Another procrastinating space
Oct. 8th, 2007 07:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sheenaghpughI've joined facebook, so I have, and am liking it a lot better than the useless myspace. It's a good place to find literary folk (I am still staggered to have become an online friend of Edwin Morgan, no less) and to play online scrabble. Not the debating chamber LJ is, and nothing like the same html possibilities even with the added funwall, but it clearly has a different purpose.
I shouldn't be playing the scrabble. But the first two jobs awaiting me in the sabbatical, now started, thank god, were (a) to finish writing a new collection, which'll be fun when I can get around to it, and (b) to compile the MS for a new selected poems (1990 onwards). This would have been much easier if I had not, in a fit of economy, overwritten the floppies three of my old books were on.... So now I have to key most of the poems in again. This has its advantages, because I can see loads of useful emendations to make along the way (mainly punctuation but some more substantive) but it's nitpicking work and every so often you need a break because you start typing more misprints than prints. We do have a scanner but it won't wrk on print although it's meant to.
I don't, incidentally, feel any guilt about altering the poems in this version; I agree with Auden that they aren't finished until you're dead. I do feel rather differently about the number of Collected Poems I've reviewed which were no such thing, because the poet had left out what she didn't like. Carole Satyamurti's, among others, was like that and I think Boland's was. I can well understand why poets might find early stuff cringeworthy and not want to acknowledge it any more. But in that case they ought not to call the resulting volume a Collected, because scholars who come after them have a right to assume that this term means a comprehensive collection of everything wot you ever wrote. (One reason I'll never do one, the other being superstition.)
The one problem about facebook is that you can find people, but until they are friends you can't find out much about them, so it's hard to tell which Charlie Farnsbarn is the one you know and friend him, especially if he leaves no photo. If anyone's over there and willing to risk being pestered to play scrabble, I might be the only one of me, and certainly the only one in the Wales network!
I shouldn't be playing the scrabble. But the first two jobs awaiting me in the sabbatical, now started, thank god, were (a) to finish writing a new collection, which'll be fun when I can get around to it, and (b) to compile the MS for a new selected poems (1990 onwards). This would have been much easier if I had not, in a fit of economy, overwritten the floppies three of my old books were on.... So now I have to key most of the poems in again. This has its advantages, because I can see loads of useful emendations to make along the way (mainly punctuation but some more substantive) but it's nitpicking work and every so often you need a break because you start typing more misprints than prints. We do have a scanner but it won't wrk on print although it's meant to.
I don't, incidentally, feel any guilt about altering the poems in this version; I agree with Auden that they aren't finished until you're dead. I do feel rather differently about the number of Collected Poems I've reviewed which were no such thing, because the poet had left out what she didn't like. Carole Satyamurti's, among others, was like that and I think Boland's was. I can well understand why poets might find early stuff cringeworthy and not want to acknowledge it any more. But in that case they ought not to call the resulting volume a Collected, because scholars who come after them have a right to assume that this term means a comprehensive collection of everything wot you ever wrote. (One reason I'll never do one, the other being superstition.)
The one problem about facebook is that you can find people, but until they are friends you can't find out much about them, so it's hard to tell which Charlie Farnsbarn is the one you know and friend him, especially if he leaves no photo. If anyone's over there and willing to risk being pestered to play scrabble, I might be the only one of me, and certainly the only one in the Wales network!
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-08 02:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-08 02:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-08 05:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-08 08:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-08 09:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-10 07:19 am (UTC)On the Collected point, I don't necessarily expect it to be everything wot you ever wrote (I'd call that a Complete, which is for obvious reasons posthumous, usually). But it's always nice to be told what's been left out, and what's been revised.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-10 09:06 am (UTC)