It occurs to me that I’d enjoy doing a State of the Blog for December, although with only 32 entries I have to give myself a pretty substantial break for being out of town. Still, my Gentle Readers contributed a total of 121 comments and only left ten of my entries commentless. So y’all have picked up my slack.\n
12 of my 32 entries were book reports, of which nine were new reads, so that’s all right. Among the others were a couple of the sort of posts I actually want to write, so that’s even better. On the whole, I think December was a pretty good month. In particular, if anybody missed it, I’d like to draw attention to my post on Purity<\/a> and the conversation following it. That’s the sort of thing that makes the blog worthwhile: I note something somewhere, write something about it that I still like, although a wide-ranging conversation brings my attention to a variety of aspects in a variety of ways, without anybody getting cranky (as far as I could tell). Now, if I could do that once a week, I’d be getting somewhere.\n That also brings to my mind something I’ve been thinking about in relation to the Koufax awards over at Wampum. My first reaction, well, my first reaction was to curse the lefty and his hated team. My second reaction was probably amusement that the award for bloggers of the left was named after someone who was only dominant for a few years, was average before, and was out of the business just after. It’s not a bad award for Blogovia, where it’s all about Peak Value. Anyway, my third reaction was that surely in a list of 160 nominees for “Most Deserving of Wider Recognition<\/a> there’s room for YHB’s little Tohu Bohu. I mean, don’t I deserve wider recognition? Ain’t I a blogger and a lefty?\n The thing is, though, that although I do dearly desire wider recognition in the sense that I want the ungrudging respect of admirable men and women, I don’t actually want much in the way of greater readership. Or, more accurately, I don’t want comments from hundreds of ignorant yahoos, or even hundreds of informed yahoos. I’m pretty complacent about the commenters, and given my druthers, I druther that Michael and david and metasilk and David and Nao and Chris and fran and Dan and Jed and Chaos and Irilyth and Amy and Wayman and all had a lot more free time to comment, rather than having an addition two dozen commenters. And I mean that only partially in the elitist my-friends-are-the-smartest-and-most-articulate-people-on-the-web sense, although it’s hard to imagine the tone being raised by another two dozen commenters. Mostly, I mean it in the sense that I actually know y’all, even though at least two of you I’ve never met; when I read a comment, I have a context to put it in, either through years of face to face conversations or through the occasional comments here and through your own blogs.\n Now, if anybody else wants to start commenting, I’d be happy as a pig in mud. If CRConrad chimes in from Finland, or alleged-Neal-Asher, or Sozadee, or quadratic, or anybody starts commenting frequently, I feel confident my mental ability can expand to include them. Gentle Reader, please don’t think I don’t want you to comment; I do. It’s that other guy that I'd rather not have. Really, it isn’t even him, but the aggregate of dozens of them that I see on Pandagon and Alas, a Blog, not to mention Eschaton. Which is to say, I want the wider recognition I so richly deserve, I just don’t want to be bothered by that recognition or have it affect my life in any negative way at all.\n Where was I? Oh, yes, the blog. Still without form, still void. Still how I like it. And still behind on vacation reading: I have four reports to write before I can pick up another book in good conscience. The rule, you see, is that the stack of completed but unreported books should not grow large enough that when it topples, I am at risk of injury.\n Thank you, It occurs to me that I\u2019d enjoy doing a State of the Blog for December, although with only 32 entries I have to give myself a pretty substantial break for being out of town. Still, my Gentle Readers contributed a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2558"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17262,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2558\/revisions\/17262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"