There was an interesting article over the holiday period by the music writer Simon Reynolds, about why he still blogs, and I agreed with more or less every word:
I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved.
I did have a brief moment, back in January, of wondering whether I should be slightly more responsive to the preferences of my readers as far as post topics and themes were concerned – this was probably one of the various times when I looked at everyone else upping sticks to Substack or the like, and wondered about the logistics. But scarcely anyone responded to the poll, the results were all over the place, and a couple of people commented that they liked the random eclecticism and self-indulgence, so here we still are.*
I did more or less manage, as planned, to keep up the posting rate to at least two a month. How much of a difference this actually made is unclear; on the one hand, the stats for visitors and viewers are substantially better than for the last couple of years, and 50% up on last year, but on the other hand most of that stems from January (of which more shortly), and on a month by month basis they are at best holding steady. The decline of Ex-Twitter has not, as was speculated at some points in the last year or so, produced a resurgence of blogs, and since it’s still the main way in which people seem to find their way here (even this month it’s dwarfed Bluesky by 4:1) the lack of engagement there definitely has an impact.
But, in the spirit of Reynolds, this remains very much an ‘if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus’ enterprise, and I am glad I don’t have to spend any time at all worrying about whether I’m attracting enough paid subscribers. This is, as ever, a selection of the year’s posts that I enjoyed the most, or which (in the case of the more miserable ones) expressed something important to me, rather than the ones that got the greatest interest from anyone else.
January: It’s well known that what really gets the clicks and hits is a massive online row, and if I really wanted to improve my statistics and build my subscriber base I’d pick a fight with Mary Beard or Tom Holland at least once a year. But I’m much too thin-skinned, squeamish and anxious not to upset anyone to do that. Much better to invent a fictional target; an imaginary research institute, based partly in someone’s living room and partly at a London address used by hundreds of other companies, staffed by a lot of stock photos and a few family members, offering expensive courses in using the WayBack Machine as a research tool and plagiarising other people’s blogs on the grounds that they were merely blogs and not proper academic publications… No, hold on, this was actually real, not an Umberto Eco fantasy, and my musings on the status and credibility of blogging, Nothing Even Matters, despite saying nothing at all about #Receptiogate that wasn’t already in the public domain and indeed taken from the published words of its protagonist, was enough to get me added to the noble roll-call of those sent florid and unactionable legal threats – and it did wonders for my viewing figures. But the issues are entirely serious and worth discussing, if we can all just stop giggling about it.
February: Despite breaking my foot, or perhaps because of it, I managed three substantial posts this month. My favourite, I think, is Oh Well, perhaps simply because it epitomises the appeal of blogging, at least for the author; a combination of serious research into traditions of Thucydidean scholarship that would never in a million years amount to a proper publication, some fascinating tidbits of information about one of the earliest attempts at developing political psychology, and some self-indulgent rambling about how I might like to be remembered.
March: As ever, the nice thing about doing this end of year review is revisiting stuff I have absolutely no recollection of writing in the first place. Yet more weird Thucydides-quoting bots on Twitter; questions of plagiarism in different sorts of academic writing – this does seem to have been a theme for 2023, given it began with Receptiogate and we’re now ending it with questionable and indisputably bad-faith accusations against the president of Harvard – and finally a reflection on academic work-life balance, Rule the World, giving me a chance to chat about why I love the Rule of St Benedict, without ever actually succeeding in applying any of its lessons to my own life.
April: just two posts this month, not least because by this point I was not just thoroughly sick of limping round the place with a broken foot (including a particularly miserable experience doing the ‘mobility assistance’ thing in Heathrow Airport) but was also simply very, very tired. But they were both quite substantial posts, and I find it hard to choose between them; Almost But Not Quite Entirely Unlike Tea was an important step in the development of my thinking about ChatGPT, as I was marking the first essays where I feel certain I detected its influence in some entirely fake bibliography, while Everyone Is Everybody Else attempted to work up reminiscences about my graduate student years into a State Of The Discipline argument about why we don’t seem to get so many major theoretical/methodological rows any more.
May: More posts, less substance – I don’t actually remember, but I suspect I was hacking things out just to have something to post. Some reflections on that year’s teaching, wondering how far we’d been too quick to try to get everything back to normal; further ideas about ChatGPT and assessment, and the question of whether it’s no more than the latest fad, like MOOCs or Second Life, rather than a real transformative moment in higher education. But probably the most on-brand post this month, since it expresses my ability to be pretentious about absolutely anything, has to be Stargazer, prompted by the astonishing mass emergence of emperor dragonflies from the pond.
