In the words of the great Candi Staton, self-preservation is what’s really going on today. Or what went on yesterday, for the first time ever in the Cheapskate Intellectual kitchen. But it won’t be the last. Following the directions in the super-easy and super-fun book CANNING FOR A NEW GENERATION, I rendered a colander full […]

This is me this past weekend, celebrating my summer self.  Gloriously, the season is shifting inside my head — the loosening and breathing and unconscious release of the anxious, trouble-borrowing, multitasking clench which I realize only in retrospect is my school-year norm.  And the shift is outside my head too.  Literally, right on top. Because […]

Less than $200 left to go.

I’m here again at last at my desk on a damp gray Sunday morning in which one season ends and another begins, and subtle kinds of fertility are churning despite the overcast sky — I’m feeling the familiar-to-college-professors sense of release from the clutch of preoccupation that marks the school year and a lightening, lifting, […]

One more month to go in paying off the years of credit card debt. If there were a chart for the car, it would look like this too. The debt-payoff journey of the past four years will end in the next month, maybe two. It’s a good feeling.

As a new clothesline convert, I now find the journey up the stairs from the basement where the washer and dryer are and out the back door into my backyard is literally and figuratively like the journey out of Plato’s cave.  Rise up into the light which at first dazzles, then comes to seem so […]

“Be like Flannery,” the late, great Barry Hannah said to our creative writing class at the University of Mississippi, looking at me.  It was the fall of 1995.  I was twenty-one, there as a visiting student to write with him, drink and smoke at City Grocery, moon around the aisles of Square Books, and hang […]

The last – how many weeks? Three? – have been a blur of activity in Cheapskate-Intellectual-land. Two East Coast conference presentations in two successive weeks (Chapel Hill and Yale), revisions for a forthcoming essay, writing a book review for Keats-Shelley Journal, getting caught up in important curriculum-planning for next year, end of semester advising, Skype […]

Every morning, as I leave my house in an April that is already pretty busy — a gathering whirl of anger over new threats to academic freedom, two conferences in two weeks (the East Coast Tour – Chapel Hill, New Haven, and home), student stories to be graded, et cetera — my glance falls into […]

Folksinger Woody Guthrie played a guitar labeled, stirringly, “This Machine Kills Fascists.” And this machine — rented from the locally owned hardware store down the street — can chop up some fierce foes as well…. This machine kills the vague ennui of too much solitude.  It kills the self-disgust of totting up accounts and realizing […]