Readers and writers blog

Jim is 40 (he’ll be 41 in July), lives in the suburbs of New York City (probably somewhere on Long Island but he doesn’t say), has an office job that pays enough so that his wife can stay at home and care for their daughters, 6 and 4, and among his dreams is a fantasy that his weblog becomes so popular that he can light cigars with $100 bills and admire his and his wife’s matching Range Rovers in the driveway.

Jim’s world is perfect, and just for its relentless optimism, his weblog, a well-written site titled appropriately enough ‘I think this world is perfect . . .,’ deserves to be on our blogroll. And so it is.

Jim describes his blog as “one man’s attempt to keep track, and make sense, of the ups-and-downs and side-to-sides of parenting in the 21st century.” And he does seem a commendable father, writing in gentle tones about his daughters, wife and home. In fact, the blog’s name comes not from Jim but from daughter Madison, 6, whom he helped tap out some of her thoughts about their new home, a 1950s-vintage house with a trellised wooden fence laden with flowers, in a Word document on his computer:

I think this world is perfect. We are still moving in. We don’t have a swing set yet. We still have boxes of toys. We are going to unpack the boxes soon. And, the people who live in this house are named Gwen, Madison, Jim and Ava.

On the bottom of the document printout, scrawled in a child’s capital letters, is the name ‘Madison.’

In another of his more endearing entries, Feb. 21, Jim tucks his younger daughter into bed, gives her a kiss and a hug and says, “Ava, who’s more adorable than you? Nobody.”

As soon as she hears the line, I can see her mind working, a little mischievous glint in her eye. I’m walking out of the room and she says, ‘Daddy, who’s more adorable than you?’

She lets the question sit for about a half a second, and then my 4-year-old completes the thought, accompanied by giggles . . . ‘Somebody!’

On Memorial Day weekend, activities include a neighborhood birthday party, lacrosse practice, lounging at Jim’s parents’ pool, a visit to the city for brunch in Tribeca, some ‘city-quality’ tuna steaks and wild salmon to send back home to the suburbs, shopping for outdoor furniture, a visit to the mall . . .

It’s the sort of existence Theodore Cleaver — well, maybe the Beaver’s children and grandchildren — would have. And well, maybe with a considerable amount of computer-driven consumption and brand names thrown in.

For example, Jim doesn’t drink wine, he drinks Turley Zin. The family doesn’t eat bagels, they eat Alvarado Street bagels. The children don’t have shoes, they have Crocs — in fact, Jim is so impressed with the popularity of the brand that he invests in the company. And they don’t have stuffed animals, they have Webkinz, visited on the computer.

I couldn’t help but think of the kid in the Christmas story recalled by a former newspaper colleague, Rob Borsellino, in our May 3 entry about an 8-year-old living with his grandparents in a seedy walkup:

The only sign of Christmas in the apartment was an anemic plastic tree they’d found on the street, dragged home and propped up in a corner. The only sign that a child lived there was some overused toys strewn around the living room floor. They were the kind of toys they give out at the fast-food places when you buy kid meals.

The rest of this Christmas story is even sadder, if you care to click on this link and read the whole story. When you say ‘ups and downs,’ this is a ‘down.’

Not that Jim doesn’t have his negative moments — a May 30 entry about Ava’s broken arm, for example, although we are reassured by the doctor that it is “a very common break in children” and that her arm should be out of a cast in six weeks. But mostly, Jim’s parenting experiences are ‘ups’ or ’side-to-sides.’

To be fair, he doesn’t promise tales of poverty, hunger, war in Iraq or global warming. The closest he comes to the hard realities of the world are recent posts about the Paris Hilton jail saga and the final episode of “The Sopranos.” Because his world is, like the blog says, pretty much perfect.

Your world may not be, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t visit his. Just to see what it’s like.

– Sid Leavitt

Troy Chapman is a slender fellow in his early 40s with an engaging smile, a graying beard and a long list of accomplishments as an author, artist, songwriter, music minister, ethics lecturer, literacy volunteer, community college librarian, even a Jaycee chapter organizer.

What’s important to us is his writing — specifically, his weblog, Sacred Matters, the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

Well, some people might also mention that he is a convicted murderer serving a 60- to 90-year term in the Michigan state prison system. That’s not an incidental fact, of course, but significant to us not for its legal or social aspects but because of its apparent influence in his development as a writer.

