TeleOctoscopy: a Birthday Build

'Is there much more of it still to come?'
'Two hours of it. Why do you sigh?'
'Because I should like to see it all.'
'And why can't you?'
'I have to go - presently.'

Mark Twain, From the "London Times" of 1904 

It all started with hat envy.
Yesterday afternoon, Maya Paris and the ubiquitous otter Scottius Polke were sporting headgear that rather effectively burst the bubbles in Pop-n-Glo part of Oberon Onmura's new install at Fruit Islands Art on sim Mango. Maya responded to my hint about hat-sharing by cryptically asking if I had received the invite to the TeleOctoscope  her SL7B build, a joint project with the brilliant L1Aura Loire.
Then the otter passed out. (BTW if you click on the pictures, they get bigger.) Maya's build is here on sim SL7B Phenomenal.

It's inspired by a 19th-century long-distance communication device called a "telectroscope," a perfect metaphor for friendship and the close, long-distance connections possible in the metaverse, particularly celebrating the one between two women, one in Massachusetts, the other in far-away Kent, or vice versa, depending on your point of view.

Interactive, like so many of Maya's builds, you get to wear a uniform, including non-stick gloves and yay! the big hat! and join the ranks of mermechanics, powered by 'steam, chocolate and tea'. Not sure about the mustache; it makes me look like a goodnight-hating gun-toting guitarist.

We Mermechanics are sworn to keep the machine in perfect working order. Not sure what that involves; as you know, I never read notecards. Or write syllabi, until I absolutely have to, but that's off topic.

At the bottom of the structure, which gets slightly lost in the busy sky of the birthday build, I was absolutely enchanted by the 4 viewing pods showing films, including one about mermaids, and a nostalgia piece about the blowing up of Maya and L1Aura's eggy Burning Life build.

The very best one, though,  is 'Toggle' a short film in which L1Aura tells the story of her Lives, a "mixed-reality work-in-progress" as she puts it. She stands in her RL office with, on the screen behind her,  images of SL (hey, that's Filthy Fluno in the photo! - Side note, I think his wife makes him wear that hair, don't you? as a sort of contraceptive device).  L1Aura/Lori is a RL university professor in Boston, and this film tells of her investigation into the virtual world, and what her friendship with Maya Paris means to her, and what it led to... you have to see this one, it's just great, and is available for viewing here if you can't get inworld.

Oh and I have incriminating pictures of Kolor Fall drinking beer at a Japanese Rain Festival, if anyone would like to see them.

Ceci n'est pas une...

No, he is complitly naked, it moust be art lol!

Betty Tureaud

... tetine... wait for it... nope, didn't get ejected from anywhere, I think they made that stuff up for the oodles of free press. Or maybe all the Lindens are lighting candles at the Shrine to the Perpetual Doodle, and didn't notice my naughtiness.
zephyru Zapedzki  is a cross-world artist from Portugal and he curates art at the Paris Eiffel sim - a place that has one huge defect: the landing point is set centrally, so when you get the LM for Zeph's shows at the Jeu de Paume, you arrive instead under the Eiffel Tower, and by the time you rez, and wander about a bit, you've received so many distracting IMs you forgot why you were there and leave again. And by you, obviously, I mean me.
His latest show, Ceci n'est pas une exposition ends this weekend, I don't know if you're still in time, but the sim is fun anyway, and this photo may help you get your bearings. Oh and here's the video commemorating the event

Better late than never. Zeph, who was smoking a pipe when we met (or was he??), showed me around the exhibition. Ub Yifu's well known interpretation of  Dali's Temptation of St Anthony greets visitors, and opposite there's a tribute to Bettie Page.
zephyru Zapedzki: I like this piece because it's complete in many ways. It's a rl painting I did tributing Bettie Page, it's a SL sculpture too with the wooden mannequins I did (I have a collection of them, famous RL sculptures included) and it's an installation art in SL. And the funny side of the theme, the wooden mannequin became the painter and paints his girl, but in RL, not in wood.

The always astoundingly beautiful AM Radio is represented by eight exquisitely surreal canvasses, from The Flow of Intention to The Red Door and Overcoming Imaginary Gravitational Forces. In juxtaposition, McPol Kamachi's rather frightening real life oil paintings and the superb digital work of Araminta Kroitschov complete the lineup, transporting the viewer from real to surreal to virtually real in a perception-bending ride. The locus  for the exhibition only heightens the disconnect between our preconditioned expectations and the subject matter of the paintings; we are in an impression of the Jeu de Paume in an approximation of Paris; in a way the most real thing here is the content of the artwork.

