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workspace whining

My boss informed me this morning that I should feel free to complain about work on my blog. I told her I thought that it would be a first if I did. I didn’t think I’d ever actually done any complaining about work on my blog before… but now that I do a search, the third result for “work” comes up with me complaining, so I’m a big fat liar.

Anyway, I’m writing this from cubeville. Population: 2. My coworker Matt is not “home” right now. He will be here hardly at all this semester, as he has school at like one in the afternoon or something every day.

Fluorescent lights suck. Also, these desk chairs suck. (There was some talk of not brining over our chairs from the other office, but I think after everyone got here we realized they will be a necessity.) My biggest complaint would probably have to be that my back is to the “entrance” to cubeville. IE, that’s the way the monitor faces. This makes me feel unconsciously like someone is always watching me. I’ll get over it soon I’m sure.

Oh yeah, and the drive. Took me 22 minutes this morning with no traffic. And there is going to be traffic, I know it. But probably not on the way in, which is good. I just start late enough, I guess.

Biggest bonus about the new diggs would have to be the bathroom. They pipe in classical music, and the toilet paper doesn’t suck! Also, there was some kind of fresh flower in a vase on the marble countertop next to the sinks. They are probably the nicest bathrooms I’ve ever had at a workplace.

Also, I’m switching to a four-day workweek. So fridays off from now on. At least, as long as I put in enough hours the rest of the week. (Which I’m going to make an effort to do.)

Anyway, I should get back to it. Just thought I’d give you all the rundown.

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crap poetry, getting old

Today’s poem is mediocre at best. I felt incapable of putting some of the best words into it, ‘impacted’, ‘serial cable’, ‘toner’, to name a few. I ended up chopping a bunch off, and it didn’t have any real conclusion, so I tacked on those pathetic last two lines in some feeble effort to bring it all together.

I played City of Heroes all afternoon with about five other friends that I know locally. It was fun, but just now I found myself wondering if maybe I should have been spending that time writing… or at least reading a good book. I’m about a fourth of the way into Broken Angels, by Richard Morgan, and it’s pretty damn good so far. He does a great job with action and violence. Some of the more cinematic prose I’ve read lately, that’s for sure.

Just now I found myself thinking back to the beginning of this year, when I decided I wanted to challenge myself to read more. Time seems to have just slid by so fast since then. Does perception of time change as we get older? I’ve had dozens of conversations about this over the years, and most people seem to think it does. I think we just keep doing the same things over and over again our entire lives (more so as we “grow up” or anyway leave school) and after awhile, we stop noticing ourselves doing those things as we do them. So that a day’s work seems like nothing when you look back on it, even though at the time it was just as real as any other moment.

Time is one subjective motherfucker. It makes mincemeat of us all.

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printer paper

these dot-matrix lines, word-dots
dealt out in little letter-clusters,
are pointillism poetry
machine inked on a
page framed by printer-feed fringes,
perforated holy strips, the frayed edges of this poem
whose message, completely obscured by the medium,
is small and lost among other tiny messages

but from far enough away,
the meaning is clear

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slow ping, sloping

a machine on the dark slope
sliding into textual abyss:
300 milliseconds, an eternity
character repeat rates
falling off chronic charts
waiting full seconds for the
comatose command line
to show your fevered strokes

when a path is packed
packets like sardines,
all you have left to
band with are your
memories of mistakes
hoping to hit backspace
the magically correct number of times

these insufferable moments spent
chewing whole fingernails into oblivion
between typing and seeing

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mt 3.11

OK, I upgraded to the latest version of movable type. Why? Because 1) I’m not getting off my ass fast enough in terms of switching to WordPress, 2) it was relatively easy (aside from the all-afternoon template finagling I’ve had to do), 3) I wondered what Six Apart had been up to, 4) clean install so comments work again, and 5) so I could beat Laura to it. (That’s last one is a joke, I swear!)

There is a lot of new shit. An amazing amount of new code went into dynamic rendering, (so much php that I’m surprised they didn’t just re-write the whole damn application in it).

