Recording the New Audio Book
We got little out of Isiais until Tuesday night when for 20 minutes exactly the skies opened and a hard and much needed blessed rain fell. It was short but dropped about ½ inch here. It cleaned the air so I’m not having an allergic reaction to the pollution that hangs on in summer. Now we’re back to sun every day, but we briefly enjoyed lower humidity Thursday and Friday, making it pleasant, to work in the gardens. I harvested the remaining beets and transplanted cucumbers I started. We’re getting buried under zucchini, normal – but last year, we got not one zuke, none at all. The rabbits gobbled them a lol as fast as they formed. Whatever is eating our veggies this year doesn’t like zucchini but loves eggplants and tomatoes.
I spent from 9:30 to 12:30 starting Tuesday and going through Thursday recording for the audio book [actually Woody was the tech person and had to buy extra equipment to do this] 180 pp of poetry from my volume out September 30th, ON THE WAY OUT, TURN OFF THE LIGHT. I had a director on ZOOM from her apartment in New York City making me reread sections of each poem again and again. She was very nice but the process was agonizing. Afterward, I was hoarse and exhausted. I’m dreading them coming back for more changes in two weeks. The stress update my digestive system.
I’ve had poetry books published since 1970, the last 16 with Knopf. This is the first time the process has been chaotic. My editor, down in South Carolina for safety’s sake, nobody in the office, apparently no one really doing copy-editing. My editor has one version of the manuscript, I was sent another version by the audiobooks people.and I printed out yet another version from my computer. It’s a complete mess. I also couldn’t do a great job finding typos and omissions when the ms came straight from the printer to me. I hadn’t yet had my assistant come back to work – I was still completely isolating besides Woody and the cats. I’ve always been a poor proofreader – my eyes get tired and I see what I expect to see.
I wrote no poems or anything else this week because of the recording process. When I finished each day, I had nothing left in the tank. Sitting was awkward because I had to lean around the huge microphone and the lowered desk lamp in order to see each poem. So my neck is still sore, my knees hurt from the awkward position and my back is an inferno. We did all the recording in Woody’s room because it is the farthest form the road and local noises and it’s easy to shut out the cats so they don’t yowl or jump up and knock over the microphone or other recording equipment or throw all the pages down. As there was no room on his desk for the poems that I’d already performed, I dropped them on the floor as I went. Now two different versions of the manuscript are all mixed up and messed up. I have no coherent copy and if I did, it would still be different from the other two versions.The director is a very nice woman, but the process of being constantly interrupted and asked to read a particular sentence out of context was confusing and disruptive.
Lately I feel as if we are approaching the end of our particular civilization. Probably other countries are more together. My email is slow now, emails I send or people send to me are disappearing into the ether. We cannot travel. Things we order on line sometimes take months to come and sometimes we get two of something when we ordered one. Trump’s chosen crony is intentionally fucking up the post office. Everyone who used to work there is gone and the new people are not as helpful or friendly. The mails are suddenly much slower. Random things disappear from supermarket shelves. Social distancing and mask wearing make interacting with anybody but Woody or my assistant Dale difficult. I wonder if I will ever see my chosen daughter Melenie again. I wonder if we will be able to drive up to Maine to get our annual organic lamb, let alone do any outlet shopping as we do every September for things like sox, underwear, good fresh apples from a farm where you can see them picking the apples as you drive in.
What the new head of the post office is doing is inexcusable, intentionally slowing the mail. People are dependent on mail to get checks, to pay bills, to send packages, to communicate with old friends who aren’t on email [hello John Nichols],to get medicine they order on line. I expect to have to start paying interest on bills because they won’t come in time to pay them on time. My last cable bill came with only a 2 day turnaround by the time it was delivered to my box. Under Trump everything good the government does is being dismantled or destroyed – only the nasty and violent parts carry on like the ICE and border thugs.