It MUST Be A Class Assignment

Suddenly, MANY dozens of people are visiting my humble blog and finding me through a search for “Debra Winger” or “Richard Gere” or “An Officer and a Gentleman” or some combination of the above (with a lovely variety of creative spellings).

This happened after I posted the e.e. cummings-like poem many moons ago, too.

I get the cummings-related visits (heck, I, too,  wrote a paper on “anyone lives in a pretty how town” when I was in college), but what’s with the sudden interest in Winger, Gere and Officer? What paper topic could be generating the hits? Something like this, perhaps?

• Write an essay evaluating the class dynamics, dialogue and sex scenes in this film in contrast to  the same elements in Pretty Women or Urban Cowboy?

Or, and this I fear, is someone actually thinking of remaking the film?

Multiple Blogiality Disorder

Last December I gave a lecture on Oprah’s Book Club, and based on my emphatically positive spin on the Oprah Effect, I was recruited by an eager colleague to assist in starting a faculty and staff blog: a public space for our rapidly growing institution to remind each other who we are and what we do.

We’ve been active for a few months now: our small blog task force has reached out to those faculty and staff members who we think might have something interesting to write about (and who might actually want to take time out of their busy daily lives to do so).

Based on the blog stats, people are reading these postings (with truly novel takes on subjects such as post- modernity, social networking,  soap and chemistry, and “generation me”).   One faculty member “outed” herself as an anonymous blogger of mostly mother and teaching related reflections when she agreed to cross post on our college blog. Another faculty member who posted is also a blogger, but not an anonymous one: she links to both blogs on Facebook, and enjoys the cross pollination of the various public forums.

This week, for the college blog, we are encouraging faculty and staff to submit their summer reading lists.  I am getting some interesting titles, but not as many as I’d hoped.

Despite a slow start, it’s been rewarding starting this new blog—which has yet to really find its footing.  Is the college blog a public relations tool of sorts (not that the PR folks are selling it in any way), or is it just another form of a “Water Cooler” that we have on our internal e-mail system? Right now, it seems to be the latter, but what is most interesting is that because I am one of the public faces of this new blog, I am often confused as the writer of many of the postings—folks stop by on campus to thank me for my interesting posts about Facebook or teaching, and I have to stop and remember that they mean my colleagues’ posts on the college blog (not Annie Em’s posts on those same subjects).

It’s a little unnerving.

This blog, too, is still trying to find its niche: partly educational, partly self reflection, partly a pastiche of links that amuse me.  But that’s ok.  I’ll keep writing and see where it goes.  While I don’t have the talent to write stories like TK,  or the charm to blog on life like Inky, or the wit of Acadamnit, I enjoy the process of writing a blog posting.  Tenured Radical (a rather well-known blogger) has a thoughtful recent 400^th posting where she reflects upon her rather satisfying “career” as a blogger, a public intellectual of the 21^st century.

That’s a marvelous goal, to be a public intellectual.

One of my students this term came to chat with me about that: he wants to be a public intellectual when he grows up (he’s 22) and asked me what he should major in!  I was truly at a loss. What would you have said?

Since he was sitting there in my soon to be small, old office, waiting for me to give him advice, I ultimately said something, though it probably sounded like a rambling list to the poor guy:  I said that it didn’t matter what he majored in, as long as he took a variety of classes, challenging classes, too.  I said it was probably more important that he write and participate in conversations as often as possible.  That he travel and become involved in the world around him. I gave him a list of titles of books by writers I consider to be public intellectuals, and encouraged him to take classes with professors on campus who I think would be possible mentors for him.

And then I said I hoped we could chat again someday after spring term when my brain was not quite as mushy.

I hope he does stop by to chat next week after he hands in his research paper (an approach on a topic that is, of course, original and challenging).  Maybe I’ll tell him to start a blog.

On Blogrolls and Sitemeters

Here’s a possibly naïve bloggy etiquette question:  should I ask, or, at the very least, inform, those bloggers whose blogs I add to my Blogroll?  WordPress bloggers are notified when they are blogrolled, but it’s not clear to me if other blog writers I link to are notified.  [Note to self: read up on Pings and Trackbacks-they may be my solution.] Of course, why wouldn’t a blogger want the exposure (however limited) of a link? I suppose, however, that I would like to be informed if someone linked to me (or even actually READ my blog, but that’s another issue), so my pre-New Year’s resolution is to contact the bloggers I’ve linked to and actually request permission. Until then, I will suspend adding to my blogroll (though, to  the many who are not yet included, please be patient).

