I’ve stopped keeping track of traffic. Aside from promoting to people who pretty much know me, I’m trying to let my work speak for itself:

• What’s funny is the hubris of our standard-setting. We see ourselves as humble throughout the process. (from the post Emily Dickinson, “We never know how high we are”)
• Sleep is what breaks time into sentences – Hannah Stephenson, “The Aloe Vera Grows Ragged”
• Yes, it is a love poem – one about how crazy love is. (from the post Emily Dickinson, “I have no Life but this”)
• I think the “god” question, in light of the respect for the “being” question, sets up the problem of Socrates. Socrates is an extremely unique individual, even as he is self-sufficient, seeking the nature of things, unconstrained by convention. He is a natural human being, perhaps the natural human being. “Rational animal” applies to him too well. (from a post on Seth Benardete’s “Memorial Speech for Leo Strauss”)
• That doesn’t mean every writer is a glory hog. Some of us just want to do this well. We’d like to know what we can do. But honestly, the glory stuff catches up with you in weird ways. (from a post on Sappho’s “We shall enjoy it”)
• A lover is a strange sort of being. Not all lovers are creeps, but this poem presents a creepy “love” which may be more present than we like to think. (from a comment on Hannah Stephenson’s “A Light Hand”)
• What is fear, asked Child Helga. A blank wall in the sky with only one door, said her father. - George Szirtes, “Child Helga on the Big Questions of Life”
• What I’ve been trying to do here is dedicate myself to the spirit of the liberal arts. That spirit isn’t about right answers. It’s about raising questions and working through them carefully, understanding the value of wrong answers and misleading insights. (“Blogging is dying. I need to blog more.”)
• Is this how love burns,
  shimmering in its feathers,
  looking to touch down? 

  - George Szirtes, “Courtship”

• I traced tales of cloud shapes until you believed in sleep. – Katherine Soniat, “Morning Child”
• The eros of writing, if I stretch this idea, is the revelation of self. But right now I’m thinking I probably would have had a few fancy things to say to a date yesterday. (from a post on Sappho’s “Standing by my bed”)
• The grass lifts lightly in the heat like the ancient wing of a bird. – Robert Bly, “A Late Spring Day in my Life”
• I like to say that I dislike travel but love being in new cities. The getting there part is not always fun. – Emory Rowland
• “An Imperial Affliction was my book, in the way my body was my body and my thoughts were my thoughts.” – Hazel, in John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars”
• I kept going back to poetry from then on to see experience encapsulated. People took the time to record their experiences and thoughts in verse. (“Why Read Poetry? – 2/20/14″)
• If you perform miracles, who are you? And what is the price of performing one miracle? (“King and Country: On Lawrence of Arabia”)
• The “safe” world is that of design and marketing. The pen reminds of what truly lasts. (Gerald Murphy, “Razor”)
• I did point at another work entitled “Chair” and said it was a file cabinet that had a hatchet taken to it, that the artist was like “woah man, I can rip the lid off a file cabinet and get a chair out of it.” (On Museum Jokes)
• Sing the way the artist does / since you will never hold / completely the thing you are sure / you almost see  – Hannah Stephenson, “Painting”
• The older me knew that more would burn than the goat if I pursued too fully, too soon. (on Sappho’s “And I said / I shall burn…”)

The surest sign blogging is dying isn’t twitter or youtube or instagram. The surest sign is the inability to hear anything about what you write for months. Blogging always was like putting messages in a bottle and hoping for a response. Now it feels that much worse. The commentariat is on social media 24/7 and won’t look past their navel.

And yet, something is at stake. “Blogger” has been made a derogatory term because of the connotations of “amateur,” “wannabe,” “gossip.” I certainly have been all three and far worse. But when you’ve been working to be better, and keeping a log of how you’ve improved and evolved – well, that’s gotta mean more, right?

It’s gotta mean more when you’re trying to start an involved, in-depth conversation about what’s important to you. Right?

A blog is a log, a diary. If you’ve done something with yourself, a blog can track that. And as much as I bemoan my older entries and their bad writing and incoherence, they stand for something important. I’ve read a lot over the years and done quite a bit to respond to it, to work through its relevance. The payoff until recently has been scattered. I think a few of you are seeing that something over the last few months has been taking on a new relevance. Only I’m in a position to judge where I am, and I can safely tell you that I’m a bit scared. There are smart blogs by intellectuals and academics. There’s new agey stuff that has my rhetoric and moralizing. And there are close readers who analyze in order to appreciate.

I think it’s fair to say that what I’m trying to do online is pretty exceptional. I don’t know. I’ve run into smarter people, better writers, more relevant and far better researched blogs. Yet what I’m bringing to the conversation is unlike anything else. It isn’t just my voice. It’s a number of voices, a diversity of media: I work to introduce everything from webcomics to video games to contemporary art to snippets of philosophy to rants on politics and, yes, poems. Where I fail is in getting my audience to contribute, in making sure they’re appropriately valued and rewarded. But that’s not quite fair to myself. I consistently aim for short poems, short texts so people have something to carry with them through their day. I’m not (always) shooting for every word of mine to be savored; I’m really looking to get a poem or quote or image in someone’s hands so they have something different.

