ABSTRACT
For much of my academic life parenthood and teaching have induced staccato writing habits more apt to essay than monograph production. But my taste for the vignette is also a matter of preference in style and genre, while obsession for detail and a tendency to convolution make relatively small chunks of prose easier to produce and digest. Almost every article I wrote attained the size and complexity of a small book until confined to decent proportions through partition or ruthless pruning. The current publishing vogue for collected essays over monographs is something of a godsend, especially as I tend to produce clusters of related papers addressing particular themes.
