Still puzzling over the lack of apostrophe but I’ll let it go. The apostrophe is the crowbar of punctuation, intent on prying words apart when the silence of its absence creates more temperature.
Getting here is a bit of a trek. I’ve done E train to WTC from QBP for its single-train dimension but other routes will have to be explored.
Walking around these stacks I feel like a stranger and then I feel like I’m home. Shelf after shelf of the old literary reviews and poetry journals I used to hoard until bored. I got rid of most of them. Poetry Magazine is my only lingering subscription. It was a Christmas gift from 3 years ago and that 3-year sub will end soon. The time I’ve been subbed to Poetry I’ve received confusing and confused automated letters from them asking me to resubscribe, subscribe for the first time, and other nonsense.
I’m just here wasting my version of time. The days of waste, I’ve become acclimated. Something will give, I know it, but for now I’m resigned to and at peace with this period of my life being wasted. I work a job that costs me money every single day. I compromise with my time, accepting a nebulously beneficial “compressed” schedule which has me working full-time 4 days a week. I can do nothing of my own interest on the job. I mean, nothing is really stopping me save for my belief that I should not be doing my own shit on company time. It’s also a matter of paranoia. Network admins can see everything happening on their network, and in my experience they are known to take advantage of this God-like power with impunity. I remember a time I made a harmless edit to a Wikpedia article. Within seconds there was someone else logged on to my PC. I don’t know who it was, I don’t even care. And it wasn’t even an edit, just a question as to why an upstate New York cemetery was included on a list of New York City cemeteries. But simply interacting with the Wikipedia set off some alarm in the bowels of the network and I had a new best friend for the rest of that work day. There are also threatening messages that appear if you mistype a URL or try to access anything to do with gambling or the lottery. I do not gamble or play lotto but the subject of both comes up now and again at the workplace. Most non-traditional TLDs are banned as are many social media sites. I happen to work on the social media end of things but I do not know if that explains why I can access FB, IG, and X or if it’s simply true that everyone can. TikTok is banned as is Bluesky and probably others.
Yesh, this is great and lofty discussion for the Poets House, is it not… I used to make the Rose Reading Room a destination for this sort of thing but they seem to have restricted access to it and I don’t want to go through their screening process any more than I want to allow them to check the contents of my messenger bag any time I pass through their vaunted doors. The bag check is the most perfunctorily useless flourish. Here, there is no bag check and I do not mind being asked to sign in with a name and email address. I even use a real email address.
I’ve been contacted again by someone I’d kind of forgotten about, if deliberately. A documentary filmmaker I met with over 2 years ago has reappeared, acting as if we’ve been chatting every single day. This is not the first such interaction I’ve had with documentary filmmakers. I waste so much time with these things, giving up hours upon hours and divulging some of my skunkiest secrets and behaviors for absolutely nothing in return. I’ll be nice about it. I’ll get back to him, after a few days. It’s no lie that when it comes to correspondence, I simply don’t have the time or focus that I did a few years ago. The 4-year anniversary of my current job is coming up. Maybe it’s time to graduate. Once I’m out of that job I can actually talk about it. I don’t let anyone know where I work and I have my reasons for that. If a possible job I applied for last week pans out it would be at a place I’d be OK with talking about but for now I’m living kind of a secret life within this job. Getting the gig felt like a bit of a coup, and I still have my thoughts about that but that’s all I need to say for now.
I’ve been unearthing more payphone remnants. Given that the subway system still has “TOKEN RETURN” chambers decades after the death of the subway token I would think these payphone remnants are likely to be around for decades to come. It’s mostly a matter of holes in the wall and a lingering metal pipe that secured the landline cable. But sometimes you find something clever or unexpected. At one station the landline, which typically rose up above the phone and into the ceiling, was stuffed into a metal tube behind the steel beam on which the phone was mounted. It looked like someone’s idea of a clever joke. Those pipes will be there for all times. They’re not hurting anybody or getting in the way, just like those token return chambers.
I’ve been here less than a half hour and this mountain of text is what I have to show for it. I remember early in the online universes I inhabited how affected I was by the differing ways text appeared on a screen. In some chat rooms text rose up from the bottom of the screen, creating an atmosphere of endless accumulation. When conversation drifted up and off the screen it was, in the early days (to me at least) gone. Scrolling back in an IRC channel on a terminal connection was probably possible but I didn’t know how to do it. There was also the talk (or was it ntalk?) protocol, where text slowly rained down from the top of the screen. When conversation reached the floor it, too, would commence to disappear from the top of the screen, never to be seen again.
One of those talk protocols had an esoteric feature that a woman I had phone sex with for many years said was her most favorite chat/interactive function ever. If you both typed at once the words typed by one person would intertwine with what the other person was typing. She described this as the most erotic thing she’d ever seen text do, and she would masturbate when these text-entanglements occurred, however mundane or non-sexual the discussion at hand might have been. I never found this particular talk application, and I suspect what she experienced was glitch in an early version of a talk-protocol based application that was later remedied. It would be very life-like, though, to experience being talked over in text as you would be talked over in spoken conversation.
But the difference in atmosphere between text rising and text falling was something I never failed to feel. The rising accumulation versus the falling debris. With either of these you could clear the screen for a clean slate. In *nix applications it’s usually Control-L but I don’t recall if that is what it was in the talk protocol interfaces.
Today’s format is the conversational balloon-like design that makes text conversations look like comic book interactions. Voice balloons. Threaded versus non-threaded email correspondences still seem to confuse some email clients. I’ve begrudgingly forced myself to move on from the old ALPINE email client, though I still have to fall back on it at times.
I just took a word game break from this important discussion.
I heard yesterday that MTV Music finally kicked it after 44 years. That means it was 44 years ago that my sister and I, flipping through the endless selection of maybe 15 channels on the new cable system, landed on MTV the moment it first came on the air. I believe it was twelve noon when we turned the dial to what had been a snow channel. It was dark, as I recall, and then the MTV logo appeared, seemingly by magic, followed by the Buggles doing “Video Killed the Radio Star.” That video repeated a lot in the months to come, as there were relatively few videos available for MTV to use. That quickly changed, of course, and I spent an unknowable quantity of hours gaping into that channel. VH1 (owned by the same players as MTV, if I recall correctly) came along later to pick up the slack when MTV basically stopped playing music videos.
My connection to that moment when MTV appeared for the first time came years later, at corporate. I was at Time-Warner when AOL bought the company. I have no idea what his name was but the person who claimed MTV was his brainchild was a key part of the AOL takeover of TWX, and that’s the guy who fired me. Not directly, of course. I never had any encounter with him. But he was the string-puller that got rid of expensive people like me, even as the person I worked for at the time resisted and tried to prevent this from happening, later saying in his own exit interview with that same guy and the CEO of TWX that firing me was the worst day of his professional life. It all came down to money and the billions of dollars of shareholder money that evaporated after AOL purchased TWX. I didn’t know it at the time but getting fired from AOL/TWX was an MTV moment.
Ok, time to get on with this precious gift of a day. It’s almost 1pm.