Dear Internet,
Russia has invaded the Ukraine. Suddenly The Americans seem topical television show, not one steeped in history.
Tonight’s the Oscars and the only reason I can muster the will to watch is to make sure white people don’t overrun the awards with their sloppy circle jerking, but of course they will.
It’s a cold (19F/-7C) early Sunday afternoon and I’ve started listening to R.E.M’s entire catalog, starting with Murmur. According to Spotify, this exercise will take me 24 hours. Since I have nothing really planned for my spring break week, this seems fortuitous.
Though I will note my hot cocoa has cooled off and is like drinking a thicker version of chocolate milk, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Thick, barely warm chocolate milk is much preferable to the remnants of milk from my cereal I poured into my coffee this morning because I was too lazy to walk to the fridge. Lesson learned.
This morning, as I ignored the phone calls from my brother to go the gym, TheHusband asked what was on my plans for today. I said read and write. I need to start working on my fiction. I have an article due tomorrow which I’ve started and need to finish, I need to start making headway into my large to be read pile. I keep checking out titles from MPOW because we are given almost unlimited time for titles without consequences. Some titles I’ve had for over a year. Possibly longer.
But it’s hard when you keep finding authors who pique your interest. Recently discovered Clarice Lispector, a mid-century Brazilian Mary Maclane, who is getting new breath injected into her work via Penguin. Then this morning, I found Eve Babitz via an article I read in Vanity Fair.
How could not become enamoured of a confident naked woman playing chess against Marcel Duchamp?
Babitz’s work, unlike Lispector’s, is out of print. I will be able to procure much of her work via interlibrary loan, but purchasing it? Not unless I get eagle-eyed on jaunts to used book stores. Used copies are fetching for hundreds on Amazon. Another important and critical voice burnished into obscurity.
It’s painful to consider how much is lost to the void. It has made me conscious of my own work, the never ending fucking battle of getting all of it back up online after nearly a decade of remove. But will it lay in the ether forever because once we’re dead, the lights of the site will go dim. Not that I’m going to die anytime in the near future, knock wood, but what would happen?
This July marks 16 years I’ve been writing online and right now the goal is to get as much of the back content up before then, to make the archives complete. The whole site is already indexed, but to make it even more available, I’ve started manually forcing the Wayback Machine to crawl it to archive the latest and greatest. It will always be available then, under different guises. Even if something happens to me, my work will live digitally on until the world dies.
I’ve added this thought to my project list this summer: Finally do something with the work other than getting it back up online. Edit it, clean it up, release it in volumes of something.
And then write some more.
x0x0,
Lisa