Beneath that development is a personal belief system that seems to have borrowed the best from Christianity, Eastern philosophy and native American pantheism. And he seems to find the best ways of expressing these beliefs, as in a June 16 entry about suffering:

Suffering (is) a fundamental point of connection. Every human being who’s ever walked the earth, all the way back to the misty beginnings of our species, has suffered. When we suffer today, there’s a point of connection with all our ancestors. Sometimes when I’m suffering, I ponder this truth and draw strength from all those who have come before me.

Just so you don’t think he’s some latter-day Chuck Colson trying to use religion as a revolving door out of prison, we also should mention that Chapman has now served 22 years with, under his current sentence, at least 38 years more before he will be eligible for parole.

The case in brief: Chapman, imprisoned earlier for a crime committed at age 16, in November 1984 walked away from a halfway house — the authorities called it an escape — and eight days later stabbed and killed another young man in a drunken bar fight. Chapman was convicted of second-degree murder by a jury that also weighed a lesser charge of manslaughter, but he got what seemed a first-degree murder sentence from a judge who saw “no hope” the 21-year-old could be rehabilitated.

I’ve spent the past two decades trying to find my way back to the person I was before the killing — not to the insanity, hopelessness, addiction, and sickness of that time in my life but to the innocence that lay behind all that . . . I had to allow myself to feel the full horror of what I’d done. I had to (look) at the human body that lay on the barroom floor in front of me that night.

I made myself imagine that he was my brother . . . that he was my son . . . (finally) that it was me who died . . . This brought me closer to the truth of my crime than the facts ever could. (December 2003)

On love, written in January 2006:

Instead of ‘good/evil,’ we should see the world in terms of ‘love/not-love’ . . . When terrorists recruit people to kill other people, they convince them that this is a ‘good’ thing. Racists, Nazis, and fundamentalists of every stripe use the same tactic. But imagine them trying to convince people that murdering other human beings is an act of love. It doesn’t work nearly as well.

Chapman’s weblog entries are posted by a group called Friends of Troy Chapman from his current and earlier writing, and they run a separate weblog about their efforts to get his sentence reviewed and shortened.

It’s hard for us to comment on this because all we see on the two websites is their side of the story. Still, 60 to 90 years is a long sentence for any crime.

But reading Sacred Matters convinces us of a few things that a very good editor at Yes! magazine wrote beneath Chapman’s byline on an article for the quarterly’s winter 2002 edition:

Sometimes the people with the most to teach us about love are not behind pulpits. They’re behind bars. In prison, one man learns that love is possible in the worst of places, and that even when there is no way out, there is a way up.

– Sid Leavitt

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is Chapter 9 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Caldwell, Texas. March 17, 1989.

It is one fine hot day in Caldwell. I am leaning on the passenger door of the truck, waiting for my clothes to dry in the laundromat. In the side mirror, I can see my face being turned rosy by the sun, aided by a kingsize can of beer I am storing just inside the open window on the passenger seat. A few feet away, a man with chestnut arms and face, about my age, leans against a post at the laundromat entrance and sips what appears to be beer from a white coffee mug while his clothes spin around in the machines. His hat explains to whom it belongs and at the same time makes a strangely appropriate observation about the weather: The hat says, “Daddy’s Hat, Daddy’s Hot.”

He can see I’m reading his hat when I ask, “How’s it going, Daddy?”

“Fine enough, sir,” he says, although it comes out something like “Fahn enuff, suh.”

We smile at each other. I bring the can out for a sip and put it back in the truck. He takes a sip from his cup.

We smile at each other again. It is time to start a conversation.

“I was wondering, sir, if you could tell me what these trees are that I’ve been seeing along the road. They look like hardwoods, but I don’t recognize them. There’s some of them across the street, in front of that white house there.”

“What whaht house?” he asks.

“That white house,” I say, pointing.

“Poce sokes,” he says.

“Poor soaks?” I ask.

“Not poe. Poce.”

“How do you spell that?”

“Poce. P, o, s, t.”

“No, not the fence posts. The trees that are behind them.”

