Blogs and Blogging – Page 59

September 12, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Tree art, tree stories

The next edition of the Festival of the Trees — the blog carnival for all things arboreal — will have a special theme, Art and Arboreality.

Many of us have specific, personal stories about a tree or forest from our lives. Blogging is a great medium for short story-telling, so that’s what I encourage this month: photoblog, videoblog, break out the crayons, sing a song, write a poem, whatever moves you: tell us a story about a tree or forest from your life. Or make one up. Or do something even cooler. (And then send me the link.)

Submit your blog posts to me via email at jadeblackwater [at] brainripples [dot] com, or use the blog carnival submission form.

The deadline for submissions is September 27. Don’t miss your chance to be included in what is sure to be a stand-out collection of blog links.

September 10, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

I was one of fourteen authors who took part in the writing of a chain poem at the poetry collaborative. Like the other participants, I only wrote a single line, but apparently that gives me the right to revise it however I want and post the results here. I hope I don’t ruffle any feathers with the extent of my revision. Read the original to see how much I’ve altered, and who contributed which words and images.

Quite by coincidence, qarrtsiluni announced a new theme on Monday: Journaling the Apocalypse. Beth Adams and I are taking a turn as issue editors. Submit!

We thought it was a sign, the imminent
undoing of the sky. Canting prophets
consulted the lint balls in their navels.
We thought it a sign, the flying
out of orbit of the world — but what
to make of the coffee becalmed
in its cup, the street’s slow traffic
gangling past our doors and windows,
all bolted against the loud flocks
of grackles? An iridescent sea
broke across our lawns. Black
rainbows of wings blocked the sun.
But an old woman, bent over her stick,
warned it wasn’t the sky we should fear
but ourselves, how we fail to bear witness
to whatever happens in each & every
holy, unstable moment.

September 1, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Rockin’ new links

International Rock-Flipping Day 2008 is now only a week away: Sunday, September 7 (with an alternate date for public schools on the preceding Friday, September 5th). If you missed IRFD 2007, or have forgotten how much fun that was, my mother’s nature column for September will tell you all about it.

Please help spread the word. For more information, see the complete Rock-Flipping Day file.

Festival of the Trees #27 is up.

Postal Poetry shifts to a M-W-F posting schedule, starting today with a postcard from Tom Montag and Marja-Leena Rathje, “blue.”

After briefly alighting at WordPress.com, the dynamic group of female online poets calling themselves the Poetry Collaborative have settled into beautiful new digs at thepoetrycollaborative.org. This is an exciting, ground-breaking site: where else can you watch collaboratively written poems grow by the day and by the hour, and be privy to side discussions between the authors? Start following the PoCo now and you should have clear bragging rights in six months or so. Because it’s gonna be huge, the Huffington Post of the poetry blogosphere. You read it here first.

August 30, 2008May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Depression

Dear Dana,

Three days of hurricane-remnant weather —
a tropical depression — have brought varying
& unpredictable amounts of rain. Today
we’re in a cloud, which acts as
an acoustic blanket, letting me fantasize
that I’m living in some mountain fastness
a thousand miles from the nearest factory
or highway instead of just two.
The night before last, hard rains
loosened the bark on the lower limbs
of the dead elm in my yard, and I woke
to find the tree half-stripped. A pair
of nuthatches — bark-gleaning birds —
flew in & discovered the change
while I watched, spiralling rapidly
down the bare columns of wood
on their big clown feet, poking,
calling. The fog reminds me of early June,
and makes me miss the wood thrushes
& their melancholy flutes.
It occurred to me that memory
provides its own layer of vibrato,
whether or not the original tone
still sounds. But sadness wasn’t
the whole of it: the low pressure
provokes a mild elation in me,
as what was once a boiling fury
passes over these tired, old mountains
without opening its eye.

P.S.
With our internet connection
rapidly degrading here, I may soon get
my wish for isolation. Which
was never of course my wish.
So I wonder if I really could live
without the highway & the railroad,
the quarry & the factories,
the human presence implicit
in all that noise?

August 24, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Porch 2.0

In case you haven’t clicked through to my mini-blog The Morning Porch lately, it has a new look, a new URL (though the old one redirects), and a few new features, including a search bar in the footer and a random post link up top. I’m still using Tumblr, and after ten months I have virtually no complaints about the service — unlike the frequently absent Twitter, whose 140-character limit inspired the format. (While I still do cross-post to Twitter, I much prefer the open-source alternative Identi.ca, where a growing number of other online writers trade thoughts, links, and occasionally lines of verse. You can read my own miscellaneous brain-farts, in addition to the daily morning-porchisms, here.)

The photo in the header may change seasonally; I haven’t decided. But the new design, which I modified from one by the Italian web designer Marco Giusto, feels almost too elegant for an Appalachian porch-sitter like me. Check it out.

August 10, 2008 by Dave Bonta

September 7 is International Rock-Flipping Day

Yes, that’s right: everyone’s favorite holiday, held since 2007 on the first Sunday in September, is less than a month away. So make plans now to round up the kids, go outside, and flip some rocks.

Again this year, Bev Wigney and I will help coordinate things by acting as distribution points for blog links. Drop me a line to join the email list. On the day itself, and in the days immediately following, we’ll circulate a list of blog links to every participant to publish at the bottom of his/her own IRFD post, or in a separate post if they prefer. Or they can simply link to Bev’s or my posts containing the links list.

You don’t have to be a blogger to participate. We encourage everyone with a Flickr account to join the International Rock-Flipping Day Group and post photos or sketches to the photo pool. Those who would prefer not to join Flickr can send images to Bev (bev AT magickcanoe DOT com) for posting in a gallery on her site.

In case you missed all the hoopla last year, here’s the post that started it all, and last year’s participants are linked here. On 9/2/2007, people flipped rocks on four continents on sites ranging from mountaintops to urban centers to the floors of shallow seas. Rock-flippers found frogs, snakes, and invertebrates of every description, as well as fossils and other cool stuff. As before, we advise wearing gloves for protection, and getting the whole family involved — or if you don’t have a family, rope in some neighborhood kids. Be sure to replace all rocks as soon as possible after documenting whatever lies beneath them.

Any and all forms of documentation are welcome: still photos, video, sketches, prose, or poetry. We encourage those of a scientific bent to try and identify everything they find, but we’re also open to purely lyrical or impressionistic responses. Our coveted, if wholly imaginary, Grand Prizes this year will go to: 1) whoever identifies the most species under a single rock; and 2) anyone who appears to have a genuine epiphany as a result of flipping rocks. This second category may seem like a long shot, but the Zen literature does record that a monk named Kyogen achieved Great Satori when he heard a stone strike a bamboo trunk, so it seems at least conceivable. So mark September 7 on your calendars, and get ready to rock-flip, y’all.

IRFD badge by Digital Frontiers Media — get yours here.

July 17, 2008March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

July Stones

video link

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.

Category: Blogs and Blogging