Saturday, December 31, 2005

Things to look forward to next year

This blog will continue to cover items of interest to me, my family, friends and hopefully even one or two strangers in the next year. I don't expect my core group of half a dozen readers to grow too much in the next twelve months. My readership seems to have been pretty stable the last couple of months. Among the topics that I will cover here in the next few months are Arivacanese folk ways, the Great Job Hunt, Stalinist repression and Guru work.

Regarding Arivacanese culture I would like to blog more about music. I have not been able to see much of Arivaca's musical night life yet. I am hoping that when Chris returns from the Land of Frozen Lakes he can give me a lift to some of the evening concerts here. Otherwise I am going to have to start my own concert series in the Chicken Shack.

The job hunt is going to undergo a major reorientation next year. I have now wasted a big chunk of two years applying for jobs for which I realistically had no chance of even getting an interview. I can not say that I did not receive multiple warnings that my research topics were ideologically incompatible with the ruling powers in American academia. As recently as my last trip to London my friend Abdulhadi told me that using my article "Socialist Racism: Ethnic Cleansing and Racial Exclusion in the USSR and Israel" as my writing sample pretty much guaranteed that no US university would ever hire me. In retrospect it appears he was right.

I am going to continue my Human Cost of Communism series. I will put up a new post in the series once every week until it is finished. Right now it looks like it will have 15 posts total. I will also mark each of the major Soviet ethnic deportations throughout the year on their anniversaries. That is another dozen or so posts.

Finally, I remain committed to the idea of transmitting knowledge, a practice now evidently banned at US universities. Guru Pohl renews his vow to help all seekers of knowledge free of charge in the upcoming year. So far my students have been very satisfied with my teachings.

2 comments:

Chris O'Byrne said...

Chris has had his fill of the frozen tundra and heads back to the land of milk and honey this very morning! I will gladly take you to some of the great Arivacan musical events!

KRISTIN said...

HAPPY NEW YEAR OTTO :)