I discovered my trough of hundreds upon hundreds of documents at GDocs. Strange to be so voluminous with so little to really show. I don’t remember much of it, some is a foggy memory.
I am reminded, once again, of a couple of anecdotes. One is from someone who worked at the library of my college. He described how the library was approached by executors of the estate of a recently deceased individual whose hand-written scores filled a hundred boxes with operas, concerti, oratorios, musicals. Every genre was conquered by this person, and the library would behoove itself to accept and index the complete oeuvre of this apparent unknown.
Unknown he was, and for reason. The library and select members of the college faculty pored over the pages, possibly numbering over 100,000, tightly scored with stingy noteheads and scratchy stems. Page after page was leafed through, the library and faculty looking for something, some glimmer of joy or revelation.
All they found was drek. Page after page of hackwork, vulgar attempts at melody, banal harmonies and cadential obviousnesses. Nothing of value could be salvaged from this primordial soup of brothless emptiness. The library certainly could not justify committing resource to indexing and documenting this bottomless sea of shit. They returned the materials to the estate with little comment.
Another anecdote comes from the pages of the Etude Magazine. An elderly researcher is described as spending all his days at the library reading, reading, ingesting history and musical literature without returning a single comment or insight from his readings. All this knowledge going into the brain with nothing coming back. So much intake wasted, wasted, wasted.
I actually encountered my GDocs outlay within the last year or so. I was thinking I’d merge all my cloud account into one, and that the GDocs couldn’t take too long to copy over. Surprise surprise when simply listing the documents in that account caused my web browser to crash. So much stuff. I’m an endless spout of stuff.
…
I saw a tweet last night showing a nearly empty subway car at rush hour. I had just returned from a subway trek which as jam-packed as any I could remember, and this trek occurred at the same moment this person’s tweet depicted. 5:57pm, I think. I thought I’d be clever and respond with a short video from my journey, which started out elbow to elbow crowded and gradually receded to just very crowded. I put the video into premiere pro, trimmed it down to 2 minutes, then hit Export. Premiere Pro did was what Premiere Pro does, sometimes but not all the time. It took two hours to export a two minute video, getting to the 100% point after a couple of minutes and stalling there for two fucking hours. Indications are there is no fix for this and there never will be. By the end of the two hours I was too tired to complete the act of responding to the individual’s tweet, which suggested the subways in general are still an uninhabited wasteland when nothing is farther from the truth. I thought I’d wait until morning, since there was no rush. Except there should have been, if this really mattered to me. By morning the post was followed by a mixed chorus of those who claimed subways were empty because of all the crime and those who called the photo for what it was… a very selective attempt at creating a false representation of reality. But I could not contribute to the discussion. My 2 minute video which took two hours to produce was too large, exceeding the 512mb limit which I never encountered before on Twitter. I said fuck it, No one needs to know the truth, and the video might have been considered voyeuristic because it happened to capture a moment in which a woman shoved her hand under her shirt to adjust her bra, briefly exposing her flesh.
Technology is as often an intruder as it is a facilitator. Just now I discovered that posting straight into WordPress through a web browser on this cell phone is a Javascript-strangled mess. Attempts to write some of the first sentences in this critically important screed looked like this:
One is frosomeone who worked at the library at my colleHe dehow the library hthe papersad been offered scribed ge. m
The Javascript buzzards swarming around my keystrokes had the cursor scampering all across the landscape, making the above attempt at a sentence look like that, and also inserting what must be 2000 line returns.
I have to go.
