20151119.0703

This is the one thousandth post to this webspace. It has only taken, what, five and a half years to reach it, starting from the first post or the first substantial post. (I do keep returning to the latter; Edmundson looms large with me, as I have noted on several occasions elsewhere and no few times here.) Some retrospection would seem to be in order, given that my post count has now crossed into numbers that take commas in their writing.

When I look back in this webspace, I typically do so first by reviewing earlier years' posts from the same date. Doing so now offers me work from 2010, 2013, and 2014. The first looks at a scholarly article published at a time when I was abreast of my scholarly reading (as I am not now), noting the implications that those of us in the academic humanities must speak out even as we know our voices will not be appreciated and remarking that the droning din of shouted ignorance is the ostinato over which the themes of public understanding and perception are figured. I do not think matters have changed so much in five years, although I am glad to have the reminder that things were not better in the before.

The second and third both treat the Gettysburg Address--one on its sesquicentennial, the other, a year later. 2013 lauds the piece and emulates it (admittedly ineptly; my anaphora is not as telling or pithy as Lincoln's). 2014 muses upon the piece in verse, also less aptly than the piece itself. The latter is another reminder that matters remain as they have been.

There is other retrospection to do, though, than to simply look back at previous iterations of this date. I have done much to change the kind of writing I do in this webspace since I began to write in it, moving from irregular entries (such as I tend to do with another blog for which I write) or from the weekly entries I had tried to make in this webspace's now-vanished predecessor to daily entries that run to some 500 words each. That I am not always successful in that plan, either in writing daily or in writing enough daily, annoys me somewhat, to be sure, but I do try to do it even so. I have benefited from the exercise, I think. I am more in the habit of writing than I was before, and writing for a general public--for the site is open to all readers, even if few avail themselves of it--helps me to write in such a way that others can read it. Academic writing operates under an onus of perceived inscrutability, even from its own creators (GA Cohen comes to mind, as do arguments about Judith Butler and others). I hope that I have worked in this webspace to improve my writing in terms of readability, and as I look forward to another thousand posts, I hope that I will continue to get better in all the ways I need to do so as a writer.

There are many yet.