Saturday 14 June 2014

So what do you want then?


 

I write this blog mainly for my own satisfaction, but part of that satisfaction is the belief, or at least hope, that some people read it. But sometimes it feels like standing in front of a classroom full of bored children or indeed ‘adults’ who would rather be playing with themselves in front of a pornographic video. With one honourable exception, (thank you, Jane), no-one writes in to congratulate or condemn. (It’s simondarragh@hotmail.com in case you hadn’t noticed.)

Perhaps you’re all voting with your feet, or rather mice? Well, Google does provide me with something called ‘overview’ which purports to show me how many people, and in what countries, are reading which pages, during the last hour, day, week, month, or ‘all time’. Early yesterday morning, for instance, it told me that so far that day three people had looked at the blog, of whom two had looked at the entry for the 12th of June this year, (the one about the swan in ‘Lohengrin’) and the other two had looked at the entry for the 11th of May 2011. Hmm. No wonder the founders of Google had trouble spelling googol.

That 11th of May 2011 entry, by the way, has for some time been looked at several times a day (if one is to believe Google), or 40 odd times a week. So I had a peek myself, and found that that day I had put in my English translation of a poem by Nikos Kavvadias. What should I conclude from that? My translations of Greek poetry are popular? Kavvadias is popular? Or that the word ‘lover’, which is in the translation, is often googled, so that people actually looking for something rather different flit briefly and impatiently past that page on their way to ‘Shoe lovers: the site for pedal-wear fetishists’?

Perhaps I’ll publish a list of things I could write intelligently, wittily, and eruditely about. (Oops! ‘About which I could write…’ etc.) It would be a very long list. You sullenly reticent people could copy it, tick things, and send it back to simondarragh@hotmail.com

But you won’t, will you?

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