A Trickster Or a Warrior (The Ribos Operation)
As we round to about a week away from what is, statistically speaking, probably a major gift-giving occasion for a lot of the readers of this blog, I wanted to take one more opportunity in 2011 to shamelessly beg for money.
I apologize for the raw crassness of this. So let me frame it another way. A lot of talk, in various spheres and contexts, goes on about supporting “independent” producers of things or about creating “new digital models” for creativity that get away from the normal models of publishing and the like. This blog is the sort of thing they mean.
I’m a barely employed PhD in English facing an economy that, realistically, means I will probably never see full-time employment in the field I spent a decade and went into crippling debt to train for. When you see stories about people staggering under the weight of their student loan debt, I am what they are talking about – if I devoted 100% of my paycheck to paying off my student loans then I would still be paying them off in twenty years. Full-time hires in my field barely exist. There were a dozen full-time academic jobs in the country that I was qualified for this year, and every one of them had 200+ applicants.
I think that’s bullshit. I think there’s way more demand for scholarship about popular culture and media, and way more people who want to learn about it than anyone gives credit for, but that academia as it stands is a noble profession badly corrupted by money and politics, and that publishing hasn’t come close to figuring out how to cater to people insane enough to want to read 10,000 words a week about postmodernism and 20th century British sci-fi television. I think there has to be another way. But I’m not a business guy, and the extent of what I can really do to find that other way is to spend a lot of my time writing the sort of stuff I wish existed in the world and trying to find fair ways to let people pay me for it.
I don’t want to get rich off of writing about Doctor Who. I do want to, off of the work I’ve spent my life training to be good at, eventually be able to afford my own place and support a family. Right now I can do neither. I mean, I’m not on the streets – I have a strong support system that will make sure I’m taken care of and a comfortable life. If you want to find someone to throw charity at, I’m not the guy. But on the other hand, if the issues I talk about in this blog are ones that matter to you, well, they’re ones that matter to me in a very real sense too. And if you think that independent scholarship on popular culture that’s aimed at a general audience instead of an insular academic one is something that should exist, well, you can help.…