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.

As long as I’m on the subject:  one of the things that I actually have spent a bit of time worrying about—worrying, mind you, but not enough to really do anything about it—since I discovered among my readership a number of folks in positions of authority, folks whose good opinions of me I’d like to maintain, and whose judgments of me matter, is my tendency toward a vocabulary more befitting a member of the merchant marine than my own decidedly unsalty self.  Some of it’s laziness, and some of it’s a carefully cultivated shock value, but get me in casual conversation about something I really care about, and chances are there’s an f-bomb on the horizon.

Which is not to say I don’t censor myself, or that my censor sometimes flags; I’m always critically conscious of my audience, and have never, even under the most exigent circumstances, let such a bomb drop in front of, say, my mother, or anyone else who I’m pretty sure wouldn’t respond well.

But here, on the blog, my sense is always that I’m having a conversation with friends, or if not friends, at least the kinds of acquaintances who’ve decided to drop by and listen, and thus I feel much less compunction about such filtering.

On the other hand, though, this is where the concerns I’ve heard lately about professional self-presentation do in fact have some purchase with me.  For a reason that I cannot quite yet put my finger on, I’m far less concerned that someone in some relative position of authority with respect to me might read the post about my last mammogram, for instance, than that said person might be turned off by my casual vulgarity.

This is a crossroads of a sort, the decision about whether or not to pay some attention filtering my language.  Perhaps it’s just common sense, common courtesy, something of that order.  Or perhaps it’s the leading edge of losing my voice here, of making the character you’re constructing from what I’ve written here somehow less me.

I’ve had a few conversations about this here website of late, conversations with folks who seem uncomfortable with the personal nature of some of what I’ve blogged here.  Nobody’s upset with me about having been indiscreet, or about having said something about them that I shouldn’t have.  Rather, they’re concerned (albeit in different ways, and for different reasons) about my level of self-disclosure, and particularly with the ways that such disclosure might interfere with my professional self-presentation.

I’ve spent the last few days of silence trying to figure out how I feel about their discomfort.

The part of me that’s held off on posting anything takes these concerns seriously, and has tried to think through the question of how much I want to reveal here, and why, where I cross the line, where the line lies, and what purposes, for that matter, the line serves.  Much of the rest of me is having a hard time not finding this anxiety—both theirs and my own, as spawned by theirs—quite hysterically funny.  Because, yeah, I often post here about things that one might find a bit “personal,” at least in the sense of not being about work.

I’m just not sure why anybody would be surprised by that.

Because, damnit, isn’t part of the point of the blog that the personal and the public (and thus the personal and the professional) are so mutually implicated as to be inseparable?  That intellectual life is a profoundly personal experience, and that our lives outside the seminar room are as much in need of examination as anything inside it?  That, as Dr. B has at moments been fond of saying, academics are more than brains on sticks?  That our desire to distill the purely professional for public consumption, casting aside the personal, participates in the myth of the neutral, objective, disinterested scholar that we’ve done our best to reject on a theoretical level?

Isn’t part of the point of the blog—or at least this blog—the liberation of the personal from the slag-heap of academia, and an exploration of its co-implication with the professional?

I’m in the midst of a project that’s primarily about personal blogs, the ways that such blogs are dismissed as a kind of neurotic oversharing, and the reasons that such dismissals are a huge mistake.  And the purposes such dismissals, whether meaning to or not, must serve.  So I’m realizing that the main thing that all this concern about my dangerously unprofessional self-disclosure is making me want to do is theorize that writing, by bringing parts of the article I’m working on here for some early-stage discussion.

We’ve long since forgotten that the personal is political.  I’m not sure why it surprises me to find resistance to the notion that the personal might be professional, as well.

I spent much of last night lying awake, primarily suffering under what I’m pretty sure was a bit of bad salmon.  I wasn’t anywhere near as sick as I could have been, but I did at one point wonder whether TSA would let me board my plane today if the bucket of fluids I was carrying could be demonstrated to have originated within my own person.  That eventuality has blessedly not materialized.

But what all that lying awake tossing and turning and trying to decide whether I’d feel better if I just forced myself to puke did was give me ample time to think about my last brief entry here, and whether it was ill-conceived.  Or whether it was just the PS that made it sound ill-conceived, raising the specter of stalkerdom where it needn’t have been raised.  And whether I should delete the PS, or the whole thing, or just pretend like it never happened, or just simply relax, because all this anxiety was probably bacterial in origin.

