Words on the Street
Words on the Street
Words on the Street
*
One of my New Year’s resolutions for Via Negativa was to bring back Words on the Street as a regular feature (I’ll try for weekly), in part as a way of commenting on, or at least acknowledging, the current global economic crisis (which I don’t expect to end in my lifetime, only worsen). Also, in recent years I fear Via Negativa has skewed a bit too far yin-ward on the yin-yang continuum. More satire might help restore the balance.
Incidentally, for some good, incisive yet non-preachy “poetry and prose for hard times,” check out the new online journal Cur.ren.cy (and consider submitting).
Words on the street
Words on the street
25 things about Via Negativa
- Almost every year, I think Via Negativa’s birthday is coming up on the 20th. Every year, it turns out to have been the 17th. The problem I guess is that I think of the first post as having been in late December, although it was really the middle of the month. So given that I can’t even remember that much, I can’t vouch for the complete accuracy of everything that follows.
- My gateway drug to blogging was Yahoo Geocities. I still have a webpage there, which is usually the second result for a Google search of my name. And I haven’t touched my proto-blog there, the page of essays I wrote in 2003, originally sparked by the invasion of Iraq. Note that the brief apologia at the bottom of that page already contains the germ of my blogging ethos:
[M]y most memorable prose, I think, has been written on the run, or off the cuff. It’s fairly disposable–but maybe that’s the point. As long as it biodegrades in a timely manner. And gives off a pleasant fragrance, thanks to all the spirits of the invisible wild: yeasts, molds, fungi, bacteria. Whatever works.
- When I started blogging, I didn’t anticipate any need for comments. (And the original Blogger/Blogspot didn’t have any; you had to hack in a Haloscan commenting system. Which, in early January 2004, marked my second CSS/HTML hack, after learning how to code links for the sidebar.)
- When I started blogging, I didn’t think there were any other bloggers covering religion, philosophy, or poetry. The first such blog I found — by using a blog directory (Blogarama, I think) and looking under “philosophy” — was the cassandra pages. Five years later, I remain close friends with its author, Beth Adams, and co-edit qarrtsiluni with her.
- “Via Negativa” is probably not the best name for a blog. Not for this blog, at any rate. I quickly dropped what I had thought would be my primary focus — religious agnosticism, broadly defined — but kept the name because regular readers had already gotten used to it. I decided that if the name tended to weed out people who avoid any hint of negativity, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Being near the bottom of most alphabetized blogrolls was a bit more of a problem.
- I started my very first side-blog in 2004 — Dead Raccoon. It was also my first microblog, though I’m not sure the term had been invented yet. It consisted of almost daily absurdist political bon mots, filled with cynicism and black humor. I killed it after a few months, because I realized I didn’t have very many original political insights, and most of the time I really don’t know what I’m talking about.
- The indirect successor to Dead Raccoon was a cartoon called Words on the Street, which began as a text-only feature called Diogenes’ Tub. The idea to make it into a cartoon came from a reader who at the time used the pseudonym the Sylph (and who was also, I believe, Via Negativa’s very first commenter, though all those Haloscan comments are gone now). A big part of the reason for doing it originally was to break up the text — Via Negativa had virtually no other illustrations until I started taking and posting photos in 2005. Diogenes the bum still puts in an appearance from time to time (as at the top of this post).
- My first two years as a blogger were my most ambitious in terms of average post length and number of series. (I’ve subsequently been able to put most of the latter into fully functioning series, with archives in chronological order, thanks to the fantastic Organize Series plugin for WordPress.) What happened I think was that I had a certain number of ideas I had to get out of my system. Once I did so, I noticed an unexpected real-life side-effect: I began to feel much less of a compulsion to turn every conversation into a lecture or a harangue. I’m not trying to claim that that impulse has completely gone away, but I believe I’ve mostly broken the habit.
- I began blogging an epic poem, Cibola, on January 3rd 2005 and finished it up six months later. Those posts were interspersed with almost-daily Words on the Street cartoons as well as my regular blog posts. I think I scared off a lot of readers that year. Nowadays, I do just as much stuff online, but it’s spread over several different sites.
- Via Negativa is part of an informal “class of 2003,” which includes a number of blogs still in my blogroll. Blogging first hit the internet-using mainstream that year, I guess, and the war made a lot of us look for a bigger soapbox. My first meet-up with other bloggers was in New York City in February 2005, where we convened to see Christo’s Gates installation in Central Park. I blogged it, of course. So did Lorianne and Leslee, not to mention Diogenes.
- I moved off Blogspot on April Fools Day, 2006. My main reason was the lack of categories, which I dearly wanted in order to make my burgeoning archives slightly more accessible. I think it was at least a year and a half later before Blogger finally introduced categories (“lables”). It was hard to leave more than two years’ worth of comments behind when I moved. I really felt bad about that.
