Subscriptions

If you want to subscribe to the stuff that appears in the main column of the blog, you have two options.

1. Get Via Negativa posts sent to your email. Use this form:

2. Subscribe to the feed.

Use the fancy new (as of March 2008) Feedburner feed, or use one of the original feeds if you prefer: RSS or Atom.

What’s a feed, you ask, and what the heck do I do with it? Well, the gist of it is that you can read the contents of the blog — along with as many other blogs and news sources as you want — through what’s known as a feed reader, or aggregator, which publishes new content to a portal page such as My Yahoo, Google Reader, or Bloglines. The advantage is that it saves you the time and trouble of clicking on sites to see whether they’ve been updated. The disadvantage is that you lose all the design characteristics of the blog, and if you want to leave a comment, you still have to click through to the actual site.

Speaking of which, you can also subscribe to the comments feed if you feel so inclined. Be aware that the feed includes trackbacks and pingbacks – even when I link to my own posts. And a few spam comments get through everyday, too. So I don’t necessarily recommend subscribing to the comments, unless you have a crush on one of the commenters or something.

If there’s a particular conversion you want to follow, you’ll find links to the feeds for individual posts at the end of each post, if you click on the permalink.

As if that weren’t enough, you can even subscribe to any of the categories, simply by adding “/feed/” to the end of the URL. So let’s say you’re only interested in reading my posts labled “Poems and poem-like things.” Simply subscribe to http://www.vianegativa.us/category/poems/feed/. Wild, huh?

I tend to update Via Negativa once a day, usually around mid-afternoon. I typically take either Saturday or Sunday off to avoid burnout.

photo by Bruce Bonta

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Smorgasblog
- Velveteen Rabbi
  Avraham failed the test.
  For Sodom and Gomorrah he argued
  but when it came to his son
  no protest crossed his lips.
- Parmanu
  The flight took us towards Heidelberg. We approached it along a silvery streak (the Neckar), flew over a terraced hilltop oval (Thingstaette), the cramped rooftops (altstadt), a ruin in pink (the castle) and then turned around just as the sun sank behind the horizon. The places we had seen earlier --- and spent hours exploring --- flipped past us in an instant, and at that moment I could not decide what I liked better: the fleeting but striking impression from this height, or the slow immersion into those places below.
- The House & other Arctic musings
  Another use of the seal, that as far as I know is particular to them is that the small intestine is relished. It is taken out, the contents squeezed out, a couple of plugs of blubber are then put in and squeezed through to further clean out the contents. Then they are coiled through each other for ease of handling and cooking. The intestines are eaten boiled, much like hollow sausages.
- small change
  Oh Emily, I see you leap
  through your mother’s tatted dream
  of the hearted ballerina
  you don’t want to be. Your face
  a stage, wrought in shadows
  as it is, the lattice of discomfort,
  but the cushy seat of your reserve.
- The Storialist
  A cute thing begs hyperbole,
  rhetorical questions:
  aren't you just the cutest...
  
  It is little, an it, a thing, small
  and low to the ground.
- Metaphors for the Moon
  Early marriage is a wetland, a marsh
  of co-mingling reeds, breeding birds.
- Cleaning My Attic
  Cast-iron Royal, weighty and not regal at all but seriously proletarian, ostensibly portable in your anonymous black case: my secret unmusical instrument, which I lugged to cafes before they were wireless or even wired...
- Clumps and Voids
  The program description, however, devolves into the fey. "The lingam (or linga) is a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, and a dispute about its meaning has been going on for many centuries." When a phallus is tagged with the museum label of "cylindrical votary object," I lose hope that the speaker will be introduced as Professor Wendy Doniger: don of dongs.
- botanizing
  On calm days, the soil swirls and rises in isolated twisters. On a windy day when the wheat is being harvested — a day like today — the soil lifts like a yellow curtain, obliterating the sky.
- The Twitching Line
  My uncle, gutting a fish:
  removing the fins from either side,
  tipping the knife below
  
  the little anus, pointing the tail-
  end away, slitting it to the gills,
  then plunging in a hand
  
  to scoop the organs out, soft
  and scarlet as a litter of kittens.
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"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.