Category Archives: Words on the Street

Now available: the first Words on the Street book!

An almost daily cartoon I did in the early years of this blog, before I had a camera to provide images. Some of these were hosted on Imageshack, which evidently purges its databases from time to time, resulting in empty posts.

News from the ‘Hood

Posted on July 2, 2008 by Dave Bonta

faith-based initiative

Yesterday was a lovely day in my virtual neighborhood. A new edition of the Festival of the Trees went up at Earth, Wind and Water, honoring the 150th anniversary of the publication of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Tai Haku wrote a full paragraph for almost every link, placing the trees in ecological or cultural contexts. My favorite entries included a post on the bizarre and beautiful Common Screwpine; a great overview of mangrove forests by artist Carel Brest Van Kempen, who is putting together a traveling group show of mangrove art to raise money for their conservation; and a page on the Ginkgo trees that survived the atom bomb blast at Hiroshima, which I somehow missed on my visit to the city 20 years ago.

The first of the month also means posting a new nature column over at my mom’s site, this one illustrated as we often do with some of my old photos: Sunday, Sweet Sunday. It should give you a good sense of what Plummer’s Hollow is like this time of year — and why we are grateful to live in a conservative Christian area despite being what you might call secular humanists (and believers in “evil-lution,” needless to say). Sundays really are much, much quieter.

Finally, we announced the next bimonthly theme at qarrtsiluni: Transformation, with guest editors Jessamyn Smyth and Allan Peterson.

We are looking for work exploring transformative instances of all kinds with an emphasis particularly on the change itself — the dynamics inside the chrysalis rather than a static image of the butterfly emerged; the moment of Daphne becoming a laurel.

And within an hour the most highly motivated poets (yes, they exist!) began sending in submissions, much to my wonder. It should be another interesting issue.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Trees, Words on the Street | Tagged faith-based initiative | 5 Comments

Posted on April 5, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Am I delivering a blog brand experience? Lord, I hope not!

I gotta hand it to John Pozadzides: even though he’s one of those big-shot dispensers of the very kind of received blogging wisdom that I was railing against last week, he sure doesn’t buy the malarky about narrow niche blogging being the best way to attract and keep an audience.

I’ve been hearing people advising authors to stick to only one topic per blog for some time now. And they are just plain wrong.

Any possible SEO [search engine optimization] advantage is more than outweighed by the fact that authors and readers become bored by the same subject after a while and content becomes stale and painful. Not to mention the fact that you’ll only keep a regular subscriber for so long without some variety. (Oprah doesn’t talk about the same thing every day, so why should you?)

Instead, write about what you know and love… all of it. As an example, my blog has 42 categories and 2,300 tags. I average 15-20,000 page views each day, with a record day being over 140,000.

Of course, here at Via Negativa it’s more common for me to write about what I don’t know (but still love). But one way or the other, with advice like that to mitigate the effects of his unexamined assumption that big audience = success, I happily sat through a video of his entire speech at WordCamp Dallas, and have even decided to follow two pieces of his advice. First, as this post demonstrates, I’ve started adding title text to links — the words that appear when you mouse-over a link (or a linked image, but I’ve been doing that for a while). The visual editor in the brand-new version of WordPress makes it easy and convenient, so what the hell.

I also decided to add a “Related Posts” feature, though not with the plugin Pozadzides recommends. This one searches the entire database for keywords and uses complex algorithms, apparently. (I’m always a sucker for complex algorithms, because I don’t have the foggiest notion of what they are or why they work.) You can see it in action by clicking on any post and scrolling down to the bottom, right above the big gray block of info. I currently have it set to display a maximum of five Possibly Related Posts, with the parameters of relatedness set wide enough that something should always turn up. The results are listed in descending order of relatedness, which is to say that the most closely related post should always be at the top. And it seems to work pretty well, knock on wood. For example, the first Possibly Related Post for Consumer, that story about feeding a shrew in a box, was an essay from last year containing a photo and description of a dead short-tailed shrew.

