A NOTE ON THE BACKGROUNDS

This page was initially assembled by my dear wife in 1997. We were living in Atlanta, we had no friends, and she was attending ECPI, all conditions that lend themselves to assembling silly backgrounds for inconsequential web pages. I was working at a dumb terminal connected to a UNIX mainframe at my job there, and we had no home computer then, so I only got occasional glimpses of the page when we visited her folks here in Charlotte. Needless to say, I was, at first, horrified by the backgrounds.

But, after a while, the backgrounds started to grow on me. The addition of "Kleebold and Harris in Hell", for instance, brought the question of background and text color into sharp focus; when my wife suggested a black background and red text, she was definitely having and Evil Genius moment. Later, after adding Big Sur Poem, we went actively looking for a background. After bopping around in the ether for about ten minutes, we stumbled across the cloud jpg. Perfect! An ironic touch to a poem about… well, about how insufferable my pal Chris can be on long car trips, essentially. The background for "Psychotic Break on I-77" reinforces the idiot-savant spirit in which the poem was conceived. The background for "Last Rude Note for Your Departure" began as an utter disaster; the background actually made every third word indecipherable. But turn the text red and Viola! A whole new poem, nearly! The background for "On Bird, Smiling" turned out to be appropriate, by extension, for other tribute poems (like "A Prayer for Gregory Corso" and "The Last Nights in Cuernavaca.") The background for Six Fragments for Alanis Morrissette, originally, was the cloud jpg you see here; I was browsing for a background for something else entirely when I stumbled across the cartoony, dingy background currently in use. I thought it a nice compliment to the piece. Of course, the best background is the one to "An American In Denny's", which apes Denny's corporate logo (red text on yellow background). (I didn't get it at first, either.)

For a while there, the backgrounds became an essential and formative part of the presentation of the poems. After a while, though, I started paying less attention to them, and, frankly, I grow weary of the histrionics displayed by the people who run background depositories. (On top of which, such sites tend to be whizzed out with so many bells and whistles that they take twice as long to open as most other sites.) (I'm sorry, but they're just ANNOYING.) So I've decided to forego the backgrounds unless I think there's a particularly good reason for one.