I can’t seem to stop eating cheap Thai food from the Grange for lunch, and I think it’s making my tummy rumbly. Bother.
This morning I started thinking about Samuel Pepys, and what a champion blogger he might have been, if born in this digital age. He might even have given my ambitiously prolix friend
And then I started thinking: wow, what a neat little applet it would be if someone created “The Pepysometer”, a little tool that tracks how many words you’ve written in your blog, and compares it to the total number of words in the 73 volumes of Pepys’ diary, written between January 1659 and May 1669. I believe he wrote somewhere in the region of million and a quarter words, and I think it would be fascinating to set his abbreviated longhand against the speed of modern typing, which doubtless encourages certain bloggers to write at extreme length.
One of my favorite writers, for example, who I have not read much of since switching from Diaryland to LiveJournal, was a Ms. Xtine Squirrel. Xtine wrote on average 1500-2000 words EVERY DAMN DAY for at least a year after her separation from her husband, setting up her tarot business and discovering her psychic abilities. But the last entry currently sitting on her site is from December 4th, 2004, over a month ago. Pepys (from what I understand) averaged more like 100 words per entry, but the man had endurance. He plunked his activities, no matter how mundane, down on the page every day for 10 years. Consistency counts! How would Xtine measure up? Squirrel versus Samuel? Inquiring minds want to know!
FYI, for those of you who are interested in reading Mr. Pepys’ daily entries, a kind gentleman named Phil Gyford is using MoveableType to create a weblog of exactly that – Pepysdiary.com posts the good old fellow’s daily entries in real time, four hundred odd years later (ie. January 31st, 1661 is posted on January 31st, 2005, etc.)
BBC Article from January 2003 about Gyford’s ‘Pepys Online’ project
Interview with Claire Tomalin, author of “Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self”
Someone make me my Pepysometer! Get coding!
I am known to ramble on occasion.. is it simply coincidence that I lived on Sammy’s road when I first moved to London? I mean the place had changed dramatically, but I felt his presence somehow… all the road signs are in paragraphs. 🙂