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Important announcement

Sorry if I kept anyone in suspense about this surprise weekend announcement.  I had some secret deals in the works, and I was hoping that Samuel Alito would withdraw his nomination to the Supreme Court so that I would be named in his stead.  Failing that, I had an outside shot at teaming up with Judith Miller on an exciting new blogging venture, Turning Aspens Media.* But both of those possibilities fell through while I was at Villanova with Jamie, so tonight I have only one little piece of news that’s important for this stumbling blog.

John McGowan and I have reached a new phase in our experiment in sporadic co-blogging: the terminal one.  Over the past six months, as you may recall, John has made frequent guest appearances here at me.com: in May he took over for a full two weeks, just as I thought I was getting burned out.  (In retrospect, I was simply getting ready for an emergency appendectomy.  Who knew?) His posts were so sharp, so discerning, and so refreshing a change of pace that I invited him to post on Thursdays as permanent guest host; after August we changed the schedule to alternate Tuesdays, and more recently, to “whenever.” (No, that’s not quite true:  John’s simply been out of the country for a while.) His last post, on October 13, was titled “The Social Bases of Political Activism,” and he concluded it by saying he’d “be back in a few weeks with some further thoughts.” And so he will.

John will be taking the reins from Monday, November 14 through Thanksgiving.  (Yes, this blog has reins—Expression Engine is so cool that way!  it even has a bell and a whistle, though I rarely use them.) After that, he will keep posting on his own blog, Public Intelligence, which I recommend to you with a great recommendation, and then I’ll come back here all by myself.

It turns out—and this aside is for the benefit of you advanced theorists of blogging—that “sporadic co-blogging” is a particularly difficult thing to pull off.  There are solo blogs, dynamic duo blogs, terrible trio blogs, and supergroup blogs, but sporadic co-blogs seem to pose special structural and compositional problems.  Basically, you’ve got one person (say, me) who has a blog (for example, this one) and who posts on it most of the time, and then someone else who guest-posts here and there.  And when the name of the blog is Michael Bérubé, and the other person’s name is not Michael Bérubé, well, that only makes things more awkward. 

But I have to say that John is just the kind of guy you’d imagine from his posts: gracious and then more than gracious.  Never once has he objected to the overwhelming Michael Bérubéocentrism of this meocentric blog, and he’s negotiated our different blogging styles with élan.  OK, yeah, there was the one time he complained about the Hansons logo on the top right, insisting that the picture of Hannah Arendt and Kenneth Burke sitting on the Boston Bruins bench (in that famous 1969 photo with Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito) would be more “dignified.” I patiently explained to John that I had changed the template for the same reason that I was hitting the tour bus with a sledgehammer: to make it look mean.  He didn’t care for that at all.  But otherwise, he’s been great.  (And I’ll change the front page for the next ten days, just to make things simpler for John and for everyone who stops by without reading this post first.  The Hansons will remain on the comments page, though.)

So, dear friends, while I take a breather, please welcome back John McGowan for one last run.  John, take it away. . . .

________

* I really was asked to join Pajamas Media about a week or so ago.  I got a very flattering email from someone who’d been sent my way by one of my favorite contrarian lefties, Marc Cooper.  (Good luck, Marc!  I’ll be rooting for you.) But I decided that my life was already quite complicated enough as it is without turning this shy, retiring (and sometimes really exhausted) blog into a professional enterprise.  UPDATE:  I forgot to add that I never, ever blog in my pajamas.  But if any liberal venture capitalists out there want to start up an enterprise called Formalwear Media, I’ll be front and center.  In my blogging tux.  UPDATED UPDATE:  a diligent reader has located the Arendt-Burke-Espo-Orr photo, and I’ve revised the post accordingly.  Thanks, Anne!  People were beginning to accuse me of making things up around here.

Posted by on 11/13 at 08:25 PM

  1. frist!

    um, no.

    You sure about this Pajamas Media thing? because, you know, publication is important to you academics.

    hee.

