As of today, I've been blogging for ten years, nine of them in this space. I've now been blogging for longer than I've done anything in my adult life: I started blogging before I finished my dissertation, before I started teaching full-time, before I moved to this city, before I met my spouse.
(I mean, okay: I guess I've done a few things for longer, like being a legal drinker and a contact-lens-wearer and a short-hair-sporter, but not much of substance.)
Every time this anniversary rolls around, I wonder whether I have it in me to keep going--whether I have enough to say, enough time, enough that could possibly interest whoever still reads blogs these days; the retirements of Tenured Radical and Dr. Crazy have only made that question more urgent. But though I'm not sure I've totally settled into a post-tenure blogging identity, every time I have a two-week dry spell and am convinced I've sputtered out at last, I think of three things I want to write about. So I keep going.
As many of you know, my current book project is about nostalgia. A friend to whom I recently described the project asked how I felt about nostalgia, personally--whether I was pro- or anti-, more for nostalgia or more for progress--and though it's a reasonable question, it caught me up short. Anyone who's been reading me for more than a month knows I'm obsessively interested in how we negotiate our relationship with the past; I'd freely describe myself as susceptible to nostalgia (probably unusually susceptible). But I'm also generally optimistic and forward-looking, unafraid of change, and I dislike what I perceive as sentimental or naive nostalgia at least as much as I dislike sentimental and naive futurism and the cult of innovation.
I suppose I see nostalgia as the byproduct of progress: for me it's not about wanting to roll back the clock or thinking things were better in the past, but about acknowledging the sense of loss that accompanies even positive change. Nostalgia is the cost of moving on, of growing up, of living inside of time.
All of which is to say: for as long as I keep blogging and as many new subjects as I take on, I'll probably still be looking backwards. No doubt I'll be talking about grad school and my experiences as a junior scholar when I'm sixty, as I try to find the continuities and figure out what holds a professional life together.
You've been warned.
10 comments:
It's hard to be pro- or anti-nostalgia. Nostalgia exists whether we like it or not. I like your understanding of it as appreciation for a loss even as we appreciate even more the progress we've made.
Keep on blogging! (Isn't it funny how blogging is now the "long-form journalism" of the social media world? Am I nostalgic for 2002 when they were the next newest thing? Maybe.) I will be posting some links to some new blogs of interest to our readers in the next few weeks.
Take it from one who is sixty that the interest in figuring out what holds a career together is not unique - particularly when your career is non-standard, as mine has been.
Happy blog-birthday!
I am very pro nostalgia, and spend a decent amount of time reflecting on how things that occurred decades ago have influenced things that occur today. It's fun to think about that kind of stuff. It's not that I wish I was back then instead of here today, but that it is valuable to me to see how yesterday's me still exists as a part of today's me.
I'm so glad you're still here!
All that professional socialization graduate schools don't provide I got from reading blogs like yours and Dr. Crazy's and NewKid and ProfGrrrl and Maggie May and... I can't say how grateful I am for all of you, and I'm really very glad you will still be blogging.
Happy you're still blogging! (After all these years ...)
Professionally, does the interest in nostalgia come out of an interest in melancholy? And are the Snows of Yesteryear prominent in your book?
Glad you'll still be around. Us old-timers gotta stick together...
Thanks, all!
Anon: MAGGIE MAY! I think of her from time to time, along with a bunch of other long-gone bloggers, like Ancrene Wiseass and the blogger-most-recently-known-as-Kora. That's another kind of nostalgia: having no damn clue who those people I once felt very connected to, but whom I never knew under their real names, have gone to. And some like Kora departed under alarming circumstances. I hope they're all out there and are well, somewhere.
Withy:
No, it doesn't; I have to say that I'm not particularly interested in melancholy, medically or otherwise! (And I know that "nostalgia" is an anachronistic term for the period, but it's the most useful one for my purposes right now.) I'm interested in what I guess you'd call collective nostalgia, or the sense of a shared past that is, for some reason, inaccessible or irrecoverable (in the case of my book, because it's the WAY WAY LONG AGO past, not just one's parents' or grandparents' rose-colored memories).
Even though the professional travails of academia are no longer relevant to me, I'm glad you're still blogging! I learn a great deal about teaching and academic life from you and your commenters. Now that blogging is no longer remotely cool (or, I assume, professionally controversial), there should be no pressure on anyone to blog at any pace other than that of their own choosing. Besides, it's a great way to knead the occasional whim and see if it works as a fully baked thought.
Happy Blogiversary! I love reading blogs, and miss those lovely people who've moved on to another form of social interaction. Please keep writing, musing and thinking about writing, thinking and remembering.
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