journal features

farewall, lost photos

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Kokubunji, 2022.08.28

On our recent trip to Canada, I tracked down a lot of old backups because I'd discovered at some point in 2021 that I'd deleted the original images from a visit to a bamboo forest in Kyoto. I brought with me a long-running set of DVD's spanning that whole period, plus two old hard drives that I'd set aside after about eight years of use. Well, the hard drives are blank and the backup DVD's have exactly the same set of images as I still have today. So, at some point between October 2006 (when I took the photos) and 2008 (when I made the backups) I seem to have deleted the files. My last hope is a separate set of backup DVD's that seem to have been packed separately and are probably still in the bag that we left at the airport (having inadvertently picked up an identical bag that was riding the carousel with our other one).

rand()m quote

Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

—T.S. Eliot