Urbane Sprawl

Hello scant few loyal readers!

If I had accrued any goodwill or interest in this blog with my infrequent posts in late ‘08, I doubt any of it is left after my 9-month blogging hiatus.

But consider Urbane Sprawl reborn!

Here are some ideas for how this blog will change/evolve in the coming days, weeks, and months:

1. US2: A Broader Lens

Writing for Urbane Sprawl 1.0 (US1), I think I was restricting myself too much in insisting each post offer a completely novel take on a social/cultural issue or a completely original intellectual idea.

This hyper-self-edited approach led me to pass over posting thoughts and insights that might have still been of interest to readers and that might have still added something unique to The Conversation-With-A-Capital-C.

From now on, I’m going to treat this blog as my true donnée book — the vision I set out in my first ever post of a notebook for ruminations and postulations. These might be additions to an ongoing dialogue rather than just hopefully-groundbreaking conversation starters.

2. More Urbane… Still a lot of Sprawl.

My essential interest is in collapsing the barriers between “high” and “low” thought — finding the common ground between The Economist and The CW, hoping to reach a détente in what Virginia Woolf called “the battle of the brows.”

In that writerly endeavor, I’m pursuing the sprawl of the urbanity of sophistication and cultivation. But I’m equally interested in the sprawl of the slightly, subtly distinct urbanity of self-possession and civility.

Ethics and etiquette — and the thin, faded line between the two — are some of my favorite academic interests, and I never miss the weekly ethics and manners columns in our major publications, be they print or web. But I often find myself fuming at the lack of rigor or just plain wrong conclusions found in these popular pedagogies. I’ll be confronting them, expanding on them, and exploring my own questions about what makes an urbane person and population.

3. Yeah, and Some Links…

I know that in my original manifesto I eschewed the idea of blogs that just talk about what other people are writing rather than writing something original themselves. These “Wunderkammer” blogs, i.e. cabinets of interesting things (with “things” in this case being links), are intrinsically limited but do sometimes contain treasures. So I’m giving in: I’ll post links to things like ‘Llectuals and Allison Iraheta once in a while.

I hope you’ll stay and read!

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 at 10:44 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.