The Death of the Blogger

Today, Michael Berube wrote his last post. Berube's blog was one of the first "academic blogs" I encountered, and while I think I only commented maybe once or twice, I was a pretty faithful reader (though I must admit that I didn't get through some of the longer posts). When I heard that he was going to stop blogging, it made me feel a bit sad, and it also made me wonder whether and when a day will come when I, too, no longer want to blog. What purpose do blogs serve? What does it mean when a writer decides to leave the blogosphere? And what are the conditions that one needs in order consistently to write for an audience? Each blogger has to answer those questions for himself or herself. I wish that something I could write here could somehow make Michael keep blogging, though I'm not sure why I feel that way. I think in part it's because I'll really miss the posts about Jamie, such as this most recent one, which made me laugh my head off.

Berube's not the only one re-evaluating this week. Ancrene Wiseass, too, seems to have decided to leave blogging behind - or at least to put it aside for a long while.

On the one hand, we shouldn't be surprised. The medium of blogging is such that most blogs don't last very long. At least I feel like I heard that someplace. But somehow the loss of these two particular blogs from the (relatively) small list of blogs in my little corner of the Blogiverse has caught me by surprise. I always assumed that the prolific Berube would blog into infinity - that I would quit long before he would. And Ancrene Wiseass began blogging almost a year after I started, so it never occurred to me that AW would stop before I did.

So as I sit here writing this post, I'm wondering about the viability of this genre in the long term. Can we keep the community of academic bloggers alive? Is this, ultimately, a passing fad? I know that I still feel like blogging, but what if everybody else decides to stop?

Over at Acephalous, Scott wonders whether " "academic blogging" is strangling the life from "academics who blog." Careerists like myself may unwittingly pressure "academics who blog" into thinking their blogs must be more than mere blogs to justify their existence." I've got to say, I don't think that's happening. I think, at least for me, what's kept me blogging - pseudonymously, and in a more "raw" fashion (per Berube) is 1) that I value this kind of writing about my life and about the profession and 2) I was able to develop a voice that feels consistently comfortable. I think that #2 is the real key to keeping "academics who blog" blogging. I am in no way seduced by the idea of writing a purely "academic blog" that is inextricably linked to my real life professional identity, partly because I don't feel like I could be consistently comfortable with the voice that such a blog would require me to develop - at least not every single day. I think that one of the great things and one of the challenging things about this genre is that it requires one to make the rules of one's expression for oneself. Sure, there are conventions, like linking to those to whom one refers, or putting pictures of one's cats up on Friday or whatever, but ultimately, there is nobody policing one's blog - no peer reviewers, no editors, no publishers. Now, more solidly "academic" blogs do fit more closely within the conventions of academic writing and publishing, but if you take a look at some of those, such as Amardeep Singh's blog, you will still see that the form is looser - that it doesn't strictly adhere to the conventions of academic writing and publishing. So will the push to institutionalize academic blogs suffocate academics who blog - push them out of blogging altogether? I don't think that has to be the case. But I do think that blogs will continue to go defunct in this community of bloggers in part because finding and maintaining a writing voice for an audience is no easy thing to do. And sometimes we outgrow our voices, and it's not always easy to see a way to reinvent ourselves in writing, just as it's not easy to see a way to reinvent ourselves in our lives.

How Do I Make This Count? A Post about the Value of Academic Blogging

On the 28th, when I was at MLA, I found my way into the first of the two blogging panels on which Michael Berube spoke (also with Amardeep Singh and, in a kind of "one of these things is not like the others" twist, one of my absolute favorite critics, Rita Felski, who talked about phenomenology and the role of pleasure in reading and not at all about blogging). First of all, I felt very (privately) fancy because Berube mentioned me, or, rather, Dr. Crazy. (By the way, I've been pronouncing Berube's name incorrectly in my head for years - burr-OOH-bay instead of BEAR-ooh-BAY - and yes I realize the accents -which of course I don't reproduce here because I'm too lazy - tell you how to pronounce it, but, well, all I can say in my defense is that his name was a word I'd never had cause to say except for in my head, so I didn't pay attention to the accents. Also, related to this digression, it turns out everybody pronounces "pseudonymously" as sood-AH-nihm-uhs-lee (like anonymously, I suppose) but all this time I've been pronouncing it SOO-dough-NIHM-uhs-lee, and I've got to say, while the other way does make a kind of sense, I like my way better :)

OK, that was a hugely long digression. Where was I? Oh, yes, Berube. (And should I call him Michael now? Since we've met? Probably should - and thanks again for dinner, Michael Berube! - but somehow it feels pompous to talk about him as "Michael" on the blog - like I'm trying to seem like I'm in some sort of inner circle when I'm totally not - it's just that once you meet people you generally don't call them by their last names.... Anyway for the purposes of this post, I'm going to stick with Berube, because I didn't know him when I went to the talk, and in some respects I'm using him like a critical source, so it feels more natural. I don't want to be one of those people who starts talking about critics like they're their old friends from summer camp. I hate when people do that.) Berube's paper was a version of the paper that he gave at MMLA, and so very early on, he talked about Dr. Crazy. (And how weird is it to talk about myself in the third person? All of this is really confusing.) Now, first of all, I felt really gratified by being "cited" at MLA, even if it wasn't "me" being cited but rather my blogging persona. Also, I liked the reaction Berube got when he mentioned me. But after the initial laugh-line, Berube went on to talk for a second about the title of my blog in the context of how he perceives his blogging - he said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that blogging for him is reassigned time - he does not perceive it as being part of his job in a formal way, as writing books or teaching or serving on committees are.

