Category: Personals

One Year of Mostly About Stories

Mostly About Stories has been going for just over a year, and it’s time for a little retrospective. I started the blog for a few different reasons. I was about to leave Cambridge and spend a year in Russia, and I would be losing the company of my dear friends Sophie and James, both of whom received the brunt of my reading reviews over dinner each day. I wanted to tell somebody – anyone really – about what I was looking at and what I thought of it. A blog has the advantage of eventually creating a little community around it, with regular commentators and a discursive atmosphere. This has not happened with Mostly About Stories yet, but perhaps it will one day.

Another reason was that I wanted to make sure I was writing. My creativity is fickle, but both from a literary and an academic perspective it makes sense for me to be regularly squeezing thoughts and words out of myself. The weekly/fortnightly deadline I set myself was successful in forcing me to write. It also forces me to think, just a little. Another, closely related, advantage is that of the reading I have done, much of it has been from my reading list for the next academic year, so writing about these books serves as a preliminary solidification in my memory of impressions and the early formulation of critical viewpoints.

It is funny how, as I began to see viewers come in, and then eventually began to see one or two of them stay, I started to be concerned about views. Initially I was writing for myself, on the whole. But once I had a little counter, like a budding little “influencer” I came to consider how to boost my popularity. Luckily, that desire is not too dominant. The fact is, if I wanted views I would need to focus on writing “analyses” and “summaries” of my reading list. In the end, the idea of making a small community of like-minded readers is more attractive, and although having some views are important in that – otherwise how will anyone find the blog at all? – a different style and some small degree of quality is more important.

But anyway.

What Went Right; What Went Wrong

So, as far as I understand it, the blog has not done badly in terms of views. After all, who reads these days? As the year went on, I got more and more of them – except for the final months. when university ended and people presumably had better things to do. Now that we are into January, things are picking up again, and I hope that the trend will continue once we get into February proper.

Not a disaster by any stretch. As the year progressed I had slightly more viewers than when I started!

I had a comment too! My review of Satantango had a comment by the translator. This was very exciting, because I’d liked the book a lot. Nonetheless, that’s one comment over the course of an entire year. I’d prefer to have more. Engagement is great, because it makes you – as the author – feel that people are at least reaching the end of your pieces. I have, as I imagine others do also, an instinctive distrust of Google’s Analytics, which although they are very detailed, paint a somewhat depressing view of how long people actually look at things. Or perhaps it’s just that my content isn’t good. Who knows?

The same situation holds true with my subscribers. Or should I say subscriber? The subscription box, much as is with the case with comments, isn’t easy to locate, and I imagine confirming an email subscription takes a lot of effort – I know I’d hardly do it myself. But still, it would be good to have at least one more subscriber, and ideally someone I didn’t actually know in real life.

A Bit of Data

Mostly About Stories is a book blog. I dropped maths as early as I could, and although I like it, nonetheless it is one of my weaker areas. Still. Here are some statistics for you.

In 2019 I had 4635 views from 3336 unique visitors, 2 comments, and 1 subscriber. By the end of the year, in October and November, I was averaging 35 views a day. On my best day I had 96 views – that day was also my birthday, funnily enough – but as most of the views were on my article about Walter Benjamin this seems a simple coincidence. At the time of writing there are 37 posts on the blog, which is pretty good going. I only once took a break between posts of longer than two weeks (my stated schedule in the about page).  

For a book blog this may be good, but probably isn’t. My only real source of data is this page.

Concerning the Writing

Of course, it’s all well and good to look at metrics and think of plans, but really the heart of any blog is its content. Mostly About Stories is dominated, in its views, by my piece on Walter Benjamin’s the Storyteller (see above). Next to that is my translation of Kafka’s Before the Law, and my essay on Gogol’s The Nose. But everything that I’ve written, almost without exception, has had a viewer or two. That makes writing them worthwhile, as it’s often the less well-known things that I’m most excited to share with people.

My favourite pieces on the blog, or at least the ones I feel most proud of, are likely Salvatore Satta’s The Day of Judgement, Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time, and Valentin Rasputin’s Money for Maria. I also quite like my translations of Theodor Storm’s poetry.

I do admit that this blog probably lacks a coherent identity. It’s basically just me reading literature, mostly from my reading lists, and writing about it. I quite like the idea, going forward, of being a bit more disciplined with my post lengths. I read somewhere that viewer attention drops off rapidly once a post goes over 1700 words, and I want to make that my target. Something should be not too long, but also sufficiently in-depth as to be interesting. That would be good.

Steps Forward and Goals for 2020

I recently changed the theme of Mostly About Stories. I think it looks better now. It makes the text easier to read and has a bit more of a modern feel to it.

I’d like to have a few more comments, maybe another subscriber, before this year is over. All that would be good. Perhaps I should be like those annoying YouTubers who end every video begging us to like and subscribe? It’s a difficult balance to get and I tend to hope any readers who want to comment will comment without prompting, but perhaps I should try to be a little more pushy?

Anyway, I hope you found this look at one year of Mostly About Stories to be slightly entertaining. Remember to like, subscribe, and leave a comment about how I can improve the blog going forward! 😊

Literature in the Face of Death and Mourning

Today my father was cremated. Though he had lived an enviable life he was just fifty-nine – not an age at which many would be satisfied to face death. For my brother and me, at sixteen and twenty-one, it feels far too soon to lose him, and more than a little unfair. But so sudden was the cancer that we all had little say in the matter. Death affects us all in different ways, and those of us touched by it must find our own solutions for coping, whether they be fighting bravely against the current, or following it into a numbing despair that seems, all things considered, reasonable enough. I want here to set down a few thoughts about books, and their value, in times of difficulty. Exhaustion has left my mind not entirely clear, so I apologise for mistakes and incoherency. This is, I’m afraid, a personal piece.

