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Glass Houses

Posted on January 6, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

There is a wonderful show business saying that if a performer is a great enough talent, “you could put him or her behind a brick wall and they will still find a way to entertain.” While I believe this to be true in idealistic theory, I also think that not putting him or her behind a brick wall would be profoundly helpful to their cause. If a website is going to be worth a visit, publicity is going to help get that visit.

I have gone viral approximately not once, so I have some expertise in the field of not being at all famous.

Some of you may not remember that last March I was almost on the verge of getting on line for the waiting room to visit the Land of the Almost Known. My “About.me” page was featured on that website’s “popular” list, and my page, which usually receives about 150 views per day, was seen by 3051 other About.me users, 2000 within the first hour of being listed. Another 1300 visited the next day.

Three thousand. I know, I know. I have lived in at least one building that had a larger population.

What does fame feel like? Living in Philip Johnson’s “Glass House.”

The Glass House. Located in New Canaan, CT, it was built in 1949.

This post will be number 192, I think, on this website. There are a handful of columns that I am proud of having written and published, and they are these:
1. The several pieces I have published about my life with adult spinal muscular atrophy. I even explain the duck on my website. Here, I will group them together in one package: Spinal muscular atrophy.
2. A Conspiracy Theory of Conspiracy Theories
3. Guilty of White
4. Requiem for a Sponsor
5. Two appreciations of the Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band and its leader, Vivian Stanshall
6. A column about the Baseball Hall of Fame
7. An appreciation of one of my favorite places, Opus 40
8. Comedy: The ‘Fish-Slapping Dance’
9. A column about W.H. Auden’s character: “Auden’s Decency”

As a self-publicist, I am not certain I would hire me, but I was the only person to apply for the job. On Twitter, there are a handful of people who profess to like what appears here and even share selected pieces. That amazes me, and I am speechless.

There are also people on that service who use unpleasant names (I was called the B word recently, which was a surprise) or offer strange advice (when I shared a recording of T.S. Eliot the other day, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, one person took the time to explain what drugs I ought to get a prescription for, and that he could help). In the name of publicity, I should never block anyone, but I did in both of those cases.

No glass house for me.

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Please visit some or all of the above columns, follow me on Twitter, and please subscribe to The Gad About Town on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thegadabouttown. Thanks.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for January 6 asks, “Your blog just became a viral sensation. What’s the one post you’d like new readers to see and remember you by? Write that post.”

November Thank-yous

Posted on November 30, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

This is the 30th post for the month of November 2014 on this website. I have not written something every day, but there have been a couple two-a-days, one “in memoriam” poster, and some reruns (yesterday). All adding up to a very special 30-for-30 episode.

I am beginning to feel like a host at a party with this project, and sometimes I want one reader who posts comments to meet another one (where can we all hang out for lunch?); then sometimes I will read a third person’s columns and see that those two faces have clicked “Like” on that other person’s work. “Ah, I see you two have met. Good.”

In December, The Gad About Town will be one year old on WordPress. I started this in the fall of 2013, on another blog-hosting site, and there it still sits: The Gad About Town. I might have acquired readers beyond my immediate family and immediate friends as I proceeded with the website there, but readers other than my immediate family and immediate friends started to respond to this site right here right from the start, hitting “Like,” or subscribing, or commenting. I did not know what I did not know when I moved to WordPress: That my need for instant gratification, my addiction to numbers, would be met here.

Anyway, it sometimes seemed that most of my page views on that service came from spam-generating sources (anything called “vampire” anything is not something that I feel happy about seeing visit my website fifty times in one short hour).

In the month of November, this site has been visited 1677 times so far (by real people), at a rate of 57 visits each day. Neither of those are big numbers; I am certain that many of the blogs I read every day get thousands of visits per day. There were 38 new followers, which is a term that I have decided I do not like. “Subscribers,” okay; “followers”? No. There was one award from a fellow blogger, Aruna, who writes every day at Ripples N Reflections.

A Facebook page was launched here: The Gad About Town. You can find me on Twitter over here: Mark Aldrich. There are some very supportive Twitterers who Tweet my columns to other Tweeting people. (That’s how that works, I think.) I also have Ello invites if you want one.

All of these numbers have increased dramatically since I started participating in the Daily Prompt exercise in August. Before then, I was publishing once or twice a week and approximately one person (other than my mom or girlfriend) would hit the “Like” button each post. Thank you, Susanne Leist; she is the author of “The Dead Game,” and more than once seeing her face pop up on something that I wrote cajoled me into writing a next one. That is the effect a blogging community can have: We egg each other on.

Here are some more thank yous: Judy at Lifelessons, my fellow spoonie Mary at A Body of Hope, Willow at Willow’s Corner, Leigh at Leigh’s Wordsmithery, Melissa at This, Right Now, Rebecca at Genusrosa, Dixie Copeland, The Reluctant Baptist, Lydia at A Lot from Lydia, Swoosieque at Cancer Isn’t Pink, Mark at Joatmon14, Rose Red at Gelatinous, Ina Vukic at Croatia, The War and the Future. There are other thank yous, but this list is some of the people who communicated with me in November.

In December (wait! that’s tomorrow!) I will start playing around with a new layout and, more important, get my big book co-writing project moving towards the door marked “Publish.” Thank you to all the future purchasers of that future book.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 30 asks, “What’s the longest stretch you’ve ever pulled off of posting daily to your blog? What did you learn about blogging through that achievement, and what made you break the streak?”

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