I’ll be honest. I know that the vehemence of my response to the Crooked Timber post and thread was out of proportion to the attention it deserved. But here’s the thing: Look at that list of bloggers under “literature, language, culture” on the “Academic Blogs” page CT maintains. How many times have you ever seen a CT post that references or responds to something one of those bloggers has posted? That’s why I wrote that crack about CT getting $5 every time they mention Scott McLemee. And that’s why I am incredulous when Farrell writes, in comment 10 on the aforementioned thread, ìWhy is it that you arenít creating a competitor blog to us?î
Hey, that’s a great idea! Why don’t we start up our own blog? If we did, then you’d be able to read
- Matt on plagiarism, the web, and contemporary media culture (Feb 2003),
- Jason R on Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (March 2003),
- Kari sharing a chunk of her dissertation (June 2003),
- Chuck on film and Lev Manovich (June 2003),
- Dave on politics and teaching composition (June 2003),
- Jason J on recent nonfiction (September 2003),
- Tanya on the Isabella Gardner Museum (August 2003),
- Ryan on his dissertation defense (August 2003),
- CJ on ìSylvia Plathís Ekphrastic Poetryî (July 2003),
- Brandon on participating in a Renga (June 2003),
- Jeb’s prospectus for jeblog (August 2004),
- Marc on the body as avatar (October 2004),
- Me on Walter Benjamin (March 2003).
Please. Do tell me more about this blogging you speak of.
Bit of a lurker here, just wanted to thank you for drawing my attention to those posts.
I particularly enjoyed your post on Benjamin. I’m a graduate student in History and, amongst other things, I’m looking at British autodidacts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and their physical relationship with books and the building of personal libraries. Benjamin’s essay (as well as several sections of The Arcades Project on ‘The Collector’), have been really interesting in this regard. I also recommend reading The Arcades Project to see the use Benjamin put his extensive and rich collection to.
I’ve gone off the main point of your post somewhat, though: my apologies. But please do keep on contradicting the CT contingent by higlighting some of the wonderful work that is being done in the humanities.
I was once told that ‘cultural historians don’t go to archives’ by someone that was a self-proclaimed defender of ‘proper history’. It was news to me. Just goes to show that a lot of these people have absolutely no idea what we spend our days doing.
Thanks, Cath! I’ll probably be in Manchester (Methodist Archives are at the Rylands) at some point in the next few months if you’d like to meet in person. Keep an eye on my blog for when I might be going.