I
once had a teacher who was inordinately fond of a small repertory of
witticisms. About once a week she
would survey the classroom in simulated consternation and say: “Hummmn. Not everybody is here today. There are some people missing. Who are they, I wonder?...If you are absent, please raise your hand.” This was supposed to be amusing, and
for the first two or three dozen times it was, sort of. We soon enough learned to fight corn
with corn by all raising our hands.
Yet
this harmless little farce exemplified a recurrent and perplexing problem that
does from time to time appear in life: by what means does one communicate with
the incommunicado? I have had a
certain number of email communications from occasional readers of the blog in
which the sender tells me that he or she is encountering technical difficulty
in summoning the weekly posts from outer cyberspace to the actual computer
screen. All that appears is the post’s
title. This news has presented me with a dilemma. I am reluctant to admit that in fact
the title is usually the best part, after which it is usually all downhill, so
that they are not really missing all that much.
The
Berkeleyan philosophical problem is of course engaging. If you write the Great American Novel,
show it to no one, and upon your demise leave it abandoned in a trunk in the
attic of a house later razed to enlarge the municipal parking lot, is it still
the Great American Novel? This is
a fascinating poser, but in and of itself perhaps insufficient to make the mare
go. So at the practical level I
must now offer this advice to all those who are not here today. It might be a browser problem. My tired old Firefox has begun to balk
at all sorts of things. Blogger,
being googlish, seems to respond more robustly to Google Chrome. A cathartic flush of the old cache—nasty
as it may sound--will also, I hope, prove helpful.
I
myself have taken counsel of my website guru, which brings me at last to the
ostensible topic of this post: namely, my resurrected website, johnvfleming.com
redivivus. In the later stages of the production of my book The Anti-Communist Manifestos, which
appeared in 2009, I launched this site at the behest of the marketing mavens of
W. W. Norton and Co. The website
was, in effect, a gimmick for hawking the book. Since the book itself was about Commies without the
dot, there was a certain mystical symmetry to the enterprise. The launching of the website was but
one feature of a wide-bore commercial campaign. My publishers also sought my aid in placing a review in what
their little form called “your home-town newspaper”. I was, however, unsuccessful in my attempt to solicit the
cooperation of the Baxter Bulletin of
Mountain Home, Arkansas.
As
you know, history repeats itself.
That is one of comparatively few reassuring things about history. I shall fairly soon (July) have another
Norton book appearing—The Dark Side of
the Enlightenment. The
marketing mavens, a migratory species, have reappeared. Hence my web guru, Beth Morgan, has
re-animated johnvfleming.com, mounting thereon some new information about the
new book. Though the pictorial
matter has the same old author, there is a new book jacket. Limited progress is preferable to no
progress at all. The new posting
includes some rash promises made by me.
I there declare it as my intention to add a few mini-essays about the
subject matter of The Dark Side of the
Enlightenment, and about the process of book publishing generally, in the
foreseeable future. What I don’t
say is that the execution of my good intentions will depend upon my ability to
remaster Dreamweaver, the web-design
software that allows the ignorant and the amateur to create an illusion of
knowledge and professionalism.
It’s been so long since I last used it that I can no longer remember
even the first steps. Maybe it
will turn out to be like riding a bicycle—supposedly you never forget how to ride a bicycle—but I somehow doubt it.
