Holiday reading: Jon Swift memorial

One of the meanings of Italian "batocchio": The thing you use to whack your Tibetan therapeutic singing bowl, in black chamois and wood, with wooden bowl, €49.90 from macrolibrarsi.

Oh, hell, the gang's all here! OG blogger Batocchio has mounted the annual Jon Swift Roundup for 2025, honoring the late Jon Swift/Al Weiser and the ghosts of blogs past and blogs present and Blogmas yet to come, and the blogiverse itself, such as it is gathering the bloggers' best posts of the year, in the bloggers' opinion (and we're nothing if not opinionated!). So pay it a visit!

Blogfeast

Supermercado Batocchio, in Resistencia, Argentina.

 

Batocchio's annual Jon Swift Roundup (the Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves) is up.

Jon Swift Memorial

 

Commedia dell'arte cover art, 1920s. Via MareMagnum.

Happy Boxing Day and good Kwanzaa! I may be back with something later, but in the meantime there's probably something terrific from this year that you haven't read yet in the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup for 2022 of blogposts chosen by the bloggers, created by the great blogger Jon Swift/Al Weisel and curated since his untimely death by Batocchio. 

Swift and Certain

Every year around this time I run a photo representing one of the many meanings of the Italian word batocchio in honor of the host of the Jon Swift Memorial Blog Roundup, and this one is the best ever, a kind of deep-fried pizza from the restaurant Isabella de Cham in Naples (the batocchio Nonno Peppe, in this case, named for somebody's Grandpa Joe, apparently no longer on the menu; there's a batocchio Donna Isabella that comes with arugula, provola and caciocavallo cheeses. lemon zest, pepper, and basil, or a batocchio completo, with tomatoes, cicoli—pressed and dried leftovers from the lard-rendering process—and ricotta, pepper, and basil). Oh, and the annual Jon Swift Memorial collection of the year's favorite blogposts, as chosen by the bloggers ourselves, is up tonight. Happy reading!

 Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

#JonSwift2020

Feast!

 

At Batocchio's Vagabond Scholar site, it's the annual Jon Swift Roundup of the year's best blog posts, chosen by the bloggers themselves, including of course yours truly, and commemorating the life of the great and good Al Weisel, known as Jon Swift, one of the founding figures of the genre. Go have a look!

A Clickable Feast

Batocchio in the sense of door knocker, Faenza. Photo by Claudio Trapano/Flickr.

The Jon Swift Memorial Roundup of the year's best blogposts (in the partial view of their authors) is up at Batocchio's place.

Jon Swift Roundup

Batocchio piccolo rosso, a Venetian carnival mask for a pretty small face, via Maskworld.

For in those days it is written that the late and great journalist Al Weisel, who used to blog snark as Modest Jon Swift, did wish to encourage the humble bloggers throughout the land and even outside of it and to make their work known far and wide, and each year somewhat after the winter solstice did assemble a metapost to which every blogger no matter how small might link her or his favorite post of the year, which tradition is maintained and curated by our friend Batocchio, this year's edition of the Jon Swift Roundup #jonswift2018 is online, and if you want something to read there's tons of great stuff from many friends old and new, funny, thoughtful, sweet, and terrifying as your mood requires.