It’s Spring Break here at El Cid, which means I’m partying working in my office.
Ah, the glorious life of the professor.
Honestly, though, these next few days are a welcome chance to get some uninterrupted labor accomplished on several projects I have in process. Today, for instance, I was able to spend more than four hours with zero interruption — email off, door closed, building quiet — which allowed me to hammer out the last few thousand words of an article I’ve been messing with for a few years now. I’m biased, of course, and I still haven’t read it all the way through myself, but I think it’s a pretty interesting piece: an intentionally convoluted reading of the Alliterative Morte Arthure, my favorite medieval work about King Arthur. I’m extremely pleased to have it done, but I really will need to find someone to read it over for me before I go sending it off to the land of academic journals. I typically don’t mess with a first reader on my work, but given the amount of time I’ve been working on this, and the inherent complexity of the argument I’m trying to pull off, I probably ought to have a second set of eyes look it over for gaps of logic and flow.
Of course, that means I need to find someone who wants to read over an 18,000-word draft of an article (with 91 footnotes so far) on late-medieval alliterative poetry. Somebody besides me must like this stuff, right?