Trying to reconstruct notes from the Blogging Conference without the notes which froze on on my Pocket PC and disappeared when I did a soft reset...

My interests are in audio and video blogging, more to add the speaking and dancing of my poetry to the text than to portray my daily life in a running narrative.

As the only speaker I heard all day that referred to artists, his name? famous, I'm sure, though gone in my absent notes, whether he cares about artists or not was obfuscated in his talk, but he spoke about a very wealthy American man who does: Brewster Kahle, the founder of the presitgious Internet Archive, and the force behind the scanning of millions of books to become available to the public (Google is involved in this project too, I believe, but don't quote me!). Brewster Kahle has decided that artists don't have much money. Understatement!

So he is funding a site where filmakers, artists, videographers, musicians, poets, etc., will be able to post their work, and where it will be archived.

One of the problems is the cost of bandwidth and space. Audio and video files take up a lot of space. For the creative artist, space on this site will be free.

This site, and please correct me if I've got it wrong, is Open Media, the Global Home for Grassroots Media. The site should be fully operational later this year.

Another site recommended was Creative Commons. Here you can get your multi-media work published. Check it out.

I gotta run...

Wish I had them damn notes, she says, disappearing over the bandwidth (you know, the place where the sun rises and sets on the internet)...

What is the blogosphere? It's 31 million bloggers world-wide. That's alot of writing. That's a movement. That's a social force. That's an upholder of literacy. And we thought the written word was going to die with the ushering in of the audio-video age. Were we wrong!

Audio and video blogging are coming, though. And then we could expect a total explosion in the medium.

We live in an era of self-expression. And we create our own reality shows out of our own lives with no producers or television studios to oversee us. How money can be made out of us is another question.

There was one man at the blogging conference who makes a living from his blog. His name is Chris Pirillo. Today I finally gave in and went to his site. His writing is good, but simple - nothing too complex there. And there are GoogleAds, which is where he makes the major portion of his income. The more hits he gets, the larger his monthly paycheck. What I noticed most prominently, however, is that his site, to my untrained tastes, resembled a General Store. Many links, many products advertised, with him as the genteel owner behind the counter with whom you chat a bit, only, in this blogland, it's mostly him who does the chatting, for he gets few comments. But that's okay. His site has 12,000 visits a month and generates enough income for him to travel all over North America to conferences like the one he spoke at last Saturday in Vancouver.

In fact, most of the folks there, the presenters, seemed more focussed on numbers and income than they did on the quality of writing. One lone voice in the audience asked a question about the artist who blogs, and it wasn't answered with much sensitivity or depth.

Why I want to podcast (audioblog) is so that I can offer readings of my written poems. Why I want to videoblog is not so that I can bore you with tales of my life in poor light but because I would like to offer dance pieces where I perform my poetry.

Though blogging is a medium of disappearing posts, writing our lives disappears as quickly as we live them, I take my writing seriously, as most of us do, and my blog is where I experiment with different ways to write and post my efforts and receive invaluable feedback.

Blogging is one area in my life where I can creatively realize myself. It's also a place where I can offer support to other writers, and thus help them to foster the expression of their creativity too. What blogging has done for my writing is immense; but it's not just the writing and posting, it's the comments, the support of fellow writers, the community.

Which is why I love Xanga. In a sense, Xanga has created its own 'mini feed' in our subscriptions to each other; and by making commenting a 'members only' activity, fosters the possibility of a strong community of writers, I feel. For this I am grateful.

Yet I also feel a pull to be part of the larger blogging community. At my blogger site I went 'public' last night - it had been a private site. I added a site meter. And frankly, I don't know what it means that 30 people have visited, since there's not one comment. And where did they come from? Who are they?

One piece of advice that I would like to pass on, and from someone in the audience, is that if you want to build readership you just keep blogging, post frequently and, the guy said, in five years you'll be way ahead of where you are now...

Is that what serious writers do? Aren't we all serious writers here? Isn't this why we love our blogging site so much?

And the good news is that there is one major feed service that does recognize Xanga - Bloglines...though I tried to activate my account for about 3 weeks using different email addresses before contacting help, who activated it for me. At bloglines I can subscribe to people who blog at many different sites and read their most recent posts, as we do at Xanga.

One last question, HomerTheBrave in a comment on the mirror post of this one at my Xanga site wrote that Blogger/Blogspot is a publishing site; wheras Xanga is a blog site. Any comments?


Xanga and Blogger

How does it happen? I lost all of my notes and links from the Northernvoice blogging conference. My Pocket PC file went strange, and then dissipated into something unreadable.

