Thursday, August 20, 2026

It's the end of summer, which means it's time to get back into school mode...

In Montana, even tenured professors work on annually-issued yearlong contracts which go from August 15 to May 15. That way, the state doesn't have to pay us for the summer. 

However, the great majority of scholarly research--which constitutes 40% of the job description for most humanities professors--takes place in the off-contract summer months. I'm not complaining--I mostly like the current system. It entails having a specific date--August 15--when I feel like I need to start thinking systematically again about teaching, classes, and students. 

It's been a while since I've been in a classroom, as I was on sabbatical in the spring semester. It started off well. I stayed in the 'Grade through what I had anticipated to be the harshest part of winter. However, there was freakishly little snow this year. I love writing in my little house, especially in the dead of winter, but there was little snow to be found. 

I left town in the first week of February and paid a former student of mine who lives nearby $50/week to look after my rambling estate. The Borderlands Lodge was in good hands.  

One of my favorite research sites anywhere in the International Institute of Social Research in Amsterdam. I spent a fair bit of time there back when I was working on the Nazım Hikmet book, as they have a lot of holdings related to communist parties, unions, labor movements, etc. This time I was there checking out papers from the League of Nation's International Labor Office, which played an important role in the evacuation of Russian refugees from Istanbul in the 1920s. 

From Amsterdam, I flew to Istanbul, where I stayed until the middle of April. Most of my research in Istanbul took place in the Ottoman and Turkish republican archives. They're located in a huge building that's pretty far from Taksim, which is where I was living. The bus gets there quickly, though, as a lot of the ride is through tunnels.  

It's hard to describe how nice it was to be in Turkey again--it had been two years since my previous visit, one of the longest stretches I've gone without being in Turkey since returning to the United States to start an MA in 1999. 

I decided to celebrate the end of my sabbatical with a couple of weeks downtime in Sicily (on my own dime). After Sicily I was going to fly back to Istanbul, wrap things up there, and then spend a week in Paris, where I had more research planned. I was to get back to Montana in late May. 

The goal in Sicily was to go someplace quiet and obscure so that I could hopefully speak Italian--which I've been studying on-and-off since I was a university students--to people who were not necessarily service personnel, i.e. being paid to talk to me. 

There were a couple of islands off the western coast of Sicily that I wanted to see. That's where I, in Marettimo, finally managed to have a real conversation with non-service personnel. A couple of people in a group of five Italians (Sicilians and non) started chatting with me before inviting me to join them at their table. We spoke, mostly in Italian, for about two and a half hours. Walking home that night, I had fond thoughts of my Italian teachers over the years. 

The next morning I received word that Jack, my beloved older brother, had died unexpectedly of natural causes at his home in Minnesota. 

I loved my brother. This was a devastating, heartbreaking blow. I traveled back to the United States Palermo-Paris-Detroit without returning to Istanbul. I spent a few weeks with my family in Ann Arbor, then came back to Montana. 

Most of the rest of the summer was spent in the 'Grade, writing. 

I did take part in a very cool writers' retreat, sponsored by my college at MSU. It was organized by my dean, Will Thomas, and Tiya Miles. Beyond all the obvious reasons, this was a great thing to focus on when I came back at the end of May. Sixteen faculty members, eight from MSU and eight from other schools, spent three nights at a lodge in the Paradise Valley. It was pretty sweet. 

In late-July/early August I visited Ann Arbor, and from there flew to Montreal, where I spent five nights with a friend and fellow-traveler. We ate Georgian food on my birthday. It was great. I went to university in Montreal, but had been back only three times before this summer. 

I'd attended a conference in Montreal a couple of years ago and ever since then had been thinking of going up there again, maybe even spending some weeks up there sometime. Cliche that it is, after this summer I started thinking a bit more in terms of not putting off plans indefinitely. 

Such as, come to think of it, getting ready for the semester.