I have a new post up at the Plummer’s Hollow blog. It’s a gas.
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.)
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.
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.
New paths into the old thicket
If posting has seemed a little less frequent here lately, that’s because I’ve been adding some new indexing features to the site, trying to improve access to the voluminous Via Negativa archives. Some of these changes will be obvious to anyone who’s visted the site regularly. First, I reorganized the way I link to favorite posts. Now there’s a box in the sidebar with links to ten random “Best of Via Negativa” posts that change everytime you refresh the page, with a link below to a complete archive of favorites in reverse chronological order. It took a while to tag all those old posts, but I think this is a big improvement over the former system, where direct links to favorite posts were two clicks away in yearly compendiums.
Second, I’ve just substituted paged navigation for the default “Next” and “Previous” links at the bottoms of pages. This not only helps one move more rapidly through the various types of archives, it also removes the confusion about whether “next” means “older” or “newer.” The need to avoid such confusion was especially urgent because of my implementation of a third feature: a new way of indexing and displaying series that includes archival pages in proper chronological order, so one can read through a series of posts in the order they were written. At present, I’m using a sidebar box to display links to series, too (in the future, I might simply link to a series index page).
These changes have involved a lot of editing of old posts to add new tags — a very easy but also very time-consuming thing to do. I also finished putting all my old “Words on the Street” cartoons into the sub-category of the same name (under Humor). The only problem there is that some of the oldest cartoons have disappeared, because I hosted them on ImageShack, which apparently cleans out its servers every few years. I have copies of all the cartoons on my hard drive, but I never kept records of which ones I posted on which dates.
If anyone’s interested in the plugins behind these changes, I’ve just updated the Credits page. I learned about the Organize Series plugin from a review at Weblog Tools Collection last week and downloaded it immediately. The possibility of a third taxonomy in addition to tags and categories was pretty exciting, and it works O.K. out of the box, but if you’re interested in using it on your own self-hosted WordPress blog, beware that changing the styling is very much a hands-on operation. And depending on your theme, the series index page (which I’m not using here yet) may not display properly; it didn’t for me. Major fenagling with PHP files was required to make that part of it work.
There are a couple other, minor problems with the plugin, too, but its approach to the problem of organizing and presenting series is revolutionary, and I’m sure with all the attention it’s receiving, the developer will get a lot of help in ironing out the rough spots. I’m certainly hoping for its mass adoption as an indispensible plugin, because that’s really the only way to ensure that a given plugin will still be around and compatible with the latest versions of WordPress five years from now. If not, future readers of the Via Negativa archives will probably wonder what the hell I was so excited about.
Change
Change can be exciting, but also a source of great anxiety. Currently I am feeling both excited and anxious about the new theme design here… and not surprisingly, I already miss the old one. Modern was a terrific design — one of a relatively small number of what I consider great WordPress themes, at least as far as aesthetics are concerned. But the code was lacking in other ways, and I was having real trouble getting the sidebar to display properly in Internet Explorer, among other things.
I make no great claims for the current design, much of which is my own work, and incorporates some styles from the old theme (go here to see what it’s supposed to look like). I’ve wanted a double right sidebar for a while; I think it helps usability to make a clear distinction between internal and external links. I also wanted to include links to recent comments (on the home page only) and links to recent posts, useful since I’ve cut down the number of posts shown on the home page (and always a good thing for visitors coming in on links to archival posts). The longer navigation bar in the header has room for a few more things that didn’t really belong in the sidebar. I think the blog is still narrow enough to display without a scroll bar at most standard resolutions (mobile phones should pick up a much more minimal theme).
So if you’re reading this via feed reader or email, click through and let me know what you think. I’ve checked it out to one degree or another in Firefox, IE7, Opera, and Safari for Windows, and it looks pretty much the same in all of them. Now to bed.
Related
Am I delivering a blog brand experience? Lord, I hope not!
I gotta hand it to John Pozadzides: even though he’s one of those big-shot dispensers of the very kind of received blogging wisdom that I was railing against last week, he sure doesn’t buy the malarky about narrow niche blogging being the best way to attract and keep an audience.
I’ve been hearing people advising authors to stick to only one topic per blog for some time now. And they are just plain wrong.
Any possible SEO [search engine optimization] advantage is more than outweighed by the fact that authors and readers become bored by the same subject after a while and content becomes stale and painful. Not to mention the fact that you’ll only keep a regular subscriber for so long without some variety. (Oprah doesn’t talk about the same thing every day, so why should you?)
