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Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

Brand New Me

Posted in Musings, tagged on January 2, 2023| 2 Comments »

Welcome – a guarded, once bitten twice shy sort of welcome – to 2023. Ironic self-pity in my Review of 2022 aside, I am genuinely resolved to do a bit better with the blog this year; to post at least twice per month, so that at least I have a choice when it comes to selecting my favourite posts at the end of the year, and to try to be slightly less boring and self-involved. The latter may prove difficult, but my overall health is definitely better than it was a year ago, and so I hope to have fewer grounds for moaning about everything.

One thing I do wonder is whether I should have slightly more of an idea what I’m doing, rather than just randomly scribbling whatever happens to occur to me. (more…)

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2022 on The Sphinx

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 31, 2022| Leave a Comment »

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… (more…)

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Blogs of the Year 2021

Posted in Musings, tagged , on December 26, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Are blogs still dying? Doing my best to separate this question from my feelings about this blog, which is definitely somewhat sickly – further discussion of this when I do my own review of the year – I tend to conclude: answer hazy, try again later. There have been some really excellent posts this year, and sone exciting new voices and ideas, and I honestly haven’t a clue whether they are getting the readership they deserve. It was a little disconcerting, for example, when someone I know on Facebook mentioned that yesterday their blog – albeit a time-limited project where the last post appeared in the first half of the year – got no visitors at all (suddenly my statistics look better than I thought…). I had a vague idea that in current circumstances we would all be looking more to this sort of short-form, informal, immediate commentary, both as readers and writers. But then I did think that, even if I couldn’t manage sustained writing at the moment, I would at least be able to keep up the blog posts, and look where that ended up. Indeed, looking back through this list, I’m struck by how much my reading clearly fell off at various points, and how much I fall back on certain writers time and again…

Anyway, the point of this post is not to moan, but to celebrate, and to remind myself – and whatever readers I have left – of some brilliant stuff they may have forgotten or missed. (more…)

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First Contact

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , on May 5, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Further musings on what next year’s teaching might look like… Yes, I know that there are already highly successful distance-learning models out there, above all from the Open University, and we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I suspect that what we end up doing will be rather different: we don’t have the time to develop all the material and supporting framework for full-blown online courses by September (especially with the likelihood, given recruitment freezes due to enormous financial black hole, that we’ll all need to take on more courses than planned), and most of us lack the experience (and probably skills) to make that work – better to produce a hybrid that plays as far as possible to our existing strengths – and finally universities are likely to want to distinguish their offerings from what’s already available from the OU. (more…)

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Between the Wars

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on August 29, 2019| 1 Comment »

One of my least favourite novels in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence is the sixth, The Kindly Ones. I’m not entirely sure why; it offers one of his most sustained bits of classical reception, the Kindly Ones being of course the Eumenides or Furies – but my love of Powell, and personal response to this book, long pre-date any serious classical interest – and is just as full of unforgettable scenes and character sketches. More than likely it’s my habit of over-identifying with certain characters and then feeling vicariously miserable, and perhaps I simply shouldn’t enquire too closely. But in the last year or so it’s been difficult to avoid being reminded of the book on a regular basis, and that is Not Good – finding oneself in The Kindly Ones is akin to the Chinese curse of living in ‘interesting times’. (more…)

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Blogs? Huh!

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on June 11, 2019| 29 Comments »

What are they good for?

This thought was prompted in the short term by a friend’s remark in a Facebook discussion that “I remember blogs” – followed up, when I enquired, by “#obsoletetechnology” – but I’ve been wondering about it for a while in the face of a steady decline in the viewing and visitor statistics for this one. (more…)

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I’ve Come For My Award…

Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged , on June 3, 2019| 3 Comments »

I’m in two minds about scribbling this, and may change my mind about publishing it by the time I’ve finished; something that has always, quite irrationally, infuriated me about academics on social media is the way that some of them just use it to celebrate their successes and forthcoming media appearances. Non-specific sighs and laments in search of sympathetic responses are entirely forgivable in comparison… (more…)

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2018 on the Sphinx

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , , , on December 29, 2018| 1 Comment »

It’s been one of those years… As far as the blog is concerned, I’ve managed to keep up a reasonably steady routine of posts – it does help that the WiFi on South Western trains is pretty reliable, so I can get things written on the commute down to Exeter – and the viewing figures have been pretty steady (no weird public controversies, and I managed to resist the temptation to launch unprovoked attacks on any prominent media figures during the slow weeks). I have at various points wondered whether it’s worth it; on the one hand, this remains a great opportunity to write about things that would never make for a proper academic article (or which perhaps might count as groundwork for something more substantial in due course – I am committed to giving a paper about Thucydides on Twitter in February), but on the other hand it is a time commitment, and in a year when it feels like I’ve lacked both time and energy even for the regular work stuff, sometimes it’s felt like that ‘one more bloody thing’ which could turn out to be that one thing too much. (more…)

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Hello? Is there anybody in there?

Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged on October 13, 2017| 3 Comments »

Warm greetings to all new followers of this blog (even if usernames suggest that a surprisingly large number of you are heavily into the supply and fitting of high-quality flooring…). I don’t actually know why WordPress should have chosen this week to give me a boost, as it’s actually really terrible timing; the first couple of weeks of term are always a bit hectic, but on top of that I’ve been writing my inaugural lecture (last week) and pursuing a lengthy and increasingly tetchy correspondence about why I don’t seem to be allowed to share the recording outside the university (this week), plus finishing a short-but-nevertheless-quite-substantial-given-everything-else book that ought to have been finished last month (yesterday). (more…)

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Mea Culpa

Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged , , on April 19, 2017| 6 Comments »

It seems entirely possible that there are certain people out there reading this blog and noting the fact that I’m currently managing to post at least once a week on average, and also remarking on my occasional contributions to online book seminars* and other non-academic publications, and thinking to themselves: “Okay, Neville, so where the hell is that book review you should have submitted eighteen months ago?” I try not to think about this too much, as I am genuinely embarrassed and guilty about my large backlog of missed deadlines – not to mention the thought of other colleagues’ reactions when they realise that I’m the reason why their book hadn’t been reviewed – but I’m prompted to do so this morning by discussions on the Twitter in the light of the recent debacle at the American Historical Review (links via @helenrogers19c). Why haven’t I got these reviews written? Not because I’m lazy, and not just because I keep taking on too many things, but because writing a decent academic book review is hard, and boring, and fraught with problems. (more…)

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