Miscellany

Regarding the invasion of the Bot snatchers: Google Search Console provides a useful alternative to stats. It’s easy to set up and returns queries used to reach your site, as well as actual pages viewed, countries (sans bots!), and average position (the average position of your site in search results, based on its highest position whenever it appeared in a search). Interesting to the stats hobbyist. Simple and relevant.

In between books, having finished Audrey Magee’s “The Colony,” which takes place on an island off the coast of Ireland, involving two summer visitors at odds in purpose and reception, an English oil paints artist come to paint the cliffs and sea, and a French-Algerian linguist come to study the Irish language as spoken by the few locals. “The Troubles” are followed via transistor radio and interrupt but augment the plot chapters like newsreels before the main feature continues.

And so with nothing to read bunkside brought to bed Ferlinghetti’s “Pictures of the gone world,” Number One in the City Lights Books Pocket Poets Series. Originally published in 1955, I have the second edition, January 1995, sporting 18 new poems, which explains some of the references in poem number 34 (the poems are numbered, not titled). Here are a few lines from different parts of “34”:

“Surfers are Poets too…They too are looking for the perfect wave…the endless light at the end of the tube of time…These are not cyberpunks surfing through cyberspace / They are sailors who know that the sea like life has its rages…dashing the poem of your endless summer…”

In bed reading “34” aloud to Susan (for we both endlessly enjoy all things surfer and summer), it occurred to me that I might say that the poem illustrates why Ferlinghetti is a good but not a great poet and why I prefer good poets to great poets. But then I decided not to say it. But then here it is anyway, in miscellany style.

I had also brought to the queen bunk Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style,” previously mentioned here. Endlessly enjoyable, quite the study. The 2012 New Directions edition includes ten newly written versions of the original anecdote written by guest writers “in homage,” and it occurred to me I could add an 11th new version, titled A.I. But I have not done so, and probably won’t.