Category: Blogs and Blogging

Over at qarrtsiluni, the literary e-zine I help curate, we’ve just lauched a new issue: Insecta. The editors are Ivy Alvarez and Marly Youmans, both writers I got to know by reading their blogs. Their call for submissions welcomes both writing about insects and writing inspired by insects, so I hope the issue will blend straight-up nature writing with some wilder and woolier explorations: J. Henri Fabre meets Karel Capek.

The issue just completed, Making Sense, features some outstanding work. As the editors wrote in their summary,

We got… scales, petals, cloves. The wet insides of living creatures. Jackknives, fishhooks, claws. Days and nights, in one way or another aware and present. People large and immediate; people small in a wide, living space. A sense of beginning and ending and putting to bed…

Rob also wrote about the experience of editing an issue of qarrtsiluni in a recent blog post.

UPDATE: Speaking of insects, be sure to check out the latest issue of the invertebrate blog carnival, Circus of the Spineless, at The Other 95%.

Joel at Pax Nortona has been blogging from the center of the inferno in southern California, with the kind of ecological and geographical astuteness that you won’t find in mainstream media coverage. Joel’s coverage began with ominous forebodings last Sunday. By the next day, he described a party-like atmosphere as neighbors gathered to watch the fire close in.

Clearly visible to us in the park was the big screen television of one of the houses perched on the hillside overlooking the Serrano Creek drainage of Whiting Ranch Wilderness. One fellow pointed his binoculars at the living room. “He’s watching football,” he announced.

I smorgasblogged Joel’s post from his cat’s point-of-view. Another anecdote about the neighbors caught my attention in one of yesterday’s posts:

The lack of information leads to speculation. We know that the fire was started by arsonists, but who? “Towelheads,” said one man with a white cairn terrier. “Yeah, must have been towelheads,” said another. “I’d bet it was.” My thinking is that if it was Al Qaeda, they would have claimed responsibility for it by now.

Things get pretty harrowing — and Joel has photos, too. Visit the main page to read most of the coverage (for archival purposes: click on the Disasters category).

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This week’s Science Times has a number of articles on new research into sleep and dreaming. The most interesting, I thought, was by Carl Zimmer: “In Study of Human Patterns, Scientists Look to Bird Brains.”

Bird sleep is so mysterious that scientists are considering several answers, all intriguing. The godwit may have managed to stay awake for the entire journey. Or it may have been able to sleep while flying. Or, as Dr. Benca and other scientists suspect, its brain may have been in a bizarre state of semilimbo that they do not understand.

And the Times‘ other outstanding science writer, Natalie Angier, contributed “In the Dreamscape of Nightmares, Clues to Why We Dream at All.”

Cultural specifics can also tweak universal themes. Dr. Bulkeley and his colleagues have found that nightmares about falling through the air are common among women in Arab nations, perhaps for metaphorical reasons. “There’s such a premium in these countries on women remaining chaste, and the dangers of becoming a ‘fallen woman’ are so intense,” he said, “that the naturally high baseline of falling dreams is amped up even more.”

[…]

“Bad dreams are functional, nightmares dysfunctional,” he said.

If you feel yourself falling, spread your arms out and learn how to fly.

Other bloggers do monthly digest posts; I thought I’d try something similar here. Gather round!

The aquatic invertebrate pool at Penn State’s Great Insect Fair

First, let’s look back to September 2006. What were some of the stand-out posts last year at this time?

• Coats

By the end of the night, a dozen foxes, several hundred ermines, and well over three thousand minks have passed through the arms of the coat-check man. His hands glow like a swimmer’s, fresh from navigating a cold river of furs. All over his body, the small hairs stand up from the static charge.

• How the anthropologist learned to tell stories

The natives are getting restless at the poor quality of the anthropologist’s stories. In all his years of schooling, he never stopped to consider how difficult the informant’s job might be: anthropologist and informant were two very different things, he’d thought. But in Imbonggu society, one listens in order to learn how to embroider. And if he wants to hear their stories, he has to tell some of his own. That’s how it works.

• Out back at the all-night diner

Chilly out.
I’m getting goose pimples,
says the baker. The rolls harden
in their metal beds. Dawn settles
over everything like fine flour.

• If I were you

What if the soft cubicle walls reminded you of albumen, and the clicking of keyboards sounded like the tapping of beaks against shells, under the florescent lights of an enormous incubator?

• The Sycamore

The young veteran — a double
amputee — is still learning how
to pilot a wheelchair. He stops
a few feet from the concrete lip
of the pond, gazing across at
a sycamore shining in the sun.

I’ll leave it to you to repeat the exercise with 2005 and 2004, if you feel so inclined.

The past month at Via Negativa began with the International Rock-Flipping Day reports, which I managed to get four posts out of. I was surprised and gratified by the response to this impromptu event, which was sparked by a comment at a VN post in late August. I linked to all the other IRFD participants I could find at the end of my second post. I was also pleased to see some dissenting voices — bloggers who preferred to leave under-rock denizens undisturbed.

In a sign of growing senility, I had two posts with the same title less than ten days apart, Making Sense and Making Sense, both pimping for the new qarrtsiluni theme, Making Sense (for which submissions remain open until October 15, by the way). I also had two different posts whose titles ripped off Rambo: First Blood, which is especially strange since I’ve never actually seen the movie.

So it’s safe to say I plumbed the depths of uninspiration this month. I published probably the fewest total posts of any month since I started blogging. On the other hand, I did manage to find five new posts to add to the Best of 2007 page, so I guess the month wasn’t a total wash-up:

• Iron aged
• Kobayashi Issa: haiku about shitting
• Going to ground
• Rockin’
• Houseplants in the garden

Via Negativa posts were graced with some fun comments this month. Blog virgin Simon described the path that brought him here and his reactions to the site. Printmakers Marja-Leena Rathje and Linda Dubin Garfield both responded positively to my post on Richard Serra. Butuki shared a more realistic interpretation of “going to ground,” while Rebecca Clayton put a new spin on the phrase “confusing fall warblers.” The Rockin’ post prompted several amusing responses, including a poem from Joan, “Petrophilia.” And comments and pingbacks continued to trickle in to my inexplicably popular August 29 post, Should poetry be open source?

I wrote two short posts for the Plummer’s Hollow blog this month, Barred owl and Monarchs on the move.

Smorgasblog had a pretty good month, though I fell an entire week behind at one point. I added six more blogs to the folder in my feed reader from which I draw the digest: Walking the Berkshires, G. Willow Wilson’s blog, molly arden says so, and the brand-new blogs Talisman, Clouded Drab and Eye in a Bell. This may sound like a lot, but an equal number of blogs folded or went quiet in the last couple of months, so the overall number of blog posts I read every day hasn’t changed much.