But then, during the Q & A, a woman asked, "How do we make this (blogging) count? You know, for things like tenure?" I've got to say, when she asked the question, I thought to myself, "you just don't get it," even though I know that a lot of people are considering this question seriously and are talking about the transformative power that blogging might have in terms of what counts as scholarship. For me, though, I love that I have a public writing space that doesn't quite count - and Berube's response to the questioner was similar. He said that he doesn't at all see his blog as scholarship - if anything it would be service and public outreach - and that he's not sure that faculty members should invite administrators and those higher up in the chain of command into everything that they do. I agree with this.

The fact of the matter is that I think that my blogging would potentially be a positive if I revealed that I do so to my university (which is VERY focused on public engagement activities) but it would change the blog if I did so. As it is, this version of the blog is very toned down since the days of the Chronicles, when I really believed that people wouldn't care who I was and try to ferret out my "true" identity. Once I realized that a lot of people really do care what my "true" identity is, I did change the tone of my writing on my blog. Still, though, how much more would I have to change the blog if it was - or had to be - a professional document?

I've got to admit that I often wonder about these people who push for blogs to count as scholarship (or even for them to count in some other area of their promotion and review). Is it that they don't have enough traditional scholarship going on that they want to pad the cv with blog writing? As Berube said (either socially or at one of the panels, I'm not sure), his posts are not revised, polished pieces of academic prose, unless of course he's re-publishing his own writing that was originally produced in an academic context. The stuff that he writes for the blog might become a draft of something that he will write for academic consumption, but it's not, in itself, "finished" in the way that writing in another venue has to be. That doesn't mean that his blog is without value (some might say it has even more value, as it's not for such a specialized audience), but it does mean that it has a different kind of value than does, say, a journal article or a book.

To me, that is a good thing. I'm active in traditional scholarship, and I don't need my blog to be a vehicle for professional advancement nor do I want it to be. I like that I can put whatever I want on the blog - from silly memes and quizzes, to pics of my cat (and yes, I'll post some more of those soon), to long considerations about teaching or the profession or whatever. Perhaps the distinction between the professional me and Dr. Crazy is artificial, but I think that it helps me to feel that I have a writing space in which I'm both accountable (to readers) and in which I can play a bit (because those readers won't be evaluating my tenure file).

In thinking about it, I believe that one of the reasons that blogging is most gratifying to me is because it is "service" that is actually voluntary. I remember in a post a while ago a few people commented about the generosity of blogging, and at the time I felt sort of sheepish, like people didn't realize that I'm totally a selfish person and that I don't feel like I'm blogging for "others" in the sense of being some kind of do-gooder. But then I realized when at MLA and while talking to the bloggers I met that in fact my blog counts as the purest service I do. In my job, I've come to equate service with the following: obligation, bureaucracy, tedium, feeling burdened, pressure, and a slew of other pretty negative things. Service is the part of my job that I most resent, mainly because I feel like service at my institution is compulsory, which pretty much goes against what I think "service" is supposed to mean. Now, I'm not such a brat that I don't realize that one has to perform service activities to keep universities running, but I think that when junior faculty aren't protected from certain kinds of service and when service is construed as something that has nothing to do with one's passions and interests, that it becomes less and less likely that individuals will find "service" gratifying. In contrast, what I do on this blog? I think this is what service is supposed to feel like. I'm doing something that doesn't "count" - that isn't intended as a line on a cv and that isn't conceived as something about which I have no passion, a compulsory activity. At the same time, though, I am being a "public intellectual" - I'm putting a face on this profession (even if, ironically, that face is something most readers have to imagine), and that is a good thing for undergraduates, graduate students, non-academics, or even people higher up on the academic food chain who don't know what working conditions are for junior professors at certain kinds of institutions.

My blogging "counts" in really important ways, even if it doesn't "count" for the academic me that stands behind the pseudonym in terms of professional advancement. I suppose the fact that Berube mentioned Dr. Crazy was a testament to just how much it counts - as was the excitement that people to whom I revealed my identity expressed when they found out that I am not just a literary scholar and a professor and a teacher but also that I am "Dr. Crazy."

Will I ever blog under my own name, the name by which students and colleagues know me professionally? I think a lot about that. I suspect that when I get tenure, I might make the choice to reveal publicly who "Dr. Crazy" is. But will I give up the moniker? I don't think so. Not to give too much importance to the identity of "Dr. Crazy," but I think that "Dr. Crazy" is an important figure for a lot of people, and I think if I took away the Crazy and replaced it with my actual name that something would be lost. I think that this blog might become the kind of service that I despise rather than the kind that I seek out. That said, it was nice to let some people know who Dr. Crazy is - to be able to talk about what I'm doing as Dr. Crazy openly - if only for a few days. It was nice to be part of a community of people who are doing the same thing, in person and as people rather than as disembodied voices.

Should everybody run out and start a blog? Not necessarily. For some, the genre is constraining and creates unnecessary pressure, making them feel more pressure to write (and not a good kind) and pressure to acquire more readers, etc. For me, though, the genre has been freeing. It's taught me to write in ways that are accessible (and I hope smart at the same time). It's given me confidence as a thinker when I didn't used to have much confidence in myself in that regard. It's given me a community of people whom I'd never have met without this virtual identity.

I've got more to say about MLA and about blogging, but I think I'll sign off for now. I suppose my point at the end of this post is this: blogging DOES have value - precisely because it doesn't "count" in traditional ways. What I hope happens, as this genre expands and becomes more firmly entrenched in academic culture, is that we find a way to retain space for blogs that don't necessarily count in those traditional ways, while making room for blogs that do count in more traditional ways. I'm not sure why it has to be one or the other.