I do find it intriguing that WordPress asks me whether the blog is written by a friend or a lover or a colleague, or if I just have a crush on the writer! [To read more about what WordPress calls "Defining Relationships", go here.] What exactly is the point of that? Is that information then made public?  Of course I have crushes on some of the bloggers I read: intellectual crushes, rather than physical, since I haven’t actually met most of them.   I fall for a finely wrought sentence, a sharp wit: a lively, engaging writing style simply makes me melt.   And while I will praise their writing in public,  I think identifying my interest as a CRUSH is problematic, to say the least. 

There are so many reasons why such a tag could get me, and possibly the targeted blogger, in trouble (note even the word “targeted” is so aggressive and hostile).  The Oxford dictionary definition and illustration is very interesting:

Crush (noun)

A person with whom one is enamoured or infatuated; an infatuation; so to have or get a crush on, to be enamoured of, take a strong fancy to. slang (orig. U.S.).

1884 I. M. RITTENHOUSE Maud (1939) 338 Wintie is weeping because her crush is gone. 1895 J. S. WOOD Yale Yarns 153 Miss Palfrey..consented to wear his bunch of blue violets. It was a ‘crush’, you see, on both sides. 1913 Dialect Notes IV. 10 (Have a) crush (on), to be conspicuously attached to some one. 1914 G. ATHERTON Perch of Devil I. 31 Some of the younger married women..get a crush on some other woman’s husband. Ibid. 186 To be jealous you’ve got to have a fearful crush. 1928 Punch 2 May 484/1 Gervase and Pontefract had had a quiet sort of masculine crush on Joyce for some time. 1929 JELLIFFE & WHITE Dis. Nervous Syst. (ed. 5) iii. 335 They tend to be aggressive, domineering and often play the man role with their schoolmates, or ‘crushes’. 1952 V. GOLLANCZ My dear Timothy 212 It is common to make fun of schoolboy and schoolgirl ‘pashes’ and ‘crushes’.

I like “Gervase and Pontefract had had a quiet sort of masculine crush on Joyce for some time”: I assume that is the equivalent of my feeble “intellectual crush”, but perhaps not?  We need a better term, like “crushiness” (aka Colbert’s “truthiness”).

This from the Online Etymology Dictionary clarifies the connection between gnashing teeth and infatuation (really, they are not dissimilar at all):

crush

1398, from O.Fr. croisir “to gnash (teeth), crash, break,” perhaps from Frank. *krostjan “to gnash.” Sense of “person one is infatuated with” is first recorded 1884; to have a crush on is from 1913.

For now, I will not identify any of the bloggers I link to as either an intellectual and/or physical “crush”-it may be best to remain mysterious about that and let them figure it out in other ways. 

On a very related note, I also recently discovered (the ongoing revelations after deciding to begin a blog are relentless) the sitemeter or blog stats revealing who is visiting your blog. Call me naïve (will do, Dr. Naïve) but I had no idea that they reveal how often you visit a particular blog, how long you lurk,  and, and this hurts, the location of your Internet service provider (and thus, potentially, YOU). 

In my defense…..

To those of you who may have noticed me lurking on your blog a bit too often, please let me argue that in my defense I am at the computer for at least 8 hours a day, leaving it on, with all its various “windows” open, even when in class or at meetings.  I am really, truly not actually lurking for hours at a time in your blog!  It definitely does NOT mean I have a crush on you (or that I even like your blog: it may mean it’s taking me way too long to get through the less than stellar sentences or the tedious analysis of a ho-hum, at least to me, subject).  Or, it may mean I actually love reading your blog and I’m trying to catch up by reading older posts.

I need distractions at work, especially when students don’t seem to be distracting me: I’m a multi-tasker at heart (see Nov. 23 posting).

End of protesting too much….

In fact, I’ll just end it with that.

Addendum: It looks like Crooked Timber has already covered the “blogcrush” territory. Check it out here.