Poet Ponders the Digital

I love typography. For my contribution to an upcoming collection on the rhetoric of type, I consulted the following texts: Bennett, Paul A., & Bruce Rogers. (1963). Books and printing : a treasury for typophiles (1st Forum Ed. ed.). Cleveland: World Pub. Co. Berry, John D. (2006). dot-font : talking about fonts (1st ed.). New York: Mark Batty Publisher. Bringhurst, Robert. (2004). The elements of typographic style (3rd ed.). Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks, Publishers. Carter, Sebastian. (1995). Twentieth century type designers (New ed ed.). London: Lund Humphries Publishers. Clair, Kate. (1999). A typographic workbook : a primer to history, techniques, and artistry . New York: Wiley. Coles, Stephen. (2012). The anatomy of type : a graphic guide to 100 typefaces . New York: Harper Design. Davis, Graham. (2007). The designer’s toolkit : 500 grids and style sheets . San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Dodd, Robin. (2006). From Gutenberg to opentype : a...

The lumbar radiculopathy, which sounds too much like "ridiculously" for me, hasn't faded completely. My left leg still cramps, tingles, and hurts with sharp pains. My mind remains cloudy, too, even as I stop taking painkillers for the back pain and a recent surgery. Efforts to reboot and get back on track intellectually, physically, and emotionally are off to a slow, grinding start. It reminds me of an old 80286 PC, the infamously confused Intel CPU that wasn't sure what it was meant to be. And this was before the "SX" fiascos, which wedded 32-bit CPU cores with 16-bit connections. The 80286 was supposed to be able to multitask, but design flaws resulted in a first-generation that was useless to operating system vendors. My back, my knees, my ankles are each making noises like those old computers. If I haven't already lost you as a reader, the basic problem is that my mind cannot focus on one task for long without exhaustion and multitasking see...