Personal Stuff

Up until fairly recently, if someone had asked me what the best year of my life has been so far, my answer would probably have been my senior year of college. It was covered with an air of beautiful melancholy due my own aimlessness and non-starter romance, but though I felt I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, it was mixed with friendships, opening new hobbies, and learning new things. There have been ups and downs since then but with little real progress until last year, and though my various projects are still in progress I’ve done enough in 2018 that I can say that, for the first time in years, I have a reasonable sense of optimism about my future. I’ll start this year-in-review by talking about Everything is Oll Korrect!, then end it with some personal notes.

Once again, it’s time for me to look at the past year in bibliophilia. In 2018 I read thirty-six books, down from 2017’s forty-two, though considering this was also the year I started graduate school I’m actually pretty happy with that number.

Every year I like to take a look back on what I’ve read and size up my literary diet for the past twelve months. Normally I do this on Twitter, but I’m going to start doing it here instead so it’s more permanent. Self-indulgent? Yes, but I don’t care. I’m the absolute monarch of my web log.

What shall I render to the Lord, for all the things that he hath rendered to me? Things continue to improve here at Everything is Oll Korrect! This is the third year in a row that views have been up, and quality, if I may say so myself, has held up pretty well. I wrote forty-six posts this year, which is the most since 2012, when I had a weekly schedule. There’s also a major change up ahead for me personally, but we’ll get to that.

Two years ago, I wrote about an excellent little book called the Hyakunin Isshu, a Medieval Japanese poetry anthology of one hundred poems, specifically five-line tanka, each by a different poet. At the time, I started wondering if, perhaps, I could memorise that many poems. If that sounds overly ambitious, keep in mind that this is something people actually do for a game called “karuta,” which is a card-matching game based around the poems. So, it’s certainly feasible, but I’m unsure about memorising the Hyakunin Isshu specifically. As much as I love the book, I do like some poems more than others, and besides, I’d like to write about the experience as I go. Each of the hundred poems, though, has already been covered, and covered very well, at this excellent blog.

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by- wait, that’s a different story. Mine’s a little less exciting than that, I’m afraid.

I first heard of Xenophon and Anabasis while at college, in Bl. John Henry Newman’s great book The Idea of a University. In this particular essay, Newman gives an illustration of a poor applicant for university studies by giving a dialogue between a student and a tutor. This student does indeed stumble through the interview, able to give a basic summary of events in Anabasis but unable to answer questions about the etymology of the title and its significance, basic Greek grammar, and other such things. What struck me, though, was that Newman assumed that even a poor student will have read Anabasis, among other works from the Classical world, and have some basic knowledge of Greek and Latin. Indeed, in the printed essay, Newman does not even transliterate Greek words; he merely assumes that anyone reading would know the Greek alphabet.

The first really successful year for Everything is Oll Korrect! was back in 2012, and going into 2013 I had a lot of momentum built up with the weekly posting schedule and generally improving post quality. I had high hopes, but that year turned out to be the Agincourt of web logging (from the French perspective), and in 2014 it really came tumbling down. So even though 2015 was Everything’s best year, I was only cautiously optimistic about how 2016 would turn out.

2014 was the year in which it all came tumbling down, tumbling down, tumbling down, and though I was somewhat optimistic that 2015 would be better, I assumed that the best days of this blog would remain in 2012.

So, if 2013 was the Agincourt of weblogging, 2014 was The Battle of Little Bighorn.