- One of the irritating things about Blogspot is that it doesn’t retire domains when someone deletes a blog. So cyber-squatters snatch up newly cleared domains like mine in order to take advantage of the incoming links, even if they never put up more than a single post. And if they then encode instructions to search-engine bots not to spider their site, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine will restrict access to all its archives of one’s own site. Moral: Never delete a Blogspot blog. Clear the archives if you need to, but keep at least one post there redirecting visitors to your new site.
- Since April 1, 2006, Via Negativa has been hosted free of charge by my cousin Matt Albright, who grew up nearby but currently lives in Silicon Valley with his wife and three daughters. Matt bought lifetime server space for a website some years ago, but has never had time to put up more than a CV for himself. My dad’s site, Peaceful Societies, piggybacks on Matt’s website as well.
- Matt’s also the guy who got me into digital photography when he sent me his old camera in late February 2005. I had blogged about an icestorm, and he wanted to know what it looked like. The Via Negativa readership at the time was divided about whether the addition of photography would be a good thing, but eventually I think they all came around.
- My first Blogger blog used a template with the sidebar on the left, but within six months I switched to a right-hand sidebar and it’s been that way ever since.
- I’ve been on-again, off-again with stats counters, which means I really have no idea how many people have visted Via Negativa over the years. I seem to average about 10,000 page views a month. The best month for which I kept records clocked in at just shy of 30,000.
- I am still routinely surprised that anyone stops by here at all, though. Sometimes Via Negativa readers even make me things and send them through the mail, which astounds me. At times, I like to tell myself that blogging makes me a useful and productive member of society. But probably the reality is that Via Negativa and my other online projects are a drag on the economy, by helping diminish the productivity of office workers.
- I passed my one millionth spam comment at the beginning of this month (see the counter at the bottom of the page). That’s since August, 2006 when I installed the Akismet anti-spam plugin. I’m told that’s a pretty meaningless figure, but so too are a lot of the other metrics that bloggers use to try and assess their blog’s value or importance. Via Negativa has gotten 9,392 legitimate comments since moving to WordPress. (That figure includes my own responses, though.)
- I’ve written some 1,138,000 words in 2,270 posts (not counting the 218 Smorgasblog posts, since they’re just quotes). That’s the equivalent of ten or eleven novels, I guess.
- Aside from Cibola, I’ve made two e-books of poems that originally appeared in Via Negativa, Shadow Cabinet and Spoil. I’m not real crazy about either one of them; I just enjoy creating websites.
- Via Negativa posts have been translated into foreign languages twice that I know of. Blogger Agustin Fest translated Should poetry be open source? into Spanish, and Poetikon translated the first half of Poem for Display at a City Reservoir into Norwegian. Very very flattering.
- All my work here is licensed under a copyleft statement designed to permit everything except taking my work and claiming it as your own, or preventing other people from modifying something that you have made from something here. Creative remixing is just another form of translation, as far as I’m concerned — something to be welcomed. I also decided a while back not to care about the scrapers who take fragments of text from Via Negativa (along with tens of thousands of other sites). I don’t understand why some bloggers get so worked up about that.
- The relative lack of focus on personal stuff here has less to do with any desire for privacy than the plain fact that I bore myself. And as a poet, first and foremost, I am more interested in self-mythologizing anyway.
- Blogging has had a really positive effect on my writing. Even though I’ve been writing and publishing poetry since I was seven, my poetry writing has become much more fluid and sure-footed over the last five years, I think. I’ve written more than 540 poems and translations for Via Negativa, and in the process have grown much more comfortable with sharing relatively unpolished work. And I’m fond of telling people who wonder why I blog that as a poet, I have found a much larger and more varied audience online, through blogging, than I would get in most print journals — to say nothing of the ability to interact with readers. I’m also pleased with some of the prose I’ve churned out, as well as the posts combining photos and text which are perhaps most typical of the non-political blogging medium.
- Fewer than half a dozen Via Negativa posts have ever included numbered lists.
Disadvantaged
This morning, my uncle described his first encounter with African-Americans, which happened when he was drafted into the Army in the late 1950s. They were nice enough, he said, but they cursed constantly, using the foulest language he’d ever heard. And every month when they got their paychecks, they went and gambled for hours until one of them had won all the money from everyone else, forcing them to go borrow ten dollars to live on for the next month. “I found that incomprehensible,” my uncle said. “It was as if they had nothing to live for.”
