Year: 2010

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Train Song

This entry is part 5 of 37 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

I lurk in a wooded
bend of the railroad
where I won’t be spotted.
Duffle bag — check.
Zippo lighter — check.
Deck of marked cards — check.
All my life I’ve been listening to trains
& all my life I’ve been letting them go by,
each whistle Dopplering down
from summons to wail,
followed by a thunder
as intoxicating as any heavy metal band,
graffitoed messages flying past
too fast to parse
& a poorly aligned wheel
shrieking like feedback from a speaker
all the way to Chicago.
It’s not that I want to travel, but this sky’s
too narrow, too full of murk.
It hurts to breathe.
I raise a pants leg
& here’s another goddamned tick
just starting to burrow in.
Out West, I’ve heard, there are places so empty
nobody’s even given them a name yet.
That’s why the next
slow freight & I
have a date.
Here comes
one now. Hear how
the rails are starting to sing?

*

For the Big Tent Poetry prompt, “Write about something you would love to do but have never dared.” Other responses are linked in the comments here.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The Rescue

I am rescuing Roma children from the Gestapo. They have, I discover, a marvelous gift for silence. We escape to the forest and live off whatever their quick fingers can find: eggs from hidden nests, truffles from the roots of oaks, frogs and arrowroot and wild carrots doing their best to masquerade as water hemlock. They are good at helping each other. Whenever I make a suggestion, they tilt their heads to the side, and on rare occasions when one of them speaks, it’s a single word, phrased like a question, in a language I don’t understand.

A little bit of hunger can sharpen the wits, but too much makes you dull. When dullness threatens to overwhelm us, we launch a night raid against some nearby farms, first drugging the dogs, then slipping in among the sleeping cows, their steamy breath, their hot stink, to liberate a gallon or two of milk from some rubbery teat, while the stealthiest child goes into the shed and eases a chicken from its perch without waking it up.

It’s a tricky business. The pasture is nothing but mud and we struggle to hold on to our prizes as we slip and fall and grow mired. The smaller children flail; the older ones settle exhausted onto their haunches and wait for dawn. The moon comes up and everything is illuminated: this is not mud but oil. These are not children but seabirds robbed of flight. And whatever you call this foaming about our feet, it is not the sea.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ceiling snakes

This entry is part 4 of 37 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

Direct link to video on Vimeo

The night that a pair of mating milk snakes drops out of the ceiling, I do not dream of snakes. I dream of mating, and of breaking through the crust of the earth and discovering another world filled with an unnatural light. I dream of inescapable stairs verging on a cliff-face to which I cling like a wingless fly. When I wake, it’s still humid, if no longer hot, and a wood thrush sings at the edge of the woods, where wood thrushes always sing: one part joy, two parts longing. I find my notebook from the night before, what I’d been writing when I heard a noise in the kitchen and set it down (some writer!) to grab the video camera. Picking at a scab, it says, and worry beads. I’m sure I had something in mind, but I don’t know what. The snakes were beautiful, and if I hadn’t known better, I might’ve thought from their configuration that they were one snake with a head at both ends, curious but calm as milk snakes always seem to be. If they’d stayed longer I might’ve stood beneath them and offered the use of my body as a steep set of stairs. But the ceiling or their unfinished business called them back, and up they went.

night kitchen
feeling in the dark to pour
a glass of milk

Posted on by Dave Bonta

How to Delete a Blog

So you want to commit blogicide. Is this a spur-of-the-moment decision, prompted by a sudden attack of self-loathing, morbid shyness, angst or ennui? If so, you’re probably not going to do anything so left-brained as to search the web for instructions like these. On the off chance that you do, however, here’s my first piece of advice:

Back up the blog before deleting

I’m not talking about just saving your work to disk. You should be doing that anyway, unless blogging is some kind of bizarre exercise in egolessness and impermanence for you. What I mean by backing up your blog is saving it so that if at some point you should change your mind and want to reinstate it, or begin another blog and incorporate the archives from your old blog, you can do that. The procedure for doing so varies according to the platform you’re using. For example, with Blogger/Blogspot, click on Export blog in the Settings → Basic tab, and save the XML file onto your computer. This can be imported not only into a new Blogspot blog, but also into blogs on other platforms, such as Typepad and WordPress. WordPress will import not only posts and all associated metadata, but also comments from Blogger (but not from third-party commenting systems).

