So something weird must have happened while I was out of the country — my comments were closed by some gremlin, and a default option forcing folks to register in order to make new comments was created. I’ve opened up current posts for commenting by anyone again (though some may be moderated), and apologize to those who were unable to weigh in.
Archive for the 'Blogging' Category
I need a hiatus. Today is July 29, and I plan to return to blogging 31 days from today, on August 29.
This week marks the fifth anniversary of the beginning of my blogging career, though the archives from my first five months of posting are, alas, lost in the floating ephemera of cyberspace. My preserved archives (which can be viewed by clicking on the tabs at right) go back to January 2004. Again, thanks are due to the wonderful Lauren of Feministe and Faux Real Tho for doing amazing work to create this blog and collate a great many posts. I’ve written close to 2500 posts which I’ve stuck into more than 100 categories. No single person, including myself, has to my knowledge read them all. I’m not suggesting that that’s a great loss.
As many long-time bloggers have pointed out, blogging can come to feel like work. Sometimes, it is exciting work — but other times, it is unpaid drudgery. Most of us notice that our “stats” rise (in terms of number of readers) as long as we post regularly, and the fear quickly develops that if we don’t stay active, our fickle readers will leave us, never to return. Chasing readership is tiring sometimes. It’s not what I do for a living, after all. This summer, blogging has felt like work.
In the last nine months or so, I’ve gotten involved in several bruising battles within the wider progressive/feminist blogosphere. A number of bloggers took temporary breaks from the ’sphere, so exhausted and disheartened were they. Most returned within a few weeks or months. I realize now that I ought, perhaps, to have taken a break as well. It’s only been recently that I’ve figured out how disconsolate I was as a result of some of these exchanges. Losing the respect and “cyber-friendship” of people I admired has taken a greater toll than I imagined. A very large number of people who once linked to me now no longer do. It’s not other people’s job to make me feel good, but it was painful and upsetting in ways that took me, oh, about four or five months to figure out. Sometimes my verbal dexterity covers up a heart that is very slow to process. (The darned ENFP/Gemini thing.)
I love blogging. It has changed my life. I intend to return to it at the end of next month, and be a regular blogger through the fall. But I think that for those of us who blog a lot (and I’ve averaged nearly ten posts per week for five years), taking at least two months off a year is probably a good thing.
I have some traveling to do in August, and lots of thinking to do. When I come back to the blog, I want to come back with a renewed commitment to eradicating the worst of my writing habits. The tendency towards sanctimoniousness runs deep; it’s one of my worst defects of character. I don’t doubt for a second that I can write with power as well as with humility, but the pompousness is so damn reflexive, so seemingly natural…
In any case, I’ll see you all on August 29.
Sometimes, I make fun of Unitarians. I have many Unitarian Universalists in my family, and have more or less grown up on the fringes of UU culture. My father, step-mother, and sisters are deeply committed Unitarians and have been active in the society for years. My father’s memorial service was held at the Unitarian church where he, uh, didn’t quite worship but did sing enthusiastically. The Unitarians have a long history of commitment to social justice, of commitment to radical inclusion, of commitment to interfaith dialogue. Above all, they are the best and kindest of universalists, sure that in the end, the ocean refuses no river. I honor them for that.
Yesterday, a gunman opened fire at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville. Two church members were killed before the deranged gunman was tackled and taken into custody. One of the two dead parishioners stood in the path of the attacker’s shotgun, protecting others with his body.
Today’s reports reveal that the assailant targeted the Unitarians for their liberal views.
One of my regular readers — and a Facebook friend — is Sarah, a student at Tennessee and a member of the church. She was not there yesterday, and is well, though badly shaken. She and all her community are in my thoughts and prayers. Continue reading ‘Pundits, pastors, and bloggers: of anger, culpability, and the Unitarian shooting in Tennessee’
Too much to do, and too little time in which to do it. Blogging ought to return next week, albeit only for a short while before a month-long hiatus.
I’m resting at home, watching the Croatia-Turkey European football quarterfinal. It’s well over one hundred degrees outside, and I have no desire to blog or do much of anything other than do something I so rarely do, which is sit on a couch and be, for a short while, a vegetable.
Posting resumes Monday. Come on Croatia!
