Monday, December 26, 2005
(12:10 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Holiday Love Meme
Scott Eric Kaufman has memed me based on a post in which he is given holiday love -- but I must be honest and say that I don't know exactly what the meme is. If it's the ten blogs I read most regularly, then I'd have to say (in no particular order)- Bitch PhD
- Crooked Timber
- Unfogged
- Long Sunday
- The McElroy Family Experience
- The Valve
- Cliopatria
- Le Colonel Chabert (assuming that we can count my readership of Alphonse van Worden on the Colonel's scorecard)
- wood s lot
- Political Theory
I don't know that any of those blogs particularly inspire me to keep blogging, and certainly none of them got me started in the blogging business -- the majority of them are younger than my blog (including Crooked Timber, though by only a matter of days), and I didn't discover the others until long after I developed a crippling blogging habit. No, I cut my teeth reading Tom Tomorrow, whose blog I only discovered through the link on his comics in Salon every week. Out of the blogs that I used to read most back then, Matt Yglesias is the only one I still read at all regularly, and that's still not very regularly.
I'm glad for all the friends I've made through blogging, and my reading habits now mainly reflect that, rather than a fantasy of one day "going mainstream." Long Sunday of course represents a whole broad circle of friends, whose participation in various conversations and particularly in the Agamben reading group has been much appreciated. I would also like to thank all of my co-bloggers, particularly Doug Johnson, who has performed admirably as the designated Thursday sub, as well as Brad Johnson and Anthony Smith (at least before he took his indefinite hiatus for mental health reasons). I'm glad that John Emerson was able to settle in temporarily here, and I hope he won't be too disinclined to continue to post once in a while now that his blog is back up to full power. I had hoped to make The Weblog a group blog from close to the very beginning, but I feel like it's only been within the last year that the group aspect has been very stable, so I'm glad for that.
I feel like I'm becoming an old hand at blogging at this point -- and an old hand at writing blog posts where I'm glad that the year is over. I don't want to write that again this year, but it really is the case. I have some hope that next year I won't have to write that -- a lot of fresh prospects, a lot of potential for productive renewal of old ones. So we'll see.
How does this meme work, then?
