Month: January 2024

classic gloomy January Sunday

/ John Enright / 1 Comment

data voids are a known challenge for all search engines

It must be so. I read it in The Times. I’ve had days like that, days, say, when there are no birds or weeks that left nothing behind worth remembering. 

Data voids and search engines.  Composition cloze tests, staring off, waiting for the word you know exists that will turn the sentence outward, open it.  Search engine self definition.  Blood hound minded, all else unimportant, or just sick solipsistic obsession? 

The bareness of a frozen overcast winter afternoon.

Just the One Typeface

/ John Enright / 2 Comments

My emotional attachment to my old baby-blue Smith-Corona portable sums it all up.  Nostalgia means yearning for home.  So, this can’t be nostalgic because our yearnings then were all in the opposite direction—the road, escape adrenalin.  The rooms we occupied!  Man, I could type back then, the hands working fast as the brain. Paper was always the problem, wasn’t it, old buddy?  You never complained of the cold.  I never had to plug you in or clear your memory.  All-in-one keyboard and printer, you never once questioned me.  I did drop you down that metal stairway to the loft, but you bounced and forgave me (except for the carriage-return bell).  You did not like carbon paper sets.  Who could afford xerox?    I left you in that Harlem pawnshop, headed west.  I meant to return.  Just hoping you are safe in a museum someplace.