Skinny Dipping

§74 [9.ii.24.b] Finally, now that L.W. is recovered from the flu and she doesn’t have to play nursemaid (as enjoyable as that is, no really, it’s great when someone else really needs you, although I suppose this is debatable since I recall that Bernardo Soares, in his Factless Autobiography, wrote that he would hate for anyone to have to take care of him when he was sick for the simple reason he can’t bear the thought of having to care for someone else when they are sick, there’s probably more to it than that, but I can’t be bothered to look up the precise passage at the moment given that I only have seventeen minutes left to write this note), V.W. is back working on “The Hours” which (as we know) will become her masterpiece (or one of them), Mrs Dalloway. How exciting to be sitting next to her at her writing desk as she labors in her mine, those subterranean caverns from which she’s drawing out literary gold. What do you imagine that I’ll draw out of my mine? literary radium (!) perhaps? L. Frank Baum, in writing The Patchwork Girl of Oz in 1913, described a village populated by “Horners”, round mulitcolored people with with (you guessed it : !) horns protruding from their foreheads who mine radium and use it to decorate the interiors of their houses. Clearly, this was before “we” discovered just how deadly radium is if used for ornamental purposes. Still the idea of literary radium intrigues me …

May I generalize? Could I say that we writers (poets : !!) are compulsive spelunkers? How many writers can you name who aren’t (or haven’t been) obsessed with death? — the Great Subject :: Caves (natural mines) have always been closely associated with death. Where else could the land of the dead be located except for the Underworld? Elizabeth Sewell writes about this in The Orphic Voice : connecting the story of Orpheus (the first poet) who goes down into Hades in search of his dead wife, Eurydice : caves (and by extension, mines) are “the site of a journey between the two worlds of the living and the dead.” I don’t want to make too much of V.W.’s mining for gold metaphor (too late : ?), but there’s also a danger of not making enough of it. But speaking of gold, here it is :

The great thing is never to feel bored with one’s own writing. That is the signal for a change—never mind what, so long as it brings interest. And my vein of gold lies so deep, in such bent channels. To get it I must forge ahead, stoop & grope. But it is gold of a kind I think.

What can I add to that statement? Nothing really, but being a writer (poet : !), I can’t not write something : one’s own interest in what one is writing is justification enough for writing it— “never mind what” it is that you write, as long as it really interests you, just run (naked?) with it. So what if your little fantasy novel gets streaked by nonfantasy diagonals! A zebra wouldn’t be half so interesting without its stripes.

§73 [3.ii.24.a : samedi] I’ve been up since 4 a.m. (it’s just past 8 o’clock now) and I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything yet. I’ve read a few pages of Joseph & His Brothers by Thomas Mann, the Sunday 3 February entry in V.W.’s diary, and some notes I wrote back in the summer of 2020 about “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. My mother calls this activity (the doing of whatever shiny thing catches one’s attention) “puttering”. I guess other people would call this kind of casting about puttering also, it’s not a private or obscure work, but I always think of my mother when I’m busying around without a clear object in mind : “I’m just puttering,” she’d say as she moved about the house doing this (picking up a sock) and that (wiping the counter) with no apparent system or plan. Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been at home most of the time. I don’t have to go anywhere : now that I’m a freelancer and so work from home. Rarely do I see anyone other than Alice (and at certain times of the year, my son when he’s home from college). Being at home so much has led me into increasing the amount of puttering I do. I clean the house constantly, keeping all the surfaces clear and wiped down. I’m constantly tidying up. The kitchen is the focus of a lot of my puttering since it is a site of constant activity (so much of our home life concerns the preparation of food : eating it takes much less time than either prep or K.P.). This tendency to putter in my physical space has probably led to a tendency to putter in my mental space. Now that I’m working more with the Brain (my private wiki where I do the majority of my writing) there’s more opportunity to putter since I can be constantly cleaning up the pages in the Brain, adding links, transcluding quotations, entering bibliographic information for the sources I consult. As the Brain grows it requires more and more attention and organization. I could putter endlessly inside the Brain. In theory, this puttering should lead to something : some finished project. All the note taking, commenting, contextualizing should lead eventually to the crystallization of a project+book. (I hope / that’s the theory.)

