Becoming what we eat

Carlos Sillero of Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil,
Old Books, sxc.hu

The content we devour on the internet really can have a lasting effect on our cognitive abilities. At least, so says a new study published by the International Journal of Business Administration this May.... it may not be the screen time that’s at fault for lessened abilities—it’s the low quality of most online content. The IJBA study suggests that people who read more low-quality content had lower sophistication, syntax, cadence, and rhythm in their own writing. ... If you really can’t resist, all is not lost. The authors prescribe a heavy dose of literary fiction or academic journals as a countermeasure to fight the mental fatigue of listicles and tweetstorms and their super-ultra-meta offspring.                      --Chelsea Hassler at Slate. 

 So. So go. Go on now. Go get a book! Me too.

The House of Words (no. 24): Dave Bonta and internet publishing, 5

Dave takes a picture at Rhoneymeade--
arboretum, sculpture garden, and labyrinth.

Back to The House of Words after travels in the Carolinas and Wales, where I met Dave Bonta in the flesh at Ty Isaf. He is as remarkable a fellow as one would imagine, after meeting him on his blog, and so he is one of the many reasons that I am glad that I drove to North Carolina, hopped on planes in Asheville and Atlanta and Paris, and managed to make it from the Birmingham train station to Aberytswyth without being carried away to parts unknown at the challenge-to-pronunciation Machynlleth, where the train splits and goes in several directions. And now, more of the wisdom of Dave...

MY: I’m thinking in particular of a number of writer (or ex-writer) friends and acquaintances who have grown dark and discouraged over time, and who might have done as you have done — perhaps not exactly the same, as not many have either your freedoms or your interest in multiple forms. What sort of online alternative activities or forms would you recommend to such writers?

DB: Hmm. Well, It's easy enough to start a blog at a site like WordPress.com, but not every writer is sufficiently gregarious to be able to build up an audience (more on that below). But there are hundreds and hundreds of good online magazines looking for content — the Links page of qarrtsiluni is a good place to start. I would also point out that poetry can be worked into any number of other online media. It's not hard to accumulate Twitter followers with poetic updates, for example, and Facebook will accommodate poetry as well as anything else if you really want friends and family to read your stuff. And for someone who has technical skills and is willing to learn new things, online audio and video platforms such as Jamendo and YouTube are still chronically underexploited by poets.

From Dave's ramblings at Plummer's Hollow:
wood frog eggs anchored to a stick
in an ephemeral spring pool. April 2008.

MY: You have made so many interesting acquaintances through your online presence; do you think that such relationships give you the sense of fullness and belonging that so many writers appear to lack?

DB: I suppose so. In general, I think the best medicine for the kind of discouragement you mentioned in your previous question is to join a community of writers, online or in real life, and focus on the writing rather than the writer. A lot of writers are way too self-absorbed, so I suppose they'll remain dissatisfied no matter how successful they get.

Dave at home in Plummer's Hollow, 2008.
He  takes a picture of a tattered Compton tortoise shell.

The House of Words (no. 23): Dave Bonta and internet publishing, 4

Dave Bonta's "Indian pipes"

MY: It also strikes me that you avoid much of the unrest and lack of satisfaction that plagues many writers once they attempt to enter the publishing world. You determine the extent of your freedoms and will what your world will be. You determine what standards measure your work. Comment?

from Dave's "Words on the Street"
series, discussed in the prior post

DB: True enough. I've never really depended on getting published to feel good about myself or my work, and now that I can reach more readers through Via Negativa than I ever could have hoped to at most of the small print journals I used to struggle to get into, I feel even less pressure than before to play the submissions game. It's not just numbers, either. I reach people who would never pick up a literary magazine at a newsstand, or even necessarily visit one online.

I do feel there's value in submitting to journals with editors who have the time and inclination to suggest improvements — which is pretty much limited to online journals, I guess. I feel like a bit of a hypocrite: I run an online journal, but almost never submit my own work to journals unless invited. But mostly that's because very few journals consider previously blogged material, and I write first and foremost to feed the blog.

House of Words (no. 22): Dave Bonta and internet publishing, 3

Continued

Dave Bonta, "Birch leaf in ice"

DB:  I was also pushed to do other creative things to feed the blog, such as take photos, which I hadn't done since I was a kid. And the direct ancestor to my microblog, The Morning Porch, was a daily writing exercise at Via Negativa called Words on the Street, where I had this cartoon I'd drawn of a bum holding a sign, and every day I wrote a new message for the sign. Again, the push to come up with new content every day was transformative.

Over time I've accumulated new tools for organizing content, such as the software plugin I use for series at Via Negativa, and as new projects suggest themselves, I have to consider carefully whether they deserve a new site or can be integrated into something I'm already doing — and, crucially, whether I really have time for something else. Bringing out print editions of my poetry is farther down the priority list.

Dave Bonta, "Luna moth with harvestman"

The House of Words (no. 21): Dave Bonta, 2

Continued from Dave Bonta and internet publishing, 1

Dave Bonta, "Talus"

I don't regret the rise of Facebook, Twitter and company, because I think a lot of people who didn't really want to write used to feel pressure to engage in long-form blogging, and quickly burnt out on it and disappeared from the scene. And I think it's very important for writers to engage with others who are not writers. But I do miss the more in-depth conversations that used to take place in blog comment threads even as recently as five years ago.

MY: I started out as an innocent in the print and book world and met all the usual mad, mad world discouragements and fleabites: multiple editors who left for greener pastures and orphaned my books; great historical events nudging my book out of the way, Jonathan Franzen comically shoving my book and others out of the way (along with 9-11, not at all comically), multiple editors who fell out of the business for various reasons, the problem of being on great publishers’ lists but not getting a “push,” etc. I imagine that in some ways you avoid all the annoyances of print world (and when you do have a print book, as you now do, it emerges naturally from your online world) by having an online kingdom. Is that how you see it?

DB: Yeah. My mother is a mid-list nonfiction author with ups and downs at multiple presses, so the traditional writer's path held little romance for me. I had pretty much given up on submitting poems to print journals by 2001, when I racked up close to 40 rejections in a row before finally landing another acceptance. I just couldn't afford the postage. I approached blogging as a form of self-publishing from the outset; it's just that poetry didn't happen to be my focus at first. Though I abandoned all pretense of having a thematic focus after about six months, Via Negativa continued to be dominated by long-form expository writing about religion, philosophy, anthropology and culture for about two years, until I finally got that out of my system. But gradually the poems began to creep in, and I was encouraged by the positive responses from other readers and bloggers.

I've come to feel that blogging and poetry writing are an ideal match, at least for those of us who are shameless enough to share imperfect drafts with the world. One friend — Dale Favier — credits my posting of original poems at Via Negativa for sparking his own interest in modern poetry, which I find enormously gratifying. And I've watched any number of other bloggers grow as poets through blogging, myself included. In my case, I was never very good at keeping a journal — if no one but me was going to read it, what's the point? So the discipline of daily blogging has really whipped me into shape.