It’s been a while since posting here, mostly because of other priorities, but also because my blogging software tells me this in my 500th entry since beginning to blog in 2004 and I figured I should say something more or less profound. Nothing profound occurs to me, though, so I’ll just mark the passage and move on, as inconsistently as usual.
In the past week or so I’ve added a dozen galleries of this year’s images to my photo site. Collections range from the Boston Sabeel Conference, Zionist counterprotest, and local anti-war rallies to less political subjects, including people, abstracts and macros, hummingbirds, and travel to Colorado, Vancouver and Denman Islands, and even Niagara Falls.
And these ants:
Technorati Tags: ants, photography
Those of you who like my photos might want to look at the new (still short) list where I brag about where they’ve been published, exhibited, or used in other ways.
The list doesn’t include all those people who simply link to my photos from MySpace or other pages without asking permission, giving me credit, or linking back to my site. I learn of this when my website statistics show lots of hits from various sites around the Internet, where I then discover a photo of mine being used as background or to make one point or another. Every time someone looks at those pages it registers as a hit on my photo site, but the viewer never sees my site and doesn’t know that’s where the image comes from. I find this annoying.
Most attention has focused on my photos of Israel and Palestine, as in the currently running Dialogue on the Wall exhibit in Minneapolis. I’m glad these have proven useful for a variety of organizing purposes. That lets me combine my various artistic, political, and even academic interests. I hope to do more of this.
Still, I like my apolitical subjects, too. I become fascinated by things I stumble across, and have been experimenting with different strategies as I try to improve my skills.
Here’s one I took the other day of a muddy San Miguel River running by my cousin’s house in Colorado. One of many.
A month between blog entries makes it hard to think of this as an ongoing project. Maybe things will pick up.
In my previous posting, the first in a long while, I mentioned old letters and slides I’m hoping to get to. That’s one project diverting my attention; I’m expecting imminent delivery of a new scanner that will help me get to the slides. I’ve also been going through old papers, some of which might make their way into other projects. Much of this has to do with my overall Israel/Palestine focus, but other things come up as well. Maybe I’ll even blog about them!
The main thing occupying my time recently has been preparing to begin co-editing the second edition of Critical Psychology: An Introduction, first published in 1997. It’s still in print, but the second edition will bring things up to date and expand into new areas. This will be my main project for the next year. More about this another time.
I’ve also been tweaking several other papers, planning my summer travel, experimenting with my new camera, and otherwise keeping myself busy. Blogging? I figured it could wait.
Eric Kintz’s posting Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore should help me feel less defensive about my sporadic blogging patterns. He offers ten reasons the traditional pressure to blog daily hurts rather than helps. The most important to me are these:
#3- Loyal readers coming back daily to check your posts is so Web 1.0 – As the blogosphere matures, the number of new readers and bloggers will decrease and loyal readers are going to matter more. …. Loyal readers subscribe to your blog via RSS feeds and have new content pushed to them. They will remain loyal because they have subscribed, not because you post frequently.
#4 - Frequent posting is actually starting to have a negative impact on loyalty: Seth Godin (a frequent blogger) has a very interesting theory. According to him, RSS fatigue is already setting in….
#6: Frequent posting drives poor content quality – … Few bloggers have enough time (or expertise) to write daily thought leadership pieces, thus adding to the clutter.
I don’t know how many loyal readers I have, if any, but non-spammers get here primarily in one of two ways: straight from a Google search, which presumably might lead them to something relevant, or, as noted above, within their RSS reader. Whether I post daily or monthly, whatever I do write will still reach both sets of people.
So, like Kintz,
As for me, I will continue to post only when I have something to say.
Or when I’m in the mood.
It’s a month since I wrote about getting back to blogging and then stopped again. Perhaps I will again pick up the daily habit and delve into the many emails and links and other newsy items I’ve thought of commenting on or linking to. We’ll see.
In the meantime, a few days ago I updated the blog software I use, which lets me use a better automatic spam killer. As I write this, the bottom of my main blog page shows the spam filter stopped more than 1200 comment and trackback spams. That’s about 300 day. Assuming this is common for blogs, the number is pretty astonishing. Whether this will inundate the Internet completely is a technical question I have no expertise about, but it does make me nostalgic about the good-old pre-commercialization Internet.
