Breaking the Million-Hit Barrier

Pageviews

I definitely feel like breaking out the champagne today. One million hits on my blog! That seems like quite a lot to me.

It all started in 2010, when they introduced a new feature on blogspot which made it possible to access easily a range of vital statistics about your site/s. As well as the basic count of how many hits each blogpost achieved, you could study your main sources of traffic, the ways in which visitors accessed your site, and other intriguing pieces of trivia.

Pageviews 2010-18

I started The Imaginary Museum back in 2006, so I'm not sure if those earlier posts (half of the 462 to date) are included in the tally. Whether they are or not, though, I find it rather amazing that this most self-indulgent of websites, dedicated to so many subjects which I suspect I'm quite unusual in finding fascinating - bibliography, ghosts, poetry, the 1001 Nights, poetry readings and book-launches - should have clocked up so many individual hits over the past eight years.

Top-earning posts

Mind you, I do understand what a blunt instrument such counters can be. There's nothing qualitative about this data. A long read of a post will show up just the same as a momentary glance at a headline or an image.

They're not all from me, either. There's a little link you can click on to make sure that your own pageviews don't get counted in the total, otherwise it would all seem a bit incestuous.

Pageviews by countries

And as for the countries the hits are coming from, why so many from Russia, for instance? Why more from Belgium than from Australia? It's hard to reach clear conclusions about such matters, beyond noting the bare facts.

More to the point, though, I recently conducted a census of all the various websites I operate (you can find a complete list of them here, if you're curious). The nearest contender to The Imaginary Museum was my book collection site, A Gentle Madness, which has reached 276,970 pageviews. Most of the others were considerably less than that - though I was pleased to see that my Leicester Kyle site had clocked up more than 50,000 hits.

In total, they came to more than 3,000,000 pageviews, so I'd have to say that this long experiment on online writing / publishing must be seen as a success. I don't see how I could ever reached anything like that number of people by conventional means.

No doubt Whale Oil and the Daily Blog get more than that number every hour, but then they are targetting a rather different audience.

Pageviews today

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Imaginary Museum stats (22/12/20)

[Postscript - 30th December 2020]:

As you'll see from the above, it's taken me roughly two years to collect another quarter of a million hits here on the Imaginary Museum. In the meantime, there's been a complete redesign of the editing platform, so the results present somewhat differently.

All-time Pageviews (30/12/20)

Here's how the pageviews break down over the past ten years. And below you can see a list of the top posts on the blog to date. I guess it means that there's some kind of an audience for my wares out there - it certainly makes me feel more like persevering with it, for the time being, at any rate.

Top-scoring posts

Pictures from the Paper Table Booklaunch (3/12/17)

Paper Table book display

Bronwyn and I would like to thank everyone who came to the Paper Table novella launch yesterday, and were generous enough to buy so many books! We'd also like to thank our two brilliant speakers, Stu Bagby and Tracey Slaughter; our visionary designer Lisa Baudry; Leicester's cousins Dave and Viv Kyle, who were there to represent the Kyle family; our two helpers Niamh and Hatty Fitzgerald, and all the rest of you who were able to spend your Sunday afternoon with us.

We really appreciate it.

The approach to the book table

Jack and his book

Book display

Hand-sewn bookbags

Leicester's first cousin, Dave Kyle, and his daughter Viv

Niamh and Hatty Fitzgerald, our two helpers

The back garden

Gabriel White

Richard Taylor and Tracey Slaughter were the first to arrive

soon joined by many others, including Stu Bagby, Jackie Ottaway and Richard von Sturmer

Bronwyn makes her publisher's speech

Stu launches Leicester's novella, Letters to a Psychiatrist

Tracey launches The Annotated Tree Worship

Bryan Walpert with his bookbag, with Matt Harris behind him

group shot (1)

group shot (2)

group shot (3)

If you have any questions about either the books or the imprint, please visit our Paper Table website.

