For those who blog: if your blog isn’t eponymous, how did you come up with its name? And for that small number of you whose blog, like mine, simply carries your name, what title would you pick if you had to change?
I’d call this blog “The Permanent Bottleneck of His Highmindedness” (or just “Permanent Bottleneck”), after the wonderful Louis Macneice poem that seems to fit me all too well.
mine’s subtitled ‘An exercise in benign narcissism’ just to acknowledge that pretty much all I write about is me, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing… :o)
Sx
My best friend and I blog together at Our Descent Into Madness. Just around the time the blog started up, I’d finished a sort of semi-autobiographical novella or fictionalized memoir about my friend and I and our other friends. It ended up being called “We Are Always Inside Our Skin,” but the earlier, more accurate and descriptive title was “Our Descent Into Madness.” Since that name was already floating around our collective mindspace, we snatched it for the blog.
I call my blog “Attempts”; here’s a shortened version of the post in which I explained why:
For me, the best of the blogophsere approaches the literary form of the essay. When I sat down to start a blog, I used the title that I had, for many years, thought I would use if I were ever fortunate enough to publish a book of essays: why save the title for a hypothetical volume when I was about to put real worlds in a genuine (if virtual) public place? So I called it “Attempts”.
Why Attempts? Because Montaigne — the first, and some claim still the greatest, essayist — called his works essais: a French word meaning “attempts” or “tries”.*** (We still have this verbal meaning for the word “essay” — one can ‘essay’ something — but I think it strikes most people as a little archaic.) His essays were meditations on diverse topics; they were deeply personal; but they were, above all, preliminary. Essays in a direction, not the final word on subjects.
And since I speak 21st century English not 16th century French, I call them by a translation of Montaigne’s name for them, in hopes to better recover the spirit with which he bestowed the name.
This is not to say that all my blog posts are up to this standard; I know they’re not. (That is, the standard of being “essays” in the literary sense; I know that none of my essays are up to the standards of Montaigne. I just hope, at my best, to be playing the same game, even if not in the same league) I often use it the way that others use their blog — for link collections or quotes or memes or whatever.
But I think the best of what I write are essays — that is, at any rate, what I consider to be my goal. To make forays into odd patches of personal, intellectual terrain. Those are the ones which I put up in the sidebar as “favorites”. Those are the ones I hope that people will really read. Those are the ones I take to be, not typical, but proto-typical: what I aim for when I’m doing what I really want to be doing.
wanted to get under my parents skin, even though i will never let them know that this blog exists. if i were, the title would be another blow ontop of the fact that i violate their asian code of keeping whatever i think to myself.
My food blog (http://chocolateshavings.ca) is so named because nothing so small and inconsequential as a teaspoon of dark chocolate shavings can transform a dish from a simple dessert to a sumptuous indulgence. I thought it be a good fit for a food blog about the little things that make food worth enjoying.
For a while, I used “The Delay and the Greatness” as my blog’s tag, but I’d picked Brooklynite because it was an appropriate single-word name that nobody’d scooped up yet over on LJ, and eventually the D&G thing faded away.
I sometimes think that I should make my blog title more descriptive — call it Feminist Fatherhood, or something — since I hardly ever write about Brooklyn, and I don’t even live there anymore.
But so far inertia has carried the day.
The Human Wunderkammer
“A giddy craze was sweeping across Europe at the turn of the 17th century. The wealthy and the well-connected were hoarding things - strange things - into obsessive personal collections. Starfish, forked carrots, monkey teeth, alligator skins, phosphorescent minerals, Indian canoes, and unicorn tails were acquired eagerly and indiscriminately. These Cabinets of Wonders - Wunderkammern - mingled fact and legend promiscuously, reflecting European civilization’s dazed and wondering attempts to assimilate the glut of physical data that science and exploration were then unleashing.”