I’m still in them middle of other projects, but hope to catch up on things here soon.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks since last I blogged. The social psychology class I’m teaching is nearing its end, something I’m sure to write more about soon enough. I turned the blog entries I wrote in March about Social Psychology’s Essence into a short article I sent off to a journal. I’ve been working on some options for the fall when the new academic year starts. All in all, it’s been busy, while events to comment upon come and go.
Still, despite my lack of input, my site statistics show increasingly large numbers of visitors. Yet I see no real sign of anyone paying attention to this blog. There are almost no actual comments by real people, but sometimes I get dozens, even hundreds, of spam comments that I manage to keep from appearing here, but which must raise my stats to respectable rates.
The spam could go to my head. Lots of nice compliments, like “I really like this blog — Thanks!!” (along with a link to a gambling site). “You make a good point, but I’m not sure you’ve taken everything into account” (porn). “This is full of useful information — I will be sure to bookmark it!” (Viagra).
I wonder how much spam inflates web statistics in general, along with the googlebots and similar cataloging efforts and the searches that bring people to a site for the fraction of a second it takes to realize it’s not really relevant to what they want. How many people actually stay and read something? Don’t know.
Housekeeping issues.
First, I’ve added a few more blogs to my list of Weblogs I Try to Read. That doesn’t mean I agree with all, or even most, of what they say, but it does mean I’ve kept them in my RSS reader so that I can easily skim their postings. The blogs vary in theme and politics, but I often find them thought-provoking and useful.
Second, I’ve added a Social Psychology category. Now that I’m teaching social psychology again I’m more frequently noticing material related to the field’s primary concerns; adding a blog category is the easiest way to add links that some of my students might find interesting or useful for class assignments, though my take on what’s relevant to social psychology is a lot broader than they’ll see in the textbook. Of course, the distinction between the social psychology category and the critical psychology category is rarely clear, and many posts will be listed in both. How to integrate critical psychology into a traditional undergraduate social psychology course is something I’ll save for another day.
Third, I continue to look for a way to make the comments system work without overloading my Mailbox with hundreds of spam comments I have to at least glance through. I may give up.
Eliot Gelwan seconds Ed Fitzgerald’s confidence in George Bush’s dishonesty but wonders if there’s a productive forum for people who disagree with one another:
The polarization of the weblogging world, moreover, is just mirroring the process in society as a whole. …However, call it arrogant or closeminded if you like, but I believe in my opinions, and I am confident that those who share my viewpoint have a monopoly on balance, as Ed defines it — maximal truth and minimal misinformation. Although I am sure the right wingnuts feel the same, I have no insecure need to entertain their madness politely. As someone once said, my mind isn’t so open that any ol’ thing can fly in…. I would love to hear if readers have any counterexamples of recent meaningful exchange across the ideological gulf, in the weblogging sphere or elsewhere — where they are listening to each other or perhaps (shudder) even influencing each other’s viewpoints…
Eliot’s comment reminds me of my dissertation. Two decades ago I interviewed 10 individuals who had written letters to the editor of local newspapers expressing a broad range of nonmainstream political views. Among the many topics I asked them about as part of this endlessly open-ended qualitative research project was what made them so sure they were right. They all pointed to books that influenced their thinking, courses they had taken, certain kinds of experiences, and they were all happy, or at least willing, to talk for hours about what they have come to think important. Maybe they all have blogs today.
But one question generally left them stumped: Why do so many other people who have read the same books, taken the same courses, had the same experiences completely disagree with you? Well, the interviewees on the political right were more likely than those on the left to say they were smarter than other people, but mostly they, too, just shrugged their shoulders.
This social psychology dissertation, obviously, reflected my own interests and analysis as well as my own curiosity about how I justified my own political conclusions. Like my interviewees, and probably like Eliot, I too thought my conclusions were supported by evidence. Like Eliot, I still do. But I try not to forget that other people reach different conclusions about complex issues without being idiots.
