BurningbirdJust writing
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
The Practical RDF Book should roll off the publication lines this week, and I’m re-awakening this weblog to provide support for it.
Besides – there’s a lot of good stuff happening with RDF lately. Time to start playing again.
Mike Golby’s Hello, Mister. Writers like Mike, works like this essay – they keep me here, and keep me coming back.
The weather was clear and hot during the trip, and the van had an air conditioner that either didn’t work well, or worked too well. The first day I wasn’t too tired and I thought about just driving straight through – 30+ hours – but I was concerned about hitting animals during the night.
The highlights of the trip were the ground squirrel colony, all of Wyoming, and my arrival in Missouri. The lowlights were the fact that I was allergic to the lotion the Park Hyatt provided, everything was at summer rates, and I passed too many accidents trying to make it through on I70 in Kansas City. And the spammers when I got home, of course.
I entered Wyoming at sunset, and the deep amber/red/purple light brought out all the nuances of the painted cliffs – astonishingly beautiful. I itched to stop and try to take a photo that captured the colors, but I remembered that supposedly I see myself as a writer, and perhaps it’s time to refocus more on writing, and a little less on photography. I was sorely tempted, though, when passing the plains, where literally the antelope were playing, just like in the song. Wyoming is at its most beautiful at times of great subtlety, at that first morning light, and that last evening ray.
Kansas was Kansas and hot and crowded with people heading home from the holidays. This combined with constuction delays slowed my travel and I didn’t enter Missouri until quite late. I really dislike driving I70 at night – the road’s bad and the truckers are worse – but last night was worth it because the car lights brought out the fireflies. The hills and the rocks and meadows by the side of the road were alive with fireflies, each adding their bit of glitter to countryside left gray and subdued.
If one wants to write fantasy, one should live in Missouri because I saw the dance of the pixies last night. Pixies, gnomes, and other creatures of the twilight live in these hills. I swear it.
When I got home I checked my email and when I saw that there were 15000+ emails, I knew we’d been hit by spammers. I thought at first it might have something to do with the hacker contest, because of the nature of the spam, but I think it’s your usual scum of the earth spammer. I was rather proud that I managed to handle the problem all by my little lonesome, including clean up the outgoing queue, my incoming email, and deal with the technology that led to this problem. Now, who said women can’t handle techie stuff?
Once I install new email software, the problem should be fixed, and I’ll be ready for the next server challenge.
I did do a lot of thinking on this trip, about some new things I want to do, about writing, Echo, RDF, and so on. I want to try something with RDF and Echo, but I’m not going to say what it is because if I do, someone with more time than me will do it first. I’m selfish enough to want to try this idea on my own, first, without someone else grabbing it before I have a chance. I guess this doesn’t make me a great team player.
I have an article of two for O’Reilly on RDF I need to finish, some legal paperwork to file and various other odds and ends. And I have a new domain – forpoets.org. I plan on dividing this into:
linux.forpoets.org
weblogging.forpoets.org
internet.forpoets.org
markup.forpoets.org
rdf.forpoets.org
And so on. I’m hoping that if this works out, perhaps there will be a book or two in this concept. Or not, and I do it just for fun. I am really strongly motivated to get in and start the RDF for Poets articles – before someone else grabs these and does them first.
Writing and technology aside, I’ll always have time for photos, but I want to make them less of a focus. And I want to start expanding the types of photos I take – something besides “photos for picture postcards”. However, there was a rest area in Colorado that I did take a longer break at, and grabbed a few pictures. You know me and water and reflections.
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.
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.