If you’re a reader of Lorianne DiSabato’s blog Hoarded Ordinaries (and if not, why not?) you may have noticed that the site has fallen victim to the dreaded White Screen of Death. Lorianne has so far been unable to post anything to let even the subscribers to her feed know to go find her at the blog’s new location, http://hoardedordinaries.wordpress.com.
Making a blog-book: some preliminary conclusions
Someone in the WordPress.com help forums asks about the nuts and bolts of writing a book on his blog. I’d been meaning to share some of the lessons I’ve learned from my experience blogging three different books, so I thought I’d post about it here and leave the link in the forum.
If you want to have a book as part of your blog, then the logical thing to do, I guess, is make the book title a category (or “topic,” for you Blogger users) and put the category link in the sidebar. The category pages will of course display however your blog’s theme (template, skin) dictates — many themes only show excerpts — and with whatever number of posts per page that you have as your global setting. You can hand-code a clickable table of contents (hereafter, TOC) to include in the sidebar (use a text widget in WordPress.com) or on a dedicated page. If the book has already been written and you want people to read the contents in order, you can of course put the entire text within a single page or post. But if you really want people to read it, I’d advise serializing it whether or not you already have it written. In WordPress, each category has its own RSS feed, so people can subscribe to your book whether or not it is on a separate blog. But putting it on its own blog gives you much more freedom to format it however you wish. You can display links to its latest posts in the sidebar of your main blog using the RSS feed, with an RSS widget in WordPress.com, or a customizable display from Feed Digest for other platforms (the “New at Qarrtsiluni” section of my sidebar here uses code from Feed Digest).
I’ve blogged three books, the latter two at WordPress.com (not to be confused with the open-source blogging software I use here, available at WordPress.org). The first was an epic, integrated with this blog (then at Blogspot). It had a couple dozen enthusiastic readers at first, but they gradually dwindled as the months wore on, leading me to wonder if in fact the blog form was a good fit for longer books — at least the kind that demand sustained attention to plot. I put the finished document into a PDF and haven’t pursued further publication options, such as Lulu.com, basically because I just don’t like it that much anymore.
The other two blog-books are both collections of lyric poems, one drawn from this blog, Shadow Cabinet; the other, called Spoil, a selection of older stuff. I originally set up Shadow Cabinet using exclusively non-chronological pages for the poems, and a sidebar TOC. I included a blog in which I wrote about the process of putting it together, and allowed comments there but not on the poem pages, because I felt that a book would look better without readers’ remarks — and after all, people had the chance to comment the first time around, when they appeared here. But when WP.com introduced a Random Post feature last month, I decided to move all the poems from pages to posts so I could take advantage of it: I’m a big believer in opening collections of poems at random, and reading backwards or forwards from that point. With a single post-page displaying at a time, I wanted readers to be able to easily find the links to the preceding and following pages so they could move through it the same way they’d turn the pages in a real book. The sidebar TOC wasn’t as handy, I decided, and besides, it distracted from the main content. But as I tried all the different themes on offer at WP.com — currently around 70, I guess — I was shocked by how few included post-to-post links. (This is the sort of feature you can’t change from the stylesheet, and WP.com doesn’t give access to the main template code because of the way it’s set up, as a multi-user community — a change in any theme’s PHP would show up in every blog currently using that theme.) After a lot of fussing around with fancier themes, I found that good old Kubrick — the default WordPress 1.5 theme — did the trick (see detailed theme review here). Not only does it have previous and next post links right up top, but the sidebar disappears on the post pages: perfect!
