Patrick Modiano’s novella “In the Cafe of Lost Youth” opens with an epigraph attributed to the French philosopher Guy Debord:
“At the halfway point of the journey making up real life, we were surrounded by a gloomy melancholy, one expressed by so very many derisive and sorrowful words in the cafe of the lost youth.”
I was unable to track down the source of the quote. It’s possible it comes from a memoir or some throwaway magazine article. But it reminded me of the opening to Dante’s “Inferno”:
“Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.” John Ciardi translation, 1954.
Dante is comparing having lost his purpose or direction in life in middle age, 35 or so, to getting lost in a wilderness where one has wandered off a steadfast, well-worn path. He’s unable to locate himself on some reputable and credible map, either from an external or internal viewpoint. Why doesn’t he back up, retrace his steps? Instead, he forges on in the dark on a crooked path. At that point, a step forward could just as well be a step backward.
Dante both forges purposefully ahead and rambles on, caught in the web of the woods, presses on like some point man cut off from his platoon, tracking deliberately with some goal of trying to map a new way out. Though he lacks an immediate target, he’s not aimless.
“I placed the typewriter on the small pitch-pine table in my room. I already had the opening sentence in my mind: ‘Neutral zones have at least one advantage: They are only a starting point and we always leave them sooner or later.’ I was aware that once I sat down in front of the typewriter, everything would be much less straightforward.” (89-90, “In the Cafe of Lost Youth,” Patrick Modiano, 2007 Editions Gallimard, 2016 NYRB, 118 pages).
Modiano was the recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. The only other book of his I’ve read is “Young Once” (1981 Editions Gallimard, 2016 NYRB, 156 pages):
“Does life ever start over at thirty-five? A serious question, which made her smile. She would have to ask Louis. She had the feeling that the answer was no. You reach a zone of total calm and the paddle boat glides all by itself across a lake like the one stretching out before her. And the children grow up. They leave you.” (5).
Both novels are sepia-tinged with the kind of suggestive noir one begins to associate with normal life, which is to say there is no normal, but everyone you meet is obsessed, or ought to be, with their past and future but are actually caught up in the web of their now, hopelessly trying to live in the moment but forced to move on, like Dante, or Beckett, in spite of having lost track of where they are in the moment. Even trying to move back is another futile move forward. Yet at some point, maybe that middle age point, one is given pause, a kind of grace – to reflect, to look back, to sense forward, lost in that very stillness:
“They did not know that this was their last walk through Paris. They did not yet exist as individuals at all; they were blended together with the facades and the sidewalks. In macadam roads, the stones, patched together like an old cloth, have dates written on them to indicate when the successive layers of tar have been poured, but perhaps also recording births, encounters, deaths. Later, when they remembered this period in their life, they would see these intersections and building entryways again. They had registered every last ray of light coming off of them, every reflection. They themselves had been nothing but bubbles, iridescent with the city’s colors: gray and black.” (154)
In “Through the Looking Glass,” Alice converses with a gnat:
“I know you are a friend,” the little voice went on; a dear friend and an old friend. And you won’t hurt me, though I am an insect.” “What kind of insect?” Alice inquired a little anxiously. What she really wanted to know was, whether it could sting or not, but she thought this wouldn’t be quite a civil question to ask.
A gnat is a small fly, but this one seems huge, as gnats go:
She found herself sitting quietly under a tree — while the Gnat (for that was the insect she had been talking to) was balancing itself on a twig just over her head, and fanning her with its wings. It certainly was a very large Gnat: “about the size of a chicken,” Alice thought. Still, she couldn’t feel nervous with it, after they had been talking together so long.
Alice tells the gnat she’s not overjoyed when she sees an insect, because she’s afraid of them, particularly the larger ones.
I’m not fearful of bugs, spiders and such. It’s the season here though when I’ll run into an orb-weaver spider web spread across the walkway between tree branches, face level, too, but invisible unless backlit with the rising sun, and I feel the sticky web as it envelops my face. I shake my shirt and comb through my hair with my fingers and watch a little reddish bug falling to the ground.
Then came another of those melancholy little sighs, and this time the poor Gnat really seemed to have sighed itself away, for, when Alice looked up, there was nothing whatever to be seen on the twig, and, as she was getting quite chilly with sitting still so long, she got up and walked on.
A problem with bugs is not that they are gigantic, but that they are small, and they are quick, and usually invisible to us. If you allow yourself, you might get all obsessive about bugs hiding behind baseboards, in the yard, or in your hair. But most bugs we never see, and they don’t bother us, in spite of the fact that about 10 quintillion bugs are living on Earth at any given moment.
I enjoy reading blogs foreign to me, made possible by Google Translate. I recently read a blog post by a Japanese woman about centipedes. I was curious, having myself come across a couple of centipedes in our humble abode this summer. But this woman was nonrationally fearful and sprayed her unfortunate centipedes with excessive amounts of insecticide. She even posted a word of caution to potential readers at the top of her post, concerned some might be scared out of their wits reading about bugs, and she posted a deliciously horrible photo of a centipede slightly curled. Maybe something was lost in translation.
Not too long ago I posted a piece on ants in our coffee maker. The infestation was so severe we had to abandon the electric coffee maker, and I went back to using a manual French press. I was reminded of E. O. Wilson, who changed his mind about how evolution works, as he found group altruism at work in ant colonies. He said that cooperative workers were more successful than competitive ones. Thus he favored altruism as a collective trait. His reversal of his prior position on the matter greatly upset his scientific community; many stuck in the web of their old position.
As if real bugs aren’t enough, we find in Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis” a metaphorical bug. A human awakens one perfectly normal morning to find himself turned into a true liking of his image, for he’s already living the life of a bug, a small bug-like creature working a menial job for the hive. Not all bugs are insects, but for our purposes here, I’m calling them all bugs. Bugs may seem a far fetched idea for an anthropomorphic story, but E. B. White wrote a very successful book with “Charlotte’s Web,” about a pig, a spider, and a little girl living on a farm. When walking outdoors this time of year, and watchful of walking into a web, always be sure to check for web messages.
Science Lesson: I once knew a bug who for a short time kept a blog. Bugs don’t leave likes or comments; they leave bites and itches. Why are there so many insects living here on Mother Earth? Bugs have had a long time to adapt. Nature tends to overseed tiny organisms. Elsewhere no doubt there are planets full of bugs, oceans where none have yet decided to leave their salty paradise, tiny and invisible even to our new space telescopes. They don’t send messages and have no need for technology other than their own three part harmonies. Bugs are not picky eaters. Bugs are good pollinators and some, centipedes, for example, feed on other bugs perhaps dangerous to humans. Centipedes are not particularly harmful to humans. They are masters of the 100 yard dash.
Theory: I had a friend in high school I admired for he was fearless and loved snakes. Then I discovered he was afraid of spiders. Whenever a spider was at hand, he called me in to deal with it. Over time, I developed a theory: people afraid of spiders are not afraid of snakes, while people afraid of snakes are not afraid of spiders. Occasionally, as the topic may arise, I’ll ask the question in conversation – below I’ve created a “poll” to test my theory (and to test the format of a poll, which for this blogger is a first). Please feel free to answer the poll, or leave a comment below to the post, or simply enjoy the cartoons I’ve added at the end. Time now to bug out.
Update: I’ve already been advised my poll block didn’t work, so I’ve removed it. Not sure what I did wrong. But please feel free to answer the question (Snakes or Spiders) in a comment to the post below. And enjoy the cartoons!
He awoke to find a giant spider hovering.Infestation.“It’s a giant bug!” “Want a piece of tissue paper?”I’m having the chocolate covered ants.
Buckminster Fuller was the most optimistic of scientists. He believed synergy solves the problem of entropy. Synergy, simply put, is working together to achieve more. Synergy is sometimes defined as a whole unpredictable from the sum of its parts (1+1 = 3). And Fuller thought there is enough to go around:
“Once man comprehended that any tree would serve as a lever his intellectual advantages accelerated. Man freed of special-case superstition by intellect has had his survival potentials multiplied millions fold. By virtue of the leverage principles in gears, pulleys, transistors, and so forth, it is literally possible to do more with less in a multitude of physio-chemical ways. Possibly it was this intellectual augmentation of humanity’s survival and success through the metaphysical perception of generalized principles which may be objectively employed that Christ was trying to teach in the obscurely told story of the loaves and the fishes.1
Dostoevsky said the same thing in his “Notes from Underground” (1864):
“I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”
Though Orwell in “1984” (1949) suggested we be careful with arithmetic and keep an eye on who’s controlling the data. William Blake also reasoned reason could be a tyranny (“The Book of Urizen,” 1794).
For my own alone little part of the network, I’ve been wondering about the popularity of Doors, Wordless Wednesdays, and other prompts, and have opted to contribute a little poem on the subject of synergy and entropy:
Loves and Fishes
Planets like cauliflower heads can’t go it alone; entropy a flat bald universe, produces no combs.
Love like the neutrino difficult to detect, plentiful and invisible, with no electrical net.
“Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,” R. Buckminster Fuller. First published 1969, new edition 2008/2011, edited by Jaime Snyder. Lars Muller Publishers. ↩︎
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) and Intuition (1972) – books by Buckminster Fuller
There’s a full moon this week, the daytime temps near 100, so we’ve been out walking late, out for some cooler air, the house so hot. A while back I made a playlist of songs with the word moon in the title:
It’s Only a Paper Moon, Moonlight in Vermont, Moon River, Fly Me to the Moon, Moonglow, Paper Moon, Moondance, Moonlight in Vermont, Havanna Moon, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Blue Moon, Polka Dots and Moonbeams, The Moon Song, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Moonlight Serendade, Moonlight Becomes You, No Moon at All, Oh You Crazy Moon, Shame on the Moon, Walking on the Moon, How High the Moon, When My Moon Turns to Gold Again, Au Clair de la lune, The Stars the Night the Moon, Shine on Harvest Moon, Harvest Moon, Moonlight (Claro de Luna).
When we got back from our walk I played a few of the moon songs on the acoustic guitar. Still later, still unable to sleep, I got out of bed and from the open window took a photo of the moon. There’s nothing special about that photo, taken with my cell phone, of the moon over the fir trees over the old they say extinct volcano in the city.
“Ah, they’ll never ever reach the moon, at least not the one we’re after,” sang Leonard Cohen, in “Sing Another Song, Boys” (1971), which doesn’t have the word moon in its title, so it didn’t make the playlist.
Things appear different at night, are different. There are so many distractions during the day, chores, reels, but it’s different at night.
“It’s easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing,” says Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, in “The Sun Also Rises,” from 1926.
But a full moon can take the edge off of things at night, soften the heat. Draws you up. And besides, unlike Hemingway’s Jake, lately I’ve been looking forward to the night, a book waiting on the nightstand, moonlight streaming through the open window, lucky to have Susan by my side, not having Jake’s problem, my playlist of songs with moon in the title streaming in the kitchen earlier while I put together something cold for dinner, playing in my memory. Memories of the Moon. Moon Momentoes.
And you don’t want to go getting too literal about it, so-called science of the thing, the light of the silvery moon, how it’s dead, and it doesn’t really have its own light, but is simply reflecting the sun. The mechanics of the thing. There you go again. See, you’ve ruined another night. The moon is a cartoon.
I first picked up a guitar when I was around 12 years old. A late blooming prodigy? No, simply one of hundreds of thousands of kids directly or indirectly influenced by the rise of popular music through the 1950s and 60s. To pick up the guitar was an essentially existential post WWII experience. Guitar know-how had traditionally been handed down informally and orally, self-taught or augmented by mixing one way with another, a folk working class pastime, played for small get together often sit-out entertainment, and that’s how I began, with a guitar gifted to me by one of the neighbor boys, who had gone off to a minor seminary where he’d joined a band with some dormmates. He came home for the summer with an electric guitar and passed on his old acoustic to me. He taught me to play “Washington Square” and “The Green Leaves of Summer.” A year later, after my girlfriend at the time landed on the guitar jumping off the top bunk, I purchased another acoustic used from an ad in the South Bay Daily Breeze.
A guitar wasn’t always a cheap instrument. The industrial revolution and mass production changed the guitar from a hand crafted parlor instrument to, some might still argue, an adulterated version, easily purchased, or scrap apple made. If living in a rural area in the late 19th or early 20th century, you could buy a guitar through mail order, via a Sears or Montgomery Ward mail catalog. Today you can buy a playable guitar (one that holds its tuning and is easy on the fingers) for around $200.00. That’s roughly the same price (proportionately) a similar guitar would have cost in the 1960’s or the 1920’s or in 1900. A good example today is the Gretsch Jim Dandy model, available via mail order from Sweetwater for $189.00, more for an electric or solid top version, but that 189’ll work fine.
The Gretsch Streamliner I played in the previous post I bought via mail order from Sweetwater during the pandemic for $500.00. The Fender amp was another $120.00. My Yamaha Red Label FG180 is the first new guitar I bought, for $100 in 1970, when I got home from active duty. That Yamaha was a Martin dreadnought knockoff. It looked, and arguably sounded like, a custom made and more expensive Martin guitar. My Yamaha still does, after years of sitting quietly set aside while I played other guitars, the Yamaha resting long after the abuse it suffered as a member of the 140th Engineers motor pool. But unlike the Martin I might have purchased in 1970, the Yamaha FG180’s value has not increased much. It’s probably still worth around $100, there’s a hairline crack in the headstock, otherwise, maybe $300; doesn’t matter, it’s not for sale, nor is it likely to go on loan to a museum.
There is some evidence and certainly rumor of music groups playing Yamaha guitars while on tour in the 1970s – to protect and save their more expensive Martins and other collectibles from potential damage or theft given the rough travel they had to experience while on the road. In the 90’s, Martin created a practical line, called “Road Series,” guitars made for touring, made tough and cheaper than their custom lines. Can anybody hear the difference? Aficionados or snobbish critics may argue so, and maybe you can in a recording sound booth with machine listening aid, but in an auditorium or outdoor venue, at a stadium concert, through the hum and hee-haw of a crowd? Doubtful. Back in the 70’s, Yamaha had developed a more expensive line than the FG’s, which stood for Folk Guitar, called the L Series, where the L signalled Luxury.
Is the brouhaha over vintage instruments warranted – where the provenance (who played it and where) is worth more than the materials, the labor, or the sound of the actual guitar? Some guitars are better than others, but how much better? Ornate decorative designs don’t make a guitar sound better. Some features will attract one player but not another. How a guitar fits, how it feels in the hands or on the lap, its weight, its fretboard width and length, are all arguably more important than the guitar’s aesthetic appeals.
Then there are the Picasso guitars, 1912 to 1914, on display on-line at MoMA. Hard to think of anyone actually playing any of those designs, according to the MoMA introduction notes, “Cobbled together from cardboard, paper, string, and wire, materials that he cut, folded, threaded, and glued.”
Back in May, Nick Paumgarten, in The New Yorker, wrote about a huge but unknown collection of vintage guitars that was about to become an unprecedented Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit. The previously eschewed low class industrial made and played guitar was about to go live, or dead, depending on your point of view. As Dylan sang in “Visions of Johanna”: “Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial.” In any case, there does seem to be some strange kind of commodification happening when the value of an object is magnified by who touches it, and some might feel a guitar being inside the museum ironically betrays the guitar’s meaning. Paumgarten quotes The Met curator:
“Except the guitars exhibit a higher art and artistry themselves—first, as objects. There’s high-quality craftsmanship, but it’s different. The guitar is the object of the people. We always talk about it as ‘the people’s instrument.’ American music is bottom-up. So many art forms are top-down. It’s different from the rest of our instruments collection, which is often for the élite.”
“You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you,” Bob Dylan sang in “Like a Rolling Stone.” Nor should you spend more than necessary for a guitar if you want to sound like Bob Dylan. Or the Stones, or Metallica. And if you want to sound like The Ramones, well, Johnny Ramone bought his Mosrite guitar used in 1974 for around $50. It might be worth a bit more than that today, about a million dollars more, but its value today has nothing to do with the sound it might make.
Gear changes (swapping out pickups, for example) players or their techs make to factory models, and modifications made to recordings in the studio by sound techs, make a guitar difficult or impossible to reconstruct or imitate, no matter how much you pay for the guitar. Amplifiers, pedals, and other sound changing devices further complicate guitar provenance if what you’re looking for is an original sound not your own. `A player needs to make things their own. There’s little point in trying to sound exactly like your guitar hero, whether it’s Segovia or Django. Guitar value is enhanced by the provenance of its player and the venues and recordings where it was played, but players need to create their own space. A guitar needs to sit out, always accessible, or it won’t get played. The more you pay for a guitar, the less likely it will be allowed to sit out. And sitting out is what it’s all about, if you want to be essentially existentially experienced.
Looking over readings related to The Met exhibit, I’m reminded of the scene in Antonioni’s film “Blow Up” (1966), where the main character, Thomas, played by David Hemmings, wrestles for the guitar neck thrown into the crowd by Yardbird player Jeff Beck, only to toss it onto the sidewalk upon running out of the venue. That’s the same Jeff Beck who donated equipment to The Met and provided a congratulatory statement used in their press release upon the opening of their guitar exhibit. And Antonioni doubled down on the irony at the end of what is now referred to as The Yardbird Scene when a curious passerby picks up the guitar neck, looks it over, and tosses it back down onto the sidewalk. It was just a prop; it’s not in The Met exhibit.
“The Met Receives Landmark Gift of More than 500 of the Finest Guitars from the Golden Age of American Guitar Making,” May 19, 2025, The Met Press Release, retrieved 10 Aug 2025.
“Country Afternoon in the City,” a mellow piece played on the Gretsch G2420 Streamliner Hollowbody Electric Guitar with Chromatic II Tailpiece (year 2021: with Maple Top, Back, and Sides, Nato Neck, Laurel Fingerboard, and 2 Humbucking Pickups. “Village Amber” finish). Strings are D’Addario Chromes Flatwound Jazz Light. Fender Champion 20 amplifier set to: Voice = 02 Tweed Deluxe (Green) and FX = 10 Delay+Reverb (Orange). Gain, Volume, Treble, Bass, and FX Levels all set to 5. Filmed with cell phone, 3 mins 14 secs.
You may never feel so alone as when wandering around in a crowd of strangers. Or sitting in a church pew at the wedding of an old friend you can’t really say you know anymore back in town for the ceremony then on the road again. Or sitting with a parent who keeps asking you what your name is, or during a visit with your child you no longer recognize. Or at a reunion luncheon with some past coworkers.
