Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Needs No Handwriting on Its Emptiness


I tease when I threaten to bray here, but I do seek some advice - does anyone know of a program that would allow type in different directions and colors - right-side-up, upside-down, left-to-right, right-to-left, up-to-down, down-to-up, and across different lines, that a lazyfuck techdope can use? Is there a trick in Word I don't know?

No, I didn't watch the speech. I typed that previous sentence three hours before the event. Did he say anything anyone couldn't've predicted he'd say?




Fucking Dukakis in a tank awesome. I recycle a joke in celebration. Also, serendipitously, looking for a paperback copy of Vineland four days ago in a used book store, between Crying and V was the one Ishiguro novel I hadn't read, An Artist of the Floating World, the exact laxative needed for my page 600 blockage of Littell's The Kindly Ones. The view from my carrel:






ON THE TERRACE


Landis Everson

The lonely breakfast table starts the day,
an adjustment is made to understand
why the other chair is empty. The morning
beautiful and still to be, should woo me. Yet
the appetite is not shared, lost somewhere in memory.

How lucky the horizon is blue and needs
no handwriting on its emptiness. I am
written on thoroughly, a lost novel
found again. I remember the predictable plot too late,
realize the silly, sad urgency of moss.


9 comments:

  1. Satellites circling the drain, that walkway's (if that's what it is) quite industrial labyrinthine.

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  2. Hey, bmpthnx! at your place.

    Roof terraces of dorms, though the middle glow is the Potomac.

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  3. Depending on how sophisticated you want the text, Powerpoint is a quick way to muck around with text layout, fonts, and color (or even better, Keynote if you are a Mac user). You can get more sophisticated programs, but learning curves etc. etc.

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  4. Randal said to stop in. Sure you aren't related to that whacked librarian from Cleveland? But then if you are existing in or around or even within a short commuter plane jump of DC, then that would explain it.

    Can't help you on the writing outside conventional and accepted parameters and I can't say what Obama man spoke of last night. So I guess I am up to my usual tricks and showing off how useless I can be.

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  5. If you work in Word in a table, then you can change the text direction of each cell. Kind of awkward and it would help if you knew how many cells you needed in the table before you start.

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  6. Today's post title made my mind think of this: "Needs No Handwringing on Its Ennui-ness." Not really relevant to anyone/-thing, but just the result of some word gaming.

    I have no clue how to do that in Word, but would be interested in hearing what you find.

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  7. mdp, if he ever manages to leapfrog your sage advice into the technology here, I will volcano-sacrifice you to a gaggle of dirty, drunken Barra girls.

    Wait, was I too wordy there?

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  8. I read through that a mite hurriedly and for a moment I thought you wrote "Skippy dies on my desk" which conjures up an alternate reality in which novels are made available in only one copy at a time, eventually passed on to the next person, and allowing any annoyed reader to kill the advance of a tome which irritates him. But then we wouldn't need critics.

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  9. Re: p 600 TKO blockage: You're in the Hamburger Helper section. Another couple of hundred pages red flags will be a'waving as you slide down slippery banisters. Wheee!

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