The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin famously declared that the urge to destroy is also a creative urge, and I repeated that to myself as I eliminated, one-by-one, all the posts in the writing blog originally included at Shadow Cabinet in order to make room for the poems. I input them in their TOC order and assigned a fictional date to each post, starting with January 1. (I apologize to the handful of souls who’d subscribed to the feed, and must’ve suddenly wondered at the 83 new posts that appeared overnight!) I amended the stylesheet to suppress post metadata (date, time, etc.) and other irrelevancies, but — in a switch of policy — decided to allow comments. My original focus with Shadow Cabinet had been simply to put together a manuscript for print publication, so I was trying to make it resemble a conventional book as much as possible. But I gradually realized I like online publication as well or better: no trees are killed; costs are minimal; world-wide distribution is automatic; and the potential for reader-author interaction adds a whole new dimension. The trick, I think, is just to add a lot of white space between the poem and the comment form or comments. I’m still working on uploading audio versions of the contents, which I think is one other way to make an online book more compelling than one in print. For an extra, one-time payment of $20, WP.com lets me store up to 1 gigabyte of mp3 files on-site.
For my third experiment, Spoil [now no longer on WordPress.com – 3/10/09], I used chronological posts from the outset, and rather quickly settled on the Day Dream theme (review here) — one of only two one-column themes at WP.com (three if you count the one-column skin for the Sandbox theme). But as I got near the end and started thinking about navigation through the finished book, I decided to switch to another theme, White as Milk, and import all the styles that I liked from Day Dream, because in the latter, the navigation links appear down below the comment form, and I couldn’t see any way to change that without changing themes. The vestigial sidebar I retained from the White as Milk stylesheet gives readers the option of going to a random page at any point, rather than merely from the home page as with the other book. The current front page setting — just the TOC — is very boring, I think, and I should probably put together some sort of preface page instead. On Shadow Cabinet, by contrast, the TOC is split into three different pages and isn’t even displayed on the home page sidebar. I’m really not sure what the best way is, I guess, because I really don’t know how the average reader prefers to navigate, and the visitor statistics aren’t detailed enough to tell me. For both books, it might be helpful if I introduced separate title pages for each section right into the chronological loop, so readers paging through in order will know when they switch from one section to another. In Spoil, especially, the five sections are thematically quite distinct.
I’d be interested in feedback, positive or negative, from anyone who has spent time with either book: not so much what you thought about the contents (though that’s fine, too), but whether the presentation and navigation worked, and how it might be improved. And if you’ve experimented with book-blogs yourself, I’d be very interested in seeing examples and hearing how you went about it. Several literary magazines publish “online chapbooks” now, so I’m clearly not the only one thinking that this is a good way to present collections of lyric poetry, at least.
Greatest Blog Hits sought
Qarrtsiluni is calling all bloggers to send in their best posts.
The blog form is now ten years old. How better to celebrate that anniversary than with a “Greatest Blog Hits” issue? From now through our deadline of June 15, we’re reversing our long-standing prohibition against previously blogged material: we want ONLY previously blogged material, at least one year old. It may take any form – fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art, photography, audio, cartoons – and there’s no restriction on length (though excerpts will also be considered). We simply want your best posts.
Read the whole call for submissions here.
Down to earth
Trees in the Concrete, the 11th — and first themed — edition of the Festival of the Trees, appeared yesterday morning at Flatbush Gardener. Xris did a great job of finding articles and blog posts to fit his theme. Also, I and the Bird #48 — “A Field Guide to the Bird Posts” — is fresh this morning at Greg Laden’s blog. (The next edition of I and the Bird will be right here at Via Negativa on May 17! Those of you who know me personally can wipe the coffee off your computer screens now.)
And as long as I’m posting links: fans of my mother’s nature writing can find three new posts from her at the Marcia Bonta and Plummer’s Hollow sites — Saving the Future; Spring wildflowers: back on track; and April Journal Highlights (2).
*
Almost every morning I have a choice: stay inside and write, or go for a walk. Yesterday, I went for a walk. I was rewarded with a rare daytime sighting of a southern flying squirrel, supposedly our most abundant tree squirrel species here in Pennsylvania but seldom seen because of its nocturnal habits. This one was fleeing a pair of gray squirrels — it wasn’t clear how the altercation started — and landed on a big black locust tree right beside the road.