If you’re using WordPress, you can also export your blog to back it up, but, just as with Blogger, this will not save files. If you’re on WordPress.com, you can contact support and ask them to send you a zipped file of your images and other files you’ve uploaded; self-hosted WordPress.org bloggers can save files themselves via FTP (and can also take advantage of database backup plugins). Typepad users have to save files one by one, but evidently there are some third-party tools than can automate this — see “How do I backup my content?” on the Typepad Knowledge Base. Regardless of the blogging platform, backing up files is a pain in the ass to one degree or another, which brings me to another piece of advice:

Consider hosting images and other files on third-party sites

If you’re only planning to blog for a limited time, or especially if you anticipate moving your blog at some point, it’s a whole lot easier to upload photos to Flickr, Picasa, or some other photo-sharing site and link from there. Free and cheap file-storage services exist for other formats, too — hardly anyone hosts their own video, for example. If privacy is part of the motivation for terminating your blog, remember that photos on sites like Flickr can be marked private there, but still display in your posts if you ever revive your blog. I do advise against using image-sharing sites that don’t require any registration, however: many of the older images on this blog have disappeared because I foolishly stored them at Imageshack, and evidently they periodically clean out old files that no one has viewed for a while.

Going private as an alternative to blogicide

One alternative to deleting a blog is simply making it private. In Blogger, go to Settings → Permissions → Blog Readers and click “only readers I choose.” Blogs hosted at Typepad and WordPress.com can also be made private. (If you want to make just some of your blog posts private, WordPress offers the option of having password-protected posts on otherwise public blogs, which is a feature that seems to be drawing many writers of a more ambitious bent than me, who intend to eventually submit much of their content to publications that don’t consider previously published work.) Private blogs (or password-protected posts) will not be syndicated in feeds and will not be indexed by search engines.

Preventing your content from being perpetuated elsewhere

Again, I realize that most of the time people don’t start blogging with the intention of eventually wiping the slate clean, but if that is your long-term goal, you have to think seriously about whether you want to be indexed by search engines. Google in particular can cache material from dead websites for a very long time, and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine exists for the stated purpose of preserving copies of the Internet for all time. You may think you’ve deleted your blog, but chances are that at least half of all your content has been preserved at the Internet Archive. They’ll remove it if you write to them and ask, but you can also instruct their spiders not to crawl your site in the first place — and the same goes for Google and other search engines.

On WordPress.com, under Settings → Privacy, there’s an intermediate setting you can check: “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors.” In other blogging platforms where you have direct access to your theme/template files, you can insert code instructing bots not to index or cache your content. If you have access to the root of your domain, you can simply use a robots.txt file. If you want to exclude the Internet Archive from copying your blog for all eternity, but still be accessible to search engines up until the date of deletion, you can do that too.

Cutting the feeds

Feeds are generated automatically by all modern blogging and content management system software. In most if not all systems, you can choose to supply partial rather than full-content feeds consisting of the first several lines of each post (although those of us who subscribe to feeds find this intensely annoying), but making the RSS completely private is quite a bit trickier, from what I gather. You’re better off disabling the feed altogether: Settings → Site Feed → “None” in Blogger; I don’t think this option exists for WordPress.com blogs without making the blog itself completely private. For a self-hosted WordPress blog, you can either edit your theme’s functions.php file or use a plugin.

Once a feed reader or aggregator has syndicated your content, deleting your feed won’t destroy that content. Anyone who happens to have subscribed to your blog at any point will still be able to read your posts indefinitely (and I hesitate to point this out, because in some cases I have saved the contents of deleted blogs I was fond of in this manner). So before disabling your feed or deleting your blog, if you want to be thorough you can republish all your old posts with empty or minimal content, then wait a day or two for feed readers to update all the posts. As long as you don’t change the permalinks in any way, this should overwrite all the old content. Then you can proceed to total blogicide.

Don’t forget about incoming links and readers

When I moved this blog from Blogspot to a self-hosted WordPress installation back in 2006, I initially kept the old blog up with a redirect message. But after a year went by I got tired of having all that duplicate content up, and I deleted the blog. Bad move.

