My academic "passion project" is a study of manual crafts in early Arabic poetry, where poetic description of poetry itself was a conventional trope as far back as the pre-Islamic period. Mostly, poets accomplished this by comparing their verses to other well-crafted goods, textiles and weapons above all. This cultural fact seems to be in conflict with another, which is that weavers, blacksmiths, and professional tradespeople generally were regarded with disdain by Arabia's nomadic elite, whose spokesmen the poets were. Reconciling these facts is the task of Hands at Work, which is one-third finished. Interested readers are directed to the "blog within a blog" I've created to showcase different aspects of this research, and for a look at the book proposal editors are invited to get in touch.