UPDATE: 24 hours later, I’m once again on the couch, enjoying two consecutive relatively leisurely days. That hasn’t happened in I don’t know how long, but I shan’t feel guilty. I need this down time. And my wife’s flight lands at LAX in a few hours.
One of my favorite “looks” for myself is a fitted, carefully tailored button-down shirt, tucked into khaki or navy-blue trousers, with the sleeves rolled tightly almost to the elbows. Thanks to Juergen Klinsmann, the former Germany skipper, I see that it’s become a nearly-universal style among coaches in this year’s Euro football tournament. I cannot take any credit, but I am glad this very smart look has spread about. My shirts tend to be pink or pale lavender, however, rather than the crisp white favored by the managers.
Today is a very busy day, with finals to give and office hours to hold and grading to do. Posting will resume tomorrow, Lord willin’ and the crick don’t rise.
I’ve got some serious posts in the mental hopper, but they will have to wait. I’ve got two lectures this morning, followed by a flight up to Northern California; my wife’s niece is graduating from high school up in Sutter County this afternoon, so we’re on the road yet again. (The current plan, however, is to spend every single night of the month of June in the same bed — something that by my calculation, I haven’t done since last October.)
So today’s post is a meme: name five works of fiction (no, Shakespeare doesn’t count, nor does the Bible for those of you who call it “fiction”) that have changed you and how you see the world. What five novels, plays, or short stories (no films, no poetry) have impacted your world view, perhaps altering how you live and how you think? Here are mine, in no particular order:
1. Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee. I read this novel in 2000, some two years after getting sober and forswearing, at last, my habit of seducing students. There are few characters in literature with whom I identified more than the narcissistic, self-destructive middle-aged protagonist of Coetzee’s Nobel prize-securing masterwork. And as a story about what I didn’t want to become, but might, and as a story about the necessity of humiliation before redemption, it was immensely impacting. I still re-read it every year. Continue reading ‘Five books meme’
Eliot was right about the cruelty of April. Jill at Feministe has announced she is taking an extended hiatus from blogging, joining Blackamazon and Brownfemipower as prominent voices who have chosen to leave the ’sphere in the aftermath of some immensely painful discussions about race, class, gender, and identity. I’ve been reading Jill since she joined Feministe years ago, and I will miss her prolific and insightful posts. How she blogged so much whilst in law school is beyond me.
I won’t say I haven’t thought about taking a break as well. (I do take short hiatuses of a week or three fairly regularly). Sometimes, I wonder if I’ve run out of things to say, or if, as Jill wondered today, my voice is doing more harm than good. I am confident an extended break will happen someday, but for now, I’m going to keep at it.
One aspect of male privilege, I recognize, is the learned ability to compartmentalize. I’ve railed against various aspects of compartmentalization before, particularly when it becomes a device for avoiding the hard work of reconciling contradictory aspects of one’s life. At the same time, there are some useful aspects to compartmentalization, particularly when it comes to blogging. Continue reading ‘On compartments, fuck-ups, and more precious voices leaving the blogosphere’
I’m sticking an entire post below the fold, and leaving the comments turned off. It’s pretty damn stream-of-consciousness, and though I am as sober as can be, I may regret this post in the morning. It’s been a very emotional day. Continue reading ‘One of those “something’s gotta give” moments’
Too much of my writing tends towards the self-congratulatory and the pompous. I’ve had that pointed out to me since I started blogging, and I’ve seen it as inextricably linked with my basic style. But more and more, I find myself bothered by some of my stylistic choices, if only because at worst, these choices tend to reinforce an image of entitled cluelessness.
Anna called me out on that in this thread on Ilyka’s blog, and I’m holding myself accountable for making some substantive changes. It won’t be immediate and it won’t be easy, but I’m committed to doing it.
No more dismissive language like calling a serious and painful discussion a “kerfuffle”. A limit on how often I use “folks” to refer to disparate groups. And an effort to be a little less like the image on the top of this page.
My beloved and I are in an unseasonably cool South Beach this morning. My poor wife, who craves the heat and humidity that reminds her of Colombia, was forced to wear a wrap as we ate a late pasta dinner on Ocean last night. I had a short run this morning on the boardwalk, and am now negotiating the dicey wireless and excellent coffee at the Tides Hotel.
