Why do I write this blog? Well, it certainly isn’t because I have a huge audience—most of my posts top out at 40-60 views, and many garner a lot less than that. Every so often I get signal boosted when one or more people share a post. The most I’ve ever had was when a friend posted a link of one I wrote about The Wire and police militarization to Reddit, and I got somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1500 views.[1] Huge by my standards, minuscule by the internet’s.
Not that I’m complaining. I have no compunction to chase clicks, or to do the kind of networking on Twitter that seems increasingly necessary to building an online audience, which also entails strategically flattering some audiences and pissing off others. The topics I write about are eclectic and occasional, usually the product of a thought that crosses my mind and turns into a conversation with myself. My posts are frequently long and sometimes rambling, which is also not the best way to attract readers.
Blogging for me has always been something akin to thinking out loud—like writing in a journal, except in a slightly more formal manner, with the knowledge that, however scant my audience is, I’m still theoretically writing for other people, and so my thoughts have to be at least somewhat coherent. And every so often I get a hit of dopamine when someone shares a post or makes a complimentary comment.
I started my first blog when I moved to Newfoundland as a means of giving friends and family a window into my new life here, without subjecting them to the annoyance of periodic mass emails. I posted in An Ontarian in Newfoundland for eight years, from 2005 to 2013, during which time it went from being a digest of my experiences in Newfoundland to something more nebulous, in which I basically posted about whatever was on my mind. I transitioned to this blog with the thought that I would focus it more on professional considerations—using it as a test-space for scholarship I was working on, discussions about academic life, and considerations of things I was reading or watching. I did do that … but then also inevitably fell into the habit of posting about whatever was on my mind, often with long stretches of inactivity that sometimes lasted months.
During the pandemic, this blog has become something akin to self-care. I’ve written more consistently in this past year than I have since starting my first blog (though not nearly as prolifically as I posted in that first year), and it has frequently been a help in organizing what have become increasingly inchoate thoughts while enduring the nadir of Trump’s tenure and the quasi-isolation enforced by the pandemic. I won’t lie: it has been a difficult year, and wearing on my mental health. Sometimes putting a series of sentences together in a logical sequence to share with the world brought some order to the welter that has frequently been my mind.
As we approach the sixth month of the Biden presidency and I look forward to my first vaccination in a week, you’d think there would be a calming of the mental waters. And there has been, something helped by the more frequent good weather and more time spent outside. But even as we look to be emerging from the pandemic, there’s a lot still plaguing my peace of mind, from my dread certainty that we’re looking at the end of American democracy, to the fact that we’re facing huge budget cuts in health care and education here in Newfoundland.
The Venn diagram of the thoughts preoccupying my mind has a lot of overlaps, which contributes to the confusion. There are so many points of connection: the culture war, which irks me with all of its unnuanced (mis)understandings of postmodernism, Marxism, and critical race theory; the sustained attack on the humanities, which proceeds to a large degree from the misperception that it’s all about “woke” indoctrination; the ways in which cruelty has become the raison d’être of the new Right; the legacy of the “peace dividend” of the 1990s, the putative “end of history,” and the legacy of post-9/11 governance leading us to the present impasse; and on a more hopeful note, how a new humanism practiced with humility might be a means to redress some of our current problems.
For about three or four weeks I’ve been spending part of my days scribbling endless notes, trying to bring these inchoate preoccupations into some semblance of order. Reading this, you might think that my best route would be to unplug and refocus; except that this has actually been energizing. It helps in a way that there is significant overlap with a handful of articles I’m working on, about (variously) nostalgia and apocalypse, humanism and pragmatism, the transformations of fantasy as a genre, and the figuration of the “end of history” in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and contemporary Trumpist figurations of masculinity.
(Yes, that’s a lot. I’m hoping, realistically, to get one completed article out of all that, possibly two).
With all the writing I’ve been doing, it has been unclear—except for the scholarly stuff—how best to present it. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a short book titled The Idiot’s[2] Guide to Postmodernism, which wouldn’t be an academic text but more of a user manual to the current distortions of the culture wars, with the almost certainly vain idea of reintroducing nuance into the discussion. That would be fun, but in the meantime I think I’ll be breaking it down into a series of blog posts.
Some of the things you can expect to see over the next while:
- A three-part set of posts (coming shortly) on history, memory, and forgetting.
- A deep dive into postmodernism—what it was, what it is, and why almost everyone bloviating about it and blaming it for all our current ills has no idea what they’re talking about.
- A handful of posts about cruelty.
- “Jung America”—a series of posts drawing a line from the “crisis of masculinity” of the 1990s to the current state of affairs with Trumpism and the likes of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro.
- At least one discussion about the current state of the humanities in the academy, as well as an apologia arguing why the humanities are as important and relevant now as they have ever been.
Phew. Knowing me, I might get halfway through this list, but we’ll see. Meantime, stay tuned.
NOTES
[1] David Simon also left a complimentary comment on that one. Without a doubt, the highlight of my blogging career.
[2] Specifically, Jordan Peterson, but there are others who could use a primer to get their facts straight.
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Freedom in University.