redaction
Monday 9 March 2009 | 7 cookies in the jar
Apologies for earlier hand-wringing and soprano-keening. Backup and subsequent upgrade to WP 2.7 has gone without hitch, and thus there’s now this Autosave feature which should make the loss of five hours’ so-called labor a thing of the past. Should. Though in fact the rule is always, Always, ALWAYS write your posts in a text editor. Always. Am I doing that now? Psssht, of course I’m not. Firefox could combust at any second! I’m living on the edge!
Anyway the Brujo staggered home around 4 pm, completely wrung dry by his A-day, his tunneled-out exhaustion placing everything in perspective. Also he waggled his finger at me as if I had been naughty and proposed that the universe apparently does not want me blogging when I have Other Things I am wanting to be writing, or anyway I claim to want to be writing them. I of course took immediate umbrage at this classically Santa Fe interpretation, which he meant only in jest, and then collapsed into bed rebelliously, squanderously, nursing a Reed’s Premium Ginger Beer and To the Lighthouse, which I have just reread. And I now feel mighty mighty silly. Also this new interface is so slick and white and gleaming, like a Stormtrooper, that my prose is intimidated. Obviously its high-gloss surfaces are going to predicate some matching blog redecoration (which means, I suppose, removal of the beloved flocked wallpaper), and I suspect it will be a long time before I feel O-spontaneous-me enough again to write, at random and on whim, an umpteen-gazillion word post for Firefox to swallow whole. Did I mention I feel silly? Because OMG TEH DRAMA.
In lieu of the previously quoted-and-then-immediately-erased paragraphs from A Room of One’s Own, which were supposed to be pertinent to receiving disability, or not, I thus offer you instead, somewhat abashed, the thoughts of Virginia qua Lily. With, again, apologies. And a promise to have another go at the mighty devoured post tomorrow, when I have energy for its redaction.
But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. “About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay”—no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotion of the body? express that emptiness itself? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty.) It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind.
7 cookies in the jar
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Ah ha! There you are. Ms. teh drama. Please send a nomination ballot for Poet Laureate of Arizona. You’ll be getting another sheepskin soon, and such things sometimes lead to remunerative situations.
Wow. I Ms. teh drama too. I also Ms. V Woolf and would much rather be rereading To the Lighthouse than grading essays on (at least) Mrs. Dalloway.
Meanwhile, Woolf always makes me cry. Or shiver. Every time. The whole telephone line through time thing. And then, I am clearly becoming one of those apprehensive wrinkled ones, though I once tried so hard–or wanted so badly–to say everything–but then, nothing to nobody.
Dude! What a huge change. I love the flors. So sorry about all the electronic strife. Check your email.
@kimba: Alors, the fleurs may come and go for a while, until I figure out the Great Everything. I will check my email!
@repat: Ah, Ms. V. And then as the Brujo played Facebook Scrabble last night he was trying to reassure me by saying that the writing of the writing is what is important, not what happens to the writing. So I read him the bit about the painting getting rolled up and thrust under a sofa forever, or, god forbid, “hanging in a servant’s bedroom.”
And we agreed that of course it is important what happens to the painting. While it is also not important. Cf. that transcendently horrifying-wonderful Borges story “The Secret Miracle.”
We are all the apprehensive wrinkled ones.
I keep trying to change my theme, but I seem to be addicted to my wallpaper. Anything else looks so bare and nakey and gleaming and sterile and and EXPOSED. Like zinc countertops or those bobo (a.k.a. bourgeois bohemian) “Zen” slate shower stalls or something.
I like your wallpaper, too. I felt slightly agoraphobic in the other theme (though I’m sure I’d get used to it, and I did love the flora up top…).
Oh, those electronic travails! My problem with text editors is how a blog post will grow stale waiting for me to come back to it and actually finish writing it, that they enable, um, overthinking: current count — nine items waiting that I thought I needed to write about, seven of which seem sadly dated. Already. But also, wanted to chime in, how I like the wall paper, how well your blog WORKS and how I know one could adjust to change (even the absence of blogroll) but see no real need for it. And how signs of life on the unreliable are more cheering and welcom than the signs of spring (sadly lacking in Portland where it, sigh, snowed AGAIN yesterday.)