Sabbatical update: procedures, puzzles, and (peculiar) people

This morning a colleague told me, "You look like you're enjoying your sabbatical," and I replied, "Oh I am! This morning I spent three whole hours updating a spreadsheet!"

Okay, so not every moment of a sabbatical can be suffused with pure joy, but on the other hand, it's a pretty awesome spreadsheet--tracking information about submissions to the collection I'm editing on teaching comedy. In fact this is a pretty awesome project, appealing to my love of procedures, puzzles, and people, some of them delightfully peculiar.

Any endeavor that involves gathering submissions from scholars all over the world is going to require clear procedures for collecting and organizing submissions and communicating with authors. Fortunately, MLA provides helpful guidelines for bringing together edited collections, but I've had to impose some discipline on my inbox (to make sure submissions don't get buried) and my filing system (to make sure I don't lose track of essential information). As boring as it might sound, constructing a simple spreadsheet to track submissions was an important part of the process. And what a great spreadsheet! Seeing all those names and titles sorted on my spreadsheet keeps the chaos under control and gives me a delicious foretaste of the final product.

But before I get there, I'll have to try fitting all those puzzle pieces together in different ways to find what works best, creating a coherent and orderly progression through concepts while juxtaposing essays in productive ways. Some submissions want to cozy up side-by-side to reinforce similar concepts or methods, while others create friction that will spark further discussion across a wide spectrum of readers and scholars.

And what a fine group they are! Already I've (virtually) met scholars from many disciplines, hailing from all over the country and other parts of the world, proposing clever ideas that I want to adopt in my own teaching. I wish I could tell you about all the cool people with whom I'm corresponding, but I don't want to violate anybody's privacy. But let me tell you this: comedy people can be a lot of fun, even when they're discussing serious issues. Right now they're all just data points on a spreadsheet, but after I get all the puzzle pieces put together, this collection is going to rock.