Readers and writers blog

There are more things in the blogosphere, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your vocabulary.

I paraphrase Shakespeare in an epigraph because it is a classy and erudite thing to do. And my latest blogosphere discovery, Varieties of Unreligious Experience, is one of the classiest and most erudite weblogs I’ve found.

Of course, it also makes me want to quote James Thurber — specifically, his University Days description of Bolenciecwcz, the star football player: “(F)or while he was not dumber than an ox, he was not any smarter.”

That’s how Varieties often makes me feel. And contrary to what you might think, it’s a good feeling. More on that in a while.

I’ve worked with words for decades, but my vocabulary, syntax and style are those of a journeyman journalist — a hack, some would say. But the language of Varieties’ author, who calls himself Conrad H. Roth, probably a pen name, is from academia — a well-studied academia — and is anything but workaday. And he’s still in his mid-20s. I am in awe.

Consider his entry of March 18, 2007, which starts with a quotation from John 21:25 and discusses the process of translation and his preference for “a new language” that retains the flavor of the original and doesn’t pretend not to be a translation. The entry goes on to cite the 18th century German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and the anonymous fifth-century philosopher known as the Pseudo-Dionysius, shortly after which Roth writes . . .

. . . Furthermore, for the Pseudo-Dionysius, it is the ugliness of angelic symbols that prompts us to make the Platonic ascent towards God, just as for Schleiermacher it is the incongruity of semantic usage that prompts us to appreciate the alterity of the original language.

Wow. Now that is compact writing. But not impenetrable. Because if you read the entire entry, about 2,000 words, and look up all the literary, historical, philosophical, theological, etymological and other references you don’t understand (as I had to), you’ll follow — and appreciate — what he is saying.

Hard reading? Yes. So maybe you’ll appreciate his Nov. 5, 2006, entry about reading and why he hates it.

Here are some other entries you may appreciate:

• Chalybea, which talks of a 20-page poem he wrote by that name, an ode to his birthplace, the London suburb of Hampstead, and its once-iron-rich waters: “Chalybea to me was an object of love, a face half effaced peering out from a wall, a goddess presiding over the iron and the waters of time, and of the unfinished act — ‘Her who has thy thirst subdued.’” (June 26, 2006)

• Obitur dictum, words in passing about the death of Norman Mailer, controversial writer and “old fugger”: “That will teach him to go licking Chinese toys, won’t it?” (Nov. 11, 2007)

• Hunters in the Snow, poetry spun from William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Hunter in the Snow,” which itself was inspired by Pieter Brueghel’s 1565 painting “Hunters in the Snow.” (July 31, 2006)

• Decameron 8.9: pun and pumpkin, which traces the roots of the word ‘word’ back to ‘gourd’ — medieval schoolteachers carved Latin words into squashes to help children remember. (Oct. 2, 2007)

• Pinky, an examination of why one traditionally raises one’s pinky while drinking tea. (Sept. 2, 2007)

• Comedy of Errors, a hike into Arizona’s Agua Fria National Monument: “I think I’ll stick to books from now on.” (March 27, 2007)

• Why blog, sinners? Just read it. (Nov. 3, 2006)

• And finally, N is for Neville, a reference to Edward Gorey’s darkly humorous alphabet book The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an entry in which Roth seems to slide from humor into a dark musing about this Ikea world, again asking the question — why blog? — and seeming to come up with a different answer.

We hope he isn’t tempted to give up Varieties of Unreligious Experience. As a vehicle for words and ideas, it is a luxury model, maybe like one of his homeland’s Aston Martins — quick, powerful, although sometimes hard to handle.

Because if more people in this world were made to realize they’re sometimes no quicker than an ox, not cruising along in eternally all-knowing righteousness, maybe we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE: The nameplate on Roth’s blog leaves the word ‘unreligious’ uncapitalized, but I’m not sure why, unless it is to give the word a commonality — more precisely, commonalty — that accentuates the capital quality of ‘Experience.’

Copyrights, dead links, inactive links, posting schedules, free publishing . . ..

