I have been letting myself down. I have big ideas for a new web presence, but I drown in the details. I can barely look at code anymore. My new site would endeavor to be all this and more, ha ha. A combo of the .MOBI and this, and all the thousands of other things I never posted.
I buy stacks of blank CDs at thrift shops. I got up to 100 blanks for a buck. I’m going to make a static copy of my original website, The Place of General Happiness. My intent is to distribute it for free by dropping CD copies at thrift shops and in strangers’ mailboxes. It will be edited down in places, and I might even remove some stories in favor of fully rewriting and attempting to have them published somewhere… although I’ve never really cared much for being published. I did it for a little while with one particular “New York stories” type of website, but it proved to be a dead end.
And of course one must ask himself, “Why?” Who even cares anymore? Well, I do. The daily postings to the .MOBI, while not exactly on schedule anymore, had been a very important thing for me, for nothing else then for the tempo they set. They still are important to me, regardless of whether or not anybody still reads them.
I unwittingly found myself revisiting the scene of an old message board I used to be on, before the web was accessed through anything more than Lynx and certain other now-primitive text-only browsers. That BBS was a crazy place, happily annihilate by its owners.
I would type the letters “WWW” and get a strange upward avalanche of text. That is one element of interactive communication that I think makes a subtle difference in how we experience it. When we wrote letters we wrote and read from top to bottom, unless we happened to be corresponding with an eccentric who preferred to write from the bottom up. With interactive chat spaces, depending on the application, the text could start at the bottom and accumulate upwards. I thought this created the subtle effect of making the person who contributed the most recent comments feel buried. On the other hand, in other chat rooms where the text starts at the top and fills in going downward it feels more like rain. Until, of course, the text reaches the bottom of the screen and that feeling of falling reverts to the previously described experience of being buried.
I had been in chat rooms that were so active messages were coming in every second. I remembered thinking “Those gravediggers are shoveling pretty damn fast.” The text was flying up off the screen faster than anybody could possibly read it, so fast I guess you could not have time to actually be buried by it. It was like instead of shoveling dirt onto each other we were blowing it through some kind of hose.
It was comical how hyperventilated the pace of communication was in that chat room. But that was a long time ago. I’ve since extended that observation about the hyperventilated pace of communication to virtually all means of electronic messaging, means which overwhelm to a point where they become trivial and you just ignore them because it’s all you can do.
Changing the subject, I had a slightly melancholy moment at the thrift shop yesterday. Anyone who knows me probably is aware that I have what may be the largest personal collection of copies of The Etude music magazine. That is not exactly something to brag about, but it reflects the fruits of a certain period in which I manically collected copies of that magazine for a few years. I had such high hopes for the musicological and editorial content of those magazines, but little of that came to pass. I developed a website that look more academic than fun.
And that is the melancholia that occurred to me yesterday. I was at a thrift shop where I had recently donated seven years worth of copies of that magazine. These were the hardbound copies which once occupied library shelves. I had no use for them anymore and was happy to let them go. Since I donated those seven volumes it appears that two of them actually sold. The rest sit by the front door, where I check in on them every day to see if they are still present.
So yesterday I saw a woman, probably in her 50s, at that thrift shop leafing through those copies of the magazine. You know what she was doing? She was smiling. Turning the pages slowly she just sat there, looking at the old advertisements and the cartoons, and she smiled.
Now I know that often tends to be people’s reactions when exposed to magazines from generations ago. But why could I not have developed a website based on The Etude content that made people smile? I did try to make the pages flippable, as they say, meaning you leaf through them on the computer screen as you would print magazines. But it was a laborious and ultimately dead-end pursuit, for reasons too boring to get into.
I suppose I could try again with that content, for no other reason than to validate the countless hours I spent scanning the pages, and however much money I spent procuring them and the hardware and software used to convert the scans to text. At the moment I am more inclined to write it off as a waste of time and just let it go.
Another hope I had, if “hope” is not too strong a word. Was to establish correspondences with musicologists in such who needed access to copies of the stories that are not otherwise available on the Internet. That has happened here or there but by far the most inquiries I’ve gotten regarding The Etude are to ask “How much money are my copies worth?” My answer pretty much across the board is “Not much.” Some of the very oldest issues from the 1880s might possibly get you 20. And if you can find the right buyer than the beautifully printed supplements they used to put in the issues in the earlier part of the 20th century could possibly get you 10 or 20 bucks. But for the most part you’d be lucky if you get 4 or 5 bucks a copy, and that’s if you consider it worth the time and hassle of posting them to eBay and letting them sit there for however many years it takes to sell individual copies.
I guess you could say that it is on account of their paltry financial value that I was able to accumulate such a large collection.
As influential and important a magazine as it might have been in its heyday The Etude today just isn’t worth anything.
So my thinking turns next toward tchotchkes. T-shirts, coffee mugs, lapel pins. Hey why not, right? Who doesn’t need a Beethoven themed deck of playing cards?
And lately I’ve been rediscovering the 20 pages of sheet music that filled the center of the magazine. Gems of music are quite few and far between in those pages, excluding the standard repertoire. If you are looking for something unique or off the beaten path that is also of some quality then you have a sea of mediocrity to wade through with that magazine. I don’t really need The Etude for its occasional Chopin waltz or Brahms intermezzo. If I am going to dip into that large a trove of music it is with the hope of finding worthwhile music lingering in obscurity. And if they are not great pieces on their own then maybe they are the type that one can bring all their innate musicality to. Playing mediocre or easy pieces (playing them exceptionally well that is) is itself not necessarily easy.
