In Between Worlds

For the last few days I have been without a voice and without a working computer, which I found makes me feel very itchy as a writer – I’ve grown so accustomed to writing in multiple files at once on a computer, to answering e-mails or doing research or making submissions during my downtime, and then, when I don’t have my computer, I can usually at least talk to friends and family on the phone. But with a sudden onset of tonsillitis, bronchitis, and laryngitis – I hardly ever lose my voice, and I didn’t even notice I was getting sick, just thinking I was having the usual fall allergies – and my old laptop, a Lenovo, dying, and the new computer I ordered to replace it starting to fall apart within 24 hours of ordering it, I have been at a loss. I feel lost, between worlds, especially with a fever that makes me feel alternately way too hot and freezing cold, the dreary cold rain and mist outside gripping my chest.

So my husband, seeing my frustration and knowing I’d been told by the doctor to stick to bed rest,  went out to the mall and picked up a shiny new MacBook for me to try, probably too expensive for me to afford on my poetry salary alone, seeing me so frustrated (and having the fourth PC failure in four years.) Note that I haven’t worked on a Mac since I was 19 years old, so this will be interesting but I think it’s probably the right move. And probably, the laptop and PC as we have known it is probably on its way to obsolescence, soon to be placed by, goodness knows, smartwatches and smartphones and smartpets. Something device-y and tiny for a generation used to texting with its thumbs.

I like my routines – don’t know if that is a Taurus thing or a writer thing – and it wrecks my creative energy to have to adjust, to spend all my time and energy trying out a new system. But I think in this case it’s important to adapt, because I’ve noticed that for things like grant and job and conference applications, we writers are now required not just to write and provide samples of our writing in Word format, but to edit videos of ourselves, produce mp3s of our readings, produce photos for different media. Yikes! No PC software I’ve found has been really great at any of those things, and Mac is supposed to have great and easy-to-use software for all those kinds of things. My artist and graphic designer friends have been using Mac forever, and so, maybe I have just accepted the inevitable – that poets must now be jacks of all trades, or at least knowledgeable in multimedia. And these Apple computers have always struck me as a bit elitist – so much more expensive than any laptop I’ve bought in the last five years – but I guess if they last longer than two years, they will earn out their higher cost. Anyway, next time I post, it’ll be from a new Apple! There’s something I’m probably missing here about voice and delivery system, about the connections between human and machine, between the writer and the representation of the writer, between spoken voice and written word. But who knows whether this computer will stay live long enough for me to write about that stuff? It’s on its last legs, after all.

I’m supposed to be reading tomorrow night at the wonderful collaboration between the Jack Straw Writers and the Bushwick Book Club, where talented musician Matt Price will be putting a musical spin on my poem “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [in films]” I’m just hoping I have enough of a voice to read the poem in question loud enough for the crowd to hear it!