It has been a few weeks since I last posted anything on this site, not since before the Christmas and New Year holidays, and here we are well into January 2014.
When I started this blog, as said a few times already, the purpose was to trawl through my backlog of old essays, stories, reviews, poems and miscellaneous pieces, most of them unpublished, some of them printed but in very small and obscure places, and occasionally bring up to date or even create something new. It had been suggested to me that by doing so I would establish an archive of all this work--some of it going back more than thirty years--which would be accessible in some sort of orderly form for posterity. Yes, at my age that is something I think about, that, and my posthumous place in the world of letters, should such a world continue to exist in the electronic-digital age, whereas my mind and creative juices remain way back in the literary and print stage.
Assuming that there was actually enough of that old material to keep me going for years to come, in my enthusiasm and naivite, I began to put things into this space not just everyday, sometimes more than that, and in clusters and clumps of three, four and more items. Then suddenly I realized that what I was dredging was not a bottomless pit at all. It became harder and harder to find prose, poetry and formless ramblings. Fiddling with combinations of words, trying to rack my own brain for titles of long lost stories or essays, eventually near the end of last year (2013) I had to admit, the well was dry.
What I could vaguely recall as written many decades ago was simply not to be found inside my computer's memory system, and probably had never been there at all, since for so long I pounded on typewriters or even handwritten my work before passing it on to some departmental secretary at the university. The jolly idea of scanning faded, yellowy pieces of paper, in smudgy handwriting or unclear typed versions, just doesn't appeal any longer. Someday perhaps--big laugh now, please--my future biographers will have to go through the box-loads of papers not yet tossed into the rubbish heap and undertake this labour of love for themselves.
All of which brings up the fact that if there is continue to be this Blog, then new material will have to be written. At the moment, I am actually doing a fair amount of writing, in the sense of preliminary drafts for three or four projected books to be sent off to publishers, perhaps one this year. Whether or not to place some of these early drafts on to the blog site does not seem like an easy choice for me to make. On the one hand, it would be a perhaps pleasant exercise in seeking feedback from readers--yet, as there is still only one official "follower" and a vast public of four or five, on very good days twenty, this seems a pointless opportunity; on the other hand, precisely because thesituation of "fit audience though few", as John Milton has said, the idea remains attractive.
So maybe I will and maybe I won't. If I have any response to this, it will help me make up my mind.
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