“Poce. Poce sokes,” he says.

“Ah, post oaks,” I say. “I guess I’ve heard of them. Small, hardy oaks that were cut for posts by the early ranchers.”

He nods his head. We smile again.

He comes closer to the truck and looks at the Maine license plate. He frowns.

No one is quite sure how the state of Maine got its name. The most common theory is that the state was named because its coast was the mainland that colonial ships followed on their way back to Europe. Or because the Gulf of Maine was the first high sea that those ships bounded over. But there is a lesser-known theory that the state was named for a rural district in France that is still called Maine.

“How you get this truck here?” Daddy asks. “You a long way from home.”

“I drove,” I say.

“Not by boat?” he asks.

“Say, just where do you think Maine is?” I ask.

“Somewhere in Europe, ain’t it?”

I look at him, and we grin at each other again. I bring out the beer can and lift it toward him, he lifts his cup toward me, and we have a drink on it.

“It might as well be, Daddy,” I say. “It might as well be.”

– Sid Leavitt

You’d have any number of reasons to add dooce to your blogroll. The only one we care about is whether the writing is good, and Heather B. Armstrong’s weblog certainly qualifies on that count.

But there are other reasons: Now in its seventh year, dooce is not only one of the longest-lived weblogs in a cyberworld where lifetimes are measured in months, but also one of its most popular. And that is largely because it is written by a woman who rebels against her upbringing as a Mormon in Baptist-Belt Tennessee, battles depression, struggles with parenthood, flirts with substance abuse and, due to her explicit vocabulary, offends some of her readers and most of the residents where she now lives — of all places, Salt Lake City.

In fact, it’s her aggressive independence that in the early days of her blog got her fired from her job, a dismissal that raised an important debate about Internet privacy but that she never challenged. Instead, she warns others: “Be ye not so stupid.”

A vestige of the debate is a new cyber word, ‘dooced’ — its origin supposedly is a quickly mistyped ‘dude’ — that means to lose your job for something you write on the Internet.

Thematically, the issue fits into the last two entries on our weblog — June 11, A Gentleman’s C, written by a professor who doesn’t identify her school, lists no email address and uses a fake headshot, and June 14, Axis of Evel Knievel, written by another professor who doesn’t mask his identity but wonders if he’ll be fired.

I have no answer to the issue, except I’m not surprised Armstrong was fired, even from a dot-com company supposedly dedicated to creating more open communication. I once worked for a newspaper, a very good newspaper, that changed my personal columns when they didn’t fit the editor’s views. (I’ve never understood why a company that insists on candor from its news sources can’t seem to tolerate it in its own employees.)

So I’m a big fan of Armstrong’s independence as well as her writing, even though the content occasionally seems sardonic:

For example, I don’t know what to make of an entry March 5, 2002, titled “Road Kill”:

I once ran over a bird with my car . . . There were actually two birds, but I only hit and killed one of them . . . I’m pretty sure that the bird I killed was in love with the bird I did not kill (because the surviving bird) landed close to the dead bird’s body and started crying . . . If the birds really were related, if they really were siblings or a mother and child combo, then I would have turned my car around, sped back to the scene and killed the other bird. The world just doesn’t need incestuous birds.

And I’m not sure I share her feeling, expressed Feb. 22, that Britney Spears needs compassion for the sake of her two baby boys.

But Armstrong certainly doesn’t deserve emails so nasty — “I can’t help but think that bad things keep happening to you because you are a bad person . . . When your child gets older and goes to school, everyone there could know that her mother is literally crazy. Imagine how hard that will be for her” — that she disables her blog’s comment function.

And I certainly feel compassion for a woman who writes in her Jan. 26, 2005, entry:

One of the most terrifying moments of my life was walking into our bedroom the afternoon we came home from the hospital, two days after giving birth to Leta. I was stitched up to my chin, but the physical pain paled in comparison to the shocking realization that I was now The Mother, that there was no longer a nurse to whom I could hand off the baby. It was like I was peering into the heart of a black hole, the magnitude of my life now swallowing me whole.

The website, Armstrong says, “has been the biggest component in my fight against depression.”

May dooce continue far into the future.

– Sid Leavitt

This weblog is too new to have many rules, but I’m breaking one — that is, the one about keeping our blogroll as diverse as possible — by adding Axis of Evel Knievel to it.

