So it’s been forty forevers since I updated here. I’ve been busy! I went through a three-week orientation period for my fellowship here at ol’ Harvard, and then a stretch of class shopping and now plain old class attending. It’s a bit odd getting back into a college class frame of mind. On one hand, the sheer luxury of spending time listening to smart people talk about subjects they know well feels mighty plush. On the other hand, I’m also seeing the parts of academia I never really cared for — the self-absorption, the exclusionary jargon, the indulgence-not-in-a-good-way. (Whatever you think of writing in the popular media, academic prose makes it seem 200x better. I keep wanting to red-pen all my reading and scrawl “Clarity! Clarity!” on the top of every page.)

Anyway, I’ve completely oversubscribed myself, as is my wont. I’m taking six classes at the moment:

— An English class on the literature and culture of the 1960s. Lots of JFK, black power, Philip K. Dick, Tom Wolfe, Mailer, Warhol, et cetera. Should be entertaining.

— Two (count ‘em, two) classes on the economics of immigration. They will, I hope, be complementary: one focuses on the impact of immigrants on their new countries, the other on the economic motivators that determine who migrates and why. The first’s taught by George Borjas, the somewhat controversial expert on the topic, the other by migration-pattern czar Jeff Williamson. I suspect that sometimes in the next 10 days I will hit the outer boundaries of my economic knowledge and throw my hands of econometric concepts, but I’m hoping to push on through.

— A history of jazz class, which promises to be pretty light stuff. It’s my mental break, knowing a fair amount of the territory already. Although it promises to move into turf I’m really interested (jazz’s intersections with African independence movements, etc.) later on. Am I a bad person for wishing the class could fast-forward to post-WWII stuff? Until we get to Bird/Monk/Miles/Coltrane, I’m bored. I’ve heard the “early 20th-c New Orleans was a unique social mixing pot” schtick 300 times now.

— Two writing classes taught through the Nieman Foundation, one on fiction and one on narrative non-fiction.

All that, plus the three mandatory events of the Nieman week (each multihour), plus going to the gym six days a week (!), plus a yoga class (!!), plus weekly soccer matches (!!!), plus random other soopersecret projects, and I’m busier than I was when I had a 9-5 (well, 10-7) job every day. But it’s a good busy, a creative busy. I just don’t spend nearly as much of my day in front of a computer, hence the decline in postings here.

(Did I mention this blog had its sixth anniversary two weeks ago?)

Anyway, I have a big backlog of things to post, so I’ll let those dribble out in the coming days.

25 September 2007

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