I get excited whenever someone comments on this blog. People are engaged and want to brainstorm about marketing the arts, three cheers! One scary guy did comment on the Contact field and e-yelled at me, saying I should find a shrink and/or a husband to burden with my problems rather than airing them in a public forum, but other than that, all of the comments have been constructive and interesting, I think. [Naturally that one comment led me to a sitcom-esque fantasy sequence flash in which I see a normal shrink every week and say things like,”The New York Philharmonic annoyed me yesterday because they sent a hardcopy mailing to advertise an online contest for a digital music player. I just get really frustrated by both the killing of trees and the total disconnect.” And then the shrink would say, “Amanda we talked about this last week: you should be encouraged by the fact that they know about iPods!”]
I digress. So two, three, four comments on a blog post are exciting to me; tiny little baby steps to building a national arts community, if only online. But then I find out that Parterre Box ((shakes fist at the heavens)) entries often get hundreds of comments!! I’ve been served. An excerpt from Matthew Horner’s interview over here received 89-comments-and-counting over there. I’m not really shaking my fist at the heavens, but rather applauding the mainstream levels of participation in a blog devoted to opera and the opera industry; I thought that number of comments was reserved for Perez Hilton & Co.. So much for the popular notion that die-hard opera fans are old-world and technology-less – they blog, they comment! Neither Alex Ross nor Terry Teachout have comment fields on their blogs, but I suspect if they did they could garner similar results.
Results like this, perhaps:
OK, perhaps that’s another sitcom-esque fantasy sequence flash, but a girl can dream.
Update, 8/28 10:01 am: 104 comments!