Today is Blog Action Day, and this year’s theme is poverty. The coordinating site suggests ways that participating bloggers of various types might post on-topic, and for personal bloggers like myself, the suggestion is, “document a personal activity of the blogger that is helping the disadvantaged.” Hmm. Well, I’m not doing anything to help alleviate poverty per se, but I would like to think that the range of materials I publish online, here and elsewhere, for free to anyone with internet access — which is, in the United States at least, anyone who can get to a public library — constitutes “helping the disadvantaged” as much as anything might. I don’t make any great claims for my own work, but I think a lot of the stuff I’m helping to put online at qarrtsiluni and Postal Poetry is first-rate. Like Andrew Carnegie, whose philanthropy was so instrumental in the spread of free public libraries, I tend to believe that “It is the mind that makes the body rich.” But unlike Carnegie, I don’t exactly speak from a position of privilege.
I’ve never been a gambler, but I do cuss a lot and at one time in my life had very little to live for apart from drinking and carousing. I spent most of my paycheck on booze, and switched apartments frequently to avoid paying rent. After a while, I found a basement to store my stuff in for free and began crashing on people’s couches. It was actually a fairly satisfying existence, though I think if I’d done it for more than a couple of years, it would’ve gotten old. But simplifying one’s needs and learning to satisfy them in a way that doesn’t directly engage complex thought processes is a sure route to something that looks at least superficially like contentment. A couple years later, when I read Down and Out in Paris and London, I recognized the lifestyle in George Orwell’s description:
I had no sensation of poverty, for even after paying my rent and setting aside enough for tobacco and journeys and my food on Sundays, I still had four francs a day for drinks, and four francs was wealth. There was — it is hard to express it — a sort of heavy contentment, the contentment a well-fed beast might feel, in a life which had become so simple. For nothing could be simpler than the life of a PLONGEUR. He lives in a rhythm between work and sleep, without time to think, hardly conscious of the exterior world; his Paris has shrunk to the hotel, the Metro, a few BISTROS and his bed. If he goes afield, it is only a few streets away, on a trip with some servant-girl who sits on his knee swallowing oysters and beer. On his free day he lies in bed till noon, puts on a clean shirt, throws dice for drinks, and after lunch goes back to bed again. Nothing is quite real to him but the BOULOT, drinks and sleep; and of these sleep is the most important.
Then there is the kind of poverty I enjoy now, where the deprivations, still self-imposed (given that I do have a college degree and a few marketable skills), are mainly social (no wife or girlfriend, no kids, no employment, no car and thus no easy way to go do things with other people). I have simply made a decision to try and be content with very little, with the critical difference that now I’m living a life of the mind. I guess I’ve been pretty successful in this regard — successful enough to feel rather sorry for those with other life goals, and to suspect that most people might be happier if only they were more like me. Which is complete bullshit, of course.
Poverty used to be considered an unmitigated virtue. Up until the 16th century, begging was treated as a valid vocation: beggars were considered closer to the heart of reality, and were also valued as objects of charity, helping the less virtuous bribe their way into God’s good graces. I believe this is still the attitude in much of India. For some reason, though, attitudes changed rather suddenly in early modern Europe, when begging was outlawed in city after city and beggars were driven out. Poverty now became a problem to be solved through wage-labor. Through sheer coincidence, this was right about the time that the enclosure movement began, creating vast numbers of hungry peasants through the privitization of common lands: disadvantagement was an active, intentional process. And needless to say the deliberate destruction of traditional, subsistence economies was essential to the creation of impoverished, utterly dependent laborers in the global South, as well. The first great lie internalized by the conquered and the enslaved was that they were poor, ignorant, and without a valid culture of their own.
To what extent do any of us choose our destiny? The typical American answer is, “to a very great extent” — we are nothing if not positive thinkers. My favorable quotation of Andrew Carnegie above exposes me as a typical American, too, I guess. But that means that if you’re poor (or sick, or overweight), it must be your own fault. Even a lot of poor people believe this, to their extreme detriment, along with some admixture of blame for a scapegoat (black people for poor whites, white racists for poor blacks). These are the second and third great lies.
Can poverty ever be eliminated without first confronting these poisonous assumptions head-on, I wonder? I don’t have any answers — that’s why I’m not a political blogger. I am by no means certain I’m even asking the right questions. If, as our politricksters are continually suggesting, more jobs are the answer to all social ills, what about that mind-numbing spiritual poverty that Orwell wrote about? This I suppose is where art and poetry could enter the mix, by making people feel intellectually empowered and creatively enriched. But should poverty really be the target of our social uplift efforts in the first place, given that our economic system is based on a gambler’s worldview in which there can ever only be a few winners and everyone else must lose?
Perhaps you think socialism is the answer. But if we impoverish the land past any reasonable hope of recovery — witness the almost total loss of topsoil in Haiti, for example — what then? What happens when the global population so far exceeds the ecological carrying capacity that no redistribution of wealth can buy us a new earth?
News from the ‘Hood
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.
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.