An inaugural post, eleven year after I wrote, in a Fresh Air piece on the new phenomenon of “blogging,” that “the only thing bloggers seem to have in common is that they have a lot of time on their hands and an exhibitionist streak.” It was the first, certainly not the second, that kept me from going there — the internet is full of author blogs that were abandoned after a few weeks or months of sporadic activity.
As my mom said when I asked her if we could get a dog when I was about eight — “Who’s going to walk it every day?” (She was right, but caved anyway.) On the other hand, it would be nice to have a venue where I could discharge thoughts that are too idiosyncratic for LanguageLog and too verbose for Twitter. And if you had to pick a promising point of departure, you could do worse than the topic of assholes and assholism, which comes in over the transom every morning without benefit of an RSS feed. So watch this space. For a while, anyway.
Geoff Nunberg 