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Things a little too light to ever revise or publish, but too "together" to take apart and use elsewhere. But I like them — and they are dedicated to Jordan Davis, the indefatigable!
Four Improvisations
I want to know more about that murder, yes.
Give me another hour of coverage, ok,
this morning isn't plural enough
and besides, I plan on sleeping all day —
I want to eradicate the baloney of my mind,
this is the quickest way to the treasure. I'm going to dream
over their hands
as they are moving.
Sleeping in news repose.
*
That small digital woman
in the expert photograph,
she's a fortune for those of us
at the editor's desk
especially me,
who keeps disappearing
in the text, replacing
the letters with em-dashes
and acting all
superior about it — she pulls me back
and soon I am writing
some marketable crap
about headaches, Pat Cash,
and the Secret Service.
What do I know? The poems
appear in a little yellow book.
She shows up
at the launch party, and signs her name.
*
Someone was fat and happy.
(I've learned to write
on the marble.)
Does it pay to care about things?
One could be precocious
and start a Day Op,
(first, we'd have to know what that is
and stop caring about being lonely)
— did you forget her conversation
so quickly, because
you were drunk for days afterwards?
Hopping on tiny leather springs.
*
I found cheeks in my blow dryer.
But it's only the sincerity
of the voice that matters.
It's only the pitch and temper
of the voice that matters.
I found a thong in my television tubes. That time,
it was getting kind of crazy.
I found a plural in my
days on earth.
Please translate this misery
into several languages.
Take a quarter with you
in case you need to call.
There are better ways of passing
for a 9th Army tyke than whistling.
When it rains: wheelchairs.
I met Jim Jarmuch last night.
He looked kind of like
my brother, or could have been.
I found
delirious amounts of affection
for my mother in my last paycheck.
Thanks for the dedication, Brian. Naturally I like the space they occupy -- number two may inspire me to try a few "skids."
Posted by: The Indefatigable at August 27, 2003 12:52 PMWhen the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.
Posted by: Francisca at January 18, 2004 11:21 PMWhen the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.
Posted by: Julius at January 18, 2004 11:22 PMThis will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of
Posted by: Jerome at January 18, 2004 11:23 PMFor this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.
Posted by: Martha at January 18, 2004 11:24 PMThis back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec
Posted by: Arthur at January 18, 2004 11:24 PM