Medicine

I am the only one in my family who reads fiction. My father was a great lover of non-fiction and read widely, according to his whimsy, in the way that only one who is naturally intelligent but has never been confined in a university can. When news of his several brain tumours came, just over two months ago, in spite of his inability to read properly he did what he could to try and understand the disease that was killing him, and see if he might not discover a solution that the doctors had passed over or did not know. I myself placed my faith in them, because I know many medics at Cambridge, and they have always struck me as the greatest, hardest working, and best of all the students there. If anybody could save him, it seemed to me that a doctor would be the one.

A picture of Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy may have ended up with some odd views about God and religion, but at his best his fiction can instil a sense of wonder that lets us weather the storm the death brings into our lives

In Anna Karenina Tolstoy on several occasions displays a sort of scorn towards medicine. Doctors come to try to rescue Kitty from her despair, proscribing contradictory remedies that never work and looking like fools in the process. Of course, Tolstoy has a point that is still relevant today, when it has been proven how much our mental health can affect our physical health. Often the best remedies can be ones of the heart and head, and not things we ingest. Tolstoy’s mistake, at least as I see it, is that he thinks all diseases work this way and doctors have no purpose. But he was as opinionated as they come, and I can understand why he thought that way – at least in the late 19th century medicine still had something alchemical to it. Now we are much luckier. My father’s problems were in his head, yes, but not his mind.

Wonder

I thought of Tolstoy a lot as my father rapidly declined. The Death of Ivan Ilych, Hadji Murat, and Anna Karenina in particular were sources of comfort. They made death real, but Tolstoy, the spiritual man, also made death valuable and sacred by imbuing it with a sense of wonder and mystery. He makes us see its horror, yes, but he also shows that through it there may also come a kind of salvation. There was a sense of wonder in seeing my father’s casket, and a sense of wonder in hearing our bagpiper piping us all in. In moments of such wonder you can feel that death is but a stepping-stone to something that lies beyond.

Tolstoy, like the best of our writers and artists, instils this sense of wonder. They make us see that death is not an end, but a new beginning. By making us aware of the mystical, the spiritual component that accompanies a passing on, they give us the consolation that mere thoughts and intellectual rigor cannot. Schopenhauer’s idea of death as returning to sleep is nice, but not nearly so nice as what Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and other writers of spiritual conviction can achieve at their best. The Bible, and the other mystical books of our world’s religions, are full of tales that inspire wonder. They give us food for belief in magic, the sort of magic that makes the world glisten and shine with meaning. I’m thinking of Ivan Karamazov’s sticky buds here. And when we feel wonder, nothing, not even death, can hurt us or our love for the world.

A picture of Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky is another writer who for me can fight against the pain of death. His earnest belief in God and mankind, regardless of one’s own spiritual persuasions, is inspiring. His politics, however, is not.

Dreams and Levin’s Brother

For what consolation can rationalism offer here? The man under the shroud is still dead and cold. Death can lose its sting through thinking about the absence of our perceptions in the tomb, but loss of life will never cease to be painful to contemplate unless we see the mystical opportunities that surround it. My father came to me in a dream. He was in the Saint Petersburg Metro, healthy and well again, and heading onwards. He did not speak, but we embraced. The dream came during his final night alive – he died the next afternoon. Of course, it could have been just luck that made him appear at that time. But I see no reason to favour seeing it as mere chance instead of a holy and hopeful sign.

I cannot explain my dream, except as a revelation of the magic and mystery of our human souls. I remember clearly the death of Levin’s brother in Anna Karenina – his death was not one, but twofold. He said his final words and departed in dignity as a soul – “Don’t leave me”. And then he struggled on for another day, and when the characters gathered round his deathbed mention he has finished his struggling he suddenly comes back to life to say: “Not yet… just a little longer”. And then he dies as a body as well.

Conclusion: Narratives against Death

I have an advantage as a reader and as a writer. I live in stories, and I build them. Death, as Walter Benjamin remarks, destroys the placidity of our bourgeois existence – it is the one thing that breaks through even the strongest of our illusions and delusions about our lives. It creates a rupture and destroys the meaning of our world. In the initial weeks of my father’s illness I was almost glad to have, for the first time, a real reason to be depressed. It felt right for once to be in mental anguish. But of all my family I have been the one to cope with the fewest tears and the least pain, and I can’t help but think that reading has something to do with that.

Against the rupture of death, I was able to create a narrative, to come to an understanding with what has happened. I had read about death many times, and when the grief came, I saw how it reflected countless moods I’d seen in books. It gave me the community of fellow-sufferers and their strengths, and their own attempts to move on. And it made me feel less alone. By understanding that stories are the way we give meaning to our lives, I was able to reconfigure the meaning of my own to take into account my father’s death. Perhaps I am deluding myself in talking of wonder, in seeing signs in dreams and the dewy grass. But it is the power of books that they give you the choice to do so. They give you the tools to choose your fate. And that is a magical thing, whatever you believe.

Have you found literature to be a consolation in times of great suffering? Or have all our great scribblings become petty and unreal for you under the harsh light of death? Do leave a comment and let me know what you think