what I'm reading these days

David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society. Giving me all sorts of ideas about the social functions of punishment, the emotions ignited by punishment, the significance of different forms of punishment, all in service to working out a conception of plagiarism as punishment.

Along those lines, too: David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Who'da thunk that my experience teaching life writing in prison would be helpful/generative for my work in plagiarism? Lots of things coming together: prison, life writing, autobiography, authorship, authority, capital, plagiarism, punishment. (I bet you read those last three in the wrong order inadvertently: capital, punishment, plagiarism.)

Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point. This is rather like reading a young adult novel: some important insights but simplistic in its presentation.

Frank Farmer, Saying and Silence: Listening to Composition with Bakhtin.

Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture. I'm thinking I'll do my Fall section of English 101 on plagiarism and intellectual property (shocker!), and this just might be one of the key texts.

Oh, the guilt, though, that comes from not actually writing anything. All of this is in service to scholarship, all of this is crucial to said scholarship, but none of this is writing. Of course I'm taking notes, but I have a little nagging voice in my head asking me what I'm writing and when it will be published. And yet there's nobody holding me to any foreseeable deadlines.

In my authorship course, I assigned an autobiographical essay (two shockers in one post!) and I mentioned in class that I might do one, too, cuz I love this stuff. Except I am at a complete and total loss for what to write. I'm at a loss for what to blog lately, too. I feel the pressure to blog, but then when I go to write there's nothing there.

Early mid-life crisis perhaps.