I didn’t get going until around 10:00 o’clock, but I did so with a great sense of accomplishment, having just solved a fairly complex coding problem on my own. This had to do with the way my recently revamped Shadow Cabinet site displayed in Internet Explorer. In essence, post titles were being messed up by the next page and previous page navigation links, and the fix involved pandering to a proprietary IE property known as “hasLayout,” which I’d never heard of until yesterday and still barely understand. But it occurred to me afterwards, as I started off through the woods, that the feeling of getting way in over my head is very similar to what I experience when I write a poem. In both cases, I really have no idea what I’m doing; I just keep trying different things until something works. The process (or stylesheet) may not be pretty, but as long as the product looks good, who cares?
WordPress has this dumb little slogan, “Code is Poetry.” No, it isn’t. The elegance and simplicity that WordPress coders pride themselves on may possess a certain kind of aesthetic appeal, but they are borne of an utter lack of nuance and ambiguity. Good poetry, by contrast, may or may not adhere to a minimalist aesthetic, but is almost always dedicated to exploring nuance and ambiguity, rather than eliminating it. Such devices as metaphors or puns have no equivalent in the necessarily literalist language of code (although there is a new form of poetry that depends on a detailed knowledge of scripting). All of this probably seems fairly obvious, but the slogan bothers me because it suggests that poetry is, in turn, a type of code — and in fact, I’ll bet that a sizable majority of people who state that they “just don’t understand poetry” are reacting to this very misperception. “Why can’t the poet just say what s/he means?”
Writing code and writing poetry may have a few things in common, though. In both, there’s almost always more than one way of saying something, and the trick is to find the best one. A concern of conscientious web designers these days is to “futureproof” their work: to try and anticipate which tags will fall out of favor as web standards evolve, and to avoid using them so that the page they’re working on will still render properly five or ten years down the road. For poets, something akin to futureproofing occurs when we weigh the extent to which the appreciation of our works depends on a knowledge of local conditions, ephemeral slang expressions, or current events. The anticipated shelf-life for poetry may be a bit longer than for software or web pages, but at some level we must realize that there are no true universals; even the concept of romantic love is a little over 800 years old, and might not be very well understood a millennium from now.
This realization ought to bring us down to earth, but somehow most poets — like many computer geeks — still tend to be rather full of themselves. The power of language at its most suggestive (poetry) and at its most tool-like (commands of any sort) is intoxicating, and power tends to turn people into assholes.
While stalking an ovenbird yesterday morning, I almost stepped on this box turtle. Both creatures are very well camouflaged for a lifetime spent on, near, or — as seems to have been the case with this turtle shortly before I found him — underneath the forest litter. Wildflowers and tree seedlings aren’t the only things pushing their way out of the ground these days.
Trees in the concrete
On the About page for the Festival of Trees, we note that “We are interested in trees in the concrete rather than in the abstract.” Xris of Flatbush Gardener thought it would be fun to take that literally and have “Trees in the Concrete” as a theme for the next edition of the blog carnival. In his own words:
Yes, I am also interested in trees in the concrete […]. Urban trees and forestry. Street trees, park trees, weed trees. So, for the next Festival of the Trees, I’m especially looking for submissions on this theme. This is not a restrictive theme, so anything which fits the FotT submission guidelines is welcome. If you have a doubt, send it. You can submit entries via the Festival of the Trees Submission Form on BlogCarnival. You can also send an email to festival (dot) trees (at) gmail (dot) com with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line.
The publication date will be May 1st, 2007. The deadline for submissions is April 29. It’s my first time hosting a Blog Carnival, so be gentle.
Blog ennui
I think I have blog ennui. In regard to my own posting, that is — I still enjoy reading others, and still get exciting about discovering great posts on unheralded blogs. But I have a rapidly diminishing interest in the products of my own pen. For the last few weeks, posting anything here has seemed a chore. The thrill is gone. Anyone know any cures?