On Clinging to a Pseudonym Long after It's Lost It's Utility

Ok, so after all of the crap of the last week, I think that everybody here probably knows who I "really" am. And yet, I have no plans to stop being Dr. Crazy. And I've thought a bit about this, wondering why that is. So let me just lay it out for everybody here, if you care:

1. When I say I don't want the blog to be google-able under my real name, what I mean is that I don't want any stranger I meet to be able to google my real-life name and find the blog. I'm single and dating (well, or not dating, but I would date - I'e not ruled it out) and there are a lot of fucked up people in the world. I also want the choice of who reads it in connection with me (as much as I can have such a choice) in terms of professional contacts. I don't particularly want people to have access to the blog without choosing to give it to them in those circumstances. Now, if people choose to use any number of clues to figure the real-life name out, while I don't get it, I don't care all that much.

2. I don't want to feel like this needs to be a space on which I write only "professional" material. I know - male academics write blogs under their own names and they don't stick only to "professional" topics. But let me tell you: I've got no model for that in terms of a woman doing it, and so until I become brave enough to be a pioneer in this regard, well, I will continue to stay Crazy.

3. It actually kind of pisses me off that people persist in their interest in who the fuck I am - you know, really. Why does that matter? My readers are great, and I do think it is kind of the many people have emailed me (over the years that I've been blogging - not just this week) to warn me that they were able to "figure me out" with whatever methods they've used. I will say, though, that I will never understand the desire to sleuth around to find me out. Why the fuck does it matter? When you find out my name, do you really know any more than you know from what I write here? You know where I work. You might even be able to read my publications, if you're really motivated. But does that give you some kind of insight that you wouldn't otherwise have? In truth? I really don't think so. And if you want to know who I am, just send me an email - I tell most people. Why be all cloak and dagger about "figuring out" who I am? Because I'm many things, but I'm not particularly cloak and dagger about much, and every time somebody tells me that they've done all this detective work to figure out who I am, I always feel a little bit violated. Why not just respect the conceit that Dr. Crazy is who I am? Or if you don't respect that, why not keep it to yourself that you don't - because when you reveal it to me - in however well-intentioned a way - I often feel like that translates into a disrespect for me. I mean, I'm not actually trying to keep the blog a "secret" even if I don't want it immediately connected with my professional identity. That makes perfect sense to me, even if it apparently doesn't to anybody else. The pseudonym isn't really about being afraid at all, or at least not in the way that people think.

I don't know. I've thought a lot about what it would mean not to use a pseudonym. But I don't want to be forced into that decision, should I ever choose to make it. But I also don't want to write about my pseudonym or having one or anything else for a while. So, if by some super-secret detective work you put two and two together from details in posts and you figure out who I am, don't tell me. I don't really want to think about right now. Mainly because the more I think about it the more exhausting blogging becomes and the less I want to continue doing it.

Outed - But then Put Back In! Hurrah!

Ok, so sure, I outed myself yesterday, but another blogger has taken it upon him/herself to out me on his/her blog. Even after I asked nicely that no one do that. Is it just me, or is that a really fucked up thing to do?

I suppose I have myself to blame, but if the person will not change the reference to Dr. Crazy, I may be changing pseudonyms and changing addresses, or stopping blogging altogether. This is mainly because I do not want this blog to be google-able with my professional name. I didn't set this up as a "professional" space, and I don't want it to become one. I don't list it on my cv, and I don't ever want to. I also don't want to have to explain it to people unless I choose to do so.

So, that's the dealio today. I was going to do a post about shopping, but you can thank the Outer for killing my shopping buzz, so that post will not be happening tonight. Tonight, I will be drinking some wine, prepping for class, and being irritated - both at my own carelessness and at other people's assholery.

EDITED TO ADD:
Thank you all for all of your comments. You should know that I emailed the blog in question, and all is well. (This is one reason why I did not link to the offending blog, as I wanted to give the opportunity for the mistake to be corrected.) At any rate, the whole thing was coincidental. They had no idea about my own foolishness yesterday (early) but just picked up on some other foolishness. See? I told you all I was careless. At any rate, to anybody out there who finds a blog that does not have the person's real live professional name out front and center: Even if you make the connection, DON'T PUBLISH THE REAL LIVE PROFESSIONAL NAME ON YOUR BLOG! At any rate, until further notice, I've no plans to move, to change names, whatever. God! So much drama! And all of my own making!

Isn't It Ironic? Don't Ya Think?

Edited to change opening of post because a kind reader alerted me to the fact that he figured out who I was from googling related to the opening. Not to be a bitch, but why do people even care who I am? I never google to try to figure out who people are. I thought about just leaving things as they were - I feel like everybody in the free world knows who I am anyway at this point, but I suppose an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure or something. And I, no, I'm not sure what I mean by that. But so here's the post with basically no introduction....

Why do we choose pseudonyms? What do they give us? What kinds of anxieties can they cause? How does one manage two identities - one "real" and one invented? (Or is all identity invented, blah blah blah, but I'm not talking about that right now.)

I suppose this brought me back to thinking about how 19th century novelists like Charlotte Bronte or George Eliot (whom we still know by the pseudonym, which I think is incredibly interesting, especially since we "know" it's not a man, except for I didn't know it was a woman when I had to do a book report on The Mill on the Floss as a senior in high school and, whoa, was I surprised when I found out I wasn't reading a male author) used pseudonyms.

Why choose to take a male name?
Why choose to take a name like Dr. Crazy or Bitch, Ph.D. or New Kid or Profgrrrl or Bardiac or Anastasia, or Horace, or Scrivener?

What do the names that we choose say about us? Why do we choose them? Why do we work to protect them? What power is there in a pseudonym, and what weakness?

Many have written about bloggers who use pseudonyms as doing so out of fear. Many have also noted that many bloggers (though not all) who use pseudonyms are women.