It turned out that Blogger had no problem recycling unused subdomains to new users, so neithernor.blogspot.com quickly turned into a splog, or spam blog, selling some kind of tawdry product — I can’t remember just what. Fortunately, this seems no longer to be the case: Blogger has joined WordPress.com, Typepad, and other reputable hosted blogging services in retiring subdomains after blogs are deleted. This does mean of course that you won’t be able to reuse the subdomain yourself, either — once deleted, it’s gone. So think carefully before you click that Delete button. Even if you back up everything and import into a new blog, you’ll have to start from zero as far as incoming links and readers are concerned.

For domains you register yourself, the problem still remains. Serious sploggers have automated systems to notify them the instant that a domain in use becomes available, and such domains are valuable to them because of the incoming links, which might translate into clicks on ads. So if you’re only planning to blog for a limited time, go with a hosted service where you’ll be mysitename.whatever.com. If you do find yourself in the position of deleting a site with a registered domain, you’ll have to decide whether it’s worth it to continue paying the annual registration fee and just put some sort of “this site is closed” message up, or whether you want to try and contact all the people who were kind enough to link to you and ask them to remove the link so their readers won’t end up on some crappy, possibly virus-ridden site.

One way or another, if people have linked to you, it’s a nice courtesy to let them know that the site has been deleted — nobody likes having dead links. And what about your readers? Surely they deserve a little advance notice of the blog’s impending demise, so they have a chance to catch up on reading if they’ve gotten behind. You can always disable comments if you don’t feel like fielding a bunch of distraught messages. It’s your blog and you can do what you want with it — if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t have written this post — but I do think we have some obligations to our readers and fellow bloggers. As with suicide, it’s grim to contemplate and no one who loves you is going to be happy with your decision, but there is a right way to do it.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

(Re-)Claiming the Body

This entry is part 3 of 37 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

I’ve been trying for days to make a videopoem that I’m satisfied with — no luck. But at least I managed to revise an old poem in the process. (This also appears in my online collection Shadow Cabinet. One of the main advantages of self-publishing your work on the web is that you never have to abandon it. Come to think of it, that’s also one of the main disadvantages!)

This is a modified Google poem, meaning that I searched a word (body) and collected some of the most common or interesting usages, but added my own responses (the unitalicized phrases). A pure Google poem would consist entirely of search results, such as my earlier “Chant for the Summit of the World Body,” which inspired this — a very tame form of flarf.

Claiming the Body

 

body
of work
why do you wake me up at 4:00 a.m.

body of evidence
weighed
wanting

body of knowledge
errata

body of the paper
here comes
the red pen

governing body
hold me

body of water
hold me
up

body count
deadening
you overwhelm

body image
upside-down in the lens

body in motion
you rest at
a constant speed

body of Christ
one size
fits all

Body of Missing Pilot
missing
missing

body of a Venus
elastic
full of give

body work
everything comes into play

body
art
thou


Download the MP3

*

I’ve been asked to respond to ten questions for a series at Nic S.’s blog, Very Like a Whale, on poets’ uses of technology. The responses so far, by Amy King, Collin Kelley, and Ren Powell, have been excellent, and I’m not sure what there will be left for me to say by the time my turn rolls around, in least in terms of theory and analysis. That’s probably for the best, though — analytic thinking has never been my strong suit. But revising the foregoing poem has reminded me that I have done a bit of experimenting, even though stylistically I am not an experimental poet. I suppose there might be some general interest in showing how someone who is pretty much a mainstream practitioner of contemporary poetry can still take advantage of digital and online technologies.

So I’m trying to think of examples in particular for Nic’s eighth question, “Do you use technology as an integral element of your poetry? If so, how? If not, why not?” Clearly, my two neo-Flarfist “body” poems are one example where a technology (internet searching) played a pivotal role. I could also mention my use of online polls and surveys (I need to play around some more with branching surveys), mind maps, digital poetry postcards, audio- and videopoetry, and Twitter poetry (i.e. The Morning Porch). Needless to say, I also plan to talk about the salutary effects of blogging on poetry in general, such as the way photo captions often morph into poems. I guess I’ll mention online collaboration, though I haven’t done nearly as much of that as I should — my chain poem about news stories with Patricia Anderson is one of the few examples that comes to mind. What else am I forgetting?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Portico bat

