Long Overdue Name Change

I opened this blog on September 26th, 2004. I was a rookie cop, and I was in entering the mourning stage of my break up with my old life as a professional actor, playwright, and general literati, so I started a blog to help preserve that part of myself that I feared police work was already starting to kill.

Because I saw it primarily as a space to work out questions of literary aesthetic (films, novels, plays etc.) I gave it a name that parodied literary journal titles, which always seemed to me to end in "Review" (Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, the Southern Review, and so on. A search on the Poets and Writers database lists 248 journals with "review" in the title). In an act of self effacement, I named it the Brummagem Review, an early-modern era reference to counterfeit coins.

Of course, I misspelled it as "Brummegem," an error that lasted an embarrassingly long time in the banner title (not the only time I've done that: see the back cover of my self-published play, The Origin of Language, also the second act of my Master's thesis Murder/Rapture).

The blog has taken a number of forms throughout the years from baseball column, to political opinion page (on both sides of the aisle), to culture site. The past several years, as I have landed more solidly in Composition and Rhetoric as a graduate students and teacher, it has mostly become my place to work out ideas about teaching, composing, and literacy.

With that in mind, I've decided to change the name to Composition Cop as a nod to my two lives, and as a play on "grammar police." This is already my handle on both Twitter and Instagram, so it seemed a natural move.

Apropos of blogs in general, I'll still feel free to let the subject matter stray when I feel like it (see my last post regarding Valentine's Day cards), but this name fits much better than a misspelled, antiquated self-offending word.