I can’t recall a week where I’ve had more comments go into moderation! Unlike at the big, communal blogs, I have no one else to do the moderating for me, so I apologize if your comment gets stuck in limbo for hours and hours. Though I’ve closed commenting on the main post about the citation/stealing women-of-color controversy, my follow-up post remains open, as long as it is not used merely to continue the thread from the first one. And of course, personal attacks on anyone even tangentially involved in this sprawling controversy will be deleted.
I’ll be returning to what I hope will be thoughtful blogging a week from today; until the 22nd, I’ll be moderating comment threads and checking in regularly. I do appreciate both the traffic and the ongoing discussion.
For now, though, we’re going to enjoy a much-needed break here in South Beach and the surrounding area. Greater Miami both seduces and appalls, I find. After four visits out here in as many years, I’ve decided it’s very much the “nice place to visit, but wouldn’t want to live” experience. I would go absolutely mad in a world so utterly and indefensibly flat.
But hey, South Florida has its benefits. I’m going up to Boca Raton this afternoon to take a buddy of mine to lunch. Though he and I are both in our forties, knowing where we’re going to eat, we’ll be guaranteed to be the two youngest patrons in the place by at least a quarter century. I felt “old” a few weeks ago at the WAM conference; I feel positively coltish here.
The part of me that likes to avoid conflict wants to stay quiet. That part of me is not on display this morning.
Certain radical women of color bloggers (RWOC) are accusing Amanda Marcotte of “stealing” her ideas for this RH Reality Check piece: Can a Person Be Illegal, from this speech by Brownfemipower at WAM. The speech was given March 29 in Cambridge; the Reality Check article was published on Wednesday, April 2 (and republished by Alternet five days later). Here is Brownfemipower’s post, and Sudy’s,and Sylvia’s, and Rebecca’s.
Amanda has explained, in comments on various blogs, that she had already outlined the Reality Check article in an editorial meeting well before she, Brownfemipower, and all the rest of us were gathered for WAM. Brownfemipower has not acknowledged that claim, and has chosen not to name Amanda, changing her name to an “X” in her comments section.
Radical women of color have rightly suggested that “mainstream”, predominantly white feminist bloggers need to do more to cover broader issues of social concern. Amanda, who has been writing about a wide spectrum of justice issues for years, chose to tackle the immigration/language issue in her Alternet piece because, as she says, immigration is a vital contemporary issue, much in the “zeitgeist.” And inevitably, when people who share the same progressive concerns start focusing on an issue, the chance that they will independently come to similar conclusions is pretty high.
Perhaps the Reality Check article ought to have had more links within it; I don’t know what Alternet’s particular policy is to citations. But the accusation of “stealing” — a charge now being repeated on multiple blogs today in regards to Amanda — is very serious indeed. It’s also a charge that requires far more proof than has been offered, and if that proof cannot be found, it’s a charge that ought to be withdrawn. It’s one thing to be frustrated, as many women of color bloggers are, that radical ideas are not getting published. It’s another thing altogether to accuse a fellow feminist of theft when she does take on, in eloquent and thoughtful terms, the very issue you’ve been demanding that mainstream white feminists address.
Certain words are matters of perspective and opinion. You can call me elitist and pompous; you can call me a clueless, self-serving asshole; you can call me a self-loathing fuckwit. (I’ve had all of these thrown my way in the past year.) It’s not a crime to be pompous; I can’t be sued for being a fuckwit. But to accuse someone who makes their living with words of stealing is a very, very serious charge — one that is normally subject to civil litigation or severe academic discipline. To make that charge without compelling evidence is to damage a writer’s reputation in perhaps the most serious way possible. No amount of frustration or anger justifies it.
There are larger issues here that may be driving some of the anger towards Amanda. Her new book (which I reviewed here) has just been published by Seal Press. Representatives of Seal Press got into a nasty exchange with some women of color bloggers at WAM. The community of “radical women of color bloggers” has suggested that Seal needs to do more to publish serious works by non-white feminists; Amanda’s article in RH, repeated on Alternet, coming so soon after both the publication of her book and the conflict with Seal, is understandably exasperating. Why some folks get book deals and others don’t, why some folks get articles published and others don’t — these are issues worth discussing.
Here’s what’s not okay: assuming that if Amanda Marcotte writes an intelligent and interesting piece about immigration right at the same time that Brownfemipower makes similar points at a conference, then somehow the former has “stolen” from the latter. The struggle for justice for undocumented migrants is an important one. Those who come late to the issue ought indeed inform themselves by listening to those who have been publicizing the struggle for a long time, but that doesn’t mean that the right to publish on the subject is limited to those who were writing about it first.