On the other hand, it’s also dangerous to let awareness of complexity prevent political conclusions and action, a topic I’ve blogged about before. The traditional academic objective style and the perennial recommendation that “more research needs to be done” strengthen the status quo. So does the related tendency of people who identify with the political middle to reject all nonmainstream input. Our goal should not be to oversimplify — which happens too often on the left as well as on the right — but to reach commitment and action despite awareness of complexity.
Forums for people who fundamentally disagree can be interesting, but I suspect not many underlying assumptions change. I’ve tried in the past to spur discussion across ideological lines, especially in the Israel/Palestine context, but I’m not sure how often that turns out to be useful. Dialogue groups that focus on this kind of exchange can increase understanding, empathy, and friendship — positive outcomes — but as far as I know they don’t routinely lead to effective action toward social change. When we think we are on the side of justice and equality, calls for dialogue and understanding can lead to expectations of compromise that mask rather than resolve justified grievances.
What do do? Maybe more research needs to be done….
I suspected this blog’s comment system was broken when I went for months with no comments at all, but I was so relieved that whatever I had done to stop the spam was working that I never tried to sort it all out. Then, tonight, I discovered a couple of dozen actual comments that never reached me. I just approved them for posting, but have not yet figured out the underlying problem. I’ll try to get to this soon….
And I apologize to everyone whose comments never reached the blog. I’ll try to respond in the next day or two to those of you who asked specific questions.
Between planning the course I’m now teaching (noted in the previous blog entry) and dealing with other things, I’ve gone a long time without touching on Israel/Palestine. I’ve also had the feeling, as I do with blogging more generally, that often there’s not much new I want to say even if I have the time to say it. Sometimes I’m tempted just to post a link to something I wrote months or even years ago. The details of whatever that past topic was may differ from the current topic, but for the most part those connections are clear enough. I’m not convinced that everything is worth repeating. Maybe I’m not a blogger at heart.
One year after my month-long visit to Israel and the West Bank I remain interested in returning, and am now hoping a preliminary connection to a West Bank university gels into a firm plan. In the meantime, I continue to keep up with events and collect tidbits to blog about if the mood ever strikes.
I did begin to write two weeks ago about Ariel Sharon, though I never finished the entry. Most of what I was reading at the time was annoyingly chirpy about Sharon’s late “change of heart” and “sincere desire for peace.” That the Zionist left and other Israeli peace forces came to consider Sharon an ally, and that Kadima is portrayed as the best hope for future Israeli stability, struck me as utterly divorced from morality.
Around that time I got an email from Jewish Voice for Peace that paralleled my own sense of Sharon’s legacy. An updated version on their website, which has details about Sharon’s history, now says more or less the same thing:
If anyone had said ten years ago that Ariel Sharon would leave office being remembered as a “man of peace,” they would have been laughed at by virtually anyone across the entire political spectrum. Yet the mainstream media’s coverage of events over the past several years, right up to Sharon’s current hospitalization, makes it fairly clear that this is how he will be recorded, at least for a time, in the popular mind of America. Israelis, no doubt, will have a considerably more nuanced and informed view, but his legacy there still seems to be largely one of a man who changed his ways in the last years of his life. Palestinians, on the other hand, will always remember him as the “Butcher of Beirut”, the man who built a wall in the West Bank and, in general, as a war criminal and merciless opponent.
But if Sharon is going to be thought of in the near term as a man who changed his course toward peace, it is both our hope and our task at Jewish Voice for Peace to convey the reality of Sharon, both his early days and his time in the Prime Minister’s office.
What emerges is the picture of a man who knew no boundaries in fighting for his agenda. We see in Sharon a man who rose ruthlessly to positions of power and, when he attained them, was both clever in his machinations and brutal in his actions. No careful study could possibly conclude that Sharon was ever a “man of peace”. But he is a man who is ending his career at the height of his popularity in Israel and the US, and who has, inarguably, made a profound impact on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
This is my regular local column for today’s Brookline TAB. It was supposed to appear last week, but the editor never received my email. It turns out the newspaper’s spam filter blocked my column’s reference to “sluts” and “oral sex.” Makes me wonder what else doesn’t get to newspapers, and to other recipients, because of mechanistic approaches to dealing with spam.