Because I collect stories and facts and opinions like a magpie, with little care of whether they’re real or fantasy, so long as their fascinating.
http://eskarne.livejournal.com
I can’t think of a creative blog title. All of the ones I can think of are pretty lame, so I don’t have a blog title at all. I am just “mermade.” I like “Through the looking glass” because it’s kind of the story of my life (my favorite poem is Mirror by Sylvia Plath — I can recite it all by heart). And that seems to fit. Still, I can’t think of something truly unique. I always had problems coming up with creative headlines when I wrote for my high school’s newspaper. It isn’t my strong point.
Do lj names count too?
Elanor isn’t my real name. When I started searching for the username I remembered that in Lord of the Rings Sam decided to name his daughter after a small, magically beautiful, white flower. I liked very much the way the flower was described in the book & decided to take this name too, not remembering the name itself, btw. So after searching a few websites I found that the name was “elanor” & took it.
My blog is “the windswept land”, translated from the Hebrew phrase “ha’eretz ha’noshevet”, which dates back to Biblical times and denotes agricultural areas, i.e. inhabited places. It was a blanket term for ‘civilization’.
Here Be Society, it says, Or At Least My Definition Thereof.
My manga review blog is “Prospero’s Manga” to get that mix of a literature-oriented POV, focus on manga rather than anime, and just being different.
The personal blog over on LJ doesn’t have a title, it’s just “carlaviii”. But I don’t post a lot, either.
Mine is my name. My tag line is “read my mind” which is simply because that’s what a diary blog is all about.
I have other blogs that are descriptively named: Vegan Soapbox, Ed Miller Fan, and others.
My blog, damnum absque injuria, is named after a legal doctrine that I like on two levels. On the snarky level, I like the idea of a Latin phrase that means, in essence, “too damned bad!” On a non-snarky level, I like the reminder that the law is good for some things, but cannot (and should not try) to right every wrong.
I called my blog Christian Feminist because that’s what I am.
The sign-off tag, “PJ,” dates to a long time ago, however, and isn’t my real name. I suppose I should change it.
I gave Diary of a Freak Magnet a full explanation here.
As a Catholic female priest (now bishop), “Junia’s Daughter” was the perfect title for my blog because it refers to the one female apostle explicitly named as such in Scripture (Romans 16). I explain this, with a couple of relevant links, close to the top of the blog.
no real story behind “reveries & ruminations.” just a moment of alliterative inspiration.
My first name is Sumana and my boyfriend, now husband, once made the offhand line “Cogito, ergo Sumana” in an email to me. I enjoy the reference to the famous Descartes line and the pun. There aren’t many puns that include my name! So there you go.
the seemingly nonsensical name of my blog seems that way because it’s a direct translation from another language. but that’ll all i’ll say about it, because i like for it to remain as nonsensical-seeming as possible :)
My blog name, Profane, is a play on what I am, a ‘Prof-fan’, and what DI intercollegiate athletics has become.
I have renamed my blog several times and am not sure how to find a good sounding name. I like my current blog title pretty well though. It’s inspired by a poem that says, “the authentic is a line..”
My lj blog is named after the nickname of a Japanese band that I like. I started it when I was living in Japan, and the tagline means “I don’t get what you are saying”, in Japanese. It just seemed to fit at the time, and still does. It’s pretty much all private, though.
I’ve been “mother of All.” The taglline was “when you’re to blame for everything, you must be the mother of All.” I was thinking how huge natural disasters get called things like “the mother of all storms.” Also, it’s a name for Biblical Eve in my church, and then there’s the fact I have a lot of kids, including the neighbors kids who come over, it seems.
As my blog started to develop a readership after a few years, I got nervous about even the limited renamed references to my children. Most motherhood blogs are about preschoolers for a reason. When your kids are in Junior High, you don’t want their friends to find you boasting about how badly you keep house. Today, for example, I took the kids kite flying, though there is still food under the kitchen table from last night.
“Yardful of Weeds” because I’m busy with the kids, not keeping up with the laundry, and we’re all playing on the stomped-down weeds in the backyard. Things are growing out of control. And some of the kids are taller than me now. Yet there is a certain beauty to weeds.
There’s also Dis Organized, again reflecting my love/hate obsession with being organized and getting anything done. Perhaps I would be more organized if I didn’t keep disparaging the effort it takes.