Press Update
Yes, indeed have printed my first broadside (one copy exists, right now), but as always, it's in the car. Is barely 10 am and the temperature is already appalling and I am typing this at my desk upstairs where there is no air conditioning, so must be brief.

Is interesting to do something when you don't really know what you're doing (setting type, operating a letter press, page design, etc.). Want to eventually merge with the rest of the art I've been doing but don't want to get too illustrationny (on the one hand) or too artsy fartsy on the other.

And the WIFI is gone again, so am on the modem again, only loading pages out there that load quickly.

Am up here looking for a fat folder of poetry I know is around somewhere, since where else could it be, since I throw nothing away. I used to be organized, back before the computer, if I can remember that far back, since I used to work things out on paper, then type up a "final" copy, send it (or rather them) in batches of 3 to little magazines around the country, based on careful scrutiny of Poets & Writers, Small Press Review, American Poetry Review, etc. etc., and then wait for the inevitable rejection, and staple it all to the bunch of documents and stick it in a pile. The pile would then be mined.

I didn't write much after I entered the real world (except for the stacks and stacks of failed attempts at novels, never what I considered "real" writing anyway), tho occasionally used to look out over a snowy street and dash off something that lived only on the desktop of the old Dell.

All that is now gone due to a disk crash, however, and, like the fat file folder of the oldest stuff, I keep thinking it was far better than anything I've done since, or might ever do again.

Since much of what I used to write I remember as really, really embarassing, I suppose I should be grateful it's gone. And so am ambivalent (not my favorite word, but perfect right here) about bringing the disk to the disk doctors and having them try to revive it.

A note to you all: MAKE BACKUPS NOW! Heat does terrible things to computers, so this is the season of crashes.

But as the hormones diminished, I did occasionally look out at the world and see it as a real place for the first time in my life, and started writing about it (maybe this blog continues some of it).

So bear with me, if I occasionally inflict a horrible poem on you. It was written by someone else.
- posted by Cynthia @ 10:08 AM | | | Link |