Ulterior Colors' First Anniversary

Anatomy of the Blog:

illustration: chart of the brain from the system of phrenology

When I first started this blog, I set myself a goal of posting once per week. Because I didn't quite trust myself to meet that goal, I usually posted twice a week, to assure a good average. The idea of coming up with fifty-two topics over the course of a year was overwhelming, but I hit that number at nine months. Counting all of the fingers and toes on this baby has been a joy, mostly because I didn't think I could.

One unexpected reward for me was seeing how far away from my little place in the world that some of my posts were caught. The ideas and works referenced in them hit their mark with individuals, not in a widespread manner by promotion, but like an arrow that was strung by the technology of the web. The world wants to be a receiver, and the communication wants to be received, and the two find each other, apart from my own hopes, intentions or attempts to manage it. In the blogging world of spambots, not every hit is legit, but some intentional ones that have come from countries outside of the U.S. are Brazil, France, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Romania, Austria, and Turkey. All I can say is, Hey, what's up, Canada?

As surprising to me as the formation of the blog itself is to see which posts are the most highly read. Often, it is my own poetry entries. That pleases me to no end to see that people still respond to an art form that is considered mostly played out, unappreciated, dead, or re-shaped and handed off to the music industry. In times past, poets were sometimes celebrated as the rock stars of their day, without a back-up band or cover art. Paper and ink and a quiet moment was all it took to engage with other minds. Slipping my poems into my blog felt like transporting bootleg moonshine, for my own indulgence. That people still want to sample poetry as much as any other art form should give us all hope for our human collective. It would seem that beneath the hoopla of entertainment and news cycles, the soul is still a heat-seeking missile, and unlike the universe, poetry is not winding down toward a heat death. It's possible that something of ourselves may escape the Laws of Thermodynamics and Black holes.

Photo image from U.S. News & World Report

And what if trade sow cities
Like shells along the shore,

And thatch with towns the prairie broad
With railways ironed o'er;—
They are but sailing foambells
Along Thought's causing stream,
And take their shape and Sun-color
From him that sends the dream.

                    -- from "World-Soul" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

photo image: statue of Antigone pouring a libation from her forehead

I'm primarily a fiction and poetry writer, and never dreamed I would write informal essays in addition to my other work. I dreaded writing formal essays in college, and there were so very many to slog through, especially in the Creative Writing field. I can only thank my past self for sticking with that program, in spite of nights filled with angst and confusion, trying to find examples of Existentialism in the Grapes of Wrath, or deconstructing the treasonous undercurrent of Virgil's Aeneid.  Why would I now assign myself this ongoing stream of a project?

I will let one of the best bloggers that ever lived answer that for me. From Roger Ebert's memoir Life Itself:

"Most people choose to write a blog. I needed to. I didn't intend for it to drift into autobiography, but in blogging there is a tidal drift that pushes you that way… The blog let loose the flood of memories. Told sometimes that I should write my memoirs, I failed to see how I possibly could. I had memories, I had lived a good life in an interesting time, but I was at a loss to see how I could organize the accumulation of a lifetime. It was the blog that taught me how. It pushed me into first-person confession, it insisted on the personal, it seemed to organize itself in manageable fragments… Some of these words… come pouring forth in a flood of relief".