Blogs and Blogging – Page 61

January 22, 2008 by Dave Bonta

I know Via Negativa is probably not the first place you go for breathless tips about blogs and blogging. But I just stumbled across a new feature in Google Reader (well, new to me, at any rate) that has literally revolutionized the way I read blogs!

Remember how it was back in the beginning, when you first discovered blogs that were fun to read — the excitement of clicking on your half-dozen bookmarked blogs and seeing what was new? Then do you remember your impatience at those bloggers who would go through phases where they would post multiple times a day, followed by weeks or months of silence, and how that and the growing number of blogs you followed led you to start using a feed reader, where you wouldn’t have to waste time clicking on anything that hadn’t been updated? Now, I’ve discovered, it’s possible to have the best of both worlds.

In the Settings section of Google Reader, click on the Goodies tab, and you’ll see a “Next” bookmarklet that you can drag into your Firefox bookmarks toolbar. If, like me, you subscribe to a certain number of feeds that you only skim once in a while, be sure to restrict it to whatever label you use for the feeds you never miss. ~~Then go back into Google Reader, click on that label — making sure that the display is set to “new items” rather than “all items” — and click through to the first blog post that comes up.~~ [Update: This turns out not to be necessary. Clicking on the Next bookmarklet from any page seems to take one directly to the top post in one’s queue.] Once there, you don’t have to return to the GR shell: simply click Next to go directly to the next-most-recent blog post (or other feed item) in your queue — and have each post removed from the tally of unread items in your reader as you land on it.

What this means, of course, is that you can get around the bother of having to click through to read the full posts of blogs with partial feeds, or to leave a comment; you’re already there! Best of all, for those of us who enjoy the aesthetic experience of reading unique texts, we’re no longer restricted to the dull uniformity of the feed reader. Bloggers who follow their stats will be pleased by the extra visits (though presumably puzzled by the new “came from” data failing to correspond with incoming links).

So now I can essentially surf my own blogroll without hitting the Back key. It almost reminds me of clicking the “Next Blog” button in WordPress.com’s top navigation bar (or Blogger’s back in 2004, before BlogSpot got taken over by spam blogs), except that I don’t have to go through 25 bad or mediocre blogs before finding something good.

NB: If you’re still using Bloglines, or another aggregator, and you want to try Google Reader out, importing all your feeds only takes a few minutes.

January 10, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Manifest Oh

I’ve been working on an artist’s statement of sorts for the About page of Visual Soma. I must confess I’ve always considered artist’s statements to be a little self-indulgent, not to mention superfluous: if the art can’t speak for itself, what good is it? It seems especially presumptuous for a rank amateur like myself to consider writing one. On the other hand, I can rarely pass up a good opportunity to propagandize. This starts out promising enough, but soon turns, Dr. Jekyll-like, into a manifesto.

The vast majority of my photos have been taken within a mile of where I live. For me as a poet and an editor, photography is a spiritual practice, a training in how to see, how to frame and edit, how to find the poetry in ordinary things. I’m especially interested in the challenge of making photos in which the roles of figure and ground are reversible, or even nonexistent. Philosophically, I feel we must get beyond a perception of nature as mere scenery. Gorgeous wall calendars from Sierra Club and the like offend me at a very basic level; nature porn does nothing for the cause of conservation. Indeed, to the extent that it helps sell SUVs and houses in subdivisions, it actually makes things worse. We must get people to appreciate their own back forty, or the vacant lot down the street — only then do we have a chance of convincing them that every part of this planet is a work of art in which we participate and are continually remade.

I can hear the protests already: “Easy for you to say — you live on top of a mountain!” Well, yeah. But I love photos of human landscapes, too, and if I lived in town I’d probably specialize in them. The thing is, I don’t think it’s quite as easy taking compelling photos in the woods or fields as it is in a city, where the colors are so much brighter on average, where the symmetries are obvious, and everything is built to a human scale. Let’s face it, urban environments are pretty damn stimulating! In less human-shaped visual milieux, one needs to constantly shift one’s perspective and scale to avoid monotony.

One obvious and increasingly popular solution is macro photography. Some months back I was struck by a blog post from the professional photographer Mike Moats, in which he answered the question, “Why Macro?”