This morning, all of this has me thinking about the old post-editing controversy of 2003.  In fact, I thought about this a couple of weeks ago, when I had lunch with my dean; we were discussing my blog (which, yes, he has read), and he asked whether I ever regretted particular posts.  I had to tell him yes, and that what I regretted about them was usually something tonal—too much whinging, for instance, or too much knee-jerk thoughtlessness.  The beauty of the blog, of course, is that the comments allow for a modulation of that tone, a development of a thought, a slight shift of direction.  Because of that I’ve never regretted a post enough to delete it.

Last night, however, or more properly very early this morning, I was seriously considering deleting the last post, mostly because it seemed, in the midst of the abdominal cramps, to make me look like an unremediable idiot.  I’m now not sure it does quite that, but it still makes me a little nauseated, so this post is, in effect, doing the work of modulation.  Also of pushing that last post down off the first screen.

But now I’m wondering:  What are the ramifications of deleting entries?  Under what circumstances does deletion seem appropriate?

Hey: this site is not your own personal publicity organ. Any future comments that are clearly serving no other purpose than promoting your work—not contributing to a conversation, not responding to a post or comment—will be considered spam and will be deleted forthwith. Moreover, I will close comments on any posts that seem to generate such comments.

This is my blog. ‘Kay? Thanks.

[Note: this post probably makes little sense, as I’ve already deleted the offending comment. But an official announcement of this policy seems appropriate.]

[UPDATE, 10.14am: In fact, I’ve just instituted an automatic comment-closing procedure. Should you find yourself wanting to comment on an older post, but the system won’t allow you to, you could always email me instead.]

So there was a piece of comment spam loitering hereabouts for a couple of days, while I debated what to do with it.  I finally deleted it, as the last thing I want is to encourage this kind of behavior.  But what the culprit did is half ingenious and half insanely stupid, which is what had me thinking about it.  The post on which the comment appeared had about 7 comments already, and the spammer simply duplicated the text of one of those comments—a comment from me, no less.  At first glance, the comment seemed in context, if weirdly familiar.  It took me a second to recognize it as spam.

This is not, I think, what Emerson meant about one’s words coming back in alienated majesty…

So, I noted some time back that I’d built a website for my book, including excerpts from the text (the introduction and first chapter, the opening section of every subsequent chapter, and the bibliography and index) and the ability to comment on them. I mentioned this to one of the guys here in NYC yesterday, saying that traffic had been pretty modest and that I’d only gotten one comment so far. He asked me how I’d publicized the launching of the site.

I said that I’d written about it on my blog.

He suggested, perhaps, you know, posting information about it to a listserv? Such as, isn’t there a Pynchon listserv?

Posted to both pynchon-l and wallace-l a couple of hours ago. As of this very minute, here’s what my statcounter looks like:

Oh. Yeah.

Somebody else has noted this recently—I’m sorry I can’t remember who—but spambots are getting weirdly smarter.  Another blog that I have editorial privileges on gets a fair bit of trackback spam, and yesterday I got an email message telling me that there was a trackback awaiting my approval.  The source claimed to be the University of Virginia library, and the excerpted text seemed at first glance to be related to the material on the blog (including the term “EText”), so I followed the link to the MT edit trackbacks page, half-expecting to approve the ping.  Instead, I found that the linked domain was avoidcollections dot info, with “university of virginia library” its subdirectory.  And the text on that linked page is a computer generated hash of text from UVa library pages, interspersed with Yahoo ads.  Yesterday, most of the ads were for credit card companies.  Today, looking at the page again, the ads are for commercial resources related to attending college in Virginia.  There’s something extremely disheartening in this.

I have days when I really wish this blog were anonymous, or that I had another anonymous blog in which I could write without the kind of self-censorship that comes with knowing that many of my students, colleagues, and friends are reading along.  I’m having a bit of a rough time right now, but the roughness of the time is entirely internal, and personal, all about my thought processes and emotional baggage, stuff I’d love to be able to write my way through, but that I don’t really want to share with the world.  At least not with that segment of the world that knows who I am.

And so… I’m left wondering what to write about instead.  I get up every morning and look at the blog, and think… nothing.  I’ve got nothing.  Which is, as you might expect, part of the problem.

In sum:  pretty much the standard why I haven’t been blogging and log-jam breaking post.  With any luck, an actual return to writing, soon.