After six years with Blogger, I'm having serious technical problems and I'm no techie. Perhaps Blogger bogs down after several years of use?
I've decided to move View from Federal Twist to WordPress.
I'll provide a new address within the next few weeks. Meanwhile, posts will continue here, and the old blog will remain accessible.
Now, a poem on imaginary gardens with real toads in them:
Poetry
I, too, dislike
it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it,
however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it after all, a
place for the genuine.
Hands that
can grasp, eyes
that can
dilate, hair that can rise
if it must,
these things are important not because a
high-sounding
interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful. When
they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same
thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not
admire what
we cannot
understand: the bat
holding
on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants
pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the
immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan,
the statistician --
nor is it
valid
to
discriminate against 'business documents and school-books';
all these
phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when
dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till
the poets among us can be
'literalists
of the imagination'-- above
insolence
and triviality and can present
for inspection,
'imaginary gardens with real toads in them,' shall we have
it. In the
meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw
material of poetry in
all its
rawness and
that which is
on the other hand
genuine,
you are interested in poetry.
- Marianne Moore
I'm on wordpress and love it. I know others have transferred and I think it takes a day or two.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment about my 5th blogaversay. I think you are right we should have an oldies group - maybe we should have a special badge!!
Transferring old posts, especially with many photos as I have, seems to take a great deal of time, so I'm transferring very few. And the comments are lost, which in many cases I value more than the posts. But so it goes. Having that backlog of almost 400 posts makes it hard to move to a new platform, but life goes on.
DeleteArchive, not backlog!
DeleteThanks for posting the Marianne Moore poem. And Wallace Stevens' Anecdote of the Jar. Great poetry helps me see my garden with clearer eyes. Is this true for you too?
ReplyDeleteI think I'd approach it in a different way. For me, gardenmaking is something like poetry. I'm not at all sure how to express it, but they both tug at some deep inner "organ of feeling." Your question elicits some unease because I'm not at present able to articulate a clear answer.
DeleteSeems to me that easy answers are just that -- easy. Clear isn't easy. Personally I like uneasiness and uncertainly. they make me question my own assumptions.
DeleteI've just read the post about burning, with photos of the new pool. I like the straight edging very much and look forward to seeing the progress.
Do you ever speak to gardening groups?
I agree. Clear isn't easy. I'm much happier with the straight edging, but I still have some changes to make. The gravel needs to be leveled, and that may require addition of a step back to the entry from the house to drop the level and allow the pool area to be completely flat. I also want to stain (perhaps) the pool coping to get a color closer to the native stone. I'm sure other things too. Yes. I've spoken to gardening groups.
DeleteI don't envy your task, to be sure! It seems like Blogger just starts to act up every few months, doesn't it...good luck with the transfer!
ReplyDeleteIt appears that some Internet database has identified my blog as spammy. I can't post anything from it to facebook, and I don't know what other problems it may be causing. Facebook won't help, Blogger won't help, so I have to move. No way can I move close to 400 posts, so it's kind of like starting again.
ReplyDeleteIf you are moving to a self-hosted wordpress site, you can move everything, including subscribers, comments, etc., and it doesn't take forever either. Sadly it doesn't work if you are moving to wordpress.com...
ReplyDeleteI'm hosting it on GoDaddy. Not sure whether that's "self-hosting" or not. I paid for GoDaddy to host it because they take care of my domain name.
DeleteYep, that's "self-hosted", but if you have a pro setting up your site for you already, they will know how to do this if you want it done. There are lots of guides out there, but they tend to be written by geeks for geeks... Good luck!
Delete