A soft word, “indecent”, and it brushes my lips as they touch a petal pale as the sky and soft as the silk of a white white nightgown still warm from bed. The rain has stopped.
4 thoughts on “pale as the sky”
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I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen. Blogging here since October 2000.
A soft word, “indecent”, and it brushes my lips as they touch a petal pale as the sky and soft as the silk of a white white nightgown still warm from bed. The rain has stopped.
mae
Jill – This is not a direct response to pale as the sky, although I might do that next! I’m not sure if this is the best way to contact you – it’s my first writing (posting)to a blog. I’m doing a project on blogging in a course on Cyberculture that I’m doing at art school – and you are one of my main sources, being so prolific, knowledgeable and passionate! One or two weeks ago I read something, which I’m sure you said, in your blog, about people being able to maintain a false persona in ‘real’ life, but through regular online journalling one cannot hide one’s ‘real’ self, one’s self inevitably comes through. This interests me, partly because it contrasts with how people see the internet – as a place where role playing and deception are the norm. Do you remember writing about that? Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find it, but will keep looking. I’m really interested in how liberated people feel on the internet, seeming to reveal so much of their personal lives to a huge public, through blogs and even webcam girls, and then the connections that are built up through those journals and blogs. I don’t have a blog, but am hoping to set one up soon.
Jill
Mae, sure, you can contact me like this – ah, I forgot to put my email address in my new design didn’t I?
I’m pretty sure someone else must have said that bit about its being easier to maintain a false persona offline than online. Perhaps it’s your own thought, that you compiled from other things you read?
But you do raise an interesting point, and what I *might* have written, though I don’t remember it, but I’m happy to write it now, is that it doesn’t really matter whether a blog is “real” or “fictional”, because the emotions and experiences and thoughts expressed and the connections made and the ideas written out can be real and moving whether they happened to a particular individual on that day or whether they were simply imagined.
Novels and movies move me and are important to me whether they were “based on a true story” or not.
And it’s interesting how people think they’re finding out everything about a blogger’s life. So much is not written. Even a more personal blogger than I leaves out vast swathes of what he or she does and feels. Yet as a reader I know I piece together the little bits of infomration that I do have and shape myself a lovely picture of each blogger I read. Just as Wolfgang Iser says we do with fiction.
Good luck with your blogging and on your project!
Constance
Nothing comes out of the sack but what was in it...
Jill
Well, you know, sacks don’t really have a great deal in common with literature or art, anyway.