COLOPHON
I usually write them fast, flat out, without much revision and, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, without always checking for errors. I typically post them right away. Once in a while I write a whole bunch in a blue streak, on electric days, and post them one at a time during the inevitable dry spell that follows. There are very few b-sides, rejects or stillborn pieces. I go back and fix the really awful spelling and grammar errors if my girlfriend points them out, but she doesn’t read it all that often. Sometimes readers write in with corrections. Once I spelled “borders” as “boarders”.
I worry that at some point I have written the same thing twice. If I haven’t yet, I will.
I tend to write them in the mornings, before work, on my old Mac in the dining room with its rust-colored walls. Idiosyncratically, I type them into a Quark XPress document rather than a word processor. There is a postcard of Jasper Johns’ Flag on top of the monitor. I wonder if visitors think I’m a patriotic American, but I just like the painting.
Sometimes I hand-write them, like this one, in the car on a scrap of paper on a Sunday afternoon in little Italy, driving around looking for something with my girlfriend and listening to the new live Lou Reed album.
We are flying to Paris tonight.
