As some have noticed, blogging has been slow here at the stately Mead manor the last few days. I got in late yesterday from Lithuania, and today I somehow just didn’t have much to say. Tonight was also a culture night; I had tickets to Hamlet at the Metropolitan Opera. The singing was fantastic; the plot was insubstantial even by operatic standards. Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most depressing and least plausible plays. As Wendy pointed out in Peter Pan, they all die. Laertes dies, Ophelia dies, Claudius dies, Gertrude dies, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern die, Polonius dies, Hamlet dies. The death rate in the opera was a little lower; Polonius and Gertrude were still standing at the final curtain. But trimming the plot highlights the drama’s inconsistencies and some of the set pieces like Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be” soliloquy and the “alas, poor Yorick” graveyard scene don’t work very well.
There’s a lot more opera to come before the Met season ends in May. I’ve got tickets to Attila, Tosca, Traviata and Armida. Expect at least one opera blog before it’s all done.
Regular blogging should shortly resume. I’m working on a post looking back on the Iraq War which started seven long years ago this weekend. There are a few more posts in the planning stage. I haven’t quite finished my posts on the mess in the Middle East and I’ve been thinking about the ways in which good people with good hearts so often make such dreadful foreign policy. “Goo-Goo Genocidaires: The Blood is Dripping From Their Hands” is my working title; let’s hope I find something a little less confrontational before posting.
We are nearing some mileposts here at the blog. The end of March will mark six months of blogging. At our present pace, we’ll reach 500,000 hits sometime before then. That’s a much greater response than I ever expected. Thanks to all those who have linked to my posts or checked in from time to time. And finally, very soon the comments on the blog will outnumber the posts by a factor of ten to one. That means a lot to me. It means that readers are finding this an interesting place and a useful service. Even when the comments are critical of yours truly, I appreciate that you take the time to make them. And to those of you who send encouragement and support, thanks! It means more than you know.
As I wrote in the beginning, blogging is a relatively new literary form and I am still a very new blogger. This blog has already changed from its earliest days and will no doubt continue to evolve. If you have any thoughts or observations about how it’s changing or maybe some suggestions about how it should change going forward, please feel free to share them below. Blogs change the relationship between writers and readers; that’s one of the reasons I find this form so interesting. Your comments and responses help me figure out what the blog needs to do; keep them coming.