We're renovating...

Clay Shirkey, in a guest column for Penguin, wrote "Most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public forum. Because of this personal address , it makes no more sense to label this content than it would to call a phone call with your mother "family-generated content." A good deal of user-generated content isn't actually "content" at all, at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience." The problem with this blog was that it was caught between offering up content and "personal communication in a public forum." Admittedly my job—teaching and coaching at a boarding school—has left me little time to write, but when I did stumble upon some time (usually by neglecting class prep), I was struck at the loneliness of the whole blogging bit. That is, there wasn't much of a conversation going on, which was my original intention for this blog, which I named after Auden's 1946 Phi Beta Kappa poem, "Under Which Lyre." The poem wittily describes the battle that Auden perceived on college campuses— the battle between the humanities and the sciences, the romantics and the pragmatists. The poem, which traces the success of the scientists, draws to a close with the resistance of the poets, the "sons of Hermes":

Lone scholars, sniping from the walls
Of learned periodicals,
Our facts defend,
Our intellectual marines,
Landing in little magazines
Capture a trend.

By night our student Underground
At cocktail parties whisper round
From ear to ear;
Fat figures in the public eye
Collapse next morning, ambushed by
Some witty sneer.

Which, in some fantastical, delusional way, is what I originally wanted for this blog—a sort of cocktail party where ideas could be discussed. (Although in writing this, it sounds awful. I can taste the pretension, people casually alluding to books they've never read with an air of authority, the name dropping of professors or intellectuals that might have once said "hello.") But it didn't happen, really.

So I've decided to make this a group blog, a collective conversation, an idea I stole from a friend's similar endeavor, and the folks over at the American Scene. So I'm pleased to welcome Jason Harper, a student at Princeton and Die Freie Universität Berlin; James Hoey, a student at Chicago's divinity school; and Benjamin Ekman....who is from Sweden.