Monday, November 22, 2004

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.

1 comment:

Peter Moore said...

Change is good. "Us Tarzan, Them Jane" is, well, not so good. Ok, not "not so good" as much as just incomprehensible. Tarzan and Jane is the perfect synthesis. This title creates your basic false dichotomy.
Petri Dish is better.
Keep trying.