RBOC: Newsy

So, yeah. There's a lot to report. I want to write about fifteen posts, but for the moment I have to bullet everything, because It would take about week of constant typing to get everything I want to say on the screen.

• Over the weekend, I saw Anna Deavere Smith's new performance, Let me Down Easy at Arena Stage. It'll probably figure prominently in one of the chapters on the next book project, and in many ways it was affecting in the ways that Smith's performances often are, but it was also a bit of an unwieldy mess that didn't grapple with some of the representational problems she's taken on more successfully in the past (specifically: performing different kinds of bodily identities--but race signifies differently that disability and pain, which she has trouble with here). I hope to post more soon, but for now: I liked it, I would recommend it, and I have a lot to say about it.
• Yesterday I got somewhat more official (although perhaps not final?) confirmation of my sabbatical for Spring 2012. Perhaps I will spend it writing about bullet point #1.
• This morning, I got my tenure recommendation letter form the department. Which recommended me for tenure. It's not the last stop in the process, but it's the most important one, and the most substantive in terms of feedback. Particularly wonderful--and I mean really wonderful--was reading the digested reports from the external reviewers, some of whom said nicer things about my work than I actually believe, even at my least modest. I know that these are crafted rhetorically, but that these reviewers would choose to single out some of the things that I didn't think I did very well (i.e. prose--Thanks Willow!) has had me grinning all day long. I want to write about this much more, and in a more thoughtful way, not just in the "Yay! I rawk!" way I am now.
  
• This afternoon, I got an email from the press telling me that reader's reports are due in three weeks. This in response to a query I made about a month ago, and which I since was able to follow up on at MLA. Point is, this particular update then seemed kind of random, and so I assume it means that one of them has already come in, but I don't know how to read those particular tea leaves.
• The itinerary for London Theatre Tour came in today (quite belatedly). But at least I have confirmed the plays that I've already been teaching for the last three weeks.

Frankly, I've been waiting for a lot to happen these last few weeks. A few things have not come to fruition. And while all this stuff is happened, I have been reluctant to talk about others, namely Willow's long employment (now just underemployment, but still), which will likely hang over our heads for a while longer. I'm still ambivalent about how to blog about all of that, but there are number of issues there germane to the substance of this blog and to academia more broadly, which I am trying to parse out. Perhaps I will find more time to post about those things in ways consistent with my online persona here, perhaps not. In the meantime, there's plenty going on worth celebrating, so I'll start with, I think.