This is my hundredth post since 16th
August 2011. For two years before that,
while still working in Cambridge, I wrote a blog called World
and Time, which began life as a way of bringing Madingley Hall’s
programme of courses to the notice of a wider audience. I’m not sure it was
particularly successful in this, but keeping a blog became for me a way of
reflecting on how my interests in literature and teaching, Cambridge and Venice,
architecture and stained glass have helped to shape the life I lead now. In my
introductory post I wrote the following:
'Who am I writing this blog for? For my
students past and present; all those who have taught me more than I have taught
them, and with whom I have had great pleasure talking about why writing matters
and reading matters just as much; for students I have yet to meet; for friends
and colleagues; for fellow teachers of English; for anyone interested in what I
have to say, even if (particularly if) they don’t agree with me; for myself –
on the ‘how do I know what I think till I hear what I’ve said?’ principle.'
When I retired from Cambridge, I wanted to
stay in touch with these same students, colleagues and friends – some of whom
had been rash enough to ask me to keep writing. So I called my new blog (the first post of which was published on the
same day as my last post for World and
Time) simply Adrian Barlow’s Blog,
in the hope that people would find it easy to track down if they wanted to. So
it has proved, and the joy of blogging for the past four years has been hugely
enhanced by the number of new friends I have made, and old friends with whom I
have reconnected. I have been amazed by the popularity of my blog: it’s
currently receiving well over 100 visitors a day: not exactly ‘going viral’, I
admit, but readers come not just from the UK but from the US, Canada, Australia
and New Zealand, and more recently from Russia too. This has led to the only
conscious change in the way I have written: at the outset I assumed all my
readers would, broadly speaking, have the same frames of reference that I have;
more recently I have tried (unobtrusively, I hope) to give a bit more context
when introducing people, places, books etc., that may not be familiar to all.
I had written about blogs before I started
to write my own. In my book World and Time: Teaching Literature in
Context (C.U.P. 2009), I included a chapter entitled ‘Essays and blogs:
Woolf, Carter and Beard’, in which I tried to find links between the way three
writers I admire - Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter and Mary Beard - address their readers.
‘The blog,’ I wrote,
… is a
phenomenon already shifting our perception of how ideas, opinions and prejudices
can be shared and expressed in print – even if in cyberprint. Curiously, it has
led to a revival in the art of the conversational essay: everyone who writes a
blog tries, consciously or otherwise, to shape their prose in such a way as to
get across effectively what they want to say and, in doing so, to give an
impression of themselves as someone participating in a conversation.
My childhood introduction to the art of the
conversational essay was Charles Lamb’s ‘Dissertation upon Roast Pork’, and I
have been a fan of Lamb’s work ever since. It pleases me very much that a piece
written for World and Time in 2010, ‘Charles
Lamb and Cambridge’, led to an invitation to give a lecture (‘Lamb and
Cambridge: Cambridge and Lamb’) to the Charles Lamb Society in London earlier
this year. I’m pleased, too, that going to London to deliver this lecture
prompted me to compose one of the posts I am most pleased to
have written: an impromptu meditation on London, Lamb, and the poetry and people
to be found in Queen Square. But before I paused in that secluded square on my
way to give the lecture, I had no idea that before nightfall I’d have written ‘In
London, with Charles Lamb’.
Later in my chapter on essays and blogs, I
reflected on the significance of the term ‘post’:
You post a blog.
And this suggests two things: not only sending it by mail as if it were a
letter that someone would open and read at the other end, but also pasting it
on a wall like a poster so that any casual passer-by can read it [….] Posters
are general, aimed at a wide audience who may or may not take any notice.
It is one of the pleasures of blogging to
discover that people have taken
notice, and have sometimes been interested, moved or irritated sufficiently by
something I have written to post a reply, email or write directly. You get far
more feedback to a blog than to a book, in my experience. I treasure a message of thanks sent by someone working in the Janitor’s
Department of Alcatraz. But my thanks to all who have ever got in touch after
reading my blog.
This, however, will be my last post. 100
not out seems a good score with which to retire, if you’ll forgive the
cricketing metaphor. Over the past four years, a few pieces have written
themselves at a single sitting, but I find I’m spending longer planning,
writing and editing them now, for each one has to be just 1000 words. I still
enjoy this, greatly, but I don’t want my posts seeming laboured to those who
kindly read them. Besides, the book I’m now writing - Kempe: Life and Legacy - presses insistently. Some friends have suggested I publish a
collection from my blog. I’ve been tempted; I even chose a title, Short Measures. But blogs, I have concluded, are best left in their
native element, which is cyberspace.
Adrian Barlow
[illustration:
an urn inscribed with the words of William Blake’s poem ‘He who binds to
himself a joy’. My post about this poem, Short
Measures (i): William Blake and Eternity’s Sunrise, has been by far the
most visited page of my blog.
www.adrianbarlowsblog.blogspot.co.uk
will continue to be found at its present
address, and I am compiling an inventory of all my past posts, if anyone cares
to revisit them. I hope to publish this online
very soon.
Text and illustration © the author
