Weirder Stuff

While doing a bit of administrative work on this blog recently, I realised that a number of links weren’t leading where they were supposed to go – particularly the ones going to Obnoxi.us. Having checked back with Chris, who originally got the site up and running, I discovered that, owing to, basically, pressure of time, he hadn’t been able to give the site the care it needed and had thus suspended it – hopefully temporarily. I understand his position completely; doing anything right inevitably takes time, and those who take a personally chosen habit like blogging seriously will need no further explanation. It is one of the wonderful things about this still very young virtual world that, while there are many on the web who are only interested in making quick money (sometimes in dubious ways), and many others who work hard on-line earning a living by providing quality services which help us in all sorts of ways, there is a huge group of people exploring the possibilities of the internet to be creative in all sorts of fascinating ways, investing immense amounts of time and energy in what can only be described as labours of love.

In all the discussions raging about digital copyright, SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, etc., there is a fascinating aspect of the virtual world which has not – in my view – received the attention it deserves; the extent to which the practical doings of hundreds of thousands of people on-line call the all-pervasive economic/monetary models of human living, which are the new (generally) unquestioned orthodoxies of our age, into question. For if, on the one hand, there is a general feeling on the part of many people that they should not be forced to pay for music and films, on the other hand, there are just as many more who put their own creative efforts – music, film, writing, photography and all sorts of combinations of the same – online without any thought of remuneration whatsoever. There are whole areas of activity on the web where other, more fundamental currencies than dollars or euros prevail; the satisfaction obtained by sharing one’s creativity with others, the positive feelings engendered through genuine interaction in virtual communities, the incalculable pleasure experienced through expressions of appreciation and praise.

At any rate Obnoxi.us has (temporarily) gone to sleep and I had a problem. Over the past year I had found the site useful for publishing material which I felt was somewhat different to what I was generally posting here on Attempted Essays. Though the essay form of writing is extremely fluid and flexible, it does have its boundaries, and there is a definite difference between an essay and a short story. And then of course, there was the embarrassing question of Frankie. He does have something to say – in his own, er, inimitable way – but I retain the conviction that he is as suitable for Attempted Essays as Sid Vicious would be as a member of Abba. Still, I wasn’t happy about having him consigned to some kind of digital limbo, much as he often deserves it.

For these reasons, I have decided to start a second blog. I won’t be posting there with the same frequency and regularity as here but, from time to time, when the muse kisses me in a particular way, I will be using it for more experimental material than I feel really fits in on Attempted Essays. And it will give Frankie a sort of home of his own.

Allow me, then, to introduce Weirder Stuff. I’ve already put most of the material I’d posted on Obnoxi.us on it (luckily I keep copies of everything I post on one or other of my hard drives). And, as an introduction, there’s also a new science fiction story I finished recently, called

The Last Supper

Picture retrieved from

http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Blogging4.jpg 

A Year of Attempted Essays

A year ago today, I started this blog. Although it was an idea I’d been playing with for quite a while, the decision to actually do it was taken quickly. It was a Sunday afternoon, I’d just checked my mails and then, almost on a whim, went to blogger.com and had the whole thing set up in less than half an hour.

One year and eighty two posts later, this first anniversary is an opportunity to take stock. According to the counter you can see to the right, the site has had over 30,000 hits in that time; in fact, according to the statistics with which blogger.com supplies me, the number is over 36,000.

36,000 readers in a year? That would be nice! Unfortunately, the reality is somewhat more modest. Examining the statistics I have more closely, I have to admit that – entirely by accident – I’ve done a couple of things right; at least as far as the hit, and therefore the overall internet ratings (in the top quarter million sites in the world, according to Alexa) are concerned.

The first fortunate choice was the name of the blog. I called it Attempted Essays because I wanted to explore the Essay as a particular form of writing. As a form it has advantages because it is very loose, but for me it involved the aspects of dealing with a particular theme in a personal manner, coupled with a certain attention to writing, style and form. Recently I came across some reflections by Aldous Huxley on the subject and was relieved to find that he sees it much the same way as I instinctively did:

By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly as can a long novel ... Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. 

The essays I have posted here in the past year have touched all three of Huxley’s poles though – in common with him, I may add – the fewest fall into the third category, and what he calls poles are (in my case and indeed in the case of most essayists) more to be seen as tendencies rather than hard categories.

What I had forgotten on choosing the title was that the essay is also a form of writing with which millions of students have to struggle daily and that most young people nowadays have access to the internet. So, when I look at the “search key words” which blogger.com helpfully supplies as part of the statistics, I regularly find phrases like “essays about the American dream,” or “essay on early risers.” Then my heart goes out to those young sufferers who, out of ingenuity or despair, have resorted to the world wide web as a resource for homework help and can only hope that they have the intelligence and capability to rewrite what they find in their own style, for they should not forget that teachers too have computers and that most of them are just as capable of using Google as their students.