With the autumnal equinox more than a month behind us, we at R&W Blog figured it’s about time we did some fall housecleaning. (This blog didn’t exist at the vernal equinox, and nobody does housecleaning for the summer. Or for the winter, a good thing in regions where cleaning already involves ice and snow.) (And by that last ‘we,’ we mean ‘I,’ since I’m the only one of the two or three¹ people with any influence at the blog who has to do chores.)

And so I now address the following topics:

Copyrights

Thanks to emails from a bright young² writer in Ontario, Canada, I’ve amended the copyright section on the ‘Contact details’ page found in our Works section (upper right of this page) to make even clearer that we make no claim to rights of works submitted for publication here.

Copyright law is not simple, but basically, your copyright to your work is established the moment you finish the work in material form — that is, a manuscript or computer file — and belongs only to you unless you convey it to someone else. As we say in ‘Contact details,’ we don’t require that conveyance. And now I’ve added words to that section that amend our byline policy and clarify our intent even further:

Bylines in our Works section, which once were accompanied by a copyright that listed only the year of publication, now say the work is copyrighted “by the author,” followed by the publication year.

Links, dead and alive

Sadly, we say goodbye to Phone for Profits, the first weblog we’ve jettisoned from our blogroll. Nothing has been posted at the site since Aug. 25, and we’re no longer fascinated by the face of its author, Kamau Austin, happy and prosperous as he may appear. As we said when we listed the site on Sept. 13, we’d love someone out there in the blogosphere to suggest a good, personal blog written by a telemarketer. So far, no takers.

And yet, some blogs can be inactive for several months and still be very much alive. Case in point — The literary thug, where Robert Lashley’s latest blog entry was Sept. 4, and that was the first since June 13. But the latest is about his latest poetry on a companion site, A thug’s poetry, where he has posted 15 poems written for a Rosenthal Fellowship application. They’re all compelling. We especially recommend No. 6, “Dear God, I Got Those Bused to School Blues.” We know he’s busy, but we hope he returns as well to his narrative blog, which remains on our active list.

Same with philosophy of art, where the last main-page post was Feb. 25 but the comments remain sporadically active. The last comment had been Sept. 3 until someone named Skannof posted a long rumination about the Feb. 25 subject, a universal aesthetic, on Nov. 8 — not once but twice. Ah, those nutty philosophers.

Our posting schedule

Generally, we try to post twice a week, once at 12:01 p.m. Sunday and again at 12:01 a.m. Thursday, so that each entry is at the top of our blog for 3½ (see note ³) days. (This is for standard time. The numbers are 1:01 p.m. and 1:01 a.m. during daylight savings time because our computer refuses to save daylight. At any rate, this schedule is not a hard and fast one.) We also try to limit each entry to 700 words, although this one is droning on.

Free publishing

Our bright young² Canadian, Ian James Michael Spitzig, introduced himself to me in an email:

Hi Sid, I don’t see the point of publishing if not for money.

I don’t have a good answer except what I told Ian — basically, that some people just have to write, to communicate something that only they feel or know about and are able to express well enough for others to feel or know it, too. I granted that some writers don’t do that last part very well, but . . .

. . . I like honest writing, even if it’s not very good. And I think there’s something to get out of really bad writing, even from its badness.

And that’s why we publish for free.

But Ian, 29, who’s been writing for 13 of those years and wants to become a fulltime writer and still pay off those $30,000 in student loans, needs the money:

I realize that it is difficult to get published (for money) and that I am just a small man in a big lonely world. The day will come when I will not have to worry about money, but I wish it would be tomorrow.

I wasn’t able to offer him much comfort other than to say any exposure is good for an aspiring writer. And I do think he expressed a writer’s hope pretty eloquently.

The royal ‘we’

See note 1.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. Besides myself, this number includes my wife, with whom I live (oddly, I just mistyped ‘live’ as ‘love,’ a true Freudian slip . . . really, hon), and my mother-in-law, who lives next door. At various times, voices also are heard from my wife’s two grown sons, both very computer-literate and, not coincidentally, bigger and stronger than me.

