New Blog location

My new blog is located here:

http://stevemueske.com/wordpress/

Posting will be limited until I get all my ducks in a row. Please bear with me through these changes. These are much needed changes to get my artistic (and emotional) life in order. I want to get a fresh start and introduce diverse readers to my creative life through a single site that approaches the process from both an interior and exterior perspective.

Thanks!

last three candles journal post

Dear Readers:

This is a somewhat sad announcement that comes in several parts. First, the last poetry to be published in three candles journal, after eight years online, will be Javier O Huerta.

Javier O. Huerta is a doctoral student in English at UC Berkeley. His research interests include the naughty poetics of John Keats and the rhythm of immigration. His manuscript Some Clarifications y otros poemas received the 31st (2005) Chicano/Latino Literary Prize from UC Irvine and will be published by Arte Publico Press on September 30, 2007, which coincides with the 800th anniversary of the birth of the sufi poet Rumi.

This has been a long and painful decision to make but one that is necessary to free up creative time for writing and composing. Three Candles Press and Poetry 365 will be my two primary public writing endeavors. I thank you for the years of readership and for the many fond memories.

Three candles journal will be available through November at the old URL and will then be archived permanently under "publishing" at stevemueske.com

Once everything is in order, I will pull my public blog as well. I see these steps as necessary to continue to grow personally. I hope you understand and continue to support poetry, both in print and on the Internet.

http://www.threecandles.org/poetry.html

Steve

Poetry 365 updated

Poetry 365 has been updated with poems by eireann lorsung, Geoffrey Hill, Dorothy Barresi, Lana Hechtman Ayers, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Juan J. Morales, Jonathan Aaron and Aaron Anstett.

Hope you enjoy the poems!

http://poetry365.com

Bridge Collapse

I'm guessing many of you have heard about the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. What you probably don't know is that the bridge is about a block from where I work. I often walked under it when walking to a restaurant for lunch or just out for a walk. I drove over it hundreds, probably thousands of times; it's on the main highway through town.

CNN Link

I was sort of shell-shocked last night thinking about all those people, the terror they must have felt. This morning, it was pure chaos. We couldn't park in our work lot. The police had setup camp near the red cross across the street. There were state troopers, helicopters, trucks with huge bumpers blocking every possible access to the highway. All walking routes had been cordoned off with yellow police tape and guarded by an officer checking to make sure that only authorized personal (or workers) were allowed past. Photographers lined the railings on both sides of the road looking for pictures. I've never seen anything like it. I was leaving the gym about ten minutes before it happened and was never in any danger, but it really makes you think about living in the moment.

I want to thank those who called and emailed to check on the safety of my family. It means a lot to me.

Update: Here are a few photos a woman at work took this morning.





Tomorrow the building will be closed by order of the FBI. All essential workers (including myself) will be working at another location.

Next Poetry Title From Three Candles Press

Three Candles Press is very pleased to announce that Erin Elizabeth Smith's book Fear of Being Found will be added to the Winter 2007 lineup. Erin is a PhD candidate in Poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi, Comp teacher, president of Sundress Publications, and editor of Stirring. Her manuscript was chosen among those entered during the open call for submissions by a female poet.

http://threecandlespress.com

I should also say that today marks the start of my no ice cream diet. I will also begin working cardio to offset the damage done by 14-hour days in front of one monitor or another. In no time, I'll be down from 212 to a svelte 211. You wait.

A few updates

Everyone who's been here for the past few years has seen that I've tortured myself about how to publicly present my activities and escape the self-conscious nature of display. I've moved most of my personal entries to a more private blog and will be using other resources to compartmentalize various activities.

For music, I have created a Myspace account (yes, I know it's caving but with the site's ubiquity it would be pretty foolish for me to ignore it).

http://myspace.com/stevemueske

Also, we have new journal blog and there I'll post announcements about poem and book publications, readings, and such. Hopefully, the other editors will join me in discussions about the editorial process, what we're reading and such so that we can open our doors a little about what we'd like to see the journal become.
http://threecandlesjournal.blogspot.com/

Pardon the dust while I start rearranging stuff. I also have an account on Facebook and am evaluating whether that suits my needs.

My spit and duct-tape studio (pt. 2)

Because you are anxiously awaiting the next installment of the chronicle of my computer upgrade, I figured I had better deliver it soon.

After I had the computer physically built (it took me three tries -- all three times required completely disassembling every internal piece -- mostly for dumbass reasons; for example, forgetting to put brass studs under the motherboard so that there is an air gap between it and the case.) I began the long and tedious process of installing the software and copying project files and samples from my two previous IDE drives onto the new SATA drive. There were no copying or installation problems; however, the third piece, reregistering the software turned out to be a frustrating and time-consuming process that required calling vendors, disabling previous keys, creating new ones, transferring keys between USB sticks, etc. Ugh. After all was installed and configured yesterday (which took about 12 hours), I went to bed.

All night I was antsy to try out a project and see how it would load. After some problems with the audio card were ironed out (for some reason the host program was trying to use the WDM drivers instead of the ASIO drivers), I found that most of the virtual instruments work fine. One, however, does not. I cannot use it for any projects where it was used in the past. I tried deleting the sound bank and reloading it but nothing seems to help (it locks up the computer and generates a C++ declaration error). I

t works fine for new projects. Basically, it is a drum machine / sampler that uses 8 engines to program and process sound. You create patterns and save them to a shortcut pad called a pattern (which uses any combination of the 8 engines). So I'm going to have to decide if I want to go back into the previous two projects, diagram the patterns oh graph paper, delete the instrument, and then recreate the instrument and reload the sounds or just go with what's been done. The mixes are pretty good but I'm not 100% happy with them. I had wanted to tweak a few things before mastering the files. Decisions, decisions ...

Anyway, aside from that one problem, things look very good. The last project I was working on before the upgrade was up to 63% CPU utilization and I had the ASIO buffer set at 1450ms. I'm now at 20% with the buffer set at 512ms. Needless to say, that's a lot of headroom and should greatly speed up the work process.