Well Mannered Frivolity

fancake's theme for July is Unreliable Narrator! This round is dedicated to all the cats out there claiming they haven't been fed. It's a good story, but we know the truth.

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

Folks may have noticed that the site has been slow for logged-out users over the last while. This is partly because we separate traffic by logged-in, "logged out but have visited the site before", and "logged out, never visited the site before" and assign the fewest resources to the last category (because we're pretty confident the overwhelming majority of it is bot and scraper traffic, even if it's often impossible to say for sure). The flood of garbage traffic is a plague and a scourge the entire internet is dealing with, and it's hitting small sites the hardest as operators get better and better at cloaking their requests to look like real, authentic use. We long ago hit the point where adding more resources is a possible solution (because they just eat them up as soon as we do), and splitting traffic lets us keep the site usable for our actual users without wasting too much server power on garbage.

We've now, lucky us, reached the point where the "logged out, have never visited the site before" path is just flooded all the time, and the "logged out but have visited the site before" path is suffering some of the overflow. We've made some changes to the routing to try to improve things for logged out users who have visited the site before and keep it at "it may be a little bit slow, but at least it works" instead of "it keeps timing out", and we've seen some improvements, but if you're accustomed to browsing the site while logged out, I'm really sorry but it may continue to be a little miserable.

You will get the fastest page loads and the best performance by browsing the site logged in. If you are having trouble loading the front page to log in, bookmark the direct login page. We can't route the front page to the "more power" server pool, because it's a common target for garbage traffic, but we've switched /login over to "more power" and we'll try to keep it there as long as we can unless it starts getting slammed, too.

How else to rate a greatest hits album but that it contains all your favorite hits? Of course Ask Me, my favorite Stafford poem, is here. (The icon on this post takes its keywords from it: "hold the stillness exactly before us.") As is At the Bomb Testing Site, because I am a simple person, and I cannot resist the image of that lizard, its elbows tense, as it waits on the desert sands, and, yes, also the anti-war message.

Stafford's anti-war sentiments pop up frequently in his poetry, at times making him sound almost naive, but as a conscientious objector he spent four years in the Civilian Public Service during World War II, fighting forest fires, building and maintaining trails and roads, halting soil erosion, and still getting up early every morning so he could write. There is nothing naive about him.

Stafford's voice is consistent, steady, warm. Family, nature, the homestead, all of these things repeatedly show up in his work, and his poetry often feels haunted, by loss and injustice, but in such a delicate way that these things are often only hinted at in oblique melancholy—a son a lost kite, the father left holding the empty string in Father and Son—and many of these I finished reading and felt compelled to go right back to the beginning and read them again. I am curious about the poems that seem to be from a Native American perspective, and those that seem to belong to the pioneers; there's something to get into there, but mainly I'm drawn to his more transparent work, and the way he can lay the natural world on top of the human world and make a statement about both. Here's a poem about a mole:


Starting with Little Things

Love the earth like a mole,
fur-near. Nearsighted,
hold close the clods,
their fine-print headlines.
Pat them with soft hands—

But spades, but pink and loving: they
break rock, nudge giants aside,
affable plow.
Fields are to touch:
each day nuzzle your way.

Tomorrow the world.


Some others I enjoyed from this collection: These Mornings; Ceremony; The Fish Counter at Bonneville; Malheur before Dawn (ed: yes, that Malheur); Climbing Along the River; Any Morning.

( Status Updates from Goodreads )