An experiment

So I haven’t posted much. That much is obvious. I think of posts occasionally. My friend texted me ‘if we can’t trust celebrities to fight the class war, who can we trust?’ and it’d make a great title for a post about the Screen Actors Guild negotiations.*

But a fear of being trivial had never stopped me before. I have written more about ‘Joss’ than ‘colonialism’. There must be other reasons I am not writing.

My posting slowed down considerably after the raids of October the 15th 2007. It’s changed the focus of my politics, and I haven’t quite known how to deal with that. One of the things I have managed to write about has been prison. Most of the posts I’ve started and not finished over the last year, have been around the parole of police rapists. I am no longer satisfied with the pat answers I would have given 18 months ago. I maintained two sets of politics on parallel tracks, and wasn’t particularly interested in exploring the blurry space between them. But now I want to write about that space constantly, it crowds out everything else I might be interested in. But I never start because the task seems too huge.

I also think there’s an even deeper problem. After three years I’ve written out most of what I think. There are people who see the first role of their blogs as organising tools, or soapboxes. I’ve done both of these things, but I don’t see that as the purpose of this blog. I write to explore and clarify what I think. And after 3 years I’ve done that with most blog-sized thoughts in my head. So I can’t get in the habit of writing, because I don’t have the right sized things to say.

I don’t want to stop writing so I’ve decided to try and experiment, which addresses both these problems. Starting tomorrow everyday for at least two weeks, I’m going to write a post about the intersection between my ideas about violence against women and the ideas about prison at my blog. I’ll particularly be trying to write about what I don’t know, and don’t understand. I’ll probably cross post some, but not all those posts here.

If this works, then I’ve got some other ideas that I might write about for a concentrated . I’ll try and write out some of my ideas that are longer than a single blog post. And maybe in between these concentrated bursts I’ll write that post about the Screen Actors Guild.

* I sometimes have some strange text message conversations. Particularly when I’m watching a new television show. You’d be amazed at how much political analysis of a TV you can get into 140 characters, or perhaps my messages don’t make any sense.