Immortality

[Lightning Rod]

When I was a naive college student, I imagined a time, probably after I was dead, when whole teams of graduate students would be pouring over my manuscripts and dissecting my poetry line by line. I have stacks of tattered spiral notebooks that I was saving in anticipation of my immortality.

We only know about Bach because Mendelssohn popularized his music nearly two centuries after he died. The reason that we all recognize "Tiger, Tiger burning bright" is that Blake was a mad printer. Whitman sold his chapbooks off a vegetable cart.

Which brings me to the subject of the blogosphere. Blake or Whitman or Homer himself would have given their eye teeth to have the instantaneous and large audience of readers that many bloggers enjoy on the internet today. I can write a poem and within an hour after I publish it on the internet, several hundred people have read it. This is a literary miracle from the writer's point of view.

Then there are the questions of ubiquity and durability. Anybody can write a blog. All it takes is a $400 computer, modest typing ability and an internet connection. Blogs are everywhere. There are millions of them.

My friend Mike Nelson and I were talking one night several years ago in Club DaDa in Dallas. Our respective bands were performing there that night. We have both been musicians since we were in high school together. He said to me, " You know, when we were growing up, it was really something special to be a musician. Now, every kid on the block is in a garage band."

Blogs are like assholes, everybody has one. So how do you know which ones contain valid and penetrating thought and which ones are just some teenager's overflowing angst? I guess we'll have to leave that question to the teams of graduate students.

And will these documents last? In the 1980's, when I first embarked into the digital world, I only trusted hard copy. I wanted everything printed. But as time has gone by, I have become lax in my prejudice for print. I have volumes of work that exist in no other form but zeros and ones. I have also seen my work disappear from the internet. Servers crash. There are network accidents. Viruses can attack. Hard drives can die. I used to archive my work by emailing it to a yahoo account. The account disappeared when I neglected to visit it for four months. Poof! A year's worth of archives gone. Luckily they were just back-ups.

Suppose the internet went away. Would literary historians in the future be devising ways to resurrect hard drives from some dead server, like the lost soul of our wired civilization? What experts will decipher our digital cuniform or restore our sad papyrus of pixels?

[Dave The Dov]

Somewhere somehow things of the past are remembered that is the key to being carried on in life.
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government bailout

[Zlatko Waterman]

Dear LR:

This is one of the strongest pieces of yours I have seen to date.

It moves swiftly, the prose is clean, the points pounded together like finishing nails on a Donald Trump Taj Majal ( Trump ordered the exterior of his building in downtown Manhattan covered with bronze panels-- yes-- forty stories of BRONZE . . .)

And you have, without even a patina, thrust something punchy, artful and well-shaped into the public eye. I am fond of Bill Henderson's and Neil Postman's writing on the digital age.

You are up there with them.

Thank you for your comments.


Zlatko

[Lightning Rod]

Happy New Year Dave the Dov, I know you are forever watching.

Thank you for you constant encouragement, Z

My best wishes in the new year to you and Mrs. Z.

I slept through the midnight hour last night.

should I be worried about this sign?

your friend and fan,

lrod

[Dave The Dov]

I didn't even know it was the midnight hour in my area and I did not worry about it!!!!
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Korean Forum

[stilltrucking]

Cuneiform tablets, thousands and thousands of them have been found; about 99% are records of commercial transactions. Then there are a precious few like the Epic Of Gilgamesh. I imagine some archeologist from another world going through our trash dumps two thousand years from now. They are puzzled by the changes in our plastic tools. Why did the coffee stirrers with the McDonald’s logo on them suddenly change from having tiny spoons on the end to a flat surface?
Oh yes we as a species are dropping a rich load of knowledge for archeologist of the gone world to rediscover. Every word I post is another exercise in vanity. If I was not so fucking vain I wouldn’t post another word, let these slippery silicon documents crash and burn.


Nice peace, just my ramble in response to, don’t mean nothing

[Dave The Dov]

In the sands
was found ancient lands
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Acura RDX