is due Jan 30th for the most important grant application of the year – I’m hoping to return back to 43T after that, but right now I need to focus really really hard on reinventing everything I want to do in the next three years, in which order, why and how. (The referees last year were not impressed by the previous plan – they thought it was interesting and innovative but implausible and badly worked out.)

I got shaken out of my completely unexcellent work lethargy that has been going on for months and months and was really beginning to kill me by two very very good things. First, some excellent coaching. And then, two anonymous referee reports on a book I have an essay in. The first says, among other things, “On the strength of the abstracts, the essays by X, Y, Z and [Wildcranberries] in particular appear to break significant new ground – I would certainly want to read them.” And the second says “Where there is representation of emergent scholarship, as with the inclusion of [Wildcranberries], again the editors have chosen the very best – Wildcranberries’s work (I have heard her read papers in the States) is very fine.”

This means so much to me, that two expert people who are not from Bohemia and obliged to like me and my work, like it. I have been so very unexcellent for such a long time. And I want to be excellent, and was scared I was all out it. Now, I want to live up to this idea of myself as an ‘emergent scholar’. And I want to do fine work.