Sunday, 14 January 2007

Blogging Blogs about Blogging, Bloggers, and Blog-Readers

Granted, blogging is an exercise in solipsism. 

Granted, blogging about blogging is a narcissistic indulgence.

Granted, the repetition of a word as ugly as "blog" clogs paragraphs, each one a log jammed down the craw of some unsuspecting tributary.

Therefore, the following posts will be pompous, sound vainglorious and look beastly. 

You have been warned.

Jan 14, 2007 9:09:59 PM | Academia, Literary Theory, Literature, Philosophy, Weblogs

5 Comments

eb

They wrote regularly in keeping blogs, they learned little things that are things in keeping blogs, they learned many little things that are things in keeping blogs, they wrote blogs every day, they wrote regularly, they wrote blogs, they wrote blogs the same length of time every day, they wrote blogs, they wrote quite regularly blogs.

Posted by: eb | Sunday, 14 January 2007 at 09:27 PM

Adam Roberts

There are blog blogs. These are things we blog about that we blog. There are blog unblogs. That is to say, there are things that we blog that we don't blog about. But there are also unblog unblogs. There are things we don't blog about us not blogging.

Posted by: Adam Roberts | Monday, 15 January 2007 at 07:46 AM

uncomplicatedly

Well, we blog what we know, and we all know blogs. I related my post on Bataille and Weil to blogs largely in an effort to help my readers to give a damn. Blogs are, you know, the one thing all bloggers have in common.

Posted by: uncomplicatedly | Monday, 15 January 2007 at 01:52 PM

Anna Hiller

Rev up the blog, and start the dialogue.

Hey, that rhymes.

No one ever said I was a poet.

Posted by: Anna Hiller | Monday, 15 January 2007 at 02:52 PM

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Little Circles "Blogging," Conventional Wisdom declares, "is a poor representation of your intellectual output. Why not spend the time you devote to blogging writing conference papers four people will hear or articles eleven will read?" On its face, the idea that bloggers aren't serious scholars requires an unintellectual notion of what constitutes "serious" scholarship. To not produce useless intellectual artifacts is to be unprofessional. To participate in a culture of engagement—one in which ideas matter in ways they seldom do without the life-support of seminar rooms and qualifying exams—is to be unprofessional. To be professional is to embrace the intellectual isolation responsible for so many unreadable articles and books. Not that all articles and books are unreadable. Far from it. But pull your five or ten favorite books from the shelf. Scan the acknowledgment page. Now marvel at how frequently the same names appear. You see, small circles of serious readers exist, but they are largely closed to young scholars in remote climes. But the people they read? These scholars and their students occupy the upper reaches of the discipline. They already belong to a serious, engaged intellectual culture. They already possess what so many on the professional peripheries desire. They already have what many academic bloggers hope to create. They have every reason to consider blogging unnecessary and unprofessional. The articles they help place, the dissertations they direct, the books they review—all the useless intellectual artifacts others lack the time and resources to read with the attention they deserve? They've earned the privilege to read them in a professional capacity. Most scholars haven't. And sometimes, they blog.

Scott Eric Kaufman

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