Out in the Blogosphere

'Garret' only has one 't.' I cannot begin to tell you how disappointed I am. It looks rather naked there, don't you think - two 'r' letters, fat & happy - and nair but the one 't' to accompany them. Like a fiddler, perhaps, in the rain.

A fiddler needs the sun to manage properly, out there on the street corner somewhere, cap patiently on the sidewalk beside him waiting coins. Put him out there in the rain & the effect of it all is lost. The pathos of it all, watercolour running in the rain, as a songster once noted...

Which is to say. The watercolour wasn't exactly a work of art. If it were, it wouldn't have been out on the street corner anyway...

Oh me. I don't even have the benefit of a typo: the poor word is firmly & completely misspelled in my mind (and you should hear the way I pronounce things, trouncing all over them as if they belonged to me & I could wrest them into whatever shape I chose; I have even been known to completely delete a word from my small cache of spoken vocabulary purely on the reality that the true pronunciation was not at all what I'd assumed & didn't feel like what a word should for me to use it).

And now I must not only correct it in those places I tromp about, free ranging, but in my sidebar as well.

What brought all this on. Well, I do keep a tracker on my columns here - a fairly necessary item in a world where you don't have people purchasing your work to let you know anyone is reading it - and back on 30 October, a reader from somewhere in Florida (I will be delicate & not mention the city) googled the quote by Thoreau I keep for good company on my sidebar here at passeres.

I'm now up to six separate visitors with the same quote (which I'd thought misspelled & google didn't help since they politely note, "did you mean...garrett...") and imagine the paper must be due.

The assignment appears to be either to 'explain' or 'paraphrase' the quote - and, in good form, the students all type in the entire quote (properly spelled); the daughter of the woman for whom I am the fictional representative is working on her doctorate (and in addition to teaching fellowships has experience as a middle school teacher & summers of teaching/assisting at a well-known program for gifted students): I've heard along the way of students and their proclivity for - err, borrowing the work of others without letting the other(s) know.

I do hope the instructor who assigned the good Thoreau googles his/her assignments before grading.

Nonetheless, although passeres pops up as the second hit each time the good man is googled, the students won't even get the benefit of research or commentary on my part for a literature assignment. I know one reader - I have to imagine it was a young man; somehow I could just picture the frustration & couldn't see a young woman being quite so concerned about it: he even went so far as to cache the results, certain google had misled him - the item does not appear in my posts, but only in my sidebar and you can read every word in the post google proffers twenty times, but you will never find the quote therein.

Each time google put passeres up save one, it was to a different page at passeres. I found that amusing as well, peering into their small world in my imagination. Three blind men & the elephant sort of amusing.

Not as if anyone would be in class saying, oh, did you see that blog?

Nothing remarkable 'pon which to comment at passeres.

N'est ce pas? She said ruefully (because after all, too many seem to take my wailing seriously). [Err, that is. It is, to be sure, serious; if it were not, I wouldn't be me.

But it is Extremely Nerve-wracking for Said Many to worry about wee bird.

Tough old bird here, as I mentioned to a friend yesterday - one of those who actually exist in the day-to-day of it, which another friend (of that day-to-day variety) tells me is what a friend actually is - day-to-day, in the flesh - not those screen personalities by which facebook & myspace & chatrooms (and resident bird, tough or otherwise, does not go to chatrooms) seem to define as friendship; he quite has a Notion about these things - i.e., a passion - and he is, indeed, quite right about the matter.

Except he is also quite wrong.) In any case, I got the impression the other friend didn't really see how tough said bird actually is.

But I ignored it & continued eating the bowl of homemade potato soup he'd warmed for me - cooked by his own wife's hands - and brought me to eat while I was answering phones at the job yesterday.

Very tough bird, here.

Very, very, very.)]

Not much else to do with it (imagination): it seems to interfere with living the good life of the ant mentioned in other posts.

On which note I move merrily along to a friend I've met here in the blogosphere. I am (for those of you to whom I am at the present moment being introduced) like an overgrown puppy & still prone (as I mention often) to jumping up to lick your face when you're in your Sunday best: I don't mean to, but I am a puppy & can't seem to contain my exuberance; can't help that I can quite stand as tall as you are & put my silly paws on your shoulder - and that tail I keep wagging has knocked everything off the coffee table behind us. My paws are not just oversized & wet but covered in mud & tiny blades of grass - after all, you mowed the lawn last night before going to bed & it rained in the wee hours.

Two major problems there. The one, I tend to jump in when most my age would be more seemly. I hear often that the blogosphere is a place where you meet new friends. All for friendship, here. But I suspect I would do better in that corner of the garret alone with my thoughts; I tend to assume people want to hear my thoughts & then there goes another friend.