Next up at the Jeu de Paume?  zephyru Zapedzki  reveals - the inimitable Patrick Moya! now I've got my pseudo-Parisian geography straight, count on me to be at the vernissage - I hope you'll join me.
Also happening today, you can vote for the best piece of still life at The Meisterbastler Gallery.

Still life somewhere between 2 and 3D - it's a great idea by Asmita Duranjaya, Zewe Major and Miriam Evanier and given the chance, I'd have liked to submit something of mine to it, and badgered you into voting for me, so be grateful I have zero free time lately, guess me and M Linden have something in common after all, although, he is probably going to be less tied up in the foreseeable future.

You might also want to drop by Dulcis Taurog's new show at the KunstGalerie sky where there will be musicks and celebrations at 3pm SLT. For even more interaction, At Fruit Islands Art on sim Mango you can explore the nature of presence and absence with two new works by  Oberon Onmura: first see 'Intersectors', where multicoloured prims react brightly on contact with one another, and then get up close and personal with Pop-n-glo spheres...

Now we are seven

The Birthday Party is like any other family festivity: you find yourself tripping over dull relatives chirping the same-old same-old; (alleged) Funny Uncles come out of the woodwork, while sharp-eyed old biddies tut-tut at all and sundry. There's always somebody's dad making a long and boring keynote speech, and a lot of nay-sayers neighing about it afterwards, and pie fights, yummy. And the Attention-seeking Cousin is there with an inappropriate gift, and her Attention Deficient cronies are all ooh-ing and aah-ing about it, as if this doesn't happen single every time there's a get-together with a capital G.
This is why I don't do family dos, as a general rule. However, handsome hunk and part-time purveyor of cold drinks Eli Schlegal offered to tp me to UpsideDown and I couldn't say no.

It's in the TOS.
If you've ever wondered what the Linden Homes look like - you know, the ones touted on the 'Premium Account' ad? - wonder no more.  Here they are, in mini version. At least, I hope so. Not sure how those A frames can possibly be cam friendly. The designs reflect the same cutting-edge forethought that put 'Stop Animating My Avatar' in the 'Advanced' tab in 2.0. I took the weight off and admired the view, not sure what Eli's doing, you'll have to use your own imagination. Try to keep it PG or better.

We went to see Babel which is a translating device by Peter Stindberg. Particle words in a bunch of different languages were floating up into the air, very effective marketing tool for a wordlover like me, and there were lots of explanatory boards, which of course I didn't read.

It's obviously a brilliant piece of engineering, but in his profile Peter refers to RL as FL, which always sounds like swearing to me, so I didn't buy one, if indeed the device was for sale. My Competent Partner was whispering stuff out of context, and that distracted me. Plus I had clearly overdone it with the pixel punch.

The cool part of an extended-family kneesup is that you might come across new and exciting people. We popped over to sim Contradiction to see Sunman Loring's ubercool Frontier Spaceport display, it was fun just trying out the upholstery, maybe one day I'll be able to afford one of these babies for myself. Hint hint, Eli.

If that's not enough testosterone for ya, there's a giant ball machine right next door! *it's kinetic*!! Argos Hawks made this chaos machine in two bits in contrasting styles, in honour of the holiday theme, which you may have thought was Unbridled Linden-bashing, but that's more of a yearlong celebration than a Birthday treat.

Nice to see that Argos gives credit to a RL machine maker as well as to the SL creatives whose work is used in his installation - now there's a cause to get behind: giving credit where it's due, instead of tacitly passing off other people's work as your own.

I also really liked the machine called Timeline by GM Nikolaidis. When you click on the number boards, things magically appear in a way I'm not prepared to describe in this post, and there's a free gift. Try it out!
The unexpected goings-on continued when we got to Portucalis.

I had no idea Mr Schlegal was such a Portugeezer, he answered all my questions in surprising detail. We spent ages here, and tried all the activities indicative of the Land and its Culture, que graça! I hope the rest of you had as much fun at the party. It's easy - be careful not to make eye contact with the sermonizers, and keep circulating.

Pixels in the City 2: Big Bambu

SL7B? Woot!

