Blogging

I’d be more excited if he had started posting to “Language Log”:http://www.languagelog.net/, but even if we won’t be seeing flashes of linguistic brilliance, it’s still newsworthy that “Noam Chomsky has started a blog”:http://blog.zmag.org/ttt/. The introductory post is a little hard to decipher.

bq. This blog will include brief comments on diverse topics of concern in our time. They will sometimes come from the ZNet sustainer forum system where Noam interacts through a forum of his own, sometimes from direct submissions, sometimes culled from mail and other outlets — always from Noam Chomsky.

bq. Posted by Noam Chomsky

I wouldn’t have guessed that Noam Chomsky calls Noam Chomsky “Noam Chomsky”, but if it’s good enough for Rickey Henderson I guess it’s good enough for the Noam.

Hat tip: “NicoPitney”:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/3/24/223959/120 over at Kos.

“Invisible Adjunct”:http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000498.html has announced that she will be leaving academia and giving up her blog. It’s a very considerable loss – her blog has been wry, balanced, and very very smart. It’s become the core of a real community. She’s going to be missed.

In case anyone has missed the news in “today’s Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1042250,00.html , “Don Foster”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/reviews/newsid_1410000/1410211.stm , the guy who used literary forensics to identify Joe Klein as the author of _Primary Colors_ and who confirmed Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber, claims to have outed the anonymous author of “Belle de Jour”:http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/ as Sarah Champion, a minor author from Manchester. Belle, naturally, “denies the claim”:http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_belledejour-uk_archive.html#107953767586241556 .

Congratulations to Kevin Drum for having effectively “taken over”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ the Washington Monthly’s website with his rather excellent blog. I note for the record that I “argued”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001372.html last month that hybridization with blogs was likely the way forward for magazines of opinion. Clearly the proprietors of the Washington Monthly agree. It’s a magazine that has been doing quite well the last year; I suspect that its links to the blogosphere (through Josh Marshall and Nick Confessore) have already been helping it get the word out to potential subscribers. More power to them.

Chris Sheil has been making lots of excellent points in his running review of “The”:http://backpagesblog.com/weblog/archives/000295.html “Howard”:http://backpagesblog.com/weblog/archives/000309.html “Years”:http://backpagesblog.com/weblog/archives/000341.html. I’m not sure how much interest this will have to our one or two non-Australian readers, but it’s been an excellent series so far and I hope Chris keeps it going. It’s a real pleasure to see someone prepared to use the freedoms of the blog format to spell out all the things they want to say rather than compress them into a soundbite length post.

Gabe Wildau, a (real-life) Brown philosophy grad, and Jai Singh have a smart-looking blog called “Flexible Response”:http://flexibleresponse.blogspot.com/. It’s early days, but so far they look like they’re doing a good job putting into practice the aggressive liberalism “the Gadflyer”:http://gadflyer.com/ is campaigning for.

I’ve always been curious about why some academics blog and some don’t. Indeed, I’ve been thinking of finding out more from CT readers ever since John Holbo’s first “guest post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001378.html, which talks at length about his start in the blogosphere. So, in a completely unscientific survey, I’d like to turn the mike over. If you’re an academic who blogs, what prompted you to start blogging? And what keeps you going? What do you try to do in your blog? Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship? If you’re an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven’t done so at this point in time? If no, why not? Either way, what do you get from reading blogs? Answers to any or all of these questions (or other related questions that you think are more interesting) would be appreciated. Anonymity/pseudonymity is fine. Anecdotes are positively encouraged – as I say this is a completely unscientific inquiry.

Brayden King is in Depression, Stage 4 of the Five Stages of Blogging. Characterized by morbid feelings that your blog may somehow get you into trouble, this stage follows Denial (“I don’t really have a blog, it’s just a webpage I update sometimes”), Anger (“Why the hell isn’t anyone reading my blog?”), and Bargaining (“I’ll only post once a day, I promise”). Fortunately it is usually followed in short order by Acceptance.

In a disproportionate and heavy-handed response to a specific problem, the University of Birmingham (UK) has banned staff from hosting personal web pages (including blogs) on their systems. “The Guardian has the story”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/administration/story/0,9860,1166989,00.html . And staff at Birmingham have “a campaign”:http://web.bham.ac.uk/web_campaign/ to defend their right to host personal material.

