Missing Hours

Down. Oh dear. After 20.5 hours without access while "maintenance" was being done, this little whatsit of mine came back. Not whole, at first, but back. About a week's worth of nonsense and doodles, and one longer bit of chin-wag were missing still for some hours. Eventually, even those that went astray, came back, only a bit garbled in insignificant ways, easily corrected. In fact, everything I though lost, has actually come back now more than once, one clerihew in draft reappearing no less than three times, which was disconcerting at first, and then made me feel ever so much better. See? Nothing lost forever. But, for awhile there, when I could not access any of the material that appeared to be suspended in some kind of limbo between publication online and nowhere at all, I could, rather maddeningly, see some of it -- out there in the ether -- by searching for a title elsewhere online. There they were, my little rhymed jokes and the rest, ascribed arightly and all to me, but with nothing really there; no content and no history beyond the name. This was hopeful. However, until I had access to the point at which this stuff of mine was again under my control, I was a little frantic.

As I've said, now everything is fine.

It is important to note that the site did make information available to me throughout, did fix the problem, whatever it was, and did restore everything that I was afraid had been lost. I should also mention that this had never happened before. On the rare occasions heretofore when any maintenance work has required restricting my access, notification has always come well in advance, the inconvenience has been minor, and nobody the wiser, frankly. This service remains free -- important to emphasize that, I think -- and, this one instance excepted -- so simple and reliable that even I can use it. Imagine that.

So why then, do you suppose, I panicked so, at the thought that I might have lost even the few trivial entries that threatened, for a little while, to drop into the void? In the first place, I'm not very sophisticated about the way the magic computer box and the interwebs all work. I panic, at least a little, every time I hit "enter" unwisely, open an email from an unfamiliar address, look at pictures of naked men. One would think that by know, doing this sort of thing daily, I would be better equipped to cope with a minor crisis. Not true, I'm afraid. I've been driving a car for a dozen years now. Still wonder every time I get behind the wheel how on Earth the machine manages to go forward pretty much whenever that's the direction I intended. Frankly, I don't want to know how machines work, I just want them to.

I would be lying if I said I was not a little proud of even the least of my efforts here. Perhaps not every one, were I to go back and have another look. Some I know are rather shoddy goods. That is not the point. There are by now a few things I've written here that I would preserve, but the chief source of my pride is less in having done any one thing here well, than in having continued to do this, whatever it is, almost every day, one way and another. None of what went missing could, by even the kindest surmise, be thought to be an irreplaceable loss to either literature or art if never recovered. I'm not such a fool as to think, by dithering away about books and such, every night or nearly, that I might have made something that will last. Even if I believed in writing that way, or thought myself capable of such writing, I don't think "publishing" a blog would be the best way to go about staking such a claim, even now, do you? At even the best estimate of my most popular post, I think I'm reaching just about the readership for which I might ever hope. In fact, I'm delighted to discover that I've found any readers at all, bless you. There may be a couple of very dear, devoted friends who might eventually notice this little light of mine going out, but even in the best of times, it might take quite awhile before anyone noticed other than me. But then, as with all such blogs, diaries and the like, for me, I'm ultimately rather the point, at least to me.

One other consideration, being the thing I tell myself when discouraged, overworked or overwrought, would be that I do flatter myself, in my own very little way, that at least by doing what I do here, I contribute something to the preservation of the best books. That sounds rather grand, but all I mean to suggest is that by quoting Mark Twain -- and not just contributing to the seemingly endless online recycling of the same weary quotes of Mark Twain -- by typing that name with some regularity and sending it out again, and again, and in the company of Johnson, and Lamb, Thackeray and Dickens, I add to the happy noise. I don't know of but a very few, documented instances when, by means of this blog, I've actually induced someone to go and read Twain, or Dickens or any of the great writers and poets whose names I so frequently bandy about here, as though I knew any of them well enough, or my readers, to insist. I have yet to experience what it might mean to have influence in such matters much beyond the friends I knew well before I ever took this business up. What I mean to say is something simpler, and more important.

I believe sincerely that while the means by which some people access literature may be changing, that human beings will always have need of literature and find a way to get at it. More substantial commentators are forever lamenting the "death" of the book, and the failure of poetry, or the novel to thrive in the midst of this latest technological revolution. Headlines in otherwise respectable publications, online and off, are forever announcing the very end of traditional publishing, of the bookstore, of reading. It's all such bullshit. If anything, the changing environment would seem to me to be encouraging all kinds of truly exciting new innovations and experiments. Access to publishing books in both new and more democratic ways is happening all around us now, every day. How anyone can say that fewer people now read, when literacy rates world wide must be higher now than at any point in human history, when more and more people communicate by means of text, when more and more people have access to greater and ever greater collections of information and art than ever before, well... it's just silly, to talk about the disappearance of any of it.

The one thing about which I do worry, the thing I aim in my eccentric way to help prevent, at least insofar as I am able by doing this to do anything at all, is that even on the miracle and marvel that is the Internet, one sees entirely too little of entirely too much that is better than what most people would seem to have any interest in reading. I don't say everyone ought or needs to read a poem by Walter Savage Landor, or that millions of people haven't led perfectly productive and satisfying lives without once opening a book by Denton Welch. I do say that unless those of us who appreciate such things regularly assert their superiority, as art and experience, to videos of kittens playing piano, or gossip columns about naughty starlets, or romance novels, or the collected works of J. K. Rowling, then the one very real risk I do think we may be running, in so many people just nattering away about nothing much that matters, is that we may someday not remember, many of us, most of us, what a poem can be, or a novel, or art, or that some things matter more than others. If we someday do indeed have access to just about everything ever written, while that's an awesome development, I do worry that we may forget some of what we might best remember.

So while nothing that I might have lost and regained during that missing day would qualify as important in any way of itself, I'm glad the missing bits and pieces of this blog came back, because I'm convinced that every opportunity afforded me here, to add a mention of bookstores, to reading Thackeray, every time I get to say Charles Dickens name, or type the word "book," I'm keeping a light on. That's all. May not add much to the general enlightenment, but it keeps me off the streets. That's something.

Glad to be back then.