When I started in nature photography, I like most new photographers wanted to shoot landscapes. I went out east to the White Mountains, and to Acadia, went west to Yosemite and came home with some really nice images, but when I was home between trips I wasn’t able to shoot as much as I wanted due to the lack of great landscapes like I saw on my trips. I started to look at macro photography as a way to spend more time shooting near my home. I was shocked at the amount of images I came home with on my very first trip into the woods. I’ve spent many years of my life exploring past the end of the pavement but have never really taken a good look at the interesting life all around me. When I started to study my surroundings for subjects they were everywhere. I have some great parks with diverse environments within twenty minutes of my home but I also found many subjects within my own yard.

In another post, though, he admits that the easy subjects can literally dry up at certain times of the year, leading to photographic slumps.

Most of the vernal ponds (where I shoot my floating leaf images) are starting to dry up due to the lack of rain so this leaves me shooting the wooded areas. When I’m out looking for images I’m always scaning for subjects that have contrast. Contrast in color makes for some great images and also sells very well for me. The problem at this time of year is that the woods has very little color contrast, everything is GREEN!

One of these days, I will get a macro lens attachment for my camera. But I think the not-quite-macro level is interesting too. We can generally tell what we’re looking at right away — as opposed to, say, some of the extreme close-ups of weed-creatures from photographers such as the amazing Doctor Swan — but the scale is just different enough to give us pause. We’ve seen moss or mushrooms like that before — when we were three. It seems just barely possible that we might still, decades later, recapture that kind of seeing without preconceptions, through eyes undulled by weariness, heartache and boredom, and provoke that primal Oh.

January 5, 2008 by Dave Bonta

New arrival: Visual Soma

Color was returning to reclaim the world from black-and-white. It started on Sapsucker Ridge and spread down across the field. Soon it was right in front of my doorstep, where it paused for a while. I took that as a signal to go out, camera dangling from the strap around my neck like a shrunken head. It can see things I can’t. It can steal souls. I point and click, and sometimes, when I am looking for nothing in particular — “just looking,” as I always say to solicitous sales clerks — the miraculous appears. Or at least the pretty darn interesting. Or the mildly engaging. Or… well, you get the picture.

Why “Visual Soma”? Because when a regular reader of Via Negativa visited the then still tentative photoblog for the first time the other day, she thought I must be smoking something. And because a name like that will give me something to try and live up to: photos that alter consciousness. Can it be done? I don’t know, but I’m going to try.

This is not a resolution, mind you, but an aspiration, keeping in mind the multiple meanings of that word. The breath itself is enough of a wonder. Who needs smoke?

Again, for those unfamiliar with the photoblog format: the front page displays the latest photo only. Click on it — or use the Previous or Archive links at the top — to go back in time. I’m paid up for a year, so the blog and all its archives will stay online at least that long. In addition to new photos, I have two years’ worth of photos that need a second look and in most cases re-processing.

January 1, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Hidden messages

dancing grass

Call for Submissions: Hidden Messages

The world is full of hidden messages, real and imagined: the letter concealed in the stem of a pen, the meeting place coded into a newspaper ad, information sailors derive from the weather, destinies astrologers divine from the stars, art drawn on the walls of catacombs, the farmer who finds signs in the behavior of livestock, the teenager who hears joy or doom in the seemingly random order of radio songs, people speaking freely among strangers who don’t know their language, the vast distance between what is meant and what is said.

This issue of qarrtsiluni is interested in hidden messages: the ways they’re concealed, the moments they’re revealed. The “messages” we’ll collect for the issue can come in any form: poetry, story, painting, photograph, essay, fragment, memory, code, and, for the first time, film.

Does our world conceal a great secret, or is it always struggling to speak? What hidden messages have you found? What do you dream of finding? What messages have you concealed?

(more)

December 29, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Middens

I have a new, probably temporary photoblog, borne of my itch to test out the shutterchance platform, but also reflecting my interest in sharing photos that explore complex patterns and textures, which can only be appreciated full-size. In typical photoblog style, it displays one photo at a time, and clicking on a photo takes you to the previous photo.

Note that I only have the standard, free “account,” which means that shutterchance won’t archive more than 30 of my photos at a time. And if I go more than a month without posting an update, they eliminate the blog to clear up space on their servers. So even though I’m calling it “photomidden,” this won’t be like the packrat middens of the American southwest, which can persist for 40,000 years. Probably I should change the name to “water writing,” instead.