But, astonishingly, the largest number of hits are the result of another phenomenon, one with which I had not reckoned at all – people’s attraction to pictures. Three of the four most popular posts (Depression, The American Dream, and Hippies, Hair and the Baby Boomers all with thousands of hits) are nearly always clicked onto as a result of Google searches for pictures. Now, I only started to put pictures in the essays as a means of lightening things up a little and improving the presentation and very few of them are original to me; I have found them just like those thousands who find them on this blog by searching the web. This fact makes me feel something of a fraud but, on the other hand, friends have assured me that I should relax about this and see it the way one would see advertising. You put up a sign to get people to enter your shop in the first place and, for every hundred that come in, maybe five or six will actually buy something. That’s the way things work and, as my daughter commented recently, in terms of internet rankings, a hit is a hit – it doesn’t matter what the people who came to the site were actually looking for.

In fact, in terms of popularity, the site has really only started to develop in the past couple of months. The first major thing that happened was that Chris Jenkins, a virtual friend of mine (and an awesomely talented web guy), reposted something I wrote in September on reddit.com, and the result was nearly 7,000 hits in the space of a few days. That got me to thinking about my number of visitors a bit more and I started spending considerably more time surfing the blogosphere and making contact with other bloggers.

 

It has been a very fruitful experience. I freely admit that there is an awful lot of crap out there in the blogging world, but there is also a cornucopia of great talent and wonderful, creative people – many of whom I have got to know in the past year. They visit my site and often post comments, I visit theirs and do the same. You can see some of my favourites listed here on the right.

In my opening piece I promised, “I will try to stick at it, if only because, in my experience, people don’t tend to continue to visit web-sites where nothing happens for weeks on end.” This was a promise made to myself as much as anyone else – and as much a challenge as a promise. In the course of the year, I’ve found a rhythm where I try to post something new every four days or so. At times this has made this blog into something of a tyrant; a monster lurking in a corner of my life which demands regular feeding. But anything decent I have ever read about writing emphasises how important discipline is for the whole endeavour. When once asked about how he wrote, Stephen King (who has produced many millions of words in his career) answered, “one word at a time.” It’s not very productive to sit around waiting to be enticed and seduced by a Muse, the only way to write – if you feel that this is something you want to do – is to actually sit down and do it.

In the course of the past year, I estimate that I have produced around 120,000 words for this blog, about as many as are contained in an average sized novel. Of course, writing a novel is a very different kind of project and one I don’t (as yet) feel is imminent. Although the experience I have gained in the past year – particularly the experience that it is actually possible to write so much in addition to working full time and living a pretty full life with other priorities and interests – has me thinking a little more seriously in that direction.

For now, I will go on writing essays and posting them here. Because it’s, for the most part, fun. Because I still have ideas. Because I’m still driven to test my own limits, to see if I can do it better, to produce something that I think is good. There’s stuff I’ve posted here in the past year that I’m not particularly happy with, but there are some other posts which, in my own humble opinion, worked pretty well. Where I managed to produce something that I was proud of, even when I reread it later.

And, after I’ve excluded all the picture searches, all the results of internet searches which weren’t what people wanted (even excluding those genuine hits on that one post about “the other 9/11) my efforts here have been read up to ten thousand times in the past year. That is something which continually awes and humbles me. To those who visit my blog regularly I extend my sincere thanks and hope that I can continue to produce essays interesting enough to keep you coming back here. If you’re new here, welcome and why don’t you take a little time to look through the archives? Behave the way you would in a good bookshop – take a few books from the shelves and have a look inside!

There are many who claim that the joy of any kind of creative endeavour is the act of creation itself. There is a lot of truth in that, but it’s not the whole truth. The other side of it is the process of sharing it with others, in giving them pleasure, in – let’s be honest about it – winning their approval too. For in every artist who exhibits a picture, every musician who performs publicly, every writer who publishes anything, apart from the joy in the creation and the personal belief in what they have produced and their desire to communicate, there’s something more basic, more primitive; that little girl or boy jumping up and down, shouting, “Look at me, look at me!” And hoping that the world will deliver responses like, “Oh yes, aren’t you wonderful!”

I’ll finish this with another quotation from the great Aldous Huxley, also taken from the Preface to his “Collected Essays” quoted earlier:

But “please do not shoot the pianist; he is doing his best.” Doing his best, selon ses quelques doigts perclus, to make his cottage upright say as much as the great orchestra of the novel, doing his best to “give all things full play.” For the writer at least, and perhaps also for the reader, it is better to have tried and failed to achieve perfection than never to have tried at all.

P.S. It has become part of the form of what I post here to finish with a piece of music. Feel free to listen to it or not as you will; I only want to explain that I see the music as a part of the essay I’m attempting. You may sometimes have to think about the connection but, I assure you, it is there, somewhere, even if only in a line or two in the lyrics. Some readers like to switch the music on before reading the essay – a good idea, I find. I would place the YouTube video at the start of the post, but this would mean that it would always be the image featured when the essay is shared on social networks or linked on other sites and that would, in my view, misrepresent the sense of what I’m trying to do here.