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Brand design: Lisa Baudry

Paper Table Novellas Launch - 3/12/17

Brand design & images: Lisa Baudry

I'm pleased to announce the launch of Bronwyn Lloyd's new series of single-volume novellas, in our back garden in Mairangi Bay, on Sunday 3rd December, from 2 pm onwards:

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Paper Table Novellas Launch:

When: Sunday 3rd December, 2-4 pm

Where: 6 Hastings Rd, Mairangi Bay, Auckland

What: Books by Leicester Kyle & Jack Ross

Who: All Welcome! (but please don't forget your wallet)

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For a long time now Bronwyn and I have been lamenting the lack of attention paid to the novella form in New Zealand. Now, as the publisher of Paper Table Novellas, she's finally decided to do something about it.

The first of her titles, Letters to a Psychiatrist, is the strange tale of a West Coast spiritual odyssey by distinguished eco-poet Leicester Kyle.

The second, The Annotated Tree Worship, is a story told in two novella-length portions, relating the sordid adventures of a disgraced, self-pitying Academic, caught in the grip of his own psychic crisis:

1. Letters to a Psychiatrist, by Leicester Kyle
   
   
   
   
   
   [$NZ 25]







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2. The Annotated Tree Worship, by Jack Ross
   
   
   
   
   
   • Draft Research Portfolio
   
   
   
   
   
   
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   • List of Topoi
   
   
   
   
   
   [$NZ 40 the pair]
   (not available separately]

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Stu Bagby (on the right, with his wife Sheila beside him)

Leicester's book will be launched by award-winning poet Stu Bagby. My book will be launched by award-winning fiction writer Tracey Slaughter.

Tracey Slaughter

There will also be a range of artworks on sale both by Bronwyn and by Paper Table's brilliant designer, Lisa Baudry.

The wine will flow and a range of culinary treats will be provided. Please do come and spend the afternoon with us.

If you have any further questions about either the books or the imprint, check out our new Paper Table website.

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Brand design: Lisa Baudry

Leicester Kyle & Paul Celan: 2 Corrections

K. J. Walker: Powelliphanta augusta (2005)

Quite some time ago now (in April 2014), I published an article [“Paul Celan & Leicester Kyle: The Zone & the Plateau,” Ka Mate Ka Ora 13 (2014): 54-71] on New Zealand poet Leicester Kyle, attempting to link some of his attitudes towards place with similar ideas in the work of Paul Celan.

Some time later I received two emails which offered corrections to some of the information in the essay. I had (as I thought) arranged with the editor for portions of these to appear in the next issue of the journal, but given that has taken over two years to appear, I imagine these details must have got lost in translation.

In any case, it's perhaps better that I put them on record here instead. The above preamble is simply intended to explain why this process of correction has taken so long.

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The first letter, from Dave Johnson, Leicester Kyle's brother-in-law, concerns the precise circumstances of Kyle's father’s suicide. The passage in my essay reads:

His father, a journalist with some literary ambitions (he worked with Allen Curnow on the Christchurch Press) came from a well-established Greymouth family, but found it difficult to adjust to life in the city. He committed suicide when Leicester was still in his teens. [60-61]

Mr Johnson, in his email of 29th October 2014, makes these adjustments: “Cecil committed suicide (without meaning to) as he rang Helga [Leicester’s mother – JR] on the day of his death asking when she would be home. She was delayed by well over an hour and when she found him after he had swallowed his pills and binged it was too late to save him. Leicester was 29, not a teenager.”

He goes on to comment:

The snail Millertonii you mentioned is not the one from Mt. Augusta (now strip mined) I actually found the first specimen when we tramped up to the old Rainbow mine while botanising. Leicester thought the shell looked different and sent it off to Ch.Ch. It was eventually given the specific name Augusta.

This refers to the passage in pp. 62-64 of my essay about the discovery of the rare “Millerton snail,” which I have unfortunately confused with another, even rarer snail discovered on Mt. Augusta.

K. J. Walker: Powelliphanta lignaria (1993)

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Kath Walker (2011)

The second letter, received 9 April 2015, from Kath Walker of the Department of Conservation, has provided a good deal more detail on the distinction between these two snails:

I just thought I’d get in touch to clarify some confusion in your essay around the snail Leicester found at Millerton township, which we initially thought a newly discovered subspecies of the species Powelliphanta lignaria (we dubbed it Powelliphanta lignaria “Millertoni”) and the famous one which was found higher up on the Plateau on the Mt Augustus ridgeline (now described as Powelliphanta augusta). Your essay has them as one and the same but they are actually 2 separate very different entities, & they suffered different fates.