The new default templates and stylesheets SUCK ASS though. There is extra white space in their stylesheets everywhere, and things are redundantly declared with great abandon. I had to make major modifications to get back to even this shoddy semblance of the way things used to be. More changes will no doubt be forthcoming. I prefer variable width to fixed width sites anyway, especially ones that are mostly (all) just text.

Tonight is the annual TCUC banquet. Laura is freaking out in the other room because she has to have all kinds of stuff done for it. (She thought she had more time to finish things.) I’ve offered to help, but I think I’m probably more help giving her encouragement and staying out of her way.

Monday night I have a sneak preview ticket to go see Team America: World Police at Block E. (I’ll also be setting up my desk and stuff at our new offices in Bloomington all day before that.) Tuesday The Faint is playing at first ave.

Today’s daily poem took a little more effort than yesterday’s. I sorta did some word doodling for about ten mintues before coming up with anything. I worry a bit about how many people will really be able to understand either of the two poems I’ve written so far. Just to clarify, I don’t feel obligated to post these if they are crap. So I may not be posting a poem a day, I’m just making the effort to write them.

I’m going to mow the yard now.

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foreach()

Nanowrimo registration supposedly starts today. One month till I’ll be writing like a madman. I think as a sort of “warm up” for the big month, I’m going to try and write a poem a day. I was thinking about this on the bus this morning, and also about how I don’t write enough poems about technology, so I may try and keep to that broad theme for the whole month.

The first one is called foreach() and is written in parsable php.

===

<php
	#  poem:  foreach()
	foreach( $thing_you_know as $useful_thing ) {
		foreach( $useful_thing as $fact ) {
			foreach( $fact as $assumption ) {
				if( $assumption['unsure'] == true ) {
					unset( $useful_thing );
				}
			}
		}
	}
	if( empty( $thing_you_know ) ) {
		return true;
	}
?>
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wow is right

Worlds of Warcraft. There, I’ve said it. Far more addicting than the also recently aquired Fable (for XBox), Worlds of Warcraft has supplanted City of Heroes as my new favorite video game. I still know lots more people who play CoH, so I’m not going to give it up entirely, I’m just giving some of those people a chance to catch up with the atomic pig, who is about five levels above most of their highest level characters. ;)

So yeah, I got accepted into the WoW beta test. That means that this newest latest addiction is entirely free. (Until release.) Unfortunately, all our characters will go away at that time. So Grid, my level 12 Undead Mage will at that time cease to exist. I think I will probably stop playing at that time. At least, I hope I will be sick of it by then.

Unlike city of heroes, worlds of warcraft is a very different game, depending on what “race” you choose to play. (At least in the early levels anyway.) There are less options for customizing your character up front, but more options as the game progresses. They are very different games, really.

Fable is also pretty fun. I just don’t know when I’ll get around to playing it in betwen marathon nights full of WoW goodness. Laura started playing it, and last actually went to bed later than I did. (After last sunday realizing I’d played WoW from midnight to 7:30, I decided I’m going to make sure I get in bed by 1 am from now on.) It’s just added incentive to start playing earlier.

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know thyself

I went to Tai Chi today for the first time in about two weeks. As we began the standing meditation (in the beginning of class, just after stretches) I was composing this blog entry about how I’m going to take a break from Tai Chi for a while. Maybe all winter, I thought. But then as class ended, and I was wishing we did the entire form at the end of every class (as we did today), I started chatting with some of the people I’ve gotten to “know” from my months at the studio. Then the next (more advanced) class began, and as most of those friends turned towards it, the instructor turned back and beckoned to me specifically. It was my first non-beginning tai-chi course at the studio. After that class, I didn’t feel like I’d learned anything extraordinary, but then it’s not about learning extraordinary things. It’s about practicing tai chi. And it’s about knowing yourself.

One of my last posts was about how important I think it is to know yourself emotionally, and how I feel that is the poet’s job and obligation. Tai Chi is about knowing your physical self. And unfortunately, you can’t just think about your body and know how it bends and how it moves. You actually have to bend and move to know those things. And interestingly enough, the more you bend and move, the better you become at bending and moving. The same probably holds true for the non-physical self as well. The more you think the better you are going to be at thinking.

