Angus is ready for a walk. Angus is always ready for a walk.
Hello friends! Summer has arrived in Texas, though with something less than its usual fierceness, for which I am thankful. It'll be fierce soon enough, though.
My biography of Paradise Lost will be out on June 3rd, so don't miss it! Recently Phil Christman invited me to chat with him about the book, and you can read that conversation here. I thought it interesting that the chat was primarily about the poem itself, rather than about its afterlife, which is my chief theme. So that gave me an idea:
One of the nice features of micro.blog — which I have written about often, for instance here — is podcasting. (You can do fairly long episodes, but I think it works best for shorter ones, what some people call microcasts.) I haven't done much along those lines, but starting next week I will be doing more. I'll begin with a series of microcasts on Paradise Lost itself — nothing systematic, just some orienting thoughts — and then later move on to the people, the readers of the poem, who populate my book. These will be very casual episodes, but I hope entertaining and useful.
(The microcasts can be listened to at social.ayjay.org, but you can also find them in Apple Podcasts, or whatever podcast player/service you use, by searching for my name.)
I also am thinking about the future. As I've mentioned before, I'll be retiring before too much longer — December 2026 — and when that happens I want to keep teaching ... but teaching you, my dear readers, as opposed to Official University Students, whom I have been teaching since 1982. I think podcasting will be an important part of this teaching, and I will be experimenting along those lines in the months to come. (This will be in addition to, rather than instead of, blogging.)
In other news, I wrote about Pandaemonium — not the one imagined by Milton, but another one — and a second essay on that topic will be up soon at the Hog Blog. Mainly I am working on Dorothy L. Sayers: I am allowed 80,000 words, and am coming to the end of her career as a detective novelist with 45,000 words written. It's hard for me to imagine writing about the rest of her career in less than 50,000 more words, so something will have to give somewhere. And I could easily have written 20,000 words more about her novels! At least I will have plenty of material for future blog posts.
Thanks once more to all of you who are members, and all who have otherwise supported my oddball labors. Because I will over the next 18 months or so be gradually ramping up the work I do on my own site, I am hoping for additional support. And especially as I look forward to being, as I think we senior citizens are supposed to call it, "on a fixed income." (As a millennial friend said to me recently, "Hey, a fixed income is still an income, people of my generation aren't likely to have that." Which I can't argue with. But still.) Financial support is practically a very nice thing, but it's even nicer as an encouragement, as a sign that at least a few people think that what I'm doing is worthwhile. Because I have so completely opted out of the culture wars, and fighting those gives you a large built-in audience, substantive affirmation is especially meaningful.
That said, I'm not going to put my work behind a paywall. I remain committed to the open web. So if you can't afford to support me, or are otherwise disinclined to, the blog posts and images and links and podcasts will still be available to you. Happy reading, viewing, and listening — and happy summer to those of you in the Northern hemisphere!