Meta: Posts that draw a surprising number of hits every day

And, I’m back from vacation.  (See here, here, and here.)  There’s no better way to capitalize on the traffic spike from InsideHigherEd.com than to . . . have it come while on a week’s hiatus.  Damn.  It did give me a chance to reflect a bit on traffic patterns to this tiny, tiny blog.   Judging from my stats over the past year (that is, since this post), the following things draw the most new visitors to The Salt-Box:

1.  Complaining about VitalChek

2.  Dickensian gay porn

3.  Neil Diamond concert reviews

The staying power of items 1 and 2* is amazing, especially considering neither of them are really within my ambit.  There are other posts that regularly draw traffic (such as “From dissertation to book contract” or “Wikified class notes”) but those make more sense.

*That people on the internet come to this site in search of gay porn, based on one wry little post, reminds me of a story: My first serious publication was an essay on Wilhelm Reich in a U of Chicago Press collection called Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis. (Other authors in that collection, edited by Tim Dean and Christopher Lane: Foucault. Leo Bersani.  Lauren Berlant.  Jonathan Dollimore.  Many, many other prominent theorists and scholars. It’s really a very helpful collection.)

My mom asked–sensibly enough, for a person of her generation who’s not enmeshed in English-department-style cultural politics–whether it was possible, as a result of the publication, that potential employers might not think I was myself gay.  It turned out the *real* concern, I think, on the job market was that my two main publications to that point weren’t on Victorian topics (the other was on Arnold Bennett.)  Anyway.