Blogging again

I've been making an effort to maintain my commitment to writing in the blog every day. OK, every day-ish. But it's a struggle some times. Who am I writing to? I miss the feeling of blogging as a conversation, when I had comments and relationships with other bloggers, when I had the sense that I was talking to people. How did that even happen? I don't really remember.

Almost none of the bloggers I first became attached to as a reader, back in 2006 or so, have blogs any longer. Most just stopped: one writer I adore is mostly on Twitter these days; another migrated her activity to a Flickr photostream and now I no longer remember the name she was using so I can't even look her up. To be honest, I was more of a lurker/reader than an interlocutor, but I read many blogs faithfully, commented on some, and felt I "knew" the folks who shared something about their lives. I appreciated the way people were able to create conversations. Some spaces had such healthy comment sections that I learned a lot from them. I think the kind of blogging I am remembering was personal or confessional, even when it was academic or about a theme, not a substitute for journalism or marketing, but a place where you encountered a voice. And in the beginning, the kind of writing and publishing activity that was academic blogging was entwined with concerns about anonymity and publicity, especially as we academics negotiated our semi-public personae in our forays into digital teaching spaces.  

Some of the changes in blogging happened because of money--when bloggers were able to monetize their blogs, what they did changed as a result of the pressures of writing for advertising. Some single-topic bloggers got a book deal, others became paid consultants. A "successful" blog was the goal, and readership or subscribers were leveraged into ad revenues.  The proliferation of platforms also led to a fragmentation of connections. Now a lot of that conversational energy animates social media, where writing a short personal essay is not the goal. A subset of bloggers has migrated to Instagram where the impulse is to put out aspirational content; others are (still) on the evil Facebook, or vlogging at YouTube, or podcasting. Some changes in blogging happened when platforms like Tumblr or Livejournal were sold to companies that gutted them.  Maybe the short personal essay on Medium is where some of that confessional energy has gone, and some survives in the form of a personal newsletter and link round-up by subscription.

Who are the audiences? So much of what is published about blogging today treats audience as the target market for a brand. Blogging as a form of journaling isn't about building a brand. I know at least some of my posting here is a way to take notes on the things I learn, or to embed YouTube videos about the movies I watched, so in that sense the audience is me. If there's no uptake for one's personal ramblings, why write in a blog as opposed to a notebook at the breakfast table? Maybe because writing in a journal these days feels a lot like whining while writing in the blog forces me to do more than blurt.

Reading: Zadie Smith essays

Reading in progress: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith. Seventeen essays are grouped in five sections: Reading, Being, Seeing (on film), Feeling, Remembering. I started reading the book straight through, but ended up jumping to the middle to read her essay on her writing process.

"That Crafty Feeling" is a lecture she gave when asked to speak "on some aspect of your craft" and it's funny as hell.  When I was working on my one and only book (not a novel), I was definitely in her "Micro Manager" category: endlessly rewriting the first chapter, finishing the last half of the book in a few months.

Atul Gawande

Dr Atul Gawande is a physician, a teacher, an public policy leader, and a writer. His columns in The New Yorker magazine have been some of my favorites pieces of the last few years: filed under "Annals of Public Policy" or "Annals of Medicine" but also "Annals of Human Rights," they talk about subjects ranging from blushing or nausea to solitary confinement as a form of torture. His books on being a surgeon have won awards, and his research and work on improving the safety of health care, among other topics, are important contributions to public health and safety worldwide. Having read his work now for a number of years, I have trust in his ability to communicate complex scientific and social issues in clear, compassionate terms to the general public, but in ways that avoid oversimplification.

His article on how Obama's administration should approach the urgent need to reform our system of health care does something important: it gives us the historical context for understanding how the variety of European national health care systems emerged as responses to particular local arrangements and needs, rather than as ideological master plans; it places the pragmatic approach as an alternative to the idealist (but potentially dangerous) or the free-market (and ineffective) approaches. And it talks about how Massachussets' recent state-wide reforms give us a glimpse of how a national health care reform might work. Here's a bit of an interview with him on Charlie Rose's show:

He reads from his book at a talk he gave for Google employees here. I'm not embedding it because they chose to film him against a hideous yellow background, and positioned an icon of a book right in the back of someone's head. But the story he tells about his medical training as a resident is fascinating: he is fascinated by the intersection of intelligence, competence and those other less well-understood elements of performance that make one doctor better than another. One of his strengths as an intellect is in his ability to think from the local and the material to the level of the global and the systematic.

Writing and images

Today in class we talked about corn, history, writing, and work. I used a new tool in class for the first time: the Offline Image Viewer of the electronic database ArtSTOR. I'll write more about that tool another time, but what it allows me to do is have access to a fabulous database of images and use them for class without violating copyright laws. I used it to search for images tagged with corn or maiz, and turned up one famous image of a Maya scribe writing, who is depicted with an ear of corn in his headdress, probably associated with the Young Corn God.
The photo here in this post was taken by Ana and Jose on their travels in South America (gracias) and they lent it to me to use in class because we had been talking about the challenges we teachers will face as we try to take advantage of the latest groovy technologies for multimedia in the classroom, while trying to respect the rights of authors and artists to their work. It is a challenge for the blog as well. I am trying to only post images I shot myself, or links to images, but it's so easy to copy and image and post it--when do we cross the line?

The subject of writing in the Americas--writing systems that pre-date European arrival and the introduction of alphabetic literacy--is one that fascinates me, and on which I've done a lot of research, although I am not a specialist in that area. This explanation of how Maya heiroglyphic writing works, and how that compares to the alphabet we use, is a good explanation to start with. The links on the page are excellent. It is part of the very cool FAMSI site (Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc).

There has been much written on the Popol Vuh. I recommend this post on the blog Posthegemony, not as a "starter" post, but as an excellent sythesis of the scholarship and thinking on the topic.