Unfortunately, I don’t feel qualified to judge the trends of modern poetry–or fiction, for that matter–but I can say with some confidence, that there is a bit of the Jackson Pollack grand show going on here.
Oh come on, admit it; some of this stuff is extraordinarily bad, and if you can at least drop the elitist,I’m more cultured, educated and savvy attitude and instead look at it with the eyes of a child, in many cases, you’ll find that the emperor has no clothes.
While technology may seem to put us at arm’s length from our fellowman, it literally puts us within arm’s length of the world at large via the internet. With everything but scent–and that is something a skillful writer can accomplish with words just as a photographer or artist may with images–to engage our interest in any area subject to our whim of the moment, no one with internet access should feel isolated or ignorant if they can point and click.
We are open to a bombardment of information, and there are as many perspectives available as there are writers and topics. With the added stimuli of animation and audio, and without the battling of crowds or struggle for parking spots at the mall, many more people every year are shopping, being entertained, quietly reading classic literature, listening to music, going to meetings, being creative and enjoying the creativity of others simply by parking themselves in front of their computer screen.
I would hazard a guess that this trend will continue on an even greater scale, at an even faster pace. On the internet, not only do we "listen" to our world, but in blogging, signing in with services or shopping sites, chat rooms and e-mail, the world listens to us.
The serpent shed its skin and so we too. Gliding on the soft green tender grasses silently and swift. It is the quick way to the quest, the guess of what is real, sideways dodging that which dry and crisp would whisper names. Once worn and weary scales smooth out, no longer treading but rolling like glass marbles on a mirror lake, it leaves itself behind in images. Paper, glass, and scissors swims away.
For our upcoming April Writers Conference, we were fortunate enough to get Dr. Carole B. Shmurak as a speaker. Dr. Shmurak is the author of Deadmistress, a mystery novel, as well as co-author of a children’s book series following the adventures of a character named Matty Trescott.
We are looking forward to meeting Dr. Shmurak, and if any of you are local to the Hartford, CT area, Dr. Shmurak will be on C-Span tonight at 8 pm in an interview on her work.
Cold. Brittle squeaky snow. Bone white bleached landscape bleached bone white. Sets cold bones to rattling in their shell of pink muscle, fat and skin. Lost the insulating hair of the original design, lost the mindset of survival, lost the graceful bend of spine.
Good day. Happy day. Managed to maneuver my way through DOS in the old computer to fix it up to a WIN 98 reinstall.
Don’t know if that was the problem, but it seemed that the hard drive, which is only a gig, had about 14 megs of free space left on it (we did warn them that a lot of the games take up too much space for this computer, but I think they got carried away). I just couldn’t get to the hard drive and finally decided to just FDISK and FORMAT it, thus wiping it clean and then just installed a copy of WIN 95 then upgraded it to WIN 98. I’ll upgrade that with the service pack and upgrade IE to 6.0, then look for a good deal on a bigger hard drive and more memory and suggest they purchase that.
But I was able to make a phone call to my big sis this evening to let her know that she can go in tomorrow and tell a little boy that his computer is back up and running.
That’s a happy day.
(Note: Since I hadn’t worked with DOS for a long time, the first thing that came to mind was the interactive fiction mode of text response required. It was pretty scary typing FORMAT at the cursor, but I knew that "north" wouldn’tve worked.)
Couldn’t help but peek into Mary Roach’s "Stiff – The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers."
She hooked me right in with this statement in her introduction: "A book about dead bodies is a conversational curve ball. It’s all well and good to write an article about corpses, but a full size book plants a red flag on your character. We knew Mary was quirky, but now we’re wondering if she’s, you know, okay."
Ms. Roach goes on to tell of her library research, and the glances she silently received after checking out several books on the topic.
I related instantly.
Blogbinders is a web service I heard about through Katey at One Good Bumblebee and I decided to try it for a quick bound journal of the entries I’ve made on New Media. While I don’t think it’s going to work out for this particular project, I believe it’s something you may want to check out for yourselves if you’ve ever had the urge to see your words in a book format, or if you, like me, want to have a record or backup without overloading your hard drive (or like the real reason–you still don’t trust technology not to poof your words into outer space, lost forever.)
The main reason why the Blogbinders service may not work for this project is that for one thing, it downloads the entire content of your (for example) Typepad account. I have four active weblogs, so it wouldn’t separate them out except by posting date. This, combined with the inability to focus in on my so anally organized categories, would mean that while I can, I may not be up to sorting through the 1400+ entries in Spinning alone to select those that are categorized for New Media. It also strips out html and photos, so that meant that I went back and added in important URL addresses to provide a manner of linking because links, of course, wouldn’t show up.
But this entry is not by any means a pan for Blogbinders…in fact, I’m still very much interested in what they offer, and they are most helpful in solving problems and looking ahead to the future by overcoming some of the current restrictions.
In the meantime, I shall be sitting by the front window anxiously awaiting the delivery this week of a duplexer accessory for my printer to allow for two-sided printing, and a binding machine.