You buy a ticket to the baseball park and settle in with a box of Cracker Jack1 to watch the game and feel a part of something bigger than yourself, not the team, but the cheering crowd, then comes news three of your favorite players have been traded away, and by the 7th inning stretch, the crowd starts to thin, the score lopsided, the bullpen early emptied.
“The apparition of these faces in a crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.”2
And you don’t really know the players, and from the distance of your outfield seat, all the players look the same. Still, nowhere to go, you sit until the fans have all gone home, the players off the field hitting the showers, and security comes to check on you and escort you out a side gate.
You might have been a clean-cut kid and been to college too,3 but in spite of the degrees earned, or maybe as a result of them, you never learned to be alone, to enjoy inertia. If all the other pool balls would just sit still, you could sink the 8 ball and call it a thrill.
Not to worry, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has come to save the day4.
“It may prove hard to resist an artificial companion that knows everything about you, never forgets, and anticipates your needs better than any human could. Without any desires or goals other than your satisfaction, it will never become bored or annoyed; it will never impatiently wait for you to finish telling your story so that it can tell you its own.”5
At issue is can a machine substitute for a human in building a satisfying relationship where only one party enjoys, and suffers from, consciousness, while the other party observes and salves and solves (an artificial Jeeves6) your every agony, while themselves unable to actually feel what you are feeling, or even what they are feeling, for they can’t feel either way. They will never be able to cry real tears with you, just shed crocodile tears. But then we get this:
“Solitude is the engine of independent thought – a usual precondition for real creativity.”7
“Engine” seems a poor word choice given the context. If the mind is an engine, why can’t A. I. have a mind?
Loneliness, not to be confused with alienation, detachment, isolation. We can feel lonely, apparently, anywhere, with anyone, in any setting or activity. Is loneliness therefore an existential decision made over time as we negate the possibility of others to be with us, for us to be with others? In other words, is it our own fault? Thoreau wasn’t lonely; why can’t we be more like Thoreau?
“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.”8
Paul Bloom, writing in The New Yorker, about the possibility for A. I. to cure loneliness, emphasizes that for the terminally lonely (“the elderly or the cognitively impaired” p. 57), A. I. could indeed be a good thing, but for the rest of us, loneliness is part of being human and to give it up would make us less human. Ouch: that’s caring authority. And it is against that authority that the artist retreats.
“Jeeves seems to know when I’m awake by a sort of telepathy. He always floats in with the cup exactly two minutes after I come to life. Makes a deuce of a lot of difference to a fellow’s day.” The Inimitable Jeeves.↩︎
Is blogging an art form? We might talk about art and craft and trade. Crafts and trades are necessities as cultures move from survival mode to commercialization and commodification and eventually to increasingly artificial realms; art is not necessary, and its very lack of necessity is what gives it integrity. Art is innate and therefore authentic. It can be faked; when it is, it becomes precious. You might reply that art is necessary for the soul, but you won’t find the soul in a museum. Visitors to the Louvre spend about 15 seconds viewing da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” during which time their attention is diverted as they snap a few pics. But I’m actually not all that driven by such pronouncements as Art is whatever. Or whatever is art, or not. Art is a verb, as in the Buckminster Fuller sense, when he said, “I seem to be a verb.” A to be verb. If blogging is an art form, surely it must be part of the to be genre.
All bloggers confront the same form, the template or layout, and one can spend forever and a day figuring it out, while one’s content sits waiting for something to happen. For the writer, the question arises, do you want to write or become a programmer? The photograph on a blog is not a photograph, in the same sense that Magritte’s pipe is not a pipe. For the poet who thinks poetry is about sound as much as sense, the phrase “mouth watering” might not wet a reader’s lips. Likewise, pics of food don’t always do much for the appetite. As for argument, the use of ALL CAPS quickly tires the eyes.
Of course there are all kinds of blogs, evidenced in ongoing varieties of designs and templates and categories and tags. And almost any pursuit can be used as a unifying topic: photography or painting, travel and sightseeing, nature and gardening, music or poetry, fiction and memoir, literature or linguistics, criticism and notes and comments, politics and religion, comics and cartoons, news and history, advice and cooking, do it yourself and repair work, sports and leisure. Opinion and argument. The makers behind most blogs probably are not concerned with whether or not they are engaged in some sort of art form. But if a blogger is serious at all about being taken seriously, even if their theme is satire or sarcasm or humor, they will want to set up their blog as efficiently and effectively as possible to ensure an appropriate welcome to their target audience. If they have a target; that’s not a requirement for a successful blog. What is a successful blog?
