Hesperado, how recondite art thou?

At times, I despond, and despair of my blog making any sort of a ripple at all, even in an eddy of an inlet of a lagoon far in among low-hanging trees that screen out the sun, out of the vaster sea of the Web's wide world, from which any fish may find their way here to be caught in my net, at least for a while until I toss them back again.

In moods like this, I try various ingenious ways of finding myself on Google.

It was particularly pleasing, then, to find apparent proof that, should anyone out there do a search for "Vaclav Havel tuba pastoralis", he shall find my blog on the very first page of Google search results, about halfway down.

Or, at least, he shall find a comment I posted as Hesperado (with my name linking here) on July 1 of this year, on the relatively new blog of film critic John Simon -- John Simon Uncensored -- commenting on his essay about Czech composer Leos Janacek:

"I don't mean in this little comment box to be impertinent nor to flout Wittgenstein's famous dictum -- let alone disagree with Mr. Simon about pre-modern music -- but one of my favorite pieces of Czech music is Allegro ut Pastorella in B for 2 clarinets, 2 French horns, 2 bassoons and tuba pastoralis (a B flat bass alphorn nine feet long), by Václav Havel who, according to the liner notes on my LP cover, was "the otherwise obscure personal secretary to Maria Thaddäus Trauttmannsdorf" (and, if that isn't enough to distinguish him from the more famous Velvet Revolutionary of the same name, his composition was dated 1806)."

I wonder how many thousands of people out there have had cause these past two months to Google "Vaclav Havel tuba pastoralis"...?  Surely, many many thousands!

I shall sleep like a little baby tonight, counting pastoral sheep, bustling up the scrubby hill to my little hut at the sound of my alphorn.