2. Anyone under 60 is young to me. I’m in middle age and will be so until 80 or 85.

3. In case the compound number garbled on your browser, the interval between each post is 3.5 days.

4. Today’s illustration is a Roomba, a robot vacuum cleaner developed by iRobot of Burlington, Mass., a company founded by three robotics engineers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The model shown is the Discovery, which you may notice is upside-down because that gives it kind of a smiley-face look.

A weblog called Small and Big measures up well in both dimensions: The little whimsies are entertaining and sometimes downright funny, and the poetry and philosophy can be grand.

The author, who identifies herself only by name, P.L. Frederick, writes in her April 11, 2007, entry about waking up on a cold morning from the following dream:

A pink angel-fairy woman about the length of a baby hovers, Tinkerbell style. Her gentle but sure voice explains any number of truths to me, now forgotten. All but one — a memory of a memory echoes deep in my ear. It is the last thing she said before I awoke to warm cozy green flannel sheets. ‘Even mathematics cares,’ she says. ‘The whole world, it cares for you. It loves and it waits and there will come a day when humanity discovers that even mathematics cares.’

Eyes looking up to a painted white ceiling, I let the first and the last three words swirl within me. ‘Even mathematics cares,’ I whisper over and over, nourished by two promises. The first, that infinite numbers, tall quiet pine trees, flying red kites, and even weapons care for us. And the second that, some day, this will be commonly known by all persons.

Or consider the following poem, part of a collection called “Two Liners” in her blog’s first entry, Aug. 15, 2006:

We slip away
light as day.

There’s a lot of poetry in Small and Big, subtitled “Ways to Use Up the Alphabet” with the word ‘Up’ elevated from the line, and also a lot of cartoons, jokes, wordplays and illustrations as well as tidbits the author has found on the Internet and a variety of community events she thinks might be helpful to readers.

Although she gives us only her name — if P.L. Frederick in fact is her name — we surmise from reading her blog that she’s married (at least she lists as her ‘better half’ someone named Pablo, which we will accept on face value), is in her 60s (born during World War II) and lives in the Boston area. We say area, not city, because her June 26, 2007, entry is a review of a brochure left after her septic tank was serviced.

The black and white tri-fold photocopy concerns the use and enjoyment of the Septic Tank. It’s got it all, and starts off with a bang.

Good bacteria helps break down ’solids.’
Anti-bacterial soap kills good bacteria.

See how the Good Guy Bad Guy moralistic setup occurs straight off? I like that. There’s not a lot of space on an 8.5″x11″ document to dilly-dally.

Things quickly get hot and heavy, with:

Anti-bacterial soap can wreck a septic system.

A long running family feud between the Anti-bacterials and the Septics makes a gripping read — just look at the Montagues and the Capulets in Romeo and Juliet. There’s trouble a-brewin’. It’s called conflict and it doesn’t end there.

‘Solids’ never break down 100%.

. . . In all, I rate the action-packed brochure 3.5 stars out of 4. My single gripe is that the brochure is evasive about what, exactly, ’solids’ are. Great mystery remains even after reading all six panels. I feel like I’m left dangling.

One of her favorite pastimes is redefining words. What does ‘morals’ mean? “To need more L’s.” Pigment? “The other white concrete.” Oh, and here’s her No. 1 pick on a list of 25 favorite cartoons.

If you didn’t click the link, it’s to her May 27, 2007, entry showing a Gary Larson cartoon. A chunky kid with plaid trousers and a large book in his hand is pushing as hard as he can against a door clearly labeled ‘pull.’ The door leads into a building identified by a large sign as ‘Midvale School for the Gifted.’

Speaking of gifts, perhaps P.L. Frederick’s best is the ability to turn a small phrase into something more: In her Nov. 28, 2006, entry, she describes taking a cheese-tasting class with Pablo only to find both are repelled by the stench of the selections. She has to look away from Pablo “so I won’t laugh and take cheese air into my mouth.”

Or her March 22, 2007, description of a favorite kitchen appliance that has now grown old: “The once-white refrigerator I inherited with the house bravely soldiers on, refusing to be stood out behind the barn with a cigarette in its mouth and shot.”

