I’ve been ‘blogging’ since 2002, which, heaven help us, makes thirteen years of publishing my thoughts to the internet. A veritable archive of my personal history, there for the viewing (first here, now here, in case you’re interested). At some point in my blogging career (I really don’t like the sound of ‘blogging,’ I might add, but…) I decided to limit my ‘personal’ writings, namely, posts in which I opined on some item of political or cultural interest. I then largely phased them out, in favor of things that, I hope at least, have proven to be of use for people interested in history, in poetry, and a few other topics, but which carried relatively little of my own political, philosophical, or cultural idiosyncrasies. Poetry excepted, I should note- I’ve gotten bolder, perhaps, about offering my poetic attempts to the world. But gone are my days of broadcasting juvenile political tirades- not that I’ve ever been an especially potent polemicist, mind you.
Well, they were gone. This blog (that word!) is going to constitute something of an exception, at least for a few months. For entirely practical purposes, I will be writing here, on as daily a basis as possible, honing my essaying skills in preparation for my upcoming comprehensive exams, as part of the process of securing a PhD. I am also working at a couple of journal articles, and will soon enough begin writing my dissertation. I’d also like to move towards a more, dare I say it, literary style of communication, though perhaps not a ‘popular’ one. But at least something with fewer traces of academese. Not an absence of pretentious words, mind you, just an exchange of the duller, stuffier sort we tend to employ in the Discipline, in favor of the stuff novelists use. That’s what novelists do, yes? No matter.
Somewhere, in some book, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote something to the effect of: ‘I write to make progress, and I make progress by writing.’ That is my very modest goal here. There are many things- philosophical, critical, political- that I want to begin addressing, that I do not wish to litter my ‘primary’ blog with, things with which I am grappling, refining, and for which I make no claims of definitiveness. I hope to make some progress, towards various ends, practical and less so. I do not wish to be read as a polemicist, though I am sure I come across in that way at times. Rather, here I will offer up conversations within myself, as it were, with topics and matters of current interest broadly, as well as things that will likely interest few to no one besides my self. Hence the title of this blog, actually- which I will perhaps explain in greater depth later, but shall for the moment leave a mystery (and I checked- Google will not help you, it seems).
Sohbetname 