A Year of Blogging Dangerously

This is the one-year anniversary of my first ever blog post.

As Tamim Ansary wrote a few years back, "At last count (about a year ago) there were some 64 million blogs... I have to wonder: what do these 64 million people do for day jobs?"

Who knows how many blogs there are now? Mark Helprin in Digital Barbarism evokes how much more peaceful it must have been in Edwardian times, when correspondence routinely took weeks to arrive. There's much to be said for having less information to sift through.

But there are also advantages to the practice of formulating and broadcasting a few thoughts during the course of a chaotic week. Can the whole of a blog be more than the sum of its parts? Generally I'm overcome with gratitude that life affords me any time at all to write stories and novels -- blogging feels like a way of giving back. Which I agree makes no sense. But even so... this feels sometimes like a sort of cosmic debt repaid.

So happy Saint Patrick's Day, and what are you reading a blog by a limey for anyway? Go read Julian Gough on the state of Irish literature instead. Money quote -- "I must be a real bastard for translators, because increasingly I like to back-engineer scenes so that a crucial line of narrative, thrown up by the action, is also a line of poetry by Yeats, or a line of dialogue is also a line of Joyce, or Kafka, or is made out of Radiohead song titles."