22 November 04

Blogging About Place

Cliff swallow nests under the bridgeI was having a conversation this evening with another blogger about why we write about place. It was interesting to rethink this whole question after yesterday’s SketchCrawl.

suspecting chapBlogging is about audience, ultimately, for me, and when you spend a whole day wandering around where you live making sketches of railway crossing warnings and gloves abandoned by the side of the road, of the Tabasco bottle at your breakfast table, of the tall pyrex glass where your Ti Kwan Yin sits steeping, of the people you’re trying to draw surreptitiously but they always KNOW, it’s a different manifestation of this audience thing. Here’s where I live. Here was my day, Sunday November 21, in Davis, California. It was bright but very windy and chilly. We looked for salmon in the creek but didn’t see any. We saw instead the abandoned nests of cliff swallows under the bridge and the floats attached to nylon monofilament line that got caught in the willow, not just any willow but THIS one. We saw the valley oaks and the interior live oaks they planted last year along the road braving the fierce north wind. We saw the sun setting and the high-priority freight train rushing in front of it, eastward.

Train at duskLook, I say. This was here. This was then.

Posted by at 07:38 PM in Nature and Place | Link |
  1. I very much wanted to capture that same wind and sun not far from where you live, Pica, and on the same day, too, when I tried to write about the rowing race at the Port of Sacramento. I didn’t take my camera on purpose, because I wanted to look, really look. And then, although I looked, I suppose, my motherly pride, or whatever, got in the way of my seeing … and I didn’t have the words left to describe that world without looking at it from that particular angle.

    Thanks for this post!

    — maria    22. November 2004, 20:17    Link

  2. Beautiful. Your attempt to site yourself in place and time makes me wonder what it would mean for a placeblogger to emphasize WHERE over WHEN. The world is full of timebloggers, after all—everyone poking away at that old harlot, history … Is placeblogging necessarily a little time-resistant? Not just about ephemera but about those that speak across a large expanse of time? Nothing you describe, after all, places this post in 2004 rather than any of 50 years earlier or (we hope) later.

    This may be why it’s harder to blog out of a city … Though certainly possible if I squint.

    Peace, J

    — Jarrett    23. November 2004, 15:06    Link
  3. I found your site through Floyd’s, and was delighted to find another sketchcrawl participant. You may find, as I have, that it brings you into even closer communion with your world. There’s something extraordinary that happens when you meditate on a face or animal with pencil in hand.

    — Karen Winters    25. November 2004, 06:12    Link

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