Robert

"so i turned the radio on, i turned the radio up,
and this woman was singing my song:
the lover's in love, and the other's run away,
the lover is crying 'cause the other won't stay.

some of us hover when we weep for the other who was
dying since the day they were born.
well, this is not that:
i think that i'm throwing, but i'm thrown.

and i thought I'd live forever, but now i'm not so sure".
---from an old Lisa Loeb song

I got up near dawn to make some copies for my work. Then, in the very early morning just after first light, I drove ninety miles to a little North Carolina town with a little courthouse. On the way there, I passed numerous little attraction signs that said "Potteries". The folks who settled this area, a deep piney woods, started little homespun pottery manufacturing sites. There must have been dozens that I passed. This awed me, a bit, because Camark Pottery, the pottery of my folks' home town (now, I suppose, my home town) featured just one family pottery, and yet it had trouble staying in business in the long haul. Now they write books about it and sell the pottery at a premium on eBay.

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Today the copy shop is finishing the binding on briefs I must federal express today. At first, I thought I'd have to tape bind them myself, as the kind woman at the shop was personnning the copy shop by herself, though she had work enough for three. I copied my covers and my documents, but then she got free to help do the binding itself. That's a good thing, as I prefer comb bindings to doing my own tape bindings. I need to get a fallback binding machine, as I do not think I kept my little vello binder that I used to keep for personal purposes. Now I'm waiting for her to finish, so that I can run to Federal Express.

In the meantime, here are the answers to my recent "Gurdonark Poll". Everyone did very well in guessing the answers, which confirms to me that I am not nearly mysterious enough in any way:
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I notice that I have a lot of writers on my weblog reading list, some of whom have professionally published, and some of whom have not. I notice, also, a recurrent theme that a number of those who do not publish professionally wish that they could get their works into magazines, books or little literary journals, but never actually submit their more-than-winning work.

One of my journal "themes", if themes is the right word, is that any form of publishing, including self-publishing in a weblog, can be a "good" kind of publishing for the right person. I do not hold large corporate publishing houses or small-as-a-shoestring literary reviews (and particularly not academic short story and poetry journals, which often are filled with nepotic instincts and grandiose misplaced snobberies, but which I love anyway) in any particular regard. I trust my own aesthetic more than many other aesthetics. I am free to be bad at my discretion. Nonetheless, I have published a bit of creative material and a bit of legal material from time to time, and it is absolutely fun to be published by someone other than oneself.

I find that lots of the best writers just need a little prompting. I am a good prompt. I hereby volunteer my services to be that prompt.

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