    Posted by julia  on  11/13  at  11:09 PM

  2. If you ever need another co-blogger in the future, I’d be more than happy to take the reins.  The CV too, for that matter.  In fact, I’d be more than happy to handle next year’s MLA for you.  I’d go as “Michael Bérubé,” spout a few scripted lines about plastic surgery and inevitable weight gain, and win you a job at the sort of top-flight institution I’ve always wanted to work at.  I think it’s a win-win proposition.

    Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman  on  11/13  at  11:31 PM

  3. Scott, applications for the position of sporadic co-blogger will not be accepted until after Thanksgiving.  But yes, plastic surgery will be required.  If you’ve seen Face Off, you have the general idea.

    And thanks for volunteering to take my place at the MLA convention.  For that gig, you’re on.  The electric blue polyester suit is in the mail.

    Posted by  on  11/13  at  11:36 PM

  4. So long as your expectations cling like scum to the underside of the barrel, I won’t let you down.  By which I mean: I fully intend on heckling Hillis this year just so he’ll hush me by name.  “Who is ‘Scott Eric Kaufman’?” will be the question of the day...and three hundred and fifty some odd ones later, they’ll learn the answer: “Michael Bérubé in one sweet blue suit.” All this irresponsible impersonation is sure to land me a tenure-track position somewhere.

    Posted by "Michael Bérubé"  on  11/13  at  11:49 PM

  5. "Michael,” please consult the comment thread on the previous post.  There you’ll find that this sober, straight-shootin’ blog eschews every kind of artifice and duplicity, particularly with regard to the iterability of the signature.

    And with regard to the wearing of aviator glasses.

    Posted by  on  11/13  at  11:59 PM

  6. you left out the important news—how’s jamie, and did he have a great weekend?

    Posted by  on  11/14  at  02:28 AM

  7. I did indeed leave out the really important news—it would’ve made this post way too long.  But I’m hoping to do a whole Jamie Series when I return, I promise.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/14  at  08:02 AM

  8. Before you go, I’d really like to see the Burke/Arendt photo.  Kenneth was quite the mucker in his day—you couldn’t move him once he got in front of the net; and I always thought Hannah was underrated on defense.  She was really the first to join the offense (because she had the speed to get back into position). Yep, I miss the days of seeing Hannah Arendt skirting the blue line and a photo would do me a world of good.

    Posted by  on  11/14  at  09:26 AM

  9. For some weird reason I’m having trouble finding that photo on Google, Chris—it’s funny how image searches lag so far behind text searches, technologically.  But even though I can’t deliver on Arendt in a Bruins uniform (and I agree that she should get her due for inventing the modern style of defense Orr and Brad Park are always credited with pioneering), I did find this priceless pic of a very young Bobby Orr (not wearing number 4!) having a pregame chat with an equally young Donald Davidson.  Legend has it that Orr said, “we can take these Rangers if we can get them to play our game” and thereby gave Davidson the idea that a language-game counts as a language if it’s translatable into “our” language.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/14  at  09:44 AM

  10. Great photo indeed—just before the great falling out over Quine and Frege on Natural Propositions. Hard to believe it took three decades for Rorty and Pie MacKenzie to bring them back onto speaking terms. What I wouldn’t do for a photo of that summit conference, but I hear no photographers were admitted. Of course, the differences were simply buried for the sake of friendship. No one was surprised to hear that Davidson’s last words were: “Bobby still doesn’t know jack about T-conditions.”

    Posted by  on  11/14  at  11:50 AM

  11. Jeez. It’s like when I teach first-year writing: “I can’t find anything in Google!” I ask, “What are you writing about?” “Hydrogen fuel cells.” “What did you use as a search term?” “Cars.”

    How did you miss the picture that serves as some major inspiration to our hockey team, the team that doesn’t get as much press or support as the *other* team because pink is its preferred color? (While there, check out the issues in volume 7 to see some of the hockey players of the month—as well as the other flavors of feminism on this campus, involving guns and skinning.)