Another aside: I’ve finally blocked all spam comments from appearing on this blog without burdening me with dozens, even hundreds, of emails a day for me to approve or deny. I don’t think I disabled commenting entirely, though. but if you leave a comment that doesn’t appear within a day or so, please let me know….
The heat’s got me too lethargic to focus on any one topic, but I return to three familiar ones — my community, my daughter, and my congressman.
My wife and I flew to Los Angeles earlier this month for a family wedding. We spent much too much time sweltering indoors instead of immersing ourselves in cool ocean water, but I did like the Fairfax neighborhood’s ethnic and economic diversity, which is much broader than we’re used to here in Brookline.
The TAB reported a few weeks ago that the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth ranks Brookline fourth in the state in the percentage of immigrants, with more than one in four residents born elsewhere. That’s a good thing. Our immigrants’ top ten countries of birth are China, Russia, Japan, Israel, Korea, Canada, India, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and Germany. This list is no surprise to anyone eavesdropping on conversations in Coolidge Corner or entering our many Asian restaurants.
What Brookline’s missing in significant numbers, though, are the Latinos and African Americans most people have in mind when talking about politically relevant diversity. In Brookline, the most obvious people of color are those who come into town every day to serve white families as nannies, house cleaners, lawn workers, and taxi drivers. Fairfax was a refreshing change.
Limiting Brookline’s ethnic diversity, of course, is our lack of economic diversity. That’s not too surprising in a town where, another TAB article informs us, 45% of residents hold graduate degrees (the third highest percentage in the country). Inundated with doctors and lawyers and post-docs and professors, Brookline has failed miserably to provide meaningful numbers of affordable apartments. The result is a community technically diverse but, despite exceptions unnoticed by most residents, homogeneously comfortable in income, profession, and values.
Another quick trip this month directs my musing elsewhere. Last weekend my wife and I drove up past Lake Winnepesaukee to visit our 12-year-old daughter in sleepaway camp. At a different camp last year she picked up far too many fashion tips and came home more knowledgeable than we expected about makeup and dating. This year’s camp is more rustic. We’re glad to see her more focused on hikes, group games, and horseback riding than on which boys might be available.
But I wonder what will happen in September once she hits seventh grade. She and her friends all became premature teenagers this past year, determined to act like 15-year-olds who are themselves trying to pass for 18. Listening to my daughter and her friends chatter about potential and imagined boyfriends and casually refer to sluts and players and oral sex, I wonder if it isn’t time for town schools to institute lessons in Feminism 101.
My impression so far is that the schools treat encroaching teenagerdom far too gingerly, delaying serious talk about adolescent angst until most kids are already through it, often damaged by it. Sex and relationship education should come much sooner, much more honestly and comprehensively. So should facilitating coordination, or at least communication, among parents.
A third thing on my mind is Brookline’s representative in Congress, Barney Frank. When the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly last week to send Americans back to the Moon and then to Mars, Frank was one of only 15 reps dissenting from the 383-vote majority. Most Democrats went along with the president’s NASA plan. Frank said no.
I have pleasant memories of childhood summers reading science fiction. I spent a few adolescent years imagining myself blasting off into space. I’d still go to Mars if I could. But Frank is right. According to the Associated Press, Frank “questioned spending billions to go to Mars when ‘day after day … we’re told we can’t do enough for housing and we can’t do enough for health care…. This is a fundamental debate the country ought to have … about whether or not to commit these untold billions … at the expense of other important programs.”
Frank should continue to push his Democratic peers away from the deadening center toward more progressive politics. The space program’s place among national priorities is only one of many fundamental debates this country ought to have.
I just discovered that RSS feeds from this site may have stopped working after last week’s software upgrade. I think I have it fixed now. To subscribe, either drag this page’s url into your news reader or use the RSS or Atom links at the bottom right. If this doesn’t work, please let me know!
Of course, if your feed stopped working you wouldn’t be reading this now, would you?
To deal more effectively with this blog’s mounting spam comments (more than 150 of them today), I’ve finally upgraded the blog software to WordPress 1.5. However, since I know less than I should about how WordPress’s CSS styles work, and much of what I put together through trial and error for the 1.2 version doesn’t immediately transfer, right now the blog looks sloppy. The photos below push the Sidebar too far to the right (in Internet Explorer on my Mac, for example, but not in Safari), but I don’t want to go back and resize all the photos I’ve added. And I want to re-order the items in the Sidebar. Other things are less noticeable, except to me.