First a warning: Don’t visit this site if you believe that traditional versions of history are true, that traditional values of religion are meritorious and that the war on terror has hurt the terrorists more than us.

In fact, even if you don’t believe all those things, you will probably come out of Axis a little twisted. But you will admire the writing of its author, a history professor at the University of Alaska Southeast. His site enters our blogroll immediately after another professor’s blog, A Gentleman’s C, on whose blogroll in fact we found Axis.

The writing on Axis is well-informed, well-expressed and, well, strange. Other than the pun on our president’s famed axis, I’m not sure Evel Knievel has much to do with it, except the crash-prone motorcyclist may have inspired the blog’s subtitle, ‘Another Day, Another Pointless Atrocity.’

For about the past year, the professor’s writings have focused on the history of the date — June 4, a riot by beer-sotted fans at a Cleveland Indians-Texas Rangers baseball game in 1974; June 1, the 1660 hanging of Mary Dyer by Puritans in Massachusetts for her Quaker beliefs; May 31, George Washington’s 1779 order unleashing destruction on Iroquois settlements.

Aside from the subject choice, it’s pretty straight history, but the professor does get in a personal shot or two:

On April 15, Ken Lay’s birthday, the professor notes that the once-avuncular leader is now remembered by Enron’s 20,000 employees “as the man who urged them to sink their pensions into Enron’s company stock . . ., many of (them now forced) to work until they quite literally drop dead.” Now dead himself, “Ken Lay now rotates slowly and eternally on a greasy, barbed grate in the nether reaches of Hell.”

Jan. 17, the anniversary of the first Gulf War:

Sixteen years ago tonight, the United States led a coalition of nations into war to liberate a tiny, undemocratic emirate from the temporary clutches of a somewhat larger, undemocratic dictatorship located along its northern border . . .

At the end of the war, President George Herbert Walker Bush jovially remarked that “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all,” adding that the United States had at last fought a war without “one hand tied behind [its] back.”

April 20, 2006:

Those who yodel endlessly and ahistorically about the spectre of ‘Islamofascism’ will no doubt be thrilled to learn that today marks the birthdays of both Adolf Hitler and the prophet Mohammed.

The professor’s earlier entries are less date-oriented. On March 14, 2005, he writes about the latest Bush administration’s tax incentive for small business owners to write off vehicle purchases:

As near as I can tell, my chiropractor purchased the Hummer while the cap was set at $100,000. This is, I remind you, a small town in Alaska. We have a mere 40 miles of roads and nothing to justify the purchase of a vehicle that symbolizes the worst hybrid of arrogant militarism, loathsome status-consumerism, and appalling disregard for the future of everything.

Aug. 3, 2005, in an entry titled ‘Evolution and its Discontents’:

When I teach the 1920s in my history survey course, the Scopes Trial usually makes an appearance. At that point, I sometimes ask whether it matters that we live in a nation whose president doesn’t understand the concept of evolution. For the most part, my students don’t seem to have a problem with that. As the saying goes, “mission accomplished.”

At several places, the professor wonders if it’s wise to go public with his opinions. On Feb. 3, 2006, he talks about being nominated for a blogging award:

Thanks to whoever nominated me. I owe you a shiny new nickel and a signed copy of my (as yet unwritten) memoir about working at Subway in 1993, a project that I will pursue with renewed devotion after my university administrators discover this blog and fire me.

– Sid Leavitt

The first entry I read on a weblog called A Gentleman’s C was the author, a self-described Angry Professor, complaining that a student didn’t seem to understand that her final exam couldn’t be rescheduled in order to give her a full day between each of her finals. Then I read more: This student, described as ‘nontraditional,’ receives the services of the school’s disability office, but the Angry Professor won’t budge on the exam date. Wow, I thought, this guy is going to get it in his comments section.

That was just the first wrong conclusion I drew.

First, some right conclusions: This blog, I realized after reading much more, goes beyond some professor’s rant about students and offers reflections on parenthood, ailments, neighbors, society, religion, life in general — much of it with humor — and, yes, death.

And it is extremely well-written. Which is why it’s the latest addition to our blogroll.

