Monday Miscellany

Miscellaneous Rambling

I'm on vacation this week. Actually, it's a bizarro vacation: Whereas work piles normally grow during a vacation, on this bizarro vacation, I plan on work piles shrinking. I packed a bunch of big files and took them home, where I can work on them without distraction. In the evenings (after the office is cleared out and I won't be hijacked to answer questions or deal with A, B, or C) I'll go back to the office and replace the files with new projects. I'm hoping the leisurely pace of working on involved legal projects with undistracted attention will not only reduce my work pile, but also give me a degree of relaxation. It's an experiment, but not a rash one. It's based on current psychological studies regarding the human brain, stress, the power of attention, etc. Of course, I'm no expert on such things, but I believe I've read enough to make an educated guess that this experiment could prove highly beneficial. I won't bore you with progress reports, but if any of you are curious next week about how it went, feel free to email me. * * * * * * * Interesting publishing efforts: Belt Magazine. What's it about? The Rust Belt. They're going to publish a lot of books, such as A Detroit Anthology that they published earlier this year. I wouldn't mind betting that anthology for Christmas, but I'd rather have it on my Kindle, plus the Kindle version is half the price. My mouse hovers over the "Buy with One Click" button. * * * * * * * I have mixed emotions about writings that celebrate the Rust Belt and urban areas. They tend to take the approach that these are working class neighborhoods that have fallen on hard times, whereas I tend to view them as ghettos that, at least partly, brought the hard times on themselves. They celebrate the people as hard-grizzled, whereas I tend to look at them as lazy. They celebrate the toughness; I see thugness. They see physical decay; I see societal disease. Maybe I'm a racist, but if so, the racism is at a level of my consciousness that I can scarcely discern. But regardless, I find inner-city decay/disease fascinating, so my mouse continues to hover.