Bloomsday & Bloggings Wake

June 16, 1904.  The day reconstructed by a self-exiled Dubliner in Trieste and Paris, whose finished work after years of obsessive rewriting was both the pinnacle and the destruction of the novel.  I refer, of course, to that masterpiece by James Joyce, Ulysses.  

I read the book all the way through three times, twice in the same year.  I haven't got the patience to do it a fourth, and that's my loss.  

Then I think of his last work, Finnegans Wake, over which he obsessed for nearly twenty years, and would have obsessed over longer in new editions if he hadn't died right after his escape to Switzerland as the Nazis spread like ink over France and most of the Continent.  A mad book.  Some sort of mad apotheosis.  This I've never had the patience to read all the way through.  I suspect you need hallucinogens to do so.

There's been much about the changes in blogging of late.  I've weighed in on it.  Fredric Koeppel has. Lenn Thompson has, mostly on Twitter.  Alice Feiring has too, so much so that she's thinking about giving it up, or she says so at any rate.  I'm rather tired of it but now have to maintain not one but two blogs to connive at getting Domenico Selections a bit better known.  Blogging’s gone from being a labor of love to a labor. I think this is, to some degree, inevitable, not least because my goals and my energies are necessarily focused elsewhere.  But we all reach a point where what we're doing no longer seems to work as well as it did or we just grow tired of it.  

You know my heart's not in it as it once was.  The visits and page views numbers reflect the shift of my energies and interests going back to October.  I used to care deeply about the triumphant rise in the bar chart showing a growing readership.  I studied the figures and trends obsessively.  Now I barely look at them. I know the levels are lower than they've been in over two years.  

I do believe it's time to -- not exactly pull the plug on mondosapore, but to devote more time to Muddy Boots.  It means a narrower, less self-revelatory focus, of course.  None of my rants, drunk or sober, no wildly off-topic posts.  For such venting mondosapore will still be personally useful.

Short bursts of op-ed from me will generally suffice.  Twitter, Facebook, the usual minimicromedia.  

Will I really put this blog, the focus of so much energy and passion for so long, out to virtual pasture? Yes yes I will I said yes 

  

 

Comments

[David J]

...I would not expect you to 'go gently into that good night' of blogging-- but welcome to the Semi-Permanent Hiatus Club!

[1WineDude]

You're THE MAN for the Joyce reference at the end.

You're NUTZ for packing this blog in!

[Strappo]

Yeah but I'm BORED.

OK, it's a hiatus. Of indefinite duration.

Btw, to which of Blooms questions did Molly ecstatically reply Yes yes yes I will yes ?

[art predator]

Sorry to hear this--I always appreciate the well written literary quality of your posts and understand how it can be daunting.

I've found it really difficult to maintain more than one blog; most o my energy goes to Art Predator, spinning off relevant posts to Wine Predator etc.

[Tommaso]

TH

I would like to thank you for creating and maintaining a superior wine blog. Life goes on but it will be diminished without Mondosapore

[TH]

Thank you guys for your warm words. Mondosapore was then. This is now.

Clever, non?

[alex]

Terry,
I will miss Mondosapore...
ciao
Alex

[Thom Calabrese]

I can't believe my eyes!!!! I will miss your musings and witty ways. June 16th the day the music died.

[fredric koeppel]

ah, she was a flower of the mountain that day on Howth Head when Bloom proposed to her, and she got him to ask again and she thought that it might as well be him as another and that's when she said "yes I will Yes."

[TH]

FK, it had to be you. Flower of the mountain. And thus did Marion Tweedy become Molly Bloom.

Thom, you are giving me too much credit, but thanks.

Tommaso, grazie.

Grazie a tutti.

But...this thing isn't QUITE ready to be interred. Not just yet.