To counter this, many who use pseudonyms (including me) have talked about doing so in order to gain a certain kind of "freedom" in their writing.

Isn't this juxtaposition of fear and freedom exactly the same juxtaposition that we see with writers like Charlotte Bronte? We have Jane and we have Bertha - the good girl with some rebellious tendencies that must be mastered and the madwoman who must remain behind closed doors. Isn't this exactly what a pseudonym offers? The ability both to be good and to be mad (or bad)?

I've written about choosing this pseudonym in terms of feminism just recently. And I know I've written, whether on this blog or my previous one about pseudonyms generally. I suppose what's interesting to me in light of my recent gaffe, in light of my recent talk, is the ways in which pseudonyms allow us to move inside of certain kinds of discourse without certain kinds of repercussions. And yet, we're never without repercussions, right? We're never, ultimately, outside of power. So why even bother?

Clearly we all get something out of the pseudonym. But what, ultimately, do we get? On the one hand there is a constant fear of detection. If one, in fact, expects that one can get away without being detected. On the other, we get a certain kind of freedom to say whatever we want. Except for that's not quite right, either, since of course, once we build an online identity, it's as constraining as a real life one. As Dr. Crazy, I can't really say anything. I can say some things. Within the confines of this persona. Yes, this persona evolved when I moved addresses. Yet, just as Dr. Realname "means" something to people, so, too, does Dr. Crazy. Is there really more "freedom" with the pseudonym? Probably not. So then why? What is the payoff? Is it just a game? Is fear of getting caught part of the fun? Or is it something else that motivates us?

I don't have the answers here. I do know that I'm careless when it comes to protecting my real life identity. I have been since I started blogging. It's never been tremendously difficult for people to figure out who I am. I cared in my former space, about this carelessness; I don't really care about it at reassignedtime.blogspot.com. Carelessness, I know, from things I do in my real life, is to some extent a part of who I am. Part of what that means is that I need to deal with the consequences of my carelessness, but it also means that I have a certain fearlessness, which doesn't really go with the "I'm not blogging under my own name" profile. So if I'm not afraid, why be Dr. Crazy? If I'm not hiding something, why bother with the facade?

Maybe this has been the question for all writers who've written pseudonymously. Or maybe it's just my question. But at the end of the day, I think that maybe all of the anxiety over naming doesn't really mean much. Maybe we all exaggerate the importance of our "real" identities, or of our "pseudonymous" identities or of both in conjunction.

On Being Crazy

Bitch Ph.D. has a post today about her pseudonym/blog title and the project of claiming the word "bitch" or reclaiming it or whatever (in response to a message from a reader). Since the awesome B. linked to me (thanks for the shout-out, B.!) I felt like I should do some sort of a post that might in some way respond to the conversation going on over there and also that might help any readers of hers who head on over here and who don't know my blog (hello readers of Bitch Ph.D.!) understand why B. refers to me as a "like-minded bitchy academic [woman]," as if you just glanced at recent posts you might think, "what the hell? That Crazy's no bitch!" (in either the positive or negative sense - doesn't really matter which).

Now, B. and I started blogging within a couple of weeks of one another (though I started at another address, in which I was a bit more hard-core than I am in this "I'm crazy but I'm not quite so raw" incarnation). But I suppose my point (and this gets to what some readers are talking about in the comments to B's post) is that it doesn't really make me less of a bitch or less crazy that I've toned things down a bit since starting Reassigned Time. At the end of the day, for a woman, and maybe even more for a woman in the academy surrounded by people who claim to be feminists, there isn't really much difference between "acting bitchy" once in a while and being labeled a "bitch," or in "acting crazy" once in a while and being labeled "crazy" (or, a crazy bitch, to up the ante just a little bit more). As women - even as women in fields where people think a lot about gender and who embrace "feminist" politics - there's always that danger that if one doesn't play nice then one is going to be categorized in these ways. And maybe the only rational response is to say, "yep, I'm a crazy bitch - so deal with me," because whether one embraces the label or not, one is going to be labeled.

When I decided to become a professor, I was under the naive impression that I'd be entering a world in which gender didn't determine my identity quite so much as it would in other professions. I thought all of the theorizing about women and all of the lip-service to feminist ideologies meant that by becoming part of this world - the world of the intelligentsia - that I'd be less regulated by sex/gender stuff. I also thought that all of this education would introduce me to people who had broader ideas about sex/gender than the people I knew from my working-class upbringing. To some extent, this has been true. But to another extent, I've seen the ways in which women are put in their place in this world to be more insidious (and as such, more diabolical). People may be more politically correct in this world, but they are often just as sexist at rock bottom.

So what does it take to be labeled "a bitch" or to be labeled "crazy"? Having an opinion. Expressing unhappiness. Pursuing ambitions above one's station. Getting uppity about an issue. Speaking one's mind. Refusing to take no for an answer. Refusing to make nice or to smoothe things over. Being too dynamic in the classroom (and no, Sexist Student, I don't think that "taking horse tranquilizers" would make me a better teacher - nor do I think that I'm "too much of a feminist" to be qualified to teach). Not accepting being pigeonholed into the role of "Professor who listens to students' problems and will cut them some slack," in the way of Mommy or Big Sister or Best Friend. Saying no. Saying yes.

In other words, you're going to call me a "bitch" or call me "crazy" no matter how hard I try to play by the rules. So why not just call myself Crazy and be done with it? All of the momentum that would be gained by calling me Crazy is lost if I just say, "oh yes, I'm crazy, didn't you notice that sooner?" I'm not going to spend my time and energy trying to refuse that label. There are more important things to talk about.