I already regret the time this is taking from other things. If you know WordPress and have some suggestions, please get in touch!
UPDATE: Some progress. Not as sloppy, at least.
Appearances to the contrary, I haven’t forgotten about this blog. I was on the West Coast for two weeks, then busy catching up on piled-up tasks after I returned. I also had a retirement party (I’m now “emeritus”), spent time with my visiting sons, wrote my regular Brookline TAB column, and continued to investigate how I might travel back to Israel/Palestine sometime over the next academic year. I should soon resume jotting down my passing thoughts.
High above whatever lies beneath the clouds below me, I’m on my way to the West Coast. Over the next two weeks I’ll attend a conference (Psychologists for Social Responsibility) and visit friends and relatives, first in Portland, Oregon, and then on Denman Island, off the coast of Canada’s Vancouver Island. It’s good to be breaking routine. It’s especially good that there’s no one in the middle seat next to me, so I’m not completely hemmed in.
It’s almost nine months since I started this blog, primarily to keep track of what was then my planned winter visit to Israel and Palestine, in the context of my conflicted views about events in that part of the world. My regular website, which I still maintain, has more than a dozen columns and essays on Israel and Palestine, plus dozens of political and academic essays on other subjects more or less related to my interests in critical psychology, law and justice, and anarchist politics. In comparison to the the more structured website, I hoped the blog’s easier, more spontaneous approach would facilitate my ability to insert my own analyses and views into a broader public discussion, make contact with others whose interests overlap mine, and focus my attention on Israel and Palestine — the political issue that has come to dominate my attention over the past three years almost as much as it did when I became a Zionist in the 1960s — as well as on other issues that still interest me.
For the most part the blog accomplishes what I hoped it would. It’s a challenge at times to find the right balance between analysis and speculation, first reaction and considered conclusion. Sometimes important things happen that just don’t grab my attention. Frequently I avoid simply rehashing views I expressed elsewhere at greater length. But, all in all, I anticipate continuing this project.
One downside to all this blogging is that too often the process dilutes my enthusiasm for sitting and writing the longer, more structured pieces I used to do more frequently. The blog becomes one more way to stall, along with my local newspaper column, my photography hobby, my Arabic class, and even this flight westward.
I’ve been telling my family, my friends, and myself for a couple of years now that I’m about to start writing a book about my own Zionist history and my subsequent political confusion and reassessment. I would expand on many of the themes I touch on in this blog, assess my participation in Young Judaea and the group that started Kibbutz Ketura, reflect on what moved me in that direction and what moved me away and what moves me today. I think my struggle to work through ambivalence, to dissect the competing strands of tribal identity and universal values, is widely enough shared among many American Jews to make a book feasible. Having a publisher lined up would be more motivating, but in the meantime this blog helps me keep track of things to get to in more detail later. And it’s satisfying on its own. But at some point I should move from a rambling to-do list to something more substantial.
What motivates these thoughts, beyond the imposed luxury of the six-hour flight’s lack of Internet access, may be that last week marked my official end of employment as a university professor. After several years on disability leave, this week I’m officially retired from the University of Illinois at Springfield, with a pension and a certificate naming me emeritus associate professor of legal studies. Since I’ve been on leave anyway, the change in status has no substantive effect (well, the cut in pay is pretty substantive), but being labeled retired at age 56, an age at which my friends and colleagues have years of full-time work ahead of them, stimulates even more self-reflection than the disability label did. Perhaps that’s why a couple of weeks ago I finally gathered together papers I wrote decades ago as a young Zionist. Maybe wading through the morass will get me closer to that book.
The Internet access is a hassle. I’m once again in the lobby of our group’s hotel in Tel Aviv. Last night I wrote some new blog postings on my laptop, but can’t seem to get it into this lobby computer to upload. There’s wireless Internet access from the hotel next door, but it costs a fortune. And in just a few minutes our bus leaves to spend the day in Jenin, in the northern West Bank.
