Categories
Writing

Sensualist

 

The world that lieth in wickedness, the sensualist, has no taste nor relish for that bread which cometh down from God out of heaven, and nourisheth the soul up unto eternal life.

Thomas Lechtworth, They that wait upon the Lord

Roget’s Thesaurus defines a sensualist as a person devoted to pleasure and luxury, a hedonist or sybarite. Merriam-Webster defines the sensualist as a person in “…persistent or excessive pursuit of sensual pleasures and interests.”

Weighed down with this association to addiction of earthly delights, the sensualist has been cast as the wanton, the wicked, and the antithesis of both the intellectual and the spiritual throughout history.

Eyes and fingers speak in its favor, visual evidence and palpableness do, too: this strikes an age with fundamentally plebian tastes as fascinating, persuasive, and convincing – after all, it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternally popular sensualism.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

 

Small wonder that I’ve spent most of my life trying to deny my own sensualist nature; first wearing the misty face of the spiritualist, and later donning a mask showing the placid wisdom of the intellectual. It’s only been recently that I’ve stripped away all such self-doubting foolishness, and have felt confident enough, or perhaps indifferent enough, to show myself.

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standards, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Being a sensualist doesn’t mean I run into the street, tackling every man I see – a modern day succubus. With laptop.

Nor does this mean that I am not capable of intellectual pursuits or appreciation of same. And if my spirituality is tempered, it is more so by the intellectual aspect of my personality rather than that part of me that is sensual.

Being a sensualist just means that I’m highly attuned to and very aware of my senses, to the point of defying conventional behavior at times.

Helen woke up in the middle of the night wearing someone else’s breasts. Not her own insignificant, almost non-existent bumps, but huge, pendulous, full ones. Breasts whose only master was gravity, whose creases ached in bands across her ribs, whose weight cascaded irrepressibly onto her lap. Breasts that could round shoulders and cave in chests. “Damn,” she murmured to herself, “it’s begun,” and then went back to sleep.

Barbara Hodgson, The Sensualist

 

I will stop to listen to a bird, or alter my course to follow an intriguing smell. I hesitantly place a hand on shoulder or arm when in conversation with another – being aware of the possibility of giving offense with said action.

I love sparkly sidewalks.

i love sidewalks that are all sparkly. i can’t imagine why a city would not get sparkly sidewalks. the sidewalk company says, “ok, 50 new sidewalks…. you want sparkles with that?” and the city says, “nah, we’ll take the ones with black, dried up chewing gum on them, instead.”

eggstone 2000

 

Being a sensualist also does not make me a sentimentalist. As much as I appreciate subtle and complex emotional interplay there is nothing I abhor more than maudlin, contrived sentimentality.

The movie Titanic would have been best served by sinking the ship in the first ten minutes, and taking the Bridges of Madison County with it. Debbie Boone singing “You light up my life” or Helen Reddy’s “I don’t know how to love him” generate an almost overwhelming revulsion in me. Yet the Andrew Sisters World War II classic, I’ll be with you in apple blossom time never fails to move me.

As for writing, there is some writing that is so sensual and that invokes such strong mental imagery that I have to put the material down; there is no room left within my mind for processing the letters into words and the words into sentences.

Categories
Just Shelley

Moving to the beat

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I spent the morning pulling boxes and furniture down from piles and placing the items into the storage unit’s hallways. I opened several boxes and pulled out some favorite books I didn’t want to lose – GravitationThe God ParticleVisionBotticelli’s Dante, which I picked up at the show in London, and my hard to find books on faceting and various other bits and pieces.

As I was dragging a load down to the van, a professional mover who was helping someone else asked if I was trying to move the stuff all by myself. I must have looked pretty pathetic because when he was finished with the move, he came over to my unit. Ten minutes later, everything was back in the unit, the remaining boxes I needed to look through pulled out and a space provided to push the boxes back. What would have taken me half a day took him no time at all. And then he asked me out dancing Friday night. He said that he’d been taking Salsa lessons and wanted to try them out.

Well. Well. Of all possible outcomes from the day, this is one I didn’t expect.

Salsa dancing aside – and I love to dance – I finished what was a two day job today, thanks to Geraldo’s help. I salvaged what I needed and pulled down the gate and walked away from the rest, never to see it again.

