Where I Stand

Israel-Palestine and Trying to Write Creatively

I’ve mentioned to readers a few times in the past that back in the heyday of blogging, in the aughts into the early teens, I blogged at the sad red earth, (a phrase from Kerouac’s On the Road.) I blogged about a wide range of topics, in many areas of intellectual and human activity. What meant most to me was the creative writing I shared, but what I wrote mostly was political and cultural: I soon learned that the audiences didn’t overlap a lot, and my larger readership hungered for the political.

When I created this Substack, I didn’t conceive it as a return to blogging. Many people write on Substack in that manner, and that’s fine. But I’ve done that. Time is dwindling and I don’t care to direct my energies in that way anymore. That’s why I stopped blogging. For me, Substack is a publication platform, and as I’ve written in a few places, the aim is artful production in writing, in mostly finished form, not topical commenting on the world as I stroll by, a verbal flaneur of the passing…