I feel like I write one of these every year around this time, if only to get the yearly counter in the sidebar restarted. But it's still true that I want to make the most of this space as a writing outlet, particularly as I enter a period of needing to clearly delineate between that which is and is not relevant to my current academic work. This year, I won't try to hold myself to a goal of any specific number of posts generated by December 31. I want to post promptly on whatever I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about it, since posts can linger in draft stage forever. I want to clear the old posts I have lingering from the past few years. I want to embrace what interests me, and not hold myself to juggling endless series posts or projects with a disproportionate work-to-fun ratio. I want this space to compliment the other ways I'm working on organizing my thoughts. I hope it will be a good year.
To kick it off, here's two pieces I found interesting within the past week:
- Maureen Ryan's pro/con breakdown regarding Downton Abbey in anticipation of the third season airing in the U.S. articulates several good points regarding the show's strengths and weaknesses, particularly regarding the depth of the character writing and the vagueness of the timeline. I'm looking forward to the new season, though the tenor of certain headlines in the past few weeks makes me worry that I'm going to spend the whole time waiting for something untoward to happen. (I mean, more so than usual.)
- This Smithsonian article is a few years old, but got linked in this week's Longform roundup for Slate. It's interesting to me the way that, in the time since the article was published, popular culture has interceded to imagine life back into the masked veteran in the figure of Boardwalk Empire's Richard Harrow. The work done by Terence Winter's writing staff and Jack Huston seems all the more impressive in light of the article's description of a life experience largely lost to the ages.
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