M Linden

I think it was back in February that Igor Ballyhoo started seriously playing with his idea for a scissor forest, now set up over at the University of Texas at San Antonio sim. (Another coup for Co Solo and the team). It's worth visiting. 
Under the blades, the infinite pattern of creative thought.  I had just been doing some stuff about the asymmetry of molecules: chemist, writer and Auschwitz survivor  Primo Levi talks about it in his book Il sistema periodico.  In nature, molecules are often made of atoms strung together asymmetrically. Using polarized light, researchers discovered they fall into two groups - the same compound could twist the light beam like the thread of a screw, either to the right or to the left, a twin pair of molecules; just as your right and left hand match but are not the same, or like two scissor blades coming together, complementary but forever opposed. A classic example of adaptive asymmetry. It is called being chiral.

 Living things, from amino acids onwards, are made almost exclusively of left-handed asymmetrical molecules. By chance or design, the fragile grains all turn in harmony. Yet the same configuration reversed ought to be as feasible: why is it not? Levi contemplates our attempts to polarize the choosing principles of asymmetry and life, and ponders the fate of right-handed molecules, the lost twins of our left-twisting selves, and the ambiguity of the apparent symmetry of opposition in our world between vice and virtue. Do the right-handers flourish elsewhere, banished by some sort of poter ascoso - and if so, how and why?

At the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the roof has become a rain forest, overlooking the greenwood of Central Park. Nestling among the concrete and brick of the fourth floor courtyard, bamboo poles crowd and cluster, forming a sort of stilted cocktail party, alive with anticipation.  This is Big Bambu, and once again, Oberon Onmura gets the thanks for pointing out another New York treasure to me. Give that man a drink! At floor level, it's a labyrinth of slim pillars, but look up a little, and Big Bambu becomes a bird's nest, full of complicated, chaotic intersections. There is no symmetry in the tangle of poles, but somehow the eye finds patterns, geometric harmonies in 3D. Doug and Mike, the Starn twins, support and direct the overall look of the sculpture, which started as an idea some 13 years ago. Previous to getting permission to nestify the Met, they built an incredible indoor bamboo arch at their studio at Beacon, just to show the possibilities of both the materials and the techniques they had in mind. 

The interior pathway  made and reminded me of the Voliera in Parco di Monza, but while that structure from 2006 squats on the grass showing signs of decay, its transatlantic cousin is currently 20 feet tall and will soon tower some 40 to 50 feet above the roof of the Museum.  Big Bambu is the Voliera taken flight; bright, busy and still growing: how apt its tagline You Can't, You Won't You Don't Stop.  
Rather than micromanaging, the Starn brothers set goal posts, and then builders, (mountain climbers, not professional scaffolders or artists) branch out, knot by brightly colored knot, - each Swiss-made 'bootstrap' takes about three minutes to tie just right - and pole by pole, to reach them. This is performance art: every move has to be calculated, small engineering quandaries must be overcome, either in private moments of calculation, or with the help of the rest of the team. The result is a unique knitting together of individual solutions to the shared problem of how to get there from here... Big Bambu is an allegory of the city that surrounds it, already complete but never finished, worked out in flows and currents. 

It's not until you climb inside the resilient, flexible and forgiving structure, however, that you really get the feel for it. Zac, one of the builders and also a guide *mmm nice smile*, leads the way.  'You're with the elements, up here. There's a feeling of complete happiness working on this project, working steadily as a team, with the wind making the canes rustle and sway a little, you feel interconnected with all the sounds, with the feel of weather as it changes, enjoying the shade when the sun beats down, being part of the work of the people around you. Big Bambu is like a cresting wave, when you get up top, you can see the overall form the Starn brothers have in mind. It's like the jungle and the ocean coming together.'

So far, thousands of strings have been tied, and more than 4000 poles of varying sizes have been gradually  hauled up onto the roof for use on the structure: 'We're rocking the domestic bamboo,' Zac said, 'All of it comes from South Carolina and Georgia.' With the exception of sensible things like making the walkway complete and safe for visitors, they try to build in such a way that it is not necessary to cut the poles down to size; they'd rather work with the dimensions and use them to invent and suggest new departures for the construction. This is prim twisting for RL, one pole at a time. At the scissor forest, His Ballyhooness completed the task without breaking a sweat. 

They say Kirsten's working on a 3D viewer, but I don't know if even she can make you feel the wind in your hair, or smell the faint woody aroma of the drying leaves, or the feel the touch of strangers with delighted eyes, or the smoothness of the canes under your hand, or sense the tangled patterns of perception, spiralling left and right. Layers of sound are breeze-driven - the din of Fifth Avenue, small voices from the lawns far below, rustling birds in the woods beyond and banter from the party at your feet, as the sun slowly sets and the city prepares for Friday night.

