Blogs and Blogging – Page 65

May 12, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Incoming

White crab spider on Dutchman’s breeches, clearly trying to disguise itself as just another blossom in order to net an unsuspecting pollinator. See here for an even better photo of a white crab spider, on a different kind of white flower, with a bee actually in its grip.

At last, comment spammers who don’t insult my intelligence!

Those of you who don’t blog may be surprised to learn that such a thing as comment spam exists. Can it really be worthwhile to leave comments at obscure, low-traffic blogs like this one, just on the off-chance that a few readers might click on the link to the website? It wouldn’t be worth it if real, live people were leaving the comments, but it’s all done automatically, by spam bots.

There are various ways to screen out spam bots. Haloscan – the independent outfit that provided the commenting service I used when Via Negativa was at Blogspot – seemed practically immune. So when I moved to the present location, I was taken aback by the volume of spam that began to pour in, following the incoming links. So far, it’s not been much trouble to screen it out by requiring all comments by first-time commenters to go wait for approval.

I saw this species of spider in a number of different places this spring – enough to persuade me that the web here, on the inflorescence of a smooth rock cress, is merely fortuitious.

But the thing that really annoyed me about the spam that began flooding in was the language it employed – a mixture of crude flattery and awkward English. How could anyone clever enough to unleash an army of spam bots not have the sense to at least comb through the English-language blogosphere and plagiarize some real comments? Instead, they employed lines such as “Your site is very cognitive. Thanks for author!” and “Best site I see! I make link, come back often, continue like that.” I’ve seen hundreds of variations on these, and worse.

The pink lady’s slipper orchid depends on bumblebees for pollination, but gives them nothing but frustration in return. The bees are lured in by the delicious aroma, but find no nectar. The shape of the flower forces them to exit through the top, preventing self-pollination.

So imagine my surprise this morning when I find 17 posts waiting for moderation that actually force me to pause and study whether they were made by human or robot-with-typewriter. The giveaway was that they all originated from the same website, despite having all different (presumably fictional) email addresses. But the messages were, well, cute. “William Safire has just been picked on by a blog with a name that keeps changing. Not too harshly, though. The comment is William Safire, you annoy me.” First out of the block, a meta-comment! “Frivolous bastardisation of our punctuation is one of the key witnesses to the current decline of our wonderful nation,” writes another. And that nation would be Great Britain, I’m guessing.

“God save the Sex Pistols
One means it, subjects
We love our boys
God bless”
A punk poem, employing irony! Nice to see some recently graduated English major gainfully employed, isn’t it? In my favorite non sequitor from the overnight crop, “EBONY” asks, “I wonder what the society for the advancement of formal structures would make of this site about natural language parsing?” This was a comment to my May Day post.

Oak apple gall on a red oak. Worldwide, over 700 different species of insects – most of them small wasps, as with the apple gall – have learned how to manipulate oaks into growing them a brood chamber from their own tissues.

In this morning’s email, someone who has just linked to Via Negativa had what I thought was a slightly unusual request: not for a direct reciprocal link on my Reciprocal Links page, but for a link to another, related site. “In this way we both get a one-way link which is better than a reciprocal link as far as search engine ratings go,” he wrote. Since both sites were non-commercial (and seemed to reflect quite lofty idealism), I was happy enough to comply. But in my response, I did include a brief and (I hope) friendly rant about the quest for search engine rankings.

Personally (I wrote), I’m not too concerned about search engine rankings, since I feel that traffic volume is not a real guarantee of attentive readers. The site statistics for my old blog seemed to bear this out. A couple hundred unique page views a day courtesy of the search engines had no perceptible impact on the 40 or so people (not counting subscribers to the feed) who stopped in every day or two for five minutes or more. In my view, the best way to find and retain the sort of readers I’m looking for is by leaving comments on other blogs, or by reading their comments and following the links back to their own blogs. Not that that’s my primary motivation in leaving a comment, though. When I read something that moves me, it’s wonderful to be able to respond and know that the author and other readers will see it, and can respond in turn if they so choose. It’s this kind of inter-linking – the building of real human relationships – that interests me.

Woolsower gall on scrub oak. Who is fleecing whom?

