Staring Out the Window
Plus an encounter with a snake
Intro
This is Time's Corner, an occasional newsletter by Christian Leithart. I’m co-founder of Little Word and editor of Good Work magazine. By day, I teach make the most of summer break, and by night, I edit this newsletter.
An update on the Good Work fundraiser: Indiegogo took their slice of the pie and left just over $1000. That’s enough for two more issues, which will be delivered to you… sometime! Thanks again to everyone who donated.
Today’s newsletter is about blogs. In the nature of blogs, my observations are a bit scattered. There is a Thursday Question at the very bottom and I’d love to hear your replies.
CONTENT WARNING: In the Dispatch from Broken Bow, I describe an encounter I had with a snake last week. This warning is primarily for my wife: DO NOT READ THIS NEWSLETTER. I’LL SEND YOU A SEPARATE ONE WITHOUT ANY SNAKE CONTENT.
Staring Out the Window
Foster Huntington is a photographer, publisher, and filmmaker who lives in a tree-house in the Columbia River Gorge. His most famous creation is probably the hashtag #vanlife. I discovered his blog A Restless Transplant in the early twenty-tens and faithfully checked it during the lean years when everyone was addicted to Instagram. Post-2020, he briefly revived it before following everyone else to Substack. He’s still writing and shooting photos to share with his modest group of subscribers (4k last I checked).
Foster wasn’t the only one to ditch social media and go back to blogging circa 2020. A lot of long-silent Tumblr and Wordpress websites revived—briefly, before everyone switched to Substack, hoping for coin.
I started blogging during my freshman year of college, along with many of my friends. We wrote what we thought were profound observations about life, mixed with the off-the-wall humor college students find hilarious. Most of those blogs wavered as life got in the way, and I wandered further afield into the blogging world. There were folks who wrote all. the. time, like Rod Dreher (“I have no un-blogged thoughts!”) and others who mostly re-posted content from elsewhere (e.g., Jason Kottke, whose blog is still going and still popular!).
My favorite blogs were (are) those that, even when they were popular, stayed grounded in the real world. Foster Huntington’s blog was intriguing because it was a record of cool things he was doing in real life, not in the closed loop of the internet. He built a house in a tree—and recorded the process. He started a movie studio—and invited you to come along for the ride. He also lives in the Pacific Northwest and often visits places I’m familiar with and wish I could visit again.
My article in the most recent issue of Good Work is about men’s clothing. I wouldn’t know the first thing about men’s clothes if it weren’t for blogs, but the thing that makes style blogs interesting isn’t just information. It’s that they are intrinsically real-world-oriented. Whether you post photos or links, your referent is always a physical object, not an website or a philosophical theory.
Speaking of photos, most of the blogs I like feature copious amounts of photos. Some real-world things photograph well (food, clothes, architecture) and some don’t (music, conversation). Most of the blogs I like fall into the former category. Unless the blogger is an exceptional writer, photos are a key ingredient for me.1
Despite my love of photography, I’ve never been particular enthralled by Instagram. Why not? It checks all the boxes—photos, lifestyle, real-world connection. The difference is that, on Instagram, everyone’s photos are assembled into one, never-ending stream. On a personal blog, you’re following the thoughts and experiences of one person, sometimes over many months or even years. It’s more like reading a diary, a collection of letters, or an artist’s sketchbook. The accumulation of material, no matter how unpolished, gains significance through its sheer volume. In one of his final letters, C. S. Lewis wrote the following sentence, which I find very moving despite how ordinary it is:
Our plums are splendid this year.
Read that in isolation and it doesn’t mean much. Read it on page 1458 of his collected letters and it hits you with the weight of decades.2
It’s only natural to ask, at this point, why *I* don’t blog this way. My blog has existed in various forms since 2009, but it has always been a collection of reading notes, links, and quotes. I don’t post many photos, certainly not of my day-to-day life. (I take them, I just don’t post them.) Why is it that my blog doesn’t look like any of the blogs I like?