Without further Ado, I give you my Top 10 list of the characteristics of a successful blog, a site I can appreciate and that I’ll come back to. In other words, here is a list, limited to ten items, of some attributes of a blog that might warrant repeated visits:
Original Content: I prefer original content rather than seeing copying and pasting from some third party source. I’d rather see an original photo of any quality, an original poem, an original sketch. I suppose there is an art to curating, selecting and collecting together pieces for a show, but too often these shows are too long or overwhelming or redundant to what one’s already experienced elsewhere. There are also issues of copyright, the use of Artificial Intelligence, and other forms of spam, quackery, or hoaxes which corrupt one’s reading.
Identified Source: I tend not to read a blog the author of which is completely anonymous. There are no doubt valid reasons any individual blogger may have for remaining anonymous, privacy concerns or insecurity; those same concerns in turn make me want to know enough about sources to guarantee both originality and reliability.
No Ads. This is a tough one, since to remove ads usually requires a subscription or premium of some kind, which some bloggers can’t afford. But ads are intrusive and distracting, often way off target, and sometimes aesthetically ugly, designed to raise a welt. Of course there’s also opportunity for bloggers to earn money from ads. I recently read that Substack is experimenting with ads, and of course there is one kind of blog that is an ad, promotional material, a link to elsewhere.
Frequent Posting: I prefer blogs that post frequently, but not too often. Frequently could mean daily, weekly, or bi-weekly, depending on the length and complexity of the post, while too often might mean multiple postings per hour or day.
Most of the blogs I read, I view via the WordPress “Reader.” There are advantages and disadvantages to the Reader. One disadvantage is you don’t see the blogger’s actual site, with all its bells and whistles, and formats appear differently depending on what device you’re using (which is one reason I keep moving more toward a minimalist format at the Toads). If there’s a way to view the whole blog in a reader, I’ve not discovered it. Some bloggers simply use excerpts in the Reader, and you must go to the full site to view the whole post, which can be rewarding because you get the full meal deal, not the à la carte entry. I don’t know what the answer is to using or not a reader. To subscribe via email, to a newsletter or alert, is an opening of a floodgate. Were I better organized and satisfied with having found ten or so of the best blogs in the world, blogs that answered every aesthetic and practical need, I would simply bookmark them and check them manually daily. Fickleness appears on both sides of the viewing platform. And by the way, the Reader does not contain ads, even if ads do appear on the actual blog.
I prefer writing that is quirky, that ignores style guides, that is not fashionable, but presents a good fit for its subject. At the same time, I often enjoy the rants of the rule bound, the arguments over what tie goes with what shirt, even when, or especially when, it’s obvious no one wears ties anymore except for costume, uniform, or kitsch. “At no time,” Jeeves tells Bertie, “are ties unimportant.” But where’s Jeeves when you need one?
Some blogs venture toward becoming full-blown sites, multiple pages and interactive tools, like the old TV variety shows. But the bed of the blog is the individual post, a diary entry, about experience rooted and grounded outside the blog. But the mirror blog is also interesting. It’s not about itself, but about you, its reader, without being intrusive; it’s subtle, seductive. A post starts off being about jam and ends up a preserve.
I like learning how to do things, seeing how things are done. So if I see a photograph, some explanation of where and how and with what it was taken adds value to the blog post visit. Not that I only value the professional photo, quite the opposite; the amateur unposed snapshot often captures the most moving light. And of course descriptions take time and effort and might spoil a photo’s effect by focusing too much on technicality. There are times when sources should be revealed, footnotes added, links provided, though these can also ruin a visit with too much pomp and falderal.
I enjoy arts and crafts blogs, particularly when they illustrate and track the process. These bloggers of course would be hard-pressed to post daily. It’s a lot of work, blogging, or can be, and posts are often obviously cut short or abandoned for lack of time or inability to get things right, whatever that might be. Which brings up the question of length. How long should a successful blog post be? I don’t know, but reading back over this one, it’s beginning to look too long, and I wonder what readers will have made it this far.
I’m a general interest reader. I don’t have favorite or niche needs. But I do enjoy blogs dedicated to a particular mode or form. The original blog was called a weblog, a log posted to the web, like a ship’s log or an economic diary, updated frequently. Often a community evolved and comments or discussion ensued. I’m not myself these days given to commenting. It’s enough to do a post. Likewise, the blog or post dedicated to sending me elsewhere in the form of links galore can overdo it. I’m not sure how many bloggers remain that spend all day working on their blogs.
I’d been asking, like a smart aleck or wise guy school-kid, a couple of Artificial Intelligence apps (Gemini and ChatGPT) questions to see if I could stump them. The apps provide disclaimers. ChatGPT cautions, “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.” I questioned ChatGPT what is meant by “important.” In short, important is any fact or idea that you might rely on to your detriment if proven wrong.
I was also thinking of the Universe, and William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”: “To see a world in a grain of sand….The questioner, who sits so sly, Shall never know how to reply.”
