What Should I Be Reading?

In the spirit of Scott McLemee's latest "Intellectual Affairs" column—full disclosure: Y.T. features in it—are there any blogs out there you assume I read, but have no proof that actually I do?  I'm talking about things like Eric Rauchway and Ari Kelman's The Edge of the American West.  I should have known about and been reading it, only I didn't know it existed. 

Anything else fit that bill?

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

I know that Scott McLemee means well, but that article has a very odd implicit definition of academic blogging. People should just call it humanities blogging already. I mean, to take just one tiny politico-scientific corner, where is RealClimate, Deltoid, Rabett Run, Stoat? Or, like, Effect Measure or The Pump Handle? Surely the people writing those must be mostly academics. Everyone knows Pharyngula for various cultural reasons, but Bad Astronomy, Three-Toed Sloth, etc. I'm not even pretending to mention blogs outside my tiny circle of interests, but at least I'm not calling my list an "academic blogging" list.

Things that I assume that you read? That's more difficult. If I didn't know your attitude towards poetry, I'd be surprised that you read Cahiers de Corey and Bemsha Swing but not Silliman's Blog.

[Belle Lettre]

What is your attitude towards poetry?

[Scott McLemee]

I was not just "well-meaning" but fairly deliberate with this. No, the list is not comprehensive or representative. But it makes no claim to be.

It was clearly a matter of informally querying people whose blogs I happened already to follow -- with the expectation that readers with other interests might then, in the comments field, suggest other blogs worth considering. They could do so in the comments field.

Which didn't really happen, of course. The reason being that the comments section serves mainly to let people warn America about Ward Churchill and Islamofascism. I do sometimes try to make it function otherwise, by acting "as if." This never works.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Well, this couple of sentences is where I think you went wrong: "Curious what worthwhile feeds might be missing from my aggregator, I contacted a number of academic bloggers to ask if they followed any academic blogs that deserved more attention. (I defined “academic blogging” here pretty loosely, since this seems like a category that can involve a wide range of interests, approaches, and personnel.) "

Calling attention to your loose definition of academic blogging and then getting a not-so-wide range of interests etc. is a problem, because even though you're not claiming to be comprehensive, you're getting what amounts to a focused slice, not a scatter, and you're using a comprehensive label. It's as if someone wrote about how you could get most academic journals from the arXiv. But really, I brought it up in comments here since Scott K. blogs and lectures about "academic blogging" a good deal, and I similarly think it's probably a misnomer.

[SEK]

RE: Silliman, every time I check it out, it's either lists of links or a long post about what does and doesn't qualify as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. I should give him another shot, though, because the answer to Belle's question is that while I don't read poetry that much myself, I've really grown to enjoy other people's writing about poetry. (I blame Empson, which means I blame Holbo, who turned me on to Empson.)

As for the conflation of "academic blogging" and "humanities blogging," well, I think there's something to be said about this being a corollary of Berube's argument in What's Liberal, i.e. that what counts as "academia" is the humanities -- both by people within the academy and its critics. This is just a thought, though, and something I should flesh out more. That said, you're obviously correct about this being "humanities blogging" ... although a glance at my sidebar shows that I don't limit my blog-reading to humanities sites, and while I talk about my own experience, I frequently make reference to Retrospectacle. If I thought Shelley's blog warranted even more attention than it already has, I'd have recommended it.

[va]

I really like Silliman's links posts. For the most part, I don't have the foggiest idea about what venues have conversations going about contemporary poetry. I like to think of myself as a "poetry person," disciplinarily speaking, but the fact that I'm mostly familiar with strictly canonical stuff bums me out lately. So I found Silliman a few weeks ago (I guess I'm as bad at finding blogs as I am at finding hip poetry), and then just as I suspected it turned out that the contemporary poetry scene = 75% Charles Bernstein and John Ashbery. This made me feel like I had less to catch up on, which was a wonderful feeling. (Kidding. Really, no amount of Bernstein could be enough.)

Re: what else you should be reading, I have nothing. What I was hoping for from McLemee was "Your Advisor's Blog: In Praise of Your Every Thought," or, failing that, "Academic Blogging His/Her Benders." Alas, the internet just does not have what I want.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Joshua Corey wrote something that struck me as being very true about Silliman, en passant. From here:

"On the one side, there's the strangling populism evoked by such book titles as "The Trouble with Poetry" (Billy Collins) or "Can Poetry Matter?" (Dana Gioia), or in apologias for the MFA establishment (I wrote about one such by D.W. Fenza last year). On the other side there's Ron Silliman, or the Adornian counter-institution that's come to be known as "Ron Silliman," whose single most influential intervention since blogging became popular remains the sometimes invidious distinction between the School of Quietude and the Post-Avants."

"Adornian counter-institution" somehow seems quite right. If you're interested in contemporary poetry to the extent that you're reading blogs about it, I'd be surprised if you weren't reading Silliman's; if you're sort of meta-interested in poetry, enjoying writing about it but not it itself, perhaps not.