Now to the wrong stuff: The Angry Professor in no way subscribes to the ‘gentleman’s C’ — a guaranteed non-failing grade given to students of influential families at Ivy League schools like the one where I started college as a scholarship student (before I got drafted into the Army). Furthermore, AP’s readers were supportive in their comments, largely because it would be unfair not to reschedule exams for the other 119 students in the class. And lastly, the small generic headshot of the author in a floppy beret, when inspected more closely, shows not a man but a woman. Hmmm, now where have I seen that face . . . why yes, Sylvia Coleridge, the late actress who played a professor on the British TV series “The Tomorrow People.”

Now I was warming up to AP and her Angry Family — including her husband, Angry Baker, as well as Angry Kid, Crazy Mother, Angry Sister, Angry Little Dog, Angry Crazy Cat and so on.

Not to mention Angry Student, whom AP addresses in an entry Sept. 16, 2005:

Angry Student, my first ‘real’ Ph.D. student, . . . you were the best. You were the kind of student that every professor dreams of getting the opportunity to mentor. You actually thought about things. You had ideas. You didn’t need me to tell you what was interesting. You solved problems. You taught me.

Ahhh, AP does have a heart.

In an entry April 22, 2005, she discusses the daily visit to her faculty club by the elderly professors emeriti, particularly one who admits “having some difficulty with orientation” and then struggles with a university phone as he tries to make a call and then can’t hear the other end very well:

(After he finally) terminated the call, I watched him walk very slowly, with a gait suggesting Parkinson’s disease, across the room to sit next to a friend. His friend asked him about his research. To my great delight, he launched into a complicated monologue on theoretical physics. It was a miraculous transformation and a joy to watch.

In an entry Aug. 25, 2006, the professor discusses her father-in-law’s terminal illness and reflects on her own father’s death:

I lost my dear father over a decade ago, and so I have been through much of what the Angry Baker is soon to experience. It isn’t just my father’s gone-ness that hurts. I also had to watch my father change into a different person . . . Consequently, I not only lost my papa, I lost my brightest memories of him . . .

The Angry Baker returned home yesterday from the first of many trips he will make to help his father die. My dearest love, this is probably the hardest thing you will ever do. But it is also the most wonderful, most important thing you will ever do, and I love you all the more for it.

Angry Professor works at LSU — ‘Large State University,’ located in ‘Square State.’ She can be as tough on the university as on some of her students, telling uncooperative building administrators recently, “Fuck you all. I hope you get terrible poison ivy this weekend and that it spreads to your genitals.”

Among her favorite blogs is Axis of Evel Knievel, created by another professor, this one at the University of Alaska, also extremely well-written. Among the questions he raises is whether professors who reveal their personal opinions in blogs face censure or worse from their universities.

I hope not. But that could explain LSU, Square State and Sylvia Coleridge.

– Sid Leavitt

Nathanael is a religion graduate student in his mid-20s who thinks deeply and writes with great appeal. And I was very glad to find him and add his site, Despair and Coffee, to our blogroll.

The name of his site seemed appropriate after I had searched for two days through a couple of hundred weblogs and was near despair myself. My bright idea of how to ease the search for well-written blogs had burned out.

I had decided that instead of searching seemingly endless blog catalogs, I would go to the well-written blogs I’d already found and look through their comments and links for more winners. It didn’t work out very well. For one thing, the links often were to sites similar in theme to the blogs I’d already found, and I’m trying to keep our blogroll as diverse as possible. In other cases, the comments came from admirers who didn’t write as well as the admired.

And so it was back to the blogosphere underbrush.

Granted, I’ve been at this search only for a short time, but I’ve been diligent about it, and I must have gone through 5,000 sites by now. And I’m starting to spend less time on sites where I see the following:

(1) Content that only friends or family would appreciate.

(2) Pictures of cats or dogs. We have a dog and three cats and love them all, but as in (1), you have to know them.

(3) Illustrations of unicorns.

(4) Obvious grammatical errors. From a blog that will remain nameless: “I started out as a broadcast journalist, but fate took it’s course when . . .” Forget it.

(5) Celebrity prattle.

(6) Authors’ accounts of the difficulties of writing that first novel when the novel hasn’t been finished.

