Two days into 2015 and I haven’t done my 2014-in-review post! I’m behind already.
In swimming as in blogging, 2014 was a year of constancy. No long swims, and several months with no water-miles logged — in Jan I was recovering from ear surgery, and in May I guess I got caught between pool and open water seasons — but a respectable total of 103.37 miles. On the blog, 12,500 page views, roughly the same as last year, and about 7k visitors to the site.
| Month | Total Distance |
|---|---|
| Feb | 13.01 miles (=22,900 yards, =20,940 meters) |
| Mar | 11.25 miles (=19,800 yards, =18,105 meters) |
| Apr | 5.26 miles (=9,250 yards, =8,458 meters) |
| Jun | 11.96 miles (=21,050 yards, =19,248 meters) |
| Jul | 9.24 miles (=16,260 yards, =14,869 meters) |
| Aug | 17.88 miles (=31,471 yards, =28,777 meters) |
| Sep | 6.16 miles (=10,850 yards, =9,921 meters) |
| Oct | 3.35 miles (=5,900 yards, =5,395 meters) |
| Nov | 14.80 miles (=26,050 yards, =23,820 meters) |
| Dec | 10.45 miles (=18,400 yards, =16,825 meters) |
| Total | 103.37 miles (=181,931 yards, =166,358 meters) |
Of my 55 blog posts — which I think may be a new high number for me — 19 were theater or film reviews. Here’s the list starting in January, an autobio in spectating:
1. Twelfth Night with Mark Rylance (1/17)
2. Cry, Trojans by the Wooster Group (1/31)
3. Twelfth Night by Pig Iron (2/21)
4. Antony & Cleopatra at the Public (3/13)
5. Red Velvet at St Ann’s (4/4)
6. Lear at Tfana (4/23)
7. Rumstick Road by the Wooster Group (5/2)
8. Macbeth with Kenneth Branagh (6/6)
9. Antony & Cleopatra at the Globe (6/28)
10. Two Gents and The White Devil in Stratford (8/7)
11. 2 Henry IV and Roaring Girl in Stratford (8/9)
12. Gaia Global Circus (by Bruno Latour) 9/28
13. Tempest 1 at LaMaMa (10/6)
14. The Master and Margarita at Yale Drama (10/26)
15. Tempest 2 at LaMaMa (11/22)
16. Pericles at the Public (11/26)
17. Tamburlaine at Tfana (12/7)
18. Inherent Vice (12/15)
19. Tempest 3 at LaMaMa (12/20)
Most blog posts in a month was 5, in June, October, and December; least was 1 in May (what was going on in May?), followed by 2 in July and September.
I estimate those 19 reviews amount to something over 15k words that I wrote about performances in 2014. Almost all of them were only published on this blog. I have promised an article-sized version of my response to “Cry, Trojans” to Shakespeare Survey next year, after the Woosters do a final full production in St. Ann’s this coming March. Other than that, though, I haven’t published any of these reviews, though I may still combine the three Tempests at LaMaMa this past fall into something larger. (I think my last published review was on the Julie Taymor *Midsummer Night’s Dream” that opened the new theater space for Tfana in Fort Greene in fall 2013; it appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin 32:2 [Summer 2014] 307-310. But I never blogged that one.)
This coming spring semester I’m going to mine this archive as well as recent issues of Shakespeare Bulletin, and maybe a few other early modernist blogs (like Holger Syme’s Dispositio) to think about how we respond critically and rhetorically to modern performances of early modern plays. There are a bunch of great upcoming shows in NYC this spring, as I’ve noted already, and I should be able to get almost all of my students to at least a couple of them. I’ve been wanting to shake up the writing that I assign in my Shakespeare class without reducing the intense focus on close analysis, and this might be a good way to do it.
I’m toying with a couple of other 2015-ish resolutions, but those will have to wait for a later post.
Leave a Reply