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. I like having a specific date--August 15--when I need to start thinking systematically again about teaching, classes, and students. 

I was on sabbatical in the spring semester. It started off well. I stayed in Belgrade through what I had anticipated to be the harshest part of winter, even though there was freakishly little snow this year. I love writing in my little house in the Grade, especially in the dead of winter, but there was very little snow. 

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 Lodge was in good hands.  

I spent a few days in Amsterdam, researching at the International Institute of Social Research, which is such a great place. I went there a lot when I was working on the Nazım Hikmet book. 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.  

I can't 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 in Sicily (on my own dime). After Sicily I was going to fly back to Istanbul, wrap up my research there, and then spend a week in Paris. In Paris I was going to do research, then 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 to people who were not necessarily service personnel. 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 a trip to Ann Arbor and Montreal at the end of July. I also took 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. 

Montreal felt very nice, too. I spent my birthday there, eating Georgian food with a friend and fellow-traveler. I'd been thinking for the last several years of going up there, renting an apartment, and spending some time. Cliche that it is, I started thinking a bit more in terms of not putting off plans indefinitely. 

Such as, getting ready for the semester.