The hell with metrosexuals

I used to have a link to Dervala and I removed it because it seemed never to be updated. She’s back. Mainly this falls in the blogs-of-place category (Irish-born and widely travelled, she’s now in Brooklyn), but there’s a recent funny post on her take on men’s magazines and the recent “insecurity industry” forms that focus on “aging, crunching, balding, pumping, dieting, impotence, Botox-shopping, and how to make women call you”:

I liked men better before they got neurotic about this stuff. Here’s my prescription to add to those 176 pages: Read books. Chop wood. Run. Self-deprecate. Spell well. Tip well. Cook like you mean it. Adore us. Forget the rest, and never, EVER mention fat grams or protein diets.

Well said!

12:21:32 PM      trackback [] 

Falling down a rabbit hole

The author of the Maps and Territories blog also has Parking Lot, which is interesting in itself. But his latest post sent me down the rabbit hole that is Research on Place and Space, a “set of resources [that] draws together work from a variety of disciplines on the concept(s) of place and space.”

Earlier this week, Alicia had an interesting post at Twilight Café on the “third place” – the one after home and workplace, where you meet up with your friends and community. I thought I might find something relevant to third place on the place & space site. It might be there, but I found myself in perhaps a fourth place – the place of imagination and the creative and exploring mind.

There’s an endless supply of brain food in the various links, but one link I found fascinating is Imaginary Countries, which has snippets of writing on places, real and imagined. There’s also A Sense of Place, which asks “How does an artist create a sense of place?” This got me thinking about "How does a writer create a sense of place?"

Besides literature, one place to look would be in blogs of place, which focus on writing about particular places – there are several here. Ecotone is a wiki that is “intended as a portal for those who are interested in learning and writing about place.” (I’ve never used wikis and the concept is a bit confusing to me, but Ecotone offers some help and links. A wiki is “a website where anybody can go edit and add material, and create their own pages in the site.”)

So check out place & space! And don’t forget to leave crumbs behind to find your way out again (but I think I’m confusing my fairy tales here).

11:44:28 AM      trackback []