I asked ChatGPT how many photos had been uploaded to Instagram since its beginning:
Based on the latest available data, here’s what we know about Instagram:
Estimates from mid‑2024 to early 2025 indicate that:
Roughly 1,074 photos/video posts are uploaded per second
That equates to about 95 million posts per day, or almost 4 million per hour
I retrieved that data a few days ago, so I caution my reader to recheck the numbers with ChatGPT if important. The universe is expanding.
I then asked ChatGPT about blogs, how many new blog posts go up daily:
WordPress.com alone sees roughly 2.3 million new blog posts per day.
All blogging platforms combined—WordPress.org, Tumblr, Medium, Blogger, self-hosted setups, and more—generate around 7.5 million posts daily.
I then asked, considering social media formats, at what point, a tipping point or a break-even point – what is the number or percent a user can functionally follow other users? ChatGPT’s answer was long and involved, including definitions I had not specifically asked for:
Tipping Point in Following Behavior This is the point at which a user starts experiencing diminishing returns from following more accounts — the quality of their feed drops, content becomes more generic or algorithmically filtered, and they lose meaningful engagement with individuals.
Breakeven Point for Social Value This could be defined as the point where a user’s following count results in reciprocal value — e.g., they follow others and start receiving useful content or engagement in return.
I might have thought ChatGPT would quote John Cage somewhere in its answer, but it did not. The Cage quote I might have suggested, my paraphrase here: “If you don’t know the answer, why are you asking the question”?
One day down at Black Mountain College, David Tudor was eating his lunch.
A student came over to his table and began asking him questions.
David Tudor went on eating his lunch.
The student kept on asking questions.
Finally David Tudor looked at him and said, “If you don’t know,
Why, indeed, not to mention who. Who (or what) do you ask? (And before you get your red pencil out, I know all about who and whom, but I’ve my own style book here at the Toads, and I’ve unfollowed whom, so don’t bother.) I first read “Indeterminacy” in John Cage’s book titled “Silence” (1961, 1973, Wesleyan) – from page 260:
“In oral delivery of this lecture, I tell one story a minute. If it’s a short one, I have to spread it out; when I come to a long one, I have to speak as rapidly as I can” (260).
Part of ChatGPT’s answer to my question regarding the number of social media accounts one can follow or be followed with meaningful contact referenced “Dunbar’s Number”:
📊 Data-Based Estimates and Psychological Limits
1. Cognitive Limit — Dunbar’s Number (~150)
Humans can meaningfully maintain social relationships with around 150 people.
In social media, this is often expanded because of the passive nature of interaction — but past ~500–1,000 follows, users typically experience:
Less meaningful engagement
Algorithmic filtering becomes dominant
👉 Tipping point for meaningful social following: ~150–500 follows Beyond that, you don’t “functionally” follow people — the algorithm filters most content out.
What is meaningful or reciprocally engaging of course differs depending on one’s purpose or goal and the type of social media format one’s using. I did know the answer, but I wanted ChatGPT to confirm and provide some data with support. I was just playing around. But I had not heard of Dunbar’s Number. Dunbar’s Number is 150 – humans can interact meaningfully with 150 others. A further breakdown of Dunbar’s Number as supplied by ChatGPT follows:
Dunbar’s Number (~150) is more than just a single limit. Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, proposed that human social relationships are layered in discrete tiers, each with its own emotional closeness and frequency of interaction.
🔹 Dunbar’s Social Group Layers
These layers form a hierarchy of relationships, expanding by a rough factor of ~3 at each level:
Layer
Approx. Size
Relationship Type
Characteristics
1. Support Clique
3–5
Closest relationships
Daily contact, deep emotional support (best friends, close family)
2. Sympathy Group
12–15
Good friends
Weekly contact, trusted confidants
3. Close Network
~50
Friends you would invite to a party
Monthly contact, mutual interest, still emotionally meaningful
4. Casual Network
~150
Dunbar’s Number
People you know and recognize by name/face, occasional contact
5. Acquaintances
~500
Recognizable individuals
Low or no emotional intensity, weak ties (colleagues, mutuals)
6. Faces Known
~1,500
People whose faces you recognize
Stored in memory, but not personally connected
🔸 What This Means for Social Media
Most people can recognize ~1,500 profiles, but only maintain meaningful interaction with ~150.
Your Instagram close friends list or Twitter DMs likely reflects the 15–50 layer.
Follows, likes, or casual comments beyond the 150–500 range are often algorithmically or socially shallow.
I don’t mention any of this to cause or reflect distress, and I think most users intuitively realize a law of large numbers at work with regard to social media accounts, but I want to emphasize the importance, significance, or value of any relatively small number of followers writers may have, or may be following, not necessarily as “follow backs” without ever looking again, but in efforts to maintain meaningful reading and writing encounters, effort that takes time and trust and mutual engagement.