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For about a month now, I’ve been spending 15 minutes to an hour each day organizing my library. I’ve taken all the books down from three bookcases and am arranging the novels in alphabetical order by the author’s surname. Not all the novels will be thus arranged since I have special groupings (collections / arrangements) for certain authors : for example I have a shelf for Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Roberto Bolaño. The Vila-Matas shelf brings together books by many of the authors and books that he’s written about in his novels, so there are books by Paul Auster, W.G. Sebald, Witold Gombrowicz, Robert Walser, etc. in that assembly. Sebald’s gravitational field attracts other books: Thomas Brown, Casanova, Chateaubriand, etc. I prefer to cluster authors together in a referential manner rather than alphabetically (making a kind of branching tree of relationships). Then I have other shelf in my study which collect together the books that are part of topical reading projects : Weimar, Occultism, Surrealism, Orpheus, Experimental Writing, etc.

I’ve been wanting to write something about unpacking my library and have written in my head a short book about my library and this activity of arranging while my hands are occupied with the task of shifting and arranging books. (What remains is the labor of actually writing such a book out in physical form.) One evening, I uncovered my collection of books about soccer and immediately I felt a pang of nostalgia for that time in my life when soccer was so important, when I devoted so much time and effort to following the game and even writing a book of my own about soccer (a book I published online as I wrote it, so it may still be out there somewhere). How could I let such a source of joy slip out of my life? I must recover some of that, I thought. Find my way back into soccer somehow. So books, as physical objects, carry the past and time, and when I hold a book in my hands which bears the marks of my past reading, I travel back and I am standing beside my past self, entering into a dialog. My past self says, ah, so this is how I turned out?

§72 [24.i.24.a : mercredi] The determined and resourceful V.W. has plucked back 52 Tavistock Square from “the snag in the lease” she mentioned in her 12 January diary entry : some technical point to do with a sublet and £10. In any case, the business is settled now and the Woolfs will be settled in their new digs by March (the month of novelette madness, for me).

I’ve arrived at a very important decision, and like most very important things, it was decided in a moment, a mere flash, a tickling of the inner ear : on Monday, I decided that I would complete work on Mallworld before any more “casting about”. This decision concerns (perhaps) the shape of leadworth (my dream of the serial novel) which I will be unveiling (ha!) ? … soon enough?? coming soon ???

During my vacation (a time of permission to do what I wish rather than what I’m expected to do) … not that I’m proclaiming any resolutions, but my main topic of contemplation was how to become more organized, how to work to a plan. My bee-like ways, dabbing my proboscis into this flower and then into that one, are enjoyable and the honey gets made in vast quantities, but eventually the honey has to find its way into a jar or we’ll all end up with sticky hands. And invent a Plan I did! I constructed a grid, fabricated a conceptual map, populated the fields with keywords, titles, deadlines, goals, objectives, and developed straightforward methods of record keeping and benchmarking to verify and track my progress. This is an extremely adult and serious way to proceed, I thought. But should one be so calculating with one’s play?

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I’m back at Mallworld with a new title: This is Mallworld and V.W. is “back again tomorrow to The Hours” which she was looking at “disconsolately”—oh the cold raw edges of one’s relinquished pages. V.W. plans 6 weeks of writing ahead. I’m with you Virginia! Me too! You get on with The Hours/Mrs Dalloway and I’ll scribble what comes natural: nonsense. / V.W. concludes her diary entry with a note from “Morgan” aka “E.M. Forster” who says : “To whom first but you [he means L.W.] & Virginia should I tell the fact that I’ve put the last words to my novel?” V.W. remarks : “He is moved, as I am on these occasions.” Would I be correct in guessing (since this is 1924) that the novel which Morgan has just last-worded is A Passage to India? (Oh, yes it is!)

§71 [21.i.24.a : Sunday] My books are in disarray. Yesterday, three boxes containing the materials & parts to build three bookshelves arrived. Alice and I ran out of shelf space for our books a few years ago. Every shelf in the house is double stacked. I’ve already put one of the shelves together and will assembled the other two later today, then the process of putting my books back into some order can begin.

