What is writing? I’ve been pulling maintenance on the blog. Too many categories clutter the recipe. Is blogging writing? Not if the blog is photographs only. Then again, notice “graph” in the word photograph. In a photo, we are doodling with light. Is turning wrenches blogging?
What is coding? I was also working on trying to code. Options may work differently depending on blog template, but clicking on the three vertical ellipsis dots next to the Publish button in the upper right corner of my post draft reveals a drop-down menu that includes, under EDITOR, both Visual and Code editor options. Coding is editing that results in how what you say looks.
I experimented enough to resolve not to mess with coding. For one thing, results are seldom what you saw is what you got. Format often changes depending on user device but also depending on WordPress built-in preferences – in the Reader alone there are several view options, and they often seem to apply the code differently. Sometimes the magic works; sometimes it doesn’t.
I was interested in making letters joggle and words dance, slip and slide up and down the page, dressed in wild and varied colors, and of varying size and shapes. Not gonna happen. There are wheels within wheels, codes within codes, and editors, supervisors, and principals insisting on consistent behavior.
I abandoned my brief foray into coding and set to work on the maintenance of categories and tags. Did you know WordPress limits attention per post the total of Tags plus Categories to 15? If you go over 15, the post won’t appear in tag searches. That I did not know. And major service maintenance required if you want to find those posts over 15 and whittle them down under the limbo bar. Not absolutely necessary to know or act on, but the mechanic in me wants to know how things work and how to handle the tools.
Or is it all a distraction from writing? What category to assign this? How to tag it? I’m often not sure. Meantime, under the heading of pulling maintenance on the blog, I added a Tag Cloud and a Category drop down menu to the bottom footer. And I added back the subtitle to the blog: A Literary Notebook – Since 2007. How had it come unattached? Probably my mettlesome mechanic meandering.
Writing is distraction. From what?
“Must we wring the neck of a certain system in order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole, or modify the dimensions of that pigeon-hole for the satisfaction of the analogymongers? Literary criticism is not book-keeping.”1
As for jiggling letters and dancing words, we shouldn’t rely on code:
“When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep. (See the end of ‘Anna Livia‘) When the sense is dancing, the words dance.”2
Samuel Beckett, “James Joyce / Finnegans Wake,” first published in 1929 by Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 1939 by New Directions, and as New Directions Paper book 331 in 1972 (pages 3-4). ↩︎
Sketches from the edges of notebooks, nine images under a thematic title.
This week’s theme, cafes, is taken from Hemingway’s short story titled “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which two waiters, one younger and complaining, the other older and empathetic, wait to go home while a lone customer, an old man, lingers on, drinking.
Click anywhere in the gallery for scroll and captions.
The drawings are done using a simple android pre-installed phone application. The number of colors is limited and the colors can’t be mixed: red, yellow, orange, blue, green, purple, black, and grey. White can be achieved by leaving an area blank or using the eraser. Some variation in color and shading can be achieved using the gallery editor. The cartoons are drawn using fingers and thumbs and a disc stylus touch screen device pen. The font sizes are limited to four dots, each about twice as big as another beginning with a small dot like a period. See more drawings and cartoons on the Comics page. Also on Instagram.
The Coming of the Toads 