i got a 160gb ipod a couple of months ago, and dutifully attepted to stuff it with stuff. lots and lots of stuffing. so far i burned far more time copying stuff onto it than I’ve spent lisetning to anything. It’s coming together, though. i asked among my friends, if you could carry a library of complete discographies everywhere you went, whose CDs would you use? Besides the obvious, that is. Besides the Beatles nad the Stones and Led Zepplin. I wanted to know people’s more eccentric choices. The 2 most interesting so far have been Thin Lizzy and Lucinda Williams, 2 acts I would never have thought of. I should go for a day trip somewhere, just so i can submit to listening to all this stuff.
last night i blasted Nancarrow studies into my head. hadn’t heard those in a while. gotta get rid of the CDs hovering over me, but who has time?
who cares?
…..
i spent part of this day transcribing The Bobby Pages. like almost everything in SorabjiLand, I forgot those pages were even on my web site. i figured that if i went to the bother of sharing those images then i may as well transcribe them to text. so i used a variety of techniques, including OCR recognition and Dragon speech recognition, to get some of them into text.
the stuff is uninspiring, but its earnestness is interesting in its way. the substance is kind of like listening to Charles Manson. you get glimmers of coherence enveloped by confusion and mental skidaddling. these Bobby posters are not that incoherent, but they are reminiscent of Mansonian prattle.
the speech recognition software is fun, though. i have not quite gotten my money’s worth out of that product, but maybe this will begin to justify the purchase.
who cares?
…..
i am thinking of moving back to Manhattan. once in a while i notice something that indicates i last did something “3 minutes ago” or “4 years ago” or “12 years, 4 months, 13 days, 11 hours, 48 minutes, and 3 seconds ago.” these well-meaning timestamps on digital content are probably meant to provide a perfectly innocuous frame of reference for diurnal plunges, but to me they are dismal reminders of mortality and the passages of time. earlier today i looked at an old receipt on my receipts web site. it showed me buying something in Astoria in 2004. i have lived here longer than that, but it seemed like a tap on the shoulder to me that maybe i’ve lived in one place too long. i don’t even know that i like Astoria that much. it’s got a lot of this and a fair amount of that, but for the most part i just prefer to stay at home.
i was thinking about race, and ethnicity. i was stumbling around aisle 4 at the Bravo supermarket. that’s the “ethnic” aisle, with foodstuffings from every fucking planet in the universe. i pick up Indian stuff sometimes, and exotic sardines from Portugal or Cyprus. but mostly i feel like an alien in Aisle 4.
i remembered last time i was there that i pretty well never heard accents when i grew up. i remmeber one kid, a Filipino, who had a bit of a lisp and an accent, but he was fully intelligible to me. mostly, though, i never heard the lingual drawl of foreigners speaking English as their 6th language, struggling through the heavy rain of boneless enunciation.
so i want to move it on up, back to Manhattan, back to the ethnic neighborhood of white people. Manhattan is a pain in the ass, but i need a change. i should have to put piles and piles of crap into storage, which i want very much to do anyway, since a big portion of the old magazines project is done with. i don’t need the physical copies any more, but if i set up physical storage as i imagine it then they could be available to me more or less easily if/when i need them. the encroachment of physical matter is starting to bother me. so many books, with new copies of new books coming in almost every fucking week because i fill my amazon shopping cart after 12 beers and 3 shots of whisky. most of the new books i buy are not available digitally, and they probably never will be. i’d rather read poetry off a page versus a screen, anyway.
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