That Was the Blog That Was

"Us Tarzan, Them Jane" is a rebranding of HMB "Column*which", which was itself a rebranding of the blog formerly known as "Is This a 'Column' Which I See Before Me?" In the case of the latter two, I prefaced everything by saying: No, what you are reading is not a column -- in particular, it is not a newspaper column because this is not a newspaper. This is a blog, one of millions. Think of Poe's "purloined letter." Whatever I put in this space is being hidden in plain sight -- or so I wrote back in May 2004.

I created this blog because, as a mild-mannered professor at a great metropolitan university, I have certain responsibilities. I am expected to produce scholarship, and the project with which I have toyed these many years is an examination of the contemporary U.S. newspaper column. One way to do this, I thought, was to do a "column" myself -- the quotation marks making clear that it was not a column at all -- and so explore the nature of column-making from the inside. If you have seen the movie "Alien," you will have a better sense of my basic methodology.

That's what I said.

It's worked. I have pages of notes and ideas. But a change has taken place. I now do the blog for the fun of it, for the pleasure of expressing myself and having a few people -- mostly friends, I admit -- read what I write. Recognizing what has probably been obvious for some time, I will now see if acknowledging that this is just another Guy and his Blog changes anything in the way I write and in the way what I write is received.

This sounds like yet another experiment! Maybe I should change the name of this to The Petri Dish.