Here's where B's reader was coming from when s/he wrote to B.:

My questions center around the word "bitch." A few of us have been having a rather extended conversation surrounding its use, and the general consensus is that it's an extremely gendered term (and not in a positive sense) used to oppress opinionated women and to marginalize stereotypically feminine behaviors in men and women. The controversy we've been discussing surrounds the reclaimation of this term and if it's even possible to do without having to explain your gender politics extensively.

My response is this: All language is gendered. All language regulates behavior, determines identity, and ultimately polices the individual. Claiming or reclaiming a particular word isn't going to make language itself any less oppressive. At the end of the day, if we successfully "reclaim" Bitch, or Crazy, or Slut, or Whore, or Cunt, another word is going to crop up in its place to "oppress opinionated women and to marginalize stereotypically feminine behaviors in men and women." The point in any project of reclamation as far as I can tell is not that it's going to stop oppression. Rather, it's to change the terms of the discussion. Perhaps if we stop talking about the pros/cons of being called any of the above or about whether it's ethical to use any of the above words, maybe we can start talking about the cultural structures and institutions that give these kinds of words such performative force.

Two Years Blogging: A Retrospective

I started blogging on July 22, 2004 - not on this blog, but under this name - and it strikes me that it's about time for me to do some reflecting on this blogging thing and on what's kept me going over the past couple of years. I've done a lot - too much - blogging about using a pseudonym, so that isn't what this is about. What I want to consider is what the benefits of blogging are for me, personally but also as an academic.

On Being an Academic Blogger

We've all read about what a foolish enterprise it is for an academic person - especially an untenured academic person - to blog. Even pseudonyms don't offer a great deal of protection. Bloggers can be outed, and in fact one of the more interesting parts of the blogging phenomenon is the media's gleeful embrace of stories about the latest and greatest outed bloggers, in which the bloggers are held up for public scrutiny and villification (Look how stupid he was! He got fired from his job!) as well as praise (But now she makes her living as a blogger! She doesn't have to work at a crappy job anymore! How awesome!).

I suppose what I see, having done this for two years, is that blogging has been good for me as an academic. When I began, I didn't really know what I was doing. It just seemed like a fun experiment, a medium through which to analyze my experiences and to put them into a broader context. But I made mistakes. The voice that I developed often felt alien to me, or at the very least I couldn't sustain it without deep ambivalence, and I felt very wary of talking about my work in a substantive way. I was an academic blogger who couldn't really talk about her academic life - the good as well as the bad of it - and there were many times when I thought I might just give up blogging. But instead of doing that, I moved to Reassigned Time. I retained my persona, but I fleshed it out. I worked through a problem with my writing voice, and I stuck it out even though it wasn't exactly a "fun" thing to do. And I was entirely conscious of that and of the process that I had to go through to get to a voice that felt more comfortable, and that, I think, has been an incredibly important experience for me as an academic. Blogging has made me much more conscious of voice and tone; it has made me much more conscious of writing for an audience, even in the writing that I do for my work. Moreover, blogging more than any of my other academic pursuits, has made me trust my voice, in that clearly lots of you read me and don't think I'm an idiot, so I must have some good ideas rattling around in my head, right?

I also think that blogging as an academic, and an untenured one at that, while it may be dangerous in some ways, is ultimately a really important thing to do. Well, maybe not "really important" in the way that finding a cure for cancer would be important, but "really important" in the sense that I think it's positive to give a public voice to the concerns of people who are often advised to keep their mouths shut until such time as tenure is bestowed upon them. I think it's good for graduate students to be able to read about the experiences of those just a little further along the academic track, and I think it's good for those who've moved beyond tenure to get some kind of insight into the way that their junior colleagues think. And I think that the medium of blogging creates conversations between people of different ranks and disciplines, and that can only be a positive thing. (Though I will say that it's interesting that this happens only virtually in my experience, and that in real life I don't think I've ever spoken to a person in, say, the history department at my university. Oh wait, there is that one guy who's on a committee with me. But you see what I'm saying.)

And this brings me to the whole "blogging for community" thing. The truth of the matter is that when I began blogging this was not what I was after, or at least not in a conscious and calculated way. I like the idea of conversation, and I like the idea of getting to know people through a conversation, but to characterize that as "seeking community" seems to me a different thing altogether. I think perhaps that one of the mistakes people make as they evaluate blogs/bloggers is that they assume that people who blog don't have rich, full lives, friends, interests. At least in my experience, blogging becomes just one more thing that people who blog do, and it's not an indication that they're spending their days and nights in isolation with only a computer for connection to the outside world. That said, while I didn't get into this seeking a community, I did end up with one. It's infinitely interesting to watch how that community grows and changes. The diversity of that community is fantastic. And I feel happy to "know" the people whom I've met in the context of that community. (Ok, so this is cheesy, but I can't help it. I had to say something about you all, my readers, as without you, I totally would not still blog. I mean, hell, it takes a lot of time and effort!)

On Being a Person who Blogs

While it is true that academics are people, I make this division because I think that the benefits I see for me as a person who blogs are different from the academic benefits. Or maybe they're related, but I don't know. One thing a blog offers me personally is a record of my life over a particular span of time. It's not a journal - I keep a journal separately, thank you very much, and I don't yammer on in it about the state of higher education or about things like cleaning out my office - but it does show a lot of parts of my life that don't make their way into my actual journal. By looking at the blog alongside the journal, I think it's easier to get an approximation of what's "really" going on with me at a given time. As I look back over the past two years of blogging, I realize that with my change to the Reassigned Time address I also saw a change in how I was feeling about my life. When I started my first blog, I was in a really crazy place. I had been in my job for a year, and that first year kicked my ass. I was beginning a non-relationship with a guy who was never that into me and whom I was never particularly into, either, now that I think about it. I felt really ambivalent about everything. And I was, thus, a little nutso. But now, well, I am much more under control than I was at that time. Sure, I'm a little bit bored. I feel like I've mastered the job (not that there aren't still challenges, but I feel much more at home in the job now), I feel like the personal life I've got is mediocre but at least it's not insane, and I'm taking much better care of myself. That's not because I blog, but the blog shows me that this is true, and I think that's a good thing.

