The Write Thing

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been the recipient of an award. I have to thank Miss Fiamma for the honor, which I can only accept with a wide smile and a humble nod. According to the rules that come with the award, it must be granted to ten other blogs. This has been a difficult task, which took me longer to comply with than it should have I must confess. Whenever possible, I have tried not to repeat myself.

The instructions to be followed by my nominees are:

1. Place the logo in the blog.

2. Choose ten blogs that you would consider deserving of the award or towards which you experience gratitude.

3. Post links to the nominees on the blog.

4. Inform the winners that they have been granted this award by commenting in their blogs.

5. Share the love, publish the link to this post and to the person who made you recipient of the award.

And my nominees are (in no special order of appearance):

1. Emi, La seguridad de mis objetos, a charming journey into a life that blends art and its own everyday poetry in a unique manner.

2. Flash-me, Flash me if you can, a collection of creative flashes with a cryptic personal touch.

3. Geisha, El jardín de la geisha, a garden where everything grows, led by the hand of a masterful creator.

4. Manon, Blumenfest, a feast to good literature, music and writing, although it has been silent for a while.

5. Lola, Los cuadernos de Lola, an exploration into the world of words, of writing, fresh air into a different notebook.

6. Erica, Por amor al cine, a celebration of movies, with colorful reviews that only a movie buff can write.

7. Arha, A la luz de mi sombra, poetry…because it all starts there and very few privileged souls can be themselves in that sea of words.

8. T, Atrevete, another example of writing, an art that some can do in a unique way.

9. Miss Fiamma and Von E., Juego de damas, a game of two, elegantly open to an audience of thousands.

10. Jason Pettus, Jason Pettus, an artist who proves that you can live outside the system and still be heard.

It has been complicated to keep my blog up to date these days. It has not been a question of time, as time is something we make, not something we have. It has not been a question of willingness, as I really wanted to do it, and grew more impatient the longer I saw the Nov. 22 date of my last posting setting the distance between my life and my recording of it. It may have been a question of why I write a blog… is it a megalomaniac disorder I am gradually developing or is it a need to access myself everywhere (assuming with total honesty that the bulk of my readers are occasional searchers for funny words or spam crawlers)? I still can’t decide, although it could also be that I feel more comfortable writing on a software-based pad than on a white sheet of paper. I don’t know, I am still scared of a feuille blanche, and less so of a machine that, at the push of a button, will draw me away from my own creation until I decide to bring it back by opening a browser. Maybe blogs simply require some looking after, unlike notebook pads where we doodle disconnected ideas that we are not necessarily forced to contend with in public, because we may as well have decided to keep the whole thing locked in a secret cupboard. But then, the anonymity of a blog helps a lot when it comes to throwing little messages in a bottle out into a wide ocean. There is no way of doing so on paper…paper is black or white. Either you keep it hidden from public view, or sooner or later you claim authorship of even your most disgusting piece of work.

Assuming that, despite my ping-pong monologues with myself, I still ignore the reason why I have not written before today, the simple act of seeing my fingers rush across the computer keyboard brings some relief. December has started, and I have a new entry in my blog. It is a metatext of myself, but that is what my life is, so it is as far as I can go today. In the meantime, I will be thinking of typical year-end reflections to populate a new posting with, and will probably come back before Christmas, to sing another song of myself.

I don’t know how long ago this happened, but somebody (other than spam-generating software) recently left a message on a blog I discontinued long ago. You see, I used to have another self (blog), which now I have been neglecting for a while to pay attention to the sexier, paying Wordpress. So, upon leaving a comment in one of her blog entries, I realized my former blog was linked to my profile, so she had peeked and written. I am glad she did. The note referred to my reluctance to acknowledge full lesbianism in Woolf’s Orlando. I am thinking whether it was good and to the point.

This comment triggered the literary wheel for Bloomsbury, and now it is rolling. I recently got hold of a copy of Portrait of a Marriage in DVD and book format, so I had a look at an arbitrary page, and read Vita:

Mother scolded me this morning because she said I wrote too much, and Dada told her he did not approve of my writing. I am afraid my book will not be published. Mother does not know how much I love my writing.

Writing…oh la la! What it does to one!