    Posted by  on  11/14  at  02:54 PM

  12. You turned down Pajamas Media, Michael?  That’s like refusing a free stateroom on the Titanic!  You may come to regret it in in about twenty years when you won’t have the opportunity to reminisce with the geniuses behind Pets.com, and other spectacular failures of the internets, but in the immediate future this will just keep looking like a better decision.  I always say that one of the things they don’t teach us well enough in grad school is how to say “no.” Congratulations on a well chosen refusal!

    Posted by  on  11/14  at  02:56 PM

  13. ROTFLMAO, anne.  I’m so glad you found that photo!  Isn’t it an inspiration?  Now I remember why the Bruins swept the Black Hawks in the 1969-70 semis before moving on to sweep the Blues.  It wasn’t all about the offense—it was about the pluralism.

    I absolutely have to go change the post and hyperlink to that photo.  Thank you so much.

    And Ben, thanks for the link to the Editors—a hilarious post, no?  Let’s just say that I didn’t agonize over the decision.  But I don’t think your analogy is all that accurate.  After all, you couldn’t have met Michelle Malkin and Michael Ledeen on the Titanic.  (I should add, tho, that I don’t have any problem with Marc Cooper and David Corn signing up.  They can handle themselves just fine in hostile territory, and do so all the time.  It would be nice if their opposite numbers in PJ media had anything like their intellectual depth and journalistic integrity, but then, it would also be nice to have a pony.)

    Posted by Michael  on  11/14  at  04:03 PM

  14. I feel left out. Am I the only person in the free world who hasn’t been asked to join Pajamas?

    Bad luck for them --I actually know how to sell ads! hahahahahahahahahaa.

    Posted by Roxanne  on  11/14  at  04:30 PM

  15. Am I the only person in the free world who hasn’t been asked to join Pajamas?

    Yes, actually.

    Nothing personal, though, I’m sure.

    Posted by  on  11/14  at  04:46 PM

  16. Roxanne, I haven’t either.  I don’t even know what it is.

    Posted by bitchphd  on  11/14  at  05:05 PM

  17. Michael said: I forgot to add that I never, ever blog in my pajamas.

    Well I, for one, always blog in my pajamas.  I comment in them, too.  In fact I’m in them right now, at 4:23pm.  They’re cheap men’s pj’s from Sears.

    And I have a theory about why you are taking a vacation from blogging.  I think you’re just doing it to stop yourself from making more jokes about IP addresses and aviator glasses and thus drive down Paul D’s visitor stats.  I think you’re running some weird experiment in ‘internets’ traffic.  And you’re reading up on game theory. wink

    Posted by Dr. Virago  on  11/14  at  05:27 PM

  18. It would be nice if their opposite numbers in PJ media had anything like their intellectual depth and journalistic integrity, but then, it would also be nice to have a pony.

    Yes, it would, wouldn’t it? Or even two ponies.

    I fear I’ve been had.

    Posted by  on  11/14  at  05:39 PM

  19. I think you’re just doing it to stop yourself from making more jokes about IP addresses and aviator glasses and thus drive down Paul D’s visitor stats.

    Paul D?  You mean the character from Beloved?

    Green Gene, you have to believe the ponies are coming.  If you lose faith, they’ll never get there.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/14  at  06:56 PM

  20. Anne—thanks so much for the photo.  Who can forget that surprise in the eyes of Burke and the intense defense-person’s look from Arendt.

    Posted by  on  11/14  at  06:58 PM

  21. Pajamas just seem so--non lo so--upper mid-west/north atlantic coast “ish."(that’s probably another reason O’Reilly seems to despise SanFran so much--the nude sleeping {well that and the November media ratings sweeps period}wink Tuxedos, on the other hand, do offer a functionality for discourse, even at 8 AM in the buffet line in Vegas, after an all-nighter. 

    Thanks for sponsoring John’s last ten days or so on your blog.  He really has been great, open to creating active discussions on issues, that probably should be taken a whole lot less seriously in our morning attire.

    Posted by  on  11/15  at  04:24 PM

  22. I always blog pantsless.  So if anybody wants to startup a Pantsless Media venture, that would be great.

    Sorry about the other gigs, Michael.  You’d make an AWESOME judge.  The best!  LOL!

    Posted by NTodd  on  11/16  at  09:08 AM

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