Rising from the Depths
I’ve had a bad week. Well, sort of.
Probably the majority of you reading this, have logged in to find a pretty extensive, but frustratingly organised collection of poetry analysis. Just maybe you noticed a difference over the last two weeks where the site was taken over by an Indonesia betting site.
Let me assure you this was not a bold new direction for the site, or I should say, it was not a bold new direction for the site that I decided upon. Instead some hackers decided the world needed more in the way of gambling adverts and less in the way of poetry. Who is to say whether they were right or not?
Despite this ambiguity I fought back and have wrestled control off those good for nothing poetry haters and back in my own, ever so slightly capable hands. However, there appears to have been a trade off in doing this. In return for being able to use the site I pay for, I have had to sacrifice 12 years of poetry analysis and other odds and sods I’ve added on the site over the years.
We are always taught to look for the silver lining, so let me try.
When I started the site, I was a bushy eyed and bright tailed young man in the midst of a quarter life crisis. I’d sold everything I owned and shipped off to Uganda on an adventure that I would have never have admitted was about finding myself (because I lack sentiment and that sort of thing). Posts would be composed in restaurants I’d travel to on boda-bodas in the near pitch black and with the hum of mosquitos circling and I’d do lunch-time updates to my colleagues as my reading figures started to grow and show off the map of the world that was slowly colouring itself in with readers from the five continents (Antartica stubbornly resisted) and four corners of the Earth. What started off as a free wordpress site (the original is still up and avoiding the gambling cartels attentions), grew and grew with almost a million readers in my first two years. So, I decided to take things more seriously and upgraded to a paid site and the added functionality and so cieliterature.com was born for the first time.
Twelve years on and a few things have changed. From my spiritual home in Uganda, I relocated to Uzbekistan for some money and then the Netherlands to settle down. I have a fair bit of baggage now that has made me neglect the site. My dog Alan joined the project early on and he can be excused, but my wife has been a real menace to the site. Constantly demanding my attention, getting pregnant three times, following through on each these threat and then asking me to clean and sort things around the house. Honestly! The last two years the site was basically dormant and entirely neglected, but it’s never been far from my mind.
So, where is this silver lining? Well, these good for nothing toerags have stirred up something inside me and made me want to reconnect with my website roots. Whether I will be able to recapture my youthful poetry prolific posting seems unlikely, but hopefully my notes, analysis, tips and advice will help someone somewhere with something.
A few things to bear in mind, I have not taught the CIE syllabus for 8 years now having moved to the evils on the IB and all their bloody concepts, so my notes are less likely to be specifically aimed at a particular exam. Also I sort of know what I am doing now, so hopefully the pitfalls of terrible website design will be avoided and this place will feel like a joy to navigate.
For those of you who are loyal readers through the years, welcome back old friends and I hope I can still be useful to you. For those of you who are new to the website, I am but one man and thus easily led and manipulated; tell me what you want and I will do my best.
Watch this space and hopefully you will soon see it blossom into something not completely useless to the world.