Performance Anxiety

So today marks my official initial foray into the world of blogging--the blogosphere, as I've been told it's called. As a result, I'm a bit nervous--anxious--to cite Freud. That is my real name over there in the margin, and those are my real credentials. Also, the title description of this blog is absolutely true: I'm no more the captain of this ship than anyone else in this crew. More accurately, I'm kind of a Greenhorn here, and I suppose that this is my diary. For those of you who will be touring the raging seas of Critical Theory with us, which is, as we know, one of the world's most dangerous journeys, I'll do my best to make sure that this vessel doesn't sink. I can't guarantee that, though, which is why this should be so much fun!

So for now, this blog will be sitting idle, because the upcoming fall semester doesn't begin for another two months here at GW. In the meantime, I'll be collecting my thoughts, improving the overall look of the blog, setting up a subscription feed, and just generally figuring out what I'm doing. Though this invitation might be coming a bit early in the game, I do invite any and every one of you out there to post (respectful) comments to my students' writing. I'm speculating here, but I'm sure that for many of them, this blog exercise might also represent their first trip into the blogosphere, so I wouldn't be surprised if they will be sharing some of my performance anxiety. All of which is why it's appropriate that this blog draws its name from a song by shoegaze legends My Bloody Valentine. As has been well documented by now, those shoegaze bands were derided for being poor performers who were allegedly too anxious to look their audiences in the eye. Thus, they simply gazed at their shoes, ridden with performance anxiety (and here's Freud again; we'll cover some of that gender stuff later, I'm sure). That reading is debatable, particularly given that many of those bands, especially MBV, absolutely pummeled their audiences with noise, as the following video clip demonstrates. Thus, I'll leave you with that: a justification and a promise--a promise that we'll be back, ready to rip up the blogosphere.