According to WordPress this will be my 300th post.1 Considering that I have been doing this since May 2004, that’s not really a lot. About 4 posts/month. Many blogs reach 300 in less than a year. I am not really that concerned about volume, though. Sure, there have been times I thought I should blog more, but have little to say, or I am too busy, or I just forget. Mostly, though, I blog when I feel the urge.
Looking back, this blog has grown, both in subject matter and readership, and so has the nature of blogging. People comment far less often on blogs, I have found, opting instead to respond via their own blogs, or twitter, or other outlets, which is fine. I am always grateful when a conversation ensues, no matter the venue.
The thought crossed my mind the other day that I might shutter this blog, maybe start a new one, or move exclusively to twitter, where a lot of energy that used to go into blogging goes now. I have a few reasons for contemplating closing this blog. As stated above, twitter is taking a lot of this sort of energy, but twitter is good for some things, and not for others. For example, this post would not work on twitter (“I am thinking about closing A Memorable Fancy because I tweet a lot” would likely be the extent of it). Also, now that I have graduated, I feel as if I’ve moved on in many ways. This blog might serve as a chronicle of grad school for me, and a new blog or venue might signal a rebirth, a moving on, a commencement. But that’s stupid. If we want that, just look at any post before March 31, 2010 as grad school, and anything after as post. You don’t change after graduation — everything is a continuum.
The last reason for possibly closing (and deleting) the blog would be pure caution. I am on the job market this year, and I really don’t know how this blog reflects me as a scholar. There have been times on here when I have been whimsical or otherwise thoughtless, and in these times, I may have been impulsively critical of the very institution in which I wish to make my career, or perhaps I have revealed too much personal information, which could be used as fodder for search committees looking to eliminate candidates. On the other hand, it could (and should, and does, IMO) show a dedication to thinking about issues surrounding cinema and other media. I wonder what my readers think about this.
In the end, I will keep the blog, and Iwill keep posting here. I am tempted to go through and sanitize, clean up, trim here and there, but I probably won’t. I hope anyone looking at a post from 2005 reads it as that of a newly ABD grad student, still finding his way in the academic world, and anything from 2010 as that of a marginally more mature new Ph.D, still finding his way, sure, but at a different stage and with a wider perspective.
- this probably isn’t really number 300, due to a database crash a few years ago, but whatever [↩]
