thanks for not being a zombie

I know I should say something all substantive, but can I just say "Hear Hear!" and "Well said" and leave it at that?

*stands up, applauds*

I was very happy about the IHE article, but I'd probably have missed the others. Thanks for those links and for the very sensible commentary.

I also agreed with Jeff's piece and your comments on it. It's certainly why Ivan Tribble's essay is so troubling. I've enjoyed the flexibility my blog allows in terms of writing. Sometimes I am way too serious there, but the interactions with academic and non-academic audiences have been valuable.

Okay, I see now that there are some pseudonymous bloggers who take issue with what Rice has to say (See, e.g., New Kid).

I think the essay looks like one sort of thing if you understand Rice to be addressing writers, but it looks like something else if you understand him to be addressing readers.

It sounds like uncharitable admonishment if you take the former position. The attempted connection between pseudonymity and seriousness is seriously flawed.

Writing a blog under a pseudonym is usually an argument that the only safe way for an academic to write publicly is to write anonymously. Our thoughts about students, grades, internal policy and even our private lives and interests can never be revealed to our colleagues or future colleagues or we risk losing all we have worked so hard for!

Well...no.

First, people write under pseudonyms for all kinds of reasons, and the history of writing reveals that authorial personae are much more complicated than this. (Yes, we did just read Michel Foucault's "What is an Author?" in the graduate seminar I'm teaching, thank you very much.) There are those who are worried that blogging under their real name will hurt their career, but there are also those who like the different voice that taking on a persona allows them to adopt. It can be a stylistic choice, not an argument for or against anything.

Second, let's be sure to distinguish between a writer assuming that something she's writing is inappropriate and has no place in her academic career, and a writer assuming that others will think this way and that others will therefore handicap her career. Do you believe that all academics always have the best interests of their colleagues at heart? If so, then I have some bad news for you... Ivan Tribble may be an incurious, technophobic jackass, but (as he points out in his second essay), he's a tenured, incurious, technophobic jackass. His argument is "I don't understand it. I don't have to understand it. And I'm not even going to try." He will have an important role to play in who gets hired and who gets tenured in his department. Do you want to be bold, ultimately right, but unemployed? Or do you want to be cautious, compromising, and professionally successful? That's a choice everyone has to make, and not everyone's answer will be the same, of course.

To say "I'm careful because there are jackasses out there who are scared of things they don't understand" is dramatically different than to say "I'm careful because I understand that there's no real value in what I'm doing."

...

Now, if instead we understand Rice as addressing readers, then that's a whole different ball of wax, and is (I think) more in line with what many bloggers would say to potentially critical readers: Stop being so uptight! Let people play around with their writing!

However, the essay is not at all clear about who, exactly, is being addressed.

That's a really good reading, G Zombie. I think my own reading of the essay was informed by my own feelings that I've been way too serious in my blog lately, and I probably should have made that clearer.

I do think the anonymous/pseudonymous debate (?) is a false lead, but I also wonder if writing under my own name *has* hurt my search for tenure-track work.

Hi George
It's really for the writers, and I like how you framed it in the first part of this post. I understand your point in your own comment (but not so sure I agree).
Since I'm not a lit person, I had hoped lit folks - who may be the ones so upset - would see that the real stress of the little short piece was not about being anonymous but, as you note, fearing the new medium we all have found interest in. The two brief lit examples were meant to show that lit, too, experienced its doubters, but it also found folks who were willing to experiment with the new media's form and content. The non-academic examples I offered were just that: some examples of non-academic experimentation in form and content. Maybe using the term "postmodern" as adjective for Roth was an error since too many folks also grabbed on to that word; none of the non-academic examples I offered are "postmodern." They merely do "other" kinds of things I thought might be insightful for the academic community.
And no - I am not yet tenured.
:)

Chuck, I have to say, when I'm trying to think of what my ideal model scholarly-but-not-stuffy blog of ideas might look like, your blog is always the one that I think of first. If your blog ever counted against you, it could only be because the people doing the hiring were the worst kind of philistines.

Thanks, Laura. That means a lot. I've actually worried a bit that my blog is a bit too stuffy, but I *hope* that it doesn't work against me as a job candidate, but my job search this year hasn't been entirely encouraging.