Blogs and Blogging – Page 59

July 17, 2008March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

July Stones

This morning I welcome Fiona Robyn to Via Negativa — that’s her voice in the video. Fiona’s on a blog tour to promote her book small stones: a year of moments. I’m a long-time reader of the blog from which the selections were drawn — in fact, a small stone was a major inspiration for my own daily microblogging experiment, The Morning Porch.

Fiona’s “stones” aren’t poems, exactly — some are, but others clearly are not. Each one represents a moment of quiet, focused attention, part of a daily practice which Fiona began three years ago to try and revitalize her own interest in writing. Blogging was integral to the project, it seems: from the beginning she wanted a space where she could collect and share the literary equivalent of small stones picked up on a walk and carried home in a pocket. “They might be a snatch of overheard conversation, the sun moving behind the cloud, or a cat jumping on the lawn,” Fiona writes in the introduction.

They set off a quiet ‘ah!’ inside me, like a toddler saying ‘look!’ They are nothing special and something special all at once. As time went on, I got better at remembering to notice the world around me. Not just to notice it but to scrutinize it, engage with it, love it.

When Fiona said she was publishing a book of selections from the first three years of the blog, I had my doubts about how well it work. But in fact they make a surprisingly satisfying collection. Like insects trapped in amber, the very delicacy and ephemerality of Fiona’s “stones” invite closer examination. As fragments of concentrated attention, many of them engage the reader in an active search for additional images and ramifications, in the same way that a modern translation of Sappho challenges one to fill in the lacunae.

Accordingly, in the video, I tried to leave as many lacunae as possible and let the words create the pictures. I hope it manages to excite some interest in the project (I uploaded it to YouTube, as well, for maximum exposure). Be sure to follow the links on the blog tour page for many more interviews, reviews, and conversations with the author. Consider writing your own “stones” for submission to a new, communal blog that Fiona is launching called a handful of stones. And of course check out the book.

Five minutes before midnight, a gnat attracted to the reflected light of my computer monitor dives into my eye.

July 13, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Brain and Nerve Food

What’s interesting about these advertisements from 1884 is that they appear on the back cover of an anthology of English poetry published by Funk & Wagnalls, a volume of something called the Standard Library — evidently an ancestor to Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf, Penguin Classics, and other such series of canonical works. It’s funny that nowadays we aren’t surprised by magazines where advertising takes up half or more of the content, but find the idea of an ad on a book — even a mass-market paperback — a little shocking. But then books are things we plan on keeping around, whereas magazines are inherently disposable.

I think about that distinction a lot, since I’m so involved in publishing a magazine online, where the average shelf-life of blogs and zines is even shorter than the xeroxed little magazines of yore. (Do the 1970s qualify as “yore” yet?) On the one hand, I accept the reality that nothing is forever, and transience is inherent in all things. On the other hand, why should artists and authors entrust their works to qarrtsiluni if it isn’t going to be around in five or ten years? Unlike a print publication, there’s no tangible artifact to sit on a shelf somewhere, gathering dust. Don’t we owe it to our contributors to keep their works online as long as possible? We’re not paying them anything, so it seems like the least we can do.

I spent much of this weekend pulling together qartsiluni‘s first-ever podcast for the Water issue, in case anyone wonders where the hell I’ve been. And my other project involved making a more secure archive for our news microblog, which will still originate on Twitter (for the time being, at any rate), but now has its main presence on the imaginatively named qarrtsiluni news blog.

Now that qarrtsiluni has a blog, perhaps its own ambiguous nature — half-blog, half-magazine — will be a little less obvious. Or maybe adding a podcast dimension simply makes our precise identity even more difficult to pin down. The Standard Library was clearly a bit of a hybrid, too, appearing bi-monthly “bound in postal card manilla,” available by annual subscription, but offered also in cloth editions and clearly meant to be permanent. Over a century later, the paper is still in fine shape — nothing like some of the pulp fiction I have from the 1940s and 50s that crumbles at the touch. Chalk it up, perhaps, to all those vitalized phos-phites.

July 2, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

News from the ‘Hood

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.

June 26, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Tinkering

If you’ve visited the site in the last two days, you might have noticed an “Index of Verbosity” at the bottom of the left sidebar listing the total numbers of posts, words, and comments for Via Negativa, together with some text explaining that the comments date back only to April 1, 2006. This afternoon I decided that the sidebar looked entirely too cluttered, so I moved most of that information into the footer instead. The numbers will be automatically updated everytime I post with the help of a software plugin called GeneralStats. And this evening I figured out the proper lines of PHP to use so I could put the Akismet spam-comment counter down there, too — a fun but frightening figure that grows by about 1500 a day. It didn’t seem fair to carry a free ad for Akismet and none for the many other fine plugins deployed here, though I did like that pale blue button as a visual element anchoring the sidebar. I’ll have to keep my eye out for a suitable replacement.

There’s a special joy that comes from making very minor changes to one’s blog, especially when it involves the successful deployment of complex tools and procedures that one barely understands. If you’re a blogger, I suspect you know what I’m talking about. Blogging is, above all, a superior form of procrastination. But what do you do when you want to procrastinate on blogging? Simple: you tinker with the blog.

June 6, 2008March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Stalking the wild lady’s-slipper orchid

It’s hot, it’s humid, I’m cranky, and I don’t feel like writing, so here instead is another thrilling documentary from the Undiscovery Channel. (No, I still don’t own a real video camera, and I’m still using Windows Movie Maker.)

