The Death of The Tattered Coat?
After four and a half years of inconstant operation, I’m wondering what to do with this blog. At its height, the blog had a friendly and intelligent community of regular readers, a fair bit of google juice, a perfect number of daily hits, and a wonderful network of impassioned fellow bloggers.
Now? Not so much.
And it’s all my fault. I first let the blog slip in the Spring of 2006, when I decided to take time off from it to finish my doctoral dissertation. That worked out well in the sense that I finally received my degree, but the blog never really recovered from that six-month hiatus.
I started the blog up again just as I went on the academic job market, which was probably a bad idea. And the blog has suffered — few new posts . . . . obituaries, of all things, languishing on the front page . . . . tumbleweeds blowing through the comment sections (though certain posts continue to resonate) . . . . WordPress upgrades ignored . .. . . well, it hasn’t been pretty.
“Lusting to be Lost” by mdumlao98But here’s the thing: I miss blogging. I miss the friends I made here, the dialogue I had with readers, the emotional and intellectual connections that I had with fellow bloggers . . . . and, most of all, I miss the writing. I miss sharpening my prose on a daily basis, playing with language, attempting to improve my skills.
As much as I’d like to return to doing what I used to do, however, many things have changed. The time I used to have while I was writing my dissertation has evaporated. My new job, which I started last fall, is great, but it’s time consuming — I’ve got a fairly heavy teaching load, but I also need to produce research for tenure. Although I still have family in Philadelphia, the new job brought me up to New York City, which means that my relationship to the amazing network of Philly bloggers has changed.
But the biggest difference is that I’m no longer focused on what used to be the primary subject of this blog: politics. I still care about it (Go Obama!), and I still read political blogs, but at a certain point, I became so sickened by the inexorable cycle of disappointment and frustration in recent years that I stopped believing in the power of the people to effect real change. And it’s hard to blog when you don’t have that faith.
I’ve become interested in an entirely different set of blogs and issues. Nowadays, I’m likely to read teaching blogs written by fellow academics or technology blogs written by instructional technologists. In my reading, at least, I’m moving from the realm of political blogging towards the realm of edubloggers, and I’m not sure how much crossover there is between the two camps.
So, here is my problem: I want to blog again, but I don’t know where to do it. I could start blogging again on The Tattered Coat, and there are certain ways in which that idea is attractive (see my notes about google juice above). However, I wrote this blog semi-anonymously, and I’d prefer to write my new blog under my real name. If I started blogging here under my own name, I might feel that it would be necessary to delete some older posts — an idea that bothers me. And I wonder whether it would be wrong, somehow, to re-purpose links given to me for political content that will be largely absent from the new blog.
And yet, I would have a hard time letting go of this blog, because giving it up would mean letting go of all of the meaningful connections I made here in the past.
So I find myself at the impasse that has kept this blog silent for months on end: I want to go forward, but can’t find the way.