Not only are the books of my library scattered about in piles, needing arranging, but the books I’ve written need to be put into some order. While in Oregon last week, I began working on “The Plan”. I’ll spare you the details, but “The Plan” is an arrangement of twenty years of writing (the contents of my archive, a vast and private literature) into some kind of order. It seems incredible that I’ve written so much. At roughly two pages per day, one can make quite a pile of papers in twenty years : something like 7 millions words. (Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is 1.5 millions words. This is not a boastful comparison, but rather a fact that brings shame : to have written so much, and to what purpose?)

Back in July, when I was talking with David about the writing life, I posed a question: do I spent the next N years writing new books or do I spend those years trying to make something of my archive? In reality, it will be a little of both. (It’s never either/or.)

At the end of the summer I came up with a (small “p”) plan to revise my Magnum Opus and just as I got started on the restructuring, revising, and rewriting, I couldn’t resist the urge to write something new. (The result of that three or four weeks of spontaneous typing was a novelette with the working title, “Material Conditions”.) I don’t regret having written a new novelette, but … it’s like a Lévy flight. I start something which I think will be BIG and then I get kicked into a new orbit which results in something small, dashed off, written on the run.

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[21.i.24.b] Alice woke up, so I stopped writing this diary entry to make breakfast. Afterwards, I brewed another cup of coffee and have been catching up with V.W.’s letters. I’ve forgotten about the letter since November. In Letter #1432, V.W. writes (after she and L. lost their tempers): “Are we really like that? we said. Are we middle aged and content? Do we look like old cabbages?” A little wilted on the outside, but fresh and crisp in the middle? Some mornings, like today, I don’t feel so crisp on the inside.

In the next letter, to Gerald Brenan, she writes: “I am coming to the age when I sit staring at the fire saying ‘I’m so busy: I’m so fearfully hard at work: I’ve not got a word to throw at a dog:’ and so I do nothing.” That’s how I feel, how I’ve felt since… last November? I really was sitting, staring at the fire last night, thinking I should get back to… what? when I have so many projects, both reading and writing, and when the reading projects take up so much time : I spent three full days just typing up my reading notes for one novel, and three chapters from two nonfiction books. Everything I want to do, all the tasks I invent for myself, take up so much time. V.W. writes to Brenan: “And in God’s name, what do you mean by ‘working working working at my novel’? How does one ‘work’ at one’s novel?” For the last twenty years, I’ve equated work with actual typing. But there’s so much more that needs doing (than mere typing) when “working working working” at one’s novel. But what do I really know about the business? (only busyness, it seems)

I was pleased to see a familiar name mentioned in V.W.’s letter: Theodora Bosanquet, who was Henry James’ secretary and whom V.W. called “an astute and bold American”. Miss Bosanquet sent a manuscript to Hogarth Press which V.W. had on her desk to be read. I only know of Miss Bosanquet from Jacques Roubaud, who has named his succession of typewriters, “Miss Bosanquet I” up to  “Miss Bosanquet VI”, all after James’ secretary.

What V.W. says about letter writing, I could just as well apply to my writing of novelettes: “Please believe that I could write better if I took a little more time. But novelette writing is now a mere tossing of omelettes to me: if they break and squash, can’t be helped.” And this about Joyce’s Ulysses: “What about your defence of Joyce? … I rather agree that Joyce is underrated: but never did any book so bore me.” I really shouldn’t admit this, but I want to like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake more than I actually do. (I hope Rasan never reads this. We’ve been celebrating Bloomsday each year for more than a decade now. And how many times have I read Ulysses? six or seven?) Which is not to say that I dislike either book at all. I want to like them a great deal, but … the idea of Finnegans Wake is what excites me. I’d rather write Finnegans Wake than be tasked with reading it. But still, I return to both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake again and again for … what? out of sense of obligation? Who’s obliging me? The books I’m passionate about, the book that both dizzies and seduces me is The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. I could spend the rest of my years reading only The Book of Disquiet. And why not?

In the Letters there’s a rather helpful biographical note concerning the V.W.’s and L.W.’s moved to 52 Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury. They’ve left Hogarth House and installed the press in the basement of #52. The move will be completed by 15 March when V.W. will resume work on The Common Reader and Mrs. Dalloway.