For one thing, my life doesn’t involve anything particularly photogenic except my family, and I don’t post photos of them publicly online (with rare exceptions). Writing is my main hobby, and documenting it would be pretty boring. But I think there’s a deeper reason.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved staring out the window. I have many memories of watching landscapes pass from the window of a moving car, of pressing my face against cold glass as snow falls outside. And I’ve always loved watching movies, which are nothing if not windows into fantasy worlds. I think there’s something about blogs as windows into another life that I find appealing. It’s not voyeurism, in the sense that I like being able to see without being seen. The appeal is more artistic: the window (or screen) provides a frame through which a life gains shape.
What a difference a frame makes! To Mr. Smith, gazing inward, the uprights of the painted door seemed to set out the three [young women] like some tableau representing the New World itself, of which his acquaintance to this point totalled forty-seven minutes, and which therefore he could not yet feel to be entirely solid, entirely terra firma as ordinarily founded on its bed of earth; but only to constitute a kind of scene, backed by drops and flats, where you must step forth at your cue to act your part, ready or not, ignorant as yet of the temper of the audience; ignorant of the temper of the other players, which will so much determine the drama you compose together, turn by turn, speech by speech, line by line. […]
~ Francis Spufford, Golden Hill
In this scene from the novel, an ordinary moment in the life of three young women is transformed into a work of art by a simple doorframe. At least, it is to the stranger who has just arrived. To the women, the doorway is ordinary, unremarkable.
Thus Smith, on the one side, gazing in. To the three gazing outward, however, into the dark of the stairwell, where a face had bloomed, and two pale hands clutching paper, he had only appeared in the ordinary aperture of an ordinary day. For them the blue-grey pediment of Connecticut pine faced the everyday world, as it always did, and they were their everyday selves, well launched (it seemed to them) into the middle of their histories, with loves, sorrows, resentments, hopes, all far advanced and long settled already into three familiar fortunes.
The newcomer sees ordinary life through a frame and recognizes its beauty. Those within know too much about the world outside the frame to see the beauty inside its boundaries. Photography, I suppose, is the art of putting a frame around part of the world to isolate it for a moment and thereby highlight its significance.
I find it very difficult to do this. I find that most of my attempts to capture my surroundings (through photos, videos, or writing) fall woefully short. I’m too aware of what lies outside the frame.
To a viewer, though, the frame is the end of the world. And that makes it easier to comprehend.
Dispatch from Broken Bow
Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth. ~ Psalm 104:20
It’s ninety degrees, and I’m in the back yard watching a black rat snake eat a nestful of baby bluebirds.
I noticed the hubbub right after lunch. I saw what I thought was a jay swaying on a branch near where I knew the bluebirds’ nest was built. We’d watched the mother and father bluebird carry bugs and worms to the hole in the hollow trunk of a crepe-myrtle, looking around each time to make sure they were safe before delivering the food. Now, they fluttered and dived around the hole, but whatever was bothering them wasn’t going away. I went outside to offer my assistance.
The bird I’d taken for a blue jay was a mockingbird. There were not one, but two, and not two bluebirds, but three or four. I also saw chickadees, flickrs, a robin. Whatever social crime the mockingbirds had committed was serious indeed. But it was none of my business. I turned to go. Then I saw the slug of black at the foot of the tree.
Snakes are common in Alabama, I’ve heard, but I’ve seen only one in my neighborhood: a beautiful orange rat snake stretched across the road one night. I watched it get run over by two cars—and strike irritably at one—then disappear, unhurt, into a neighbor’s yard.
It’s different seeing the thick black muscle while listening to panic in the branches above you. I grabbed a hefty stick and poked the mass until it disappeared into the weeds. I told myself he’d probably find somewhere less noisy to hunt and went back into the house
I knew he wouldn’t. After about fifteen minutes, I noticed something hanging out of the hole in the tree. I hustled back outside, stick in hand. The snake’s head was completely inside the hole, the rest of its body draped over some branches and bumps on the trunk. It was motionless. Above, the bluebirds squealed like old bicycles. I didn’t want to kill the snake—I wasn’t sure I could kill it without a gun or at least a hatchet—so I poked the stick into a loop of coils. It tightened like a sphincter. I pulled the stick up and out, hooking the snake’s body with the end. I expected it to drop onto the ground, annoyed. I didn’t expect it to hold on. It did, its head stuffed in the hole, the rest of it squeezing the tree. I also didn’t expect its neck to stretch like a gummy worm until it finally lost its grip and its head slipped out. It was in the middle of swallowing a chick tail first. A tiny beak stuck out of its mouth.
The snake was as long as my leg and as big around as an axe handle. It hung calmly from the end of my stick as I walked towards the road. What to do with it? Drop it in the fire ants’ nest on the curb? What would that accomplish? Angry ants, angry snake. Both tortured for no reason. I dropped it in the pine needles under some bushes about twenty yards from the crepe-myrtle.
It finished swallowing the chick, flicked his tongue at me a few times, then very deliberately turned and went back the way we had come. It stood out sharply against the pine needles, as black and shiny as a streak of oil, slipping across the ground as though on ball bearings, in one unbroken movement from where I’d dropped it back to the tree where the nest was.
From then on, I just watch. It creeps up the tree, taking its time like a skilled rock climber. The bluebirds dive-bomb it, but always stop in the air a few feet away, fluttering and screaming. I never knew a bluebird could hover for so long.
Now the snake is locked in, completely still except for a barely perceptible ripple in its throat. I don’t know how many chicks were in the nest to begin with. After about ten minutes, I look out the window again. The snake is gone.
Links
Ages ago, I wrote a fictionalized account of the writing of Galatians. You can read it here.
Fashion shows are universally mocked, and with good reason, but no human designer has come close to the insanity of the latest orca fashion craze: salmon hats.
Upcoming
The Theopolis Ministry Conference is on church music this year. This is the perfect event to fill the Psalm-Tap-shaped hole in your life. (Little Word will also have a table there, so say hello.)
Up To
Reading: Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier. A quick read for those who already agree with her thesis.
Watching: Yesterday the kids and I watched Sherlock Jr., a Buster Keaton film more than a hundred years old. They were enthralled.
Listening: The Anubis Gates on audio. Tim Powers comes highly recommended by a colleague of mine.
Eating: I thought I hated coconut—probably because I used coconut-scented shampoo for most of my childhood—but a coconut popsicle is perfect for a hot Alabama evening.
Thursday Question
Thursday’s issue will be devoted to your replies to this question:
What is a blog you enjoy reading? (And what do you like about it?)
About
I’m Christian Leithart, a writer and teacher living in Birmingham, Alabama. I’m not active on social media, but you can read my blog here. Use the button below to share this issue of Time’s Corner, if you so desire. Thanks much for reading.
Long-time readers know how much I enjoy Alan Jacobs’ blog, which isn’t about food, clothes, travel, or photography. I think the attraction of his blog is the fact that he is an extremely broad and careful reader. He finds perpendicular lines where most people see only parallels. Also, he is far more likely to cite books, documentaries, and letters than other websites, so his blog has that connection to the real world.
A great example of this is the blog of John Wells, an off-grid Texas homesteader who blogged at The Field Lab. John posted every day, recording the temperature, rainfall, and wind conditions. His most popular post was an underwater GoPro video of various animals drinking from a bucket. In December of 2023, he posted that his pancreatic cancer was inoperable and he was going to Alpine for hospice care. Just like that, the posts stopped.
I loved your staring out the window thoughts. I thank you for the "content" warning about the snake. I wish Alabama wasn't so many hours from South Dakota, or we'd pop on by for a coconut popsicle!