Suffice to say, it was an interesting day. Here is a link that collects some of the links at the conference:
Resources/NorthernVoice05

Rushing down the road, slippery, sparkly ice pellets flattened underfoot, the sun that the camera records is not the sun that I see. The sun before me is rising, shining in the crisp morning air. This is the sun that wholly knows the world it illumines. This is the sun ushering the day into being. A sun bringing activity with it. The bustling world awakens before this sun. It is refreshing to see, but it signals the beginning of a long work day ahead. When I return in the evening, I shall whisper goodbye to that same sun on the other side of the sky, a sun which I never saw all day at my desk in the office where I currently work. Risking being late, I stop to take a picture.

I take a picture because I know the camera will see a glow of light, a brilliance that is white at the centre and radiates translucent rainbow hues until the landscape that we only see because of that light re-emerges around its edges. I know that the camera sees more innocently than I, who compose the scene I am walking through according to my perceptions, my memories of this path, these rocks, my destination ahead. The camera will compose the possibility of another story. The camera will see two paths converging, where I only see one.

Sometimes we need to take a picture of a scene to see what was really there.

Or at least another version of what was there.

I will remember the unusual and slippery coating of frosted ice. The camera will remember the magnificent light.

That light, as I look at the photo, connects me to a dream I once had, long ago, and so strongly it brings such longing with it...

You are unaware of the bliss pooling in your eyes. It but a flicker, yet I see it clearly.

The sweetness of being.

Perhaps it is the sweet fresh juice of the apple trickling as you are biting. Or the perfect lace of snow on the branch. Or the sudden surprise of soft vivid irises reaching upwards. Or the scent of hyacinths in a summer breeze. Or the herald of choral clouds across the skyscape at sunset...

The sweetness of being, found in bliss.

The sweetness of being, the impetus to do, to be more than.

It is sensual, primal, almost visionary, the way bliss passes across us like a caress of warm sunlight.

And we, evolved, reservoirs of memory, mind, feeling, and sensation, who crawled out of the ocean eons ago and flew in light-footedness across the landscape and made alphabets out of everything.

Clay, metals, stones, quills, ink, parchment...

And our cornucopias of alphabets: like seeds in the fields growing our food; bricks forming the structures of our houses, cities, civilizations; minerals and metals upholding a superstructure of manufacture and energy; and our even breaking the codes of the alphabets of the molecules dancing and composing the universe...

Us filling our vast created cosmos with an interlacing calligraphy of alphabets, such sweetness of being.

You who come by, charms of bliss, having the radiance of angels, elixirs that we are barely aware of.

And I awoke this morning dreaming of calligraphies carved out of sunlight knowing that was it.

The Tsunami...

In memory of all those who died in, and all those who lived through, the tsunami that struck the countries of the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004.

I

In the deepness, a heaving of the earth. I am tensing, straining, the pressure too great. I am tearing, ripping, fragmenting. The gash is 600 miles long. There is thunder under the ocean as I heave and split. Frightened fish flee, their communities scattered. The water rushes over my plunging wound.

I am thrown off kilter in my revolution about the stars, a momentary faltering...

II

A sudden precipitous displacement of the ocean floor and I am falling, swirling, a lethal underwater waterfall.

The earth gives up her energy to the gashing waves. I am swelling, overflowing; there is nowhere to go but outwards. I am a deadly wave fleeing the rupture, my speed and breadth terrifying. I am churning with the energy of the earth's cry.

III

I am the shoreline and the people lining the beaches, holidaying, working, living, sleeping. I am the lands that the gigantic wave races towards. I am the unsuspecting, the innocent, the unprepared, the unguarded. The tremors of the earth are felt, but only the animals heed it. The animals, the elephants and tigers, wild dogs and birds, are all moving inland quickly: the rumbling earth, the rush of seawater in the ear, fearsome. An animal's instinct for self-preservation intact in the way the people lining the beach to watch the sucking out of the water, its disappearance at the horizon, aren't.

I am the children playing on the emptied expanse of beach. I am laughing at the sudden low tide, running on wet sand.

IV

I am the tide that is drawing back to lash the land impeding the flow. I am the striking wall of water. I cannot stop. I am rushing at 500 miles an hour. I am many tons of force. And I cannot stop. I cannot abate the fury unleashed by the underwater earthquake, the crack on the ocean floor.

You in the heavens, hear me! I did not mean this destruction...

I surge towards the beach where the people are talking and watching.

I surge with the full force of nature towards an unprepared land.

There is no early warning system to broadcast far and wide my deadly coming. No-one flees.

V

I flood onto the beach, a great wide water dragon roaring, the children, the sun bathers, wash into me. I keep surging, my water filling with mud, churning, rushing into villages, buildings, hotels, houses, huts, cars, pouring over the land in unrelenting fury, dragging boats, cars, trees, the detritus of broken homes, bashing, tearing apart the world in floodwaters.

