Titles and Footer

Older Males Attract More Females but Get Fewer Matings in a Wild Field Cricket.

That’s a title from an essay in a journal called Animal Behavior . Let me explain:

I’ve been reading Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby  and along the bottom of the book, in a running footer, is an essay that starts with: Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds.

This title is from a scientific report which she describes this way: “… the sentence reads like a ballad of one line or a history compressed down to its barest essentials."

Something about the idea of a compressed history is interesting to me, as is the form... an essay strung out across the bottom of 251 pages.

In an interview with Harper’s,  Solnit says more about the footer essay: “I wanted to call attention to the fact that the codex, the bound book, is an architectural space through which we literally travel with hands and eyes, and that to read a book of this length is quite a journey.”

For the December/January writing provocation, take a title from a journal - while Solnit used Animal Behavior , Advances in Space Research , International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science , and Emotion, Space and Society  might work, but any will do - and use it as a title for a response. The response could be an elaboration on the headline, a metaphor for an entirely different story, a song lyric, a short history of an event, etc.

And / or perhaps the form of the response is architectural, responding to the design of the page or book; perhaps it is an annotation, or maybe you will choose to gather many titles and use them together some "other" way.

Here are a few more examples of scientific report titles:

• Miniature Spiders (With Miniature Brains) Forget Sooner
• Acceptability of Beer Produced with Dandelion, Nettle, and Sage
• Field Line Random Walk
• Porous Skin: Breathing Through the Prism of the Holey Body