Programming will resume ...

eventually. Speaking of Olson, I've been spending lots of time with his work, published and unpublished, as I pull together my presentation concerning his curricular projects for the upcoming Charles Olson Centenary Conference in Vancouver. Some of the work may appear here - heck, no doubt it will, at some point. But, for now, if things remain quiet here at Natures, know that I'm at work delving into the pages (and pages and pages) this still under-appreciated poet left us.

And if you're feeling restless and need to take a trip, come on to Vancouver for the first weekend in June. It's a great city, one of the most habitable it's been my pleasure to spend time in, and there's no better way to take on Olson than by immersing yourself for three days in his work.

And now back to Mr. O's "Primordia" ...

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Photo from the old Looking for Oneself site, which was devoted to Olson's work and featured material from the Minutes of the Charles Olson Society published since 1993 by Ralph Maud. It seems to be gone. If anyone knows what happened to it, do drop me a note or leave a comment.

After long absence ...

... it feels good to get back here to Natures. And to discover that, in spite of the lack of posting for the last month, March had the third highest traffic of any month since I began writing here back in 2005. Thanks to all who checked in. I guess there's plenty to read if you poke around.

It's embarrassing to tell all and sundry why I've been gone for so long. Talk about the cobbler's children who run barefoot! Back in mid March I had the very unhappy experience of having two of my desktop system's hard drives fail on the same day. One of the drives contained all my writing (it was home to Windows' "My Documents" folder), as well as many gigabytes of downloaded music, myriad photographs, etc., and the other contained, among other things, all my email. And, of course, it had been much much too long since I'd backed everything up. Most of the music, in fact, I had never backed up at all. So I've been rebuilding, recovering, reconstructing, and re-downloading for weeks. At this point I'm pretty sure I've actually recovered all the writing from various archives, CDs, and flashdrives, and I'm working on the email. Much of the music is still available via the Live Music Archive and bittorent sites like Lossless Legs - though, of course, it'll take many hours to find and download it. And some ... well, some is lost.

When I finish rebuilding the system, it'll have dual SATA drives mirrored via BIOS-level RAID 1, so perhaps I won't have to face this particular issue again anytime soon. That would be nice. In the meantime, I'm working on my trusty notebook, formerly used mostly for recording, and backing all data up to an external 1.5 T USB drive every day. And keeping my fingers crossed. If all continues to go well, I should be able to resume posting on my usual sporadic schedule.