Oh my, Oberon, what a beautiful view! Yep, he joined me on the rooftop for a few minutes before going off to create fabulousness in the Metaverse. No teleport or 24/7 visit-at-will here in lawyer-operated RL NY - the Guided Tour group is carefully shepherded from the ticket office (in the basement) up to the roof, and then in through the bamboo gates for a twenty minute walkabout. On the narrow walkway we seem like corpuscles moving through an artery inside a great beast. We are 15 in the party, because that's how many people can fit a single elevator, not because the build couldn't take the weight, but it springs a bit, like life. 'It's not often an artwork can make you a little afraid,' Zac comments. He's not been in Second Life, yet.

No cameras, or any other droppable items, may be taken up on the walkway; luckily in SL that's rarely an issue, but, you know, in this case it wouldn't have helped to take pictures. Like Igor's misty glade among the blades, you have to be there to get it. The Starn brothers' Big Bambu pulls all of you inside, into the forest and into the beast, onto the cutting edge of complete and divine chaos.

Winner's Circle

The declared winners of the Science/Art (shakes fist at Blogger, which has issues with the ampersand) have been announced by Marjorie Fargis...
This very wonderful piece is 'untitled string theory'  by Mila Tatham and Rodriguez Imako, (sorry I forgot to mention Rodriguez when I blogged this earlier).

All the top pieces are on display for one week from today between the menhirs of MarkWD Helendale's Pseudostonehengikon, on Frontier Land.

The final trophyholders are (drum roll)...
Merlino Mayo, for this

... and Abstract Baroque for this.

You may have seen some of Abstract's early work, together with Eden Toll,  over at Diabolus  a while back. I asked Abstract to do the Winner's Quote thing and this is what he said, just off the top of his head,
Abstract Baroque: "Just as Second Life is at the cutting edge of new art forms, so in science String theory is leading scientific thought. Bringing the 2 together conceptually has been a challenge and great fun, and I look forward to all artists in Second Life developing an art form of the future, and maybe sharing the journey for a while."

See, he's much more than just a snappy dresser. Check out this video too!

Anyway, if you like to read Italian, you can do no better than to visit Frontierlander Aliza Karu's version of events in her admirable blog. 

Another Country

...they do things differently there.

L P Hartley, The Go-Between

*sigh* Another flurry of impending Arma-Linddon posts across the blogosphere... I haven't been keeping up with most of it, since repetitive whingeing brings me out in a rash, but before we all go to hell (or Blue Mars) in a hand cart, why not contemplate Pathfinders. Take a look at Leslye Writer's exhibit, you'll find it a thoughtful work-in-progress, to which you can probably contribute, in one way or another.

Enjoy the maps of Ye Olde SL, which show long-vanished places like 'The Disco', and sims like Clyde and Stillman visible in their first incarnations. Click on the little ball beside the nameplate under each picture to receive notecards at turns revealing and tantalizing, with photos of oldbies as they are now and, in some cases, showing how they looked when they were newbies.

Here you'll find famous figures from the fields of SL art, writing, music, building and scripting, including Huckleberry Hax, Russell Eponym, and Madame Thespian Underhill. I sat on 'The First Prim' - is that sacrilege? -  and had a read. In some cases, Leslye has added the story as she knows it, in others, the interested parties have contributed a paragraph or two about what it was like to be an early Resident, and how things have changed both technologically and as a community. Persephone Phoenix gives a sweetly lyrical account of her early life and her love of flying. I liked Filthy Fluno's card best though, as soon as you read it you'll agree, it sums him up to a T.

Are you an oldbie? Do you know someone who falls into that category? The cut-off age to qualify is currently class of 2006. Why not join in? Visit Pathfinders or send Leslye Writer a current photo, an early pic of yourself, and a short account of what life was like in 'olden' days - you remember, when you had dorky hair, couldn't walk right, and kept crashing. Oh wait, that was me on Blue Mars yesterday ...and in SL this morning.

Pixels in the City Part 1: Skinsmith

Serene was a word...

Betty Smith,  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 

Ah, serenity. Remember that? Back in Manhattan, me, and spring busting out all over the Park, but the traffic was terrible, so thank goodness Oberon Onmura sent me a TP to meet him in Brooklyn the other day - no, not Brooklyn is Watching, RL Brooklyn, where there's a(nother) world-class museum of art. Oberon wanted me to see the Kiki Smith installation, 'Sojourn' - it's a collection of sculptures and drawings that are inspired by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and an embroidered picture from the 1800's by Prudence Punderson showing the stages in a woman's life. 