So when we get home this evening, I’ll bring my laptop to an Internet cafe a few blocks away, plug it in, pay a decent price, and share with the world some of my thoughts, and maybe some of my photos, of the last few days.
There’s another tour group in this hotel, a horde of young college students it looks like, I think from Birthright Israel. I saw their itinerary. There’s not a whole lot of overlap between what they’re seeing and what we’ve seen, though they do go to Kibbutz Metzer, where our FFIPP group went the first day. Maybe tonight we can get into some conversation with them and see what they think. Maybe tell them some of what we’ve seen….
For a week now I’ve been too busy to sit and blog. In addition to intermittent preparation for my Israel/West Bank trip and a variety of family and other projects, I’m getting ready to move my little home office downstairs to the basement. So I’ve been going through papers piled on my desk and table and book shelves, filling up my waste basket with old news clippings, meeting notices, and other things I no longer feel the urge to do anything with.
My paper-reducing effort hasn’t yet elicited too many nostalgic aha! moments like those I had in 1998 before moving from Illinois to Massachusetts, when I had to sort through more than a decade of packed filing cabinet drawers. But I have come across items that now seem relevant once again. There’s the four-year old Boston Globe op-ed piece by Robert Kuttner, for example, titled “Bush Picks An Extremist for AG,” referring to the selection of the now-departing Attorney General John Ashbrook. I don’t know if Kuttner used the same title for Bush’s selection of Ashbrook’s replacement, Alberto Gonzales, but he might as well have.
Then there’s the June 2002 Globe article on the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision approving public money for school vouchers, with an accompanying analysis titled “Decision gives few hints of how high a wall remains” between church and state. Bush hopes to appointment judges inclined to dismantle much of the remaining wall. Another article that same day explained that many states have stronger barriers between church and state than the federal system now requires, a topic much in the news in the wake of the latest election’s Red State/Blue State disparity. For some time now, civil liberties activists and others rebuffed in federal courts have focused on state courts instead. That trend will now escalate, with liberals rather than conservatives demanding state’s rights rather than single uniform federal standards. There’s some danger in that, but also some opportunity.
Another 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that same day in 2002 allowed public schools to test students engaged in extracurricular activities for drug use on a random basis rather than only when suspicion exists of actual use. The conservative assault continues. Perhaps that’s why I also saved the clipping titled “Magazine picks Vancouver as pot lover’s paradise.” There’s been a lot of post-election talk of how much better it might be to live in Canada. It gets tempting.
Canada was also mentioned in a Globe column by Christoper Shea after the 2002 congressional elections. The piece, “Class truce: Why the poor won’t soak the rich,” notes that residents of Canada are more likely than those of the United States to end up better off economically than their parents. Despite the American myth of Horatio Alger successes and the media’s focus on the relatively few who make it, our own system is more stratified by hard-to-break class lines than most of us are taught to think. The Democrats are not going to emphasize class war, but someone should.
My desk-clearing continues.
I began this blog primarily to write about my coming trip to Israel and the West Bank, now just six weeks away (more on that in my next entry). But now that I have the blog, I end up writing about other topics as well, though that’s hard to find time to do. When a few blogless days go by I find myself thinking that one news story or another is something I could write about, or should write about, or would even like to write about if I had the time. Over the next few days I’ll try to catch up a bit, but I expect I’ll never update this blog as frequently as many others do, or cover as much ground.
As I sit here writing, the blog spam keeps coming in, something I hadn’t anticipated but which many others have already commented on (like ChuckO). As I understand it, people spam blog comments to boost the number of links to whatever website they’re pushing so their sites turn up higher in Google rankings. First I got a dozen or so porn-site comments, which I deleted, and then they stopped, at least for now. Then I started getting endless comments pushing an online gambling site — probably well over a hundred so far. Originally I set up the blog to allow commenting at will, but I’ve now changed that so comments with suspicious key words or too many links are filtered out and don’t get posted until I approve them (so I have to waste more time going to the blog site to either approve or delete each piece of spam). I apologize if this delays your posts. If anyone has a better solution to this problem, please let me know! I’d hate to have to turn off the comment system.
