Best way to kill a blog: not write, even when you're inclined to, and then wait until you're no longer inclined to.
Best way to kill a blog 2: publish a too-long review of a book you're certain no one you know has read.
Here goes anyway:
David Denby, one of two film critics for the New Yorker, recently published a book called Snark. I saw him on C-SPAN discussing his tract and was immediately delighted: someone was taking on the anti-everything aspects of popular intellectual culture. So I bought his book, read it, and was left somewhat upset. I should have expected it from a typical New Yorker writer -- an extremely intelligent, well polished analysis of something just un-mainstream enough to make me feel like I was being a cultured badass, with attacks on the American neo- and theo-cons ranging from peripheral to vociferous, but with no real attack at what's at the heart of the matter. I made my way through his at times exasperating and at times spot-on book, and I don't think that he's entirely correct in his ideas about why and how we talk to (or more importantly, about) each other in this vast internet realm of links and tagging and occasionally text.
Sounding board for an opera-going language teacher
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Blog Hard
The first post: account for the name, manifesto-style:
1. The 'e' is self-evident. Plus, an American friend went to Spain this summer, and returned with a stray 'e' at the beginning of assorted words (e.g. eSpain, eSpanish, eTC.). The eFfect was eHumorous.
2. "Age of Precarious" was already taken.
3. As a committed statist whose skin crawls at the mention of tax cuts and the loss of personal liberty, I want the government in my life. I want to walk amongst fellow citizens and know that their stake is my stake and that the terrain we share is a combination of the respected private and the well-fostered public. The proper balance of private and public is to my mind the main challenge of sustaining an industrial nation-state (in the long-term; the unbalance in the U.S. is what makes us big, and topsy-turvy). I attempt, and fail, to always factor in the pursuit of that balance in what I do, say, and think.
My hopes for this blog are to talk about all sorts of different topics, without falling victim to self-obsession. I've spent a long time resenting blogs and bloggers, somewhat cattily so. Now I'm a copycat.
1. The 'e' is self-evident. Plus, an American friend went to Spain this summer, and returned with a stray 'e' at the beginning of assorted words (e.g. eSpain, eSpanish, eTC.). The eFfect was eHumorous.
2. "Age of Precarious" was already taken.
3. As a committed statist whose skin crawls at the mention of tax cuts and the loss of personal liberty, I want the government in my life. I want to walk amongst fellow citizens and know that their stake is my stake and that the terrain we share is a combination of the respected private and the well-fostered public. The proper balance of private and public is to my mind the main challenge of sustaining an industrial nation-state (in the long-term; the unbalance in the U.S. is what makes us big, and topsy-turvy). I attempt, and fail, to always factor in the pursuit of that balance in what I do, say, and think.
My hopes for this blog are to talk about all sorts of different topics, without falling victim to self-obsession. I've spent a long time resenting blogs and bloggers, somewhat cattily so. Now I'm a copycat.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)