thduggie’s blog

You’ve read about how writing a good title for your post drives traffic, makes your blog post magnetic.  Here are three reasons not to write hypnotic titles.

1. The sure-fire titles have no character. 
Yes, good copy sells, but good copy gets copied and becomes trite and meaningless.  A flashy title can also obscure the contents of a post and make it more difficult to find.  If some day I want to find my poem “Spring Song,” what are the chances I’ll remember the title of the post containing it?  Therefore: write descriptive titles instead.

2. The sure-fire titles make you sound like a tout. 
And sounding like a tout is pretty much the definition of sucking like a flowbie, unless of course you are an unapologetic, shameless tout.  I suppose that does bring home the bacon and with the relative anonymity of the internet doesn’t embarrass your wife too much, but nevertheless, only write template titles if you have something you desperately want to sell.

3. The sure-fire titles make you sound like a sycophant.
True, I’m writing for you, and I try to make my post speak to you.  And true, my title is part of how my post speaks to you.  But at least half of why you read my posts is because I’m me, and not a spineless sycophant who tries to please everyone with his blog titles.  And that brings me back to reason #1: Write titles with character.

Thank you for reading this far, and I intend to stay away from template titles for the next few months.  It’ll be interesting to see if they do anything to my traffic, though.

One of the vestiges of my year at Virginia Tech is my membership in the Phi Kappa Phi honor society.  The society puts out a quarterly magazine that has recently always contained a poetry page and a poetry contest for the next issue.  I have decided to commit to participating, if only to force myself to write one poem per quarter.

One condition for eligibility is that the poem submitted be unpublished.  The Spring issue of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum is out, and provides the proof that my submission didn’t win.  The upside of that is that I get to publish the poem here, where I think it gets read by more people I care about than in the Forum.  Here’s the poem:

Spring Song

A silent world in frigid night
In rigid mortal torpor lies,
Awaiting beams of liquid light
To wash the dust from off her eyes.

My ear to the ground I can barely make out
The crocus and daffodil straining to shout.

The dawn restores the world to sight
And calls the morning chorus rise
To sing its fervor to the skies.

My ear to the ground I can just hear the feet
On creaky old stairs and on cracked bathroom tiles,
A pitter and patter that pools in the street
With bread-baking smells and cologne fruity-sweet.
I find, in the faces of people I meet,
The spring in the daylight means spring in their smiles.

The cold retreats,
Streams gush, ice cracks;
Green defeats
Browns and blacks.

My ear to the round of the swelling of life
I feel my joy grow with each kick in my wife:
I join with the daffodils, crocuses, birds,
And sing to new life a new song without words.

My guess from the comments in the Forum is that my poem was too one-sidedly upbeat to make it “very good.”  I can understand that from a technical perspective a duality and tension adds to the poem, and that bringing the duality out can put both aspects in stronger relief.  It also shows that the poet has thought about a topic and explores its depth.  That said, some things just are better pure and unadulterated - think maple syrup - and joy is one of those.  I’m quite happy with my poem, its metric interplay, and especially with its date.  I wrote it October 21st, 2009, just five days before I saw my first little pink plus.

So every time I don’t win, you’ll get another post here, and perhaps another stab at writing a sure-fire cheesy headline which is guaranteed to drive massive traffic to my blog.  If you want to help me win (or not win, depending), send me your thoughts on “Scare Tactics,” the topic for the Fall issue (I just submitted my poem for the Summer issue on “Recovery” on Saturday, so your help there is too late).

Oh, and note how I used the birds/words couplet here that I just made fun of (of which I just made fun?) in my last throwaway poem, Make It Rhyme.

Good enough is better than perfect.  After a few years of incubating the idea and a few weeks working on the designs I’m declaring the Bakamono shop opened.  Wearing a T-Shirt that proclaims you a fool has never been as easy, or as stylish.  Of course, you could also buy one as a present for anyone you don’t agree with but can’t tell that to outright.  Recommended recipients include politicians, warlords, Darwin Award winners, members of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, your favorite infidels - the list goes on and on.

Here’s one of the designs:

There was a man, a wizened man,
Who lived as only poets can
Within a beat-up camper van.
And in that van he ran a school,
Presenting as a precious jewel
The poet’s magic golden rule:
“Make it rhyme, every time! every time!”
So all his students rhymed their words
And struggled with their birds and turds.
(And time sublime, and love above,
And worlds unfurled for you, my girl.)
But he said “Rhyme it till it hurts!”
For he was a poet
And he know it, he know it.

Every now and then, I have to have the opportunity to preach at Basel Christian Fellowship.  This Sunday, my topic was the importance of being reminded - if you have twenty-six minutes to spare, you can download the sermon from the BCF sermon page.  One of my points was that we have the entire world at our disposal to use as a set of reminders throughout our day.

