A Note to Readers

In order to wrap up some very pressing, mid-sized scholarly projects, I am going to be cutting back significantly on my posts for the near future.

Beyond my deadlines, I confess I'm also a bit worried about the perception I've created of the way I use my time. "Surely, you can't be getting your real work done," people chatter. "You're (sic) blogs are so funny," they write. "But how do you find the time?" Just to clarify how it works over here at www.jehsmith.com, allow me to provide some perspective. The following things have no place whatsoever in my life: church; gambling; yoga; sports, either participatory or spectatorial; real estate; investment portfolios; suntanning, natural or artificial; automotive maintenance; television; courtship; prayer (other than in Malebranche's sense of attention as 'natural prayer'); commuting; pets; children. There used to be some plants in the apartment, but they died. I do have a Lebensgefährtin, but she's in Rome for a few months, scouring the archives of the Jesuits. My life is a life in which 'The Sopranos', 'Mad Men', 'American Idol', 'The Wire', are but words. I used to watch a lot of movies, but that was long ago, and now I just write about them from memory. What's left are me, and my bookshelf, and my laptop, and the various words I read off of it, and enter into it. Many of those words are scholarly words, but some of the overflow from all that reading and writing gets secreted out into what I've agreed hesitantly to call a 'blog'. Under these circumstances, isn't the only real question why this 'blog' is not more glorious still?

But I don't need to justify myself to you, dear reader. I'll divide up my time as I see fit. And for now, I see fit to get some work done, most of which will be entered into Word files that will then, by force of centuries-old habit, be converted to the printed page. Some of it will be posted, periodically, on my 'serious' website, the 'blue' one: www.jehsmith.com/philosophy. Check there from time to time for updates. Don't fret, though. I'll see you back here, every now and then, and hopefully with renewed regularity towards the middle of December.

--Justin Smith

Comments

[Elatia Harris]

Justin, do you shop for and lovingly prepare a decent dinner? Stop that too and you could keep on blogging.

I will miss my jehsmith.com/ MDR, and look forward to its resuming next month. I occasionally reflect I don't drive, watch TV, notice sports, mind money or raise children, but my productivity is nowhere nearly such that people wonder how I do it. Maybe they just wonder why I do it.

Send up a flare when you start boggling those minds again, and enjoy your seclusion!

[Jimmy]

Your (sic) a jack-ass!