This blog was launched on July 2, 2003, seven years agone this very day.
It remains now what it was then: a fool's errand.
Most anyone who was blogging during that heady period at the center of this century's first decade, roughly years 2 and 3 of this blog's span, can attest to what great fun it could be and to the sense of possibility that danced attendance upon the whole Blogging venture. This part of the Forest of Tubes has never been particularly well traveled: 1060 posts and seven years in to the project, the stats stand at around 270,000 visitors to the blog, a very large portion of them driven by Google image searches and not by any particular interest in what was being said here. (That total does not include however many or few folk may be out there following via readers and RSS feeds. I suspect I have at least a handful of recurring readers evidence for whose presence is a thing unseen.)
Though the pace has slackened, I am still having just enough fun at this to carry on into the foreseeable.
By way of commemorating the Magnificent Seventh, here are seven posts or collections of posts from the past, skewing toward poetry-related items, with which I am still more or less pleased:
- My one and only original video, a recitation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, as a PowerPoint slideshow. (Video version July 19, 2009; the PowerPoint slides themselves date back to April 1, 2005)
- The entire Double Dactyl category, and particularly the lengthy Epithalamium (first posted February 26, 2004; repeated May 15, 2008)
- Several runs and variants on Shelley's Ozymandius, including the hip-hop version, "Trunkless But Not Funkless." (November 22, 2003)
- My most recent run at poetical pastiche, from June of this year: The Walrus and the Petrol Man
- Paired posts on a visit to Gettysburg, where my great great grandfather was occupying himself Seven Score and Seven years ago today: a monument to the battle and a battle over monuments (both from July 3, 2004)
- It has been a recurring pleasure to double-host the annual April Fool's Day edition of Blawg Review, with the main edition on my sleepy-sibling blog Declarations and Exclusions and the Appendix/Prequel here, in 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006. If dear ol' Dec&Excs was a bit more of an active endeavor -- it ostensibly hits its own seventh anniversary on August 5, but the posting there is sporadic at best these past several years -- I would no doubt have done it again this year. Perhaps in 2011 we will rise to the challenge again?
- For a seventh: ransack the archives and pick your own if you care to do so. (Let me know if you have a personal favorite with a comment, won't you? We bloggers thrive on positive reinforcement and attention.)
Thank you sevenfold, reader.
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A concluding musical interlude, on the theme of the passage of seven years:
Suddenly I'm on the street
Seven years disappear below my feet
Been breakin' down
Do you want me now? Do you want me now?
-- Freedy Johnston, "Bad Reputation"
Freedy Johnston - Bad Reputation [Daytrotter Session]
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Photos: "Number 7" by Flickr user bdunnette, and "Lucky #7" by Flickr user Cordey, both used under Creative Commons license.
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