Even with the help, my back is killing me tonight, so I ended the day walking along the Dog Beach, letting the sand and the fog and the pelicans do their magic, sipping on a latte as I treked through the sand. It was a wonderous day – sunshine, fog in from the ocean, cool, but not too cool. More of the same tomorrow and Friday, and I hope I can move tomorrow because I want to explore the newly renovated Ferry building, and walk along the Embarcadero. Friday, I’m thinking of driving around the golden circle. Not sure about Salsa dancing Friday night.

Maybe.

Categories
Burningbird Technology Web

Server status

I have hit a roadblock in the server setup, specifically wildcard DNS entries (to allow things such as weblog.burningbird.net, coop.burningbird.net, and so on), as well as sendmail issues and external email.

Everything else seems to be set but that sendmail is a showstopper. My hope is to get help from my readership, but barring that, I’m going to have to fork over the money to the ISP to get their help. And I can’t afford this.

So server move is delayed until I can get this working.

Update: The fees the ISP is charging are too high. I’ll continue to try and work this through on my own, with help from other webloggers.

Second Update: A little digging into sendmail and SMTP in Google, and a copy of another web server’s sendmail.mc file (the sendmail configuration file) sent by Sam Ruby, and we’ve found the problem.

The sendmail program listens in only on the localhost port, not the SMTP port, for security reasons. Makes sense if you’re not accepted external email. Commenting this out solved the trick! Of course, there’s a sign saying “Fresh Meat!” on the server for every spam emailer.

Still – – I was never happier to see junk mail in my life. And my yasd.com address gets way too much junk email.

Onwards.

Categories
RDF Writing

Reverse Spin

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I just sent my last edit of the proofs to Simon for the Practical RDF book, which means I’m finished with the writing. Put a fork into me my babies and call me done!

Well, I still have to set up the book support site when it publishes, but the next time I see the writing is when that sexy baby falls into my hands, soft sides cool and sleek to the touch, come hither birdie on the front with legs that go all the way up!

Just in case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, it’s he’yah:

Now, go forth and buy. Send that puppy’s sales numbers through the roof! Buy till it hurts, babies!

Other good news is that I actually managed to setup the nameserver for the new site and it works, as you should be able to see over the next day or two with the domain yasd.com. Next up is moving my sites and this weblog, but first I want to finish that Linux for Poets: what’s in a name, for the co-op members. And maybe I’ll have more pics for you later. And maybe even some other writing.

Sometimes all you need to perk up is to accomplish something. I feel so good, why I’m going to go clean the bathrooms. And then I’m going to go for a nice lo-o-o-o-ng walk. This will give you plenty of time to go out to Amazon, and reserve your advance copy.

Categories
Weblogging Writing

Throwing the torch on

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I didn’t quite finish the proofs tonight – shame on me – but should have them to Simon tomorrow morning. I can only do so many pages a day before I start crawling the walls.

I also finished the nameserver for the Wayward Weblogger co-op and if the test domain shows up as scheduled then I’ll be ready to start moving weblogs over to the server this weekend. I’ve already had my first volunteer who’s going to get a shiny new MT weblog from exported blogger entries. The question then remains: will he or won’t he turn on comments?

I can’t wait to move my favorite webloggers off of blogspot and other tempermental and restricted servers to the new one. No more slow downloads, and hopefully few problems with posts. We’re going to roar where before we whimpered, and nothing will stop us now. Best of all, I’m going to be surrounded by people I greatly admire and respect. I am a lucky woman.

Speaking of being a woman and technology, Halley wrote something very interesting today about weblogging and women. She wrote:

Although the three women on the cover of Time Magazine were not bloggers, the women using blogging tools are doing a variation on daily whistle-blowing as they blog. They are using weblogs to tell their truth. Much of their truth has been silenced and not allowed to appear in main stream press which is dominated by men. I honestly don’t believe this is any conspiracy by men, but rather a shocking disconnect from the reality men live in and the reality women live in. Weblogs are not controlled or controllable by any one group. Weblogs are a no-barriers-to-entry publishing phenomenon. Weblogs are giving women a publishing platform unparalleled in history. Women are not self-editing their voices out of existence. With weblogs, women are telling their truth without even noticing. Weblogs are creating a level-playing field for women.

Liz has promised to write about Halley’s post, and my recent difficulties with email lists, and I can’t think of a better person to comment on all of this.

Back to domains, DNS, and nameservers for my literary friends, more stories about adventures in the Missouri Greens, and a Grand Co-op Opening.