the Patio, Lost the Lawn, and Fed My Family for a
Year, Spring Warren
and Jesse Pruet
True Spirit:
The True Story of a 16-Year-Old Australian Who Sailed Solo, Nonstop, and
Unassisted Around the World..., Jessica
Watson
Until I Say
Good-Bye: My Year of Living with Joy by Susan
Spencer-Wendel and Bret Witter
Down Among
the Dead Men: A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician, Michelle
Williams
A
Year Without Makeup, Stephanie Yoder
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