Web site hits

I put a bunch of code from AddFreeStats on my website on Sunday, and have been rather stunned by the results so far. Much the most popular page is my review of “Flowers for Algernon“, not so very surprising as I understand that the short story is on every high school reading list in America. But a reasonably strong second is my fairly recent page on the Book of the Prophet Amos. There must surely be loads of other sources on Amos out there, and I can’t pretend that my analysis is particularly scholarly or even devout.

And today for some reason my review of “Bloodchild” has overtaken the Prohet Amos. It must have suddenly come up on some university course, I suppose, or maybe there was a programme about Octavia Butler last night.

Also the Curse of the Presidents seems to be a steady performer.

One thought on “Web site hits

  1. Focussing on the documents in hand: I have now checked out both Shapiro’s prologue and the conference report. The 2003 conference report is a second-hand account from Daniel Wright, noting the lack of documentary evidence for the authenticity of Wilmot and Cowell; the only thing he says about the content of the manuscript is that he was shocked to learn that it made Baconian arguments. Shapiro’s account is very different: going on the anachronistic vocabulary and content of the manuscript, he concludes that it must be a forgery – a point simply not made by Wright as reported by Baca (and which Shapiro therefore cannot have copied from Wright). The two accounts are of different intellectual journeys, and Shapiro’s version is fair in a book not aimed at a scholarly audience.

    On collaborations, you have misread what I said. My own professional collaborations have not always been systematic in the way they came about. Sometimes they came through formal contractual relationships, sometimes I teamed up with a fellow-enthusiast (usually at their suggestion). Your invention of a complex formal system of joint composition as the only way collaboration could have happened (which anyway you don’t believe in) is a classic straw man, and is shredded by Occam’s Razor.

    Digges seems to me to be in the permissible level of poetic generalisation for a dead man who wrote 30-odd plays on his own and collaborated on a few more.

Comments are closed.