I’ve been writing up a storm in whatever stolen moments I can get, and working like a fiend at every other hour of the day, with the exceptions of the ones where I sleep (not enough, and not terribly well) and the ones where I watch season 5 of The Wire, which has completely and totally broken my heart this season by being so devastatingly good that I cannot bear the knowledge that I’ve only got one more new episode to watch ever, and In Treatment, which I began watching out of mild formal curiosity (how long can a narrative series that’s on five nights a week hold up?) but have gotten quite caught up in.

Aside from those bits of narrative pleasure, it’s sheer madness: preparing for class, producing endless amounts of administrative paperwork, responding to ridiculous numbers of email messages. And, not least, event planning.

On the one hand, I hate event planning; I don’t like the kind of organization that it requires of me, I don’t like being responsible for a bunch of details that I honestly don’t care about, and I really, really hate having to wrangle people who temperamentally resist wrangling.

On the other hand, this week’s events — Thursday, the English department’s big annual lecture; Friday, a gala celebration for the Media Studies program, its alumni, and its friends; Saturday, a day-long symposium thinking about the shifts and transitions in media production and consumption being produced by the digital — promise to be amazing.

I intend to sleep all day on Sunday, if I can possibly get away with it. I’ll hope to have something new to say thereafter.

The good news is that I’ve been writing fairly well, am close to a draft on the new article/chapter, and am also close to a draft of the book/project proposal.

The bad news is that I’ve been spending a little more time writing than I probably ought to, and so am horrifically behind on everything else. And I’m a couple of weeks away from five solid weeks of complete insanity.

The good news is that I’m feeling good about my general productivity, and my specific projects.

The bad news is that productivity elsewhere has me posting yet another “why I’m not posting” post.

There will be more good news to come, I’m sure. And no doubt more bad news to follow. Back to work…

From the Broadsheet, without comment:

Bill Kristol: Look, the only people for Hillary Clinton are the Democratic establishment and white women. The Democratic establishment — it would be crazy for the Democratic Party to follow an establishment that’s led it to defeat year after year. White women are a problem, that’s, you know — we all live with that.

[Laughter]

Juan Williams: Not me!

Brit Hume: Bill, for the record, I like white women.

Kristol: I know, I shouldn’t have said that.

Transformative Works and Cultures, an exciting new electronic journal (whose board I’m on) published by the Organization for Transformative Works, has just released its first CFP:

New Journal Announcement/CFP

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is a Gold Open Access international peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works edited by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson.

TWC publishes articles about popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived. We invite papers on all related topics, including but not limited to fan fiction, fan vids, mashups, machinima, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and any and all aspects of the communities of practice that surround them. TWC’s aim is twofold: to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community.

We encourage innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches, including but not limited to feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, political economy, ethnography, reception theory, literary criticism, film studies, and media studies. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hypertext articles, or other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. TWC copyrights under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Theory accepts blind peer-reviewed essays that are often interdisciplinary, with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offers expansive interventions in the field of fan studies (5,000-8,000 words).

Praxis analyzes the particular, in contrast to Theory’s broader vantage. Essays are blind peer reviewed and may apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks (4,000-7,000 words).

Symposium is a section of editorially reviewed concise, thematically contained short essays that provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures (1,500-2,500 words).

Reviews offer critical summaries of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies, including books, new journals, and Web sites. Reviews incorporate a description of the item’s content, an assessment of its likely audience, and an evaluation of its importance in a larger context (1,500-2,500 words). Review submissions undergo editorial review; submit inquiries first to review@transformativeworks.org.

TWC has rolling submissions. Contributors should submit online through the Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org). Inquiries may be sent to the editors (editor@transformativeworks.org).

The call for papers is available as a .pdf download sized for U.S. Letter (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/twc-flyer-US-letter.pdf) or European A4 (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/twc-flyer-A4.pdf).