Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Yes, It is Just Me!, or, The Blog that Came in from the Cold Watch for changes to come. I thank you for your kind attentions. You have blessed me with your attention and thoughts, even when you had no time to record the fact of your visit. And for this I bless you in return. For the rest of this day I must bless the house! with cleansing ministrations. Filled as it is with all manner of fauna, my home has me ankle-deep in hay and hair, as I wrote earlier to a friend. Out with the sponges and mops and implements of reconstruction. And I've put half my remaining library up for sale, in light of a possible move in the near future. And I am freeing boxloads of unneeded belongings to find new homes out in the world. Then I'll dress feral in new clothes and we'll see if anyone salutes. Love. 10:59:43 AM    comment []

Or is it just me? I must force myself to keep going here. Something in me insists there's a reason I do this, even if no one responds to anything I share except the weather. Someday someone may want to say something about the poetry of Anne Sexton, or about black humor, or Protestant Easters, or Wm. C. Williams, or the symbolism of the serpent and egg, the first day of spring, snakes, my lousy poems. feral is about so much more than my reactions to the wind in these interminable juniper barrens, or whether or not it snows. Recently some other blogs have gone on hiatus, their writers uncertain of the continuing value of this activity in their lives. I understand their frustration. One is always grateful for the readers who comment, the "wow"s and "this is great"s; yet one craves specifics. "I like what you did in the fourth line but I don't understand why you altered the rhythm in the middle." Or "I never liked this poet, but this poem surprises me. I'll have to take another look." Or "I had a similar experience today. I wonder if it really could be related to the phase of the moon?" Or, "How could you have behaved so callously? This isn't the Sam I know. Enlarge on this story." Just how passive are we? These are not TV shows, are they? with viewers just flipping from channel to channel blankly perceiving and moving on... Doesn't anyone want to participate? Nevermind. This is my failing. And the whole challenge of the endeavor, I suppose. If hours of work scanning and Photoshopping and keyboarding can't generate even so much as the occasional calling card from the readers I know stopped by--either the fault lies with me, or feral's audience has yet to stumble in. I'm going to revamp the page here, change the look, try to give its contents a sharper focus. I'm eliminating all personal categories. I find that because my friends and readers respond most readily to tales of travails--crises, confessions of personal failings, threats of shutting down--I am becoming conditioned to keep dancing as hard as I can in the arena of hardship, and that's not conducive to anything but more of it. There's something here to consider, though. Has personal blogging devolved to the point where it's just bloggers reading other bloggers, and gradually falling silent? Or is it the nature of bloggers in general--we are more Actors than Reactors. Or is it just me? And yet the dilemma: Even if one were to attract a readership sympathetic to one's enthusiasms, how could they be expected to think about and respond to every blog they look at? The reader must choose, in that case, a few choice blogs, the ones that speak loudest to him or her, and respond there, engage there in dialog, and relegate blogs that whisper to the periphery, the second tier--responding on an as-needed basis. I think this is where feral lives these days. 10:58:24 AM    comment []