micro-cross-blogging: barely verbal

Maybe it's a nano-addiction that will pass, but I've spent a fair amount of time lately on my tumblr Village Dog. Mostly, I just post pictures there. Here are a few very short bits of writing I've done over yonder (linking to them here because, quaint as it may seem, I think of this as a my writing outpost):

• On writer's block (appropriately enough) - inspired by the abstract collages (example below) of Hawaii-born, Chicago-based artist Ray Yoshida, 1930-2009.
  
  
• On the uncanny liveness of artificial animals in visual art - one on a leopard, one on a giraffe.
  
  
• And conversely, on the "caught-ness" of real animals on google street view photography, an interesting emerging subgenre.
  
  
• An explanatory note on "totem animals," a part-serious, part-fluffy series of animal avatars 

And finally:

• Barely verbal, an image-essay on pictograms, miniatures, and representing the unrepresentable in the post-Katrina world of New Orleans artist Bruce Davenport, Jr.