The Secret Life of the Proletariat

Because you really want to know about my day-to-day struggles – as a PhD student, as a teacher, as a writer, as a lover of cats and dogs and other furry creatures, as a person stuck in Lubbock, TX, while the rest of my family is in Georgia and Illinois, as someone living at or below the poverty level, as a nonreligious gentile fascinated (perhaps obsessed) with Jewish literature and culture, as an aging human being, to sum up: as a basically displaced person – I am baring it all for you, dear, dear reader.

Because today is the first day of the rest of my blog.

Because I actually did my little yoga practice this morning.

Because why not.

So, the semester – in which I was unwisely overloaded, as perhaps I will describe later in more detail – is finally over, which means I am free at last, at least until the summer session starts, to read the many, many books littering my room.  I’ve settled on the following to start:

• Wandering Stars, Sholem Aleichem’s novel about a traveling Yiddish theatre troupe
• To Be a Playwright, Janet Neipris’s book about, well, being a playwright

Read the rest of this entry »

I have been away from this blog so long, and indeed, had barely ever been at the thing at all, that it’s tempting to think I should simply start a new one.

But that seems wasteful. So this constitutes my triumphal return to blogging. Or maybe just my return to blogging. Or, to lower the bar still farther, this constitutes my attempt to return to, or establish for the first time, a practice of blogging.

Huzzah!