I never promised to be a proponent of free speech when I set up the forum. Some person with the username finneganswake has posted several times to various topics with admittedly wonderful imitation of Joycian syntax. Unfortunately for this person, I loathe James Joyce's writing. With a passion. If that makes me an uncultured savage, I'm willing to live with that. Also, their ramblings have nothing whatsoever to do with the topics at hand. So I deleted all of their posts from all of the topics except the Welcome one, which was mostly nonsense anyway.
Just as I was waking up this morning, I was having this dream that was like watching a movie via V-R. That is to say, I knew that was was going on was fake, but it was all around me. I was right in the center of the action, but no one noticed me at all. It involved a Jewish Cabalist (Department of Redundancy Department) and a lot of people who never bother to look up. There was a central theme - something to do with a spiritual center, or something, that I told myself three times in the dream to remember when I woke up because it would make a great journal entry (I even think about the journal when I'm asleep!) but I forgot anyway.
I've been unhappy for some time with the way comics are stored. For those of you who aren't familiar, I'll explain: First you get a mylar plastic bag and put in it a "board" (which is a little thicker than posterboard and thinner than cardboard). You put the comic in the bag with the board (the board adds structural integrity) and tape the bag shut. The bagged comics are then kept in comic boxes, which are double-thick cardboard boxes specially sized to hold comics. The arrangement has several flaws. First of all, if you want to be able to get to the comics, you can't put anything on top of the boxes. Even other boxes. Matt and I currently have about four square feet of floorspace devoted to our comic boxes. (After we finally gave up and stacked them!) Also, I hardly ever re-read just a single comic. If I'm re-reading comics, I'm usually re-reading a dozen or so of them at a time. If you pull a dozen comics out of the box and stack them on the floor, the bags are slippery enough that they'll just slide over each other and wind up in an untidy heap. And taking the comic out of its bag is a bit of a pain, too, because for some reason I always manage to get the book hung up on the tape.
None of these things are really major issues (except the amount of space a comic box takes up, which bugs me.) But I've always felt that there had to be a better way. Most of the more popular comics are available in what are called trade paperbacks, which are collections of anywhere from five to twenty issues at a time, and these collections are thick enough that they can be reasonably shelved on a normal bookshelf. Matt is in the process of trying to trade in his issues for trades. But what about the comics that aren't popular enough to have been collected? Or issues where the cover art or letter columns are a big part of the appeal?
A catalog I get was offering magazine holders. These are narrow strips of plastic with holes spaced for a three-ring binder and an open slot for most of the length of the strip. The idea is that you thread the magazine through the slot, and then you can keep a bunch of magazines together in a three-ring binder. You can usually find these things at office supply stores for about three or four dollars a dozen. The magazine was offering them for less than half of that, and an even better deal if you ordered in quantity. Comics are essentially smallish magazines, and I thought this would be a great way to store my comics. I can keep a series together so it's easy to pick up and re-read at any time, and store the binders on a bookshelf, which takes up much less space than the boxes. Ta-da! So I ordered a little over three hundred of these holders.
They arrived yesterday, and I was very excited. I'll even be able to re-organize my comics before we move! Then I opened the box. The magazine holders are all still attached to the sheet of plastic from which they were punched. To use them, I have to rip a dozen holders from their sheets of plastic, then pop out the slot, and then pop out the binder holes. This is not flimsy plastic, either - this is good, heavy plastic almost the thickness of tupperware.
I did four of the fifteen sets yesterday. I tore four fingernails down to the quick, and little plastic "holes" litter the floor where they popped out of control and missed the trashcan.
I think I outsmarted myself.
9:30 update: Matt tells me that the bits I left on the forum in the Welcome section are the beginning and end of the actual book, Finnegan's Wake, and not imitations. I am now simultaneously less impressed with finneganswake and more annoyed with James Joyce.
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