I guess I must be what they call batshit crazy, because when I saw bat shit on the bricks outside my door, I let out a whoop. The portico bat is back! I got a flashlight and pointed it up into the crack between the roof structure and the side of the house, and sure enough, there he was, blinking down at me from behind a mud dauber’s nest.

portico bat (little brown myotis)
Click through for the close-up (I differentially adjusted the light levels in the crack and wall portions of the photo, which accounts for the slightly artificial look)

Bats are long-lived creatures — in stark contrast to most mammals their size — so in one sense it’s not surprising that this little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) has been coming back to roost every spring for at least the past six years, which is as long as I’ve been keeping track. But with the epidemic known as white-nose syndrome now beginning to decimate populations of bats in nearby hibernacula, I didn’t expect to see this guy again. I decided to annoy him for a couple more minutes, just long enough to snap his picture for posterity.

No white nose yet — though last summer, he was briefly white from head to toe. The house was getting a long-overdue paint job, and it was seriously disturbing his sleep. When I scraped under the portico roof, I was careful not to get too close, but when I started blasting the adjacent wall with the pressure-washer, he came sailing out like a bat out of hell — a really, really wet hell.

So when it came time to paint, I guess the smell got to him and he decided to flee again, only this time, for some reason, he dove straight into the bucket of paint. Our caretaker Paula was the painter, and she let out a yell that brought me running. Good thing she’s not as slow-witted as I am, though. She grabbed him before he could fly away or start grooming himself, carried him into my laundry room, and very gently washed the paint from his fur and parchment-thin wings in a trickle of tap water while her husband Troy and I watched and offered advice.

You have never seen a more ugly and pitiable creature than that soaking wet bat. Fortunately, it was a warm day. I scrounged up a cardboard box to put him in until the paint dried in a couple of hours — we were afraid he’d try to crawl back into his crack and get wet paint on himself again. Toward evening when we finally released him, though, he flew off into the woods, and he didn’t return for several days. But return he did, and there wasn’t a trace of paint on him. He’s a survivor.

view of the portico showing the bat's location
view of the portico showing the bat's location

I wonder if he ever misses the teeming maternal colony of his first summer. Perhaps, like humans, bats don’t remember their infancy. Some might say they don’t remember much at all, lacking (as far as we know) a symbolic language, but he certainly remembers his spot behind the portico each year. And bats and humans might be expected to have a little bit in common, since we’re both long-lived social animals — except when we’re not, and go off and live as a recluse for a while. Even though I rarely see him, I enjoy knowing he’s there, ten feet from where I write. If he doesn’t return next spring, it’ll be just a little bit lonelier around here.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

May moon

A June bug thuds against the window
I go out to see if
the moon’s full yet

still flat on one side
but its ring is perfect

I fill my nostrils again & again
with the scent
of dame’s-rocket

stones in the driveway
shine like lost coins

florescent light leaks
from the moonlit house
a brighter shade of pale

the face of someone texting
in a dark concert hall

it’s still only May
in all this long grass
a single cricket

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Irises

I have yellow irises, I have purple irises, and starting about four years ago, I even have mixed-race yellow-and-purple irises that appeared all on their own. These last are very cool, despite the fact that they are kind of ugly: yellow and purple really don’t mix. Actually, I came perilously close to painting my living room purple two years ago, and it was only the thought of the contrast it would make with the yellow of my writing room that dissuaded me.

I’ve never regretted painting this room yellow: it’s a cheerful color that seems particularly fitting in a 19th-century cottage, for some reason. There are certain bars I visit in my dreams with yellow décor, and they are also always appealing empty — no noisy drunks, not even a bartender. You just pour a yellow drink into a glass and savor the warmth in your throat, like liquid sunshine. Maybe this is what an iris is like to a bumblebee: a self-serve bar with bright translucent walls. And when irises close, I love the way they fold up tight as six-fingered fists. It’s as if the garden is mounting an insurrection against the sun.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Sunday blog stroll

Back on May 1, the (London) Times had a feature called “40 bloggers who really count.” If you’d thought the equation of popularity to cultural significance was a uniquely American phenomenon, think again: somehow the authors found room for seven fashion blogs, two Hollywood blogs and two gossip blogs, but not a single science, nature, art, poetry or religion and philosophy blog. They included just one blog apiece in the literature and memoir categories (Maud Newton and dooce, respectively), the latter especially surprising since I believe that the memoir blog is still numerically the most dominant genre.

