The site meters of this blog were recently reinstalled.
The blog is fairly high in 'Bloglista'.
Site meter tells average per day 250, week 1770.
This is intended to be a difficult blog.
Comments are very interesting. That really is the new thing compared with writing in print - you only get opinions from profssional critics or relatives or people you meet going to restroom.
The average sales of a book of poetry is 600 copies. I am afraid the figure for literary essays does not hugely exceed this. You never know about libraries. The "difficult" books and records seem to stay in shelves in a most resolulte way.
That is a good reason to live in a municipality close to Helsinki, but not in Helsinki. The library is superb. Everything I need is always there. Everything beens for example Italo Calvino and William Faulkner, whose books I keep purchasing and selling or giving away. Calvino is sometimes too self-conscious for me. Then again his Six Memos for the Next Millenium is an unfrogettable treat. Faulkner is the best, when he is good. He often was not. I pity the students, who have to read the estate-series.
Michael Massig writes in N.Y. Review of Books about his articel: "Here, I will concentrate on the press's internal problems—not on its many ethical and professional lapses, which have been extensively discussed elsewhere, but rather on the structural problems that keep the press from fulfilling its responsibilities to serve as a witness to injustice and a watchdog over the powerful."
Terveisiä Reetalle.
I think Calvino was a kind of philosopher-poet who - for some reason - began to write novels. Not a very good choice.
VastaaPoistaTo wit - philosophers rarely have a "sense" of reality as it finds it`s deepest expression in nineteenth century novels and short stories (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chechov, Faulkner, Stendahl to name some greatest).
Of course for example Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were also philosophers in their novels but NOT poets.
This "hybrid" - philosopher-poet does not master narrative-style-demands.
Just remember Platon, Nietzsche or Pentti Saarikoski (maybe odd but apropos examples.)
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Faulkner is (also) quite strange to me. According to my "racist" opinion the best American novel ever still is Moby Dick.
Perhaps I am hopelessly out of time.. (Thank God!)
To be exact - Plato.
VastaaPoistaAnd as far as I can judge - Tsehov is either Chechov or Chekhov in English.
Did I write...Chechov, Faulkner, Stendahl?
VastaaPoistaWhat a typo! Should be Flaubert - naturally.