One caveat: Small and Big has no archives, so you have to scroll back screen-by-screen — on our browser, 14 screens — to get to the blog’s earliest posts. Still, we gladly add it to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt

If you start at the first entry of Rod McBride’s weblog — we sometimes read blogs that way — you might conclude that its title, Midwest Rock Lobster, aptly describes a guy with a red neck. You’d be right, of course, but oh so narrowly informed.

That initial entry, April 6, 2005, talks of a younger man’s frustration, rebellion, angry chain-smoking. You have to read on to find that McBride, like most people, has a number of different sides. And as far as we can tell, he writes about them all very well.

Let’s see . . . where to start? McBride, now 38, lives in Kansas (”flyover country,” he calls it), is a computer graphic artist, survivor of a heart attack in his early 30s, divorced, father of two, a guitarist and aficionado of music ranging from jazz to rock (the blog name may have come from an old B-52s song) to classical, is a big guy with a trimmed red beard and a matching tuft of hair atop a shaved head, goes to church but is an atheist, is offended by what pockets of liberalism may survive in Kansas, accepts homosexuality as no more a choice than a belief in God, loved his Ford F-150 gas guzzler, is an avid reader and aspiring novelist, doesn’t like government, is opposed to abortion (aren’t we all, even those who wouldn’t criminalize it?) and signs his blog posts as Chixulub, a reference to the crater off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula believed left by a large meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. The crater is usually spelled ‘Chicxulub,’ and we can only theorize that McBride misspells it to avoid any appearance of chic.

So what word describes a guy like this? ‘Libertarian’ doesn’t even come close.

But it doesn’t make any difference. Because his occasional rants are only pockets of heat in what to us seems like a warmhearted diary of a Midwestern guy trying to hold down a job, write a novel, enjoy hobbies like rocketry and homebrewing and try to keep everything together for two daughters he shares in joint custody with his ex-wife.

It’s this latter aspect of his life that shows the hard-core individualist indeed has a soft center. The girls are 11 and 10, and when they’re at his house, he takes them everywhere — festivals, hikes, concerts, amusement parks, malls, specialty shops — and cooks imaginative foods that range from homemade pizza to veggie casseroles . . .

Not a vegan casserole, mind you. A few things out of kilter for that, like using real cheese instead of the soy imitation. Not because I prefer real cheese, but because Soysation is freakin’ expensive.

And he treats the girls in a gentle rough-and-tumble way that a bear would treat her cubs. Both of them as evenhandedly as he can, which isn’t always easy because the younger daughter is autistic and subject to epileptic seizures. With the help of his ex-wife and their older daughter, he copes with these special needs as best he can. He doesn’t write a lot about this, but when he does, it is mostly in a matter-of-fact tone of one who has coped with these needs for years, including carrying special medication for all those field trips or spending sleepless nights with a child who won’t be put back to bed.

The photos of the daughters are, in a word, adorable.

Those images instantly cut into and neutralize the irascibility of McBride’s flights into sometimes-overstated iconoclasm. And frankly, some of those will have you nodding in agreement, no matter what your political outlook.

One of our favorites is a slogan he leaves at the bottom of each page: “Ignorance is no excuse for the law.” Considering the way our current government treats the Constitution, we might amend ‘excuse’ to ’substitute.’

And we loved his Dec. 15, 2006, entry about atheism:

I told a pair of Mormon missionaries who came by my house that they were out looking for people who already believed what they did, and one of them thought for a second and said, ‘You’re right.’ Well, I’m not one of them, so keep walking. To paraphrase Tim Wilson, I don’t go for Jesus, much less Jesus The Western.

Of course, there is the occasional typo, misplaced apostrophe or unintentionally misspelled word. But one of the best writers we know couldn’t spell his own name if he hadn’t been born with it. (See how infectious overstatement can be?)

Anyway, check out Midwest Rock Lobster, the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt

Lots of us make lists, and some of us actually pay attention to them. But someone else’s lists? Not likely — unless, that is, they come from a wonderfully eclectic and weirdly charming weblog called The List Server.

For example, you may know the world’s largest island (Greenland) or the largest lake (the Caspian Sea) or even the largest lake on an island (Nettilling Lake on Canada’s Baffin Island), but . . . what about the largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island?

