Sphinx

It’s that time of year again, when I look back over the previous twelve months of blogging and wonder why I bother. Levels of interest and engagement, on every single measure, continue their inexorable decline – the fact that it’s only a 20-25% fall from the already-feeble figures of 2021 is due almost entirely to December, with the combination of my regular Blogs of the Year post piggy-backing on other people’s talent and popularity and a bit of gratuitous snark about #Receptiogate (now removed after a take-down notice from the alpaca whose image I used without permission). Maybe the blog post as a genre will make a come-back as a result of the immolation of Twitter; more plausibly, I should be thinking about how to re-tool my prolix ramblings for the world of TikTok…

The answer, of course, is that this has only ever been an outlet for “and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus” whimsy and sarcasm, rather than an exercise in brand-building, and it doesn’t cost me a huge amount of either time or money (unlike my halting attempts at a podcast series, where I really need to move extant episodes off PodBean before my subscription runs out and then stop trying). I can’t imagine anyone wanting to pay a regular subscription for a SubStack ‘newsletter’ from me – and I’d be wary of how I might feel I needed to change my style and/or content to live up to an idea of what I imagine people might expect of me in such a newsletter, if you see what I mean.

I could at a pinch imagine a few people clicking on a ‘Buy Me a Kofi’ button – but probably not so many that it’s worth the effort of trying to set that up. If this blog has never been about brand-building, it’s certainly never been a money-making enterprise. It remains a place where I can speculate and snark as I please, even as my appeal becomes more selective, and I get billed below the puppet show…

January: we’re all pretty well used to stories about the ‘cancellation’ of authors and topics due to excessive wokeness on the part of lecturers and excessive snowflakery on the part of students – a more dramatic and rabble-rousing way of describing curriculum review or even just the alternation of modules in different years – but the ‘cancellation’ of Semonides at Reading was especially silly…

February: this year did start off quietly! If we pass over my attempts at dealing with hurt feelings about a piece being rejected by claiming that I’d been cancelled, the only post this month was one of my intermittent reflections on teaching and assessment – in this case, the idea of offering students a choice of different ways of being assessed. I suppose it is representative of both me and the blog that every so often my days as a faculty teaching officer claw their way out of the grave again…

March: and by this point in the year I was feeling entirely drained by the grind term, still suffering from intermittent Long COVID issues, and wholly uninspired to write anything much – and even my jazz composition course, a vital respite during the plague years, was starting to get me down, as my sole post this month testifies… The end result was that I didn’t continue – and, rather than submitting a negative course evaluation, I sent the tutor a long personal email, to which I have never had a response. I do think I’m justified in feeling a bit pissed off – and I still miss the routine of homework and the prompt to do something creative every week. Unfortunately I cannot find any similar course anywhere…

April: finally, the end of term! And so this month saw a return to fortnightly posts, which turned out to be pretty well the best I could manage for most of this year. As ever I have a soft spot for my occasional bursts of pretentious opera critique – see, this is why I have a blog, as nobody, but nobody, is ever going to ask me to write about staging and the Gesamtkunstwerk – but this month’s key post was the result of substantial and serious research into the uses of Thucydides in social media in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine; blogging as the best means of disseminating findings on current developments.

May: clearly I felt much refreshed by the Easter break – and a trip to Potsdam – as I was writing all sorts of stuff this month, albeit some of it quite sort and throwaway (that is to say, even more than normal). From an autobiographical perspective, the key post was a reflection on the latest attempt to come to terms with Long COVID, and my complex/confused feelings about the fact that it might be appropriate to describe myself as someone with a disability. But I don’t imagine most people cone to this blog for my solipsistic moping, so the most important post was instead one arising from the workshops I’d been running on my latest research topic, the politics of decadence – and whether the term was a fair one for the UK government…

June: at this stage in my review of the year, reading back through things I’d long since forgotten I’d ever written, I start to feel that the many thousands of former readers who’ve drifted away probably have a point. Yes, the blog is a place for random thoughts and passing ideas that would never make a proper publication, and even for occasional musings on academic life – but that doesn’t mean they need to be so bloody BORING! I might be better off not posting anything at all than complaining about my failure to get a podcast off the ground, or the travails of electronic indexing… MUST DO BETTER.

July: but of course I am now old and pompous enough to write “Ah, but in my day…” reflections on past and present academic career expectations. It’s a tricky subject, and I hope I didn’t upset any current ECRs (and that re-posting this doesn’t have any similar effect), but it’s worth questioning the occasional suggestion that things were vastly easier a few decades ago, rather than just somewhat easier.

August: this was, I recall, the height of my “prioritise health, mental well-being and that book you’re supposed to have written” efforts. On the positive side, I did write actual words, albeit not enough of them, and can start to feel the book taking shape in my mind, and I did start to feel a bit more myself. On the negative side, a single post, about my adventures in bat detection and ‘citizen science’. The steady decline of this blog becomes ever less of a mystery…

September: still pretty quiet – not least because I was on holiday at the beginning of the month and embroiled in the start of teaching at the end – but enough time for the UK government once again to take on the role of the Melians, trusting in hope and belief as effective countermeasures against reality…

October: I came down with COVID again in the second week of teaching, and seemed to be in permanent catch-up mode thereafter, so it’s probably not surprising that this was another quiet month, notable only for some rambling thoughts about proposals to de-anonymise peer review or abolish it altogether.

November: it suddenly becomes obvious why, embarking on this review, I felt any sort of surprise that viewing stats for the blog have been so feeble this year: over the last two months my posting has returned to a sort of ‘normal’, with multiple posts in a range of styles – gratuitous snark at culture war idiocies, pretentious reflections on the current Lucien Freud exhibition at the National Gallery, and several detailed accounts of my monitoring of Thucydides references in the Twitter, as the effects of Space Karen’s takeover started to be felt, and, most remarkably, with the sudden appearance of thousands of bots quoting an obscure P.G. Wodehouse school story that mentions Thucydides, for reasons which still elude complete understanding.

December: and so here we are. December is always a bumper month, as I piggy-back on the talents of others by listing my favourite blog posts of the year, and people have a bit more leisure to read stuff – but I also had a bit more leisure to write stuff, including more reflections on misattributed Thucydides quotes, and trying out the new ChatGPT AI thing as a possible means of increasing my posting rate…

Of course, what really boosted visitor numbers this month was my webpage for the new THUCYDIOCY research centre, until a feeling that the whole #Receptiogate meltdown was becoming a bit too voyeuristic persuaded me to take it offline again. There are many things I will do to boost this blog, but not everything…

Memo for 2023: more consistent posting, less solipsism, and stop feeling so sorry for myself!