Categories
Writing

I am Alice or writing through the looking glass

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Sometimes enough disparate elements come together and you have to write about it because to do otherwise would be to toss fate’s good idea down the drain. So I find myself writing about writing and weblogging and self-censorship, when I think I should be writing about a girl and a bicycle and trees with eyes.

Last week I wrote about Fight or Flight, an essay about me coming to terms with how I deal with the negative comments that can occur with much of my writing – usually my technical writing, though I’ve attracted a few wasps with my political writing. I mentioned in the essay that I was inspired by another post but didn’t want to link to it because I didn’t want to bring relationships into a story, which ultimately was about my own journey for understanding. Unfortunately, the linkage occurred anyway, but fortunately, it didn’t leak into my writing – the words were accepted at face value, on their own worth, for good or bad.

There are times, though, such as now, when I’m not only inspired by others’ writing, I link to it because they’ve started a conversation and I’m only one voice in it. I am not so clever as to write with multiple voices in one writing; I can only write in my own.

Happy Tutor’s been writing quite a bit about the anger, aggressiveness, and the flaming that can creep into our conversations at times: here and here. In particular, one essay highlighted the conflict of differentiating between the flames of passion and the flames of cruelty and how, at times, the only difference between the two is one of perception. He writes:

Any time you talk about gender differences in a profession, you might as well expect a bashing. All I would ask, if you are seething with indignation, if your selfhood is now in play, is a) discharge yourself fully b) respect other people’s right to be wrong and c) recognize that we are all fearful and sometimes immobilized on this ground strewn with landmines. So, in other words, make allowances, if you can, for other people’s vulnerability, as you would hope they do for you – still, discharge the emotion fully. Any one with a good maternal instinct, or paternal, for that matter, is welcome to bind up the wounds we inflict on one another. The truth is just a word for what might emerge if we had the courage of our convictions, and the courage to learn by putting them at risk.

For a woman who writes from a platform of passion, I see these words as a benediction and a bane. If selfhood is engaged then we have to recourse but to expend our emotions, but does this mean we should not allow our selfhood to be engaged? Or does this mean, when we do, we have no option but to respond honestly, even passionately if passion is how our truth is conveyed?

I was considering this and not sure if I wanted to write about it when I received an email from Elaine about a posting she wrote in response to a Chris Locke diatribe, written in response to another weblogger’s posting. It would seem that the recipient of the Rageboy writing was so upset by it that she pulled not only the one posting, but her entire weblog.

Elaine writes Shame on you for shutting down a female blogger’s weblog:

So when bad boy Rage Boy spoilingly shuts down a fellow female’s blog for fun and fame, I say shame, shame on you, you sad, bad, boy blogger. Is that what blogging is about? Slash and burn? If you don’t like it kill it? (Sounds an awful lot like Dumbya, doesn’t it?)

I couldn’t read the original post that set Rageboy off, but I did see a piece of it at Blog Sisters. In it, the writer, Lindsay, talks about seeing a personal ad that read, in part, SWF, 40, attractive. Looking for man aged 40-55 for friendship, maybe more. Of the ad, and the need for relationships in general, she wrote:

t’s not so rare for me to talk to someone, who is about my age and has never had a relationship, and hear them saying “I feel so lonely. I wish someone wanted to be with me.” I even read in one person’s online journal that he wanted someone “to fill this hole inside of me.” The confusion of it all is so crazy, the thought that we need someone to fill the gaps in our lives, that we cannot live fully until we find our “soulmate” who is going to make us feel complete, and we can finally be happy and carefree and la la la.

I think most of this is due to laziness and insecurity. People don’t want to do the work on themselves so that they can feel complete independently. They want someone else to do it..

The problem is not that you haven’t found “the one.” The problem is that people are often too lazy to spend much time working on themselves alone, when they have the chance to do so, before they end up in a relationship and a situation where they will almost inevitably end up codependent.

There is much to agree with in Lindsay’s writing and I’ve written before that other people cannot make us whole, we can only do this ourselves. However, regardless of our wholeness or not, to see loneliness and react, at a minimum, without understanding and with intolerance is just as ‘ugly’ as to use words that overtly burn on their reading. It’s easy to condemn and criticize the woman in her 40’s who is lonely and seeking companionship, when one is not in that person’s shoes. Or, in Chris Locke’s shoes, worn loafers of a man in his 50’s, also lonely, always attracted to the flame that will ultimately burn him.

I, too, am lonely, without the closeness of a dear companion, a warm body to hold at night, a warm soul to hold during the day; I also am my 40’s and on the shady side of life, but where the lady in the ad sought companionship, I submerge my loneliness in my writing, and use it to give my writing depth. Does this make me superior? Or just different? Regardless, there’s pain in loneliness and to dismiss it with jejune assumptions of laziness is to invite response. Yes, even passionate response.