I would often like to post other music versions, but there’s a major war going on in Germany between most of the big record companies and Google (as owners of YouTube) over royalties, which means that an awful lot of stuff just isn’t accessible here – at least not by conventional, approved means! And sometimes the live recordings which are available have a charm all of their own …

Pictures retrieved from:

http://apfelhure.de/blogging.jpg

http://howtoblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/blogging.jpg

Advertising blogs: Entrecard

So, here I am again, two posts in twenty four hours and that is unusual. There is of course a reason for this; bear with me and I’ll try to explain.

Blogging is, when you come right down to it, an instrument of self-promotion. You have something to say, you want to say it to as many people as possible and so you put it on the web – otherwise it would be enough for you to tell it to your nearest and dearest. Part of it is, therefore, a version of the opera singer’s basic morning exercise; me-me-me-me-me-me-meeee! The problem is that there are over a hundred million bloggers out there in cyberspace, all singing a variation of the same exercise, a real cacophony for every potential listener (reader) surfing around the marvellous Vanity Fair which is the internet. So, how do you manage to stand out from all the others, what do you do to ensure that others – as many as possible – find their way to your blog, after you’ve told your family and friends about it?

There are all kinds of tips available on-line about increasing the number of hits your blog gets. Some of them are easy to do, some are complicated and time-consuming. It all depends, I suppose, how important it is to you and how much time and effort you want to put into it – and where you want to put that time and effort.

I started this project last February basically for myself; for fun, as a hobby (I really hate that word, it sounds so trivial for a description of something most of us invest so much of ourselves in, but that’s language for you!). I wanted to write and follow a feeling that I could do so in a fashion that readers would find interesting, informative and, perhaps even, good. And, so far, the feedback has been fairly positive and the number of hits on the site pleasantly satisfactory. So let me express, before I continue with this, a big thank-you to all of you who take the trouble to read what I write, particularly to those who keep coming back to read the new essays I post.

But nothing in life remains static, if you’re not moving forward you’re moving backwards, etc., etc., so I’ve been thinking recently about what I could do to increase the visibility of my blog, to increase my volume and melodiousness, if you will, in that huge choir of opera singers doing their me-me-me exercises. Or, put another way, my baby has grown up a little bit and I thought it was time for it to take a few more steps out into the virtual world.

I’d already done the obvious things like telling my friends, putting my URL on my various on-line profiles and sharing links to my posts on Facebook. But I felt that the time had come to do a little more and, having a few days holidays left before going back to work, started looking around for the best ways to do this. One of the things I came across was something called Entrecard.

If you are attentive, you will notice to the right of the text (actually, if I’ve got the length of the text here right, you should be near it now), under the list of “Followers” a new widget, a box with the bottom in black-and-gold and an “E” followed by the word “Drop”. Above this will be an image of some sort, which is actually a link to another blog. Do, by all means, click on it – after you’ve finished reading this, of course – and go and read it. For Entrecard is an advertising forum for bloggers, where they get the chance to publicise each other on their web-sites.

The whole thing is a wee bit complicated; if you want to know exactly how it works, I suggest you go to the following link: http://entrecard.com/blog/?p=1593 . And there you will also find the reason why I am putting up a second post within 24 hours, because, if I’ve done this right, then I’ll get five thousand EC credits for doing so which will enable me to do quite a bit to publicise this blog. (Unfortunately, there’s a deadline for all this which runs out tonight so I have to do it now.) That’s the theory anyway, how well it works is something we’ll just have to see.

It does mean giving up a tiny corner of control over my site, although, if I’ve understood Entrecard properly, I will have approval and a right to rejection of those bloggers advertising on my site, so I can promise you won’t be linked to pages plugging Scientology, or Sarah Palin, or Japanese porn. Indeed, Just Plain Tired …, the guy who’s there at the moment (http://justplaintiredof.blogspot.com/), is well worth a look – and that’s an unsolicited recommendation!

In this context, I want to emphasise that this blog is basically a labour of love, and I plan to continue it as a platform to publish stuff; I hope to spend most of the time available writing for it and not playing with it. Unlike many others, I’m not dependent on it to make a living so I don’t have to plaster it with ads. I’m not ruling out the possibility that the odd advertisement may appear here sometime in the future – I may be a pinko liberal with strong socialist tendencies, but this doesn’t mean that I hate the chance of making a little extra cash. But personally, sites that are filled up with commercial links and flashing pictures annoy me and so I would always ensure that such additions are tasteful, understated and don’t take from the basic character of the blog. So don’t worry, you won’t be confronted with an extra Welcome portal with the announcement, “Attempted Essays is proudly sponsored by Runalot, the laxative that keeps you going, day and night!”

Oh yes, and I won’t do Twitter, I don’t like it and am not interested in it.

(And finally, I should mention Molly, on whose site http://cblegacy.blogspot.com/ I first came across Entrecard. Thank you, Molly, your posts are always worth reading!)