Sunday, April 5, 2015

Diminishing returns





Recently I was at a retirement event, an art show closing, for a beloved University art professor. I have no objection to telling you her name, Joyce Lyons, and that she is a brilliant artist. She is especially good at trees, forests, the ground. She is very good at the ground. To my delight you could find her work online but none of it looks particularly good, and all of it is a false representation of the beauty of her work. I am delighted because I wickedly rejoice every time the great and terrible Internet falls short and proves incapable and we are all thrust back into the fleshly world.

At this event my wife and I were sitting at a table. I was trying to eat as many things as possible from the very appealing looking Italian Antipasti table, but in retrospect I wish I focused more on acquiring additional glasses of the Prosecco. The cushion of slight drunkenness would have mixed warmly with the event. We would have been delighted to remain alone at our table, but this Joyce Lyon person is one popular professor. No space stayed unfilled, and soon we were joined by a couple; an artist and a physicist. The artist was very extroverted, and we're usually reasonably polite anyway so discussion ensued. We went around informally, exchanging all our bona fides, chatting. The library came up and inevitably I was called on to dispense my bit of library wisdom, which mainly came down to explaining why the thing the artist wanted to happen at her library (a longer time to come pick up her requested items) was untenable (it makes the wait lists unreasonably slow and long).

Then the subject of my blog came up. 

Exciting!

"What is it mainly about?" I was asked.

"Mostly, these days, it's about how great it is."

"But if you just brag." The artist said "You will have no readers."

Looking back on this now, an alternate, strangely appealing response to this springs to my mind:

"There are infinite paths to blogging to no readers."

In the end, though, what I responded was "I guess that's the point."

I suspect they have not since checked in to see what all the fuss was about.






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