Expect the blog to be slow for the next ten to twelve days.  I am in full prep mode, trying to finish an essay that I am due to share publicly at the end of next week.  I have no illusions of grand success; but I devoutly hope not to waste my audience’s time–and there is a real danger that I will do so.  –Some days I fear Lady Philosophy has in fact and finally relegated me to the Friend Zone.

Back from a few days vacation.  Good to be home and back to the blog.  Look for some new bits and pieces in the next few days.

Another long day banging my head against the computer, trying to write.  Hours later all I have to show for my efforts is a longish, so-so paragraph that may someday be the ancestor of a paragraph that will appear in a different paper.  Gah!  I need a better writing plan than this:  Write out of your own inner disorder.

Just back from the (this-time-not-so-) Windy City.  I travelled up for the Central APA, along with some colleagues and about ten students.  It was a good trip:  I heard a terrific talk at UC by Matt Boyle (“Transparent Self-Knowledge”), got a chance to  spend time with old friends (Jim Conant and Michael Kremer), to see former students now at UC (Ben Pierce and Stephen Shortt), and to meet charming new folks–including Rachel Cohen (thanks to her for a useful conversation on Montaigne), and a graduate student from Eugene, Oregon, with whom I had a brief but upbuilding conversation (but whose name, may she pardon me!, has slipped my mind).  I also saw my teacher, Deborah Modrak, and got a chance to catch up with her.

And of course I spend time at Iwan Reis, the amazing pipe shop, at Powells Books, and the Seminary Co-op.  But now it is time to get back to work.

I hope to get back to work on Monday.  That should mean that the especially desultory posting of the last month will become less especially desultory.  I plan to get back to work on Emerson and Montaigne, on Otto Bollnow and on a few other things I have left hanging.  –I appreciate the well-wishes after my surgery.  Thanks to everyone!

Don’t really know what any of this means, but I thought some of you might be interested in it.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

And so, off to the capitol city.  If any readers of the blog are going to be at the APA, look me up.  Auburn will have a table at the Reception.