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Now I’m in the third month of my publication project and I feel as if I’ve been neglecting it in favor of writing other material that is somehow not part of the publication project … yet? Why am I casting around for how to resume work on my Magnum Opus when I could be revising the next chapters for leadworth & manna? I know what I need to do, but how I dislike being deflected from my comfortable ways. How nice it is to sit here each morning and write for the desk drawer! No one will judge. No one will object.

§70 [17.i.24.a : mercredi] This entry comes a bit late : V.W. wrote on the 12th and this is the morning of the 17th. The cause of this delay is that I was away from my normal environs, outside of my usual space and routine. I knew before I left for Oregon that I would save this chapter for my return to Long Neck. Again (e.g. last March when I flew to Las Vegas), I decided to leave V.W. at home and catch up on my return. (Does writing such words even matter? If only to get something started…)

What seems to matter more is that due to the logistics of this year’s stay in Oregon (we arrived later in the evening, so I didn’t wake as early on the first morning so…) I didn’t get as much writing done and some mornings got no writing done at all. Not getting in a good writing session or missing writing completely is enough to put me in an edgy, irritable mood all day. I need to write, to put my thoughts in order, to feel as if I’d done something, but—shall I survive the process? The process, I suppose, is the elaborate writing rituals I’ve evolved over the past two decades of focused labor. How much of what I write is necessary? Its odd how unimportant my work seems, suddenly, when a practical matter like this [travel, in my case] blocks my way. I see how it appears to the world, from outside, not all cavernous & lit up as it appears from within. The contrast of outside & inside again : the world doesn’t need my writing, but I need my writing to be in the world (a statement that can be read accurately in at least two senses).

During the whole past week, I was thinking back to last year’s Oregon trip (see §24) and wishing that I could have awakened at 4 a.m. each morning and gotten a good start on another project ( last year, what I began in Oregon led to the first complete, if not finished, draft of a novel called Best Imitation of Myself ) or even brought my current work-in-progress ( Mallworld ) to some fuller form, but I couldn’t recapitulate my previous success. However, I was able to spend a great deal of time thinking about structural and organizational aspects of my work. What is easy is to sit down and just start typing. In a couple of hours I can type whatever comes into my head and feel as if I’ve had a productive morning, but such expenditure of effort only seems to be productive. It’s productive in the sense of causing pages to pile up, but if what I’m aiming for is making a work, then I need to attend to more than just the musical phase (of page production), I need to spend time on the architectonic and textile phases as well, and these latter phases might be the most important.

As of 2020, my list of projects begun (some fraction are completed, if not finished) exceeds 80. It’s possible that with some structuring (architecture) and weaving together (textile) I could produce half a dozen decent books out of that material. It’s possible that I’ve added another dozen titles to my project list since 2020, and the books I’ve written since 2020 are my best, the ones that I feel most confident about, but I would attribute my recent success to a more organized approach. But also, since last summer, I’ve been experimenting with a “slipbox method” (see §41) (similar to how Nabokov wrote his novels on 3 by 5 cards, crystalizing the entire project as a whole rather than starting at chapter 1 and bashing away until THE END in chapter Z : more or less “the method of Aira”) and this experiment has forced me to think more about organization. Also, the slipbox method bears some similarity to Raymond Roussel’s process described in “How I Wrote Some of My Books” : he would begin with the first sentence, then formulate a last (concluding) sentence by punning words and make letter substitutions, once sentence 1 and Z are set, the trick is getting from 1 to Z.

§69 [9.i.24.a : mardi] Last night and this morning I’ve been distracted. Travel nerves. What can I do but accept the sensations and push ahead. V.W.’s clouded brain is due to her return to London and signing a ten year lease on 52 Tavistock Sqe. and the books she’s fetching are the translation of Montaigne.

Since last night I’ve been casting about for what books I’ll fetch for the flight and for the week-long stay in Oregon with my mother. One book is decided already : The Patchwork Girl of Oz which is the seventh book in the Oz series. My mother and I have read the first six and I’ll read to her while she knits. L. Frank Baum seemed to want to put an end to the series with The Emerald City of Oz by having the Good Witch Glinda cast an invisibility spell over Oz so folks wouldn’t be able to see it anymore and wouldn’t know Oz was there. The flaw in the plan seems obvious to me. What if, not knowing Oz is there, someone decides to move in a build a city or a lake? Someone could built a freeway right through Princess Ozma’s castle and they’d never know it. Being invisible doesn’t make you safe.

