Why the slow blogging?

A variety of reasons, most importantly that I'm in the process of going over the copy-editor's mark-up of the manuscript for How Tradition Works. She is a genius and has been improving the book immensely, but it's still my book, so when she suggests an article or a few pages of a book, I have to rush out, find the source, read it, and see if I agree that it belongs in the footnote. Tiring. And I just can't believe that after several revisions there were still this many mistakes for her to catch in the manuscript. Embarrassing.

But I did want to follow up on a few reactions to my post of the other day that was picked up by SDB and BAW and others. The level of invective that it has generated in a number of places (no, I won't feed the trolls, though you can use my site-meter referrer logs if you desire) goes a long way to proving my point. If you can't argue with people, but simply assert your superiority at having mastered some arcana, well, it's no wonder the wider public isn't influenced by your work.

But on the fun side of referrer logs, I came across some highschool or college students who were using one of my old articles, on Susan Cooper, and for whom I'd become some kind of drooling idiot who couldn't not possibly get anything right. That made my day, because I used to use that approach to articles I disagreed with in order to get me motivated to write a paper. And, as is almost always the case when there's name-calling involved, it's telling that the challenges are always focused on points of interpretation that are masquerading as points of fact (hint: since Cooper doesn't say whether or not Alfred was some kind of partially human Lord of the Light, analogous, perhaps, to Arthur, we have to infer. But whether or not the inference is correct is another story. Also, a sharp word does not equal a 'punishment'. But I digress...)
Good to see that some things never change and that people are reading my old Susan Cooper article, even if they hate it.