What I Wrote in ’19

Compared with some previous years 2019 has been not been so busy, publication-wise. If we limit ourselves (as why shouldn't we) to book-length work, then I published two things this year: [1] a novella called The Man Who Would Be Kling (Newcon 2019), cover art above, back-cover description here:

... and [2] H G Wells: A Literary Life (Palgrave Macmillan 2019).

That doesn't mean I haven't been putting stuff out there. It just means that most of my wordage has appeared in blogs. Sometimes this has been fiction (check out, for instance this short stort, a few hundred words long, that appeared on my Morphosis blog in November: ‘Goliath, David, Adam’. Or, you know: don't check it out. Entirely up to you). But most has been non-fiction.

More particularly, I have divided my 2019-blogging between three sites: my aforementioned Morphosis blog, which is a venue for various literary and cultural ponderings; my Samuel Taylor Coleridge blog, which is where I post stuff pertaining to, er, Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and for this year only, Gail Marshall, a professor at Reading University, set up a blog dedicated to a month-by-month re-read of George Eliot's Middlemarch, to mark the bicentenary of Eliot's birth. I contributed various posts to that joint project.

Now, in the normal course of things that would all slide inevitably into the backward and abysm of yesteryear, for who scours blogs for old posts? Who, we might wonder, even reads blogs these days? But yesterday I happened to read Neville Morley's post of his pick of ‘2019's best blog posts’. It's an excellent list, with links to some thoroughly absorbing and compelling reads, and I don't just say so because he includes a couple of mine in there. But it did prompt me to draw up a list of what I'd say are my ten best blogposts of 2019.

And here they are, in order.

10. ‘Lord of the Sommes’: a reading of Lord of the Rings as a (late, since it was published in the early 1950s) example of World War 1 literature. I'm not entirely sure of this piece, to be honest, even though Neville M picks it as one of his blogs of the year. I worry it strays into the marshlands rather with its discussion of Literary Modernism and ends on some not-quite-completed lucubrations on memory. But one of the things I've been doing over the last couple of years is labouring to bring my thoughts on Fantasy as a mode into some kind of order, perhaps with a view to writing a critical book (probably with a friend) on the topic, and this takes its place in that.

9. ‘Coleridge's Greek Ode: "Against The Slave Trade" (1792)’ I wrote this post to get closer to Coleridge's rather maligned 1792 ode in ersatz Sapphic Greek. I make no claims for my English translation of this, but this blog did at least convince me that there's more in the Ode than critics generally admit.

8. ‘Middlemarch chapter 6: Sappho's Apple’ This is a small thing, but it pleased me: nobody had tracked down the reference Eliot makes to ‘Sappho's apple’. I did, and rather liked what I found.

7. ‘Middlemarch chapter 38: Hypocrisy and the Judgment of Men’ A rather more substantial Middlemarchian investigation, I think, in which tracking another untracked-down allusion leads to a more critically weighty discussion of the novel.

6. ‘As Green As Emerald’. I'd long been puzzled why Coleridge's Ancient Mariner describes the icebergs he encounters on his voyages as green, of all colours. In this blogpost I finally scratched that critical itch.

5. ‘Brave New World and Social Stratification’. This is a post on Huxley's novel, including something in its worldbuilding I'd not noticed before.

4. ‘Star Wars: Crash 2’ In which I argue that there is more in common between the Star Wars franchise and Ballard's perverse masterpiece of masochistic car-philic erotica Crash than is generally grasped. My recent viewing of Rise of Skywalker has not altered my opinion where the thesis of this blogpost is concerne.d

3. ‘Fantasy Mythography of WW1: the Case of Robert Graves’ This one is closer to my heart than the more general Tolkien/WW1 discussion listed above as No.10. Perhaps for that reason I over-value it. But I think this says more penetrating, and more original, things than the other blog, and about a writer much less widely read or studied.

2. ‘Eliot's Double Mirror’. This is the best of the dozen-or-so blogposts I wrote this year on Middlemarch, I think. It says some things about the novel that are true, and better than that opens up (or I think it does) a whole avenue of future investigation. Pascal was a really, really important writer and thinker for Eliot, and it surprises me that more work hasn't been done unpacking the implications of that. Perhaps I'll do some of that work, myself.

1. ‘The Fix-Up’. This gets my personal vote as my best blogpost of the year. Again, I may be over-valuing it because, as I say in the blog, the ‘fix-up’ is of peculiar fascination to me as a reader and, more to the point, as a writer. But I'd still say this blogpost says some original things, and manages not, as too many of my blogs do, to sprawl.

A couple of other posts are, as the phrase goes, bubbling-under. I think this post on Lydgate and the textual strategies of realism is saying something interesting and new-ish, but I don't know the secondary criticism well enough to be sure. I was quite proud of this new translation of the OE poem ‘The Seafarer’ of mine (but perhaps translations, of which I've posted a number this year, deserve a separate post); and I debated with myself whether to include this, the longest of my year's blogpostery, in my top ten: it starts by discussing Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules For Life book, segues into a discussion of Barrie's Peter Pan, and tries to align the two in a frankly over-reaching general theory of life the universe and everything. I didn't in the end include it in my ten, because it's way overlong, certainly broken-backed and I'm not sure it's, well, right actually. But it may be right, and if it is I'm on to something I should definitey write more about. But as actual blogposts, better are these two much more controlled and proportionate essays from my Coleridge Blog: ‘A Flash of Lightning’ and ‘Waterfalls and Silence’.