To the Founder of the Feast!
I’ve been blogging here for about four months now, and I enjoy watching my blog’s stats. I’m going to share a few of the things I’ve noticed because I think it’s interesting to see what’s on surfers’ minds.
The phrase that has brought the most hits to my site is one sentence from George Orwell’s essay Shooting an Elephant.
I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it.
It is astounding how many people plug that sentence, or some fraction of it, into a search engine. My post Shooting an Elephant is an evergreen attraction on this site.
I have a theory on why this sentence is so popular: it stands contrary to the standard academic interpretation of Orwell’s work. Shooting an Elephant (Orwell’s essay) is often quoted from as evidence of the horrors of colonialism; yet professors always seem to drop this sentence from their essays and textbooks.
I believe that when students come to read Shooting an Elephant for themselves, it’s a ‘red pill’ moment. Their natural desire is to see if anybody else has noticed what they have…
The most popular post overall- thanks to my readers in Europe and the Middle East- is What Would He Say About Harry Potter? , a post exploring Orwell’s views on propaganda for children.
I get a lot of Harry-Potter-themed referrals from search engines, but not enough to account for this post’s popularity.
If you liked that post (or didn’t and want to be goaded further), try:
So, it seems that I owe George Orwell gratitude, because he’s the top draw to my site. That’s a debt I’ll repay with tough love.
Happy Armistice Day.
