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.

Apparently, I am annoying; I have no idea who this person is, but it looks like she’s from Nebraska and is currently attending school (Johns Hopkins?) in Maryland, majoring in math.

She appears to prefer Nebraska to Maryland. I’ll let my east-coast readers fight it out with my midwest readers over the significance of this preference.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently started up a blog called Wired Campus. I wonder what motivated them to do this. Chronicle-competitor Inside Higher Ed adopted a blog-like structure from the beginning, providing accessible, date-based archives and the ability to comment directly on each news entry.

However, by creating a blog solely about technology issues, the Chronicle is not very likely to insert themselves successfully into the blogging fray that now permeates online academics’ lives. They do allow trackbacks, though, and this is an important feature that Inside Higher Ed lacks.

Good lord, can I write about anything but myself? Here are a bunch of entries from when I had a brain:

• “Reading readers reading: what can we know?“
• “The dreaded theory question“
• “Metallica: some kind of monster“
• “More on Derrida“
• “What do we call this?“

I’m sure my brain will return before too long.

I’d unravel ev’ry riddle
For any individ’le
In trouble or in pain
With the thoughts you’d be thinkin’
You could be another Lincoln,
If you only had a brain.

Don’t take my word for it. Just ask Heather Armstrong. If you’re going to mock someone and call them stupid for expressing themselves on the Internet in a way that puts their job at risk, don’t do so on the Internet (using your real name and telling people where you work) in a way that puts your job at risk. Moron.