Dear Diary: Fritzed
Message from the sysop:
The wireless drivers may need a update but im not sure that will fix the weird problems.
To which I replied:
Thanks! Does everyone have the weird problems?
Just checking to see if, you know, all men are mortal.
It was a rough but productive day. I plowed through the problems with a kind of desperate resolution. First of all, there were no links. I sat down to write the Daily Office and filled in three of the eight hours right away. Three hours later, I hadn’t added anything. After lunch, something budged and the logjam broke. I suspect that it was the difficulty of finding a good link for Lauds that put me in a curatorial funk. It was so bad that the best thing that I could come up with was the Schjeldahl–Dyer duel! But the Aesthete came to the rescue, with a gorgeous picture of Penelope Tree.
Then there were the Dymo woes. I wanted to print a lot of labels. Twelve of the labels were for bubble envelopes that I was planning to send to various friends. In the envelopes were twenty or so of the lovely little calendars that Kathleen had printed last December. She was going to send them out to clients as a business Christmas card, but I don’t think that that happened. In March or April, I had the bright idea of foisting a portion of the stockpile off on friends. You see how quickly we move here.
The other labels were for CDs that I’ve removed from jewel boxes and plan to store in lovely file drawers from Exposures.
That is what I was going to do with an hour or two of the afternoon. But the Dymo label printer was in a bad mood. It wasn’t until after I’d rebooted, reinstalled, and installed on another computer that I finally had the idea of pressing one of the blue lights on the printer. That fixed it. There was never at any time a jam. There was just a bad mood.
I persevered. It all got done.
Then there were sign-up issues at YouTube, and the “weird problems.” I want to say that I could cope better with these difficulties if they made any sense, but death and disease don’t make any sense, not really.
*
I read Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk this morning (when I still fancied myself ahead of the curve). I can’t say that I much liked the writing, despite what Michael Cunningham has to say about it.
The same might be said of Wescott the novelist, whose eye is so cold and precise, so hawklike, that the novel itself might suffer from an excess of clarity and a dearth of passion if it weren’t redeemed by its language.
Its language reminds me of a formdible old lady, a humorless veteran of magnificent causes, who lives in a Greenwich Village flat, surrounded by bibelots that, if you’re good, she’ll condescend to explain to you, one by one. What she won’t do is smile from her heart.
Drunkenness does superimpose a certain peculiarity and opaqueness of its own — monotonous complexion, odd aroma, pitch of voice, and nervous twitch — on the rest of a man’s humanity, over the personality that you have known sober. But worse still is the transparency and the revelation, as it were sudden little windows uncurtained, or little holes cut, into common recesses of character. It is an anatomy lesson: behold the ducts and sinuses and bladders of the soul, common to ever soul ever born! Drunken tricks are nothing but basic human traits. Ordinary frame of mind is never altogether unlike this babble of morbid Irishman. I felt the sickish embarrassment of being mere human clay myself. It seems to me that only art has the right to make one feel that. I am inclined to detest anyone who makes me feel it, as you might say, socially.
I’m not entirely sure what all of that means, but the parts that I understand are not attractive.
*
Message from the sysop:
Okay I’ve found information where the newest driver for the wireless card fixes the wireless connection issues.
The bear heads over the mountain, to see what he can see…