Orphan Blogs

When I first look at an unfamiliar blog, one of the first things I notice is the date of the most recent entry. I am bemused when the date of the final entry is from months, or years earlier, indicating that the author, or authors, stopped writing, posting, updating. Sometimes one just may not feel like continuing the blog, losing interest. One may be ill, dead, incapacitated, busy; Or one may have gone on to loftier summits (or moved operations to Daguerreotypebook or other websites).

There are innumerable examples, but here's one. This outstanding website: www.gustavhasford.com announces the start of a new blog devoted to author Gustav Hasford, posted by Hasford's cousin, Jason Aaron: www.gustavhasford.blogspot.com. The idea must have sounded good at the time, but the blog ends on July 18, 2008 (nine days before I began this one), fading off in a way nothing at all like Franz Schubert's Symphony 8 or Anton Bruckner's curse of the ninth. While the blog may not have endured, there is a lot of fantastic stuff on Jason's site, including the complete texts of The Short-Timers and The Phantom Blooper.

So one can study, for example, how a sequence about Mr. Payback torching rats in The Short-Timers, with a sardonic chorus from the Mickey Mouse Club Song, was translated into the symphony of flame that is the final scene of Full Metal Jacket. And I immediately have respect for someone (Hasford) who uses quotes from William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau as epigraphs in a Vietnam War novel.