Sunday, May 4, 2014

20140504.0707

May the Fourth be with you!

It is, of course, the pseudo-holiday celebrating the Star Wars franchise in all its glory and its pain (because a lot of it is painfully bad). I have marked the day before in this space, if only briefly. Too, in something entirely unrelated, this is the anniversary of my making funny electronic marks in this space; today marks four years I have been blogging here. A retrospective would seem to be called for.

The first post in this blog took place at 10:29am EDT on 4 May 2010. It is something of a bridge post, linking from what had been weekly bits cross-posted on several blogging platforms that seem now to be defunct. (The link itself no longer functions, the relevant page having vanished and the Internet Wayback Machine having no record of it. Not all data is preserved.) It offers no substantive commentary, but only a brief bit of forty-four words that say little and do less. Indeed, it was not until 6 May 2010 that I actually wrote anything in this blog that has any value (but I have made much use of that piece in the years since), and not all of what I have written since has been a credit. (Not for nothing is the first word of the blog title "ravings.")

Matters would seem to have improved, though. After spending a few years puttering about haphazardly, posting relatively little and being read even less, I started writing more in this blog, eventually coming to the present more-or-less daily posts. Indeed, the uptick happened at about this time last year, when I had been laid off and was looking for work. As I noted then, I suddenly had more time to write, and I took advantage of it. I have worked to foster the habit of taking time to write; it seems to be a good one, particularly for someone who teaches writing and supplements the household income through freelance writing work, or for someone who has to present papers at conferences four times in a year some years.

How much longer I will maintain this blog, I do not know. In some senses, I cannot know; I am a scholar, certainly, and there are many things I can know--but about what will come, I can only guess. I am a sage not a seer. And the thought has occurred to me that I may professionalize my blogging a bit more, consolidating my personal blog and the other online work that I do so that I need only maintain a single web-presence instead of trying to negotiate several as I currently do. That might cause some problems, though, given the propensities of my personal writing as opposed to my professional. (Where do the two divide from one another, particularly for a scholar of the academic humanities?) I intend to keep this going--and if it does move, it will only be a move, rather than an ending (and I will archive the site so that there is a record of it to which I can refer again).

So, live long and prosper.

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