The Honest Courtesan

Since we’re coming closer to wrapping up my annex project, it seems likely that before too long before I won’t have enough going on to ensure a weekly column on the topic; I’ll need to start throwing other things into the Friday space a couple of times a week, and eventually I’ll be completely finished and any updates will probably just appear in the diary columns.  That leaves room for a new weekly feature, because my days of being able to come up with a whole new essay several times a week are gone, and I think it unlikely they will ever return because one can only burn a candle at both ends for so long before there’s nothing left.  That doesn’t mean I plan to start leaving unsightly gaps in my perfect record, however.  As of July 10th, I will have been making a new post every single day for 13 years; that’s 4748 posts altogether, most of which the majority of y’all have never read.  Now, I’ve often said that the one moral concept from my Catholic upbringing which has remained steadfastly lodged in my head is that waste is a sin, and there’s a lot of good material there going unread; I sometimes even impress myself when I encounter some old witticism from Days of Yore.  So starting four weeks from today, on July 13th, the first Thursday of my 14th year of blogging, I’m going to start a new feature in which I peruse old columns from past years and share interesting quotes, links, pictures, etc.  As of right now I’m unsure of which years I’ll be looking at, how much I’ll quote from each, what the layout will look like, etc, but experience tells me that I’ll probably tweak it here and there for a few years until I get it the way I want it.  I already do something similar with my weekly links column and the monthly archive columns, but those are pretty dense for the sake of completeness; this will not attempt to be complete, but will instead be a kind of “best of” to introduce new readers to notable posts and remind old readers of ones they liked.  And with any luck it will free up enough time for me to start putting together a few books I promised myself I’d try to finish this year.