If you followed me on the wordpress site where I started blogging in 2017, perhaps you've clicked over to this site by now.
Or perhaps this is a new landing spot, whether for you today or someone circling back later. I hope you will bookmark the URL, sign up for email updates, and be in dialogue via the contact page.
In any case, welcome to my new on-line home. My older site outgrew its structure. Every post that was (and still is) archived there has moved here--often with significant revisions that I made during the transition--but the structure for finding and categorizing things now makes more sense.
I've retired from day-to-day research and teaching at the University of Tennessee, but I still have the same scholarly expertise plus more time to read and write. Importantly I now have more time to work on my music, which was continually on the back burner while I was in the academic rat race. A key motive for this new format is to better share some new recordings I've been working on.
As for my writing, I've never blogged on a weekly basis, much less every day. I've also been quiet during several months of transition. But part of my current plan is to begin a rotation of semi-regular posts within key thematic threads. I built a backlog during the transition, so these will come a little thick for a few days before settling down.
This project has structural limitations that I've discussed before. For better or worse, I don't spend time on Twitter or FaceBook. Thus, my posts don't get any attention that way, nor do or I receive any feedback that way. It's not that I don't care about attention or feedback! It's just that social media has felt to me like a dead-end street that I don't want to start down, so I focus my energies here.
I would be honored if any of you, my proud and small "traffic," would share posts or recommend the site as a whole, in whatever ways you like to share things. And although the comments section on the old site didn't work well so I turned it off here, I emphatically do want to be in conversation about whatever responses you have.
Sometimes I workshop things here on a small scale, and then someone bigger wants to co-publish them. Conversely I sometimes publish elsewhere and share the links here. If you have ideas or contacts to enable synergies like this, please let me know.
Mainly, it feels like a sort of spiritual discipline for me to focus on what I post here, and to let go of worrying how many "likes" or "eyeballs" it generates. I just hope some of these posts find an audience that can use them.
So we circle back to my invitations above. Please sign up for email updates since we're not going to keep in touch on social media. Help me spread the word--whether about specific posts or the whole project--if you appreciate something. Let me know if you have other feedback. Thank you!