Blogging, along with the rest of life, has been on hold recently as I feverishly work on a paper I have to deliver in Philadelphia this Friday. The Evangelical Theological Society, of which I am a card-carrying member, has its annual meeting in Valley Forge this year and I have to fly out of Memphis early Wednesday. Even at that, I’ll be late since the conference begins Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n
I’ve been turning down plumbing calls for several days. I’ve been totally absent from the Internet forums for several weeks. Except for a couple of plumbing jobs today and seeing a guitar student tonight, I’ve been at this computer since 6:00 AM.<\/p>\n
This is the price of scholarship. First you have to torture yourself by listening to papers until you become a Ph.D., then you have to write papers and read them out loud to people who have never done you any harm. They have to listen because it’s a part of being a scholar, and you have to listen while they read theirs.<\/p>\n
If you don’t crawl around on the rim of this can with the other little caterpillars, you are scholar non grata<\/i> and The System will make you clean sewers for a living instead of teaching college.<\/p>\n
Writing scholarly papers is hard for me because my brain has turned to sewage over the past ten years. I received the Ph.D. degree (they paroled me for good behavior) in December of 1995. Since then I have taught college as an adjunct for a few years, learned to play the dulcimer and banjo a little, and successfully started a business and plumbed a restaurant and a few houses. My idea of reading a hard book is trying to decipher the Shelby County plumbing code.<\/p>\n
Alas, I will take my stand this Friday in front of real scholars and follow the maxim that has served me so well for so long: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull manure.” I hate doing anything poorly; but I don’t have the choice of not doing it at all if I ever want to break into academe, so I keep trying. Maybe next year’s paper will be better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Blogging, along with the rest of life, has been on hold recently as I feverishly work on a paper I have to deliver in Philadelphia this Friday. The Evangelical Theological Society, of which I am a card-carrying member, has its annual meeting in Valley Forge this year and I have to fly out of Memphis … Continue reading “Under the Gun”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p45dxY-1J","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}