By Ben Fassett
Having touched upon the failing desire for knowledge, it’s nice to be able to write about the exception to the rule. For Santi Tafarella, English professor at Antelope Valley College, the desire to blog comes from a myriad of sources; and which ever one you choose will bring you to the genesis of a leviathan of a blog that, as of August 31st, has over 1,044,000 views under its belt. Santi sat down with the Examiner to discuss why and how it all went down.
Having touched upon the failing desire for knowledge, it’s nice to be able to write about the exception to the rule. For Santi Tafarella, English professor at Antelope Valley College, the desire to blog comes from a myriad of sources; and which ever one you choose will bring you to the genesis of a leviathan of a blog that, as of August 31st, has over 1,044,000 views under its belt. Santi sat down with the Examiner to discuss why and how it all went down.
“I love free speech, and I have always loved to write. For me, blogging sort of gave me a space where, on a daily basis, anything that happened to cross my consciousness could be given an opinion on and put out to the world.”
“Prometheus Unbound,” which started in late June of 2008, started off with a standard view count of about 300 after the first two weeks. But as the topics diversified from local to national politics, the arts and issues of evolution versus creationism, it quickly picked up momentum, steamrolling into a sometimes staggering figure in the thousands per day. The measure of his success, however, sometimes comes from a sneaky place.
“I have tricks, now. If you want to blog, just find something to quote and talk about it. If you want to attract narcissists, mention their name in your title – or at least mention them in your post! I’ve learned that somewhere in the world, there is someone out there with the same peculiar interest as you, and they will find you because they’ll Google it.”
Apparently, a lot of people share peculiar interests; and while some might balk at the attention, Professor Tafarella shrugged it off. “I’d gotten to where I’ve developed a routine,” he said, “and by the time the election came around, I had about 100,000 hits. And I thought I was staying under the radar, you know, because no one at work had said anything to me about it… until I’m sitting at a staff meeting on campus, and Charles Hood, one of the English teachers here, he says, ‘Hey everybody, Santi’s got over 100,000 hits on his blog.’ So then I was attracting attention from my friends on campus, and I felt a little more self-conscious. But, you know, nobody cares. There’s a certain degree of narcissism about what we think other people are thinking about us. You realize that if you write something crazy, other people will read it and say ‘well, that was crazy.’ But then they’re going to say, ‘I want to go to McDonald’s for lunch today.’ So I’ve never really worried about having a weird opinion. I just say what I think. Besides, I’ve found that people think a lot of crazy things that tend to pass under the radar. Our culture is suffused with nonsense.”
When you get to the actual prose, it reads in a thousand different ways. Sometimes, the commentary is direct and even harsh: when he poses the question, “Is it mean to suspect that Michael Jackson might have been a pedophile?” he lays it out bluntly. “Under normal circumstances nobody gets to do what Michael Jackson did.” Other times, we get to see the strange and logical progression of a man’s perspective. We get to watch how he thrilled at the prospect of President Obama’s administration, only to have his hopes dashed in later years. “I learned that I would be a terrible president,” he said, “because I would probably do exactly what Obama has done. Looking back, it might have been better for him to look at the economy rather than focus on healthcare or other issues.”
Probably most interesting, however, is watching Tafarella wrestle with questions of faith and morality in a very tasteful and philosophical angle that is first and foremost open minded. Very seldom does the material ever turn towards the vulgar, which immediately sets it apart from most blogs. Tafarella, a self-proclaimed agnostic, maintains a sort of love-hate relationship with all of the religious denominations; celebrating when they rise above petty differences, expressing his discontent when the institutions fail in their tact and striking in absolutely ruthless fashion when it mixes with politics.
“There is kind of a whistleblower responsibility there. Here’s an example: a while back I was… annoyed when one of the city council members here in Lancaster commented in bad taste on an incident where a Muslim man beheaded his wife in a rage in New York City. Now, the Antelope Valley Press covered it, but they don’t put much up for free online anymore. So I posted about it, and there were a lot of people within the community who found it, and it got a conversation going.” This is referencing Sherry Marquez’s 2008 Facebook post which read: “This is what the Muslim religion is all about—the beheading, honor killings are just the beginning of what is to come in the U.S.A.”
The blog post drew delicious parallels to Omar Khalifa’s comments about a Christian minister in Texas who drugged his wife with sleeping pills and smothered her so that he could be with his mistress. He punctuated this with the following statement: “Hmm. If Lancaster and the Antelope Valley really are places where a collective faith in God is affirmed—”In God We Trust”—then should we blame the high domestic violence rate on the effects of holding to that collective faith? I think that’s an inference that Sherry Marquez wouldn’t make.”
Talk about a piledriver of a point.
While personal bias is sometimes impossible to avoid in blog format, it is always about what interests him and the Socratic method. Trying to keep the conversation going is key – if by nothing else, then by initiating such challenges as “Have Lunch With a Muslim Day,” or by creating a section devoted to “The Gospel of Jessica Christ,” which is a reworking of gospel passages with the main protagonist as a woman.
“I’ve always been interested in gender reversal: what happens to a text (and I’ve done this in literature classes with my students) if you reverse the gender on a story. You’re reading a Hemingway story, and you have a characteristically sexist male character in the story. What happens if you change that around, how does it shift the perspective of the story? You can do the same thing with race. You switch that aspect of a character, and suddenly it takes on a whole new angle.”
For an English professor, this should hardly be surprising.
“I was always a reader. One of the things I would do with my dad growing up was go for walks with an adult-level book, and he would ask me to read it aloud to him and talk about it with him. So in some ways, blogging is very similar to the sort of dialogue I would have with my dad growing up. Because really, what you do when you blog about topics is find something from the internet or out of a book and you talk about it. Then someone else will come around, and keep the discussion going.”
