One of the reasons I have such energy for writing here at the moment is as a kind of proof-positive against my perpetual fear: that my professional and voluntary roles at Concrete University will drain my energy reserves and leave me unable to do anything except work, eat dinner and go to bed early. The present time of year, in which I am between semesters (we run on a slightly different calendar from the undergraduate university proper) is a time in which such a worry seems to flourish. So there’s a defensive element to my prose, getting as much down as possible so that when the time crunch comes I won’t feel I wasted it when I had it. (The final chapters of my manuscript could benefit from the same kind of fidelity, it must be said.)
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There are various names, are there not, for the act of running your name(s) through a Google search: vanity googling, auto-googling, and so on. I do this from time to time, looking in particularly for any citations of my work and also, of course, the possibility that someone has started a hate-blog about me (some strange part of my mind remains ever fourteen; one can never be too vigilant).
A little while ago I came across this article, written for a 2001 issue of a periodical then newly online. My contribution was extracted from the first chapter of my then-recently-submitted thesis, and its publication a chance to share a part of a trawling of my field that I thought would likely never see the light of day elsewhere, on account of its length.
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It’s my hope that if you’re reading this it’s because you’ve followed the redirection from my old home at wordpress.com. I hope that those of you kind enough to link to that site will update your links to here. *
As with any move, my attention at the moment is held by the bright shiny newness of it all, so it may be a day or two before I begin the usual reflective writing for which I am known across the prairies of the internet.
Let me tantalise you in the meantime by contending I have fewer than five thousand more words to write before my manuscript is complete: final draft, reading for final editing. Once I began, at the prompting of the señor and a friend or two, to move around large blocks of text, the thing began to take shape much as a puzzle might unexpectedly near completion. I am quite pleased with it, but that could be the result of a summer’s break.
CP
*2249 ETA: I’ll also be cross-posting from here to my old LiveJournal (primarily just because I can), for those of you who prefer to read my entries there.
There is plenty to read on my blogroll, and I find new gems—no stone unmined—every week. Stef and Deborah represent themselves and their experience with lucidity and clarity multiple times a week, and are collaborating with others on The Hand Mirror, whose premise shows what many of us know: that the second wave has not yet dissipated.
My online recherches for material on Murakami, whose Norwegian Wood I am working on (in translation) with my literary studies students, brought me in passing to the selfdivider, which is well-turned indeed. Reading this new writing has led me to think about the kind of writing I am doing here, and how it has changed in the four years since I began writing, in this mode, online.
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To say they rule my world
19 September, 2009
in O internet, commentatrix
I look forward daily to the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates, which I have praised elsewhere on these pages. In addition to the reasons I cite there, I wonder also if it is because his work exemplifies my sense of what reasonable argument can be: steady, reflective, connected to experience but also to the wider culture, discreetly slangy, thoughtful.
This morning’s short essay on Prince, “All of my Purple Life” was a typical treat.
I think writing about gender and pop culture needs more of this kind of careful, humble, exploration of what can easily turn into a call to arms or, worse, an outbreak of hnurgh, hnurgh, hnurgh. To what extent is a fear of someone else assuming power over us a fuel for all kinds of hateful, or even hate-skirting, words?
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