How fitting that the same day I would read Luci Shaw’s poem “Slide Photography: Climbing the Mount of Olives” from her collection “Polishing the Petoskey Stone” (see her poetry page for the book).  It makes the same point better and with greater beauty.  I’ll quote it here and hope she doesn’t mind the free publicity:

Slide Photography: Climbing the Mount of Olives

A grey wall fills the lens — old limestone
crowned with a branching weed
that blocks the sun (miraculous
that an herb so small can stop
the sun).
Hugging the barrier, close
as a disciple, the steep path
creeps up from Gethsemane. The click
and the click of the defining shutter
frames rectangles from which all sounds
will die, carried away
by air and time. Like the words
on this page, slides are silent.
It is the remembering mind that hears the
Arab children’s cries, crowds ancient alleys
with movement and the pungent smell
of sesame oil, calls back a vacant lot
rank with poppies as red as
spilled blood.
So how may we,
his distant pilgrims, know him real (whose
Garden presence still guards the gnarled,
secret olives)? Faith listens for his story
in the everyday neigh of a donkey,
an explosive obscenity, the threat of
armed soldiers, sweat on any dark skin,
the clink of coins, thorns pricking, metal
clanging on metal, a cloth tearing.

Thanks, Mom and Dad, for the book.

Ours.  Already very cooperative and photogenic.  Obviously, it picked our best genes.

February 14th I visited the muba because of the special science show called tunBasel where the Swiss Nanoscience Institute was showing our Nanosurf STM to interested youth.  (Now, they still have an older version and I think they should upgrade, but that’s another story for another day.)  There was a concurrent bicycle fair called the twoo which I was able to visit with the same pass, so I did and ended up trying out the Streetstrider.  It’s an interesting experience - imagine a wobbly elliptical machine that zips around at high speeds - and I don’t think I fully got the hang of it, but if they have a bike fair near you I’d recommend trying the Streetstrider.  It’s fun and quite a workout, but I doubt it’ll really take off here: the things a tad too wide to be practical, it’s hard to push, and I’d hate to be stuck in tram tracks with that thing, though I suppose if I was at least I wouldn’t fall.

I should have posted this sooner.  I went through quite some trouble to memorize a number of things worth posting, and I may even have written them down, but I’ve lost both the note and the memory.  At least you’ll get a few pictures of the old town of San Sebastian, which in the warmer time of the year is supposed to be humming until late.  I didn’t see much of that, but the location on a scallop-shaped bay and the design of the old town and its alleys made it easy to visualize.I began my evening in a pintxo bar (tapas bar in Spanish).  The word reminds me that I wanted to include three Basque words for you to translate, merely to make the point that Basque doesn’t seem to be related to anything.  Here they are:
Jatetxea
Komunak
Eskerrik asko

The answers will come after the photos.

Kukurruku pintxo bar in Donostia - San Sebastian.

Donostia - San Sebastian: Waterfront with Mt. Urgull barely visible above the town (look for the statue roughly above the four-story building that’s three windows wide).

The Basilica de Santa Maria del Coro at the foot of Mt. Urgull.

Donostia - San Sebastian’s Constitution Square - a former bullring and site of the former town hall.

Another view of the square.

A street in the parte vieja of Donostia - San Sebastian.

The above picture is close to the jatetxea where I had a donostiarra soup and a fine duck confit.  After dinner I used the komunak, then paid the waitress, who said eskerrik asko and bade me good night.

I found out on the taxi drive to the bus terminal that “eskerrik asko” will get you a grin every time.  I also learned that the Basque country is so green because it rains a lot.  Fortunately, I was spared.

Move over, Fiddy.  Too-Turdy-N is here!

1. My Spanish isn’t worth squat. That said, Spain from above seems plenty beautiful to merit learning the language - plains with gullies etched across them, razor-jagged ridges dusted with snow, red earth giving way to lush green.

2. Priority tags in rare instances don’t mean anything. In Philly, they were plain ignored; in Bilbao, it turned out a little differently. I was one of very few passengers waiting for luggage, and since the airport is smaller than the airport in Basel, it takes almost no time to get the baggage to the belt. In a few minutes the belt had emptied, but just to be certain, I waited a little bit, until a Spanish lady buenas tarded up to me and asked if I was waiting for my baggage. I said yes, and she asked me where I had checked in. Switzerland, I replied. Oh, Switzerland must be non-Schengen (”no, we’re Schengen”) or non-EU (”that we are”) and might my baggage be the lone item circling the belt over there past the glass? When I shrugged in an affirmative sort of way, she took me through glass sliding doors and into the other part of the hall. “Your bag is over here because you need to take it through customs,” she said. I picked up my bag, turned around, and found that the “nothing to declare” lane at customs took me right back out the glass doors through which we had come in. Nobody there, nobody to care.

3. Spanair operates like a US airline: everything at cost. Fresh from the lounge and its unhealthy delights, that didn’t bother me much on a 40-minute flight. I also learned that although I thought of saying “I’m a Senator, I don’t pay for food,” I didn’t, or rather, couldn’t.

4. Spanair also flies an old MD-83 on that stretch - not exactly a confidence-builder after their crash last summer in Madrid.

5. The Spanair flight isn’t tightly timed for the bus to San Sebastian. The wait is three-quarters of an hour - but on the bright side, I got to eat a little soft cheese/ham/jam sandwich.

6. San Sebastian must not be a wildly popular destination right now - I’m the only person on the bus. The highway runs along steep valleys, but in the dark I can only see that they are lined with a surprising number of multi-storey buildings and car plants. The topography quite feels like home. Oh, and for those who were wondering why I’m on a one-hour bus ride: the train takes at least twice as long and requires changing in some out-of-the-way town.