Work in transition

This may be my last post here at my blogger site. I recently joined a group of friends, acquaintances, and strangers in founding a communal website at sodsbrood.com. It is founded in the spirit of other literary and social communes through history, from the seventeenth century to the modern era. An interest of mine in Graduate school was the radical Christian and political reform movements of seventeenth century England, such as the Diggers and Levelers, with whom the subject of my thesis, John Milton, was in conversation. The Levelers are my particular favorite because of that society's emphasis on the universal equality of man, government by constitution, and the abolition of monarchy and privilege. To say they and their founder, John Lilburne, were in advance of their time is to understate the truth.

Perhaps we at sods brood are not quite so ambitious, or radical. There are, after all, a number of political and religious conservatives among our group. However, the concept itself is radical, since it is based on an idea ungraspable before, say, 1996: the idea of a community of people who never, or rarely, meet; a community which exists in only theoretical, imaginary space. Or I should say, the concept was not entirely ungraspable to us back in the Dark Ages before enlightenment, it was an idea given new meaning by the coming of the Internet. One could say that artists and writers have always existed in a kind of virtual space in which they are in conversation with each other. And that is the tradition we are keeping alive.

Anyhow, to keep the theory behind our new site in the background where it belongs, we are embarking on a venture together, and I am eventually going to abandon this site in favor of my blog at sods brood. The new address will be http://sodsbrood.com/pilgrim. This may well be my last post here, since I do not envision myself keeping both sites live.

The problem I am faced with, however, is transitioning from blogger to my own site. I do not want to merely publish my blogger blog to my own server. I want the flexibility of having my own web space. Thus I am probably going to be doing a whole lot of cutting and pasting over the next few weeks (months?) until I have transferred my archives to sodsbrood. In the meantime, if you visit this site and find me not at home, try sodsbrood.