June: The first episode in my new attempt at applying some discipline and consistency to my blogging, by following Christa Wolf’s practice of writing an account of a whole day, exploring and celebrating the mundane – but once a month rather than once a year. I rather doubt that anyone will be asking me to put these together as a book in the future, but it’s an interesting exercise (when I remember; missed November, and would have missed December if I hadn’t been doing this round-up… Rather less solipsistic was Your Own Personal Jesus, considering ideas about ‘proper academics’ (along the lines of the meme about ‘proper binmen’) and what this tells us about changes in, and changing expectations of, lecturing and personal tutoring.
July: An assortment of relatively short (certainly by my standards), interesting but scarcely Earth-shattering posts this month; on the relevance of Greco-Ronan slavery societies to understanding the impact of AI, on the mobilisation of Thucydides to question climate change, on the ongoing collapse of Ex-Twitter, and – marginally my favourite – Political World, on the phenomenon of politicians claiming not to be at all political, in the specific context of a local by-election.
August: Well, if you thought last month’s posts were inconsequential… Passing thoughts on how to tell students to reference ChatGPT (are the university’s guidelines – we want to work with not against LLMs, so feel free to use them but provide full details of everything you do – intended as a subtle disincentive?), musings about the monetisation of blogs; more reflections on LLMs. I’m going to pick my once-a-month diary, as this month it had nothing to do with the celebration of everyday life but just happened to coincide with our trip to Bayreuth and so gave me a chance to pontificate on Parsifal.
September: Suddenly we’re back to a tricky choice between different things that I enjoyed writing – how to weigh up the relative merits of a chatty piece on the fact that our holiday took us to a place where Eric Hobsbawm not only went on holiday but declared himself a communist and some serious thoughts about whether there is anything like a replication crisis in historiography? Tricky – so I think I’m going to go for the entirely self-indulgent What I Owe to the Ancients, exploring what I learnt from the different people who taught me as a student.**
October: A seriously up-and-down month, as horrific world events coincided with the after-effects of a course of powerful antibiotics while trying to keep on top of teaching in the midst of the rail system falling apart… The tone of my posts was all over the place, being a fair reflection of my state of mind, and so I think I have to pick two pieces this month: contemplation of the different ways in which the Melian Dialogue could be read (many of them very wrong) in Weak, and contemplation of the fact that my students seemed so much happier and chattier this year in Happy Talk.
November: REALLY not a good month – indeed, I don’t think I even publicised a couple of these posts, just stuck them up on the blog without comment, as I was feeling too miserable.. Putting a brave face on the fact that I gave a completely crap paper – a post which apparently some people did appreciate for its admission of failure – didn’t help with the tiredness from trying (and failing) to get other stuff done in the previous weeks so I could work on it, and the feelings of uselessness then impeded recovery. I picked up enough towards the end of the month to discuss the fact that my students, chatty and engaged with the material as they were, were nevertheless extremely disinclined to engage with opportunities to think about its contemporary relevance. But then I had to deal with the death of my lovely Sophie, and with the guilt at feeling such grief for a cat when thousands were dying in Gaza. Well, that sums up the month: Lovecats.
December: Basically a matter of staggering through to the end of term – dogged by the fact that I was then doing a reprise of last month’s awful paper, travelling out to Austria so that even more people could marvel at the wreck of a once-promising career. It had seemed a good idea at the time… Actually it turned out to be a good idea; had a lovely time talking to lovely colleagues, then returned home and managed to write up a chapter partly based on the paper before knocking off for Christmas. And I’d managed to track down one of the Thucydides misattributions that has been bugging me for years: Days of Wine and Roses. So we can end on a moderate high…
*The fact that the two people who commented were Phil, by far and away the most consistent and interesting commentator here – time to up your game, everyone else – and Josh Nudell, who regularly links to my posts on his blog, confirms my sense that this is all the feedback I really need.
**September was also the tenth anniversary of this blog becoming my blog, so I did take the time to pick some favourite old posts – again, plenty of which I’d entirely forgotten I ever wrote: Ten Years After.
Leave a comment