Also, for what it’s worth, I have a new post up at the Plummer’s Hollow blog: Redpolls. But really, if you’re looking for some good reading, I recommend paying a visit to qarrtsiluni. We’ve been putting up a new post every day except Christmas for a couple of weeks now, and the Insecta issue will still run through the first week in January. I’m sure it will end up with the highest word count of any issue we’ve ever done. I think the fact that insects are both ubiquitous and very alien to our experience as mammals makes them a perennial source of inspiration for writers and artists.

December 28, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Matter

In the latest installment of her on-going series on writing and blogging, Beth asks, “What matters to you, and why, and how does what we do here together serve that purpose?”

Click photos for larger views, as always.

Well, I guess bearing witness seems pretty important. I was there, I am here, I’m hearing or seeing XYZ — writing doesn’t really get much more meaningful than that.

Seeing how it all fits together is important to me, too. Writing isn’t just a matter of communicating ideas I already have; if it were, I’d have grown tired of it a long time ago. It’s about discovery.

Peace-making matters. In grade school, we used to respond to insults with sing-song nonsense: “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me!” As if by saying it, we could make it so — which, given the incredible power of language to hurt or to heal, we sometimes could. It’s funny, though. You’d think writers, of all people, would’ve learned this lesson well, but often we’re the most careless, launching witty character-assassinations and flinging maledictions about with wild abandon. Witness the legendary bad-boy behavior of many famous writers — or the endless flame-wars of the blogosphere. It’s easy to get drunk on power, I guess, even if it’s “only” the power of a well-turned phrase. So I think those of us who cherish dialogue and conversation as an integral part of our writing practice need to work especially hard to avoid conflict and promote harmony. I’m not saying I’ve always excelled at this myself, but I have (eventually) repented of my lapses and tried to learn from them.

Empathy matters to me, and both in my reading and in my writing I tend to seek out poems that take me inside the mind of another. “The world’s selves cure that short disease, myself,” as the poet Randall Jarrell once put it.* Love and joy matter. And we need a word for that quiet kind of joy — almost the opposite of passion — that comes from a mind fully engaged in what it does best. Some people find it in organizing things, or hanging drywall, or programming computers. I happen to find it in writing.

Thus, at any rate, the suggestions that arise from these latest photos: this morning’s exercise in seeing. Because the world always does come first for me. The older I get, the more I distrust abstract theorizing and language full of modular, corn-fed words like “enhance” and “utilize” and “environment”; tell me you want to improve or use the land and I’ll start paying attention. The best ideas come from contact, physical contact with the real world. Those of us who spend many hours a day staring at computer screens forget that at our peril. Matter matters!
__________

*A quote I used as an epigraph for the third section of Shadow Cabinet, “Masque.”

December 20, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Elsewhere

I was out shopping much of the day, so I’m afraid I don’t have any energy left for a proper blog post. Instead, let me briefly call your attention to two or three new and shiny things.

Mike Libby’s insect sculptures at qarrtsiluni are stirring up an interesting discussion in the comments. The line between nature and artifice is extremely strong in our culture, and blurring it can feel like a violation of the most fundamental kind, it seems.

Anthropological Notebook is rapidly turning into one of my favorite new blogs. There are a lot of anthropologist bloggers out there, but last time I checked, most of them seemed content to talk to each other, secure in their academic ghettoes. Lye Tuck-Po is an exception. She takes amazing pictures and has been very active on Flickr (much more so than me), so I was pleased when she decided to make the jump to blogging. And even though she hasn’t been at it for very long, her blogging already displays a wide range of interests and specialties: everything from environmental degradation to street photography to boats and bridges. Check it out.

Finally, one of this week’s news stories at my dad’s Peaceful Societies site describes the Christmas Bird Counts among the Ohio Amish. They rack up huge numbers of birds because they do their birding on foot. And without the help of the internet, needless to say.

December 17, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Log

Today is the tenth anniversary of the coining of the term “weblog.” Happy Blog Day!

I was disappointed, though, to see that the guy who coined it has such a narrow and dogmatic view of its application:

1. A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)

2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere â€¦ but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.

3. If you spend a little time searching before you post, you can probably find your idea well articulated elsewhere already.

But “log” sounds so much more masculine than “journal,” doesn’t it? Captains keep logs; journals are for wimpy writers. People who are arrogant and presumptuous enough to think they have something new to say, and that the world might care if they do.

