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Showing posts with label The Uncarved Block. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Uncarved Block. Show all posts

I find blogging very unsatisfying. It is the lack of feedback that bothers me. That, and the fact that several of my favorite past posts are rarely read. Blogger does give me feedback in the form of statistics – I can see how many hits a post has had over various time frames. I can see what parts of the world the hits came from. I can see if the hits came from a web search, or Facebook, and so on. But I can’t tell what the reader thought of the posting. Heck, I don’t know if they read it – perhaps they were searching for something, found my post which matched their keywords but wasn’t what they needed, and moved on after barely a glance. I don’t even know if the hits on the posts came from real people; they might be web crawlers indexing or scraping my pages.

When I write a new post, I tweet it and post it to my Facebook page. Sometimes friends will re-tweet or share about my post. For the next day or two readership of my blog goes way up – but only for that posting. If it contains keywords that are relatively rare online, but which people do search for (e.g. “Sparklets Soda Syphon”, or “Salmon Poisoning Disease”), then after a few days or weeks the post will begin getting hits from web searches. My postings about repairing an antique soda syphon and Kero getting salmon poisoning disease each receive fairly consistent views over time. Others, such as my thoughts on the death of Rodney King, are ignored; possibly because no one cares about Rodney King, or, more likely, because other more authoritative web pages are shown in search engines before mine.

But again, the data I get from Blogger has no meat to it. Did the people who read the pages like them? I get about one comment for every 1000 page views. The number of “likes” is closer to one in 5000 views. And it is fairly clear that when someone reads one of my posts, they rarely go on to read others. People read something that they found on Facebook or via a search, then leave. When I post about a new blog on Facebook, my friends will click “like” or comment – on Facebook! Not on the blog. I complain at them – “Hey! Comment on the blog itself, will ya?” I find it disheartening.

There is endless advice online (and from friends) about how to develop a following for a blog. Write on a narrow topic; blog frequently and consistently; and so forth. The problem is that I am caught in a Catch-22. I don’t get feedback on my blog, so I find it unsatisfying, so I don’t post consistently, so I don’t develop a readership, so I don’t get feedback.

This morning I had the experience of being a blog reader doing exactly what I don’t want my friends to do. A friend shared a link on Facebook. I read it and thought it was great. I “liked” my friend’s post on Facebook (he wasn’t the author of the blog.) I re-shared the link on Facebook. I even emailed it to a number of people. Then I went on with my day. Let me repeat that – then I went on with my day. I didn’t give the original author any feedback. She doesn’t know if I liked it or not. I didn’t look at any of her other postings to see if there was anything I might like as much (or more.) I behaved in exactly the way that I don’t want people to behave when they read my blog.

A half an hour later I realized what I had done. I went back to her blog and posted my comments there, and I’ve added this blog to my to-be-read list. Maybe I just need to have more faith that people are reading my postings and finding them useful or entertaining. We shall see.



This is my 100th posting on The Uncarved Block. Woo hoo!

I wrote my first post on June 27, 2008. At about that time I saw an article that said that the average blog was read by six people and was maintained for three months. I don’t know if that is still true (and I don’t really know if it was true at the time.) Regardless, it feels good to have gone well beyond those anemic numbers.

On the other hand, four and a half years to post 100 entries is hardly a raging torrent of prose. For a blog like The Daily Kos, 100 postings is barely a flicker. But I feel like this is a moment worthy of my notice and appropriate for reflection. I’m not sure why, but over the years I have gone through periods where I felt like I had a lot to say – a lot to write – and that I wanted to put it out in public. But then there were other times when I would go for days, weeks, or even months without writing a word. Friends tell me that this inconsistency is deadly for a blog; people only want to subscribe to something that they can read every day like the newspaper, or at the worst, once a week like a TV show.

One of the hardest things about continuing to write is the lack of feedback. I’m able to get reports of the number of visitors to the blog and its various posts. I find these statistics confusing at best. Let’s say this week there were 500 page views, 250 visitors, and 200 unique visitors. Hmmmmmm. What do those numbers really tell me? Of all those views and visitors, none left a trace – not a comment, not a “like” on Facebook, not a Google+, not a tweet. Did these visitors enjoy what they read? Was it valuable to them? Did they even read it, or did they find the post through a search engine only to discover that it wasn't what they wanted, then leave within seconds to search for something else?

