As I remarked in the run-down of my favourite posts of 2020 by other people, it’s now traditional at this time of year to bemoan the continuing, apparently inexorable decline of blogging, and to wonder whether it’s worth the trouble. Page views are down another 20% or so on last year – though the optimistic perspective here is that this represents a slowing of the decline in absolute terms, and the number of visitors is more or less the same (and might even be slightly higher, if this end-of-year review gets some traction…). Writing posts has at times felt almost impossible, as I struggled with the joys of Long COVID – but less impossible than any proper academic writing, so the result has been a reasonable level of production here, while my ‘to do’ list for the professional stuff gets ever longer. And this year, more than ever before, the pleasure of reading old posts is the rediscovery of things I genuinely have no recollection of writing…
January: ah, those fabled days Before It Happened, when we were all exhausted and alienated in f2fip mode rather than on Zoom or Teams. I seem to have started the year in a state of professional confusion, whether reflecting on Hunger Games at the SCS conference (something it now seems vanishingly improbable that I will ever attend in person) or on the laughable idea of having any sort of career plan. It is a direct consequence of having now had three or four decent nights’ sleep in a row, thanks to a combination of imperial stout and deranged insomniac cat being slightly more normal recently, that my angst is currently limited to the number of deadlines I’ve missed or will miss in the next couple of months, and the still ill-defined nature of next term’s teaching.
February: as evidence that I was still capable of thinking in joined-up sentences despite all my struggles with teaching Macedonian history, I enjoyed engaging with the ideas of Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman as applied to C5 Greece in Weaponised Imperialism. I also finally managed to finish a piece on staff-student relationships in academia and why they are an unbelievably bad idea, only fourteen months or so after I first started thinking about it. But the major thing this month – the one thing I’d claim as an academic achievement this year, not an individual one but a collaborative project, was the Do What You Must/Melian Dialogues performance, and I’m not going to miss the chance to promote this again:
March: this, of course, is when things got interesting. On the 6th, I was sarcastically (but also opportunistically) developing a Grand Theory of the Whole of History. On the 7th, we get the first of many commentaries on how Thucydides can and can’t help us make sense of Coronavirus, and the first of a fair number of commentaries on the experience of teaching under these new conditions. What is striking, in retrospect, is how much energy I had at this point, whether because my inner Ballardian antihero was coming into his own, or in response to a new set of challenges, or simply because the deranged cat was in one of his better phases (to be honest, I’d forgotten how long this has been going on). Result: twice as many blog posts, determined making of kimchi and other preserves, and a sudden urge to make silly videos in a false beard…
April: it’s very difficult not to see this month’s posts through the lens of dramatic irony; still full of energy at the beginning, belatedly catching up with debates on the idea of ‘Classics’ and offering snarky critique of dubious Thucydides receptions and misattributions, then some reflections on the start of the new term and the ‘new normal’ of teaching with the first hint of some flu-like symptoms, and finally an attempt at coming to terms with not doing too much after definitely succumbing to something nasty.
May: it was, in the first instance, a pretty mild dose of COVID-19, and by the end of the first week of May I was happily blogging again about the possible styles of teaching under pandemic conditions and, still more cynically, about the possibility that some universities were taking advantage of the crisis to put existing plans into practice. There was then a fortnight of silence, that I didn’t discuss at the time because I was feeling awful again, a pattern that was to repeat over the next few months. And then I felt well enough to comment on a truly astonishing US State Department paper on Huawei and state security.
June: if I recall correctly, I decided to take June pretty well off, rather than running myself further into the ground by trying to get some writing done – which is why I was posting quite a lot at the beginning of the month: continuing reflections on next year’s teaching, which I guess will date rapidly, and a comment on John Cleese’s take on toppling statues of racists. At the end of the month, I felt energetic enough to get furious about private schools fiddling grade predictions on UCAS forms. In between, I reflected on the beetles in the new pond.
July …was not great. There were posts, on topics from interactions with Thucydiocy deniers to reflections on the future of conference networking. But increasingly they were short, fragmentary, underdeveloped and distracted – I really would like to find an illustrator with whom to collaborate on a comic book Thucydides, but I could have done a much better job of selling the project if my brain was working better at this point in the year.
August: all a bit dark this month, from worrying about student mental health in the coming academic year, to sheer fury about the A-Level fiasco. It was necessary to go back to the 1950s, and the unexpected deployment of Thucydides to recruit nuclear weapons scientists, to find anything cheery to write about.
September: generally, when I do these retrospectives, it’s quite obvious which posts are worth trying to revive, or at least which ones I want to try to force people to read. This year, not so much. Yes, there’s an interesting discussion of the background to yet another Thucydides misattribution that opens up all sorts of fascinating aspects of 19th-century American political thought and the Civil War. But mostly this month was the start of a rolling diary of my struggles with teaching, from ominous foreboding to Welcome Week shambles to simply feeling old and useless, and while it’s a kind of historical record, and an important bit of my autobiography, I’m honestly not sure how much it has to say to anyone else.
October: and it continued… By the end of the month, try as I might to focus on the demise of Eidolon and the need for short scholarship, rather than ‘fast’ or ‘slow’, the predominant theme was my inability to think or write. Similarly, while I would probably have had thoughts about social media and teaching in any case, now it was impossible to detach these from my struggles with online teaching.
November: one of the genuinely positive things about this year were my online jazz composition courses, which offered valuable insight into the experience of being a student in these new conditions – most valuable of all, the experience of being useless. Perhaps because term was settling down by this point, if only in a ‘no one know anything, expect the unexpected and expect government policy to be gibberish’ manner, I found the energy to comment on wider academic developments, with the establishment of exciting new peer review opportunities and some reflections on Oswald Spengler and reasons for shunning him.
