I’ve honestly just been too busy even to contemplate blogging, much less to write anything. (Or even read anything; I’m about as out of touch with bloglandia as I’ve been anytime in the last five years.) I’m hoping to get caught up enough to produce something of value here soon.
A bit belatedly, a post mostly serving to bookmark for myself Scott McLemee’s IHE column growing out of the MLA blogging panel, with a very interesting conversation (both in the column and in the comments) about gender, academic blogging, stardom, and anonymity.
I’ve been working up a storm, and the big blogging project I’ve mentioned several times is actually beginning to take some shape. I’ll hope to post some bits from it for discussion as they become available.
An MLA moment I haven’t written about, as yet: I had three and a half minutes between meetings, at one point, and so I grabbed the laptop and headed for the corridor in the conference center, where there was a nice strong free wifi signal. Just as I was sitting down and getting myself set up, along came a guy in a very nice suit and a very nice open-collared shirt in a lovely shade of green. Perhaps I looked a bit familiar for some reason, perhaps it was the usual conference name-tag scan, perhaps it was the sight of me yanking laptop out of messenger bag, but the guy in the lovely green shirt gave me a decided squint as he passed by. I thought nothing of it for about thirty seconds, and then realized—I think that was Michael Bérubé.
I’m still not positive—I’ve never met the man in person. And of course, I left Philadelphia before the big blogging panel, so I couldn’t confirm then. Nor could I introduce myself, which is something I really wanted to do. He did me a quite astonishing professional favor some years back, one utterly unnecessary, particularly given that he had no idea who I was. It fell at a key moment in my career, when things were looking more than a little dark, and I’ve never gotten the chance to thank him in person, or to let him know how much it meant.
And now things have gone all explody over at Le Blogue Bérubé. Once upon a time, at least, we both belonged to a fairly small cohort of academics with the same weird tendency to publish our random thoughts online. Now he’s gone, and I’m just me again. I can’t help but feel like I missed my moment.
The good news is that I get spared most memes; for whatever reason, they seem to pass me by. Liz just tagged me with this one, though, and since she complied when she got tagged, I’ll do the same. I want to note that this is hard, though; there are plenty of things you don’t know about me, but not so many that are (a) sufficiently interesting and (b) insufficiently private to write about here!
Thanks to all of you who commented and emailed yesterday and this morning; sympathetic noises were much desired, and much appreciated. Yesterday’s post arose, obviously, out of a well of frustration, both with the core situation and with my painful inability to Let It Go. My hope was that blogging the frustration, even without any of the content, would provide a little bit of a release. And it has.
My goal for this week—aside from preparing and delivering the lecture I’m delivering to the faculty on Wednesday—is to really focus in on the letting-go process. To find a productive way to chill out. To seek a middle ground between being ineffective and making myself crazy. And to remember why it is I really do love this job, when I can keep my head clear.
First, however, a lecture to prepare! (And awesome butt-kicking boots to wear, which I promise I won’t use on anyone.) In fact, the lecture, entitled “Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet,” is precisely the thing I need, to remind me of what it is I’m doing here, and why.
In any case, end whine. Thanks for listening.
Happily, two other things have happened in the last couple of days that have begun to turn my mood around a bit, diminishing the stress somewhat and making it all seem, if not exactly bearable, at least worthwhile. One was meeting up with a colleague last night for some food and wine and a general unloading of aggravation over the course that this semester has taken. And the other was meeting Aunt B.
She’s in L.A. this week on business, and generously drove out here to meet up with me (among other folks, of course). And we had a fabulous chat over dinner, as she’s already mentioned. I’ve been reading and corresponding with her for a while now, and so I expected her to be great, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how amazing I’d find her, how wide-ranging her interests are, how much she cares about intellectual communication, and how generally fabulous I’d find her to be. We spent a significant percentage of the time talking about blogging, a topic which is of course taking up an increasing share of my brainspace, and as we were going our separate ways after dinner, we both mentioned how astonishing the experience of in-person meetings with bloggers you like can be. While all bloggers construct personas in their writing, personas that are never equivalent to the person of the writer, by and large bloggers with awesome personas have turned out to be awesome in person as well. Back before I met George, what now seems like a million years ago, I was terrified of what in-person meetings with folks I knew from life online would be like. And with good reason: at least a couple of the charming folks that I knew from my heavier listserv days turned out to be, shall we say, rather unpleasant in real life. The email format somehow produced a radical dislocation of personality, or perhaps it simply allowed for the masking of personality.
But bloggers—generally speaking, bloggers seem to be good folks, but beyond that, blogging’s mode of discourse, its reliance on a kind of ongoing development of a narrative of self, seems to allow, if not require, some aspects of an actual personality to come through. The blog is of course always a performance of self, and never that self in any direct sense. But the performance in this form gives me the impression, after having met a number of folks in person whom I knew first from the blogosphere (n=something greater than 10), that the blog permits, where it is desired, some glimpses into an “authentic” identity, which other modes of online discourse have often managed to mask.
In sum: Aunt B. = awesome. And blogs = completely obsessing me, right now.
While the panic has subsided (in no small part due to my having woken the fuck up and said NO, thank you, to a new administrative task that I was being asked to take on), my workload has not diminished. If anything, the stack in front of me has grown in the last week, and exponentially.
And so I’m at it, reading big piles of stuff, writing letters of recommendation, conducting interviews, producing reports.
Oh yeah, and thinking about how it might be a good idea to write the presentation that I’m going to be giving at the conference I’m going to this weekend. That too.
The funny thing is, is that I’m doing all this writing about blogging these days—the BlogTalk talk, the Claremont Discourse lecture I gave last week, and now the blogs-as-learning-management-systems talk coming up in Portland. But the more I write about blogging, the less I seem to do it. And the long-range forecast for the blogging thing isn’t really looking so great right now. I’ll hope to get back in the groove here soon; the longer I’m away, the harder it is to get going again…
I’ve spent the last three days madly working on the article from which my talk at BlogTalk will be drawn. And late last night, as I was trying to fall asleep, it hit me: I’m leaving for Europe on Thursday.
That, needless to say, was about the end of me falling asleep. There’s much to do, and I’m all in a bit of a panic about it. I’ll hope, however, to find myself with much to report shortly.
Except looming deadlines, and deadlines already past. I’ll be back with more scintillating thoughts soon, I hope.
So I really honestly did add them to my blogroll a couple of hours before Liz popped up in the comments, and had made a note-to-self to post an actual bloggy link this afternoon, before getting all distracted by the notion of my disappearing audience, and then wrapped up in a little bit of work. But all this is neither here nor there.
The thing that is most important: two of my most fantabulous former students have started a blog, Glowy Box, focused on the most serious matter of watching television.
I like to think that I taught them, if not everything, at least some small subset of what they know.
