17 March 2007

Gentle Reader...

Billy's Downtown Diner
Bethlehem, PA

When my wife Deb was associate editor for the exquisite (late) quarterly Books & Religion, editorial meetings would often concern the needs & desires of what they affectionately (and not without irony) called Our Reader. Unfortunately, this mythical creature, at least among her masters upstairs in Corporate, wasn't enough of an abstraction, and B & R tripped — or was pushed — over the bottom line into its grave.

I know it's different somehow with a blog, but my grasp of economics (which, if my Greek has not completely abandoned me for a more fertile frame in which to dwell, once meant something like "customs of the home," maybe even "Cider House Rules" without the "Cider" part) is insufficiently sophisticated to apply it to the case, and besides, the dang thing won't stand still, but keeps on transmogrifying, markets merging & splitting, devouring & excreting each other, and sometimes, like Neo inside Agent Smith, busting the matrix — i.e., "the way things are" — apart.

I've strayed from my original intent, Gentle Reader, which was to greet you after a long absence. I've brought along a few gifts, some no doubt of dubious value, as is often the case in such reunions, like the T-shirt your friends brought you upon their return from a vacation in Ireland, when what you really needed was for them to have taken you with them, and never come back.

Rambling again, sorry. Trouble with being my age is having so many damn stories to tell, & so little time to tell them in.

Which brings me round to my point at last. I'm going to perpetrate a subtle hoax — but then it's not a hoax if you're in on it, I guess — by backdating posts that actually I'm only loading in now, which will give the impression of an uninterrupted logorrhetic flow since my last "real" post of nearly two years ago. These false posts date (I *love* the ambiguity of "post" in this context, don't you?) correspond to jottings in my vademecum (if I'm using that term for my pocket notebook correctly — help me, some *REAL* classics scholar!) during my exile from the blogosphere, so I'm not lying about that.

But how can you trust me now? — short answer: you can't, and I invite you to apply that insight as widely as you wish.

What this means is that I'll be adding old stories as time allows, and they'll show up *under* this post, to preserve the appearance of chronological posting.
Enough already — except to say thank you for your patience, if you're not already long out the door, if you even exist, Gentle Reader. I hope you'll let me know if you do; I'd be grateful.

2 Comments:

At 05 April, 2007 23:27, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Readers exist, sometimes they aren't so gentle. I had to get the dictionary out and look up that word vademecum. I only read on an eigth grade level like everyone else who wage slaves. I enjoy your stories though.

 
At 06 April, 2007 09:06, Blogger bbly said...

Thanks for the kind words, anon. I agree that gentleness is in short supply these days, but like to give the benefit of the doubt.

I'm not persuaded I'm using vademecum correctly, but it's better than notebook, which could be anything — and it makes me sound smart.

Your encouragement is priceless.

 

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