Spare Thoughts: 2

Question:  How and why did you make decisions about your blog appearance?  What ambitions do you have for it?  What reservations?  What is at stake in fashioning oneself as a public intellectual in this way?  What possible connections can we make between the study of early American literature and contemporary culture?  

Answer:  I have the advantage of previously completing (and surviving) the semester long research project designed by Dr. Logan with last year’s class, LIT6009: American Novel and National Identity—Romanticism and Imperialism (Spring 2009).  So, I am relatively familiar with Blogger thanks to creating Conduct Yourself and feel comfortable with the idea of exposing myself, my research process, and my final academic product online.  With Conduct Yourself, I chose a relatively neutral color palate of beiges, greens and browns to present an aura of professionalism, and only rarely strayed off topic.  

I decided, with this current project, I wanted something completely different, and that I needed to improve and exceed my previous work.  Despite less than a year in between the projects, Blogger has changed and updated their templates, design, and posting tools, which allows for more flexibility and personalization of standard templates.  My entire research project hinges on the ideas of the female homosocial, the lesbian continuum, and the search for a usable past, so I figured I could allow my blog to have more personality this time around.  I chose a template that features a brightly colored watercolor painting, with rather indistinct shapes – they could be random blobs or perhaps flowers, who knows.  I liked the ambiguity of it, to be honest.  

To balance the tones of red, pink, and bright orange, I kept the side tabs, date tabs, and pages’ tabs a dark gray/black (but transparent).  I adjusted some of the color options for the text (kept it black on the posts for readability) to match the colors in the background image.  
I think the blog reflects some of my own personality, which in my Welcome post, I mentioned will be a key part of this research project.  I also recently discovered icons that I really like, including the flourish that now adorns most posts, echoing the flourishes Moore used in her book.

I decided to name my blog Bonds of Intimacy after reading the following passage in Karin A. Wulf’s essay in the modern edition of MMMB, “Documenting Culture and Connection in the Revolutionary Era.”

In her commonplace book, Moore was documenting her affiliations as much as she was conversing a body of work and copying other significant writings. These works knitted Milcah Moore and her circle closer together. Whether she was corresponding with someone across the Atlantic or simply across the Delaware River, the words she wrote reinforced bonds of intimacy and common knowledge (22).

My reaction was immediate and it stunned me how sure I was, that this term, bonds of intimacy, could encompass and communication the entirety of my project in three short words.  It was akin to love at first sight.  This particular passage also gives me hope that my claim of MMMB as a concrete site of the female homosocial is not so farfetched, despite the fact that neither Wulf nor Blecki mention any Queer theory in their essays. 

My goal with this blog is to accurately record and expose my own research process, as messy and embarrassing as it may be, and to learn from my mistakes and share my successes.  One of the most important lessons I learned in Dr. Mark Kamrath’s Research Methods course was we scholars do not live in a vacuum – we are part of a larger community.  I am part of the scholarly community, albeit operating at the level of a graduate student, taking part in the ongoing conversation regarding my topic in a very public and visible way, thanks to the blog.  It’s exciting to share the work that is normally behind the scenes too.  Also, I’m looking forward to seeing how my classmates tackle their projects, especially the blogging aspect.  You’ll notice that with both of my blogs, I included a list of links to my classmate’s blogs, which helps indicate the community which I inhabit, both physically (we have a class together every Tuesday) and literary (we are all exploring aspects of Early American literature).

My reservations toward this project mostly centers on my own neuroses.  What if I’m completely wrong in my approach to MMMB?  What if I embarrass myself with incomplete research?  What if I neglect to read important, foundational articles that pertain to my topic, thus rendering my research lopsided?  What if my friends and family get annoyed that I spend so much time on this project?  What if scholars Blecki and Wulf find my site and think it’s an appalling approach to their own work?  What if my work falls short of Dr. Logan’s standards?  What if the ghost of Milcah Martha Moore comes to haunt me because I’m placing her within the lesbian continuum?  What if, what if, what if, what if…..

Ridiculous, right?  I never said my neurosis was rational or made any sense, but these are the thoughts that plague me.  Deep down, I know that I am a competent scholar, and that my type-A personality works to my advantage when it comes to the details of research.  I also know that if I miss foundational articles, Dr. Logan will nudge me in the right direction.  And I have my friends who will point out articles and books of interest to me, and I will return the favor because that’s what friends do.

As for what is at stake, well, this blog will never disappear unless I choose to delete the entire site, and even then, it’s probably already been indexed and cached by Google.  It will always be a capture of a specific moment in my life.  If I achieve my goal of becoming a teacher, my students could find my blog – would it be a useful tool?  Would the mixture of personal and academic be considered objectionable?  Will they laugh at how quaint my little research blog appears to their technologically advanced eyes?  Who knows.  

I plan to use this research blog as part of my portfolio for entrance into the Literary, Cultural, and Textual Studies MA program at UCF, something that both excites and terrifies me.  Will those on the admission committee refuse to acknowledge the validity and value of my research blog, or will they see it as a student inhabiting the field digital humanities?  I firmly believe that as a scholar, I must learn, master, and then use the technology available to us; to do otherwise is to become obsolete.  

As for the connections between my text, MMMB, and the modern world, these will be explored and discussed in future posts.  Suffice to say, I think there are many connections because the women were writing about themes that seem universal – love, death, God, faith, etc.  It is their method of approach that is rooted in the eighteenth-century, but even those rhyming couplets cannot stop me from empathizing and connecting to the authors.