On re-reading my reply, though, I’m afraid it makes it sound as if my motives are more altruistic than they are. For me, it’s still all about the writing – though amateur photography has turned out to be a fun and complementary avocation. Read SB’s post about how and why she writes poetry (linked also from the Smorgasblog) if you want to know my own feelings about writing, too. “A poem is my way of discovering (dis-covering) what I feel; sometimes, what I think.” Precisely. And sometimes it’s galling what the world makes of us, what strange winged creatures ultimately emerge.

April 29, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Hot off the presses

Two bloggers I read have new books out. Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi has published a 24-page chapbook of her chaplain poems, chaplainbook, under the new Laupe House imprint. And Fred First of Fragments from Floyd has published Slow Road Home: A Blue Ridge Book of Days with his Goose Creek Press imprint. Congratulations to both authors! I take inspiration not only from their well-crafted words, but also from their example. Self-published, cooperatively published and print-on-demand books seem like a natural extension of the blogging ethos.

Speaking of natural extensions, I’ve just adapted Smorgasblog to fit my sidebar – scroll down past the Archives. The sidebar template had no problem with the HTML; it was a simple copy-and-paste job, sparing me the trouble of actually learning the language the blog template is written in (PHP), at least for now.

Links added since my last Smorgasblog update include: Numenius of Feathers of Hope on Vandana Shiva; Dick Jones on friendships between bloggers; Rachel Barenblatt on coming to terms with Jewish concepts of “purity” and “impurity”; Jarrett Walker on Jane Jacobs; a Nigerian commenter at the cassandra pages on Wole Soyinka; Patry Francis on equanimity; and Rexroth’s Daughter on being crabby. Check it out!

April 26, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

This website under attack by the U.S. Congress

If the telecommunications companies and their allies in the U.S. Congress have their way, the bum’s cynical prophecy could soon come true. “The wide and unbounded Internet could soon be fenced in by cable and phone firms. Higher prices and less choice may lie ahead under a misguided bill moving forward in Congress,” says the San Francisco Chronicle. The New Yorker spells it out:

Until recently, companies that provided Internet access followed a de-facto commoncarriage rule, usually called “network neutrality,” which meant that all Web sites got equal treatment. Network neutrality was considered so fundamental to the success of the Net that Michael Powell, when he was chairman of the F.C.C., described it as one of the basic rules of “Internet freedom.” In the past few months, though, companies like A.T. & T. and BellSouth have been trying to scuttle it. In the future, Web sites that pay extra to providers could receive what BellSouth recently called “special treatment,” and those that don’t could end up in the slow lane. One day, BellSouth customers may find that, say, NBC.com loads a lot faster than YouTube.com, and that the sites BellSouth favors just seem to run more smoothly. Tiered access will turn the providers into Internet gatekeepers.

Fortunately, big Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo are being joined by political advocacy groups from across the political spectrum in opposing this assault on network neutrality. Here’s what’s at stake, according to MoveOn.org:

If Congress abandons Network Neutrality, who will be affected?

Advocacy groups like MoveOn–Political organizing could be slowed by a handful of dominant Internet providers who ask advocacy groups to pay “protection money” for their websites and online features to work correctly.

Nonprofits–A charity’s website could open at snail-speed, and online contributions could grind to a halt, if nonprofits can’t pay dominant Internet providers for access to “the fast lane” of Internet service.

Google users–Another search engine could pay dominant Internet providers like AT&T to guarantee the competing search engine opens faster than Google on your computer.

Innovators with the “next big idea”–Startups and entrepreneurs will be muscled out of the marketplace by big corporations that pay Internet providers for dominant placing on the Web. The little guy will be left in the “slow lane” with inferior Internet service, unable to compete.

Ipod listeners–A company like Comcast could slow access to iTunes, steering you to a higher-priced music service that it owned.

Online purchasers–Companies could pay Internet providers to guarantee their online sales process faster than competitors with lower prices–distorting your choice as a consumer.

Small businesses and tele-commuters–When Internet companies like AT&T favor their own services, you won’t be able to choose more affordable providers for online video, teleconferencing, Internet phone calls, and software that connects your home computer to your office.

Parents and retirees–Your choices as a consumer could be controlled by your Internet provider, steering you to their preferred services for online banking, health care information, sending photos, planning vacations, etc.

