1) I write a fair amount - in my own old-fashioned diaries and commonplace books, in Wellesley College's electronic fora, on Facebook, in letters and emails. I spend a lot of time preparing this writing, and often wish I could make it more public. For all I know, this will be _less_ public than what I write elsewhere, but it has at least the possibility of being more public, and also less limited in scope than what I write in my Facebook status updates.
So making some of my thoughts more public is the big motive.
2) Topics: in theory, anything under the sun. Likely topics in practice: politics (including the politics of the media), literature, religion, music, violence and nonviolence, translation.
3) Likely frequency: once a week, sometimes less often.
4) Rules, mostly for myself. I'm starting this shortly after the Israeli attack on the Free Gaza flotilla. I've read quite a lot about that attack. Very little of it seems to be animated by curiosity, by engaged uncertainty. Much of it is polemic, going for the jugular. I've got a position on the attack (more on that later, probably); but more importantly, in this context, I've got a position on how antagonists talk to each other, how uncertainties should be acknowledged, how we should actually be interested in those we disagree with.
I'll try to keep myself to those standards in what I write - courtesy, curiosity, uncertainty, maybe even disinterestedness. If people end up commenting on what I write, I'll hold them to the same standards.
5) The fact that I started writing this shortly after the Israeli attack, but am only finishing it now, suggests - rightly - a certain unease about the whole enterprise. I mean, it was a while back . . . For all I know, this will be not only the first entry but also the last, or one of a very few.
I own a blank book that was made for me by a former student who'd won a Watson Fellowship and gone to Japan and Okinawa to study papermaking. It's a beautiful book to look at and to hold, so beautiful that I've never been able to bring myself to write anything in it - how could I write a sentence as beautiful as the paper I'd be writing it on? But I don't think the giver of the book had in mind to produce that effect; I think she wanted me to write in it whatever came into my mind to write, and to have that writing enhanced by, and not blocked by, the object she'd created for me. So here: I can't postpone starting this blog until I come up with the lost chord, the perfect sentence or paragraph, the perfect mixture of self-assertion and humility. I need just to start.
5) The fact that I started writing this shortly after the Israeli attack, but am only finishing it now, suggests - rightly - a certain unease about the whole enterprise. I mean, it was a while back . . . For all I know, this will be not only the first entry but also the last, or one of a very few.
I own a blank book that was made for me by a former student who'd won a Watson Fellowship and gone to Japan and Okinawa to study papermaking. It's a beautiful book to look at and to hold, so beautiful that I've never been able to bring myself to write anything in it - how could I write a sentence as beautiful as the paper I'd be writing it on? But I don't think the giver of the book had in mind to produce that effect; I think she wanted me to write in it whatever came into my mind to write, and to have that writing enhanced by, and not blocked by, the object she'd created for me. So here: I can't postpone starting this blog until I come up with the lost chord, the perfect sentence or paragraph, the perfect mixture of self-assertion and humility. I need just to start.