Last week I mentioned eTalkinghead’s Political Blog Directory with almost 300 listings. The site’s main purpose is its own political blog with postings by some two dozen contributors from varying perspectives. I’ve accepted their invitation to become a regular contributor, and just posted my first piece, about last night’s Bush-Kerry debate. I’m also posting it here, so you don’t need to go there.
Posting the same thing twice illustrates my uncertainty about how to integrate the different pieces of my growing web existence. Under eTalkinghead’s guidelines, my comments there will generally be less personal than some of what I post here, and they’ll usually be at least 500 words. In some ways these are more like traditional op-ed pieces, which I usually post on my main website, so I’ll likely post them there as well. That defeats the purpose of using easier-to-use blogging software, but it keeps my main site current, with just about every political and academic piece I’ve ever published organized more usefully than I know how to do with this blog.
I also maintain a list of people who have asked me to email them everything I publish so they don’t have to remember to go to my site. I don’t overload them with everything I post just on this blog, but I’ll probably send out my eTalkinghead pieces, since they seem more “published” than these informal entries. (To be added to the list, email me your name and email address).
If I were starting all over, I’d probably integrate my website into this blog. In the meantime, I’m confused.
In my previous post I recounted some of my blogging history, but neglected to mention my photo blog. After buying a digital camera the summer before last, I started posting photos in galleries (divided into topics like political protest, wandering around town, my trip to Japan, etc.). After a few months I set up my own photoblog to highlight specific individual photos, usually to match themes suggested by several photo-of-the-week sites.
A lot of the photos have some political relevance (protesters and police at this summer’s Democratic and Republican conventions, for example, and at other Boston and New York protests), but most are nonpolitical — street scenes, landscapes, flowers, patterns. The photographer friend who took the photo of me at the top of this page tells me I put way too many photos in my galleries — instead of the best, I go overboard trying to give a sense of an event or location. She’s probably right — certainly she’s right on artistic grounds– and someday maybe I’ll reorganize the galleries more selectively.
In the meantime, I’m happy to just shoot things that interest me, though I’d like to find time to boost my limited technical skills. For really gorgeous work by another critical psychologist, see David Nightingale’s site.
Until recently, I rarely read blogs except for my friend Eliot Gelwan’s. I had little time just to surf and read, and too many blogs were so poorly written, superficial, predictable, or nasty that coming across them wasn’t particularly rewarding. (Yes, I know that plenty of people detest my own writing and views — my biweekly newspaper column sometimes draws pretty angry responses, as do some of my academic essays. But I usually try to rant literately, aiming to provoke reflection rather than numb it. I do think this blog, like many others, is too wordy, because my postings don’t undergo enough revisions. Word limits are useful.)
My blog-reading habits changed a bit after beginning this blog last August, which I had hesitated doing for several reasons. I knew it could become tremendously time-consuming. I was unsure how to balance analysis with spontaneity, as I’ve noted before. And I preferred to write for print and online outlets that attract more readers and sometimes even pay, like the newspaper that runs my column (now that I’m on leave from my academic job, money matters more than I’d like).
When I decided to write regularly about my planned visit to Israel, I tried to interest several media sites in publishing a series of articles, but none agreed. So I figured this blog would provide a way to begin, as well as an incentive to stay focused. Of course, as I feared, I quickly started writing about other topics as well and will likely keep doing so. But so far I’m glad to be experimenting with this, even if not many people are reading.
To attract readers, and maybe even some feedback, I added this blog to a few web directories. On one site, a political blog directory at eTalkinghead.com, bloggers apply to be listed within one of several categories, including conservative, moderate, liberal, independent, libertarian, religious, and humor. The site’s goal is to assemble a range of perspectives. Almost 300 bloggers are listed so far.
I grappled with the liberal category — defined by eTalkinghead as “left-leaning and liberal” — because my political perspective is more radical than liberal, and “left-leaning” just doesn’t seem the same thing. Despite common assumptions within the traditional American “liberal to conservative” political spectrum, radical does not mean “extra liberal” so much as “not liberal” in important ways (I’ve touched on different aspects of this distinction a number of times in material posted on my website). But since the other categories were equally inaccurate or uninformative, I went ahead with the left-leaning liberals and then suggested to the site’s owner that a new left-of-liberal category might help attract additional bloggers and extend the spectrum further.