Oh well. Leaving out, to be sure, the part about all the anxieties inherent in Being a Writer; in any case, Someone Out There in the Blogosphere deleted a post he'd written & a great many rushed in to say they have experienced that same sense of - well, exuberance? confusion? paranoia? as that which prompted him (out of concern for the opinion of others) to write, post, then erase a post.

Those moments wherein we are all caught in that same lovely place of tossing the masks into the refuse pile and such relief it is, too.

But then we have to dig them out & put them on again and at that point (however pristine they might appear to viewers) we know they are covered in muck.

Inherent in this game I play of fictional and/or hiding is that same impulse. (Umm, the one before that lovely moment of tossing off the mask.) But I find that you really can't hide; something in what it is to be human (for those of us who are called to this game of words & revealing) and there you are again, in the muck of it, paws dirtying someone else's Sunday best & there it all goes.

Back before the new medium, which allows not only instantaneous publishing but also eliminates the buffer of someone else editing you before you are published, a writer had some sort of - umm, place to hide.

The fact of being published (i.e, someone investing actual money in your thoughts) at least meant somebody out there thought what you said had merit.

Even if the whole world turned on you & splat & there goes it. Infamy, ignominy [one of those very few words that survived once I learned how to pronounce it properly] or whatever fate had stored for you (and only you).

Writers tend to pull from that necessity of self-revealing. It is where stories come from.

Shakespeare, for instance. Having read one or two biographies about him in the last few years, I was somewhat stunned to find out just how possible it is that even the Great One pulled from his very own life in the plays & sonnets he created.

Had another friend once I (quite innocently; I am a writer, after all & with writers, at least, one can hope for some sense of 'been there, done that' rueful acceptance of the matter) embarrassed by commenting on something he'd written that I - err, happened to have intimate knowledge of, being as we are friends - and his reaction was quite severe.

I knew I had invaded that buffer writers require so that they can write.

Can reveal.

Hadn't meant to. I backed 'way as best I could & was more careful next time.

Blogging does change the parameters in that buffer. But I come to think that a large part of the whole will be (for each of us) merely learning to create that buffer - and maintain it - regardless of the lacking in the new medium itself. I do know how much praise a writer requires to survive in any medium - those who never know writers save by their work wouldn't necessarily be privy to that - or to the immense bravado that is the necessity (and reality) of being able to self-reveal.

In any case, those of us who are called to that torture will survive or no - will edge out, one small inch at a time, retreat, cursing ourselves for our very brazenness - will eventually figure out no one is reading us anyway (thank you Sitemeter) and will venture out again. (And really, people may indeed be reading us.

But will anyone ever read us quite so closely as we read ourselves?)

One other issue inherent in blogging - someone popping up on your doorstep & not even the courtesy of ringing your doorbell (though as those who do peruse my sidebar will note, I proffer an email address for removing at least some of the sting of the whole world observing) but there they are, sitting in your very living room drinking a cup of tea.

I think it is that, in the end, many people would likely prefer only their friends read their blogs [and in point of fact, such is possible. One can have a blog & restrict readership to 'invitation only.'] but we get back to that sense of - err, defining realities in being a writer.

Feel rather badly about that, being one of those uninvited guests (but I am at present merely drinking Lipton, which as all tea-drinkers know, is not really tea) - as noted a few paragraphs back, many do make new friends on the internet, and quite easily.

But I think now perhaps they are a sort that make friends easily anyway and - for all my exuberance (& irresistible charm), I don't seem to have that knack.

Too much of me, is all I can figure. I could have titled this post, Annie Hall...a good friend calls me that & while I would prefer that Annie Hall be known as Wren King...

Well. You get the picture. Annie Hall girl here & as I know several others like me, waif-like & incapable of being orderly or quiet and yes, dippy as can possibly be imagined...

I tend to avoid them, too.

Well, off to correct my spelling of garret and hope the correct spelling does not upend my joyful chortle at the words of Thoreau...I could always ditch the quote: no one is reading my columns anyway & I suspect an awful lot of high school & university students end up for a few minutes peering into my tiny universe & then off they go, looking for something more profitable.

I think some new loss of subtlety will happen on a global level thanks to the blogosphere; after all, when you require emoticons to let you know a person was laughing...I suppose I can hope the professor visited passeres. Maybe he/she will come back. In my own reading, I only regularly hit blots (err, that was a typo) and/or sites that contain newsfeeds anyway.

Don't know that I would read passeres if I weren't the one writing it...

Can hope that misspelled word is not on someone's blackboard & passeres held up as the posterchild of what happens when you...

Well. Never mind. In need of a new set of watercolours here, and a pad of paper that has not wrinkled from the rain.

[Editor's note(s). A silent thank you (& apology) to the blogger mentioned above, into whose living room Wren inadvertently catapulted. She notes that she is leaving you un-linked out of respect for that needful sense of privacy she always seems to trounce, and trounce again, overgrown pup that wee bird remains...]