So I think maybe I’ll keep going to Tai Chi for now at least. I do really feel a sense of inner peace after class, a sense of calm and collection. Strange that you have to not think to feel the most centered.

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marty brand poems

Dr Bombay sent me a link to his friend Charlie’s blog, where Charlie talks a bunch about poetry, and in this particular entry, about whether we can talk about poets as brand names.

Charlie’s final point is that brands are stagnating for the artist. Brands must stay the same to be recognizable, this is true, but it seems to me that an artist can still change while their brand stays (basically) the same. Think of U2. Their brand (public image) has definitely changed over the years, but very slowly, and not nearly as often as their music (for better or worse). There are examples of successful brand revolutions too. Think of Christina Aguilera, who went from being branded a twelve year old to being branded a super-slut virtually over night. Changing your image isn’t impossible, just very difficult.

Having worked in a large marketing company for a few years, I heard the term “brand” thrown around all the time… but it was never used to refer to what the actual product was… it was always used to refer to the public image of said product.

I would argue that all artists are branded whether they know it or not. Whether they go through the process of branding themselves is the real question. To market yourself as an artist, you have to have an image. All branding does is try to keep some semblance of control over that image.

This is true of poets too, although many of them (us) choose to eschew the process entirely, and either allow our publishers to make all the marketing (branding) decisions, or attempt to allow our words to speak for itself. Sure, some of the biggest name poets probably have some kind of brand, but I’ll bet none of them have logos. (I just spent far too long looking for this quiz that I saw online a few months back where you had to match up popular artists and sports stars with their respective logos. It was really a cool quiz, if you remember where it’s at, send me the link, please.)

The phenomenon of Charlie’s blog for me is not that it’s largely about poetry and writing (which I love,) but that it’s so amazingly thoughtful and insightful. Then linking from his blog to Victoria Chen’s, it was like finding a wormhole into this other world where people actually care about poetry the majority of the time.

Strangely enough, however, that world is probably as repulsive to me as it is attractive. I think if poetry were more popular than it is, I would be more hesitant to write it. Plus, there is something so sticky about academic studies of poetry. Some part of me just thinks poems are.

I get upset when people talk about this movement or that movement in poetry. The whole idea of having a movement in poetry for me requires an artistic revolution where you write a manifesto and all your friends get together and think about similar ideas. It seems to me that calling yourself this type of poet or that type of poet is such a big fad. Isn’t that era over already? Nobody actually writes manifestos anymore, but they all talk about different types of poetry as if every poem fit neatly into one or two categories and that was it.

I’d much rather hear discussion about a poem itself than about the category it may or may not fit into.

Man, now I’m just whining.

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poet as lifeologist

In today’s writer’s almanac, there was a quote from Babette Deutsch that read:

The poet, like the lover, is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is under a certain compulsion to do so.

This is actually very similar to another quote from her that I already had in my collection:

Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success.

I have always thought this to be true. The poet’s job is often to bottle or catalogue emotion. It is interesting to note that I don’t really practice what I preach… in other words that I do this remarkably poorly. Most of my poems are really just wordplaying buffoonery. I don’t even bother throwing in a dead housepet or lost pair of shoes. (OK, I may have one poem about a lost pair of shoes. Maybe.) Anyway, most of my poems are light and fluffy. But still, maybe they capture a hint of what it means to be me.

But it’s really more the philosophy of the above statements that I try to live by. I am someone who wants to know WHY I have all the thoughts and emotions that I do. I want to trace down my grumpiness on any given afternoon to the midnight snack I had the night before. Or perhaps more commonly find the reason behind a particular jealousy or relationship aggravation. I live by this idea so much that it’s not uncommon for me to get frustrated at other people when they don’t share this same philosophy. If someone doesn’t know why they feel the way I do, my typical response is to berate them for not thinking about it sooner. And goad them into spending some time thinking about it.

A poet is a scientist in the study of his or her own life. Science begins and ends with observation, but along the way one must hypothesize and theorize and test ones own life to find consistency. To find conclusion. To find meaning.

I don’t really have any particularly startling discoveries today, but I’m going to find some poems by Babette Deutsch, and maybe I can share in some of hers.