I wish people would give me some kind of feedback, some crumb or clue, even if it is negative. I think I would be happier getting comments like “why are you wasting your time on this crap” than facing the current state of silence. I find it disconcerting that a post like Repairing an Antique Soda Siphon can get 4000 hits but only three comments. The other 3997 readers had nothing to say? Ah, well. I am fairly sure that most people that get to a posting on this blog arrived there through a search engine. They search for something like “Sparklets soda siphon,” which takes them to that post. Even if it is the material that they wanted, they don’t stick around. They wanted to find out about Sparlets soda siphons, got the information they were looking for, and left. They aren't inspired to see what I have to say about seed cleaning, or Rodney King, or dogs having Buddha nature.

I had some excellent feedback from a good friend about the blog as a whole. He said that I cover too diverse a set of ideas and suggested that I make it much more focused. He said it should be about food, gardening, and my dog - and nothing else. He is quite right. Such a blog could generate a following, a readership, possibly even a dialogue. But it’s not really what I want to write. I want to write about whatever interests me at the time. So I have to choose. Do I write what I want to write and not get the response I desire, or do I try to get the response that I want without the opportunity to ramble. Sigh.

My second post, way back in June of '08, was entitled “Graffiti”. In it I pondered the question of why I was writing this blog at all. Ninety eight posts later I still don’t have an answer. I’ll check in again at post 200 to tell you what I've found.



P'u, often translated as "the uncarved block," is a Taoist idea of simpleness. It refers, in a sense, to the calm, still, empty mind, unfettered by the judgments that come along with knowledge. The uncarved block has not yet been carved. It can become anything. There are no lines, cuts, or grooves, to guide or inhibit the carver’s hand. P’u isn't something I am – it is more like a state I aspire to and occasionally obtain. If I had been P'u when making my first batch of bacon (see http://andrewsigal.blogspot.com/2011/02/bacon.html,) I wouldn't have screwed up Alton Brown's bacon brine recipe. Without the existence of vinegar in my mind, I would not have been able to mix up "cider" and "cider vinegar."

But I do like to ask naïve questions. My whole entrée into the field of culinary history was based on a set of naïve questions I asked myself several years ago while traveling. First I asked, "why aren’t Chinese food and Mexican food the same?" By which I meant: Chinese people and Mexican people are each Homo Sapiens. They have approximately the same taste buds. They have approximately the same digestive systems. They have aproximately the same nutritional needs. Why would they eat different things? My next questions were: "Are chimichangas and eggs roll the same things?" Then, “are pierogi and calzones the same things?" And what about Chinese hum bao? Does the idea of wrapping meats and vegetables in dough travel with the dough, or does it arise independently in each place where dough is invented?

A decade later the #1 thing I have learned is the naïveté of those questions. "Chinese food" isn't one thing. Neither is Mexican food. Furthermore, all of these questions ignore the time element: one must not ask merely "which ‘Chinese food,’” but also “at what time in history?" When looking at Mexican food, are we considering food of one region or another? Are we talking about pre- or post-Columbian cuisine? How about cuisine from before or after the Mexican-American war and the annexation of Texas? And so on. Worse yet, a chimichanga (probably) isn’t even a Mexican dish – it is generally thought to have originated in Arizona in the second half of the 20th century. The “egg roll” that I had in mind when I asked my question is also an Americanized food. It has its roots in a variety of Asian wrapped rolls, but it is not Chinese per se. When I asked "is a chimichanga and an egg roll the same thing," I intended to ask a question about the relationship between Mexican and Chinese cuisines. Instead, it turned out that I was asking a question about how Americans have adopted, co-opted, and modified immigrant cuisines and ingredients.

So these questions were in a sense the "wrong" questions. On the other hand, they sprang from a simplicity, from a state of P’u, that allowed me to wonder about such things and started me down a very interesting road. Had I already been aware of the errors underlying the questions themselves, I might never have been inspired to start trying to find the answers, and more importantly to find the right questions.

So here's to P’u, and Pooh too! [With special thanks to Benjamin Hoff.]