I started this blog as a teaching-adjacent project for a study abroad course in London in 2008 that never happened. In 2009 it became an e-sideline and theater suggestions for a grad seminar. Starting around 2010 it slowly morphed into its current flow of theater reviews, academic conference commentary, and the occasional snippet from works-in-progress. I don’t post as many weather pictures as I used to, but I still chronicle my travels, most of the time.
The Bookfish now archives over 550 posts in the decade since Jan 2010, though as the posts have gotten more substantial over the years I’ve slowed down the volume. Forty-odd posts appeared in 2019, from Eco-Thoughts from Oaxaca to a series of comments about the Creating Nature conference at the Fogler to a triplet about my watery travels in the land of Oz this past October. A total of 13k pages views this past year, peaking in April (SAA-season). (I can’t tally total page views for the decade because my analytics seems to have reset itself in early 2018.) Posting has fallen off a bit this fall — I have unfinished draft posts about my trip to Liverpool in September, and to Delaware in November that I still hope to put into the e-world — but now that a couple large-ish projects have migrated off my desk, I may have a little more time for Bookfish-ing.
A few highlights from 2019:
Theater Posts
Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Nov, NYC)
Mayakovsky and Stalin (NYC)
King Lear (Broadway)
Julius Caesar (Theatre for a New Audience, NYC)
Twelfth Night (Yale Rep) and White Devil (Red Bull)
Makbet (St. John’s)
Academic Event Posts
ASLE 2019 (Davis, CA)
Creating Nature (roundup post)
#shax2019 (DC)
Revaluing the Ocean (Utah)
#mla19 (Chicago)
The swimming year has included some fantastic southern hemisphere immersion in and around Sydney, my first-ever dip in the North Sea (on the not-yet-blogged trip to Bristol in September), and less time in the pool than I might have wished, for assorted trivial reasons. More water miles in 2020!