I don’t think Leicester ever saw the famous snail, Powelliphanta augusta, whose only habitat high up on Mt Augustus ended up being mined by Solid Energy, with the snails being held in DoC coolstores, tho I certainly had him searching for it for me back in late 2003/early 2004.

Coincidentally, just as I was trying to find the Mt Augustus snail, Leicester contacted me regarding the much bigger snail he’d seen in the Millerton township. We (Dept of Conservation) ran an intensive programme of rat control around the colony of the Millerton snail (P. l. “millertoni”) for several years to protect it while we investigated its origins using genetics. Not surprisingly, given its very limited distribution, very close to human settlement, this Millerton snail turned out not to be something different after all, but rather a population of P. l. lignaria (found north of the Mokihinui River mouth) looking a bit odd as it had been founded from only 1 or 2 individuals artificially transferred there, presumably by a resident in Millerton’s heyday.

None of this changes the theme of your essay – but it would be good to untangle the MAPPs reserve story – in the immediate vicinity of Millerton, which still exists, along with its annoyingly translocated population of P. l. lignaria (biogeographic patterns are important to retain in nature), and the P. augusta story with its much more sombre ending.

I’ve spent a decade trying to protect the Great Buller Sandstone Plateaux and its inhabitants via Environment Court appeals & always felt that Leicester’s poems cut to the chase & were worth far more than all the careful scientific evidence I prepared (“It’s the loss. Not protest notes to the CEO, or grumpy barricades …“). I agree with your thesis – the only chance of protecting a resource rich place is if many people love it for its own sake, and Leicester’s poetry could help that. In the end I wondered if his poetry spoke more to those who already loved and knew the landscape, both the geographical and the political landscape of the Plateaux.

While I hope that it’s true, as Kath Walker is kind enough to say, that this confusion between the two snails and their respective fates does not affect “the theme of [my] essay,” I am nevertheless very anxious to correct any misinformation I’ve unwittingly perpetrated.

Both Paul Celan and Leicester Kyle were poets who were exceptionally careful to get their facts straight, and I would be doing no service to their memory if I didn’t make every effort to alter these details in my essay.

Mea culpa, then: please bear these facts in mind if you ever feel tempted to revisit the original essay!

J. Ross: Leicester Kyle (2000)

Double Whammy

Well, I certainly hope that the subscribers and contributors to brief 50 - the projects issue are pleased with the results of my editing and Brett Cross's stunning text and cover design. More to the point, I hope they're happy to get, as a special bonus with this fiftieth issue of the magazine, a free copy of Leicester Kyle's Millerton Sequences, which has just been published by Atuanui Press:

It's been quite a while since I've posted here. Apologies for that: blame it on having to compose a new set of lecture notes for my travel writing paper at Massey, which is proving unexpectedly popular in its new distance form.

That's no excuse, of course. I hope I'll be able to do better now things have settled down a bit.

So what exactly is this book, The Millerton Sequences? Well, in a sense it's meant as a culmination of all the work I (and others) have put into the Leicester Kyle website (address below). That site certainly errs on the side of inclusiveness, so I thought it was important to put out a selection of Leicester's shorter poems which would enable readers to appreciate some of the qualities his admirers value most in his work as a whole.

There's an introduction by me, a poem by David Howard - we've tried to make it as attractive a proposition as possible for the casual poetry fan:

You can find out a lot more about the book here, if you're curious. And, yes, some copies are still available for sale from the Atuanui Press website.

And what of brief? Well, again, you can see a complete list of contents on the brief index site. Here's a list of the authors you can encounter in this special anniversary issue (how many literary magazines - especially experimental ones - actually reach a fiftieth issue?)

So anyway, as you can see, I've not been entirely idle during this hiatus in Imaginary Museum posts. I can't promise it'll never happen again, but I certainly will try to come up with some fresh new stuff to interest you once I'm over the hump of the next couple of months. Don't write me off just yet ...