and so am I!

I found a folder full of poems.  The files are text and they were typed in Applewriter or whatever that *amazing* word processing program of long-ago Macintosh computers was called.  Yes, I’ve forgotten the name.  It would be easy to Google but that would be beside the point.  Fact is that for ten years I used this program and I believe I typed my entire dissertation in it and now I cannot retrieve the name from the folds of my brain.

I got my first personal computer in graduate school.  I bought it off my officemate for five hundred dollars.  It was a reconfigured Mac Plus inside a Mac LISA.  Yes, that fiasco of Steven Jobs, named after the daughter that he refused to claim…you all saw Pirates of Silicon Valley.  That personal computer that was sold for around $10k and was a failure because people aren’t completely insane, all the time.  The shells were refurbished with the internal workings comparable to more reasonably priced Mac Pluses.  (Correction:  It had LISA hardware and used emulation software to mimic the Mac Plus. See Dean’s comment below.) The computer had a black-and-white display and if I remember correctly, it did not have a hard drive.  The system was on floppy disks. (Correction: I did not remember correctly after all.  It did have a small hard disk…the earliest versions ran on a floppy-disk system.)  It looked rather like your grandma’s kitchen radio with a little TV screen on one side.  If I hadn’t given it away to someone who had absolutely no use for it (a street musician, albeit a brilliant one–he certainly could have used it, but wasn’t all that interested in learning how), I might have sold it to a museum or on eBay and made some decent money.  My second personal computer was a Mac Performa, a much more conventional (and brand-new) sort of desktop, with a color (!) display.  That was where I used my first email account.  Truly, I had a computer well before I ever used email.  My first computer I used primarily as a word processor.  I picked over the applications and played with the calculator.

It seems useful to remember one’s old tech as well as one’s old poetry.  I found what had to be the worst poem I ever wrote:

Ditty

fleur du bonheur
fleur du mal
fleur de la jeunesse
fleur du jaune
fleur du lapin
fleur de la vache
fleur de la voiture
fleur du lait
fleur du café
fleur du thé
fleur de la crevasse
fleur des pieds
fleur du merde
et fleur d’or
fleur on the shelf
at the grocery store

On the file I opened, the poem was sandwiched in between chunks of code that appeared as the text reader translated the poem out of Applewriter, a kind of digital noise.  Something weird just happened.  I pasted that code in and wrote a whole paragraph about it, saved and published it–and everything after the poem just vanished.  So I guess it said something to WordPress that turned it invisible.  This is infinitely cooler than what I had written, but a little annoying too.

What I had written is that I had been trying to learn elementary French in graduate school and this poem, as it were, was a kind of nonsense noise my brain was generating, a kind of joke, as I was learning vocabulary and syntax.  And this entire blog post is also a similar kind of noise, like crickets chirping outside through the hum of the air conditioning.  And that that’s ok.  Given what happened, it seems like I should mention in addition that when you’re playing with computer code, noise can silence itself as it becomes visible in the exact right place.

Mac LISA photo Some rights reserved by alvy