Oberon Onmura: Kiki Smith was focusing on the body before it got fashionable. I also like how she uses materials - a lot. I'm not a theorist so I can't really go there, but for me there is a sense of woman (as opposed to girl) in everything she does that is very strong. So much work out there feels like MFA studio projects. Kiki has always been, to me, an "adult." This is hard to quantify - it's just my impression of her work over the past 20 years or so.

The paper and silk used here are very feminine: Smith has often applied the word 'skin' to describe her work, and it's apt: porous, resilient, thin, containing, a bridge and a barrier to the world around us. The pieces in the show, with their themes of feminine ties, mortality, and creativity, are delicate in every sense of the word, and something about the overall look made me think of our own Feathers Boa. I asked how the transient nature of art - pixellated or not - affects her work.

Feathers Boa:   The reality is everything is temporal and can be destroyed. The nature of my work in SL is odd, it comes from someplace inside my head and most of what it becomes happens somewhere outside of SL. I make my SL art up from things in RL. Photos, scraps of paper, scans of material, pieces of metal, and digital programs like Cinema 4D. My art is all wisps of smoke blowing in a virtual wind. Once I make it, I try and forget it exists at all. And in some ways, it doesn't exist.
The Kiki/Feathers connection came to mind thanks to 'Butterflies',  Feather's current install over at Aho. It depicts 7 stages of a woman's life: like a butterfly, beautiful, delicate and oh so brief. (admire all seven paintings, note the writing that is revealed only when you approach the canvases, and ooo, try the light switch behind the door!). Aho rocks.

Feather Boa: Every woman is beautiful and unique, I try to show that in each canvas. The words that appear as you approach each canvas are things I've thought or words spoken to me. I made the canvases and painted them as if I was the woman on each one. I wanted to see myself age and remember my girlhood. Imagine myself in my 30's, middle age and as an aged grandmother.
Yet, the apparent transience of memory and experience has another side.

Feathers Boa: I'll tell you a story from RL. Some years ago. I painted something I felt at the time, pain, hurt, shame, fear, a wash of young girl emotions welling up inside of me from a painful childhood. It was a self-portrait. I poured out all my self-loathing on the picture. My girlfriend at the time found it. She recognized my eyes in the twisted hateful face and asked me why I hated myself so much and if I hated her as well. She cried and left me alone with my creation. I burned it in the fireplace the next day, but it is still here inside my head as vivid as the day I painted it, and I'm sure it still is burnt into the memory of Claire, wherever she is. I guess knowing that at anytime all of SL could vanish along with everything in it, does play into how I relate to the art I create in-world. I treat it all like the vapor it is, and hope that somehow it lives on in the memories of the people who see it and experience it.

Woolf's essay is, of course, about how hard it is for a woman to find the space and time for independent creativity. I'm not sure I buy into it, at least not for a Woolf-like woman living today, but it raises an interesting point about time and the metaverse... what is the true shape of our Second Hours?
Feathers Boa:  It is sometimes impossible to find time to be creative. My Real Life is frantic and busy. I used to escape into Second Life. As time has passed SL has become just as demanding and crazy as RL, so much so that lately I have avoided SL altogether in the hopes that people will forget me and I can sneak back into create something while no one is watching. Inspiration hits me sometimes and I just work through the night. I've been known to call in sick if my muse strikes. Creativity is like birth, it is sometimes painful and hard. Sometimes it births something beautiful, sometimes it is ugly at birth, wrinkled, fat and crying. But once I make something, it is out there and I pour my heart and love into it. Finding time for this is like saying "how do you find the time to breathe?"

On the 4th floor of the Brooklyn Museum, 'Soujourn' spills out of the bright, modern space of the Sackler Center, and into the surrounding rooms, which are reconstructed rooms from historical houses. This is the staircase from Tripp house, for example, and in the adjoining space, here we are taking a load off inside the bedroom (I think that tail weighs a lot).

The oversized statues, lights, photographs, projections and pictures blended with the antique interiors which RL people can only enjoy from outside. In SL, we have an added layer of experience (and fun!) that comes of being able to enter art without damage. Spirituality is, for Smith, a synthesis of direct human emotion, aspects of which she draws attentions to in by transmitting her vision through multiple media; we all know everything, there is nothing new under the sun except for the novelty of the moment of transmission from one experience to another. Sitting there, listening to the whirring projector as it looped slides of faint photographs onto a cheesecloth screen, I couldn't help but think - if only you could temporarily script this four poster bed, these walls, how much more elegant ands immediate the art would seem... 