What I’ve been trying to do here is dedicate myself to the spirit of the liberal arts. That spirit isn’t about right answers. It’s about raising questions and working through them carefully, understanding the value of wrong answers and misleading insights. Understanding, in the end, what’s involved in raising a serious question and coming up with a credible, personal answer. Sometimes, because of my failures as a writer, I feel like my audience has to be ashamed they read me, and that’s got to be the height of ridiculousness. You haven’t been reading for this long because something important wasn’t going on. You believed that like any serious discussion of a serious opinion, this was important, the heart of reflecting on human being. Not hidden away on dusty shelves but brought forth for all of us who have to work and fight and study on a daily basis. I’ve worked hard at my job, even if I’m ultimately a failure. I’m saying all this because I’m not sure what’s next. I’m gonna keep blogging for a while longer, but what that means is anyone’s guess.

Did quite a bit of editing to make good on my last post. I think I’m going to go in chronological order and fix things one at a time. Still, I do want to get some posts cleaned up out of order because they’re rather important.

• Leo Strauss, “Memorial Remarks for Jason Aronson” – after the primary source, I wrote a rambling commentary about humanity and philosophy. I’ve tried to make it a bit clearer and easier to follow, but I don’t really want to cut into it too much. There’s just a lot here and I’m happy it makes some sense in places. Let me know how’d you streamline it in the comments. I’d rather not mess with this otherwise.
• The Beginning – the very first post I wrote for this blog in 2006. Editing it I realized I remembered the situation that led me to want my own site exactly. I actually didn’t do a good job then of describing that situation, but now you can tell I was blogging at a community (a place like Livejournal or Diaryland or whatever) and I got tired of it (to be fair, it got tired of me, too). I haven’t changed the post to how I feel now, but rather rewrote it remembering what I felt then. I’m amazed I can be more honest and forthright now – it feels easier to write.
• On Lincoln’s Second Inaugural – added some more specific commentary on the counterfactuals Lincoln raises about God’s plan toward the end of the speech.

Hope you guys like these posts. There are more changes to come, a lot more.

As I’m editing this dissertation, I also want to do the same for all the entries on this blog.

Don’t get me wrong: a number of the entries do need editing and clarification. Some need to be deleted outright. Going back and fixing stuff is very, very necessary.

Why now, though? I guess I’m like anyone else in trying to find any way to procrastinate. Though that’s not entirely true – I’ve spent a lot of time away from the computer and away from reading in order to think through problems of structure and overall goals for the dissertation.

I know I want my prose to be that much sharper. That requires being able to see details anew. It isn’t just a matter of going back and cleaning up some grammar. It’s a matter of working through what I wrote, seeing what I wanted to say, emphasizing the correct details, allowing the others to stay as necessary questions. – Yeah, I know why I want to edit. -

The blog is getting considerably more views nowadays. I get a lot of feedback from people reading pretty carefully – I’ve got an audience that’s very attentive and I’m not used to this. You guys are trusting me to frame difficult issues and raise tough questions. It’s a responsibility I’m privileged to have.

Expect “changelog” posts where I call your attention to posts that have been changed. Hopefully one or two will become something really special.

February 2012

I remember buying an issue of Poetry Magazine where various writers talked about spirituality. “A Prayer” by Robert Creeley had me thinking a long time. I remember loving its minimalism and reading it over and over. Nate Klug’s “Dare” was another poem that got me to sit and stare for a while.

I went to a funeral for someone who did a lot for others. I hope I’ve done the experience some justice and paid some small tribute. It was incredibly moving to see how one person could do so much, be there for so many. It’s a weird feeling when you’re at a funeral and you realize that person, even in death, has something to tell you right then and there.

The haiku poet Issa has a sentiment that I had to help broadcast: Napped half the day; / no one / punished me!

At least twice I wrote down some musings on relationships. There was this on an aphorism of Nietzsche’s about sensuality. A Studio Ghibli movie written by Miyazaki, “Whisper of the Heart,” had an incredible and serious depiction of adolescent love.

March 2012

Wrote a lot of original poetry in March. I think the highlight of everything I wrote, though, was this response to Colin McGinn declaring philosophy as practiced today in the academy a “science.” I say in the post that he may not have been serious. I think now there’s actually a very good chance he was entirely serious. He followed up his original article with far more about his proposal (he wanted to rename philosophy “ontics”).

It was reported Christian Wiman was working with the poetry of Mandelstam. I saw some of what he produced in The American Scholar and was blown away. I stared looking into Mandelstam more myself.

I write a lot. I know, I need to be editing and making things much clearer when not deleting some entries and pretending they never existed. Still, going over what I wrote this past year, I’m stunned by how much I’ve covered and in what depth. What is below is a sampling from January. It isn’t close to everything covered that month.

If you guys like how this is arranged, let me know. I can’t guarantee a story for every single thing I’ve written, but I’ll try to blurb more.

January 2012

In January of 2012 I was preparing to go to a conference and talk about academic things. I felt like I hadn’t read enough Greek tragedy, so I read Euripides’ “Bacchae” and tried to make sense of it. I think I concluded tentatively that the god of wine has to be seen as the god of drama to make any sense of the play.

I also started looking more closely at haiku, the one form of poetry I feel comfortable writing. I’m very happy with the comment on Basho’s “Winter Solitude.”

The remarks on Plato’s “Minos” turned out really well. I can’t say I understand the dialogue without speculating. Tim probably agrees with me that the original goal – to understand Strauss’ essay on the dialogue better – might take us a bit longer than we hoped. Still, I remember sitting with the tv muttering in the background trying to think how to introduce the dialogue without saying something technical. I wanted to say something about how the problem of justice and law hits us deeply and more often than we think.

I was trying to read – still am trying to read – more Polish poetry in translation. Świetlicki had my attention that month.

At the time, I was trying to write really short blog entries every so often for readers who did not have much time. Yehuda Amichai’s “What I will never see again I must love forever” was something I came across while reading about God and rationality.