Tag: blogging

Talking with myself

Covertly? The Wife will tell you that when I’m composing a blog post, my talking to myself is QUITE evident.

Chris Honeycutt – wish you were still blogging, Chris – wrote to me, “Totally thought of you on this“:

“If you’re reading this sentence, chances are you’re reading it silently…”

Yup.

“Your lips aren’t moving, you’re not making any sound that other people can hear. But are you making ‘sound’ in your head?”

Absolutely.

“Many people who read silently do so by imagining a voice speaking the words they are reading (and often, it’s your own voice, so there’s even a specific ‘tone’. I wonder if this is what makes people react so strongly to some blog posts).”

Interesting. I usually DO read, hearing my own voice. It’s especially true when I write this blog; I try to have it sound like me talking to you; sometimes I read back what I’ve written and I’ve totally nailed it; other times, not so much. Hey. what do you want from a free daily blog?

“This could be because when we learn to read, we associate symbols with verbal sounds until the association is effortless.”

It’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one who loves the sound of his own voice, especially when I’m reading back my own words.

Chris thought the funniest line was: “The authors also comment that few would contest that most of our waking time is spent talking to ourselves covertly.”

Covertly? The Wife will tell you that when I’m composing a blog post, my talking to myself is QUITE evident. It’s especially true when I have an idea for a piece but lack either pen and paper or a word processor.

I was thinking of this because I read some Langston Hughes poems last week at First Friday in Albany. Someone asked if I had practiced reading them at home. No, all my practice was “in my head,” often on the bus. The ones marked # I read. The others were sung by baritone Christopher L. Trombley, accompanied by Todd Sisley on piano. (Pictured, clockwise from top left: Chris; Roger; Gloria Wood, who was displaying quilted wall hangings; and Todd.)

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967)
A CELEBRATION IN SONG AND VERSE
In Time of Silver Rain – Jean Berger 1909–2002)
#The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Death of an Old Seaman – Cecil Cohen (1894–1967)
#The Weary Blues
Genius Child – Robert Owens (b. 1925)
#My People
#I, Too
Lonely People – Jean Berger
#Let America Be America Again
Shake Your Brown Feet, Honey – John Alden Carpenter (1876–1951)
#Montage of a Dream Deferred: Harlem; The Ballad of the Landlord
Litany – John Musto (b.1954)
#I Dream a World
#Wisdom and War
#Wealth
Carolina Cabin – Jean Berger
***
Talking with others:
Take a Seat – Make a Friend?

Second photo by Ray Hendrickson, stolen from his Facebook page.

I Write Like HP Lovecraft, DF Wallace or J Joyce?

My more informational pieces are very David Foster Wallace.

To show that, when you peruse this blog, you are reading the finest quality reading material, per instructions from Dustbury, I went to the website I Write Like, where one can supposedly “check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.”

I took the first ten blog posts of this month as a typical sampling.

The War On Christmas post and the reviews of the Walter Cronkite autobiography and the Vince Guaraldi biography, I write like Lovecraft:

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

A couple of newsier pieces my life on a treadmill and the FantaCon update are Joycean.

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

My more informational pieces, politics and commerce, and the Baseball Hall of Fame and the UHF TV are very David Foster Wallace, who, I must admit, I’ve never read.

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

No time to blog is in the style of Cory Doctorow, who I read regularly these days. (Note to Dan: so is your December 2 post.)

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

Finally, my World AIDS Day piece is like William Gibson, whose writing style I am not familiar with.

I write like
William Gibson

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

Whose writing style do YOU emulate?

The Dave Brubeck webpage. I wanted to say something clever about Brubeck, who died earlier this month, like this piece by EJ Dionne. He was a real ambassador of jazz. I DO remember hearing, and liking, Take Five on the radio when it first came out. My favorite of his songs, though, is Blue Rondo a la Turk. Also, SamuraiFrog links to a Disney song.

Like most Americans, I became aware of sitar master Ravi Shankar, who died this week, via his relationship with Beatle George Harrison. Still cracks me up when, at the Concert for Bangladesh, the 1971 event that Ravi encouraged George to initiate, Shankar says to the clueless Western audience, “If you enjoy the tuning so much, I hope you enjoy the playing even more.” The official recording label of The Ravi Shankar Foundation is East Meets West Music. “With unique access to an archive featuring thousands of hours of live performance audio, film footage, interviews, and studio masters, EMWMusic releases rare recordings and provides audiences with the definitive portrait of Ravi Shankar’s long career. And, in keeping with Ravi’s dedication to looking forward and not back, EMWMusic provides a vibrant platform for new artists, projects, and collaborations.”