December: finally… As term began to wind down, I had some final reflections on student well-being through the lens of Thucydides, and found the time to write up something I’d been planning for ages on Thucydides as chocolate card, and even to deal with a lot of people on the Twitter getting angry about the incoherence of ‘indigenous British population’. And of course there had to be one more reflection on teaching through the lens of jazz composition, this time imagining the seminar as jam session. It’s been that sort of year.
Mr Neville Morley,
Blogging is a lot like keeping a journal. The only difference is that the thoughts, feelings and ideas you write down are shared with other like-minded people. In this way, it can be a sort of ‘relatable, fun and/or therapeutic’ hobby. I think you should not get caught up in the number of views you recieve, because ultimately, every form of self-expression (your blogs included) is intended for the creative or intellectual release of the self, not for others. In other words – if blogging is enjoyable for you and allows you to escape a little from the chaos of everyday life, I say continue doing so, regardless of the views, likes or followers you have.
I myself am a follower of your blog, I discovered you recently but I admit, it is enjoyable reading your writings. A little bit about me, I am a 15 year old high school student, Greek-Australian, and I have a passion for Classics and Philosophy. My dream career is to become either a Classics or Philosophy university professor. The subjects you study/often write about are of immense interest to me and honestly I feel comfort in knowing that there are communities of people like you and me. Other than the interesting writings on your area of expertise, I find your blogs about personal life/opinions etc to be super engaging and interesting (even humorous at times).
You know, I’ve been lucky enough to meet a few professors (mostly ones specialising in philosophy) in my life, I admire them and their hard work, but getting a glimpse into their life/the academic lifestyle is a privilege I will only earn once I hopefully become one in the future. So, I guess I just wanted to share my appreciation for your blogpage – I always have been told that focussing on a career in Academia will be difficult/pointless but I have a growing passion for it and honestly it’s the only thing I can imagine myself doing.
Thank you for making this blogpage and raising awareness about Classics – we are dying in the modern world! I aspire to become an open-minded professor (and person in general) like you – you are way past the ‘stereotypical’ academic. Anyway, you and your blogs inspire me and I cannot wait to go through both the terrors and the joys of an academic life.
Sorry for this super long comment but I felt like you needed to hear it, also I debated between submitting this comment or not for some time haha.
Enjoy the holiday breaks and the New Year!
– TheLostAcademic
Very many thanks for this – I’m always happy to get any comments on here, but obviously it’s especially nice to get compliments…
I’ll be quite honest, I’m not sure this is a great time to dedicate oneself to the pursuit of an academic career in the humanities, as governments across the world -certainly across the Western world, including Australia – increasingly take the view that such subjects are at best an unnecessary indulgence, and universities respond to such policy shifts by closing programmes and departments and reducing the number of academic posts. I imagine the humanities will survive, but in my darker moments I can see them being confined to a tiny privileged minority, and that won’t offer very many career opportunities. It will still be well worth studying them at undergraduate level, as an excellent all-round education, and dedicating oneself to life-long learning; I just wouldn’t invest too much in the idea of this as a career, for your own sake. It’s the paradox faced by most PhD students and early career people at the moment: you need to be ultra-dedicated and work yourself into the ground for little reward in order to have any chance of a career, but the more you do that, the worse it is if you aren’t one of the lucky ones…
As for the blogging, the tricky thing in my case is that this isn’t just a personal journal sort of blog. I do enjoy writing it, for many different reasons, but I can justify the time and effort – which I could be devoting to more ‘serious’ academic work instead – because it is part of my professional activities, trying to engage a wider audience with my research, and if that becomes less effective then there is less of an argument that this is worth my time, when the list of other things I ought to be doing is so long.
Sorry, this is probably a lot more dour and depressing than you anticipated, but it’s been a very long year…
You are welcome and thank you for replying! 🙂
I am aware of the decline in popularity and demand for academic careers (especially in the humanities), as you mentioned, and I agree that it is a tremendously difficult careerpath to follow, maybe slowly disappearing, as you suggested.
I am an optimist (maybe because I am so young), and so far in all of my years of schooling I have put in my absolute effort and dedication into school, recieving the resuts I believe I deserve. You are right, to be successful in an academic careerpath requries not only scholarly interest from the individual, but also virtue, passion, dedication and the genuine desire to participate and become a part of Academia.
Whilst circumstances look bad right now for the humanities, I believe the few people who really are passionate (I genuinely consider myself as one of them), will lead their dream career as an Academic, whether it be with smaller jobs like Professor’s assistant, or Research assistant etc or the Professorship.
I want to assure you that the humanities in Academia will not die with your generation – I am sure of that. Teaching the humanities is an essential part of education, if not, life itself.
What I am trying to say is that although a career in Academia under the humanities seems to be diminishing in the future, it only seems like that now. Call me dramatic, but I know that civilisation cannot and will not progress/go on without the humanities – and we can see that in history!
Even though we have slightly different views on this matter, I would still like to thank you for informing me of this modern tragedy, as I like to call it.
P.S, On a more personal note, Academia is where I belong, I have known this for years – every time I attend a public lecture, I feel the strongest sense of belonging and happiness. Life is about chasing our dreams – every single person who has chased their dreams, and I mean, really, truly chased them, has eventually reached them. But thank you for your concern/warning about this careerpath, I will keep it in mind. Plus, there’s got to be someone to teach the next generations about the Ancient Greeks, right? We can’t just dispose of history.
– TheLostAcademic
I forgot to add to my reply, you are correct about the blogging situation and I totally understand your circumstances. Of course, if your professional responsibilities need more attention, then yes, it makes absolute sense to back away from blogging, even temporarily or permanently. Enjoy the new year, 2020 has been difficult for all of us and I wish that next year will be better!
– TheLostAcademic 🙂