I’m still going through files, preparatory to tossing and/or bequeathing them to my archives file at U of M (Manitoba). I read that “the golden age of blogging is over.” I guess. A recent review of current poetry included a confession from a poet, that “she didn’t read any poetry but her own.” (Well, but what about Mary Oliver?) I think that’s true of bloggers. Heaven knows I don’t spend enough time with my own blogs, let alone with OP’s. Except Mary Beard. Everyone loves Mary Beard. Blogging is a hazardous field, with no hope of recompense except for the very few. There’ll never be another Julie Powell. That was then, this is now.

I’ve said it before—I remember, even if you don’t—I keep thinking of Addison and Steele. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, both born in 1672, were writers whose essays were published in the magazines they founded, first the Spectator, then the Tatler. I keep thinking of them when I go to Starbucks because they were associated with coffeehouses, I think—hung out, I guess. I have no idea why they were on an early university English course I took, otherwise I might never have heard of them. And I have thought of them again as i struggle with my and others’ blogs. I wonder if I still have my college text. I’m not going to look now. I’ll let you know. I just wonder, was theirs the golden age of blogging? Was/is coffee our inspirational nectar? (Oh, shut up, Bettyjane.)

As for me, I fear my blog is in danger of becoming my surrogate diary and never the twain shall meet, at least, I try not to let them. But a blog is the closest we come to real writing now. One types one’s thoughts and they are immediate, flung down and dispersed—who knows where or to whom? The hard part is that it becomes an inexorable obligation. Every 24 hours—well, it used to be 24 hors for me but it isn’t any more. Too many tramlines. And I refrain from reporting on all of them because then it really would be a diary, a daily, demanding journal.

There’s always more to come, to think, to write.

Oy.

Anon.