The manuscript is in!

Phew! Now I just wait to see if the editors want more changes.

Also I need to get image permissions, scan my images properly, and write two book reviews and two articles, all by September 1. But my brain won't let me work: I've spent the last ten days lying on my couch reading the entire Sookie Stackhouse series -- all eleven books -- and, sadly, the very last Robert B. Parker mystery.

I've been telling people that handing the book manuscript in has felt like being relieved of chronic pain -- there's this radio silence in my head that's totally unnerving. I'm looking forward to filling the silence with a new project and most of all to getting out from under all of the publishing/performance pressure of a revised dissertation to find a writing voice I really want to inhabit. I'm pretty sure my next project will be about recipes, and I have a third book planned as well.

In food news, I've ordered a new, smaller, canning kit, after we stupidly sold our old one. I think I'm going to try doing some small-batch canning this summer. Since I had my initial canning phase during my first sabbatical 2007-2008 there's been this explosion in canning culture, part of the new bourgeois DIY domesticity. Makes me wish I had followed through on my plans to write a preserving cookbook.

I've got lots of theories on the new DIY culture, and a lot of them have to do with the unconscious ways our culture deals with massive environmental degradation, financial trauma and general cultural rootlessness. As Lauren Berlant said in an amazing talk given at the Hammer Museum a few weeks ago: we are in a period of massive cultural turmoil and we have no idea what is going to happen next. I think people the privileged classes are reaching out for something solid to hold on to, and as we so often do in this late-national period, we reach back to the past. Lauren also said this other amazing thing, Delphic Oracle that she is. She said: maybe we are all always thinking about futurity, but we don't have the genres to express those ideas yet.

I've been thinking a lot about genres since I heard that talk.

Writing in this blog, at one point in my life, was about reaching out for a writing voice that was easier and more joyful than my academic writing voice as a way of getting back to my academic writing when I was really blocked. I've spent a lot of time over the last few years rewriting my dissertation and manuscript - multiple times - trying to find an easier tone of voice, trying to make my intellectual prose more beautiful. I don't think that's a process that will stop now. Rather, I am hoping that reaching for the next project will open up new genres of writing for me, that somehow tie together what I do here and what I do in my scholarly life. If you look back at the last few posts, where I keep promising to start writing here, that's really what I've been struggling with.

So: what do canning, writing, political and cultural theory, genre and the nineteenth century have to do with each other? And with other worlds? I just don't know. If I keep up the writing here, maybe I will get a bit closer to an answer. I have a feeling that just writing this is helping me understand what my next book is about. I wish I could can this feeling.