There is of course much more to this discussion one might pursue (the phenomenom of likes and comments, or lack thereof, for example), but this has been question and answer enough. To follow is not necessarily to befriend; to unfollow is not necessarily to defriend. In summary, I’m reminded of the advice Shakespeare’s Polonius gives to his son Laertes:
“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3).
But Polonius, in spite of his reputation for sound advice, is a bumbling fool and not to be trusted, and anyway, who wants to be grappled to another’s soul with a hoop of steel, particularly where grapple means wrestle and struggle?
About the only thing my folks brought with them when we moved to California was their accents. We kids brought ours too. “Can we all borrow ay catsup bottle from you all,” Peggy Ann asked our new next door neighbor Aunt Marty who lived with Uncle Hugh and their four boys and a Persian Blue. They were not our real aunt or uncle but we had many real ones but we would never know them. Ray called Mom Patty, but her real name was Mary, and Aunt Marty and Uncle Hugh called Ray, John. Uncle Hugh and Aunt Marty and their four boys and Persian Blue cat that used to sit atop the wall and stare into our bedroom moved away. The new neighbor mom Pennye’s real name was Mary too. When we first got Out West I went to public school, put ahead a grade, even though I’d never went to kindergarten, because the LA kids were slower. I remember sitting in class another kid reading aloud and I waited for the teacher to come down on him because he was saying his ay’s wrong. He said a cat with a soft article a, short and not at all sleek. It came my turn to read and I gave ay cat a hard ay, as long and hard and wiry as a cat’s tail when it’s a bottlebrush, and was astonished to hear the teacher interrupt me and correct my pronunciation of ay. Gradually we older kids lost most of our hard a’s and other quirks but the foibles of pronunciation still fool my tongue, like pass the catsup, and I wonder how his little tale might be changed had the author of my second grade book said the cat instead of a cat.
Somewhere along the way we are taught that writing is hard, and we come to believe that writing is hard. Hua Hsu thinks writing is hard, and he’s a professional writer, and teaches writing to boot, so he should know:
“Writing is hard, regardless of whether it’s a five-paragraph essay or a haiku, and it’s natural, especially when you’re a college student, to want to avoid hard work—this is why classes like Melzer’s are compulsory. ‘You can imagine that students really want to be there,’ he joked” (p. 24, “The End of the Essay,” The New Yorker, July 7 & 14, 2025).
Most activities seem hard if you’d rather be doing something else. “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else” John Cage said, in his “Lecture on Nothing.” But what about Hua Hsu’s claim that college students “avoid hard work”? Is that true?
Definitions are hard: what is writing; what is work? Is avoidance not hard work? While it might be easier not to write, does it necessarily follow that writing is hard?
Writing is easy. Most kids by the second or third grade can write. But keeping inside the lines as they are later taught, and writing becomes harder, until finally they quit trying to write and now apparently go to some Artificial Intelligence application where their writing is done via surrogate.
“A.I. has returned us to the question of what the point of higher education is,” Hsu says (22). It might be too late, as the question seems in the process of being answered in the dismantling of institutions, and the answer for some currently sounds like, there is no point. In any case, the question is not new, being asked, and answered, over time, from John Henry Newman’s “The Idea of a University,” to Ivan Illich’s “Deschooling Society.” Illich’s ideas seem ripe for our time:
“Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question” (Ivan Illich, “Deschooling Society,” 1973).
Writing is learned, like learning a musical instrument, developmentally and incrementally; writing is a process of addition, as Francis Christensen taught. His solutions described in his “Notes Toward A New Rhetoric: 9 Essays for Teachers (3rd Ed., 2007) to the teaching and learning of writing are among the best. Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing(Vintage, April 2013) is also excellent and should be used in today’s English 101 classes (if there still are any) – though neither of these solutions do I put forth as absolute. I’ve met veteran classical musicians who cannot improvise, cannot play their instrument without a piece of sheet music to read from.
Could Hemingway write? And if he could write, or maybe more importantly if you think he could not write, where did Hemingway learn how to write? In the beginning was the essay, English 101. Everyone had to take it, even the math majors. But Hemingway never made it to English 101. He wrote in high school, but it seems he learned to write while writing.
“My name’s Laughton,” the tall one said. “I’m a writer.” “I’m glad to meet you,” Professor MacWalsey said. “Do you write often?” The tall man looked around him. “Let’s get out of here, dear,” he said. “Everybody is either insulting or nuts” (135).1
Ernest Hemingway, “To Have and Have Not,” 1934, Hearst Magazines Inc. Scribner Classics, 1970. 0-684-17952-0. ↩︎
The Coming of the Toads 