Making Real those Imagined

A few hours ago, I got back from a rather pleasant event – LA Bloggers Live! What was it? LA Bloggers Live! Exactly what it says on the packet. So there were several bloggers from the Los Angeles area who met (at Tangier) to read out loud some of the posts from their blogs, listening to each other and meeting each other in the “real” world, as opposed to online. It was really great – there were several great readings, and it was excellent to meet and chat with some of the people whose blogs I’ve read from time to time. It was good old-fashioned community, plain and simple. There were readings on lots of topics, from joy and pain in relationships to learning how to swim and ride a bike as a child – the hard ways. Over on Leah Peah’s blog (she conceived and organized the event) (and also here) you can see the list of readers, and later there’ll be some links to the posts that were read along with some audio. (I was particularly pleased that Will Campbell, whose blog I read from time to time, read a post that I recognized fondly – in it he’s on his bike, and he gets to do one of those things that all cyclists have wanted to do at least once, and never normally get to do.) I will update this post later to point to later such links.

After the readings, I hung out for a while with Will Campbell, Julia Frey, David Markland, and Cybele – all of the excellent group blog Blogging.la (Metroblogging Los Angeles) which was a lot of fun. (I should mention that they all have various individual blogs as well, such as David’s Offline Adventures, Will’s Wildbell, Julia’s Mexico City blog and Cybele’s Candy blog.

Of course, it being an event populated largely by bloggers, there will no doubt be a ton of posts from all the others about the event (it was amusing to see lots of people taking pictures that will no doubt all be used to illustrate various posts). So keep an eye on those other blogs for their point of view.

-cvj