i spent a chunk of the day wandering through text, a dictionary of musicians, a revised edition published in 1914. i became intrigued by the Unicode characters used in the pronunciation guide for the non-English words. i don‘t think i can render them on this device but those letters with the flat lines over them, like an a with a _ over it (not under), or an e for a long e. that got me looking at other unicode numbers, and just trying the numbers randomly, and coming up with stuff i don‘t recognize but that shore was purty.
i got a mass of matchbooks in the mail today. old matchbooks. 50+ years old. i collect them and other paper ephemera when they have the old-style phone numbers on them. i learned of a few new-to-me exchanges with this batch of matchbook covers. CIrcle. CHickering. my goal is to have a physical relic of every telephone exchange name used in the 5 boroughs of new york city. i think there were about 300 altogether, and many of them were sparsely used, but i think a complete set of evidence of the old numbers is possible, via matchbooks, old magazines, and other realms of papyral residue. every nyc phone exchange, in living color, on living paper, or other media, just so it was really there.
and in other news, i drew some tears from my face after reading Beethoven‘s entry in that aforementioned music dictionary. it is a concise dictionary, not long-winded like the mighty Grove.
the Grove also has fancy characters with the wired joining the letters, like from Ed Dorn. oh wait, maybe i‘m thinking of the Johnson Dictionary. that thing had the old Englysh characters which i can‘t find on Unicode, but which Ed Dorn used in Gunslinger. the letters a and c tied together at the top, or i and e, or other arbitrary couples of letters, joined at the head by a semi-circle. what are those called? i don‘t know but i could not find them in the Unicode realm. it felt like i wandered through a foreign language, and maybe i am.
Ӂ
…..
nothing else happened today. i went to rockefeller center to get my damn mail. i went to the laundromat to get my damn laundry. i went to walgreens‘ to get some damn toilet paper, with which to wipe my ass. i remember walking with a friend on the upper east side and he asked what i was going to do that night, i said i‘m gonna go to woolworth‘s, gonna buy some toilet paper, gonna go home, gonna take a shit, them i‘m gonna wipe my ass. the friend who asked the fateful question laughed like a pre-adolescent, snickered, looked at me looked at me looked at me, then kept laughing.
i was remembering my secret stash of emergency toilet paper, hidden in my closet, seen by only one, only one, whence the crisis arrived and i had to share the location of my secret stash of emergency toilet paper. it was fun, if a little too intimate, like the time she wiped snot and pulled a hair from my nose as we stood on a subway station platform.
…..
EDgecombe. new-to-me exchange name.
