Because I’m writing a paper on blogging for a small conference on Friday.  I spent several days being stymied by said paper because of teaching, competing professional obligations, my secret new supernerdy hobby, and other distractions.  Then I moved to being stymied by said paper by a general lack of ideas.  More accurately: I have many ideas about blogging, but the things I think about with blogging do not fit that well with the theme of the conference, which is on “public intellectuals.”

Tidbit: while the words “public intellectual” appear in a book by C. Wright Mills, the term was effectively coined only in 1987, in a book by a historian about how the public intellectuals were in decline as a result of the expansion and professionalization of academe.  So, basically, “public intellectual” has gained currency for lamenting about an idealized personage that had a golden age which is passed.

I looked at a couple books on public intellectuals and they just reinforced my sense of much of it being a giant wankorama for clever boys to manversate and inflate their mutual sense of self-importance.  I do not have much interest in contributing to reflections on all that, and it certainly does not play to my strengths.  What I said I would do is talk about blogging and markets for intellectual attention, and I should try to focus on that rather than worry about the conference theme.

BTW, when I went to the library to check out some books on public intellectuals, I learned that my Northwestern ID had expired.  See, apparently, when you start out as a tenured professor at Northwestern, you may have a lifetime committment from the University in one sense, but your ID is only good for six months.   So I’ve squirreled away the books in a random graduate students study carrell and am going over there to continue working on this.