What I Am Studying This Summer

I share my pie-in-the-sky wishes for the next three months

On the Internet, I am a yapper, a writer and Youtube video-maker. But that’s only a hobby, according to the income figures.

By day, I teach at a university. This means, as I explain it to those outside this workspace, who think “professor” means “slacker,” that I am the overseer of 100 “employees” who are 18-22 years-old. I am not allowed to fire any of them, some of them don’t want to do any work at all, and most will check out at some point. Also, they’re regularly allowed to duck out of work because sports.

When put like that, your regular McDonalds managerial job seems like cake.

Thankfully, we’re in the part of the year that normal people think involves my lounging around a beach sipping margaritas for three straight months.

It’s not that, but it can feel like that.

It also can feel like I accomplish nothing during the summer months, even though much can be done then. Without a plan, this feeling amplifies greatly.

One other not-so-bad problem with being a professor is that you are always behind in your learning. You must keep up with your fields, but at a small university, you can’t, because you teach so many fields. Worse, the advent of A.I. means that you need to learn as much as you can about using and teaching with A.I., but that eats into your keeping-up time.

This summer, I need to bone up on the following fields:

• A.I. and composition/writing essays

• 20th century American literature

• Italian Renaissance

But I’ve also got the following projects going on Substack, Youtube, and letterboxd:

• Re-assess the Oscars for 2001-2010

• Alfred Hitchcock filmography watch-through

• Keeping up with new movie releases

• Working on videos that correspond with another book project

And then we’ve got upkeep, which is 90% of life:

• Website work

• Garage and house cleanup and organization

• My own teenagers learning to drive

• Create classes for next year / Revise them

• General family time

We’re well past three months’ worth of work, yet this doesn’t account for what is absolutely necessary in “the life of the mind” — leisure, or play.

This sounds like “slacking” to Get-R-Dun American types, yet you accomplish a ridiculous amount if you free up your brain and body by playing around. That could be leisure reading, a hobby sport, or just walking around.

We therefore need a flexible plan. A tiered list gets us to what absolutely must be done, what could be done, and optional work.

Later this summer, I’ll check back in to see what I actually accomplished.

Essential

Reading

• Richard Wright, Native Son

• James Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain

• Castiglione, Book of the Courtier

• Philip Roth, one to three novels

• Saul Bellow, one to three novels

• Don DeLillo, one to two novels

• Poetry collections — Frank O’Hara, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery

• 2024 “Best of Science Fiction and Fantasy” collection

• Herodotus, Histories

Movies

• Hitchcock filmography — all of it

• 12 Criterion titles that I can make into videos

Studying

• Playing around with A.I. writing generators and composition exercises for students

• A major work of philosophy — probably Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Representation.” Maybe also Dooyeweerd’s “A New Critique of Critical Thought.”

Writing and Videomaking

• 20 Youtube videos

• 66% of complete draft of book

• Substack reviews of new releases — 8-10 of these

Possible

Reading

• H.L. Mencken’s “Prejudices” volumes

• 5-6 science-fiction books

• more Baldwin and Wright books

• major biography of 2-3 Americans — e.g., Andrew Carnegie

Movies

• 12-15 new releases

Writing and Videomaking

• post older reviews onto website

• learn newest Adobe Elements version

Other

• play through two videogames