The Small Time with Font Boy

Distorted Version of the Cover to Geof Huth's a book / of poems / so small / I cannot / taste them (2006)
I'm writing about reading. The reason is twofold: First, I generally write about only two things: writing and reading. Second, today Goodreads, a social media platform for people to document and communicate about the books they have read, sent me a note that I had to rescue two of the books I had written.

"Rescue" seemed a fairly dramatic term to use, especially since all that was happening was that Goodreads was changing the source of its database of book titles from Amazon.com, which apparently listed these two books, to other sources. Without a link to a database of bibliographic information, any book would essentially disappear from Goodreads. My ratings for them (which were no ratings at all, since I shouldn't rate my own books) would remain, as would my reviews (also nonexistent), but they would be attached to a book without an author's name or a title. Even though Goodreads knew my name and that I was the author (and even though they had ISBNs for each book).

I rescued the books by adding a tiny bit of bibliographic information, including a link to a relevant webpage for the book. After finishing with the second book, Goodreads forwarded me to a page declaring

Great news, all books you have authored are safe. There are 15 books from your bookshelves that need your help:

Now, I could take the time to save two of my books from disappearing from the Goodreads universe, but I hadn't the will to save fifteen other books. Ironically, though probably due to the protocols Goodreads used, the last book I had listed as "read" only a few days ago was at the top of this list: Rae Armantrout's Extremities, one of the books I have recently "reviewed" in this very space.

This reminded me of a couple of small events from my life, one of which was that someone interested in visual poetry friended me the other day through Goodreads, explaining to me afterwards that she did it so that she could see what I read. I explained that only a small fraction of the books I ever read are actually recorded in Goodreads, so the source is mostly holes, so many holes that there seems to be no edge to them.

The books I write are the small time, and even most of the books I read are the small time. This point leads, eventually, to my second thought. To think that Rae Armantrout's book (granted, out of print) could be in need of rescuing meant that I had to wonder what was the hope for the rest of us. Not much.

Back in 1987 or 1988, when I lived in Horseheads, New York (the place where I insisted we live, and only because of its name), I received a note from The Nation explaining that they had a column in their magazine called "The Small Time," focused on such topics as underground literature, and that they might be interested in running a short piece on my micropress dbqp. Most of the publications I published were handmade: each copy of each issue typed or rubberstamped or handwritten or linoleum-block-printed, and all by hand. So I sent off a small package, at my expense, to the magazine, and never heard a word from the place again.

Over the past few days, even before this interesting Goodreads development (or undevelopment), I had remembered that story, so I chewed over it and came to a conclusion: dbqp was too small for the small time. Maybe I could have been small, but by adding "time" to it the concept became too significant to include me. This could have been a sobering thought, if I had ever believed anything else, or wanted something else.

But I like the small time, or the nano time. I am not interested in what people in general are interested in. I know nothing about sports, but I think the Super Bowl (if that is how it's written out) is this weekend. I'm not sure, but I've seen a few signs that suggest that. I've never watched a football game, except ones I've played in at school. When people ask me if I've read certain mystery novels, I say that I'd never read such middlebrow stuff. (Yep, obnoxious, I know. But mystery novels?) No, I have not watched American Idol on TV, and I have no desire to. All of these are of bigger time than most of what I'm interested in.

What I like about the small time is that it is filled with the people I know, even if I rarely see them. I've seen mIEKAL aND only four times, I think, over the course of more than twenty years of knowing him, yet I consider him one of my best friends. My dear friend Karri Kokko is Finnish, and I've seen him in person only twice (though once for two weeks), yet I can count on him for kindness and a good run of English punning anytime I want. I like that the small time is filled with crazy people (even I am sometimes referred to with that adjective) and cranks (one of whom I actually identified as such yesterday on this blog and heard from, crankily, by this morning). I like that the small time allows for absolute freedom of expression and effort, because there is nothing to prove. Something might be proved, but it's not required, and we can decide what it will be.

Of the books I've had published (a strange collection of poetry, as viewed through various distorting lenses), I don't think any has been published in an edition over 100. And I'm fairly certain that at least a couple of the print-on-demand titles of mine that have been published have actually been made into printed copies under 50 times.

I have to conclude that this means our effect on the world is relatively small, but if I look at it from within the small time the term "relative" reverses its dimensions. We may be the small time, but my part of the small time reaches across the world. There are people in my part of the small time that I could fly to meet in dozens of countries, if only I had the money to pay for all that travel. The small time connects at the human level, the personal level.

The small time used to be relegated to the postal system and occasional personal encounters, but now we are tied together by the Internet, and we communicate with each other daily. I sent off an email yesterday to my friend Anne Gorrick with a poem of mine attached to it, and by today she had responded with this helpful message: "About yer poem: okay Font Boy, pick another font because this one is superhard to read!" Which really helped me understand how the poem was working and gave me the opportunity to tell her that her computer didn't have that typeface installed, so she wasn't actually looking at my font.

I laughed pretty well over that message of hers. Writing is a connection with an audience usually unseen, but writers of the same stripe find themselves connected and they form relationships across the boundaries of space. That's what I like about the small time. These are my friends.


ecr. l'inf.