It’s goodbye to drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk
After 4 years of blogging, and 1,062,720 page views, here is a “change of address” notification. I have decided to transmute into being a columnist, at the kind invitation of Ron Unz, so as to write my psychological comments as a column at:
http://www.unz.com/jthompson
I am happy at the prospect of more visibility, more technical backup, and a more accessible and searchable archive of work. You can search by topic and by date, and I will start adding tags so that all searches become easier and more powerful. I hope to get more readers, given that the site gets 2 million a month, shared between many writers. Whether, in this collective of authors, I will still be able to stare at a page and immediately start writing, without knowing where it is going, as I do now in the apparent wilderness and seclusion of my own blog, is an open question.
Will I experience a crushing writer’s block, the equivalent of entering a sterile business office in order to dream up, to command, a romantic novel, and find that the fluorescent lights and lunchtime canteen deadens my soul? Will I look over my shoulder at what others are writing? Or will I just close my eyes and imagine a single reader in the wilderness, and write for that one person, regardless of all else?
Perhaps I have been over-dramatic, but shifting from my familiar abode causes a certain emotional wrench. It is like walking the empty rooms of a family house while the removal van waits outside. Worse, what if you, dear reader, resolutely refuse to follow me? Will you be set in your ways, a slave to your favourite sites, unwilling to countenance a perturbation in your URLS?
I hope you can shift as I intend to shift, to a new meeting place. The medium is not the message: the medium is what carries the message, and a message only brings you news if the content is hard to guess. We need to talk of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax and Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication. I digress, but only a bit.
http://www.unz.com/jthompson