Daily Blague

Among the piles of unearthed paper that passed before my eyes late last month during Team Vacation was a stack of KLEF Program Guides. I don't have very many, certainly nothing like the sixty that I produced while I was Music Director at what was then Houston's commercial classical station. (It is no longer broadcasting as such, thanks to deregulation.) About a week after I glanced through the old issues, it hit me:

I am the world's first blogger. I began blogging without MovableType, without browsers, without the Internet even. It did involve typing, though.

A lot of typing. Anybody old enough to have used a proportionally-spaced IBM typewriter can imagine the curses that working with such a machine elicited from me. Proportionally-spaced typefaces consist of letters of unequal width: "m" is five times as wide as "l." The typewriter that you had in college (ahem) would have been a evenly-spaced machine, with each letter of the alphabet occupying an imaginary box of the same size, like the characters in Chinese calligraphy. Proportional spacing produces copy that looks more like typeset printing.

Eventually, I got a Selectric typewriter, with its even spaces and itschangeable daisy-wheels (Italics!), and life became simpler. I had taken on the job of typing the Program Guide in order to increase my paltry take-home. The work had been done by a professional typist who typed directly onto huge sheets of paper that were subsequently photographed and offset. I had the bright idea of typing on rolls of adding-machine paper, and then pasting these onto the unwieldy sheets. The flexibility of cutting and pasting was familiar to me long before I got my Peanut in 1985. But so it was to anyone working with offset printing. What's uniquely mine, in the example to the left, are the two extemporaneous comments appending to listings of music by Saint-Saëns and Chopin for the early afternoon of 8 October 1974. Yes, the image is a little small - although it can be read with a magnifying glass - but it's not important that you read it. What's important is this proof that I was consigning my impromptu thoughts to publicity as I went along, and at whatever length felt right, over thirty years ago.

Some of the comments weren't so impromptu. I have been encouraged by a few kind people who have read the long ones to republish them at Portico. Easier done than considered. My thinking about the subjects of these essays has shifted in countless ways, and of course there are mistakes to clean up. If I could just upload the material, I would, but I have to retype it first, and, trust me, I'm not a passive typist. (The inability to leave things alone is a failing, I've learned, common to lawyers who take pleasure in writing.)

Almost every day, I feel a little more completely that I was born to keep a Web log, that it is the literary form for me. Lucky for me, then, that it came into existence at some point during my time here below! Looking back at the Program Guides, I can see how I was longing for it!