i want to start every sentence with i feel because of the beautiful Jonathan Harris

So i said that i watched something that made me think about The Night Listener again and that thing was a lecture by Jonathan Harris which was about connecting people and their stories, i'll put the link at the bottom if you're interested.
The first thing he talked about has been around since about 2007 though i've never heard of it but it was all amazing. Possibly a bit too anglophonic but such a lovely idea. It is a program called We Feel Fine and it searches the world's blogs for the phrase "i feel..." and it stores all the data of what people are feeling and what they are blogging about (apparently it logs about 20,000 people a day) then it can find where you are through your IP address and can tell you what the weather is like there. You can then go and search for certain characteristics like women in their thirties who feel melancholy whilst it is sunny in Kosovo, if that's what you would like. The way i'm expressing it seems to make it sound much more like a device that stalks you and helps you stalk people than when Jonathan described it but really i think it is beautiful. Maybe i should let Jonathan know, i'm sure he checks the data sometimes as he seemed really interested in people's stories so here goes; Jonathan i feel like your We Feel Fine program is absolutely lovely, it makes me feel that i am on the road meeting new people each with a story to tell, jumping in and out of their lives like Jack Kerouac.
People ask me why i blog rather write a diary if i don't tell people the url and this is my new fantastic reason. You can even click on each quote and it will take you to that person's blog - he talked about clicking on the blog if you felt empathy for the person which just makes him an even more beautiful human - and i like that people who feel the same or feel they can help can get in contact. Some people seem to think that the internet is massive and frightening but to me it is a warm cuddle of compassion.
On to the actual link with the last post then. What is so lovely about all of this is that it is passive. It has been around since 2007 and i have not heard of it, which means every time i have blogged "i feel..." i have not known that there was an audience and this must be true for the vast majority of bloggers. It shows people as they are being honest and candid and so gives true feelings and true stories, especially if, like me, people are writing without an audience or rather without catering for an audience. This got me thinking that this was a better thing to engage with than a soap. If people like real life stories ( i am still not sure why this is but i know that On The Road would not be so sublime if i thought it was made up (if it is please don't tell me i just refuse to research it in case my heart is broken)), as i was saying, if people like real stories then they should follow We Feel Fine because there is no end to what you can find out, you can just keep reading, television, films and novels are finite in a way this isn't and this is all true (which is apparently what we want). However exciting metafiction can be - like the release of a real Nikki Heat book from the fictional television show Castle - it can never trump real life with all its intricacies and magnificence.
Jonathan then talked about how the night sky is filled with constellations that are named after Greek myths and  what stories we would have in the sky if we named the constellations. i had never really thought of the stars like that, as stories playing out across the sky. i don't know the constellations but i now feel driven to know them and go back to Zambia where the sky was darkest and the stars were brightest and just gaze up and watch myths all night long...i wish i was there right now in the silence of the Zambian night. He then talked about a program that tracked the world's media and the internet and made constellations through the stories and the words that were being used, i can't explain it like he did, if you like the ideas maybe have a look at the link at the bottom, but what i liked most about that was the fact you could put anything at the centre of the universe. and all the words, all the news stories, all the photos that were related to that swirled around it like cinnamon into coffee and you could get an absolute picture of anything you wanted. This made me happy. i want you to look at it and start lots of blog sentences with i feel, so we can all feel together.



Here is the treasured link, if you forward anything today forward this link: http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_harris_tells_the_web_s_secret_stories.html .

on authoriality

Wrote this a couple of days back but forgot to post it and then watched something else which reminded me of it. You didn't need to know that but i needed you to know that.

i just watched The Night Listener, if you haven't seen it it's about an author who gets a call from a 14 year old boy whose existence is never proved. The boy has allegedly used writing therapy to overcome the trauma of having been subject to paedophilic pornography films and being violated in them. He writes about this in the book. In the film Robin Williams says if it's a lie that it is a sick way of promoting a book. But really, aside from the possible terror of the reality, what is the importance of it being a real story? i always like to think it would be fun to pretend to be someone else when on a plane or when you meet people travelling but would i be upset or disappointed if i found that stories that i had been told were lies aside from the fact itself that i had been lied to? Is it plausibility which is important? Is it to do with how emotionally invested we get with the story? When you study history, or rather when i did i never got emotionally involved because i know that that is how it turned out and that has, in part, created the world we live in, and to an extent a true story does the same. A fictional story could have ended differently, we wonder perhaps why the author chose for it to end in the way it did. Hollywood obviously thinks that it is important because they always say when a story is based on real events. Is it maybe part of modern fiction that it has to be plausible and if we know that it happened then we can trust it and we feel more tied to it emotionally because it is real people? In the case of the film though it wasn't important if the back-story was real was it, it was just the fact that the author lied.

