In the summer of 1989, I volunteered as a d.j. on a college radio station in Nashville. For three hours of a morning shift once a week, I had my own show playing the kind of music college radio stations were playing in the 1980s, music that for the most part was not getting played by commercial radio. {This changed within just a couple of years as “alternative” music became commercially viable, but that’s another story.}

One thing I remember well was a feeling of breathlessness I had when talking into the microphone. I don’t exactly know what I was doing with my lungs, but without doing it on purpose I was somehow holding back, hesitant perhaps to say the wrong thing or to let too much out at once. Eventually I learned to relax, to breathe normally, to not think so much about what I was doing, and instead to just speak.

I’ve been thinking about this experience lately in part in relationshp to blogging, and in part in relationship to my job as a scholar and teacher.

I was talking on IM with a blogging friend:

friend: “have you ever wondered, incidently, the impact a blog has on your potential career? i’m tempted to be flippant, obtuse, even bizarre. (b/c that’s my norm)”

me: “yeah, i’m very aware of that. i’m trying to figure out the appropriate voice. i want to be interesting w/o being ‘unprofessional'”

friend: “yeah. whatever that means”

me: “i was even thinking of writing something in my blog about it — it’s similar to a ‘dilemma’ i face when i’m teaching — should i be the person that i feel like i really am, or do i try to take on my idea of the professional persona? in the blog, it’s the same sort of decision. with teaching, i try to go for being the person that i feel i really am, instead of trying to ‘behave’ a particular way”

When I was a graduate student, I thought that having a Ph.D. would free me to say whatever I wanted. Instead, as a new assistant professor I find myself even more inclined to self-censorship: as during my stint as a d.j., without doing it on purpose I am somehow holding back. Of course, issues of identity are more complex than the phrase “the person I really am” implies; real or imagined institutional pressures influence how we speak, what we write. But I want to avoid letting these pressures ‘overwrite’ my sense of myself.

I suppose that by writing about these pressures, I am trying to take away some of their power over my expression. Some of that power will not go away; I am subject to certain expectations regarding my teaching and research. However, I’d like to lose this sense of breathlessness, this worry about saying the wrong thing, or saying too much.

Obviously, I’ve only just started blogging {it was one of my goals for spring break}, but my plans are to write about issues related to my work, primarily. As Liz Lawley writes as an aside to one of her recent entries, her blog is “valuable to me as a place to work out my ideas and thoughts.” Matt Kirschenbaum writes something similar in announcing his publishing agreement with MIT Press: “I plan to use this space as an occasional sounding board for ideas related to the project”.

I have found listservs to be a valuable environment in which to share ideas, to solicit and share advice. My hope is for my blog to serve largely the same purpose.

Oh, and for the “professional” record:

• I set this blog up in a couple of hours one afternoon last week.
• Each entry takes me about 15 minutes {although this one is taking me longer}.
• My time on the blog is about equal to the time I spend on the professional listservs to which I subscribe.