I accept that the post counter is accurate. But I'm not sure what the daily page view count actually means, what with bots, spammers and photo links, but page views passed 500,000 total awhile ago. A good many Twitter and Facebook and other social media accounts exceed that number in a week, some in a day or an hour. But for a writer, it's a big number, especially if it represented actual readers. Even cutting it in half, which is generous but more realistic, is pretty good.
Blogs are obsolete, not quite yet in the same retro cool category as other things I've held onto, like vinyl records, flip phones and even video cassettes. Not yet Old School either. But Twitter is too short, Facebook too ugly and creepy, and only blogs give me the space and the flexibility to create a page, something like a magazine. I like that. So I keep playing here, regardless of who does or doesn't shows up to watch.
The superseded blogs as well the always unfashionable ways I use this one have contributed to the decline of daily hits over the years, especially for the newest post. I am heartened however that older posts still get hits, which I suspect means readers who were actively looking for something found an example of it here. I still have other blogs where I post seldom if ever (I've been blogging since something like 2002, though this blog is not that old, sometimes maintaining five or so at a time) and they continue to pile up hits, some in the thousands. There's something substantive--an issue, a play, a writer, a Star Trek episode, that somebody wants to know more about. Maybe an old movie or a book they just heard of, or just remembered. Or they're turning 60 or 70, and found one of my posts on that. This is what I've called the Internet of Remembering, and I'm pleased to be part of that.
There's an element of service in this, and I do think about that. I think about adding to knowledge, making my very particular contribution. I take it seriously.
But my dirty little secret is that I have always been less interested in sounding off, attracting clicks or going viral than I have been in writing. Sure, there's an element of showing off in all this. And I like to do what I used to do professionally for awhile, which is make a kind of page out of words and images.
When you're showing off it helps to have an audience, and there is something essential about the pairing of writer and reader. But that's becoming secondary (as the length of these posts may suggest.) Especially at this point in my life, it's mostly about the doing.
Even famous writers will say this. T.S. Eliot did, at the end of Four Quartets. Last night I read an interview with Malcolm Cowley in his old age, a literary critic and biographer who had a lot of influence in American literature from the 1930s through the 1950s especially. (And he's also a western Pennsylvania boy.) "Writing becomes its own reward," Cowley said. "What do you need from others--except a little money--if you have satisfied the stern critic in yourself?"
These days not even a little money enters into it, and the inner critic is maybe less stern in some ways. I can't say I'm exactly saintly about it--I get discouraged at the silence at the other end. So I am grateful for my regular readers. I suspect I know most of them by their first names. I probably know their birthdays, too.
But in the end it's a kind of serious play, the work of a lifetime and the work of a life. So when I get over myself and get into myself, when the energy returns, I can inhabit my zone of illusion, inside my carapace of play. And I make more sentences, and assemble another post. Some don't look so good the next day. But I'm happy with a lot of them. I may have a huge blind spot here, but I think many are as good as anything else one can find on the Internet on a given day.
Still, I doubt there's another 6,000 posts coming. Though I suppose you never know.
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