I draw back, leaving bodies littered on the sand like beached fish.

VI

Then I am flowing forward again, I cannot stop; I hammer the land with tons of force, my swirling waters, rushing far inland, devastating the landscape. The dead and the wounded float everywhere in me. I hear the underwater screams of terror of those who are drowning calling for their loved ones. My salt water fills their lungs, intruding, squeezing out the air. Their bodies are battered. Those lucky and strong enough to swim with my furious currents are wounded by sharp bits of broken things. More die than survive.

I lash and subside, lash and subside, gradually losing my momentum, sliding back out to sea where I glitter under the hot sun, gently lapping as if I had never risen like furious thunder and drowned the land.

VII

I am the mother who sees the wall of sea falling on the beach and runs to catch her toddlers. I am the mother whose children slip out of her desperate grasp, who is holding her breath underwater, who is screaming her children’s names silently in the wave throwing her inland like broken driftwood. I am the children’s terror, the children who will die in less than a minute as they cry, “Mama…”

I am all the desolate and broken children who listlessly survey the torn landscape looking for their fathers and mothers, their brothers and sisters…

I am the grieving of the living: the surviving wounded, some of whom will die from preventable gangrene; the ones gone mad with grief screaming at the sea to give back their families. I am the dead whose souls float over the arc of land by the ocean mourning the loss of their lives. I fly with the angels who have gathered in throngs to comfort those who walk in shock and grief…

VIII

In the inlets, bays, bodies bob, like swollen, broken mannequins. The land is strewn with bodies; the death count rising ever higher. Where the tsunami hit: Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Somalia, Myanmar, Maldives, Malaysia, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Kenya. Whole islands have disappeared. Entire villages wiped out. Every country in the world has lost citizens.

I am the stench of decay everywhere.

IX

And I am the love of a shocked and stunned world pouring in.

I am the aid pouring in: the able-bodied helpers, finding the dead, burying, cremating, packing identified bodies, parts of bodies, into body-bags for airflights to foreign lands; the food and blankets being handed out, supplies air dropped in remote regions. I am the forensics teams taking DNA, teeth for dental records, anything to positively identify the dead. For the living need to bring closure, and burial rights, to their loved ones.

I am the shelters that house the grieving homeless masses while the governments decide what to do; how far back from the sea to rebuild. I am the early warning system being installed in byoys bobbing on the ocean and speed detectors under the waves.

I am the love of the world pouring in, the millions of dollars pledged and raised and offered for survival, for reconstruction.

How can we comfort you? How can we help you? How can we show you our caring, concern, support, allegiance?

How can we ensure you, who are among the poorest peoples in the world, are never caught unaware again?

X

And I am the slow rebuilding, plank by plank, nail by nail, mortar and thatch and brick and glass, creating our habitat despite the fear of the sea, the memories of the lush paradise that was, will be, and until the ocean rushes from the earth’s rupturing, as tectonic plates slide one beneath the other, once more…



_____________________________

©2005 by Brenda Clews

Dec. 26 2004	yo u r :: h e l p :: c o u n t s!
	Oxfam Unicef         red cross/ red crescent	americares network for good artsen zonder grenzen /medecins sans frontières
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Dear beautiful friend,

Check out my site at Xanga!

http://www.xanga.com/brendaclews

See you there, here, wherever~

warm bright blessings, Brenda

His hands, his fingers, powerful, yet gentle, knowing the terrain of muscle and bone, following the contours of my body, the energy currents of cells that form and re-form ankle, knee, thigh, shoulder, chin. Slowly, kneading deeply, oil sliding between the flesh of palm over the flesh of body, he massages my back, the spine carrying messages from a profuse nervous system, where I feel the world feeling me, to the brain, an interwoven system intricate beyond comprehension. In the dance of the flow of the body, knots, whorls, angles and lines of pain appear sometimes as his fingers find dramas recorded in my body where I hold fear, grief, rage, and the pressure that he applies, and my wincing until I remember to breath deeply, to surrender, and then his fingers feeling the release of tension, and moving on as the dance between his hands and my body continues its, by moments, soothing, jarring, and deepening rhythms. My body and his hands are like a duet, the sensual flow of a shared meditation, as he glides from chest to belly to limb, massaging, creating a song of healing. He reads my body as a musical score, a site of memory, a terrain that holds the record of an entire life, a map to a soul. My body responds to his touch, opening, a flowing braille of energy patterns, as he guides the lifting of the burdens, whatever they may be, and facilitates a release into deep healing...