Bloggers–Costs will skyrocket to post and share video and audio clips–silencing citizen journalists and putting more power in the hands of a few corporate-owned media outlets.

I’ve been blogging at least six days a week for two and a half years now, and I have never asked my readers for a penny. But now I’m asking all Via Negativa readers who are U.S. citizens to please sign the MoveOn petition.

For maximum impact, call or write your congresscritter directly (find his/her contact information here). I’ll share my own letter to my Republican congressman as soon as I receive his response. Note that the automatic email page also displays the contact information for your representative’s local office(s), if you want to save money on a toll call. Thanks!

UPDATE (8:00 p.m.): To stay abreast of developments on this issue, bookmark Save the Internet.com. Despite losing the committee vote to preserve network neutrality today, they report that

There’s a white hot firestorm on the issue on Capitol Hill. No one wants to see the telcos make a radical change to the internet and screw this medium up, except, well, the telcos. And now members of Congress are listening to us. The telcos have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and many years lobbying for their position; we launched four days ago, and have closed a lot of ground. Over the next few months, as the public wakes up, we’ll close the rest of it.

April 24, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Introducing Smorgasblog

Via Negativa just had a baby: Smorgasblog. Go look.

I’ll be updating Smorgasblog on a weekly basis, and posting reminders here. It will have its own archives, but no comments feature. I strongly encourage readers to click through and read the original posts, and leave comments there if they feel so moved.

April 14, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Words as drugs

The versatile Abdul-Walid of Acerbia has posted two translations from the Yoruba at oncaesura. As long-time readers may remember, I have a special fondness for Yoruba folk poetry and Ifa divination hymns, especially as translated by Ulli Beier in a couple of long out-of-print volumes. Though inevitably much of the word-play and musical effects of the originals don’t come through in translation, the vivid imagery and often vatic tone still make for arresting poems in English.

Abdul-Walid translates a pair of traditional incantations (ofo) by an herbalist (onisegun), along with a simplified transcription that allows one to appreciate some of the sounds of the original without the usual mess of diacritical marks to indicate the tones of the syllables. The first is An incantation to tranquilize the afflicted; the second (in order of performance) is An incantation to calm the afflicted:

Calm, calm, soft and calm,
soft and calm is the snail,
gentle is the leaf’s fall
from the tree.

In calmness the springbok
births its young in the forest.
Softness is the mud’s by the riverside,
gentleness seeks out the banana tree.

May softness fall upon you,
may softness fall upon you.
The ikupero leaf whispers:
may your body be untied,

may rest befall you
without warning,
until all is calm.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll lie down for a brief nap…

April 5, 2006 by Dave Bonta

The ugly American Buddhist

I have a new piece up at qarrtsiluni, a (very) short story called Red Letter Day. It’s set in Japan, and I’d like to think it borrows a bit from the modern Japanese aesthetic (I read a shitload of Japanese literature in college), but you can be the judge of that.

March 31, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

In praise of gray

When Natalie d’Arbeloff changed the design of Blaugustine this past October, I left the following comment in praise of her new backdrop color:

Gray – oops, I mean grey – is always my favorite sartorial choice, though of course it doesn’t look good on everyone. Here, it definitely works for me – or maybe I’m just happy to see such a color-drenched blog vindicate my belief that grey need not be synonymous with drab. One can choose greyness as a worthy destination in its own right, not simply as some compromise between the extremes of black and white – which are in reality never “pure,” but must always contain some slight admixture of grey if we are to perceive them as other than blinding light and blind absence of light. In a certain sense, we might even be justified in saying that it is grey that approaches “purity”: pure pigment, cosmic dust, the gray matter/mater from which all else emerges.

Natalie replied,

I wholly agree. It is a beautiful colour in its own right and sets off the primaries wondrously. A grey sky, for instance, makes other colours luminous. And there is an infinite variety of greys.

“I don’t know about wearing it, though,” she added. “You’ve got to be tall.” Like a beech tree?

Black and white are always relative; it’s contrast that delights the eye. Or so my experiments with photography have led me to suppose. The following picture of an old, weathered stump of a black locust tree is the only one here actually taken under a gray sky. I think it has a little of that luminosity Natalie mentions – though again, the contrast with the yellow and brown of the background seems to play some role in bringing that out.