Ha, that’s Vulcan Point in Crater Lake on Volcano Island in Lake Taal on Luzon in the Philippines.

Don’t believe it? Well, the author of The List Server, who lists herself only as Cath, gives us a link to the source of the information in her Aug. 8 entry — the Elbruz Organization, an Amsterdam-based scientific and educational group that knows all about islands and lakes.

The latest entry we found, Nov. 2, was a list of rare hummingbirds of the United States. Guess what? A green-breasted mango was spotted in Corpus Christi, Texas, in November 1997. The last time one was seen in Texas was in 1992.

How about the history of hot sauce? Bad news for Texas. According to Cath’s June 5 entry, the first bottled cayenne sauces appeared in 1807 in, ohmygawd, Massachusetts.

Hungarian tongue-twisters? One of the worst listed in the April 11 entry is “Give me a mouthful of wall, said the wall-eating wooden horse.” Of course, that’s a translation. You’d have to try it in Hungarian. But Cath’s source, the First International Collection of Tongue Twisters at http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/, also lists 2,749 other tongue-twisters in 108 languages, including English, which begins with, you guessed it, Peter Piper and his pickled you-know-whats.

You know, Cath’s first entry, April 8, started innocently enough — a list of American quilting designs. The next day, of course, it was a list of 38 strangely named fruit fly genes, then the Hungarian tongue-twisters and it was off to the races.

Here’s a sample listing of the lists (how derivative is this?):

• Names of monster trucks (April 14), including the Raminator and its useful colleague Towasaurus Wrex.

• Yodeling phrases (April 15).

• Nineteenth-century picnic luncheon menus (April 21).

• All 56 of Saturn’s moons (April 26).

• Yo-yo tricks (May 8). Yeah, we know Walk the Dog and Shoot the Moon, but how about Warp Drive and Worm Hole?

• Extreme croquet events (May 26), including one in Nevada where trucks with oversize tires smash six-foot balls through giant hoops.

• Names of pinball machines made in 1931 (June 26).

• Songs featuring cowbells (July 13).

• Butterfly species named for the punctuation-like markings on their wings (July 15).

• Extremely expensive desserts (Aug. 15), led by a chocolate confection topped with an 80-carat aquamarine that goes for $14,500 at the Fortress, a luxury resort in Galle, Sri Lanka. (You eat the chocolate, pocket the gem.)

• Famous cheerleaders (Aug. 21). (Guess which U.S. president is on the list?)

• Facts about Rubik’s Cube (Oct. 9).

• Oldest currently registered .com domains (Nov. 1).

We told you it’s eclectic and weird. What we can’t tell you is why we find it so disarmingly charming. Maybe it’s because each new entry comes, as we baseball fans like to say, straight out of left field, each a surprise. We explain the baseball expression because we suspect Cath is either an Australian or maybe a New Zealander. Why else would her Sept. 2 entry list the steepest streets in Dunedin, New Zealand?

The mystery of her identity — she offers no autobiographical information — may also add to the appeal.

But at the bottom of it is this: While Cath doesn’t do much writing other than her lists, her selections show the skill of a very good editor. And all good editors (we emphasize the word good because we’ve met enough bad ones) are good writers.

For those and other reasons, The List Server is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES: 1. We found The List Server through the blogroll of another excellent site, The Vapour Trail.

2. The headline on this entry is a line from Stephen Foster’s 1862 song “Beautiful Dreamer.”

If you like words as much as we do — and if you’re reading this, chances are you do — then you may like a weblog by the same name, Words, as much as we do.

Written by Kevin Dickinson, a 21-year-old Rutgers student who also works part-time, Words is a relatively new site — barely three months old — but is blossoming into a celebration of those unique things we call, yes, words, and the uses to which they can be put.

As the blog’s subtitle says, “What is writing but a unique sequence of words?” In a sidebar called Where Are You, here’s one of those sequences Dickinson has assembled:

Picture a vast, flowing field of wheat. Or, if you prefer a cliché, picture some amber waves of grain. Imagine, say, a hectacre of them. But remember that a hectacre is a deceiving unit of measure — it is not 10 acres, but rather 2.47.