The charge of theft against Amanda has spread fairly widely, despite her clear statement that she had designed the article well in advance of the WAM conference. BFP’s powerful speech, read side-by-side with Amanda’s article, in no way constitutes a “smoking gun”, proving that Marcotte’s piece was plagiarized. Amanda seems caught between a rock and a hard place: if she doesn’t write about issues like immigration, she’s ignoring an issue of vital concern to women of color. When she does produce an intelligent, provocative piece on the subject, she’s accused of having stolen the idea.
There are some charges for which there are no proofs or disproofs: “clueless”, “racist”, “elitist.” But theft can be proven, and if you’re going to use the language of theft, you need a hell of a lot more evidence than you have so far produced.
UPDATE: The links to Brownfemipower are defunct, at least from my blog. If you don’t go through me but through one of the other links listed above, you can apparently still access the post. I don’t want to link where I’ve been explicitly asked not to do so any longer (Chris Clarke’s Faultline), but since this post is already up for discussion and receiving many hits, I did want to explain the difficulty folks might have in obtaining access.
My student Sarah tagged me with an interesting meme.
The Rules
1. Write your own six word memoir
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
4. Tag five more blogs with links
5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!
It’s hard to beat the obvious: “once was lost, now am found”, but I’ll just steal from Wallace Stevens, cutting him down just a bit:
After the final no, yes comes.
Six more words:
All who want tagging, are tagged.
On my right-hand sidebar, I have 84 different categories for the 2,030 posts I’ve made since January 2004.
Six categories have over 200 posts, and they reflect my primary interests:
1. Feminism (416)
2. Christianity (321)
3. Men and Masculinity (292)
4. Politics (255)
5. Teaching (243)
6. Sexuality (227)
So, over half my posts over the past four years have had to do with Masculinity, or Christianity, or Feminism — or all three. That’s good to know, I suppose.
But at some point, these categories become unwieldy. Who wants to wade through 416 posts? The smaller categories end up being more popular. My most commonly clicked categories are not from these top six subjects; rather they are the following (in order of popularity):
1. Older Men, Younger Women (27)
2. Student Crushes (10)
3. Masturbation (6)
4. Rate My Professors (19)
5. Porn (44)
6. Circumcision (5)
And I get a remarkable number of hits on the ONE post in my Sociopaths category.
Whattya think? More categories? Fewer? What to do, as my archives grow and grow and I show no signs — yet — of flagging?
Oh, this is the 192nd post in the blogging category.
The new look of the blog is almost complete, thanks to Lauren of Faux Real Tho. The header uses a photo I shot in Buenos Aires, in the La Recoleta cemetary last month. My biggest weakness as a writer is a tendency towards airy pompousness, what Louis MacNeice would call the “permanent bottleneck of highmindedness.” Somehow, this picture seems like a clever representation of that aspect of my blogging. Lauren has also upgraded all the Wordpress features, and the blog should have a cleaner look.
In any event, we’re starting to see anecdotal evidence of the recession here. Every very couple of weeks, I get a manicure and a pedicure at a nail salon in the “old town” section. My beloved really appreciates it; my tendency to scratch her with my sharp and wicked toenails had become tiresome. And I confess that when I do do my own nails, I have this awful, wretched habit of leaving clippings strewn about. It’s inexcusable and disgusting, but there it is.
Normally, on a Sunday, the salon would be packed (with a clientele that is perhaps 25% male). Today, there was only one other person getting a “mani/pedi” during my nearly one hour there. I asked the woman who was giving me the manicure whether business had been slow, and she said “Oh my gosh, yes. It just started two weeks ago. The gas prices started going up again, and all of a sudden, wham! It’s been really bad. We’re really worried; we’re one of the first things people cut back on when the economy gets weak.”
The local Whole Foods was surprisingly empty for a Sunday afternoon as well. The traffic was as bad as ever on the streets, however. I have a feeling that in this case, the plural of anecdote will indeed be data — bitter data in the first quarter consumer spending report.
And I’ve picked my men’s final four: UCLA, Georgetown, North Carolina, Pittsburgh. The women’s bracket comes out tomorrow.
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