Feathers Boa: Being able to make things change and move and morph as the viewer interacts is what my work in SL is all about. I want the viewer not just to see but feel and become a participant in my work. At first, I just scanned in my RL art and plopped in on a prim. Then I saw this possibility of making things big and changeable, to do so much more. I never looked back.

A lot of examples of that can be found at Feathers' Reactive Art Gallery over on sim Esterhal. Her piece Witch Hunt, a self portrait inspired by the Salem Witch Trials, is particularly striking. Approach or retreat from the artwork, and the fate of the woman in the picture changes seamlessly, shockingly. Not to be missed.

Regrouping in the atrium of the Brooklyn Museum, right by the light-bulb caravan - doesn't that make you think of the one Harriet Gausman has in the writer's camp at Milk Wood? - I think we were all pretty grateful that Oberon suggested a visit to Brooklyn. If only he'd given us a ride home...

Short and sweet

I was checking out the talent at PiRatsthe other day and wow! some of the art was super nice also.   I'm fairly certain that's not low tar. Eventually I got chatting to Dulcis Taurog. We were pretty in pink, it was like an explosion in a peppermint factory, I liked it. She has a show on at another Pirats gallery, called Linkers.
Dulcis Taurog: I make these completely within SL. I make odd objects, color them, then use different lighting and water settings to get the effects. The wave pattern? it's based on a Japanese textile wave pattern i made it for this show, because of the water theme in this gallery. I don't do any art work in RL, I'm self taught in SL, and found my own techniques here. I wanted to make art, and had little opportunity. Then I started to make things here, and found I could make 'painting' like pictures. I just pursued that then, people liked them, and I have even had the chance to exhibit here! I started out wanting to make Japanese houses, gardens and tea bowls. I've always wished I could do paintings like the ink landscapes of Japan and China and I also love the colorful expression in abstract paintings, so I've tried to capture some of all that.
She showed me her abstract art, and explained her process.

Dulcis Taurog: I usually start with an idea, more like an effect I want to try, or I see a painting I want to try to get the feel of here. I think of how I could use the techniques available here to get an effect, but the end result is usually far off my original idea, but still something I like. The biggest drawback to my art in SL is probably the limit on resolution, and my art is only inworld, I've nothing in RL, but I don't mind that so much. The best thing is that I can show people from all over the world, that many like it, and that here I can be an artist. It's also fun that I have developed techniques using refraction and reflection to obtain a paint-like effect. It's tedious in ways, I've shown people and most don't care for it.  But I can show you, right here if you like, it would take about 10 minutes.

She did. Here's her secret... You simply rez a cube into water, preferably somewhere with a nice current or turbulence. Put your preferred texture on the top side and lower the prim until it's below water. Set your camera so you're looking down on the picture. Then you make sure your graphics preference is good or better, and go to world -   sun -   water settings and then mess about with all the sliders to your heart's content. It's a lot of fun and you may make your own masterpiece! I think it's nice that she wants to share her method with others, too. On a personal note, yes, those are very big boots.

Today, though, today was another story. Sometimes you don't have time, but you should make time, and you won't be sorry. Sometimes.

Simeon Beresford and the others were all over at Bookstacks doing the poetry thing, and wow Leslye Writer was there! She snuck an original piece past Simeon; she didn't know the Saturday session is really only for published favourites, who today included Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ogden Nash, and most striking of all, Simeon's reading of Langston Hughes' Daybreak in Alabama in his distinctive Welsh accent.   The piece Leslye read she calls 104, I call it 170 times, it narrates a fragment of life seen through the windshield of  repetition: driving, domesticity, and those places on the way that are visibly unseen - but enough! get her to read it to you, it's much better that way.
I wanted to know more about her life.

Leslye Writer: Listening and writing........that is what I do. I rezzed in 2007, and wandered 'lonely as a cloud' for a few days until I found the writing community. Inksters was my first group. I remained silent and almost invisible as I listened to the Second Life poets and writers until the day I felt courageous enough to read one of my poems. Now I will read to anyone who will listen but I don't have a very expansive body of work for the over ten year old age group. Most of my life I have written for children. I only recently started writing poems for my peers.
Leslye is also interested in Second Life Photography, and will soon open an exhibition of photographs she has taken of SL writers performing at readings over the past three years. If you'd like to see her current show, Pathfinders, it's on over at Da Vinci Isle. She also introduced another amazing piece by W Somerset Maugham the first 'chapter' (it's more like a prose poem) of The Trembling of a Leaf called The Pacific.
Have a read.