I started this blog several months ago because I had reached a turning point in my academic career (having finished the book project that had kept me gripped in misery for so long). I wanted to become a participant in the academic blog culture that I had been reading and benefiting from for years. I wanted to explore through blog writing the idea that academia might just be a positive, constructive place for me, not merely a source of frustration, anger, and self-doubt.

However, what I’ve experienced is that all I use the blog for is complaining. Yes, I’ve been in the midst of a particularly busy and stressful semester, and I haven’t been handling it well — so complaints have been many. But, I have found it too easy to fall into the dominant discourse of academic blogging: the snarky, sarcastic, outraged complaint. Don’t get me wrong, there’s so much about academia that deserves a critical response. I’m as bitter as ever about the injustices that are perpetrated under the guise of genteel intellectualism. But, it hasn’t been helpful to my mind and spirit to indulge all my bitterness with so little attention to the positives in my life.

In addition, I’ve found academic blogging to be much more work than I expected. Between keeping up with what everyone else is writing, participating in the blog community by commenting and writing relevent posts, and the pressure (obviously of my own creation) to be “timely,” to have something new and interesting to say … Well, goodness sakes, that last thing I need is another obligation! And, that’s what this blog has started to feel like.

I contemplated shutting the blog down altogether but instead I’ve decided to refashion it. You’ll see, attentive Reader, that the subtitle of the blog has been changed and the blogroll omitted. This is no longer an “academic blog” in the narrow sense. I’m going to try blogging more generally on the topics that interest me. Naturally, I’ll write about my life as a professor but I want to explore other avenues, and essentially re-conceive this space of writing for more constructive and creative purposes.

Stay tuned.