Reviving the Blog

I closed down this blog slightly over two years ago, although, in practical terms, the blog had closed down some number of months earlier.  At that point, I was burnt out by the process of finishing graduate school, the attempt to negotiate a new contract, and was in the midst of watching the attempt to reform our graduate student union collapse on the Irvine campus.  I found myself in a place where the act of writing simply felt futile, a feeling that it has taken some time to shake.  Since then, I've made a number of attempts to reestablish my connection with my somewhat limited public through two or three new blog projects, none of which really fully succeeded.  In each case, the project felt forced and artificial.  At the beginning of the year, I found myself thinking about trying to create a new blog project, and found myself thinking of the name of my old blog.  I could simply not think of a better name for a blog than the title I came up with at the beginning of that project.  More significantly, the emotional charge from the end of the blog had lost its power, and I began to think about simply revising this project, rather than jumping into another.  In a sense, the same impetus is driving the revival of this project as the one that started the project, the need to give myself the incentive to write everyday, and more significantly, to have a low stakes writing space, rather than the more high stakes, failed attempts at revising my dissertation for publication.  I figure if I'm not going to get my materials into the journals, I might as well try to converse with a perhaps equally small if less official public.  Along with the process of writing new posts, I also plan on mildly revising earlier posts, largely for legibility, but in some cases, I also might do some rewriting.  My intellectual interests haven't changed substantially, and I would recommend looking at my first post for a sense of how I named the blog and my larger intellectual interests.  I'll probably put up a slightly revised version of a talk that I gave at the recent MLA, but I think I'll end this particular post now.