“Bill Tozier”:http://williamtozier.com/slurry/comment/academia/adviceToYoungScientists.html and “Cosma Shalizi”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/archives/000208.html on the tough-love approach to academic peer review. Cosma opts for the frank and brutal – “This MS. is completely lacking in scientific interest and should be rejected.” I’ve never had the heart to do this myself, but I don’t know that my slightly more hesitant approach to stinkers (usually something along the lines of “this manuscript may have had some merit, but I couldn’t see it”) is any more pleasant or helpful for the author.

Also via Cosma, this admirable “Michael Chabon piece”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17000 on Philip Pullman’s _His Dark Materials_ series in the _New York Review of Books._ Chabon captures precisely the strengths of the first two volumes, and the weaknesses of the third. Nor does he worry about catching genre-cooties – he unapologetically situates the books in a wider fantasy/sf tradition dating back to Vance, Moorcock and others.

“Ellen Fremedon”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/ellen_fremedon/204107.html on ‘grading with Gollum’ (via “Chad Orzel”:http://steelypips.org/principles/index.php).

And “sometime blogger”:http://www.mclemee.com/id4.html Scott McLemee “savages”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/07/books/review/07MCLEMET.html?ex=1393995600&en=50b3a9cdab447859&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND William Vollmann’s multi-volume ‘treatise’ on violence in a review for the NYT. My favorite bit:

bq. Vollmann’s prose has a distinctive way of cycling between two styles. In one, the sentences snake through dense thickets of figural language, wrapping themselves around elephant-size metaphors, which (jaws unhinged) they try to swallow. In his other voice, the tone is flat, narrating the scene in a detached and almost affectless way, like some cross between Alain Robbe-Grillet and Joe Friday on ”Dragnet.”

although

bq. Appreciation of ”Rising Up and Rising Down” properly begins — and will, for most people, immediately end — with awe at its physical presence. Whatever the genre, it is a remarkable example of the book as furniture.

is rather well put too.

‘Truly this is the sweetest of theologies’, William said, with perfect humility, and I thought he was using that insidious figure of speech that rhetors call irony, which must always be prefaced by the pronunciato, representing its signal and its justification – something that William never did. For which reason the abbot, more inclined to the use of figures of speech, took William literally …

Having run afoul of irony in both directions lately (having my own ironic post on Lent taken literally, then taking literally an ironic comment by Chris), I’ve come to the conclusion that HTML needs its own version of the pronunciato.

Here’s my proposal: Text meant to be taken ironically would be surrounded by <irony > tags. Such text would render normally, but would have a hover property such that, when the mouse hovered over ironic text, it would flicker through a range of suitably ironic colors. Not perfect, but a lot more appealing than a smiley :-).

“Andrew Sullivan”:http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2004_02_29_dish_archive.html#107851564542206172:

bq. THANK GOD FOR KRAUTHAMMER: Charles Krauthammer has never written a dumb column, to my knowledge. Even on emotional subjects such as civil marriage, he brings to the debate a calm reasoning that wins the respect of his opponents as well as his supporters.

See “here”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A56315-2004Feb19&notFound=true, “here”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A37125-2003Dec4&notFound=true and “here”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A17610-2003Nov27&notFound=true for a few recent examples of the calm reasoning that Krauthammer’s opponents value so much. And then file this one along with the crackpottery of the bloke who was trying to convince us all a few months ago that Steven Den Beste was the Nabokov of the blogosphere.

“John Holbo and Belle Waring”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/ have now finished their week of guest blogging with us, so I think it appropriate to say how much fun it was to have them around. With reflections on Sesame Street, the English murder-mystery, Chinese-Italian (or should that be Italian-Chinese) cuisine from Belle and on the changing experience of blogging, the FMA and conservatives in academia from John — we at CT have certainly done well from having them on board. (You can check out those posts again by clicking on the little squiggly thing next to “Guest Bloggers” on the LH sidebar.) I hope we’ll be seeing them again some time soon, but in the meantime be sure to visit their blog regularly.

Today is the second anniversary of my first ever blog post, on my old blog, “Junius”:http://junius.blogspot.com/ . John Holbo “reflected the other day”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001378.html on how things have changed in blogging since: my first few posts engaged with people like Lileks and Reynolds and, indeed, it was the discovery of Instapundit that set me off doing this stuff. It has been an interesting and rewarding couple of years, and I’ve met people, read people, gone places and done things that I would never have done but for blogging. Roll on another 12 months!

More and more, when I come across academic blogs that I’ve never read before, they have links to Crooked Timber. This is all very nice and gratifying – but it also suggests that there are bloggers out there who are aware of CT, qualify for the academic blogroll, but aren’t there for the simple reason that I don’t know about them. If you meet the “criteria”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000273.html email me, and I’ll put you up.