Welcome Back to Me! (with Changes)

Hello, friends. Long time, no see.

I’ve been working on my next book, and I haven’t had time to write anything in months. There are two reasons for this. First, I’ve been writing an academic book, and writing non-fiction is considerably harder (for me at least) than writing fiction. I wrote my first work of fiction in just under three years (a fictional biography of Shakespeare not yet published) and my second (Poker Tales) in just under 6 months. Compare that with my production of non-fiction. It took me 8 years to write my first work of non-fiction (my dissertation), 10 years to write my second. Given the fact that it’s only taken me 1 and a half years to write my third, I think I’m making progress. (If you click on the link to my next book, you’ll find that the asking price for my book is really high. Wait until the publication date for a much cheaper paperback to appear on the Amazon site.)

But that’s not the most important reason I wanted to take time off from writing on my blog. Late last year, I noticed that I had gotten a huge spike in the number of readers I was able to attract, and for several months now, my article on Anne Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” at the top of the list of most-read articles, replacing my excellent work on Serge Gainsbourg. This makes me happy, because I originally conceived of this blog as a place where I could take advantage of the more distributed environment in which people could publish their thoughts, and the marketplace could sort out what they wanted to read for themselves. As a competitive person who started a publishing company to publish my own works, I wanted to find an audience in that world, despite my admittedly narrow area of expertise.

In order to keep myself writing, very early on I started a weekly feature entitled “What I’m Listening to This Week.” I punctuated that very regular feature with my intermittent musings on subject like the Pareto Principle, fashion icon and rebel Louise Brooks, and the occasional work on Lana Turner’s inability to stand up. My problem was that, after waking up and writing about literature for 4-7 hours, I had no energy for writing any more on literature, a fact I noted after posting an ambitious post on how I was going to read and write on a 100 books that I had never read before. That plan went the way of my plan to post an advertisement a week.

Last year in particular, I was left with a blog that seemed to be about music only, as I had less and less time for posting about things that mattered to me. My original point in posting what I’m listening to was to challenge my studenta to keep up with my eclectic tastes, as I was teaching an introduction to rhetoric class at the time, and I wanted to demonstrate just how narrow the interests of my students really is. Most of my students believe that they have the right to think whatever they want (and I agree with them), but they attach no obligation to make themselves clear to others, as they believe that writing is a matter of conscience and that no one has the right to dictate matters of conscience to another.

There, I heartily disagree with my students, as writing takes place in a public space. In public spaces, people have different opinions than you do, and they will push back on you if you say (as one of my students actually did my first semester more than 20 years ago) that Elvis is alive and living in Kalamazoo. Lest you think poorly of me, I gave that student an A, because of his skillful use of evidence. Writing, in my opinion, is not what you believe, but what you can get your readers to believe you believe. I had to ask my student whether he believed this (he said no), and the second question out of everyone’s mouth in the rhetoric workshop that I brought it to (after “What?” when I told them the grade I had given my student an A) was the same. The fact that not one of my academic colleagues would see fit to give my student anything higher than a B (and there was only one of those, and he had to be convinced first that the student didn’t truly mean what he was saying) led me on the long path to writing Writing for People Who Hate Writing. That, too, is a story for another day.

As much as I enjoy listening to Andrea, Hungarians who play Latin music, and Yumi Arai, no one really cares about but me.

With the dramatic rise of blog viewership for things that interest me, I have decided to forgo the weekly posting of music just to keep me posting something every week. I will still post music if it has to do with cultural subjects like Nina Hagen’s false belief that she is in control (and not just insane) when she mixes her Hinduism with Christianity, Lady Gaga’s mixing of belief in the planet GOAT with a strategy to empower 12 year old girls, or the still popular post on the Ye-Ye Girls.

There is nothing like music to bring out the weirdness of culture, as people (not just my students) think that there is no push back when it comes to musical taste. More power to Lady Gaga and Nina Hagen if they want to build up their audience with a lean diet of not-too-carefully-thought-out philosophy. I prefer deeper thinkers for my philosophy, but I still like them for other reasons (like amazing singing talent) that a pure focus on philosophers can never supply.

So goodbye to the weekly diet of music for music’s sake. As I finish off my latest work of non-fiction and get back to two works of fiction in a row, I should be able to post more regularly than I have been able to in the last year.

That’s all for now.