As it happened, I started the day by cutting up a white pine tree that had blown down across the driveway. I was singing the log song the whole time! O.K., not really. But I did enjoy my walk back up the hollow through three and a half inches of new powder. And with close to two inches of packed sleet underneath that, the sledding was excellent, as I discovered this afternoon.

Coincidentally, it’s also Via Negativa’s own fourth birthday. That’s a lot of water under the, um, log.
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RSS and email subscribers: Please click through to view the Log video.

December 13, 2007December 8, 2013 by Dave Bonta

White hair

Somewhere in NJ

One day someone killed Sam the Mindreader. I found him squashed and dried up. I stayed there for a long time just looking and listening to the creek running across the rocks. Suddenly I was left with a name in the emptiness, a name I didn’t know what to do with.

The mind-reader’s name
seemed hollow after his death —
just me, rambling.

simply wait

That night I dreamed of my first home, of the trees outside the closet-sized room with the pink rose wallpaper where I spent my childhood, and the scent of lilac in the spring. In the next room my parents argued and loved, dreamed and worried. Our lives there, now vanished, seemed as solid and indestructible as those tall oaks and catalpas outside my window.

In a hospital bed
with a view of bare branches,
dreams of long-lost homes.

Feathers of Hope

This creature emerges from decomposing piles. [drawing]

Placed on a white page,
the maggot looks anything
but white.

frizzyLogic

It grew cold, and the cold grew on all surfaces.

Lovely white hair
that crumples in the sun:
frost on a rose hip.

Burning Silo

We found the remains of dead seabirds and a sea lion, along with bits and pieces of crabs, clam, oysters and fish. The Black Oystercatchers (Haematopus bachmani) and various species of gulls seemed busy as they poked between rocks and patrolled sandy beaches.

Skull of a seabird
washed up before the sea was half-
finished with it.

the cassandra pages

But something about these little, simple solids delights me: the way a few little flat sheets of paper become something so firm and beautiful.

Fed up with the blank page,
it’s so satisfying to make
a paper airplane!

tasting rhubarb

[photos of ice-skaters]

In a world of ice,
imagine how we would flock
to a walking rink!

Clouded Drab

Some serious lumps of beef on sale at Borough Market.

Red and gold foil,
a glistening side of beef:
Christmas at the butcher’s.

December 10, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Gift economy

Qarrtsiluni, the online literary magazine I help curate, has created a cache.

Get instant street cred with a qarrtsiluni t-shirt, hoodie, or ballcap! Impress your colleagues or office-mates with a qarrtsiluni coffee mug! Barely in time for the 2007 holiday season, we’ve just opened a goods cache at CafePress.com.

Why “cache,” and not store? Everything we offer is sold at cost and printed on demand — we’re not making a penny off it. And after all, why should you pay us? You’re helping to spread our logo!

For bloggers, we also have some free sidebar bling.

Had we gotten around to this sooner, you’d be able to order stuff and get it by Christmas. But if you hurry, you can still get it by Epiphany (Jan. 6) — which is really much more in keeping with the spirit of qarrtsiluni anyway.

If you’re in the habit of making charitable donations this time of year, I have a suggestion for a worthy recipient. Chris Clarke, former editor of Earth Island Journal, writes one of the best nature blogs in all blogdom, Creek Running North. But his unpaid generosity with his day-to-day writing isn’t getting him any closer to finishing his magnum opus: a book on Joshua trees, those charismatic and imperilled denizens of the Mohave desert. So he has asked his readers for help, especially with gas money, to finish the research. You’ll find not only a link to his Amazon account, but also a detailed accounting of how he plans to spend the funds. In his original post containing the plea, Chris wrote:

If you’re unfamiliar with the kind of writing I do on desert issues, you can look in the “desert” category and browse around. Of recent posts, this one on piñon-juniper forests, or this one on a bit of eccentric desert lore, or this first-person narrative provide good examples of my related writing.

I’ve been reading Chris for four years, and I feel confident not only in the quality of his workmanship, but also in his moral character — this is not some slick scheme to sucker people out of their money so he can take a vacation to Hawaii! And Creek Running North has a large, loyal, and formidably intelligent community of regular commenters whose interest and participation will help ensure that he gets the damn book written. So if you have any interest in raising public consciousness about the plight of the Joshua tree, or in supporting a genuinely great nature writer, go and give till it hurts.