So what will the blog show in the coming year? Impossible to tell, obviously. But a few months ago I was talking to my mom on the phone, and I told her (I have no recollection of the context for this comment), "I feel like I'm changing again." I remember when I said it I felt surprised, like I'd thought I was done with the whole changing nonsense when I got out of grad school and my 20s. (Incidentally, my mom claims that the changing does slow up when you hit your late 40s, but never stops completely. Good to know. Especially as my whole life I've always hated all change - in myself, in others, whatever. Change, for me, is something I fight with my whole being until I finally reach a kind of defeated acceptance.) And I've also been feeling like whatever changing is happening in me is a kind of weird gearing up for a real change. It's sort of like how you can smell a thunderstorm in the air before it arrives - I smell a change on the horizon for me. And I don't have a real sense of what it will be. Will it be a new job? A relationship? Both? Something else? I suppose I'll have to wait and see.... And you'll all have to keep reading.

(But watch NOTHING changes, and I look at this blog post a year from now and I'm MORTIFIED. How embarassing.)

Well, See, I Have This Blog...

[Before I get into the meat of this post, I want you all to congratulate me on the fact that I spent the day doing laundry and writing my paper for the conference (pedestrian though all of the ideas therein are - which, of course, I only realize now that the paper is 90% of the way completed) and beginning packing for my travels. I also booked my flight to visit my grad school friend. I am very productive.]

Since I began blogging what is now lo almost 2 years ago, I have kept this activity very quiet. Only one person in my real life actually reads my blog and really knows about it. I've mentioned the fact that I blog to a few other people, and they just really aren't the type to be interested, and so that's where the discussion of my blogging began and ended with them. As a blogger, I'm pretty much in the closet.

I don't have any particular reason for keeping things this way. When I began blogging I was somewhat paranoid about people (i.e., colleagues) finding out about my blog, but that really isn't the case anymore. Now, I think I just keep things quiet out of habit. Yes, I still have a pseudonym, but I'm pretty free in revealing my identity to those who are curious enough to ask, and I know that some of you have deduced my identity by other means. This is fine with me.

So I've done something now that is... novel. I've told a person - a real person - about my blog.

Except this person isn't really a real person in some ways. Well, he's real - he's not imaginary - but this person... let's call him... J. ... well, I met him right before I began this job, and really we've only physically been in the same place like three times, but somehow we have become pen-pal type friends. And I got in touch with him a few days ago (because in the summer I like to email boys randomly) after not having heard from him in a while (like months) to learn that he quit his job to travel for the past few months and he directed me to his travel blog, and I mentioned that I have a blog, and he asked me for the url so that he can check it out.

Huh.

And I hesitate to give him the URL.

Why? What does it matter, really? How is it that the most public writing I do in this context makes me feel weird and shy?

Note: I do not know J. in a work-related context, so this is not why I hesitate. In fact, we have absolutely nothing in common except each other, so telling him about the blog - and letting him see it - is ultimately a really low-risk move.

And yet I hesitate.

I think I'm just chicken. What if this person thinks my blog is lame? What if my blog is lame? I mean, I know that you all don't think it is (I'm not fishing for compliments), but what if this real-life person who isn't exactly part of my real life thinks that I'm a big loser?

This is ridiculous. Enough with the wishy-washiness. Enough with the insecurity. It's time that J. learns about my secret "Dr. Crazy" identity. I certainly hope that I don't regret this decision.

Jo(e)'s Pseudonymity Meme

Is your blogging persona more serious than your real life persona?

I don't think that it is, though I suppose it's possible that the tone is... I don't know, more strident on certain posts than I might be in real life.

Do you think the only safe way an academic can write publicly is to write anonymously?

Hmmm. This is an interesting question. I think it depends a lot on one's level in the academic hierarchy, one's discipline, and the topics about which a person chooses to write. Were my blog entirely about my field of specialty, for example, I think it would probably be quite safe to use my "real" name. However, were I using the blog in that way, I think that I would tend to edit myself a lot more than I currently do and I would see the blog as a professional document and treat it as such so as not to embarass myself in front of colleagues by presenting half-formulated ideas about things related to my field. However, if one is going to write about things in a provisional way - in a writing-as-thinking sort of way - I think that the pseudonym is useful as a screen between my professional self and my actual self - you know? I also do think that it's much less safe for the untenured, those still in graduate school, and those who choose to write about things that might be seen as controversial.

Do you think that your blog could ruin your career?

No. But maybe I'm stupid, and it really could. I guess I don't think that it will, but it's a risk I'm willing to take.

What would happen if an administrator at my college discovered my blog?

I can't imagine that any would take the time to read blogs, in truth, but even if they did come across my blog, the reality is that I write very, very little that is about my university specifically.

Do you use a pseudonym out of fear?

Fear, no. Caution, yes. Also, I think that when I took on the pseudonym I was playing with the idea of an overtly constructed academic identity. I wanted to fool around with making an identity that challenged some of the ways that women (and women professors) are described and that dealt with negotiating the personal and the professional. I don't think I'd feel comfortable doing that under my "work" name. Also, I think I liked the idea of the name as emblematic in some way - the first blogs I read were barely tenured and invisible adjunct, and they both used pseudonyms and it seemed both freeing and to make visible identities that are often invisible in academe - somebody trying to get pregnant with in vitro, somebody on the margins because of being a contingent worker, etc. If the writer uses a pseudonym, it's a lot less easy to dismiss the writer as not being relevant to one's own position on the academic food chain. I think that the pseudonym in fact lends authority to those who are marginalized in public academic discourse. If you saw my nametag at MLA, you would immediately move on to talk to somebody more important. If, however, my nametag said "Dr. Crazy," I suspect people would be a lot more interested.

