I lost a program 20 years ago that turned out to be stolen by the TA student section leader who had encouraged my work. I’ve already said this but the issue here is realizing that this really was a serious tort against me by the company that permitted this.
I always say that hi-tech back in the 80s when this happened, was just like the early music industry out in California when musicians were easily ripped off the value of their time and talent.
It was the same for hi-tech in the 80s. Remember pirate software? I think that that happened to me. Half of that time I was incarcerated and I have this terrible feeling that these people and this company had something to do with the evidence to my own mind of the value of this work being suppressed from me so they could keep using me for it. Not so much derogatory as my father is being with me now; but somewhere in my mind I was aware of a presence draining me. All through those awful years. And then I had this visible presence to my mind of them completely using me for everything I had. They probably tried to explain that the computer program was worth something and wanted to bring me on board but i was so sick at that time that this did not go off well. I just wish I had the sense to keep my own, original copy of the program
I did get a job out of the computer program–which writes essays on poetry. It worked and it suggested a paradigm for expert p;rogramming. You find someone who has an acuity with programming AND a deep interest in another area of study/occupation to put their two minds together develop algorithsms to translate the work that they love into computer syntax.
I know I felt very guilty about breaking down the English language to make this program work. I said that I would do it and I had to do it. I used a trick to count syllables, for instance and developed a bunch of algorithms to verify a rhyme. Once you can count the syllables and identify a rhyming pattern you have the type of poem such as Shakespearean Sonnet, Spencerian Stanza, free verse, et cetera. (I remember almost nothing of this now. I like C S Lewis and Tolken.) The program worked on poems it was preprogrammed for but it had a coherent response for any poem that was typed in.
It was sort of fun but hard work. In the end the teaching assistant was disappointed in the technical naivete of the program. It was a no-brainer that the most important part of this would be the structuring and storage of data which I did in the most rote and primitive way. I never even did that part of the coursework in that class: it was the area of my disability. I used crude lists for pre-selected poems to demonstrate the possibilities for what could be done with analyzing language to organize it technically.
I was the expert English student; he was the expert IT person and I got ripped off. I was offered a teaching post for that course for the following year but my heart wasn’t into the programming.
I chose to die inside the literary magazine and hide. Because the Advocate, whether they intended to or not, gave me the opportunity.
And then there is my father, who hasn’t worked for 35 years because of a mild stroke that left him slightly impaired. Hopkins handed control over to my mother, who was in no way equipped for it. That is the nightmare we have been living ever since.
He experienced an obvious instance of the ripping off of patents for a dollar that then became became billion dollar cornerstones to the how many trillion dollar industry? He kept his job. That was it!
There was just so much money floating around in the industry at that time and the early engineers household name industry leaders played a popularity game to keep things running just as they have all along.
Haha! Jokes on you now. At that time techies were completely disdained in the literary world. I was compromised all over the place.
Upon my return to school after a last minute leave of absence I had completely lost my place. From that point forward my life was largely grounded in faith matters with the help of a married couple from the Divinity School, the man was the TA for my section in a course on literature of Christian reflection.
After that I got crunched like a mouse.
Before leaving Horsham for the local hospital a year and a half ago (with a low pulse rate), I mentioned the story of Travis and Tanner catching a mouse and bringing it inside the cottage; I watched Tanner the cat reluctantly crunch off the head of the mouse. This led me to speculate quite a bout about the animal and human worlds; also bugs, and how they fit in a lot of obvious ways.
So, Its about time to quit worrying about the college literary magazine, it shaped my life in a way I never would have thought. If they’re still up and running I bless them on their course.
Un.Bon.Mot 