I may not care about total numbers of visitors, but I do care a lot about engaging and entertaining those who do show up — and I’m always looking for ways to improve access to the archives, especially considering that I’m probably never going to get around to categorizing all 900-odd uncategorized posts from my days on Blogger. In the sidebar, you’ll notice a new Browse section that includes a Random Post link. It might be fun to use that in combination with the Related Posts feature. I’d appreciate feedback on these or any other new features of the site, especially from regular readers.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention another new feature that affects browsing. I now have the ability to display a smaller number of posts on the main page of the blog from what appear in monthly archival pages, category archival pages, and search results, thanks to the ~~Different Posts Per Page~~ Custom Post Limits plugin. So right now the main page is set to display seven posts, down from ten — which always seemed too many to me for a front page, but not quite enough for exploring the archives. All the other settings are currently at 15, and display complete posts rather than excerpts. I’m very open to suggestions and criticism on this.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Words on the Street | 15 Comments

Words on the street

Posted on October 26, 2007 by Dave Bonta

(If you don’t get this, count yourself lucky.)

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Words on the Street | 3 Comments

What does love want?

Posted on August 21, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Friend me

To be whole.
To be a part.
To be apart.
To be wholly present.
To be a present.
To be free.
To be treasured.
To be changeless.
To be infinitely malleable.
To be indescribable.
To be given multiple terms of endearment.
To be at rest.
To be in motion.
To be emptied.
To be filled.
To be sovereign.
To be of service.
To be amusing.
To be amazing.
To be amazed.
To be wildered.
To be lost.
To be last.
To be all things.
To be no thing.
To be not.
To be.

__________

Thanks to SB for posing the question on her Facebook profile.

Posted in Personal/Political, The via negativa, Words on the Street | 18 Comments

Man on the street

Posted on June 15, 2006 by Dave Bonta

This entry is part 4 of 15 in the series Self-Portraits

My fourth entry in the self-portrait marathon

I’m personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the streets — but it’s what the people want.
–Turkmenbashi

Never read about the Turkmenbashi right before going to bed. While I slept, a bland, doughy face came looking in the window.

Tink. Tink. Tink. Water dripping on a steel roof in the prison yard.

The golden statue revolves on top of its pedestal not in order to follow the sun, as malicious outsiders claim, but in order to keep from falling into shadow. A positive attitude is a powerful potion, chant the people’s deputies.

Tink, tink, tink: spoons on glasses in the golden-domed palace. The blandest of smiles, announcing the abolition of the death penalty. Across the boulevard at the U.S. embassy, it’s like a group orgasm as cellphones in pants pockets all begin to vibrate at once.

I am a bystander in my own dream. Who are all these blue horsemen flourishing their sabers so cinematically? They gallop into the forest in a large, public park just as some demonstrators — Young Turkmens, I guess — lead a mob of military police into the same forest from the other side.

Is it that I have no stomach for gore, or that, fed on a diet of bloodless history, I lack the mental imagery? The trees hide everything. I hear shots and screams, and the winnying of horses.

Half of the horsemen come out, but none of the police. The voice of the omniscient narrator hesitates, then tells the truth. The horsemen were patriotic defenders of Turkmenistan; the police were vile enemies of the people. There will be democratic elections. Tink, tink, tink.

Now I am there in person, and so are you. We bloggers have chosen Ashgabat as our next gathering spot — it’s centrally located, we say. The elections were a smashing success; they have democracy now. The Turkmenbashi’s head smiles blandly from the top of a revolving stake.

The former secret police have new jobs as pimps and pickpockets, thugs and drug runners. They follow us everywhere. Four of them rob us at knifepoint in a crowded restaurant.

Our shouts for help arouse nothing but studied disinterest from the other diners. Then I get an idea. Tap your spoons against your wineglasses, I urge my companions.

Tink. Tink. Tink.