Oh Hell, Why Not

David Weinberger’s JOHO is a great site that I read but have never linked to. Same goes for Steve Himmer’s, Doc Searls’, and AKMA’s, the last of which includes those guys (and more) in what he calls “The Usual Posse.” I will continue to wonder why, besides Jeneane Sessum, there are not more such powerfully articulate females blogging into the current important verbal excursions into the unknown.

The other day, David blogged something that was emailed to him by Vergil Iliescu:
In Billy Connolly’s biography, written by his wife Pamela Stevenson, she notes that Billy doesn’t use the internet because the people who do are “the kind of people you wouldn’t talk to in a pub anyway” (or something like that, I’m quoting from memory).

In truth, the bloggers I’ve "met" – in addition to those I just mentioned -- are JUST the kind of people I WOULD want to talk to in a pub -- even though, more truthfully, I probably would have only hung around the edges of their conversation, listening and feeling intimidated. Well, I might have moved in a little closer after my first bourbon. I might even have tried to insert a small word of my own into the density of it all, although I don’t think I would have succeeded.

Their kind of meandering and meaningful, complex and creative verbal exercises work on the web because there’s enough empty space and time out there for their larger-than-life personas, their mega-metaphors, and their massive energy surges. They could never be contained in any one pub. And so, without the internet, I would never have had a chance – or the courage -- to insinuate myself into such intricately connected monologues. Keeping up with them, though, is something else entirely. (pant….pant…..wheeze….wheeze)

Ooops, I Did It Again

After my ritual morning roll in the blog, I find myself in the shower humming “Ooops, I did it again…”

I did it a few years ago, when on a whim I submitted some of my poetry about the mythic Lilith (Adam’s first wife) to a book on that subject being put together by the Jewish Women’s Resource Center in New York City. It was advertised as a publication written by Jewish women, and I’m not even Jewish. But eventually I find two of my pieces in Which Lilith: Feminist Writers Recreate the World's First Woman, nestled in among some major and intimidating prose and poetry, including an introduction by Naomi Wolfe. I’m the only writer represented who isn’t Jewish.

I seem to have a pattern of signing up for leagues that are way beyond my own.

And so I find myself now in the deepest of uncharted spaces – not swimming with sharks, but rather with mermen, sea sprites, mysterious bloggods big banging out a new universe and sucking me into to wordpools way out of my depths. What have I done in blogrolling so brazenly into this hierarchy of hyperbole, this maelstrom of metaphors, this mad mad mad mad mad mad whirl?

Which Lilith, indeed. Which Jeneane? Which Marek? Which Gary? Which Mike?