a word on blogs

You know, I'm very happy with my life. And with the development and further stepping of my plans. Very little of either makes it onto this blog (well hopefully some of the happiness does, every now and then), and that is how it should be. But for those who would express concern, that this record presents an ambiguous and less than perfect trace: Thank you for that concern. But really, you do not know much of anything about me. Blogging is only a luxury, and a supplement. Those who would confuse it with their professional prospects or ego are reaching for a higher standard, and good luck to them in ever reaching it. For sure, it does not take much to be a TV personality of higher quality than what is on TV these days (with a few, rather thoroughly-blogged, exceptions). Which is not to say that blogging isn't wonderful, or on occasion even superior to various institutional scenes of "higher learning." Or that I'd trade the friendships I have made this way for anything. Here's a song (via here) just for the kind-hearted philanthropists and would-be tutors of the blog. No much substantial posting for the next short while, but by all means check back in a week, if you like.

Update: I liked this post by Michael Bérubé. And this one by Franz Kafka. And well, this one by Jared, all very much.

Anyone have an answer to the Bérubé question about French blogging scene? I read Maquerelle du Vrai (and Robin's translations) and the Blanchot blog (the good one, the one organized by Nancy et al.), sometimes Anaximandrake and there used to be a few philo-related others, but whether they are representative of anything (and speaking as an Amuhrkun) I couldn't say. One commenter links to this interesting article, from which I quote:

The anxiety, though, is in fact not new. The contemporary university could be said, again with little exaggeration, to be structured along the paranoid logics laid down by these anxieties: how is knowledge to be produced out of the infinite archive? Where is the proper place of knowledge production? Is there a way of teaching, of passing it on? Universities have insisted on “universities” as the answer. This is, in part, what it means to professionalize, and certainly what it means to create bureaucracies to manage the production of knowledge. I want to suggest, however, that the anxiety about blogs is, in part, a goading realization that the answer is, if not wrong, at least inadequate. It is the contention of this essay that blogs are a vibrant space of knowledge production, certainly outside of those protocols, such as peer review, that universities have come to use to “ensure” the standards of knowledge, but not outside of standards as such, as is often claimed. Blogging shares with peer review an insistence that knowledge production is a communal effort. It is an effort that depends on and creates an audience, or as I will discuss shortly, a public...I should be explicit here that I think that the word “public” in my discussion does not describe some static, unitary collection of persons. Public is the on-going, unfolding history of readers—and within the ready and fluent power of the net and blog-tools, reader-writers—who come to interact with the blog.