So somewhere in this 2.47 acres of wheat (you may approximate) is a single stalk. Or maybe it’s a grain. What do they call one wheat? Is it a blade? A wheaticle?

Focus on your wheaticle. This one among thousands. Then zoom in with your imagination and look at just the top of it, where those mini ‘branches’ are growing off. Then look at only ONE branch, and on that branch, a single cell growing on its tip.

Are you still with me? Okay, good. I need you to picture a gnat bothering that cell. It’s flying around the cell’s head, pestering it simply because that’s what gnats do best.

This blog is the gnat. That’s how insignificant and obscure it is on the Internet . . .

Haven’t we all felt that way?

Now in the blog’s mainbar, the most recent posts we found include “Neologism of the Day,” Oct. 31, which defines the day’s new word, ‘crapolantern’ (complete with a pronouncer), as “the result of maladroit carving skills on an unshapely pumpkin.”

New words are a specialty of Dickinson, who has invented a ‘neophrastic superfluary’ — a dictionary, shown as an old leather-bound tome with a cleverly Photoshopped title (see above), that contains only “superfluous words of the editor’s own creation.”

Another of those words, ‘decafejection,’ is defined in the Oct. 21 post as two types of disappointment, both when a cup of coffee is finished — the first at the sight of the bottom of the cup and the second at its near-weightlessness. And then there’s a third definition:

The act of defenestrating a container of decaffeinated coffee because it is decaffeinated.

Obviously, a coffee lover.

Two other recent entries — well, they’re all recent, although the total number of posts when we visited already amounted to 56 — worth special mention are “All Hallows’ Eve: A Vile Poem,” set to the cadence of Clement Moore’s 1822 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” and a short story called “Lobster Bisque.”

The short story involves a lowly supermarket employee named Cody, a huge lobster reminiscent of Julius Caesar and a crazed meats-and-seafood manager named Mohammed. Beyond that, we don’t want to reveal too much detail.

The poem involves a visit by bloodthirsty zombies from a cemetery to a nearby home in which they imagine the family of five — Mr. and Mrs. Flask and their three children — are sleeping peacefully. Ah, zombies can be so wrong.

Another kind of poetry is the theme of a Sept. 20 entry, “The Musical Perils of Acorn-Bearing Dendrites.” Despite its tongue-in-cheek title and tone, this brief piece combines the sounds of falling acorns and a leaking toilet in a musical motif described as “oddly attractive,” and we agree.

And to see how a writer’s focus can change from day to day, check out the back-to-back entries on Oct. 10 and 11. The first, “Compital Oppilation Theory” (no neologisms there, as far as we can tell), discusses with mathematical logic and analysis why four-way traffic gets snarled during rush hour. The next, “Rain Fast Approaching,” is a transcendently simple discovery about a phenomenon of nature.

Although it’s hard to judge a weblog that is so new, we have skimmed his other website, Sincerely Insane, a series of letters dating back to 2005, and we get the impression that Dickinson is progressively broadening as a writer. We hope he continues with Words so that we can continue to share and enjoy them.

– Sid Leavitt

Scattered crumbs, trick mirrors, guilty murderers — all right, that’s what we’re talking about. Two new submissions to our Works section, each from sources one might think unlikely. But that’s the magic of writing, friends.

One submission — our first contemporary work of fiction — is a short story about a murder or two written by a kindly grandmother from the Midwest. The other submission is experimental poetry from a young military officer in southern California.

Thus, in the poetry section of Works, we present “Trick mirrors” and “Crumbs scattered around the terminator of the cortex,” two experimental works by Jason Gregoire using unorthodox grammar, structure and linguistic imagery.

In the fiction section, we present “Presumed Guilty” by Marjorie Pagel of Franklin, Wis., a short story narrated by a convicted murderer’s sympathetic pen pal.

We couldn’t be prouder. This was our original idea, before we became Readersandwritersblog.com, back when we were Readers-and-writers.com. The premise was that writers would write and submit their work for readers who would read and, if they cared to, comment on the writing, possibly leading to feedback from the writers, and there would be, as our subtitle says, an interactive universe of the written word.