 

The “no time to blog” blogpost

Our office may be moving back downtown.

This is how I know it was a busy autumn: this year will be the first in a decade that I did not donate blood at least six times, only five. To be fair, I DID actually go down to the Empire State Plaza (the Egg, for you Albanians) back in late October but could not get into the building. As it turns out the Governor was holding a booze summit and so I couldn’t get to the regular donor site, though I had time before my dentist appointment.

I seem to have taken off a lot of days from work in November, one for Hurricane Sandy, one to take the daughter to the ER, one to go see Wicked, two because my wife was having two minor surgeries and my daughter had a half-day of school, two for Thanksgiving, a half-day for a doctor’s appointment. As Yul Brynner regularly said, “et cetera, et cetera.”

The local bus company changed its routes, and I found myself waiting an hour for transportation that was never going to come.

The Daughter is going to bed later AND getting up earlier, cutting into my wife’s prep time for school, my blogging time, and both of our sleep times.

I performed in two different choir concerts, plus attended a Friends of the Library event, a comic book show, and did the usual stuff such as raking. Then Sunday past, attended TWO concerts.

Since it’s a low content/energy day, let me tell you the latest rumor at work: our office may be moving back downtown, I’m guessing around May, since we moved almost eight years ago in that month. I currently work in Corporate (frickin’) Woods, this soulless suburbany place with no sidewalks, and the drivers motor around it as though there are no pedestrians. Save for a bank, it has none of the amenities that downtown offering, such as going to the post office or a store or a restaurant, or MY bank, or my eye doctor or my dentist. I’d be taking off far fewer days if we were downtown. It takes me two buses to get to work now, but it would only take me one if we were back in civilization, with no fewer than six different buses that could get me from downtown to within three blocks of my home.

A real blog post manana. And the next day. And the 8th…

I saw someone on Facebook pass along the suggestion to send Christmas cards to “A Recovering American Soldier” at Walter Reed Hospital. PLEASE DO NOT DO THAT. As this Snopes.com report explains: “In these times of heightened security, mail from strangers to unnamed soldiers must, for everyone’s safety, must be discarded unopened.” You CAN send cards via Holiday Mail for Heroes, a Red Cross project, but it must be postmarked by December 7, or it won’t reach its intended destination either.

According to the NY Times, Bazooka, creators of Bazooka Joe gum, will be getting rid of their famous comic strips.

Tabula rasa

The downside to all this moving stuff around is that, sometimes, I don’t know what I’ve posted for a given morning; I’m as surprised as you.

I was reading this post from Cheri at Idle Chatter, which begins: “Here it is, 11:15 pm, and I’m just now sitting down to write today’s post. Somebody make me feel better and assure me that I’m not the only one who’s ever found themselves staring at a keyboard as the day dwindles away, the ‘publish’ key impertinently mocking, waiting for a flash of inspiration.”

Two things came to mind:
1) I really enjoyed the post, but
2) I almost never write that way

I find that I need to write things when they enter my mind. The post about my mother’s birthday, which you will read on November 17, i.e., my mother’s birthday, I wrote on September 15. It just came to me, and if the muse says, “WRITE THIS,” I write it. The muse can be rather insistent.

I would hate to get to November 16, think, “Geez, I ought to write something about Mom’s birthday,” and stare at a blank computer screen, so the muse does me a favor.

I find it easier to write when I know what I’m going to write about, which I suppose is obvious. For instance, if I know for an ABC Wednesday post X is for X-Rays (it won’t be, at least not this time around), it puts me to mind to think about all the X-rays I’ve had. The brain will percolate in the background while I’m doing something else, such as showering or bicycling, then, suddenly, a theme emerges.

After I have written it, I might change it, but it’s easier to change something than nothing. If it isn’t tied to a specific date, I might even move it to another day because I need to say THIS more right now. THIS is usually for some national or world event, or perhaps a noteworthy death. When Hal David died, I wrote a piece, but I had had something else scheduled for that day which was, fortunately, movable to a day or three later.

The downside to all this moving stuff around is that, sometimes, I don’t know what I’ve posted for a given morning; I’m as surprised as you. The upside is that I get to read it, well, semi-freshly. “Oh, yeah, I remember this one.”

