Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Scraping the Palimpsest

After spending a week doing nothing but grading, I'm now faced with doing the final prep on my K'zoo paper (which, upon further reflection, is too textish, and not suitable for oral delivery in its current form).

I tried doing a Morning Medieval Miscellany, but literally hundreds of posts had filled up my reader. I spent an hour yesterday deleting ones unsuitable for the MMM, and then another 90 minutes today, at which point I had around 70 posts left.

Blogs are a bit like palimpsests, with each subsequent posting painted over the previous one. Of those remaining posts, I found that making sense out of them all wasn't easy, since many relied on being part of some conversation earlier in the week.

So I'm scraping the palimpsest -- I deleted the lot of them. I offer the day a fresh, unmarked internet (virtual vellum, if you will) to write upon. I've had to sacrifice planned posts about Jennifer Lynn Jordan's appearance on Chivalry Today, on Guillermo del Toro and The Hobbit, on how I'm tricking my son into learning Old English (I might return to that one later), on medieval homilies (with some help from Derek the Ænglican), on the distinction between faux medieval worlds and fantasy worlds -- heck, I've even sacrificed a post on how Barak Obama's campaign keeps calling me asking me to commit a little vote fraud (one thing I don't miss about living near Chicago).

Worthy as those posts might have been, it feels good to start fresh.

3 comments:

  1. Dang! Can you at least tell me what you thought, please? Any tips for not sounding like a silly 5 year old while being interviewed are much appreciated! =)

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  2. You sounded fine. My only complaint is one of medium; I wanted to see some of what you were talking about, but the audio podcast didn't allow for that possibility.

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  3. Thanks! And I agree, it was hard even to talk about things I knew people weren't seeing at that moment. I can send you links to the videos if you'd ever like to see.

    PS, re: a post from a while back, I've been trying to figure out a way to photograph my Dante tattoo for you, photographing yourself is harder than I thought!

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