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Sunday, November 13, 2005

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 Michael on 11/13 at 08:25 PM
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