Haunting specificity. It took awhile to figure out who writes the blog called 'if' ... but I noticed that the author, Raymon Montalbetti, linked to a post of mine and so I wandered around the site. The posts are often a combination of a quotation or two, with links, and a very brief, fragmentary, and suggestive few phrases about what the writer makes of the quoted material. See, for example, this recent post, which includes a quotation from the Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan, Louise Halfe:

Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Poet Laureate Saskatchewan

"'Generally, their eyeballs roll up in the air when I say I'm a poet, I write poetry," said Halfe. "I keep hooking them by telling them poetry is a short form of story-telling. "I tell them it's about the recovery of people from the impact of colonization, and it's done in story form. "What I have found with my interaction with the public is they find themselves in those stories.'"( The StarPhoenix | Getting the word out New poet laureate ready to offer unique form of communication)

Then there is a link to another post by the poet followed by this brief "note":

:: note :: . . . a courageous decision . . . a paradoxical voice . . . small, simple, hugely haunting in specificity, touching the universal . . .

I've never seen posts quite like this, but that's not the whole reason I mention the site. I like the theme of this post especially, for isn't that final phrase a recipe (difficult to live up to, nonetheless) for good writing and good blogging: we take on a subject matter, we honor it by attending to it as closely as we can, we describe it with all the specificity we can muster in our writing, and we hope that in evoking its particulars we are touching upon the ways it participates in the universal. In doing so we start to make our writing about bigger themes: freedom, community, creativity. [1 & P]