self-festschrift!
10 December 1998
Waxwing is close to celebrating, or has celebrated, its two year anniversary -- although it might be a year or a year and a half. I'm pretty sure it took some kind of shape in 1997. Maybe before, I don't know. I had just come back from Colombia in '96 and I don't think I would have had the courage to set up a web-site until the following year, but I could be wrong.
The site began as a small collection of quotes and I have managed, despite a full-time job and the rigors of pursuing an English major, to turn it into a slightly larger collection of quotes. Much of Waxwing is wool-gathering and lists, snippets from novels and cuttings from facts -- bits of information linked to more bits of information.
How reassuringly hefty it is, when printed. Working on it, adding a word or paragraph here and correcting a comma there, gives me more joy than seems warranted. But why not? However trivial and circumspect Waxwing's pebbles of info might be, their orbits are marked by the truly celestial, Vladimir Nabokov's literature.
As of today (10 December 1998) some 12,000 people have visited, assuming an average of a thousand per month during 1998; the server says 40,000 in three months, but from that you would have to subtract my own visits and multiple hits. Besides, the recently installed counter registers a much more realistic number (1,684 since October 24), and the stats server strikes me as overly optimistic.
Still. Not bad for an amateur site set up by a college student with scads of spare time.
A few more figures: 32 sites have linked Waxwing, Yahoo! and Snap! among them, as well as an MIT class and a Britannica Online project; 122 of you have signed the guestbook, and only 14 under duress or duty (parents, relatives, and friends); 16 of you have contributed to the site with material for Vivian Darbloom Lives, and suggestions for NaboPop and Nabokovilia. Quite a few more have e-mailed me with corrections (welcomed), kudos (doubly welcomed), and questions (sort of welcomed). A lot of you e-mailed me about Sting's Nabokovian song and the Pynchon reference in The Crying of Lot 49. Thank you.
Nabokovilia, the heart of the site, now features 20 novelists: Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ann Beattie, Anthony Burgess, Truman Capote, James Dickey, Frederick Exley, Penelope Fitzgerald, Donald Harington, Harry Mulisch, J.M.M., Cynthia Ozick, Thomas Pynchon, Erich Segal, W.G. Sebald, Dan Simmons, Paul Theroux, and John Updike.
Typos still abound.
plans
I will be graduating in December of 1999. While my life-plans are still in the air (my novel hovering in a kind of electronic limbo, my upcoming status as an English major not particularly attractive to the job market, my student visa (F-1) to expire upon completion of studies, the mother country (Colombia) mired in violence and corruption), plans for Waxwing are fixed: The site will keep on keeping on.Early 1999 will see a thorough revisioning of the Lolita page, Waxwing's oldest section (ironic) and its most popular (doubly ironic). Also in the works is the correction and completion of Bridges to Antiterra (an all-important Baudelaire poem is not named), as well as a new section, tentatively titled Postcards, totally devoted to graphics -- scans of book covers (old paperbacks and foreign editions) as well as caricatures of Nabokov, but no photos of him. There's enough of them elsewhere.
There will be no animated graphics or unnecessary Java-scripts. Nothing fancy. I'll continue to streamline the site, trimming fat from prose and design.
I fly back to Colombia for two weeks on December 16. I don't foresee making any changes until after I come back in January. I look forward to seeing you in 1999.
thank you
Response, as they say, has been phenomenal. Thank you.Cheers,
©1998 Self-Festschrift is the property of J.M. Martinez. Please do not reproduce without the author's permission.
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