[Image: Fifty-Three Stations of Tokaido: 44 (Yokkaichi), color woodblock print (1841-34), by Utagawa Hiroshige. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

Well, damn. I just couldn’t quite make it to a thousand posts by today: I’m still a couple dozen short. (On the other hand, if you count all the auxiliary not-actual-posts-as-such pages — the About stuff, and the Propagational Library series, story excerpts and so on — they put me easily over the top.)

If you challenged me on the point, I’m not sure I could answer coherently why I’m still blogging (however fitfully these days), in addition to Facebooking and posting to Twitter. On the face of it, the whole blogging transaction model is upside-down (especially relative to those other platforms): the blogger can spend an hour, several hours, sometimes days of work thinking about, possibly researching and writing-and-editing a given post — for close to zero reward. Post provocatively or hilariously (however briefly) on FB or Twitter, though, and you get a dozen acknowledgments of one kind or another, from simple “Like”s to full-blown dialogue on the subject. It’s… well, I don’t know. It’s weird. Unless you’ve got dozens of followers and regular commenters (a circumstance which I’ve frankly never aspired to), and hence something like conversation, blogging may just be one of those aimless pursuits which some humans follow. You go for Sunday drives in the country; I blog.

[Read more…]

Today, Running After My Hat turns three years old. Over the last couple weeks, I had the opportunity (if that’s the word!) to go back and read a whole bunch of posts from that time. I thought, y’know, that I could maybe identify more clearly what the blog is (even vaguely, if not exactly). At the very least, it might give me some place to start revising the About RAMH page.

(I should be scuffing my feet in embarrassment to have a hard time answering that question. But I’m sure those of you who’ve been following along understand the problem. Ha.)

One really surprising finding: way more than I’d ever imagined, there’s a lot of music here. In fact, if you count multiple versions of the songs covered in the “What’s in a Song” series, and videos (in the posts themselves and, rarely, in the comments), apparently I include music in a third of the posts at the site . This suggested that I could offer you a “mix post” (like a mix CD) today.

So that’s what this is. [Read more…]