MILESTONES

This blog is now almost five years old, having begun in all seriousness on June 1, 2009.  Later today, if Google's Total Pageview Counter is accurate, it will pass a major milestone.  Google will record the one millionth page view!  To be sure, that is astonishing, but a little perspective is in order.  The Huffington Post apparently records that many page views every five hours or so [and actually racks up more than one million unique visits per day, meaning that more than a million different people -- or at least a million different computers -- visit the site once or more than once every day.]  Still, a million total page views is not chopped chicken liver, as folks used to say where I grew up.

Now that I have settled into the blogosphere and looked around to see what other bloggers are doing, it has struck me that what I do is really rather unusual.  Indeed, it may very well be unique.  Would any other blogger post a nineteen part essay on the thought of Karl Marx, or a fourteen part essay on the thought of Sigmund Freud, not to speak of a sixteen part essay on Ideological Critique, or a 261,696 word autobiography presented almost daily for fourteen months?   Logorrhea does not begin to capture it.

I know, from comments and emails, that the blog reaches at least six continents [no news from Antarctica as yet].  I cannot figure out how many people follow it more or less regularly, but it seems to be somewhere between one and three thousand.  Periodically Brian Leiter links to the blog and page views spike dramatically for a day or two [Leiter really is a successful blogger -- heaven only knows how many page views he gets.]

But you never know.  When I went back a second time to see the very nice bi-lingual Paris doctor I found on rue de Pot de Fer, she told me her daughter had called her attention to the nice things I had said about her on my blog.  And considering that Piketty's translator, Arthur Goldhammer, recently posted a comment, I flatter myself that just possibly Piketty himself took a look at my five part review.  [I mean, he watches Desperate Housewives, judging from a reference in his book, why not me?]

As I have observed before, it is like having a large permanent class, in which I lecture every day to a shifting assemblage of scholars, students, artists, and free-form intellectuals.  [I am reminded of the great line from a song in Guys and Dolls -- "It's the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York."]  I may not reach as many people as Arianna Huffington, but I would bet you the average I.Q. of  my readers is higher.

By the time I am ninety, I may hit three million.  Of course, by then, people will be reading this on their eyeglasses.