Tuesday 2 December 2008

Back

Very sorry for not blogging lately. Unfortunately, CBC's aunt passed away last Friday after a battle with a long illness. As with all things of this nature, the experience hasn't been a particularly pleasant one, especially as we were close. I'm sure readers will understand why I haven't blogged and why I put the comments under moderation.

But life goes on, and the AVPS conveyor belt will be delivering a series of posts on this and that over the next few days. I've also had a look at the blog roll for the first time in yonks, and was disappointed to see so many left blogs fall by the wayside. Will two have sprung up for every inactive blog? Has leftyblogland acquired hydra-like properties yet? If it has do let me know and the blog roll will be modified to reflect that.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

So sorry to hear about the loss.

I've noticed some blogs dropping off the radar lately, and some just not commenting on the big issue that is on everyone's minds, the economy.

I've been trying to comment on most developments as soon as they happen, but they don't seem to garner that much interest.

Phil said...

With the crisis, I think most people don't really feel qualified enough to comment on it without some degree of knowledge about economics. Generally speaking, but with a few notable exceptions, most bloggers and commentators like to appear to know what they're talking about. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about economics, which is why I've stuck to quite general pieces and revisiting Marx's critique of political economy.

Re blogs dropping off the radar, it could well be just that I haven't gone through my blog roll for a very long time. Or maybe some comrades are too busy organising to offer their pearls up to leftyblogland?

Anonymous said...

Welcome back Phil. Was sorry to hear about your aunt.

I suppose, as regards what leftyblogland focuses on, there's an enormous amount of us still grappling with the linguistic or cultural turns in disciplines ranging from Film Studies to History - a lot of us therefore only comment on here-and-now events but rarely: even then, it's often in relation to our grapplings with epistemology or some such.

Sure, we can grapple with economics but often one wonders whether there's any point, since most professional economists seem to make it up as they go along anyway. There are plenty of analyses of "Late Capitalism" or "Post-Fordism" (or whatever) out there - what's the point in regurgitating them?

Phil said...

I agree, Dave. While there's nothing wrong in trying to stretch ourselves a bit by blogging on stuff we don't know about (for instance, I can foresee three posts flowing from my keyboard over the next seven days on the subject of art!), there's nothing wrong with sticking to what we know either. The most successful blogs are always those that find a niche and hammer it for all its worth.

The Sentinel said...

"I'm sure readers will understand why {...} I put the comments under moderation."

Because your foreign friend was out of his depth.