Category: Meta

Of Blogs Past Part Three: Eating Tampa

After moving to Tampa I realized my conversations with my new-found friends always turned to recent dining experiences. We were hungry (ha!) for new places to eat.

After this went on for a few months I suggested we all sign up to do a shared blog. That way we wouldn’t have to wait until we saw each other to talk about what was good and bad in regional restaurants. Everyone agreed this was a good idea. I set up the blog and people signed up, but the reality was there were few posts from anyone but me. Blogging wasn’t part of their recreational flow like it was mine.

And so, Eating Tampa was launched. Eventually I expanded the co-blogger list, and maybe a dozen people ended up contributing, but over its run I wrote 90+ percent of the posts. I’m going to resist the urge to name-drop and just say it was a most gratifying experience. I met local food writers, local restaurateurs, and local food bloggers. I was invited out to participate in various events which I then covered on the blog. Most of my growing social circle read it and commented on restaurants I’d visited. Despite being shuttered for nearly a decade and only having a relatively short life-span, I’m occasionally asked about it even today.

Ultimately, the burden of constantly finding new places to eat caught up with me. Not only was it expensive, but there were times when I wanted to eat at familiar places already covered in the blog. How many times could I reasonably review the Taco Bus? I was also eager to expand the scope of my writing. I decided to morph Eating Tampa to reflect my broader interests.

NEXT: Re/Creating Tampa

Of Blogs Past Part Two: Patahistory

I started as a student in a history graduate program in 2006. As I contemplated whether graduate school was the right path, my undergraduate adviser cautioned me that graduate school would change me. He didn’t elaborate, but in retrospect I think I understand what he meant. It DID change me. It changed the way I thought about the world. I think it changed me for the better.

One of the crucial lessons I learned during that experience is that real learning takes real humility. Learning changes your brain, which changes your identity. It changes the way you understand the world and the people in it, and it changes the way you interact with everything and everyone around you. If you aren’t changing, you aren’t learning.

The study of history kindled a fire in my mind and I started a blog to share and think through what I was learning as a history graduate student. Casting about for a title I picked up an Alfred Jarry book lying on my desk and decided to title my blog Patahistory (tagline: A Hot and Infinitely Dense Blog). The term is taken from Jarry’s neologism ‘pataphysics. I’ll let Wikipedia define ‘pataphysics for me.

“‘Pataphysics (French: ‘pataphysique) is an absurdist, pseudo-scientific literary trope invented by French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), that enigmatically resists being pinned down by a simple definition. One attempt at a definition might be to say that ‘pataphysics is a branch of philosophy or science that examines imaginary phenomena that exist in a world beyond metaphysics; it is the science of imaginary solutions. It is a concept expressed by Jarry in a mock-scientific manner with undertones of spoofing and quackery, in his fictional book Exploits & Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician, in which Jarry riddles and toys with conventional concepts and interpretations of reality.”

‘Pataphysics always has the apostrophe in front of it, and if you’re a Beatles fan you’ve heard the term before.

From ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’:

Joan was quizzical; studied pataphysical
Science in the home.

The conceit was to investigate the history of imaginary solutions. I never really developed that angle, but I did eventually write a ‘Patahistory Manifesto’ which garnered some validating positive attention from fellow history grad students. (It’s also when I started my gmail account and why my handle is Patadave.)

Writing that blog lead to being invited to participate in a graduate student group blog titled ‘Revise and Dissent‘ at the History News Network. That was a flattering and exciting moment, but I soon realized I was out of my league. My co-bloggers were all much better writers and far more sophisticated thinkers. All of them are now, I believe, working as professional historians in universities around the globe.

Real life intervened and I chose to move half-way across the nation. My wife was miserable in her job and found a position in Florida. We could either maintain a long-term relationship or I could follow her to a region that had no PhD history program. Without hesitation I opted to follow her to Florida.

While here I finished my master’s in history and turned my attention to becoming a librarian.

NEXT: Eating Tampa

Of Blogs Past Part One: Alien Intelligencer

I started my first blog in the spring of 2001. I’d read about blogs and decided to start my own, but didn’t quite grasp the nature of blogging software. Instead of using a special software or online platform I posted an html page with posts slugged with dates in reverse chronological order. This only lasted a week or two before I jumped onboard Blogger during the days when Evan Williams was running it single-handedly and searching for a revenue model.

I toyed with a variety of names. I remember the first name was Go Go Actionblog, but I quickly settled on Alien Intelligencer (with the tagline ‘There is no other!’ which I still think is a pretty good tagline).

Through the summer and early autumn it was part personal diary, part look-at-this-cool-stuff-on-the-web. But then, after September 11, 2001, it gained a political dimension as I tried to sort out my response to the terrorist attacks and the ensuing drumbeat for war.

Through the 1990s I was involved with a variety of zines and micropublishing ventures. The rise of the internet in the 90s destroyed much of that ecosystem, but in some ways blogging was a satisfying substitution. It was more immediate, cheaper, could be done more independently, and reached a broader audience.

Apparently it helped scratch some creative itch since at this writing I’ve been blogging pretty much steadily for seventeen years.

I ended Alien Intelligencer in September of 2007. At that point grad school was taking up all my time and I turned my blogging attention to themes and ideas I was pursuing as a historian-in-training.

NEXT: Patahistory