*note: this is a post migrated from my old wordpress blog, over to tumblr, and now, once again, back to wordpress … you can find the new blog right here, where it’s been for awhile…
This space is designed to be what the ancient Greeks called hupomnēmata, an aid to memory, a digital notebook. Foucault says that the simple notebook, just coming into vogue in Plato’s time, “was as disrupting as the introduction of the computer into private life today” (#). Writing is part of the structure of thinking. And, given that my chosen profession is centered around research, writing, and instructing others in the fruits of that labor, I feel as much obliged as anything else to keep a public weblog of all these activities.
So much of the things that we think which are good don’t fit the purely professional forums of conferences and scholarly journals, and even when they do they oftend to isolate themselves off from our everyday lives. A blog seems like a pretty good solution, a sort of informal publication. I am personally currently writing my dissertation in the University at Buffalo’s English Department, so the following is the likely schema of meditations that will get posted here:
- Synopses of current dissertation research
- Some of my less ephemeral thoughts*
- Lives of infamous men that crop up in my historical research (#)
- Aphorisms
- Conferences and other academic endeavors
- Links to interesting things, such as articles
I hope that this space will continue long enough that these will mutate and change over time, inscribing some sort of evolution over time. And maybe, just maybe, it is to be hoped that these hupomnēmata “may be of use to others” as well as our self (#).
—Addendum 4/27/20: It has indeed continued long enough that all of these have mutate and changed over time, radically, into many shapes, even as the glimmer of this early efflorescence of social media has really begun to lose much of its shine. Nevertheless, it marks off an intention at the origin of a project that guides it in the breach, even if the walls are mostly breaches these days …
Absalom, Absalom! 