Readers and writers blog

Well, we’re entering our fifth month with a blogroll that is growing, and as with any organism, it’s never too early for a little grooming. So now for some TLC — culling that is tender and loving.

We’re culling our blogroll gently, with none of the trimmings sacrificed. Instead, there is now a separate entry for inactive sites — that is, sites on which there have been no new posts or comments for at least four months — that sits at the bottom of our blogroll under the listing ‘zz: Inactive but worth it.’ (The ‘zz’ not because the sites are asleep but because our WordPress template insists on alphabetizing our blogroll and that’s the only way we Luddites can keep the listing at the bottom.)

If you visit this new entry through the separate blogroll page, you’ll notice that the first listing is Don To Earth, written by a man who indeed deserves whatever solicitude we can offer — Don Crowdis, 93, a gentle soul whose writing we found clear, thoughtful, good-natured, at times tender and poignant.

Crowdis’s last entry was March 8 under the headline “I’m Not Dead” with a short message to readers that “family concerns” were keeping him from posting new entries or responding to emails. However, alongside the message was a worrisome icon of a gravestone. In December, Crowdis wrote about the loneliness of his house with his wife then in the hospital, later in a nursing home. In January, he described having a transient ischemic attack — in simpler words, “a small stroke.” He went on to post another eight entries before the most recent, one of them about his advanced age: “I know I must go fairly soon. I just don’t like the idea.” (Jan. 23)

We hope he is still alive and well. We know his writing is. All 56 entries since Don To Earth began in July 2006 are still worth reading, and that’s why we will continue to list the site, albeit inactive, for as long as we can.

Same deal with vox clamantis, a site that dropped out of sight as of Aug. 4 — it was listed as ‘expired’ — but then resurrected itself just this week. This vindicates our faith in its creator, another senior citizen who, although younger than Don Crowdis but far more curmudgeonly, is just as enjoyable. He’s Michael Moore, not the film guy but a retired graphic designer, photographer, teacher and artist from the Tucson area, and the last we heard from him by email in late April was that he planned to head north in his travel trailer with his four parrots “to make art and visit friends.” Apparently, he and the birds are back.

Vox clamantis, a Latin phrase from a translation of Isaiah 40:3 that means ‘voice crying’ and continues with in deserto or ‘in the wilderness,’ contains dozens of entries from Moore’s real and imaginary correspondence with and about various government figures and agencies. Granted, Moore’s last post was in 2006, but his site contains enough entries to keep you busy reading for a good while. We plan to keep the link as an inactive one because we’re hoping Moore, now that he’s back home, will get writing and posting again.

Now there are other sites on our active blogroll where postings are sporadic, but that doesn’t mean they’re inactive. For example, Robert Lashley, author of The literary thug, will go a couple of months or so without posting an entry, then with a burst of energy will post several long entries in a few days, sometimes just one day. So we think he’s worth actively waiting for.

And one of our more recent blogroll listings, philosophy of art, hasn’t had a new posting since Feb. 25, but the comments section stretches all the way to Aug. 10. Those philosophers spend a lot of time thinking, so they’re not in a rush. But it’s interesting to us to read what they’re thinking about. So we wait.

– Sid Leavitt