In Elaine’s comments, Lindsay wrote:

I didn’t actually choose to run. I had been thinking about shutting down my blog for awhile, because I’d been getting sick of all the nastiness going on in the blogosphere, especially on forums. Nothing like this had happened to me before though, and I figured it was the most opportune time to do what I’d already been planning on doing anyway.

I find it amusing how throughout this whole thing, there have been many comments about my age and implications about my lack of maturity and/or life experience, while at the same time the “adults” are the ones behaving in a way that is reminiscent of recess in Kindergarten. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to play without me.

I’m not defending Chris – as Lindsay wrote in Elaine’s comments, he also attacked her beliefs in addition to her writing, and I can’t defend that. But I can also understand his anger – easy for you to talk about laziness babe, when you’re not the one hurtin’.

The issue, though demonstrated effectively by this interchange, really has to do with that civility that Happy Tutor writes about. The problem with civility, though, is that it’s so open to interpretation. Some would say that being civil implies agreement, others that the discussion stay passionless and non-personal, and still others that anything goes as long as the parties agree to engage at a certain level.

It’s not easy to figure this all out. I think of reducing our writing in disagreement to assertions that begin with “I beg to differ”, and my blood runs cold; we have sold the heart of us, traded it in kind for polite political correctness. One person’s ugliness, is another’s beauty, and perhaps that’s what Tutor was saying – we must continue as we start because to do otherwise, is a lie.

In a technical post that was almost guaranteed to generate flames, I wrote about Pie/Echo/Atom and a recent seeming rejection of using RDF/XML for its primary format. How odd that a topic so seated in technology can be so potentially explosive, but any who know the players should, at this point, be shuddering at the implications. In this case, though there was disagreement and a combination of players that should have resulted in burning bits of cinder raining down on all – the conversation stayed civil. Not without bite, and not without passion, and there were hooks aplenty on which to launch flames, but it stayed civil.

I consider this thread a triumph for all the participants, but would others point to it and say, “See, lack of civility”?

This issue is only compounded because so many of us know each other, either through months, years of communication through our weblogs and phone calls and emails, or even in person.

Happy Tutor uncannily, or perhaps knowingly, also writes on self-censorship because of assocations we make with each other. This follows from Steve Himmer’s essay, where Steve talks about the impact knowing our audience has on us:

I’ve been thinking about an aspect of reading weblogs that I hadn’t considered before as I approached them as literature and whatnot. Namely, what difference does it make to our reading(s) when the blogger in question is an offline acquaintance, let alone someone we consider a friend.

So we lose the anonymity, and gain richer friendships, suggesting that we are forced (or feel forced) to censor ourselves more closely, be more careful about how we write ourselves and, perhaps more importantly, how we write about others…This suggests a dovetail between questions of audience and issues of acquaintance, but that makes sense: part of the shift from anonymity to known entity we undergo as webloggers as we become more and more social, on- and offline, corresponds to a shift our audience undergoes from nameless, faceless readers (or, when we begin writing, no readers) to known and named readers.

Tutor responds with:

In the course of this perceptive and congenial post, Steve suggests that as we become better known face to face, and via email, among our blogging circle, that we necessarily begin to censor ourselves, for fear of hurting those we now know, and for fear of the repercussions in the larger social world. Some might say that such self-censorship is a step towards civility. It can also be like “coming out,” an act of courage – or stupidity.

(Neither edge of Tutor’s sword is dull. I wonder if this is natural, or if he deliberately hones the safe side to keep his readers from experiencing comfort? )

Steve and Tutor both make a point: unlike other writing, the audience we have here is not that unknown Reader, but people we have come to know. Does this effect our writing? How can it not? But does this, then, lead to a lie – that unexpressed emotion that Tutor wrote about earlier?

Returning to my essay Fight or Flight, and my hesitancy to link to another weblog post. I did not link because I did not want to write to an audience of close friends – I wanted my audience to be Reader. I did not want to join a conversation, or invite a conversation, unless it had to do with the words, not past associations. This isolation is almost unheard of in weblogging, but it’s essential for writing. Writing centers around the words and the intent, the passion and that pesky truth – not friends’ expectations and feelings, old baggage and civility.

I hesitate now before I link to another weblogger’s writing. I think to myself, “Will this person want to be invited into this conversation?” and “Do I want this writing to become a conversation?” If I can’t unequivocally answer either of these questions with Yes, then I am not going to linclude a reference to their writing. Yet, this is considered uncivil. Do we choose writing, or do we choose community?

This would be all so much easier if we had thick skin and little sensitivity; but then we’d also be lacking in empathy and passion, joy as well as sorrow – pleasure and pain; what good the writing without the wonderful highs and lows?

