Coming soon at the TLS: New bloggers for old

The slow rebuilding of the TLS website has tested the patience of readers and writers alike.

A few weeks ago my plan was to continue my six-year path of solo blogging on our site until the new TLS online was ready.

And then, and only then, I hoped to lead my colleagues into a new TLS Blog in which all of us, or some of us anyway, would post more regularly about this and that, on a wider range of subjects, in a wider range of languages, to the general greater good.

But instead, and without conscious decision, I stopped the old before the new had begun.

A blog turns out to be deeply attached to the blogger’s brain. Somehow the decision to replace it in the future had turned the switch for immediate cessation.

Thus the new TLS blogging team met this morning to accelerate its replacement.

We had an enthusiastic discussion.

By the end of August, this Peter Stothard blog will officially cease.

And, from that time on, I will be back posting here alongside the wisest band of electronic critics we can summon from our midst, a very wise band indeed.

 They will all introduce themselves at the due time — which will be soon.

Thankyou for staying around.

Watch this space.

Mary Beard’s inimitable career as a solo blogging artist will continue triumphant and unaffected.

 

 

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

Well done, Sir Peter, even if at the end it turned into an "unconscious" Lady Macbeth sleepwalk. I hope that there will be no OCD hand washing over it.

If this is the last comment, so be it. Quite appropriate, since I am burrowing into the facticity of "Finnegans Wake."

I have a question for Thomas Nagel: What is a fact for a spider? (It is my understanding that a spider is a potential weaver of webs). Spiders spin beautiful webs that have no contact with reality.

I learned in The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy that: "The dog is a bug-ridden barking brute."

Philosophy is said to be the misconstrual of solipsist sensations. I think that that could be called infralapsarianism. What it is like for a bat.

It is a brute fact that colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

[M M Leimon]

Is "thankyou" a word at the TLS? Your spellchecker and I don't like it.

[Carolus Antonius]

O Mary Beard, dissertissima bloggatorum, iam dudum reditum tuum desiderans desidero!

[Clayton Burns]

Perhaps there will be a blogger who concentrates on literature as hard news. A notable gap in the coverage.

Except for its sometimes notable lead stories, usually the best practice when reading The New Yorker is to focus on the white space. It is worth meditating on, but the words will only induce fever.

What strikes me as a good measure is the fate of The Waste Land. A skilled reporter could assess the extremely useful Yale annotations and the iPad app set against their potential in introducing modernism.

Clearly, in The Fever Land that is the UK education is mechanistic and sleep-inducing. Except when I arouse myself to loot the backpack of a visiting student.