#82, December 5, 2005

AttentionDeficitHistory (ADH)

I was asked recently if I had any idea who reads my blogs. I was also asked why it is that I blog?  Other people have good things to say but don't care to blog.  I, on the other hand, may or may not have good things to say, but I do it anyway. What accounts for the difference?  Moreover, some of my blog elements are personal; even diary like.  Why do I go out there with it?  Is it to incite a dialogue?  To inspire thinking?  To get things off my chest?  

My response to these inquiries is as follows:

I have no idea who reads these entries; I know that a few people read them, sporadically.  I frequently get corrections, or other comments about stray items – the head of the New Lanark Museum, an author of a book that I touch on, a journalist who has been thinking about Walter Benjamin and likes my 12-page poem, a correction that Aston Villa won the FA Cup in a particular year (and not Blackburn Rovers), or a relative of Richard Stockton (who wasn’t irate).  When I stopped doing blogging for a bit I got occasional comments (mainly from friends who were being nice) saying that I should get back to it.  I did have an invisible counter and could record the number of hits, but the company that created them went out of business.  I don’t like visible counters as I would feel obliged to keep visiting my site just to get the counter over 100.  Also, there are too many ways into the blog so that you might not hit the counter.

Why I do it and other people don’t probably is because of two things: genius (just kidding).  No: 1) dissatisfaction with historical praxis; 2) tendentious dissatisfaction with historical praxis. 

1) I am critical of people who assess other people’s work mainly because they don’t like mine (this is tendentious too, I suppose).  I don’t like the journals, I don’t like the publishers by and large, because the kinds of things they want to publish and want people to say I don’t do.  As a result, I basically have made my own journal – I am my own editor, for better or worse. 

2) the above repeated, except that I also do it because it fits my ADH approach (Attention Deficit History, that is).  I write episodically, epigrammatically, ungrammatically, in sod and on paper.  That just came out.  I don’t write in the classic history style of beginning, middle and end.  I go off on tangents and I make history about those tangents.  The blog is the perfect vehicle for my visual, verbal, and obnoxious approach.  Other people are not at war (albeit one that nobody knows about) with their disciplines, so they don’t have the same need to do this. 

Finally, the personal is political, or am I the last feminist around? I don’t think one can write good history without putting oneself into the story.  That makes history, and particularly ADH, very personal.  I want to incite dialogue, inspire different insights, get things off my chest, and keep them in the chest that is my blog.