At first, we got a few submissions, and we were delighted. But then, everything stopped. We’re not sure exactly why, but we suspect it’s because the Internet is such a tangled web that a site can stay lost for months, maybe forever, hidden from sight from readers and writers who might make use of it.

That’s really why we seek out weblogs that we consider well-written and post them on our blogroll. Because we know in many cases how hard it was to find them in a blogosphere bloated by chitter-chatter, celebrity and fan diaries and political and religious rants.

Anyway, two more writers have found us, and again, we’re glad of it.

Marjorie Pagel has been writing since the age of 9 when she self-published a book of poetry for her grandmother. For 10 years, she was a reporter and feature writer for Community Newspapers, a chain associated with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and continues to write a weblog, “Meet Me at the Corner,” published by one of the chain’s online affiliates, HalesCornersNOW. She also teaches college writing at Concordia University in Mequon, Wis. She and her husband have two grown children, three grandchildren and an English cocker spaniel, Annie.

Jason Gregoire is in his mid-20s and, when he is not busy with his military duties, dabbles in experimental fiction and poetry. His current experiments, in his words, “attempt to mesh stream-of-consciousness, surrealism and science fiction. The writing’s nebulous and occasionally esoteric assembly requires patience and imagination but, with effort, provides the reader a cipher key to the underpinnings of the message.”

Thank you both. And may we also recommend the other writers who have shared their words in the nonfiction, fiction and poetry sections of Works.

– Sid Leavitt

I went out looking for a bailiff, and I ended up in Britain — 19th century Britain, that is, thanks to a weblog called The Victorian Peeper.

Don’t ask how a bailiff brought me to Queen Victoria’s world. After seven months of searching for diverse, well-written blogs, I’ve stopped resisting these side trips Google takes me on. And as for ‘peeper,’ it’s Victorian slang for ‘mirror,’ although the site’s author, Michigan-based historian Kristan Tetens, concedes that the modern meaning of ‘voyeur’ also is appropriate.

“I sometimes feel as if I’m spying on the Victorians,” she says.

It’s fun to do it with her.

Now to those of you who think of Queen Victoria as a stuffy old dowager — see the portrait, above left, as she appeared near the end of her reign (1837-1901) — we say, au contraire, nos amis. As a young woman, Victoria could be exciting and adventurous, as Tetens tells us in her Oct. 13 entry looking in on the making of “The Young Victoria,” a Martin Scorcese film due for 2008 release. She quotes screenwriter Julian Fellowes:

People think of a fat widow in black. They’ve forgotten the exciting young woman trying to find her own way. Some girls like to have fun and she was certainly one of them.

Some of that ebullience is shown in another portrait of Victoria, also above left, from a drawing by English cartoonist Ronald Searle, which Tetens shares in her June 29 post about a series of prints created by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to mark its 150th anniversary.

And Tetens herself has fun with her subject. Of her June 11 entry, we will say only that it is a Lolcats homage to Victoria’s accession that ends with the phrase “cheezburgrs 4 brekkfist.”

But most of Tetens’s attention is given to serious reflection of the Victorians, their works and their habits as they were:

• Victorian newspapers now on line, showing how the Whitechapel murders (Jack the Ripper) were covered in the Birmingham Daily Post, the Battle of Trafalgar in Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post and the west Africa scramble in the Belfast News Letter (Oct. 23).

• Contemporaneous obituaries from The Times of London, including those of William Wordsworth, John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Disraeli and Charles Darwin (Oct. 10).

• Victorians of African descent, now honored at a Liverpool museum for their achievements, including working-class organizer William Cuffay and Crimean War volunteer nurse Mary Seacole (Aug. 20).

• A Victorian dinosaur park, models of 15 prehistoric species recreated somewhat inaccurately, that was opened five years before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (Aug. 6).

• Corf-batters and bum-bailiffs (there’s that ‘bailiff’ that Google keyed in on), terms used in Pitmatic, a dialect spoken by miners in northeast England for more than 150 years. (A ‘bum-bailiff’ was a derogatory word for an eviction officer.) (July 30).

• Major Thomas Weir, a 17th century Scottish preacher who led a darker life as a warlock, possibly the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (July 10).