Instead, write about what you know and love… all of it. As an example, my blog has 42 categories and 2,300 tags. I average 15-20,000 page views each day, with a record day being over 140,000.
Of course, here at Via Negativa it’s more common for me to write about what I don’t know (but still love). But one way or the other, with advice like that to mitigate the effects of his unexamined assumption that big audience = success, I happily sat through a video of his entire speech at WordCamp Dallas, and have even decided to follow two pieces of his advice. First, as this post demonstrates, I’ve started adding title text to links — the words that appear when you mouse-over a link (or a linked image, but I’ve been doing that for a while). The visual editor in the brand-new version of WordPress makes it easy and convenient, so what the hell.
I also decided to add a “Related Posts” feature, though not with the plugin Pozadzides recommends. This one searches the entire database for keywords and uses complex algorithms, apparently. (I’m always a sucker for complex algorithms, because I don’t have the foggiest notion of what they are or why they work.) You can see it in action by clicking on any post and scrolling down to the bottom, right above the big gray block of info. I currently have it set to display a maximum of five Possibly Related Posts, with the parameters of relatedness set wide enough that something should always turn up. The results are listed in descending order of relatedness, which is to say that the most closely related post should always be at the top. And it seems to work pretty well, knock on wood. For example, the first Possibly Related Post for Consumer, that story about feeding a shrew in a box, was an essay from last year containing a photo and description of a dead short-tailed shrew.
I may not care about total numbers of visitors, but I do care a lot about engaging and entertaining those who do show up — and I’m always looking for ways to improve access to the archives, especially considering that I’m probably never going to get around to categorizing all 900-odd uncategorized posts from my days on Blogger. In the sidebar, you’ll notice a new Browse section that includes a Random Post link. It might be fun to use that in combination with the Related Posts feature. I’d appreciate feedback on these or any other new features of the site, especially from regular readers.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention another new feature that affects browsing. I now have the ability to display a smaller number of posts on the main page of the blog from what appear in monthly archival pages, category archival pages, and search results, thanks to the Different Posts Per Page Custom Post Limits plugin. So right now the main page is set to display seven posts, down from ten — which always seemed too many to me for a front page, but not quite enough for exploring the archives. All the other settings are currently at 15, and display complete posts rather than excerpts. I’m very open to suggestions and criticism on this.
Festival das Árvores
Pela primeira vez o Festival é sediado num blog de outra língua diferente do inglês e eu prometi tentar com meus básicos conhecimentos gerar o blog totalmente bilíngüe diretamente de São Paulo-Brasil! […]
For the first time, the festival is hosted by a blog from a language other than English and I promise to try, with my basic knowledge, to generate a fully bilingual edition directly from Sao Paulo, Brazil!
As I wrote in the announcement post at the Festival of the Trees coordinating blog, it’s hard to find a country more closely associated with trees and forests in the international imagination than Brazil.
Aside from the bilingualism, other special features of this month’s edition of the FOTT include the “be a tree” poems at Read Write Poem (a prompt specifically inspired by the Festival of the Trees — thanks, Juliet!); on-going coverage of a busy beaver in Missouri; a two-part post on how to cure an ailing coconut palm in Tamilnadu; and the greenest street in the world. Go look.
Pressing on
Pressing On (Return of the Phoebe) from the Undiscovery Channel on Vimeo.
Ah, to be as single-minded as a phoebe! To sing for the sheer joy of it, one’s message reduced to the bare fundamentals:
I am here.
Life is good.
Gimme some sugar.
Isn’t that really what we’re all trying to do, as artists and writers ?
Apparently not. “Whether a person blogs to make a little money, to influence opinion or just for sheer ego gratification,” says Paul Boutin of the New York Times, “amassing a large audience is the goal.” Oh. Oops.
Funny thing, though. Remember my interview with an anonymous blogger? Anon. used a slightly different yardstick to measure success in blogging:
One of my blogs lasted only a few weeks and got mentioned on instapundit and metafilter, logged hundreds of readers daily, was cut and pasted and forwarded as emails, and led to several offers of publication in whole or in part. A year before that, I had written another blog that also lasted only a few weeks. This second blog drew few readers, was not widely linked, didn’t feature my best prose, and when it ended, wasn’t archived by me or anyone else. It, however, involved my wandering in snowy woods by myself several times a week. For that reason alone, I prefer it to its more celebrated cousin.
Now this same individual, writing under a pseudonymn and working with an agent, has gotten an offer from a major publisher to bring out his second novel, which also gestated in a (now discontinued) blog — one with a daily readership probably around 100, I’m guessing. (Which still sounds like a lot to those of us who have been writing poetry for a while, and are used to thinking of a large audience as anything in excess of ten people, including family members!) Nor is he the only friend or acquaintance for whom blogging has led to authorship.
