katecous

What is a Snail’s Fury?

I decided recently to update this terribly neglected and underused website with more of my creative endeavors, with the vague thought that perhaps collecting my disparate projects together might display some kind of direction and progress and inspire future efforts.

While I was refreshing the site’s design, WordPress asked me if I would like to add a logo. In a fit of whimsy, I grabbed one of my favorite drawings, spent a bit of time removing the background to convert it into a PNG, and- TA DA- made my personal logo, my “brand,” a snail.

In the interests of retroactively justifying this impulsive decision, I present you with the following poem.

Considering the Snail

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,
pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later
I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.
Thom Gunn, “Considering the Snail” from Selected Poems.

Some humor on the topic of SEO spam

I found this amusing. Even reputable companies have been caught out by unscrupulous “black hat” backlinking services which promise quick delivery of thousands of incoming links. Unfortunately, this is the result—spammy solicitations and low-quality, often computer-generated verbiage detracting from everyone’s experience of the Internet.

In SEO, as in most things, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. The “secret” to SEO is no secret at all: produce high quality content that people will want to read, and get it out where your target audience will see it. A reputable SEO service can help you create a strategy, identify resources, and tailor your content more effectively, but be wary of anyone who promises you instant front page ranking!

Quirks of Ontology

What happens when you have unexamined assumptions about the correlation of language/classification with reality. From Michael O’Flynn:

… the Late Modern expects scientific tracts to lurk within ancient texts. In a word, they lack an appreciation for empirical fact as regards linguistics, translation, and literary criticism and prefer high-flown theories based on wild assumptions about primordial goat-herders.

But we digress.
We should point out that just as fugols are not birds, water is notH2O. …

Read the whole thing. It will have you looking at water–and language–just a little differently today.