I tend to write in spurts. I’ve created as many as four posts in a day, and often two. Then I might go four or five days without writing anything, because the muse is on strike, demanding higher wages. Or I’m sick and/or tired; spent nearly a week in mid-September with stomach flu that was not helpful to the creative process. Or I’m busy, often with the Daughter.

I like to read other blogs, not just so I can steal ideas (e.g., this post), and create my end-of-the-month summary, but because it makes me feel connected to the rest of the world. Otherwise, it’s just navel-gazing.

Today, not incidentally, marks exactly 7.5 years of blogging, every day. It is better to post once a day than three times in one day, then nothing for three days, in my hardly humble opinion.

Anyway, I hadn’t written a blog post about blogging in nearly six months, so this is my semiannual contribution to that much-maligned body of work.

Dammit, Dan, I’m a librarian, not a meteorologist!

Did you know I have linked to EVERY SINGLE POST you have written?


(Title inspired by We can’t see DeForest for the trees.)

Dan from albanyweblog.com griped:
Okay Roger… How come it’s so damn hot right now?
I want a thorough answer.

Sure.

I went to Google and put in why is it so damn hot. Unfortunately, all that got me is why certain types are hot, e.g., “Why are Canadian girls so damn hot?” Or vegan girls, gingers, emo guys, biracial guys, Norwegian people, bad boys, werewolves, rugby players. And Justin Bieber. I also found the lyrics and the video to You’re So Damn Hot by OK Go.

Meanwhile, Shooting Parrots jumped in:
Ditto: why is it so damn cool in the UK? And wet. Can I feel a climate change answer coming on?

Well, for that question, I went to the only reliable source I could think of, Al Jazeera:

“As the sea ice melts at an alarming rate, the Potsdam Institute points out that the albedo (the reflectivity) over the Arctic Ocean continues to decrease and more heat is absorbed by the waters creating a positive feedback.

“As the polar winter sets in over the upper atmosphere, the warming at low levels causes instability in the atmosphere. The resulting low-pressure systems at sea level disrupt the normal circulation.

“This circulation is measured by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Arctic Oscillation (AO). The Institute believes that such low-pressure systems enhance the NAO and AO early in the season but that, later in the winter, there is a delayed opposite effect. This would give rise to cold late winter spells across Europe.”

But the most thorough answer for both Dan and SP came from Jennifer Francis, who is a “research professor at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University, where she studies Arctic climate change and the link between the Arctic and global climates.”

“Does it seem as though your weather has become increasingly ‘stuck’ lately? Day after day of cold, rain, heat, or blue skies may not be a figment of your imagination…

“Arctic amplification describes the tendency for high Northern latitudes to experience enhanced warming or cooling relative to the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. This heightened sensitivity is linked to the presence of snow and sea ice, and the feedback loops that they trigger… [since] World War II, Arctic temperatures have increased at more than twice the global rate. A dramatic indicator of this warming is the loss of Arctic sea ice in summer, which has declined by 40 percent in just the past three decades. The area of lost ice is about 1.3 million square miles or roughly 42 percent of the area of the Lower 48 United States. “

Then there’s a detailed description of the jet stream and its “waviness;” read it yourselves. Point is that we need to limit the carbon pollution that causes global warming, if it’s not too late; the jury’s out on that.
***
Steve from Life Crits asked:
If you could pose God just one question, what would it be…aside from the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in it?

So it would have to be mundane, yet something I really want to know. Got it.

When I was a teenager, I was walking down the street, when suddenly something hit the top of one of the lens of the pair of glasses I was wearing, creating a fault line. Fortunately, it didn’t hurt my eye. It wasn’t hailing. I never found anything such as a BB that would explain it. What the heck WAS that?
***
GayProf from some university in a Decaying Midwestern Urban Center wrote:
Here is a tough, but fair, question: How did I get to be your favorite blogger?

Assuming the premise is actually true – it is the quality of your pieces. Did you know I have linked to EVERY SINGLE POST you have written since July of last year? Of course, that’s only two posts. But still…
***
Alexis, who I know personally, and who USED to blog, wants to know:

If you could have a conversation with any famous person, dead or alive, who would you pick?

I’ll choose Ben Franklin. I’d be quite interested to see what he thought of the current state of both technology and government. Could I bring him back to explain what the Founders meant by the separation of church and state? Or to explain the deadly effects of turtle sex? -I’m sure he’d find that fascinating.

Ramblin' with Roger
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