This Gaudy Gilded Stage

My New Year’s Resolution this year was to start blogging again. I guess it hasn’t gone too well so far! The main inhibitor to blogging has been my day job. Being an honors administrator and teacher generally takes up all of my time, and when I’m home in the evenings I’m usually exhausted from the day’s work. But in the past I’ve used my blog as my memory, recording my thoughts and impressions on the plays, art, movies, etc. I see. It’s been so long since I’ve blogged regularly that I’ve lost a year or more of those memories.

So, I want to get back to blogging. I’ll start by catching up on some of my favorite things from 2012. I’ll also probably fill in some movie reviews and other odds and ends just to catch up generally. Hopefully, starting today I’ll make my resolution come true!

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Today I started a second blog, one dedicated to my job. Creating it made me think about I wanted to start it, which made me think about why I have this blog. I originally started this blog when I was on sabbatical. It was going to chronicle my progress towards finishing the second book project as well as record my responses to various scholarly and pedagogical works I was reading.

After teaching Tristram Shandy a couple of times, I decided to evolve this blog to include a larger picture of my thoughts and opinions. Now that I’m an administrator, it’s mostly become a record of my tastes in music and movies.

I don’t have a problem with that, but I would like to get back to my roots. I started off blogging about the eighteenth century, my scholarship, and my teaching. I want to do more of that again. I’m not going to stop writing about movies and music — I still have a lot to say on those subjects — but I also want to be more academic.

So, let’s get to it ….

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My blogging has really screeched to a halt this summer. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to write about or that I didn’t want to blog — I have lots of things I’ve wanted to post about. But this summer has been busier than I ever imagined it would be.

I’ve traveled more than I’ve ever traveled in a two month period (and that was after canceling one trip!). I’ve also been under a lot of pressure at work. While I love my job, I definitely feel a lot of stress from it. And I’ve had a lot of allergy problems this year, more than usual.

All of this has left me mentally exhausted. So much so that the thought of blogging has often been too much. I frequently think about blogging about something only to be too mentally tired to bother with it. So, for the past two months I’ve basically taken a hiatus from doing it.

But I really want to get back into writing. I find this blog is a useful way to remember what I thought about the movies I’ve seen, the music I’ve heard, the museums I’ve visited, etc. Even if no one else ever read it, it’s worth it just for that. It’s also a useful way for me to think through my work as dean and as a researcher and teacher.

So, I’m going to try my best to start writing again on a regular basis. I’ve got lots of things to blog about, so over the next few days I’ll catch up on whatever I can catch up on, and then I’ll start writing about new things. I’m hoping it will energize me a little. Maybe it will also be a good way to deal with the stress of my job. I’ve got a week left before our quarter starts. Let’s see what kind of blogging rhythm I can get into. Here goes ….

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Today is the first anniversary of my blog. It was one year ago today that I posted my first entry, which was about being evaluated. In rereading that post today, I see that my blog started with a rant! I don’t think there have been too many rants since then — a few — but not many! I think that’s a good thing.

Since I include so many YouTube clips in my blogs, I thought I would intersperse my three favorite clips from the past year throughout this post. Here’s my favorite, which is from The House of Flying Daggers:

So, what has this blog been about this past year? I started it while I was on sabbatical and wanted to use it to keep track of some of my reading and writing while I was on leave. I wanted it to help remind me that I’m accomplishing things even if I wasn’t teaching or producing articles or a book right away.

I find that I haven’t actually written much about my scholarship. I think the reason for that is the impulse to keep my work to myself until I’ve submitted it for publication. I have written about some of the books I’ve reviewed for journals, but that isn’t quite the same thing as posting ideas from my book project or an article that I’m writing.

I have written about my teaching from time to time. I like posting about my classes and what I’m doing in them, because it does help me record some of my ideas as well as help me process some of what’s going on. One lesson I’ve learned this year, however, is to be careful what I write when it comes to my classes. One post apparently “upset” some of my students, who subsequently talked to a colleague of mine about it. She then emailed me to express their complaint (which I think was based on a misunderstanding of what I had written — I put “upset” in quotes because that was my colleague’s description of their reaction, but I don’t really believe that any of them could possibly have been too upset since what I had written was such a minor thing). It certainly isn’t my intention to offend of my students by writing about my classes, and I studiously avoid identifying any individuals or critiquing them in any overt way. Mostly, I write about me — there’s very little room left to write about them! 🙂

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