But three or four years later, Baum is back with a new Oz book : at his enthusiastic readers’ insistence. The prologue to Patchwork Girl suggests that Baum is receiving news from Oz via wireless (an idea sent in by one of his readers) : if Oz can’t be seen, then maybe it can be heard? The mention of “wireless telegraph” (aka radio) set off a little bell. Writing yesterday about a story I never wrote called Wireless and then seeing the word wireless in an Oz book, does invite one to believe in synchronicity. And I’ll add another coincidence since we’re on the subject : yesterday morning I read the story of Jacob stealing Esau’s blessing from their father Isaac, then in the afternoon when I was cleaning out a filing cabinet in the basement, I plucked at random the precise file folder containing a printed copy of my father’s sermon on Jacob and Esau, the selling of Esau’s birthright and the fraudulent theft of the blessing. As I read my father’s remarks, I thought he was rather hard on Esau. I agree that he let go of the birthright too easily and at too low a price (a bowl of porridge), but it was Rachel’s scheming that Esau fell victim to in the case of the stolen blessing. None of the characters come off too well in that story. Isaac might be old and blind, but is Esau really so hairy that Jacob’s putting on lamb’s wool would fool Isaac? Even after Isaac calls Jacob out about his voice not sounding right. I wanted to discuss the biblical passage and the traditional exegesis with my father, but I waited too late. Or maybe if I listened closely, I would hear my father’s voice.

V.W. writes that she’s heard “the voices of the dead.” In a postscript to her 9 January 1924 diary entry, she records some strange experiences in Richmond at Hogarth House: “I’ve had some very curious visions in this room too, lying in bed, mad, & seeing the sunlight quivering like gold water, on the wall. I’ve heard the voices of the dead here. And felt, through it all, exquisitely happy.” Make of that what you will, but the first thing that comes to my mind is William James and his Varieties of Religious Experience : you can deny certain interpretations of an experience, but you can’t deny the experience itself, whatever is within the field of experience always remains real. Assigning causality is a litmus test for revealing certain presuppositions in an interpreter’s worldview. No matter how comfortable you are with your presuppositions, you can’t prove them. Madness might lead to visions or visa versa.

[3.i.24.c] The Woolfs have returned to Hogarth House / Paradise Road / Richmond. I have not returned from anywhere for the simple reason that I’ve never left. I don’t do so much moving around—and certainly not from house to house. I’ve been in the same house for the last twenty-one years : this house on Fishers Way has been my space for writing in. All the books I’ve written, I’ve done in collaboration with this house. And to prepare for the next twenty-one years (or perhaps only fifteen, since that’s the average optimal lifetime for any kind of household project), we are installing new insulation throughout the house: attic, walls, and basement. So my house has been full of busy workers for the last two days. And I am displaced. My study is a work zone for a different sort of work. Still, I’m getting plenty of reading & writing done sitting here in front of the fire. And since I don’t have to write a review of Charles Cotton’s translation of the Essays of Montaigne, I will not have to cut short my other reflections which will (no doubt) fill up the rest of this page.

On New Year’s Eve, Alice & I watched Jane B. by Agnès V.  We discovered Jane Birkin (for ourselves) when we were on a trip to Belgium. We were in Toon in Bruxelles having a beer and Jane B.’s album, “Je t’aime … mon non plus” was playing. “Who is this singing?” I asked the bartender. She told us. That afternoon we went to a record store (this was a few years ago, when such places still existed) and bought a copy of the album on CD. I won’t say that Alice & I have become Jane B. fans, but she’s been part of our sonic landscape for over two decades. When Jane B. died last July, I spent a few days listening to her recordings and discovering how much I hadn’t heard yet. Then (as the months passed) I forgot she’d died. Yes, the fact of her death slipped my mind, but something led me to get up from the couch and reach for the case holding my collection of Agnès Varda films and take out Jane B. by Agnès V.  Of course, Alice remembered that Jane B. had died. Maybe some part of me did too.

