Concrete poetry?

This is what comes of working with a piece of software that picks out words from your prose to "gloss" - i.e. it offers an often wildly-inappropriate definition in an automated link.   To get rid of the links you have to go through the prose, again marking and listing your preferred "gloss exemptions". 

I looked at the resulting list of words and I had this:

Natural seed
Oblique tree scarlet species
Fall foliage leaf canopy
Head palm
Wild population
Lens down
Form floral growth
Blossom beneath alpine
It's crimson lilac flower

A nervous night at the Internet café

I am sneaky; I do stuff (like this) in my lunch hour on the computer at work. But there are jobs I can't do at work. Chief among these is getting written material off my dear old antique laptop and into a form where I can actually get at it. The computers here are (probably only just) new enough that they don't take floppy disks. My laptop won't handle anything else. So to transfer anything I've written on the laptop into a form I can use online, I have to put it on a disk and then go to the one internet café I know of that is old-fashioned enough to still have machines that will take floppies.

I guess it's inevitable that said internet café is scruffy and underresourced. They can't afford to fix their computers, after all. Or their carpets; or the holes in the wall.

So there I sat last night, clutching my precious disk of "Gabriel Yeats" in my sweaty paw, in quite the scruttiest internet café in West London. The first machine I sat down at promptly crashed. The second had sellotape over the slot for floppy disks. The third had no mouse and with the fourth, the keyboard didn't work.

By this stage I was starting to feel as if the Almighty had leaned down and marked me with "Today, Imogen, you are going to scramble all computers" magic juice. Luckily the fifth computer worked. Almost hyperventilating with excitement, I uploaded the whole of the final revision (for now) of "Gabriel Yeats" into a draft email. Then I did each chapter separately. Then for good measure I also uploaded the existing material for one of my Works in Progress, tentatively titled "Fortitude". It all went in, and it's all still there in my yahoo email drafts box today. Hurrah! I have an electronically accessible ouevre!

Afterwards I was in a slight state of shock. I've been trying to get this done for months, finding internet café after internet café had modernised and couldn't help me, and getting increasingly worried that I was in real trouble. Now I wandered out and down the road, and in a daze I got on the wrong bus and ended up in Brentford. Nobly, I resisted the urge to go in the Magpie and Crown and get drunk, and waited for a 237 home.

So anyway, if anyone would like to see the final-for-now version of "GY", or have a first sneak peek at the first draft of "Fortitude" (an attempt, heaven help me, at genuine SF, complete with space ships and everything), let me know.

Exhausted...

Last night I went to hear David Fray playing Mozart at the Festival Hall. Lovely. Bizarre-looking lad, though, I must say. His publicity pictures make him look smouldering, chiselled and cheekbone-y - trying to draw in the "Twilight" audience to classical music, perhaps? In the flesh, he looks like baby bro aged thirteen; six feet-odd of gangly, skinny, stooping awkwardness with huge feet, and hair in his eyes. By gum he can play, though. His Mozart (Concerto no. 20) was delightful, beautifully balancing emotional tension and delicate precision; his encore, which I didn't recognise, a distillation of ethereality, floating melodic veils of sound (excuse the attack of the purples). But it's Nikolai Lugansky they should be promoting as a pianist-sex-symbol, not this wee boy; and his (Lugansky's) publicity shots make him look like a horse. Weird.

Why won't the rest of the world agree with me about what constitutes good looks, I wonder? Now there's a rub...

The second half, for a bit of contrast, was Mahler 5. So I am pretty tired today - though not as tired as the Philharmonia boys and girls, and Maestro "Father Christmas" Segerstam must be.

Things kept going funny on the computer this morning, and at first I thought it was me, because I was so tired; it was almost a relief to hear we had a virus in the system. In the end everything got shut down for an hour and a half. Poo.

Off home, via Sainsburys in the rain; it's Friday, hurrah, and this time next week, touch wood, I'll have both hands and both arms free. I may even be able to hold a pencil and make a line that goes where I want, instead of where it willeth. I am so nearly there... and I am so very tired... I am a weed.

The darned laptop

Very tired and frustrated after an appallingly bad night’s sleep. My dear, ancient, antiquated laptop had a seizure last night and I’m not at all sure if it will be okay tonight. I’m going to go home after work and try switching it on, and see what happens. But it went so completely haywire yesterday – and in ways that I haven’t seen before – that I am seriously worried about it.

I had been writing for several hours, and was just going to back up what I’d been doing onto a disc, for safety – but the disc wouldn’t read. Then the next one wouldn’t, and nor would the one after that. All of them were discs I have used before, that in theory still had plenty of space on them. Then the machine decided to “rescue” the entire contents of one of the discs, without my asking it to do anything of the kind. It started making a horrendous roaring noise, and went on doing so for about twenty minutes while very, very slowly copying the disc onto the hard drive.

Then it wouldn’t shut down. In the end I just unplugged it, which is not a good thing to do at all; but the alternative was to leave it running all night, chirruping and clicking to itself at intervals, and getting hot (it gets very hot – it’s an antique, as I said). I knew I’d never sleep if I did that; so I crashed out of it instead. And then, of course, I didn’t sleep anyway.

Once I was well stuck in to the White Night thing, I began to sweat my way through a whole raft of minor concerns and worries, all of which at dead of night seemed disproportionately looming and monstrous. Would K be okay in her new flat? And has she got any bedding? – How is mum getting on as she gets over that mysterious bout of food poisoning, and should I have rung her more often, and would it help if I were to go down to Kent this weekend to see her? – Is P okay, after that odd reference to having “work done on the guts”? - Will I be able to afford the next gas bill? - Did I remember to put a stamp on that letter? – Did I remember to put my credit card details on that booking form? – Have I ever given the WWT my new address? – Have I ever given the Inland Revenue my new address? (I know I have, but once one is set on an all-night worry-fest one can get very bogged down in these irrational fears).

And, of course, round and round came the refrain – What if the laptop is permanently deaded, and everything I have on it is lost? I know I am not up to date in my backing-up-on-disc. That’s what I was trying to do last night, when it went kaput, krank unt möglich todt bin ich, bleaahh…

Woe’s me, woe’s me, I have been seduced by technology, and now it has shot me down. It was my man, but it done me wrong.

I never should have stopped writing in longhand on paper. It’s slower, true, and it has to be typed up afterwards, which is boring; but it is secure. I don’t lose sheets of paper, and they are unable to lose themselves spontaneously. The computer may facilitate, but when it goes wrong it causes far more trouble than my nerves can stand.

Have a look at this

...assuming I can get it to work...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-bni4QqSv4&feature=channel_page

I don't know if that will form a hyperlink - at the moment it looks as if it won't. Bother computers, what odd things they are! It's a link to a YouTube trailer for a fantastic play I saw late last year at the National Theatre...

Maybe I can find a better link on the NT website...

http://nationaltheatre.org.uk/36800/productions/war-horse.html

Oh blast and b*gger this, I am a computer-illiterate baby! Please, copy and paste one of those addresses and have a look. The second one might be better as that is from the National Theatre's own website rather than YouTube with all its attendant twaddle of adverts etc.

I'm off home, now, instead of sitting here abusing myself for a twerp just because I can't make this machine do what I want!. Tired but making some progress on the unpacking - it's funny, the last bit is the worst.