By coincidence, today Bug Girl linked to a CBC exposé, Cruel Camera, and an accompanying chronological guide, Fakery in Wildlife Documentaries. I knew about some of the examples, but others were new to me — for example, that Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom “use[d] staged confrontations between various species of animals. Perkins was known to also put animals in situations where he will be filmed dramatically capturing them.” Even Sir David Attenborough comes under scrutiny for a scene in Blue Planet involving spawning lobsters that was supposedly filmed off the coast in Nova Scotia, but was in fact shot in a British aquarium, as well as for a couple of other, similar deceptions in other films.

I’ve blogged about the trouble with eco-porn more than once, but Bug Girl sums up the situation quite well, I think:

I have students showing up at the university that love the environment… but don’t want to go outside.
It’s hot! There are bugs and mud! And why aren’t any cool big animals doing interesting things? Everything just lies around. […]

Being outside is about Calm. Contemplation. Quiet.
Stillness and silence are not what television is about.

Except, of course, on the Undiscovery Channel.

May 29, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Back by occasional polite request

Smorgasblog is back, at least for the time being, and has taken the place of the Google Reader-generated automatic list of recent posts from my blogroll in the right-hand sidebar. Except when I screw up and forget to categorize an item as “smorgasblog” before publishing, these link-and-quote posts will not show up in the Via Negativa feed; you’ll have to visit the blog to see them, as before. The difference this time is that I’m not coding everything by hand, but am instead using the Sideblog plugin from Kates Gasis. I currently have it set to display 10 posts at a time, and have included a link to the category archive in case you get behind.

I ended the original incarnation of Smorgasblog after a year and a half because I found it too time-consuming, especially as qarrtsiluni became more labor-intensive. I’m hoping this stripped-down, easier-to-maintain version won’t be such a distraction, and I’m planning to update it in a less thorough, more lackadaisical fashion than before. We’ll see how it goes.

The specific impetus to resume smorgasblogging today came from reading recent posts at Velveteen Rabbi and frizzyLogic and feeling an overwhelming urge to steal a little bit of their magic. So blame the Rachels, frizzy and velveteen, for blogging too well!

UPDATE: Unfortunately, it appears that the latest version of WordPress (2.5) has a bug which prevents me from excluding next and previous posts belonging to a given category (in this case, Smorgasblog) from the navigation links on single post pages. So while Smorgasblog posts won’t appear on the index page or in the Recent Posts sidebar listing (thanks to Rob Marsh), they will interrupt the flow for those who navigate from post to post, for the forseeable future.

May 19, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Gas

I have a new post up at the Plummer’s Hollow blog. It’s a gas.

May 16, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Photographing rocks

From Pohanginapete, a mediation on what it means to be an artist in a time of slow-motion apocalypse:

The comment reminded me of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous remark, “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks.”

I thought about the justification for comments like these, and my own pessimism about where we’re headed; our apparent failure to convert concern into action. Should we abandon esoteric research; should I stop photographing rocks?

It’s a hard one. It’s tempting to think we “should” act responsibly, but how happy would we be if we insisted on acting responsibly? Sure, some of us would — and do — feel satisfied and happy knowing (or thinking) we’re doing the right thing, but what about the rest of us who, if we sacrificed ourselves for the greater good, would spend our lives feeling thwarted by our sense of duty — in effect, resenting the conscience that denied us the right to pursue what we most wanted? Enough, I guess, to make the world a less happy place than it would otherwise have been.
— The end of the world as we know it

(Please leave any comments you might have over there, not here.)

May 2, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Trees, water

A new edition of the Festival of the Trees is up at 10,000 Birds. I was somewhat embarassed to find my own entry (the Rickett’s Glen post) first in line, but aside from that, it’s a great edition. Also, relating to what I was saying in that post about Pennsylvania’s endangered brook trout streams, my friend Alan Gregory has a good column up today: How not to care for a state’s official fish. Despite the Pennsylvania focus, this is an issue affecting much of the eastern United States.

What’s so great about wild trout?

Eric Palmer, the state of Vermont’s director of fisheries, summarizes the uniqueness of wild fish on the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department’s Web site:

When you catch a wild fish “you have living proof that the water they came from has suitable habitat for all of the life-stages of that species. It is like holding an intact ecosystem in your hand.”

Which brings us to qarrtsiluni and the new call for submissions to the May-June theme, edited by Lucy Kempton and Katherine Durham Oldmixon: Water.

Water is the moving skin of our planet, the most part by far of our bodies; we drink it, we bathe in it, we waste it and taint it, we may yet again wage wars for it.

Submissions of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, short film, spoken word, art, photography, and any combination thereof are welcome through May 31.

April 30, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Precursor to “The Morning Porch”

Indexing my Butternut Chronicle series from November 2004/1998, I was amused to rediscover what I had written by way of an Afterword:

In [the butternut tree’s] absence, I don’t know that I could really gather enough material for a daily front porch chronicle. I have of course recorded a number of observations in these virtual pages, and someday there might be enough to gather into a small chapbook. But the gap between the porch and the edge of the woods is too large – about 75 feet – for close observation of whatever goes on there, and I don’t like using binoculars.

Ha! It does show, however, that the idea’s been brewing for a while now — since 1998, at least. In the Afterword I also speculated about why that early journaling attempt had run out of steam so quickly, suggesting that it was because the focus was too diffuse, and I should have zeroed in on the butternut tree and its inhabitants.

The relative longevity of my current project, however, probably owes more to the brevity of the entries than to the temporal focus. It’s like running a marathon in daily, 50-yard-dash installments. And with that brevity — strictly enforced by Twitter — comes a reliance on lyrical touches, because how else to make such miniatures compelling? I’m still not much of a journal-keeper — not compared to someone like Tom Montag with his Morning Drive Journal, for example, which is in its fifth year now, with entries that are neither unlyrical nor Minuteman-short. Ah, well. Fortunately, this race is not to the swift. The one that is — well, may the best rat win.