Introducing ... Wibbity Wubbity!

“There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect, compared with which reproach, hatred, and opposition, are names of happiness.” -Samuel Johnson

Now that I have had a blog for a few months now, I have noticed a veritable dearth of outrage and/or nominations of me for president. I have not had one lawsuit from USAirways. The Boswell estate has not accused me of defamation of character. The hymn I composed in my sleep, “God Give Muscles to the BoyTM,” has not been picked up by a major record label. This blog, this fledging enterprise that is my weirdness on display, thirsts for raging controversy, thirsts to be listed on blogger.com’s “blogs of note” and having 60 billion comments for every post I write.

Through my study of great literature, I have realized how I can obtain more comments. In retrospect, it’s so obvious I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before: I can write the comments myself. For example, when Samuel Richardson wrote his eighteenth-century bestseller Pamela, the introduction provided ecstatic praise of the book, much of which was written by Richardson himself. When James Boswell published his correspondence with Erskine in the Erskine-Boswell Letters, the concluding paragraph of The London Chronicle’s review begins, “Upon the whole, we would recommend this collection as a book of true genius, from the authors of which we may expect many future agreeable productions”—the review, of course, was written by James Boswell (the eventual writer of Life of Johnson). If I wish to generate controversy with my posts, what better way than by manufacturing my own critic? The playwright Tom Stoppard once commented, “dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself”; a natural corollary is that the only respectable way of being contradicted is if you are the one writing the contradictions.

I have long enjoyed the eighteenth-century Spectator letters, a periodical with a daily essay—i.e., they were written in a prototypical blog format. The letters were framed as the product of a social club composed of different personality types, with such noteworthy personages as Sir Roger De Coverley, Sir Andrew Freeport, and Will Honeycomb. Well, world, prepare yourself for … Wibbity Wubbity!

With origins shrouded in mystery, with a future so important that it may determine the salvation or destruction of the world, Wibbity Wubbity is a baffling enigma, a Rubik’s cube with the colored stickers removed. His beliefs, his desires, his political affiliations, all are mysteries, all can only be discovered through reading his comments … and engaging with them. In future blog entries, I may acquaint you with some of Wibbity Wubbity’s friends, and may even allow them to write on occasion.