Both Alex Reid and Will Richardson recently wrote about the difficulty of keeping a blog going after so much time and so many entries. I would work harder at trying to summarize them now, but instead I’ll just point out that the main reason I am linking to this is because I am going to have to start working on a chapter/presentation on “infrequent blogging” or ending blogging altogether for the “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project. Anyway, I think that both Richardson and Reid have good points, both introspective and theoretical, and I will hopefully remember to come back to them once I get on the stick again with that project.
Speaking only for myself (though probably also for others in academia, judging from my blogroll), I haven’t been writing much of anything lately because of an insanely busy couple of weeks at work. I might go into some details about this particular project eventually here, but suffice it to say that I have been super-duper busy with one of the many things faculty have to do that inevitably take time away from teaching or scholarship. These kind of duties are obvious to me now; after all, I have been a college professor someplace since 1996. But I remember vividly at the end of my first semester of my first job at Southern Oregon University (the toughest semester of my life, by the way) how surprised by and unprepared for I was by all of the other stuff that faculty do, stuff that does not fit well into a CV, and that stuff that confirms for me that academia really is a “job.”
Don’t get me wrong; it isn’t quite like the too-close-to-home comedy of The Office or Dilbert. And I’m also really REALLY happy to be engaging in this latest project that falls somewhere between “service” and “other.” But at the same time, it’ll be nice to remind myself that what I am supposed to be spending most of my time on is teaching and scholarship. With a little bit of blogging squeezed in here and there.