I flirted with the idea of doing my own, rival list of Top 40 blogs, but started thinking about all the blogs I’d have to exclude from such a short list and thought better of it. Besides, if I’m so opposed to the “Top 40” mentality, why pander to it? Still, if you’re not reading blogs like the Marvelous in nature, Coyote Crossing, The Rain in My Purse, Drawing the Motmot, Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ Artlog, Paula’s House of Toast, Crack Skull Bob, or tasting rhubarb, you don’t know what you’re missing. There’s way more to the blogosphere than politics, celebrities and gossip.

*

I was pleased this morning to see an old blogging friend back at it with a new photoblog, from this shore, which, based on the photos she’s posted so far, promises to offer far more real and intimate glimpses into East Asian Buddhist monasticism than one could ever hope to get as a mere tourist.

“From this shore to the other shore:” a common metaphor for the crossing from samsara to nirvana, delusion to wisdom, in East Asian Buddhism.

The photographs and interviews here are part of an on-going project to both document and express the lives of Buddhist nuns.

Face it, it’s hard to find non-idealized portrayals of monastics even when they’re just boring old Cistercians or Benedictines, without the additional layer of exoticism you get from having them be Zen (Seon) Buddhists. How often do you get a chance to see that world through the eyes of someone who has lived it herself, day in and day out for five years?

Then this afternoon I discovered that Anthropological Notebook is back — another chance to see supposedly exotic people being very human and ordinary. Lye Tuck-Po is a Malaysian anthropologist who has worked extensively with the Batek, a hunter-gatherer forest people of peninsular Malaysia, and is also an accomplished amateur photographer. She took down the original incarnation of her blog last August “due to pressure of work,” but has now started it up again, intending to use it “mainly for posting photography.” One can also follow her work on Flickr.

*

The Smorgasblog on my sidebar is the main way I link to other blogs, but since it’s exclusively text-focused, photoblogs get short shrift. I also tend not to link much to microbloggers, haiku poets, and the like, since that would entail quoting posts or poems in their entirety — a violation of Fair Use under U.S. copyright law. I’d have to email for special permission, and most of the time I’m just too damn lazy. So it is that I almost never link to one of my favorite poetry blogs, Grant Hackett’s Falling Off the Mountain. His one-line poems are simply amazing.
UPDATE: Grant deleted his blog without explanation on June 1, 2010.

*

Speaking of micropoetry, tiny words (also on Twitter) recently began serializing a new issue after a longer-than-expected break. I like this magazine not only for the great content, but also the minimalist design and the fact that it is doing nearly everything right, in my opinion. Most online literary magazines are clusterfucks of poor usability, non-existent SEO, missing or malformed RSS feeds, and a lamentable tendency to try and ape print magazines in every way possible, so it’s refreshing to find one like tiny words whose editor not only has a firm grasp of how the web works, but even seems interested in expanding readership beyond the authors themselves and their immediate friends.

*

I launched a new website myself last week, a blog in the guise of a discussion forum for my videopoetry site Moving Poems. Check it out if you’re at all interested in news and views about the videopoetry/poetry film medium, and email me if you’d like to contribute posts. I explain my thinking and goals for the forum in an overview post.

*

Lest you think that blogs are no longer culturally relevant just because the cool tech kids have moved on to other things, “Surprise: Traditional Blogging Platforms Still Reign Supreme,” a headline in ReadWriteWeb recently announced. Even the bulk of online conversations still take place in blog comment threads, not on Twitter, Facebook and their ilk. Unique, personalized websites with regularly updated content on the front page still rule the web, and that really shouldn’t be a surprise. Would traditional print periodicals be in such trouble otherwise?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Sandman

I am a renter on a large estate. Every night the landlord comes around to take his cut. If I shut the door, he raps on the window. If I pull the shades, he turns my power off. It’s not my labor he’s after but my consciousness. I only need it for a few hours, he says, but already I’ve given up a third of my life. Think of it as ballast, he says, the dark sand trickling through his fingers. Imagine being unable to imagine. Imagine weeping because you couldn’t spare the time to blink.