I know one thing without ambiguity: I am a writer. Anything else, is and must be secondary; and the consequences of same is, all too often, more loneliness in which to feed the muse.

desertalone.jpg

Categories
RDF Writing

Even chickens can learn RDF

In a clever play on my For Poets weblogs, specifically my Semantic Web for Poets – a warped menage a duo of technology and art with images of rusting robots and silent metallic forests with moblogged fallen trees – Danny Ayers has created variations on the theme, all based on my RDF book.

There’s:

RDF for Woodcarvers
RDF for BellRingers
RDF for Chickens
RDF for Painters

…and others, all with their associated photographs.

And they say technical people are smart but not artistes. Ha! They say, let them say!

for-woodcarvers.jpg

Categories
RDF Writing

RDF and Grounding

I was so caught up in the Pie/Echo/Atom stuff yesterday that I missed Jon Udell’s discussion about my book. He wrote:

To get a better picture of how the CVM works, I read Shelley Powers’ very well-written new book, Practical RDF. I read it online, actually. Very cool to be able to do that. (Tank, I need a pilot program for a B-212 helicopter.) My eyelids fluttered for a while, and when I opened them again it was Chapter 10: Querying RDF: RDF as Data that emerged as pivotal.

Working through the chapter he finds:

This is cool. RDF triples are relations, and here we see that they’re amenable to relational processing. I can grok that.

Well, that made my morning. To hear others say they liked the book is a goodness, but when someone works through one of the chapters, and details an ‘Aha!’ moment, well, that’s what a writer lives for.

Jon also has some tough questions on grounding. What I should do is get with Simon St. Laurent and write an article on namespaces – the Meaning of it All – he from the tree structure, me from the graph point of view.

Categories
Just Shelley Photography Weblogging

Inexplicables

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Odd things happening lately.

My roommate is out of town at his high school reunion, which is a bit inexplicable but that’s not the focus of this tale. What is, is the fire detector in the hall between our two bedrooms.

Every night it’s been emitting these odd little sounds – little beeping alarms. Loud enough to wake me, but not at full volume. This is the first time I’ve heard the sound, and it only happens at night. First night, at 4AM; second night at 2:30; last night at 4AM again. The very regularity of the times is unnerving.

I’ve checked the batteries and tested them and they’re fine. No problems during the day, only these times at night. If I didn’t know that the Little People don’t use modern devices, I’d be a bit nervous. As it is, I doubt I’ll sleep tonight, waiting for the sound.

Then, the surface of my glasses spontaneously started cracking. There seems to be a coating on the lens that is flaking off, and it’s left one lens slightly spotted and the other foggy, but usable. I have a backup pair, but they’re not bifocals, making it difficult to see my computer. I’d take this as a sign to take a break, but I can’t – too much to do. I’m only at day 10 of my 20 day plan to finally catch up on all the projects I’ve been putting off.

Speaking of overdue projects, I’m starting to move the rest of my old Gallery photo galleries to the Faux PhotoBlog. Just finished my St. Lous Arch collection. There must have been links to these photos because I’m getting a lot of 404 errors – the file where I record 404 requests is getting large. Which means I also have to finish PostCon so I can manage the rest of the file movements.

This is also a heads up that I’m going to be implementing hot-link protection for my photos. Hot-linking is when another site links directly to your photo, using your bandwidth. The problem is intensified because when the sites do, and they publish full content in their RSS files, then the RSS aggregators are also hitting the photos. Additionally, some people publish their aggregation results, such as Adam Curry.

When I started getting hits from Curry I went to investigate and found my photos nestled among a ton of soft and hard porn photos, from other feeds Curry is subscribed to. Nude woman, nude women having sex together, nude woman and…man with two penises? And then, there were my starling photos. They were a bit out of place.

I’ll write up hot-linking and how to prevent it when I implement it. This is just a heads up for those who are linked directly to my photos now. End of week, you’re in for a surprise.

Since I mentioned Adam Curry, there’s been a lot of conversation about the BloggerCon invitations that people have received. Meryl Yourish received one and so did Making Light. So did I, which surprised me a bit.

I actually thought about going, surprising as this sounds. I’m going to be visiting friends in Boston sometime this year anyway, about opportunities in that area, and I thought I would combine both events into one trip – until I saw the price tag of $500.00 US. No can do. I figure I can either get new glasses or go meet Adam Curry – guess which one is a higher priority?

There are not a lot of people happy about the reference to the fee being necessary to bring in the “talent”. Personally, I’d rather let the ‘talent’ hitchhike to the conference or stay home, forget the fancy dinners and hit some of the funky, great, and not quite as expensive places for dinner and drinks, and pay, oh, $50.00. That’s what this blogger’s conference was originally going to be – something affordable and open, in an economy that’s not that strong right now.

