Blog 2

This is my second post labeled “blog.” I wrote the first one on May 30, 2010 and I titled it “Blog 1.” That’s not too adventurous, I now realize, but I was feeling my way at the time. This blog is number 128 and I want to give it over to reflecting on my first year of blogging.

Since May 30 of last year, I have written about a third of a post a day. When I think that this is something that was added to a life that already had a lot of things in it, that seems to be a lot. I have written more about politics than anything else (27); I guess that’s not all that surprising. Posts with religious topics come next if you combine the biblical studies (10), the Christian praxis (7) and the Christian theology (4). That gets you to 21 “religious topics.” The label “Words” is next at eleven. You can get another eleven if you combine Kiddie Lit, movies, books, books and movies, and reading. As you can see, I struggled with topic names.

I was completely surprised by the availability of a label “Saturday Evening Post.” It did occur to me eventually that a post I put up on Saturday evening was a Saturday Evening Post, so I started calling them that.

I routinely go fishing for pictures, now, to add to all the words. They are remarkably easy to find. In the most recent post on emotional intimacy, I typed “emotional intimacy” into Google and got a lot of pictures to choose from. Virtually any biblical account has a lot of pictures, mostly done in romantic styles. Politics is great for pictures: I put both Paul Ryan and Kathy Hochul in the most recent one. It was almost easier to put them in than to leave them out.
So what, if anything, will be new in the next Blog Year?

The best answer is that I don’t really know. I find that I am much more responsive people who write and say, “Yeah, but what about THIS?” Or, “That was interesting. Let’s have more about that.” One reader characterized my style as “jolly and mordant.” I loved that. Many more readers have characterized my style as terse and difficult. That presents me with a difficulty. I keep my posts fairly short by writing concisely and formally; I use a lot of parallelism to keep the structure clear. I provide labels for each new section, as a rule. Those, together, don’t do the job that needs to be done.

What would do that job, is a lot of examples. But examples are long and posts are short. If I really thought I could carry a reader through 7953 words rather than 2651 words—the length of my most recent post on emotional intimacy—I would do it. But 8000 words seems like a lot of words to me and I suspect that it is a price higher than the traffic will bear.

Ah well.

I’m going to play with my ten pages just a little. I’m going to change books and movies and music into “Arts.” Besides grouping them better, I like the idea that just as there is an art implicit in the book or the movie or the symphony, so there is an art in how to read a book, to see a movie, and to hear a symphony. And by “Arts,” I hope to put both kinds of endeavor into the same category.

I don’t have a favorite post. Some were easy to do; they nearly wrote themselves as I watched. Some were really hard to do, but those were satisfying when I got to the end of all the wrestling. I think the Love and Marriage ones were hardest to do. I think I’m still changing the shapes of some of the categories. In politics, by contrast, the categories are nicely stable.
I hope to write a post called Blog 3 on May 30, 2012. We’ll see.