*
There was snow on the ground for the fifth morning in a row, an inch and a half of fresh powder — well, not powder, exactly, but just sticky enough to cling to branches and the furrowed bark of the black walnut trees in the yard, where three squirrels chased each other, spiraling up and down the trunks first one direction and then the other in mad, headlong spurts that left little puffs of snow behind them, like clouds of exhaust. A couple minutes of that, then over to the lilac where a pair of them disdained the natural pathways the branches afforded, treating them instead like rungs on a ladder — and barely slowing down. Maybe the weird weather is getting to them, I thought. Sitting inside, I heard nothing from their chase, but I know that sound of claws scrabbling on bark so well, I can’t replay the scene in memory without hearing it, in the same way that I can’t remember the characters in a subtitled foreign film speaking anything but English.
*
This afternoon, I watched a cardinal make threatening gestures at its reflection in the window, diving and fluttering. This wouldn’t seem at all remarkable — cardinals are among the most notorious of reflection-fighters — except that this was a female cardinal. After her third sortie, her mate flew in and perched in the bush below her. I wondered if she hadn’t learned this behavior from watching him in past years. Perhaps she was trying to lead by example, feeling that it was high time he start defending territory so they could get this breeding thing underway. If so, it obviously wasn’t working. He continued to sit in the bush, looking just a little nonplussed.
Testament: last lines
for all those I have plundered (nothing I have is mine to give away)
I can’t decipher my stale devotion
it’s made up entirely of curse words
no condoms for the heart
will save you daily from three dozen blessings
pale orange branches, pale blue sky
there are always more
the mother’s slim hands vanishing into blurred velvet
her compound bird-span wings disguised as eyes
in twilight, curves as hard as nutshells
and beyond, the bright flying splinters of the stars
they shower onto the earth
to house its want
elusive green whorl
and I hid it like a mutant twin
unraveling the dark seam of winter
notch between hills
I am as empty as the mourning dove calling today –
whoo-ah-ooo-ooo-ah
__________
In response to the Poetry Thursday challenge, “Write a poem to, for, or about a poet.” If you’re reading this on-site (as opposed to the RSS or email version) the poem may appear all or mostly blue on first reading, reflecting my mood early this morning before I started putting it together. But unrhymable orange is its proper color, I think. Therefore each reader must complete this on his/her own by clicking on all the lines, in any order.
You can find links to the other April 5th PT poems here.
NaPoly attired
A number of bloggers are promising to write a poem a day for (Inter-)National Poetry Writing Month, A.K.A. NaPoWriMo, including Ivy Alvarez (who warns that she will be taking the full drafts down after a couple hours, “leaving excerpts wagging their tails behind them”), Harry Rutherford (who warns that many of his poems “will be truly awful”), and SB of Watermark (who warns that her highest hope is to “end the month with one or two good seeds”). Posting rough drafts of one’s own poems takes a certain amount of guts, I think. I encourage everyone to follow as many of these bloggers as you have time for and cheer them on. Lists of participants can be found here, here and here.
I just want to remind everyone that I, too, will be posting a poem virtually every day this month — as I’ve been doing for the past three weeks — at Spoil. The caveat in my case is that these are not new poems, and thus not in the spirit of NaPoWriMo (although most certainly in the spirit of the original, more fuddy-duddyish National Poetry Month). Since none of them are first drafts, I really don’t have any excuses, other than a sentimental attachment to the products of my long poetic apprenticeship. If you’re one of the twenty or so people keeping up with Spoil by subscribing to the feed, thanks — but you might want to click through once and a while and admire the totally bitchin’ header image, which is one of the best things about the site.
Treeplish
Festival of the Trees 11 is a many-branched wonder. Check it out.
Word of the Day: Treeple pl n [fr. tree + people, by analogy with sheeple — q.v.]
1. Trees possessing unusually anthropomorphic forms or qualities
2. People as slow-moving and firmly rooted as trees
syn see PENNSYLVANIAN
adj treeplish
Luckier
It sounds as if the kitten I posted about a few days ago is quickly adjusting to his new home (yes, she is a he — shows how much I know about cats). Read all about it here and here. Suzanne also tells me that he has learned how to use a litter box, no problem. Hard to figure why his original owners dumped him, but everything seems to have turned out for the best.