But judging by the advice proffered by most of the blogging experts I’ve read, my friends are basket-cases. Not only do they fail to measure their success by Google PageRank or Technorati authority, but their blogs often lack a tight focus; their titles usually aren’t terribly descriptive; most of them probably don’t know how to use tags to increase their SEO; and their posts often ramble far from the point and include lengthy paragraphs that few casual visitors would be able to focus on (Anon. was famous for that). But like our friend in the video above, they are hardly lacking in dedication.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the American blogging cognoscenti have completely ignored what I consider the most significant blogging story of 2008 so far. Japan’s most prestigious literary award — the Akutagawa Prize, which recognizes up-and-coming fiction writers — just went to a blogger named Mieko Kawakami. She began blogging in 2003 as a way to try and stir up interest in her music, but soon the writing took over. The prize went to her third work of fiction; all three were originally written for her blog.
Kawakami’s award-winning novella, “The Breast and the Egg,” explores the ideas of divorce, the questioning of beauty standards and other themes of solitary womanhood that are still relatively new territory in Japanese literature. Kawakami’s stories in some ways are those of Japan’s Everywoman. […]
“It’s about living, our body, the changes of the heart that accompany the body, the urgency, the problems being born, moment by moment,” Kawakami said. “The fact that we are always doing our best at living.”
So it seems that some top-notch writers are finding their voice through blogging now, even if blogging as a medium for literary expression hasn’t really caught on here yet. As someone who has helped publish bloggers and other writers and artists in a blog-enabled online literary magazine for three years, this is obviously a topic of keen interest to me. In Japan, as the AP article goes on to point out, it’s not uncommon now for writers to produce novels in installments meant to be read on mobile phones. To say that Japan has a healthy blogging culture would be a bit of an understatement.
There are more blog posts in Japanese than any other language, according to Technorati Inc., which tracks nearly 113 million blogs globally. Last year, Technorati found 37 percent of all postings were in Japanese — about 1.5 million per day. Postings in English — from Americans, Britons, Australians and people in many other countries — accounted for 36 percent of the total.
It’s not just a matter of numbers, though. In Japan, the personal or diary blog is the dominant form, not only as a percentage of the whole (which may be true here, too) but in terms of public perception. This makes sense, because letters and diaries have held a central position in Japanese literature for over a thousand years, enjoying equal status with poetry and novels. (You may have noticed the quote at the bottom of my sidebar from Sei Shonagon, whose tenth-century Pillow Book was as much like a personal blog as anything one can imagine.) Moreover, novels based on lightly-fictionalized autobiography have been a staple of Japanese literature for close to fifty years now. So a Japanese blogger with literary aspirations would not have to look far for role models or an appreciative audience.
Here in the U.S., by contrast, the literary establishment seems reluctant even to concede the value of online literary magazines, let alone blogs. The proper curmugeonly thing to do is express distaste for something so obviously deleterious to the cause of true literature, as the British novelist Doris Lessing did in her Nobel acceptance speech this past December.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention — computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked, What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print? In the same way, we never thought to ask, How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by this internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc.
God forbid! Then again, if all the bloggers I know followed the advice of the blogging gurus, I think we would have to concede Lessing’s point.
Not altogether Charlie
One day, driving in the hollows above Tyrone, looking for an entrance to the state gamelands, we drove down a rutted, unpaved road and past a rusty trailer whose occupant had come outside to stare at us. The yard was muddy and full of junk — old cars, refrigerators, whatever was too big to fit in the trailer. The man stood next to the road, head cocked to one side, mouth gaped open. “He’s not altogether Charlie,” my Dad remarked. A few hundred yards further, the road dead-ended with no gamelands signs in evidence, so we turned the Scout around and headed back. The man was still there, waiting for us. We stared; he stared; we didn’t stop.
Thirty years later, for no good reason, I think of that incident. The sky is orange with sunrise. I’m standing out by the road, gawking at another “v” of swans heading north.
*
Via Negativa hasn’t been altogether Charlie for the past five days or so, but we hope to have it back in shape in a few hours. After that, it should be faster and more reliable than it was before. I’m grateful to my cousin Matt for trouble-shooting and for continuing to let Via Negativa live rent-free at his place (which is a bit fancier than a trailer). He just replaced the virtual couch, but it may us take a little while to break it in.
Thanks to everyone who wrote to express concern. I really appreciate it.