Authoriality confuses me.

"awesome like ten million hotdogs, Sir"

So i haven't written any poetry properly for a long time. i would say i was rusty so i had an excuse but i don't want one. Art should be collaborative i think. Art is collaborative even if only one person writes it. i fear and relish your comments but i like the immediacy of this form and the pressure it puts on the poem - if i can call it that, it's more of an imagination dump.

Carriages lined with people

With stories of their own.

The world expands in my head

As they make their way home, to work, to family, to friends

To the ends of the line

And time passes time

In this underground line

Where my eyes open to the awesome size of the world,

"Awesome like ten million hotdogs, Sir."

My score of years

Is nothing here

My own insignificance pales against theirs

Their love affairs, their joking dares, their unawares.

We are follicles of hairs on the head of the city

Alone nothing but together pretty.

Or ugly. Or something

Less much less than i could fathom.

I am insignificant at best.

Chess

A strange thing to talk about i suppose but i do find it interesting. A very old game where the only female gendered piece is the strongest. The king might be the one you have to take to win but the queen is the most versatile and the most dangerous whilst the king is the most fragile; the female:male dynamic i suppose is a bit like in Macbeth, action vs inaction, potency vs stasis. On a side note i suppose i also like the imagery of bishops only being able to move diagonally, unable to defend itself from attacks right next to it and criss-crossing across the board sticking to one colour of square like it doesn't accept the philosophy of the other and thus refuses to go there (also they are more fun simply because James Joyce makes the bishop in Ulysses criss-cross around Dublin - simple things...). i like the social mobility the pawn is afforded, an american dream of a piece before America was even populated by what we would now call americans.

I but you?

It probably hasn't escaped your attention that i write "I" i. Why am i capitalised but not you or him or her or it; not even we gets that lovely capitalising treatment (isn't it a little egocentric, at least be consistent). But names do, sure. Strange aggrandisement rules. i'm happy to capitalise people i like or rather people i think deserve it the same goes for cities. But some names just look better lower case, the example that comes to mind is bogota, don't know why, it's just aesthetics. Capitals were previously used when people didn't put spaces between words but i think we can probably say it's safe to say i is fine and personally i like the little dot hovering above my personal pronoun and i'm not sure i deserve capitalisation yet, something to aim for maybe.

coffee cup

                     I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

i love this line of Prufrock. In fact i love every line of Prufrock but that is beside the point. A combination of the state of my room and this line of genius led me to thinking: what if we had just one cup which we weren't allowed to wash and had to drink from forever? Then drinking would be more like life; you couldn't just wash away something which you didn't want in your life anymore and do things without consequences. i haven't taken this experiment to its limit; i do sometimes wash my coffee cup, well it's a mug but the alliteration was far more pleasing, c and m go together like orange and green. Being the classy person i am i also drink red wine, port, whiskey and smoothie out of the same cup. And i drink water too sometimes. Water is the "i'm sorry" of drinks. It partially cleans my cup but when i drink it it always tastes of the last thing in there. i like that. It gives my palate something new and a never ending variation to experience. That goes for all of my drinks. There are all these set combinations of things that go together and this is just my little factory of new things (i always think of the mexican sauce "mole" when combining flavours, if twenty seven spices and chocolate go together nothing is out of the question). Whiskey out of a previously coffee cup: very good, coffee out of a previously whiskey cup: slightly odd. Water with small amounts of old smoothie; lovely. The collage of flavours play on my tongue so that nothing ever tastes the same. It's not just the flavours that mix, the colours do too. i seem to have a penchant for drinks that stain and my cup is rather porous and white. i like white, white shows all experience. Red wine experience, coffee experience, the cup has it's own very special pattern of old droplets of drink snaking down. That's what happens in life. You can't erase what you've done or said, even if you run away from your actions you always know what happened and it will drift into your unconscious; there is only so much water i can drink from my cup and it never obliterates the red and brown trails of former joy, the marks of the cup's past are as indelible as my life's actions. The cup and i, we like that.  
    

Hello again

After an absence i have come back to the blogosphere and hopefully will be posting much more in the coming weeks. Pressure is off until October now so i should have time to think and write up thoughts, i was even considering cojonesing up and posting some of my poetry if i can find it. Also i have ideas for my story and whereas before i have been worried about people reading it and taking from it (i have high opinions of my writing apparently) now i have squared my thinking with my communal views on plagiarism and so if i do indeed have any influence on anyone's writing i'm happy for the greater happiness.
Much love, nice to see you again
alex