I have mixed feelings about sequels. On the one hand, a sequel fulfils that urgent, impossible longing you have after you finish a really good story – the longing for it to go on forever, for “the end” to have been a mistake. A sequel reveals that the world didn’t really end, that the characters are (or were) still out there having adventures or making legacies, and most importantly, that you can still be with them (or at least in their world) a little longer.
On the other hand, the sequel is often less a rolling forward than a slippage slightly sideways. For my Renaissance prose fiction class today we read some of the prefatory letters to the sequel John Lyly wrote to his 1578 bestseller, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit. His dedicatory letter, to Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, makes clear both that he is aware of the phenomenal success of his first Euphues book, and that this current work is not so much a repetition of what the first one did, but a continuation with changes. Characterizing the two books as (monstrous) children, he says
Though I can’t say I was really dying for a continuation of Euphues (nor would I be encouraged by the prefatory letters to read Euphues His England, the sequel), Lyly’s characterization of the way that two works can both be very much products of one author, products of one fictional universe, and yet no more like each other than bad copies.
I suppose it’s a risk I’ll have to take.
This is the inaugural (real) blog entry of my very own website. It is, in some way, the sequel to my previous diary, which I kept from January 2001 to August 2006. Some of the back entries from that journal are posted here. But this new web-space/thought-space is in some ways a sequel to the old one, at least in my way of thinking about it. I suppose it says something about the way I relate to the Web that I think of pages as books – and says something about the way I relate to my own life that I think of it in terms of chapters and volumes.
So here it is. My weblog, the sequel. Truly a weblog now (I am calling it that, despite my abhorrence for the pattern of sounds in the word “blog.” It sounds so disgusted, so onomatopoetic, and not in a good way). Truly public now – I am ready for anyone who searches for me to read this page. I am ready to be both my RL self and my webself. (Note that they’re not necessarily the same self, but I’m ready to answer to both.)
I am the sequel to myself. Not quite like – maybe even so unlike that I have to identify myself with a legend or a title, but maybe improved. Or maybe not. Lyly ends his dedicatory letters with the customary direction to his readers that they take what they like and leave what they don’t, or, rather, that they amend it – I am, as I write myself publicly, also the reader of my own life, and mine is the power to take, leave, and amend as I commit my history to (somewhat ephemeral) publication.
So here I am, and here you are. Welcome to the seacoast of Bohemia.
On the other hand, the sequel is often less a rolling forward than a slippage slightly sideways. For my Renaissance prose fiction class today we read some of the prefatory letters to the sequel John Lyly wrote to his 1578 bestseller, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit. His dedicatory letter, to Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, makes clear both that he is aware of the phenomenal success of his first Euphues book, and that this current work is not so much a repetition of what the first one did, but a continuation with changes. Characterizing the two books as (monstrous) children, he says
Twins they are not, but yet brothers, the one nothing resembling the other, and yet…both like the father. Wherein I am not unlike unto the unskillful painter, who, having drawn the twins of Hippocrates (who were as like as one pease is to another), and being told of this friends that they were no more like than Saturn and Apollo, he had no other shift to manifest what his work was than over their heads to write, ‘The Twins of Hippocrates.’
Though I can’t say I was really dying for a continuation of Euphues (nor would I be encouraged by the prefatory letters to read Euphues His England, the sequel), Lyly’s characterization of the way that two works can both be very much products of one author, products of one fictional universe, and yet no more like each other than bad copies.
I suppose it’s a risk I’ll have to take.
This is the inaugural (real) blog entry of my very own website. It is, in some way, the sequel to my previous diary, which I kept from January 2001 to August 2006. Some of the back entries from that journal are posted here. But this new web-space/thought-space is in some ways a sequel to the old one, at least in my way of thinking about it. I suppose it says something about the way I relate to the Web that I think of pages as books – and says something about the way I relate to my own life that I think of it in terms of chapters and volumes.
So here it is. My weblog, the sequel. Truly a weblog now (I am calling it that, despite my abhorrence for the pattern of sounds in the word “blog.” It sounds so disgusted, so onomatopoetic, and not in a good way). Truly public now – I am ready for anyone who searches for me to read this page. I am ready to be both my RL self and my webself. (Note that they’re not necessarily the same self, but I’m ready to answer to both.)
I am the sequel to myself. Not quite like – maybe even so unlike that I have to identify myself with a legend or a title, but maybe improved. Or maybe not. Lyly ends his dedicatory letters with the customary direction to his readers that they take what they like and leave what they don’t, or, rather, that they amend it – I am, as I write myself publicly, also the reader of my own life, and mine is the power to take, leave, and amend as I commit my history to (somewhat ephemeral) publication.
So here I am, and here you are. Welcome to the seacoast of Bohemia.
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