Well folks, the time has finally come for me to bid you adieu. I have been running a blog called The Erstwhile Philistine for close to a decade now, first via Blogspot and now on WordPress. It has been an incredible ride, with plenty of twists and turns and hopefully not too many dead ends. But the time has come, most decidedly, to row away from the shore and start something new. And though my previous post here works well as an actual ending to the blog, I wanted to offer this denouement to explain the change.
Why Am I Abandoning The Erstwhile Philistine?
Why discard nine plus years’ worth of work in building a platform for myself? There are a lot of reasons I could give, all of which add up to feeling like the time was right to move on. Let me give you the most pressing reason.
Mission Drift
Or whatever the cool way to phrase that is these days. “Getting off brand” or something hideous like that, probably. Regardless, my aims and goals as a person are radically different now than they were when I started this blog my first year of college, or when I rebooted it five years ago via WordPress as a fledgling high school teacher. My life has changed so much: I’ve gotten married, I’ve had two (and almost three now!) kids, and I’ve ditched teaching temporarily for the life of a PhD student. All this has added up to radically different priorities.
When I bought the domain name for The Erstwhile Philistine, I did so in the radical hope that I could turn it into something bigger than an individual blog. That people beyond my sphere of immediate contact would want to listen to some of the things I had to say. And for awhile it looked like that might happen. I had a rotating set of excellent co-authors to keep that content mill grinding. We had several thought provoking symposia where ideas flowed like wine. The site was faithfully posting several articles a week.
But then, well, life happened, as it often does. My co-authors got busy, and gradually their contributions dropped off (which I totally understand, especially since I was never able to pay them for their work, a fact which itself caused me a lot of inner turmoil). My own work flagged, with first weeks and then sometimes months going by with no posts. I struggled on a personal level with depression, and on a blog level with a sense of aimlessness. I didn’t know what I wanted The Erstwhile Philistine to be.
Many of the things distracting me were actually really good things. I got into a PhD Program about which I continue (one year in) to be super excited about. On top of that, upon moving to Missouri, I got hired as the film critic for a local paper, something that has given me unprecedented access to films, and given me lots of motivation to keep refining my craft as a writer. Not to mention a steady (if small) paycheck.
Not to sound like a money desperate grad student with a family to support, but getting paid by an outlet to write for them has been a transformative experience, in many ways. For one, it has left me determined never to write online again for someone else without getting paid. There’s too much content getting churned out by too many places that cannot or will not pay writers, and it’s collapsing the Internet journalism economy. We as a society don’t know what to do to stop the bleeding, but I feel I must take one small step and refuse to have my labor exploited by writing for free. There may be occasional exceptions to this, but they would come under outstanding circumstances.
Lest this resolution come across as a grand ideological stance, it’s also just a practical one. Between classes, catch up reading, having a life, and doing my side work, I just don’t have time to crank out article after article. I have to be selective about what I write and think about. Given the state of film criticism, I no longer hold on to any tenuous hopes I might once have held about making that a full time career. Sure, there will still be limited places for people to work full time writing about film, but they will be few and far between, and mostly available to those willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to get there. I’m not young, and I’m not single. I can’t pack up my family to move to New York and live in a half bedroom rathole with no power for five years just to score a chance to make it “big” at an alt-weekly that will get bought up by a soul sucking corporation five months after I start working there.
And that’s ok. I like where I am in life. I enjoy the depth required by academia. In a world dominated by hot takes and superficiality, it’s nice to have a niche that values deep, slow thinking. But, I still want to write for the public. I still enjoy the thrill of clicking publish and having my words rush out into the world. I definitely still get a thrill when someone I admire recommends something I’ve written, or I hear from a stranger who was touched by something I said. I don’t want to lose those experiences, and I don’t plan on doing so; I just think The Erstwhile Philistine has ceased to be a useful way for that to happen.
So What’s Next?
I don’t want to blow things out of proportion here. I’m not Lebron announcing The Decision in front of millions on live TV. I’m just a writer with a borderline microscopic set of readers who’s trying to branch out a little. That being said, I have a number of irons in the fire that I’m looking forward to sharing with you. For now, I will keep working as the film critic for the Columbia Daily Tribune. Though I’m moving away to St. Louis, I look forward to continuing to provide quality reviews for the good people of Columbia, a town with a lot more cultural verve than it gets credit for.
Additionally, and I’m excited about this, I will be getting more aggressive about pursuing freelancing opportunities. The work of a freelancer is kind of depressing, to be honest, especially when you are just starting out and rejections abound. But I want to keep at it, and I think little successes will snowball over time to lead to bigger opportunities. I already have a few exciting pieces coming up in the future that I will keep you abreast of.
Which reminds me. Obviously, even with me chomping at the bit after freelancing opportunities, and concentrating more on my academic work, there are still going to be things I want to talk about that I won’t have any home for. Sketches of ideas that I want to doodle on for awhile. Weird pieces no respectable outlet would touch. That sort of thing. And these pieces need a home. I also, as a freelancer, need a professional place to keep writing samples and to present my best image as a writer. That’s why I am very pleased to announce the existence of:
Part bio, part portfolio, part blog, the new site will let me consolidate my writing presence online, and provide a way for people to learn about me in little time. The blog portion will allow me to write, at my whimsy, on topics I can’t pursue elsewhere. It will also help you, dear reader, keep track of my goings on elsewhere. So please do follow along. Read the site. Follow me on Twitter. Keep talking to me. The Philistine may be now officially Erstwhile, but the spirit lives on.
Peace,
Asher