The next evening, I watched the first episode of Agnès de ci de là Varda (Here & There, an arty travelogue made for TV) and because she (Varda) (when in Berlin) showed a film poster for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, I watched the first episode of that multipart film next.

I don’t watch as many films as I used to. Reading has taken over, demanding time that I can’t possibly yield to sitting on the couch eating popcorn. But I do enjoy film, so why am I denying myself? I think it might have to do with project-based thinking.

When my mania for projects started, I can’t tell you, but for at least as long as I’ve lived in this house, I’ve been working on one or more projects (usually more). The idea of starting a new project thrills me. The actual work involved in realizing the project is pleasurable, but not nearly as fun as starting something new. I don’t have an exact count on how many projects I’ve started and not completed, but I’m certain it’s more than a hundred. What I would have liked to have bitten off is more than most people could reasonably be expected to chew in a lifetime. The thing I like next best after starting a project is writing about that project : my love of the dream of the project. I delight in documenting my process, my plans, my research, my struggles. Each project becomes an adventure in writing and I am the protagonist. It’s adult form of “Let’s Pretend”. I sit at my writing desk, day after day, typing so that I can keep up the pretense of writing. It’s not so much the presence of being a writer that excites my imagination, but the mechanics of writing itself : I’m a student of the process. For whatever reason, I seem to be endlessly fascinated with writing. And not just my own writing. A great many volumes in my library are books by writers who have written about themselves writing. I think one of the reasons I enjoy reading V.W.’s diary is because she tells me about how it is for her to write. Yes, yes, Virginia, I’ve experienced that too, I know just what you are talking about. “Now how much of this is dream, & how much reality?”

[19.xii.23.a : mardi] Decisions, decisions… will Virginia take her diary to Rodmell to continue working on it or will she leave it behind? To find out we (her readers) only need to flip the page, but how do such decisions … they take on — in the moment — such a proportion, then we forget about them that same night we dream of something else like navigating a strange underground train system in the Orient or exploring the Italian coastline as a storm rages in the Mediterranean. / Why do I do the things I do? Postlogic is a great tool for explaining the inexplicable of the moment.

Like V.W. did 100 years ago today, I opened my diary and began writing to see what would happen. She says she is stifled by work. Yes, I know that feeling. I resent every minute I spend on paid work that both enables & prevents my ever writing the Magnum Opus. A writer needs food & shelter, but if after twenty years of labor on the Work and he feels as if he’s just betting started, like he can’t pour a pure stream from his tap. But there’s also the risk that if I didn’t have the constraints imposed by the necessity to do paid work that I would take my time & waste it.

For the past two (well three) mornings (here at the writing desk) I’ve been putting my projects in order which consisted (mostly) of reading material from a document I started writing back in the summer when I was just beginning to think of this publication project, The Museum of Transformation(s), and wanted to include the serial novel as part of it. Now that I’m faced with having to select material to put into the “leadworth” (serial novel) thread : decisions, decisions, and because I don’t want to post/publish material that hasn’t been properly worked (rewritten & contextualized), I must reread and make decisions about shape, form, how to better connect different parts of the text to impart a sense that this is a work and not just a collection of stuff I wrote. Such labor could be joyous, and maybe it will become so as I proceed, but I couldn’t help but think : How elliptical this book becomes! .:. instead of writing the story, I veer off and follow some other trajectory, one that is guided by the gravitational or magnetic force of the object (the imagined, unwritten text). Something good came out of this effort of combing through the already written. I discovered something that I hadn’t noticed, some interesting connection in the text itself that I wasn’t aware of, something that my subconscious (perhaps) knew about, but was completely unplanned. When I realized what the connection was, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. My only regret is that for the reader who presumes that an author works out all this stuff ahead of time will think what I discovered was obvious, trite even. I’m the only one who will ever experience that fleeting joy of discovery of something unexpected in the text that I wrote. Perhaps this is a reason to write and to struggle with rewriting and restructuring, to afford small moments of epiphany. And there’s perhaps a reason why I named the file in which I’m writing the serial novel “The Discovered Part”.

One more thing before I have to quit. A line from Elizabeth Sewell’s The Orphic Voice has been haunting me. The line was written in the context of a study of William Wordsworth’s The Recluse, which he never finished. Sewell says that he didn’t need to write The Recluse because he’d already written The Prelude which was everything that he wanted to say in The Recluse. So Wordsworth didn’t fail. Sewell states, “You cannot, after all, write something that you’ve already written?”