Political self-definition is a tricky matter. In addition to the problem of defining terms, I’ve discovered that many of us think we know what’s really going on because we’ve read the right books, talked to the right people, taken the right courses, or had the right experiences, or because we think we have superior intelligence or empathy or the like. When I did my dissertation in the 1980s, I interviewed people who had written letters to the editor about political topics. Right, left, or center, most of the people I spoke with thought their political awareness was higher than others’.
That’s what I see when I read blogs all across eTalkinghead’s categories. Mine too, I suppose. Yet I’d like to see more of us demonstrate our political and value commitments without being so nasty or simplistic.
It would also help if we stopped making so many typos.
My link to set up an RSS feed doesn’t work right — when you click on it, it takes you to the nonexistent http://blog.dennisfox.net/feed/rss2/ and generates a 400 File Not Found error. I haven’t had time yet to figure out how to set it right. Suggestions welcome!
In the meantime, if you paste http://blog.dennisfox.net/wp-rss2.php into your newsreader, it should work.
New Information: I may have fixed the link in the right column, which now works by going to http://blog.dennisfox.net/feed/rss2/ . I don’t know if both links work, or just this last one. Hope this is less confusing to you than it is to me.
I’m not yet sure I like blogging. It’s quicker to post material on a blog than create html pages for my regular website — that facilitates quick reactions to items in the news, spontaneous thoughts, etc. But that’s not exactly what I have in mind. For the few real comments I’ve added so far (about the RNC protests and the AIPAC dual-loyalty issue), I didn’t just dash them off and post them unedited, but I also didn’t edit and re-edit as I normally do for published material. It feels a little risky to post material I haven’t let simmer for a while. I try to be careful about what I write; the blog format, and the implied informality and diary-like quality, make it harder to be careful. What I say is more tentative than usual, more subject to revision perhaps.
I also don’t yet have down all the mechanics of how it’s supposed to work…
My primary website contains hundreds of pages of academic articles, political analysis and opinion, and personal essays mostly related to critical psychology, psychology and law, and justice-related issues (corporate power, anarchism, high-stakes testing, Israel/Palestine, and others). You can receive emailed copies of everything I write (except for these blog entries), generally two to four times a month:
* biweekly columns applying broader themes to local issues in Brookline, Massachusetts
* political commentaries (occasional)
* academic papers at the intersection of critical psychology, law/justice, and radical politics (occasional)
* personal/political essays (rare)
I also have a photo website. This includes galleries of photos on a range of topics and events and a photo blog of photos selected for a variety of purposes. Some photos are of political events (most recently, the protests at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, where I live) but most are not.
Although I’ve had a website for years and recently started a photoblog, I’ve resisted doing a regular weblog. I’m concerned it will soak up too much time — a blog’s informal, easy nature can make it alluring to just ramble on.
What prompts me to experiment with this now is my plan to travel to Israel and Palestine for four or five weeks in December-January. I’d like to write about my preparation for the trip, then about the trip itself and its aftermath. My goals are both personal and political. I’ve written an introductory piece about this, focusing on the difficulty of reconciling my political views — sympathetic to Palestinians seeking justice — with my Zionist past and continuing family ties and friendships. The essay will be published in a special Political Issue of The Pedestal Magazine in October. In the meantime, my regular website has more than a dozen articles I’ve written on the general topic. I expect to write additional formal pieces for publication elsewhere. If you know of any outlets that might to publish the whole series, please let me know!
In this blog I plan to write more informally and spontaneously than in essays I publish elsewhere. I look forward to your suggestions about what to do and whom to see once I get to the Middle East. As of now, I plan to participate in a two-week fact-finding tour organized by Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, and also to travel on my own, visit friends and relatives, and wander around taking photos.
Since I’m going through the hassle of setting up this blog, I expect to use it for other purposes as well. I’m new to the blog world, and don’t want to get too sucked into making everything look perfect. I learned enough html years ago to keep my main website going, but I don’t want to spend the same amount of time learning a whole new set of techniques. So this blog may not come with all the extras regular blog readers might expect, and I’ll be adjusting things as I go along.