(7) White letters on dark backgrounds. Not distinctive, overused and just hard to read.

(8) Overuse of profanity, although this can be a judgment call. One writer, describing an idol-driven TV show as a ’steaming pile of monkey shit,’ said he turned to a different show that was a “bazillion times better than some no-talent, booger-eatin’, fuckstick do(ing) fucking karaoke.” A bit overstated, but considering the show, it’s hard to disagree.

All pretty lightweight compared with what Nathanael is thinking about:

Life: “I catch myself frequently assigning a date other than the present for whenever I’ll feel satisfied with my daily life . . . I dread the hours my 20-page research paper will require . . . Life generally strikes me in a similar way . . . However, I wonder if I’m naively concluding that satisfaction is contingent upon situational factors rather than a personal choice to make the most of what one has. What if there are always things which one wishes weren’t part of his or her life? Does this necessitate discontentment?”

Love: “As time passes and the relationship endures, dramatic differences emerge or become sources of discord for the first time. And the differences aren’t found beautiful anymore but rather something that needs to change about the other.”

God: “I was diagnosed with achalasia, a rare disorder in which the muscles of the esophagus fail . . . A secret part of me blamed God (for) some cosmic endgame and my superfluous role in it . . . To be frank, though such thoughts are further removed than they have been in some time, deep down they lurk, subconsciously lingering to prevent me from being blindsided again.”

The afterlife: “What if the soul is merely derivative of human consciousness, a figment which dematerializes immediately at death and the final failure of one’s cognitive processes? . . . No matter if one feigns indifference, attempts to ignore, avoid, delay, hasten, or embrace it, death requires a conscious response. Maybe the perception of the soul is an unconscious response. Or maybe not.”

Nathanael has been blogging about five months now. The two dozen entries on his site, most fairly lengthy, are well-reasoned reflections of a young man seeking answers to questions of the ages.

– Sid Leavitt

This weblog isn’t very old, and I haven’t been blogging very long, but I’m coming to realize that this process is just a continuation of something I’ve been doing for a very long time — going through people’s garbage.

In a metaphorical sense, that is.

I’ve been writing for a long time. I first got paid for it more than 40 years ago at the Transcript-Telegram, a daily newspaper in Holyoke, Mass., where I started by writing obituaries. Well, the old T-T is now defunct — long gone, disappeared — and as I also am approaching that status, I have written my own obituary, although you’ll have to wait to read the whole thing.

For now, let me say that I retired three years ago, but it wasn’t a new experience. I had retired once before, in the 1980s, when I sold a three-story, Federal-period brick house in a coastal city in Maine and moved into a small truck — actually, a mini-motor home — with a usable floor space of 6 by 12 feet where I planned to live until real retirement age and Social Security. Sort of surviving in a cocoon. But it didn’t work out that way.

While I didn’t exactly hit the road, the truck had to move from time to time to avoid attracting landowners, police and vandals. And as I made my way around the country in increments of only a few miles at a time, I met people and saw things that attracted me. Not famous people and monumental things, but small people and the small things they struggled with. Many of those people had come loose from the mainstream or had never been in it to begin with. And the mainstream certainly overlooked the things they struggled with.

There’s a word for loose fragments that have been worn away and left floating. Not exactly garbage or trash but leftovers. Detritus.

Some of those people and things ended up in a book I wrote before returning to the newspaper business, a book that appears in the nonfiction section of this website. And it occurs to me now that the process that led to the book is something I’ve done for a long time, certainly from the time I became a reporter — picking through our society’s detritus.

So I’m a garbage picker. And as all worthy garbage pickers know, you can find some pretty good things in there. You just have to go through a lot to get to them.

Now for this weblog. Among the millions of blogs out here, there’s a lot of garbage. You and I might not agree on what exactly the garbage is. I don’t much care for blogs that fawn on celebrities. You might not care for blogs that pontificate on writing. But there’s no disagreement on the amount of garbage. It’s a lot.

And so now I am picking through the detritus of today’s electronic landscape. Why do it? Who benefits? As David Letterman used to say, ‘Why, you, the viewer.’ No, just kidding. As with everything I’ve ever done, the chief beneficiary is me. Being a newspaper reporter was easier than cutting pulpwood or working in the woolen mill. Writing the book allowed me to write off the cost of the truck. (Alas, IRS rules on depreciation for creative enterprises have changed since then.) And living in the truck gave me a chance to sift through a lot of garbage of my own.