What is the biggest drawback to writing pseudonymously?

Hmmm. I think the biggest drawback is probably that sometimes I feel like I wish I could write about what I do under my own name without it "meaning" something in terms of how I'm seen as a professional. Because I can't, I can't really capitalize on what I do with the blog in terms of my work. That said, the blog does work as a good "free space" for me to work out ideas, and it's been (I think) ultimately good for me professionally.

Has anyone stumbled on your blog and found it accidentally?

Not that I'm aware of.

Have you outed yourself to any other bloggers?

Yep. And now that I'm in my new space, I am very open about things related to my teaching and such, so it would be very easy for anybody who was interested to figure out who I am, even aside from just asking me.

Has your blog allowed you to experiment with writing?

It's definitely allowed me to experiment with tone and voice. I would also say that it's helped me to think through how I organize my thoughts in writing and in how I articulate arguments in writing. Finally, I think that it has helped me to think of "audience" in a way that is much more real and much less abstract. (In my academic writing, I often think of my audience as just a bunch of students who are forced to write papers, and I don't think that's a good thing.)

Why do you use a pseudonym?

Well, it allows me to feel much freer about not revising or not laboring over tiny details in my writing. Also, I like the image that my pseudonym conveys. "Dr. Crazy" is parts of me, but at the same time it's an identity that does to some extent stand on its own now. I suspect that if I met some of my readers, they'd have a hard time thinking of me as anything other than "Dr. Crazy," even if I told them to call me by my "real" name. That's interesting to me, and it's fun.

Pseudonymity, Blogging as a Genre, Etc.

Tragically, my first attempt at this post was lost. Suffice it to say, that I want to move the discussion of the IHE article and pseudonymity and the genre of blogging up into a new thread. In this new thread, here are some things I'd like to see:

1) Would commenters please engage with each others' ideas? I'm not interested in reading well thought out comments that are punctuated with, "But see, that's why you're a petty jerk." Those don't do anything to up the ante on the discourse. Move on from being ticked off (i have), and let's have the conversation. Oh, and if anybody implies that a comment doesn't have value because the person who writes it has a pseudonym, or uses the fact that a person has a pseudonym as evidence for a claim, I'm going to assume that you want that comment deleted. In this space, whatever your feelings elsewhere, you've got to demonstrate respect for people with pseudonyms. Why? Well, because I use one, of course. And this is my playground and I'll run it as I see fit.

2) I think it's worthwhile to include the backlog of discussion (or paraphrased versions of it) that has occurred about the practice of using pseudonyms in this discussion, from way back in the day (think July 2004) to the present. That said, I'll direct you to a post from my old blog that I think articulates a lot of issues that continue to be at stake in the current debate.

3) Perhaps part of this discussion should also include a consideration of whether and how "popular" media like IHE influence how we're characterizing this genre (blogging) and the sub-genre (academic blogging). I'm coming to the conclusion that the main problem here is IHE and not actual bloggers.

4) I'm interested in thinking about the politics of referring to a blogger as anonymous vs. referring to a blogger as pseudonymous.

5) If you have posted on your blog about this topic and/or if you've seen a post that you think I'd be interested in, please do link to it. I lost the first version of this post in which I did link to some relevant posts at other blogs, but having lost it I just don't have it in me to go back and do it right now. (And I've got to go buy something to wear tonight that is neither inappropriately slutty nor something that I would teach in. It's a tough balance to strike, that one.)

All right, well, that's all folks! Let the games begin!

The Personal and the Public

I don't know whether y'all have been following the brouhaha in the comments over at Bitch PhD's generated by a few recent posts that she's made about her marriage, but I have, and in response I've been doing a lot of thinking (and rethinking) about how blogs work, how we invite people into our lives through them and how our attempts to project an "authentic" voice can be complicated by the very audience that celebrates and villifies us on the basis of that authenticity or perceived lack thereof.

The point of this post is not to enter into the debate raging in Dr. B's comments about her relationships or her choice to communicate certain things on her blog. Basically, I just hope everything's ok for her and the people she cares about however everything plays out, and I don't see the point in throwing any further commentary her way than that. My point, rather, is to take what I've been thinking while silently lurking and watching others' responses and to translate that into something that is perhaps more easily discussable, more neutral.

I'd like to begin by breaking my thoughts down into general premises that I think are in play for those who choose to blog in ways that are both personal and "public"- including political, professional, etc.. (i.e., I'm not talking about purely personal diaristic blogs, nor am I talking about purely professional or issue-oriented or political blogs. I'm talking about blogs that blend the two.)

Premises Related to Writing:

• It is impossible for writing to articulate reality in any exact way. Who a person is in writing will necessarily differ from a person's "real" identity.
• Writing consists of a variety of rhetorical choices (such as my decision to use bullets here, for example, which one might argue indicate that I'm being very logical and point-driven, whether or not that is in fact true of what is included in the bullets) that convey a certain persona to readers, even if readers do not consciously perceive how those choices affect (effect?) their perceptions of the "author" of the writing that they consume.
• We do, in spite of Barthes and Foucault and all of those other dead French guys, respond on a visceral level to the idea of an "author" who speaks to us through the text. I might know in theory that the author is dead or that the author is just a function through with we collect a certain group of texts, but in practice I like to feel as if I'm being told a story by a real person.