Too bad. Rather that, is anyone up for coming to St. Louis for a weekend of Katy Trail bike rides, visits to vineyards, walks, Blues, a gospel choir brunch for Sunday, and maybe a river boat ride, instead? No conference, no ‘talent’, nothing formal, but if you’re in the area of St. Louis the weekend of Columbus Day, let me know and I’ll put together some fun things to do. You haven’t seen beautiful until you’ve seen the Missouri Green turn fall colors.

Maybe I can get our academic friends to the North to skip out of school work for a couple of days and come down. Did I happen to mention the Gospel Choir brunches here?

Visited Tower Grove tonight, first time in a long time. Leaving you with a little color, as a good-night while I return to my next Semantic Web essay, “The Semiotics of I”, which includes references to Jeff Wards recent essays on names as well as the W3C TAG group’s recent difficulty with representation and identification.

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Categories
Just Shelley

Bright Copper Pennies

Walking down Main, as we would call our barely 5 block long main street that ran through the center of town, I tended to walk with my head down, gaze focused on the ground. This wasn’t because I was a shy child, or a quiet child, or I was being sulky or disrespectful. No, I kept my head down because I was always looking for treasure.

Sometimes I would find a button that someone had lost, or a pretty rock with bits of sparkle embedded in it. On rare occasions, I might find a nickle, which could then be traded at the store for a candy bar that was, well, close to my size in length, or at least that’s how I remember them.

If I found a dime I would buy a candy bar and a licorice rope from the stand close to the register, usually red, though sometimes black when the mood hit. And I would eat both one right after the other if it wasn’t too close to dinner and my mother allowed me. She usually did, though, knowing that candy bought with found money was outside the rules that governed how much candy I could have at any point in time.

If I found a quarter I would stop dead in my tracks and yell out my good fortune, before swooping down to pick it up.

“A quarter! Look, I found a quarter! A whole quarter!”

I would shriek and jump about bringing no end of embarrassment to whoever I was with. I instinctively knew that I’d used up all my good luck for the day so I’d keep my head up and walk along with the quarter held in outstretched hand in front of me, to show to all who passed. Luckily, we knew everyone who walked by or I might get looks of pity — poor daft child.

I would take that quarter home and look at it and gloat over my good fortune, being uncommonly good at gloating. To annoy my brother, I would insist on showing it to him as much as I could, until he threatened to pound me. Then I would wait until dinner to gloat just a wee bit more when Mom was there and could prevent physical violence.

I would save that quarter for trips into the City, the town of about 3000 or so 8 miles away, when we would visit the Five & Dime store. There I would carefully walk the aisles and aisles of sweets and toys, and stock up on more exotic fare, candy necklaces and candy buttons and those plastic things that had the gum and the little toys inside. Sometimes one of my friends would come with us and I would share whatever I bought with him or her. I wasn’t a selfish child, just one filled with the avarice all children have.

(Children are born pirates, becoming more subtle and less greedy over time only because those who mean us well keep teaching us that we can’t have everything.)

I wouldn’t save my found money because, as my Mother understood, found money is treasure and didn’t follow the normal rules of saving money for a rainy day.

I would also find pennies of course. However, even in those days when money meant something, I wouldn’t get too excited about a penny. The most a penny could buy was a bubble gum pipe or a red hot jawbreaker, nothing to get worked up over. Nothing, unless the penny was a new penney. New pennies were the greatest find of all.

I’d be walking along, head down, looking at the sidewalk of rough grays and dusty beige and dark cracks and pebbles. I’d see a glint, a shine of red-gold in the sun, and race up and instead of finding the usual, a piece of broken beer bottle glass, or a sparkly granite pebble I’d find a bright new shiny copper penny.

I never spent my bright copper pennies, but would instead put them into a glass jar that I kept on the table by my bed. Once a week or so, I would take all the pennies out and I would wash each one and dry it with a soft cloth, polishing it just to see the shine, to feel that brightness in my hand.

As I grew older I stopped looking down as much. I was at that age when I could now walk around town by myself and if I kept my head down, I would run into things like people and dogs. Keeping my head down also meant I couldn’t see as much around me and I was beginning to find that cars and adults and dogs and other kids, especially other kids, were much more interesting than treasure, though I still rejoiced when I would find a coin. People come and people go, but candy is a constant.

I also stopped washing my bright copper pennies because I had other things to do with my time. There were trees to climb and hide and seek to play and tether ball — remember tether ball? The pennies began to get duller and darker, pushed back into the corner with each passing month as other things such as drawing pads and big crayons were added to the desk.

Finally one day I wanted something, I don’t know what it was, and I didn’t have enough money. I spotted my jar of pennies and without thinking about it, I opened it, dumped all the pennies into a paper bag and took then down to the bank to covert into useful money. Money I could spend at the store.