Wednesday, June 16, 2004

And I thought I knew shame before

Well, I had written a very nice, poking-fun-at-myself entry about how I haven't read Ulysses yet, and all the mock shame I felt about it. I told you that I have been trying to read it for about fifteen years, but that I keep putting it down to read other things. I told you all about books I read in the summer of 95, although there was a star which led you to the bottom of the page, where you would have read that although I had read those books, I hadn't in '95, as I can't find my Have Read list from that summer. Ooh, I even remember typing something like "it (the list) was supposed to be over there, see, where clearly there is now only that stupid pink bear, the star-shape-icecube tray. And Ulysses."
I talked abit about the Quest, but not much (again from the memory hole: "the short version is that we were four good friends who fucked off a year or so of school to have a lot of creative fun, and every year since we get together to drink a lot of coffee."), only to mention that I did not keep my Quest goal for QE 10 to read the Big Books I hadn't read yet that I owned, which included Ulysses. I never read any of them. One of them was Infinite Jest, and I mentioned that after reading a Mimi Smartypants entry about her love of the book, I picked it up, and um, moved it to a new pile.
There was also a few lines about how I wanted to have read Ulysses for today, bloomsday, about how I was ready to not get a lot of stuff, but the book hasn't even been moved.
By now it should be plain to you: I lost an entry. I was just about done, ready to preview it, and I wanted to find one last link on "summer of 95" using Bananaslug. My browser crashed, and me with no back-up. I thought that there would be warning signs, as there usually is. Not this time. grrr. This entry is vastly unfresh compared to the original, as it had fun fresh links to reviews of books, and to a few other sites, which this entry clearly does not possess. It also had some stuff about me feeling like a fake intellectual, that soon I will get kicked out of the club ("bounce! bounce!! bounce!!!"). Oh! and there was this whole riff on the fake University course I had to take on faking knowledge of texts and authors, but it was really overworked, and I'm glad it's gone.
I will, however, finish in the same spirit as before.
I am off for a pint of Guinness, and will be carting the Big U with me for one more kick at the cat.

2 comments:

Elan Morgan said...

Never, and I repeat, never write an entry directly into your diary host's posting area. So many entries have been lost by so many bloggers that way. I always write mine in WordPerfect or Edit Pad and then paste them in just before publishing.

starcat said...

The same thing would have happened. I wouldn't've saved in Word, as I never thought that I would write that much. It was always: oh, I'll write one more sentence; oh, I'll just go look for a good link for that; oh, that sentence has a typo; and so on.
Have learned: The Universe hates us all, and I must save the memories.