Undecennial

Today, of course, is the eleventh anniversary of the first publication of this blog.

When I published my first entry in 2007, I announced to a nonexistent readership that I had finally managed to format my blog in a way that felt esthetically pleasing.  But I also admitted that I really had no idea what I would be writing about.  Blogs were still in their relative infancy.

But chatting with strangers in chatrooms had grown boring. MySpace -- which I sometimes looked in on but never joined -- was a mess and  moribund. And while I knew that Facebook existed, it was an entity whose nature and uses weren't yet quite clear to me.

But I had read about blogs.  And I knew how to write essays.  And a young guy with whom I'd chatted had just started up his own blog, right here on Blogger.  So I decided to give it a try.  And the rest is history.  Last month, I achieved something -- I say "achieved" after groping for a more accurate word -- that I never expected to achieve back in 2007.  I posted my one thousandth post. 

That's a lot of essays, even conceding a variation in quality.

Since 2007, quality has improved in my estimation, and quantity -- after a bit of a slump -- has rebounded.  I wrote 108 posts in 2017, just one post off my record from 2008, when excitement over the Obama-Hillary primaries and the general election encouraged me to convert my fevered partisanship into frenzied essays.

Despite a lot of writing this past year, readership is -- as I've complained -- drastically down.  But since much of my "readership" back in the "Golden Age" of, say, 2012 and 2013 was, I suspect, robot-fueled, I probably haven't really lost all that many human readers.  In any event, during this past year, whatever the overall hard numbers, the statistics again show certain posts as having drawn a larger number of readers than others.

The winner is -- the envelope please -- my November post describing my travels in Thailand, Indonesia, and Cambodia.  Interest may have been piqued by my advance warning that I would be living for a week at the base of Agung volcano, a volcano that was expected to erupt momentarily.   (We're still waiting.)

Crowding it, however, and coming up fast is my September review ("Sailing to Ithaca")  of a memoir by Daniel Mendelsohn, in which he describes what it was like to teach a seminar on Homer's Odyssey to college freshman, while his elderly and irascible father sat at the seminar table throwing in his own querulous two bits. 

Other posts with better than average readership were my remarks on a visit to Manhattan last March; a discussion of a classic British book for kids about lake sailing in the Lake District; memories of my childhood stamp collection; a remembrance of a two-week bike trip my brother and I took as teens; a discussion of  teenage bullying; reflections on why studying Latin is worthwhile; and -- more recently but already showing impressive popularity -- my discussion of Ingmar Bergman's 1960 film based on a medieval ballad, The Virgin Spring.  (Some readers may have found my discussion of seven of the nine Bergman movies I saw this winter tedious and boring.  But they serve one purpose of this blog -- to help me myself to remember certain experiences and how I reacted to them at the time.)

As always, the year brought forth a lot of book and movie reviews, some expressions of amazement at scientific developments, some memories of childhood joys and pains, plus descriptions of my travels and/or hikes wherever possible and appropriate.

Surprisingly reduced output on politics.  If I were blogging in Nero's time, I would similarly have been unable to adequately capture the emperor's antics in writing, and I would have been depressed past measure to watch my homeland, the Roman Empire, sinking into the mire because of malfeasance at the top and apathy below.

But enough of that.  Onward into my twelfth year of blogging.
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(Posted from El Paso, Texas)