Welcome, one and all, to the 31st annual Christmastime update! I've just returned from the Lawrence Holiday Farmers Market where I picked up a bunch of meat from the local farm / ranch owned by the family of a former student. Because Lawrence is Lawrence, I also could've bought bagged-by-hand organic heirloom leaf lettuce (six ounces for $7.50), ecologically-made soaps, herbal tinctures, winter-blend kombucha, and ... wait for it ... locally grown bacteria. At the kombucha booth, an aghast middle-aged hippie was proclaiming loudly to anyone who might care (including his elementary school-aged son, who seemed familiar with the routine) that one should only drink kombucha in spring and summer. I'm not familiar with the rules on that, but I'm pretty confident the booth owners were relieved when the guy stepped around the corner and struck up a conversation with a Jane Goodall look-alike wearing an N-95 mask and a sweatshirt emblazoned with "Kindness can't sit down just because Anger has stood up." I debated taking my meat to the truck and coming back to people-watch for a while, but I figured I'd already experienced the high water mark for the day. So instead, here I am ... filling you in on the year's events.
Us
I guess the biggest news for us is that Paige stepped down from her role as Dean this summer. Various Texas-based responsibilities had begun to come to a head around the end of the spring semester, and burning the candle at both ends wasn't going to be feasible (she's spent 8-9 weeks, cumulatively, in central Texas since early summer). She's on sabbatical until next fall, and we have no clue what will be happening with us moving forward. I'd be totally happy for her to retire, but I don't think that's a train she wants to board. Worst case scenario, she stays on here as a member of the finance faculty, but we're selectively looking for other positions that make both geographic and career sense. She did amazing work in her role here -- raised $130+ million and oversaw ginormous internal improvements -- but I'm absolutely loving her not having to deal with the extra-special brand of illogic that drives university-level decisions at KU.
I'm still doing my thing and enjoying my time with the MAcc students more than anything else (as always). I did a research talk in Sicily in September, which was a fun trip, but I've declined all five of my international invitations for 2025. I've decided that from this point forward, if I'm going to travel I'd rather it be with Paige and just for fun. Speaking of which, we're capping off our 35th anniversary celebration with five days in Anguilla in early January. It'll be tough to top our Curacao adventure from last year, but I intentionally picked a locale at least somewhat different as a point of comparison. Not as different as my initial plan to spend a fun-filled week in Aleppo, but Paige's tolerance for adventure has pretty tight bounds.
Kids
Reagan and Hunter are still sharing a house and doing their respective things in Austin, and they seem to have enjoyed Paige stopping by and Momming them around periodically during her travels. I met the two of them in DC for a few days in August and we had a rip-roaring good time. Hadley is in College Station and has gotten very active at her church there (Grace), which we're happy about. She's moving into a bigger place in mid-January, and I think Paige may help with that as part of her Next Trip To Texas. Hollis is finishing up his Master's degree at A&M this spring and recently signed to be a tax consultant with Deloitte's Houston office, starting summer or fall 2025. For those of you who don't know, Deloitte is one of the "Big 4" global accounting firms, so it's basically the best possible outcome. All four of the kids are romantically unencumbered, so if you know appropriately aged people with an appreciation for the extra-special je ne sais quoi that runs through the Wilkins genes, we're all ears.
Reading
I've got several recommendations this year, starting with Marly Youmans. I'd read a couple of her novels before and liked them, but her two epic-type poems I read this year (think Homer / Dante, but a whole lot shorter and more readily digestible) take the cake. I suggest that you start with Thaliad (2012) and, if you like it, make your way to Seren of the Wildwood (2023). Or, alternatively, hit both of those links and see which one is most likely to tickle your fancy. Next, if you liked the Carlos Ruis Zafon book I recommended last year, you should continue with books 2-4 and finish the Cemetery of the Forgotten series. It is outstanding. If you are a Wendell Berry fan and you missed his most recent Port William installment from 2022, How It Went, find it. Next is Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. On the quirky side, I'm recommending the Flavia de Luce series by Alan Bradley. Flavia is an 11 year-old sleuth living with her father and two older sisters in 1950s England. The books aren't for everyone, but they're light and clever, and I think they're terrific. Finally, you should check out We Have Always Lived in the Castle, written by the same woman who wrote The Haunting of Hill House. Castle has the best opening paragraph of any book I've ever read:
"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."
If that doesn't pique your interest, I don't know what to say.
Listening
I have only two recommendations this year, mainly because I spent almost all of my time listening to stuff I already knew I liked. The first is Couch. I knew about them previously, but I really like their newest album. They have a nice jazz/pop vibe with great energy, and they play actual instruments and everything (watch the video). The second is Slava and Sharon Grigoryan. The album I've been listening to is sort of chamber music fusion (classical guitar and cello) and is from 2019, but that still counts as new to me. Here you go.
Watching
As many of you know, pretty much the only things Paige and I watch together are European murder mysteries. The best things we either discovered or continued this year were Slow Horses, Guilt, Manhunt, Ridley, The Vanishing Triangle, Dalgliesh, and Dublin Murders. Honorable mention goes to The Pale Horse. And from YouTube land, if you like Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, George McDonald, Dante, and/or Arthurian Legends, you should 10,000% check out Malcolm Guite. He is a poet and Anglican priest (not practicing, I don't think, but he has a regular column at the Church Times) with a passion for the previously-mentioned literature, scotch, and custom pipes. He has a 10-15 minute post every few days that typically involves him sitting in a chair in his cramped, disordered study, reading from and providing insights on a selection of the day. I find him endlessly interesting, but I've truly never seen Paige have a more visceral (negative) reaction to anything in her life. It's worse than when she tastes cilantro. For that reason alone you should check him out.
Prohibited Words
Sabbatical Paige is privy to a lot less nonsense than we're accustomed to (and I haven't read a single university-level email in at least two years), but I still managed to come up with three entries to the Prohibited Words list for 2024. The first two are sourced directly from the Higher Ed Administrators' Handbook: (1) "align," which means to gleefully conform to dictates, and (2) "transparent," which means opaque. The third entry, "moment," is more broadly sourced, surfacing frequently in the verbal diarrhea of administrators, politicians, and various other self-important people. To clarify, it's OK if you're referring to quantitative measures related to the distribution of a variable -- e.g., the first moment is the mean, the second moment is variance, etc. But if you ever say something like "here in this moment" around me, you can expect my own brand of kombucha-in-winter ire.Last But Not Least
If you are looking for an even-handed news and commentary source (apart from the WSJ), I highly recommend that you check out The Free Press. It was started a couple years ago by journalists who generally were progressives (not my particular bent, obviously) but who had gotten fed up with cancel culture and news bias post-COVID. Their staff is evenly split between liberals and conservatives, and part of their stated mission reads as follows: "We focus on stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative. For us, curiosity isn’t a liability. It’s a necessity. You won’t agree with everything we run. And we think that’s exactly the point."
The Friday column by Nellie Bowles is the funniest, most clever thing of its sort that I have ever seen. She provides commentary and weighs in on the general stupidity of things on both sides of the aisle. You can subscribe to the site and get their daily news feed and many of the articles for free. Nellie's column and a few others are behind a paywall, but being able to read her once a week is the best $80 a year I spend. Anyway, poke around at the site and see what you think.
And that's a wrap for this year. We hope 2024 was good to you and that 2025 will be even better. As always, let us know if you're in the KC area!
God Bless,
Mike (and Paige)
1118 Brynwood Court
Lawrence, KS 66049