19th Century Modern

I live a hermit's life.

It has taken a long time for me to get here too.

In a few days, Adobe's "Design Suite Premium" will arrive, and I will install the package on my computer and get to work exploring each of its publishing-oriented products.  I have a still beginner's familiarity with programs like Dreamweaver (web development) and Photoshop and none at all with standards like InDesign, Illustrator, and Acrobat.

Once upon a time (and very long ago), I developed about 350 macros for WordPerfect.  I don't know where they are today, but I poured some soul into working that software on the premise that it would be around forever.

When I built my computer in November 2007, I didn't bother loading the WP v8.x software.

MS Word managed the conversions well enough, or at least the ones I needed, and all the small editorial, writerly, and tables-with-math efficiencies I had produced years before were for nought.

Over the years, with similar but longer-lived enthusaisms, I've developed pretty good fine art abilities and skills and have no reason to be shy about them.  However, one has only so much energy and time, and the more tracks one drives, the more dilute one's initiatives.  Time in and producing becomes shorter; output -- more familiar and banal.

The Internet provides the ultimate reference library experience, and one may fly from one community to another and one subject to the next, but what is gotten out of that and what is given through it . . . time will have to tell for others.

I have been keeping an old fashioned Jewish Sabbath: all electronics off at sundown Friday night; rest, grazing in the kitchen, and reading only through Saturday.  Long walks are allowed.  No computing; no guitar playing; no television.  A few minutes in the garden watering plants and "dead-heading" petunias . . . but digging around in the earth at leisure strikes me as just that much closer to God.

What returns on that day, Sabbath, is the return to long hours of reading without distraction.

Some may recall a Twilight Zone television episode in which a bookworm masquerading as a bank teller reatreats to the vault for a spell with a book, and while he's in there, nuclear war takes place, and he emerges from his shelter to find his town completely depopulated, the local library well stocked and plenty of canned food about. 

At last all the time in the world for reading.

He takes a seat on the steps of the library, opens a book, and as he's about to read, he fumbles with his eyeglasses, drops them, and they shatter.

I understand that guy.

Compared to him, I have plenty of support--and I may leave my island library.

However, here is a note of appreciation for what I have got: a 19th Century garret, just 850-sq.ft., stocked with 2000 books and always between half-a-dozen and a dozen periodicals coming along with new books now and then, a good enough kitchen, a little leathery place for watching movies, and a hot little desktop computer and monitor: and here it may be time to depart the electronic slipstream, to back off, stand down, slow down and lapse into literary time.

I will tackle what I need to with the Adobe Suite.

I will continue producing photographs and prints (and photography services for my immediate community).

But I'm going to live differently here, farther back in time, closer to the spirit's bones.

This category, "19th Century Modern", may turn out my online journal.

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