If you ask me, I’ll say I’m sifting through the millions of blogs out here in order to find those that I consider well-written and to bring those to the attention of readers who may offer thoughts of their own in a feedback cycle that we hope encourages all of us writers and improves our writing.

I’ve found some very good things in this littered blogosphere, and they’re all sitting over there on the right in our blogroll.

But basically, I’m just doing what comes naturally — picking through garbage, searching for the good stuff, holding these treasures up to the light for a better look. If you also find some value in this, well, so much the better.

– Sid Leavitt

Talk about a rush.

I was sitting here in our quiet, little-attended website when an entry I had written two weeks ago drew public notice from its subject, Franklin Habit. Suddenly our comment count tripled and our site’s hit statistics quadrupled.

Franklin, of course, is a knitter-blogger extraordinaire whose site, The Panopticon, got high praise from us — one of our missions is to seek out and review well-written blogs. And Franklin’s response, in a section titled “I’m a Writer,” was equally complimentary to us. Except for “just one quibble” (read it here).

I learned two things, the first less important than the second:

1. Don’t try to out-smart-ass Franklin. He took my crack about “us sports-loving, beer-drinking, East Coast he-men” — a description that might have fit me 40 years ago, but now a pure fiction meant to emphasize that even someone with little in common with Franklin would like his writing — and turned it on its head (and mine, which is still smarting from being slapped down by some of his fans). In the arena of tongue-in-cheek wisecracks, Franklin is The Man (please, no more emails — it’s a compliment).

2. There’s an unbelievable wealth of writing talent among knitters. Franklin is one of the best examples, but consider the following sites, all suggested by Franklin’s devotees:

• Yarn Harlot, written by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, a Canadian blogger whose chief subject, knitting, is so skillfully woven with her observations about life that it’s interesting even to those of us who don’t knit. She’s been blogging since January 2004, and I haven’t read all her entries, but the one that struck me the most was her most recent (May 30) — her 18th birthday wish for her daughter Amanda, a long message that is often humorous, always touching and at times deeply insightful:

In short, I realized that people are adults for a lot longer than they are kids, and that it makes more sense to cultivate wonderful adult skills than those traits that make kids easy to take care of.

• The Life and Times of Florence Knitingale, written by a Seattle-area student, cat lover and newlywed who in her June 1 entry is dealing with some yarn:

The yarn is Koigu and, since Koigu does not give their colors names, I’m afraid I can’t identify it any better than that. Except to say that it’s both stunningly beautiful and a stubborn bastard. It is now in its fourth sock incarnation. In a perfect world, yarn would be able to talk, and would tell you exactly what sort of sock it might like to be knit into. I, for one, would welcome a quietly whispered ‘No, no — don’t try to make me into a feather and fan sock. I will pool like a sonuvabitch, and I won’t even feel badly about it.’

• Rabbitch, written by another Canadian blogger who in her May 28 entry offers a song, “The Horrible Boob-Morphing Bra,” sung to the tune of “Gilligan’s Island,” that recounts her struggles with said lingerie during a visit to a supermarket:

And so I stood there quite aghast
All four-breasted was I
I didn’t know what I should do
I thought I’d like to die

I grabbed a handy spatula
And scooped the things back in
I paid for the juice and got right out
They won’t let me back again

• Then there’s Crazy Aunt Purl, Tales from the Den of Chaos, Alala, and the list goes on . . .

I got to thinking about why so many knitters are such good writers, and I came up with at least one possibility: Knitters are a contemplative bunch, sitting with their knitting and their thoughts, taking care and time to keep both straight.

Oh, and a third lesson I learned: Knitters are a kind and generous bunch. The reason for this was suggested by my wife, Bonnie, a sometime knitter and daughter of another knitter-extraordinaire:

Knitters are usually making something for someone else, often to keep someone else warm.

So what I learned from fans of The Panopticon, even the ones I angered, is that knitters basically are all three — thoughtful, kind and generous. And for that, I owe Franklin another debt of gratitude.

– Sid Leavitt