To prep for the next diss. chapter, on the figure of the "believer," I’ve been reading lots of lit crit on metafiction and, in an unrelated line of reading, have been simultaneously perusing Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, a terrific book on economic development that blows neo-liberal free-market orthodoxies more or less out of the political-economic [...]

Well, for instance:  …if you really do have a chronic problem with typos and off-seeming sentences in early drafts of your writing.
Since I turned in my hipster chapter, I’ve been going over it again and again, finding (what seem to me) terrible typos and clunker phrases. At one point, I accidentally used of the term [...]

Last night, I mailed my revised hipster chapter to my dissertation advisors and to some other people I thought might be interested in reading it.  Today, I’ve been feeling intellectually lazy and hung over.
I’m cleansing the mental palate by reading Charles Johnson’s 1999 novel, Dreamer, a fictionalized rendition of the last two years of Martin [...]

I finished my hipster chapter on Saturday, at least a draft of it.  Only took me a year to write.  It weighs in at about 75 pages, and overall I’m pretty happy with how it came out.  One more major chapter to go–another 75-80 page chapter, on the postironic figure of the believer.  I believe.  [...]