There’s something restful and curative in sifting through the old things I’ve written, even when what I find is weak, or in other ways not worth preserving. In most instances, the decision is obvious. In a few, though, I can hardly bear to read to the end, so familiar and juvenile are the errors. As for my ability to judge, I do have my blind spots. In fact, it’s hardly […]
In 2005 I was still using my first computer — a desktop model with an expansive, very comfortable keyboard and a massive, heavy tower with two floppy drives. I bought it in 1993. A 486, it had a 340-megabyte hard drive, 12 megabytes of RAM, and ran Windows 3.1 at an impressive clock-doubled 50 megahertz. I called it “The Workhorse.” Almost as good as my old Royal typewriter, it was, […]
In a forest of people, it can be quite dark near the ground. It can be quite light, too, even without the sun. Museum Piece In need of a few days off, I spent them among old trees that were whispering terrible secrets. When I returned home no one could understand me; I was begged to come in from the yard. Doctors were called; I pummeled them with cones. […]
As I look over them now, I think most of the old Notebook entries from my first website, I’m Telling You All I Know, are better off left unread. But a few, like “Ghost and Cathedral,” and the piece I added earlier this year in August, are worth preserving. Already more than nine years old, I might have written it yesterday, so accurate it remains, and so dear the memory. […]
If there’s a connection between this simple new drawing and the old poem that follows, I don’t know what it is. But seeing it — seeing him — I thought I recognized a denizen of the old street-side cafés, an unknown, unsung member of the Lost Generation. The poem, of course, is utter foolishness, as all poems are that are purposely funny but true, and some days, like today, truer […]
In the same letter, the friend who told me about the Gombrowicz diary mentioned seeing deer in the quieter, more secluded areas of the campus of the college where he works, and how those lovely creatures live in their own version of time. He meant it in a philosophical way, but it’s also true in the scientific sense. Every species on earth experiences time differently than we do, and sees […]
I’ve been at it so long, I suppose it’s inevitable that often, when I sit down to work, I’m reminded of other things I’ve written. I’ve covered a lot of ground — not always well, certainly, but the old lines and images keep surfacing and reappearing, and it’s not unusual for them to arrive in the form of a lesson. One of the greatest of these lessons is, Don’t be […]
In a recent letter, a friend told me he’s reading the English translation of a diary by Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, an 800-page tome published in 2012 by Yale University Press. He found it in Santa Barbara, at a bookstore named Chaucer’s. Naturally, I would like to have a copy, although I probably wouldn’t get around to reading it for thirty years. I’ll be ninety-two then. Will I still be […]
As silly as it seems, I have even tried, a few times — with questionable success — to write poems based on famous paintings. I first encountered L’Absinthe on the cover of the 1980 printing of the Penguin Classics edition of Zola’s L’Assommoir. That is the image I worked from. It is ideally suited to the novel. The poem, on the other hand, is ideally suited for the bottom of […]
The personal, private, public nature of this project notwithstanding, I’ve noticed lately a new idea creeping in; namely, that I’m also bringing these pages together for my children. While they’re too busy living to read them now, and although they know me well enough that it really isn’t necessary, I know them well enough to say that if this website survives, they will appreciate it when I’m gone. As we […]
William Michaelian 
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