One of the hardest things for me to reconcile in life, I think, is balance between the worlds of the material and of the mind.
If in fact there is a place beyond our given years on earth, and soul which is the mind must shed its skin and enter bare-ass naked to deposit what one’s learned in just that cycle. To return again credentialed differently to learn some more.
And if there is a Catholic heaven, then it would be best to die before the baptismal water fully dried upon one’s brow. For why to suffer through a lifetime of temptation then and jeopardize one’s passport into Paradise? Or if life merely reproduces to carry on a natural scheme, why not breed and die just as the Mayfly?
So then it all comes back to this, the purpose of the dalliance on earth.
Oh great to be
a Greek
thinker.
Wearing long dress and sandles; sitting, writing, contemplating. Family fortune replacing need to make a living, civilization not caught up yet to an eight-hour day. Spouting bits of wisdom based in time sought journeys of the mind, wondering, as we all, what lies before us and behind. Answers still as questions centuries later; paths just cut and overgrown as soon as one walks by.
Oh, to be allowed to sit and think!
Snow smells like fresh nothing. It feels wet, and cold and soft, and tastes like cool clean spring water. It sounds like swooshes and soft plops on cement, and lands without sound on the bush tops. It looks like white raindrops when first it starts falling, then confetti at weddings, then pillowfight feathers as it gathers and grows.
And still, snow smells like fresh nothing at all.
Just seems that things can go from bad to worse in a hurry. Software problems are tougher to fix, I thought, than hardware for me, but I’m stumped. Have been trying all day to fix my dad’s old computer for an enthusiastic 5-year old boy who goes to a daycare center, where my sister works with his mom. They wouldn’t be able to afford a computer, and we were happy to be able to supply him at least with this old one that was quite suitable for his needs as well as up to his mom’s needs. Well, it’s just impossible for me to get beyond the DOS screen, and I’m getting strange messages from that. A utility disc doesn’t seem to be helping, and the wierdest thing is a CD drive that’s not being run off the usual ribbon but is stuck by itself to an expansion board that’s marked for audio. While the floppy drive runs, it’s being shown as a 5.25 instead of a normal floppy (and keeps going back to that even when I change the designation), but the startup stops at “invalid system disc” no matter what I’ve done so far.
I really hate when I can’t figure things out, and especially when there’s a little kid who misses his computer. I might go back to Silent Hill. At least I know how to kill monsters.
What a day; lapwarmer (Del), reading material (Suttree, Macromedia Studio Training, Glimmertrain), pesto/garlic wraps ready to be stuffed for lunch, didn’t have to make the trip to my dad’s house, a computer to fix, bills paid, grocery shopping done, and a program on Bluebeard and Captain Kidd on the Discovery channel.
Pirates are the next best thing to Indians in my mind. I realize that while history is not my favorite subject, there are civilizations and peoples that I love learning about, affiliating myself with, although my geneology has unfortunately no connection. It’s the spirit, the freedom, the touch of infamy that appeals and attracts me.
Ooh, just learned that Captain Kidd was Scottish–my husband is a quarter Scottish, although he claims it as his nationality, disregarding the other 75% of his bloodline for some reason. I knew there was something I liked about him.
Here I am, up to my eyeballs in new media methods, have some of the best software installed, even tried to use a service that supposedly can do it all for me with a simple click of the button (anyone have any experience with Blogbinders?) and I can’t come up with a simple booklet form of the New Media category entries. In other words, I can’t (as yet) turn a bunch of words into a good old-fashioned BOOK.
But Susie is in project mode, and that means that I’ll work my fingers and my brain to come up with a solution, and most likely, spin my wheels a bit doing it (I’ve already opened two more blogs to transfer the material to see if it works easier that way.)
Any suggestions? Microsoft Word? Publisher? This doesn’t have to be super slick, just a neat little journal that I thought might hold some value both for my own portfolio as well as the future of the New Media course.
Rather appropriate I guess, that in the midst of my waffling about story beyond the opening paragraph, I am in fact about to publish an unfinished narrative, the story of my introduction to and progress through new media research and study via the debut this past semester of New Media: Perspectives at Tunxis Community College in Farmington, Connecticut.
While my journey continues, following James through Silent Hill 2, building and wiping out whole neighborhoods in Sims 2, learning how to use Macromedia Flash, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, planning on buying others when I progress to animation and into hypertext fiction and IF, there comes a point when I must enter a trip report before following the trail. A rest stop, perhaps, and a way of compiling my experience as an novice makes her way through the course. I find it interesting that, for the purposes of keeping this jounal the very much new-media format of a weblog was implemented.
My paths have already forked from story in straight text to the exciting cosmos that technology offers. And they’ll go on from here, duly reported as I stumble and grope around this new energy field I’ve entered. But for now, this entry will serve as a stopping point for this original journal, and hope that it may serve as well as a guide and inspiration to others to follow, and for me, a happy remembrance of just the beginning hesitant steps along an exciting highway.
Besides, I have to file an expense report for the trip…
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology