Out of my hat

RIP Robert Palmer.

I just finished reading a fairly recent biography of Oscar Wilde. Upon reflection, I’m surprised both by the fact that I finished it, and that I seem to have an previously unsuspected taste for biography at all.

I probably wouldn’t have finished it, it I’d had anything else around the apt to read that I haven’t read a sufficient number of times before. It’s not that it was a bad book, but it was very dry. It managed to communicate the details of Wilde’s life without really evoking it. If Wilde’s life was a work of art — a conceit that’s mentioned several times throughout the biography — then this book is the equivalent to a play-by-play coverage of the work’s creation… that only occasionally manages to step outside and comment on its aesthetic merits.

On the other hand, any book that includes a short note about the typeface used is all right by me.

By the power vested in me by the State of… no, wait, wrong speech.

Anyhow, so welcome to my webspace. It’s still being tweaked and twonked, but at least the mechanics of the basic blogstuff is now in good working order. Sometime soon I’ll tell you about my troubles finding a suitable set-up for this space, but not right now. No, for now I’m just content in saying hello.

Stay tuned, though, because in a few days I’ll be declaring this site officially open and — in a blaze of no publicity — start posting more or less regularly. Until then…

This is a test. This is only a test.

If this were a real blog entry, you would be entertained at the moment.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Internet.