• Cragside, the Northumberland home of maverick Victorian inventor William Armstrong, the first house in the world to be fitted with hydroelectricity (April 1).

• The diversity of Victorian London, which nurtured the roots of Yiddish theater among Jewish immigrants in the East End and gave rise to the mysteries and myths of the Chinese who settled in the city’s Limehouse section (March 27).

• Victorian sexuality, the subject of an art exhibition at the Barbican in London that is so risqué that no one under 18 will be admitted (Feb. 24).

• The 19th century custom of post-mortem portraiture showing the departed in a peaceful sleep, a practice being revived by a Colorado nonprofit group to help grieving parents (Feb. 15).

Although primarily a historian, Tetens also is a good journalist, encapsulating her subject in the first few paragraphs so that you want to read on. For this and other reasons — clarity, interest and expertise — The Victorian Peeper is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt

If you’re a first-time visitor to the weblog lines and colors, take it only a day or a few days at a time. Because it can be a sensory overload.

The site, rich with illustrations, mostly of representational art from classic works of Michelangelo and Rembrandt to online Flash animation, drew our attention not because of the beautiful pictures but because of the writing of the site’s creator, Philadelphia artist and animator Charley Parker.

Consider Parker’s description in his Nov. 2, 2006, post about the work of contemporary artist and illustrator Francis Livingston:

I wouldn’t put Livingston’s work in the Impressionist mold, though. Instead of small strokes of color optically blended to make larger shapes, he uses big bold blocks of color, chips and chunks of color (perhaps troweled in with a palette knife in places) to define his forms.

In fact, he seems to luxuriate in the physical presence of the paint, using wonderful fat strokes of buttery oil paint, laid on with three-dimensional thickness, stroke-defining edges raised above the surface of the canvas. The effect is one of energetic abandon to the luxury of color, and a feeling of the rich sensuality of paint, looking as if it was just squeezed from the tube.

Or of 17th century Dutch master Jan Vermeer in a Nov. 9, 2005, post:

In my development as an artist, it’s taken me a long time to get over being intimidated by the great masters. Over the years, I’ve caught Raphael and Michelangelo making mistakes in proportion, Prud’hon cheating to fit a figure on a sheet of paper, even Rembrandt missing the mark. I eventually realized that the masters may have been great, but they were still only human.

I’m not so sure about Vermeer . . .

Just remember that, as amazing as they can look in reproductions, you haven’t seen a Vermeer until you stand in front of the real thing.

In more than two years of blogging, Parker — who must be a workaholic, considering that he posts nearly every day in addition to producing his webcomic Argon Zark (the character in the illustration above) and teaching at the Delaware College of Art and Design — has covered a wide territory of art that he maps out as . . .

. . . drawing, sketching, painting, comics, cartoons, webcomics, illustration, digital art, concept art, gallery art, artist tools and techniques, motion graphics, animation, sci-fi and fantasy illustration, paleo art, storyboards, matte painting, 3d graphics and anything else I find visually interesting.

If it has lines and/or colors, it’s fair game.

Among his most recent posts, Parker has written about contemporary Polish fantasy artist Jacek Yerka, mid-15th century Italian painter Cosmé Tura, the Pre-Raphaelite school of 19th century England, French comics artist Claire Wendling and the “storytelling secrets of comics, manga and graphic novels.”

And imagine my surprise to find a kindred spirit in someone probably a generation younger than me — one whose boyhood eyes were widened to a whole new world by Mad comics. Not the magazine, but the comics of the early 1950s. Parker discovered Mad in a paperback reprint. I, on the other hand, had my mind expanded — or, in the words of parents and other adults at the time, twisted — by the originals, the 23-edition series written by Harvey Kurtzman and drawn by Wally Wood, Will Elder and Jack Davis.

Those artists were incredible. Just take a look at Wood’s work in Parker’s post of Dec. 26, 2005. In fact, it’s that satire of Flash Gordon, which Mad presented as ‘Flesh Garden,’ that inspired Parker to name his online comic hero Argon Zark.

Parker has returned that inspiration to the rest of us in lines and colors, the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt