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Fighting the tricks up your sleeve
I haven't worn stud earrings since high school at the latest, but I dreamed that I lost one of a pair of diamond stud earrings I had inherited from a great-aunt who left me no such thing in waking life; it went bouncing down the vaulted stone steps of a concourse that does not actually exist in New York City and was caught up by someone who ran off when I called to them and I hired on the spot a pair of twin sisters who were famous in the dream for amateur detecting and had just arrived in town to visit their family in Prospect Heights, specifically they were standing there with their luggage as the person who had stolen my heirloom earring disappeared into the crowd and were giving their professional opinions to one another on the odds of recovering it and when I asked point-blank if I could hire them, after a long mutual look at me one of them yelled for a taxi. I imagine I would have been set for a fantastic pulp adventure if the contractors hadn't arrived, but at least I was still asleep at the point where we had all gone back to drop off our stuff at the house of one of the twins' aunts and I got a plate of goat and rice and plantains. I have done nothing of any value with the rest of the day except provide a platform for cats and I am telling myself it's all right. So much of this month has not gone as I wanted.
I have unpacked all of my physical contributor's copies to date. More than half of them had been in storage for almost eight years. They were packed at that time for efficiency rather than fidelity, so I had to reorganize them chronologically, as the collection had originally grown and been filed through multiple changes of housing; the falling-off in the frequency of print 'zines after the first decade of the twenty-first century is remarkable. I don't think it's just my career, which one could also argue fell off remarkably—almost none of the markets in which my poetry was initially, regularly published still exist. It makes me feel like the cross-section of an archive. I haven't gone looking for it in the Internet Archive, but I hope there exists a comprehensive salvage of the online markets for speculative poetry which proliferated into the first half of the twenty-teens and then went heavily defunct, almost as if the dish-eater of history suddenly ground up everybody's spoons. I am having a lot of difficulty with the idea that I should leave any record of my existence at all, so it has been slightly an argument with myself to unpack, making it more important that I should.
I thought briefly about shelving it elsewhere, but I kept in its old talismanic position my program for the production of Amadeus that I saw at the Old Vic in 1999, whose cast list has only become more entertaining in hindsight. David Suchet became instantly indelible for me, but I forgot about Michael Sheen until I saw him again in 2006 and I had no idea for further years that I would care about having seen Karl Johnson or Peter Blythe or most recently Christopher Benjamin. There is an advertisement in the program for Edward Petherbridge in Krapp's Last Tape.
I have seen the famous photo of this menorah circling the internet for years, but I did not know what had become of it. I am glad to know it is still lit: "Photo taken by rabbi's wife in 1931 symbolising Jewish defiance of the Nazis comes home."
I have unpacked all of my physical contributor's copies to date. More than half of them had been in storage for almost eight years. They were packed at that time for efficiency rather than fidelity, so I had to reorganize them chronologically, as the collection had originally grown and been filed through multiple changes of housing; the falling-off in the frequency of print 'zines after the first decade of the twenty-first century is remarkable. I don't think it's just my career, which one could also argue fell off remarkably—almost none of the markets in which my poetry was initially, regularly published still exist. It makes me feel like the cross-section of an archive. I haven't gone looking for it in the Internet Archive, but I hope there exists a comprehensive salvage of the online markets for speculative poetry which proliferated into the first half of the twenty-teens and then went heavily defunct, almost as if the dish-eater of history suddenly ground up everybody's spoons. I am having a lot of difficulty with the idea that I should leave any record of my existence at all, so it has been slightly an argument with myself to unpack, making it more important that I should.
I thought briefly about shelving it elsewhere, but I kept in its old talismanic position my program for the production of Amadeus that I saw at the Old Vic in 1999, whose cast list has only become more entertaining in hindsight. David Suchet became instantly indelible for me, but I forgot about Michael Sheen until I saw him again in 2006 and I had no idea for further years that I would care about having seen Karl Johnson or Peter Blythe or most recently Christopher Benjamin. There is an advertisement in the program for Edward Petherbridge in Krapp's Last Tape.
I have seen the famous photo of this menorah circling the internet for years, but I did not know what had become of it. I am glad to know it is still lit: "Photo taken by rabbi's wife in 1931 symbolising Jewish defiance of the Nazis comes home."
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Did it move at all?
I guess I'm wondering if the groupings were social as much as specifically poetry based.
E.g. the ST fan community also hanged as it moved online. The types at things written and the way people interacted, hanged in the process.
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It didn't as such. There wasn't a mass migration. A number of long-running print markets still exist, as does at least one online mainstay. New markets have also come into being and some of them are thriving. There are just fewer markets for speculative poetry currently overall than there were eight to ten years ago. There was a kind of boom of primarily online venues from the mid-2000's to the mid-2010's and I am not convinced it subsided naturally as opposed to being a casualty of the previous administration: 2017–18 was an extremely bad year for die-offs. The result is an entire cluster of publications whose online footprint I would prefer not to see succumb to link rot, since it was a really neat, diversifying era in the field. I would not mind seeing another boom one of these days, although I don't know who has the resources for it.
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I continue to be wildly jealous of this experience. What an absolutely stacked cast!
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I had never seen any of them before! I have never seen any of them live again! Best £20 I could have spent on that trip. (Plus my Roman coin necklace.)
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OH MY GOD AUSTRALIA LIVECAST
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You're welcome!
Its very unfortunate that so many art sharing options went away. I do hope that someone has some sort of archives of what was! And maybe something similar can be brought back again.
Most of the now-deceased 'zines with which I published still have archives that can be read online, but a few have gone to dead links and I miss them—Ideomancer and Moral Relativism magazine are the two that come immediately to mind, and I always worry one day I will go to look up some of the others and find nothing but spam.
The dream was so interesting! Thanks for sharing!
Thank you! I just wish I'd gotten the pulp adventure.
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You're welcome! These things matter.
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I love that photo and its blazing defiance. I can't put it any other way than that.
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It's a good way to put it.
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I have gold rings which I hardly ever take out. For years, it's only been for X-rays or MRIs.
Hire out that subconscious
as a ghost-writer. That's a lot of detail from your dream, including
I got a plate of goat and rice and plantains.
which makes my mouth water. Do you write them down on awakening or is your memory that good.
Re: Hire out that subconscious
I write down whatever I can remember of my dreams whenever I write about them, which is not immediately on waking because I am usually doing other things like feeding cats. I have felt for years that my dreaming brain is better at premise and plotting than the rest of me.
(I also really want a plate of goat and rice and plantains and we have nothing like one in the house!)