As Pennsylvania’s numerous fieldstone barns and houses serve to remind us, gray works well in architecture. Paper wasps (as in the first photo above) might agree. I see more and more wooden houses painted various shades of gray, too, and have flirted seriously with the idea of painting my own house that color (it’s currently white, matching the other buildings on the farm).

One reason I chose my current blog template was the presence of this very light gray behind the main text column.* In books, too, bleached white rarely looks as elegant as a page with some color in it. To be gray, it seems, is to be sturdy and full of years. I think there might be something to that metaphysics of gray that I cooked up on the spot back in October, when gray November still loomed ahead, and white snows made luminous by gray skies.

__________

*Refers to my old site.

March 29, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

News briefs

On Monday afternoon, the first coltsfoot opened in the middle of the driveway – the earliest wildflower in Plummer’s Hollow.

Spring comes to Blogistan. Leslee returns from Mexico, Karrie digs out from under a mountain of work, and Jarrett emerges from hibernation:

The rainforest winter is always claustrophobic — grey skies so low they seem to press us into the little grooves of our scurrying. At other times (and a bit further south) I’ve thrived in its indoor pleasures, but here it overwhelmed. If I’m fated to have another winter here, it will have to be under a skylight, I think, where I can hear the rain in its gentleness and capture any hint of actual light.

Paula visits with springtime ghosts.

“Tell me about camera, Uncle. Camera obscura, camera lucida.” The ghostly face wrinkled. A smile, perhaps.”Camera,” he explained, “is from the Latin for vault. As in I am lying in camera. There are light rooms and dark rooms. Rooms with and without doors. Do you understand?”

My uncle handed the camera back and wafted off toward the river.

Meanwhile, in her temple in South Korea, Soen Joon ponders more earthy spirits:

I’m quite fond of the kitchen god, despite having grown up in a godless kitchen. We had a little God (“Come Lord Jesus, be our guest…”) right before we ate, but compared to this kitchen god, offered rice each day, greeted respectfully in the morning by us all, flowers arranged for him by the kitchen bosalnim and even money from time to time, it looks to me like Jesus got the short end of the kitchen-god stick.

I guess we are what we worship. In northern Alabama, spring fever is taking a most peculiar form:

Everywhere we went, my husband ogled piles of dirt. “Look at that dirt! That’s good dirt. Where do you think they got that dirt?”I feared he’d have a wreck and I’d be left tearfully explaining to police officers that dirt envy did him in.

Down in the boggy corner of the field, Indian hemp is still working on scattering its seeds.

March 24, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Jetsam

From a blog on the other side of the world
comes an unblogly thing:
a piece of poem set in a concrete slab
at the edge of the sea, cast up on the rocks
like the sole survivor from a wreck of words,
or as if the poet’s voice, like Alberti’s,
couldn’t take fresh water in its gills
& had to be restored to its native salt.

Something about a poem in a public place
disturbs me. Every time I’ve spotted one
among the advertisements on a city bus,
I’ve had to look away. It’s like
surprising a couple in flagrante delicto,
or overhearing someone’s cellphone conversation
with their therapist. At least with a reading,
merciful silence follows, & the bare podium.

Then there’s this business of objectification.
Poems grow like agates in the dark,
each according to its own mysterious rules.
Like agates, they are common & impossible to market.
But marketing needs the claim of uniqueness
more than anything, so poetry
gets pressed into service to provide ballast
on the ship of foolish products & bland commodities.

Poets, however, are taught to value the concrete.
Seeing such weighty jetsam,
I conceive a sudden ambition for my own work:
to see it published up on the ridge
on some ostentatious boulder, enough in the shade
that lichens of every crustose & foliose form
would find my lines ideal for a slow, private,
thoroughly absorbing read.

March 22, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

An opening

A new theme at qarrtsiluni is open for submissions: an opening in the body. The editors are Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi, an accomplished poet, along with my favorite author of all time, that rascal Anonymous. As Rachel explains it, they are interested in “physical bodies, orifices both natural and artificial, or corporate bodies, or communal bodies, the body of the church, a body of work, any kind of body that can open in any kind of way…”

In other words, the theme is very much open to interpretation. Have at it!