I had a headache two hours ago (at 10 A.M.) so I took two APC’s, which have caffeine in them, and one of the pills I have with an opiate in it.  So now I feel very good.  I suspect I’m a bit looped, too, bcause of the second passage below.  (The first I wrote last night shortly after posting my blog for the day.)

One other reason textual elements are valuable in a design that I forgot to mention yesterday, maybe because so really really obvious, is that they are familiar to everyone, and familiar things will automatically give pleasure, unless too familiar.  In a textual design, though, non-representational imagery that is not familiar will generally rule, so the familiar shapes of letters and the like will provide welcome relief from that.

At Poetryetc, Chris Jones wrote: ” . . . and in my identity papers file I found another draft, a sonnet, which I thought I had lost. It is not a good move to keep poetry drafts with your ID papers in Australia… this way leads to jail. But all the same, the first draft of this sonnet was given as a wedding present to two lesbian friends (which was nice, as she kept stealing my fountain pens I used to write poetry while at work in a paid job. Okay, so they hired a poet. Get over it!)”

I was inspired to respond: “This is really stoopit, but I thought somebody at poetryetc might get a laugh out of it: when I read this post with ‘sonnet’ in its title, and came to the text, ‘my fountain pens,’ I read it as ‘my fourteen pens.’  Maybe my subconscious mind is telling me that I, as a visual poet, should compose sonnets using a different pen for each line?  More likely, I as a hard-nosed poetry critic who believes a sonnet must have fourteen lines, can’t think of anything else but that for hours after seeing the word, ‘sonnet.’”

I’m feeling good for other reasons.  One is that I learned that I can wear a soft contact on my right eye; I had thought it was too astigmatic for any kind of contact but a hard one that I didn’t want because grit from the dirty Florida air gets too easily under it when I’m riding my bike.  So I’m now wearing a soft contact lense on my right eye, and my far vision has been really sharp, after being just adequate for six or more months.  A second is that I may have attained urological normalcy after having leakage problems due to the raadddiiiiaaaaattttttiiiiiiioooooooonnnnnnnnn I got for my prostate cancer 14 years ago thanks to a device I just bought.  A third is that I found a gift from Spain in my post office box this morning–a book of visual poems and textual designs by J. M Callejo, This one took my fancy becauseI do a lot with cut-outs from dictionaries, too.who was the one who sent it to me.   Here’s one of his pieces:

 

I’m monolingual, so don’t know what any of words in the piece mean.  I tried working something out using a Spanish-to-English dictionary but could find almost none of those words in it.   Something to do with thinking?  Pensive reflection?  All I can say is the idea of a beetle, or whatever it is, coming on three scraps of paper, each with the same dictionary definition on it intrigues me.

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Red Faction Armageddon