Premises Related to Academic Identity:

• Because we "know" that a blogger is an academic, we expect him/her to be thoughtful in his/her posts and for the blog to encourage a certain level of discourse in comments.
• Because we "know" that a blogger is an academic, we expect a certain level of theoretical sophistication from the blogger, thus meaning that we may tend to invest the writing of that blogger with more inherent significance than it, in fact, is worth.
• Because we "know" that a blogger is an academic, we infer that we can "trust" his/her representation of his/her own identity and/or his/her take on the issues he/she discusses.

Premises Related to Gender:

• Because we "know" that a blogger is a woman, we expect a certain level of personal content on her blog, if it is pseudonymous. There seems to be a corelation between pseudonymity for female bloggers and a desire to talk about "personal" issues like difficulty in conceiving a child, being single, going through a divorce, mothering, depression or other psychological problems, etc.
• Because we "know" that a blogger is a woman, and because we think that they are more inclined to this sort of personal writing, we believe that female bloggers will not necessarily make political posts. If they do make political posts, these will be firmly separate from their more personal posts. (I'm not saying this is true, but I do think it's an assumption.)
• Because we "know" that a blogger is a woman, we evaluate that blogger's posts through the gender expectations and norms that we carry around with us in everyday life.

Premises Related to Blogging/Bloggers:

• Bloggers are narcissists, who seek validation and approval from audiences of "fans."
• Blogging is the equivalent of journaling if it includes personal content.
• Bloggers ask for what they get in terms of comments because they post what they do in a public forum.

I suppose my point in outlining these premises here is to try to think about the ways in which these premises dictate the kinds of things that we can/can't write in one blogspace or another (a) or the responses that we will get to what we write (b).

In watching all of the wildly busy commenting over at Bitch Ph.D.'s (200+ comments in some of the threads! and on a good day for me I get like 20!), I've been somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, I was jealous of her "popularity." That's part of this whole blogging thing, you know? Wanting to be a "popular" blogger, wanting to have a thriving community or audience or whatever of readers. On the other, I felt like she was being villified in ways that were unfair, as if posting on a blog is something more than just writing but rather is a kind of action that she's taking. At the end of the day, isn't writing a blog just writing? But then one has to ask oneself whether public writing doesn't somehow acquire greater meaning, and I think I do believe that it does. If I didn't, I'm not sure I would be as inclined to continue with blogging. It is satisfying to write for an actual audience, and it is satisfying to be able to do so in a forum that has such immediacy.

And I suppose this is the thing, and this is where the title of this post comes in. If blogging is an action that one takes, rather than the mere passive reflection of the world around us, isn't it exactly the space in which to explore the conjunction between the personal and the public? Doesn't the format lend itself to exactly that because it, too, is both personal and public? And isn't to try to explore those connections between personal life and public life exactly in line with many different versions of feminist politics? And, as such, isn't it entirely appropriate for a woman who is a mother and a scholar and a wife and an intellectual to write both about difficulties in her marriage and about the confirmation of a supreme court justice, both about her fantastic kid and about her sometimes less fantastic job? And why should others feel obligated to tell her that to post about "personal" things on the blog that don't fall in line with our world's version of "good wife" (whether in an open marriage or not), "good mother," or "good academic" is inappropriate? Isn't the point that those models for identity are kind of fucked up? Or am I missing something here?

But let's telescope back in and look at my own choices related to my blogging. One of the things that is most interesting about blogging to me is the way in which we can construct an online identity that is at first entirely conscious and then that later becomes less so. One of the reasons that I changed blogspace was because I couldn't comfortably inhabit the identity that I had constructed on my first blog any longer but at the same time I wasn't happy about the ways in which I couldn't consciously control the "Dr. Crazy" identity on that blog. My solution was to move house, thus allowing me to reinvent my blogging voice without abandoning the whole kit and caboodle. I've been experimenting with my voice in this new space, and it is both more and less personal. Strangely, on my old blog things that totally were not personal material, like the books that I was teaching, became the very things that I had to protect as my most personal information. I could write about very, very personal things, but I couldn't write about my everyday life or everyday interests or academic specialties. Now, in this space, I've inverted that paradigm. I tend to write more about the everyday things in much more open ways. In that way, I've made what is personal (in the sense of identifying) very public. On the other hand, things that are traditionally personal (i.e., intimate details of one's private life) don't show up on this blog. The funny thing is, though, that those things are actually totally anonymous, and I risk much more (in a practical sense) by going public with this material that is more suitable for public consumption. At the same time though, I also feel like I've stopped fighting the good fight to make visible the fact that I am both a public and a private person, even though I'm a "career girl" (as my grandmother would have said). It's easy to be seen as having a personal life when one gets to call oneself "wife," "mother," "sister," in our culture. When the signifiers that one has are "cat-owner," "friend," and "only-child-who-lives-hours-from-family," it's a lot harder to be seen as having a personal life that "counts." Why does it matter that it counts? I don't know. I still feel like it does, though. Nevertheless, I've given up trying to make myself visible in that way through the blog. That was the experiment of the old space, and either it succeeded as far as it was going to or it failed - I'm still not sure which.

The thing that I keep coming back to, as I think about all of the different opinions raging over at Bitch PhD's, is something that's unrelated. With all of the readers chastising her for posting about her marriage, I keep coming back to the many boyfriends of my past who've said to me when I was uppity in some way that "there's a time and a place for everything" or, perhaps better, "this is neither the time nor the place" - in other words, you're embarassing, you're not being a good girl, shut your mouth, I'm putting you in your place. I feel like that's what some of the comments over at Dr. B's are doing to her. Maybe that's what happens when you have as big a readership as she does. Maybe that's what happens when you're a woman and you step out of line. Maybe even in the personal-public genre of blogging it's still not ok to go public with the personal.