#ElizabethSewell #OrphicVoice #Wordsworth

[12.xii.23.a : mardi] woke at 4 a.m. this morning, not necessarily to emulate Jacques Roubaud and compose a prose moment in the light of a desk lamp while the rest of the world is dark, but : Gide’s Journal ,, the idea of a project, I’m always chasing after these passing and beautiful butterflies, here I am with my little net, I in my short pants (but no varicose veins yet : !) dashing through budding groves in pursuit of — the idea of a project is this : comb through Gide’s Journal and read what he writes about the piano and then do what I always do, what comes easy, to use what I read as a starting point to explore the thought-association map that is always forming and reshaping ,, my mental field. / It was in the spring of 2022 (April, I believe) that Alice purchased a new piano for me. Concerns about where to put it. It doesn’t matter, I said. Whether there is space in the house for my piano, my books, whatever, is irrelevant — the important thing is not available space, but how that space is used. I made space in my study for the new piano. I only had one rule in the beginning : that I would play every day, I wouldn’t allow my piano to become just another piece of furniture taking up space in the already too cramped house. What I wanted : two things (i) another mode of expression, (ii) to learn how to “play jazz” — I wanted to be able to touch the keys and hear the what sounds like jazz piano come from the instrument. But how? After some research, I started taking a course online. Learning the fundamentals of jazz and improvisation. / Though one might justifiable ask why I wanted my playing to sound like something else? Why not experiment at the piano as well? Different modes of expression : at the piano, the experiment is in combinations and arrangement, the quality of the notes.

I began my jazz piano course with enthusiasm and, of course, I was impatient, I wanted to have already done all the necessary study and practice to be able to sit down and play. As soon as I thought I’d mastered one thing, playing all the chords, ii-V-i’s, inversions, scales, alternate chord voicings, etc. I moved on to the next thing, only to discover that I had to go back and practice the chords again because it hadn’t stuck. I was going too fast. Now, I’m in my second year and I’m learning patience, but I’m less disciplined and allow my laziness to guide my practice : what do I feel like doing today? rather than what is it that I should be working on and mastering? Perhaps, I should have started writing the book a year ago. Another idea for a project : The Poetics of Improvisation.

Oh, my time! my time will be frittered away like this until death.

I’d begun reading Gide’s Journals a few years ago. A reference to his Journals in a novel by Enrique Vila-Matas prompted me … now! I just had a memory flash. We (Alice, Patrick, & I) were in Maine, the town of Waterville ,, I only know this because, the bookmark in volume 1 of the (abridged) Journals tells me it was The Iron Horse Bookstore where I bought the book. I see myself in the bookstore, holding the paperback, picking it out because of the idea of Gide’s Journals given to me by reading Vila-Matas. (I just realized something important. The two volume paperback set is complete. It’s a selection drawn from the complete ?? Journals of André Gide translated by Justin O’Brien, but published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1948/49. And I only have volume 3 of that edition. [Update: I’ve since ordered the other three volumes of the original hardback edition. Update: and they’ve arrived (!) ] …

let’s try this again : I’d begun reading the paperback (abridged) version of Gide’s Journal and so, this morning, I flipped through the pages I’d already read, paying special attention to the passages I’d marked and on p. 20 I find that Gide describes precisely what the last ten or twelve days has been like for me : Oh, if only my thought could simplify itself! . . . I sit here, sometimes all morning, unable to do anything, tormented by the desire to do everything. Yes, that’s my situation, I want to do everything, I want to read everything, write everything, play all the songs in my musical library, but one must choose, one must pick a single thing and focus on that, or nothing gets accomplished. / The first lesson in my online jazz piano course was this : do NOT chase more than one rabbit at a time. Also, make sure you’ve actually caught the rabbit and put him in the cage, before you chase after another. What my piano instructor actually said was (in the style of Confucius) : “He who chases many rabbits, catches no rabbits.” My expansion of this saying derives from my personal experience : for about three weeks, I worked every day on interval arithmetic, it’s the equivalent of learning the multiplication tables. A jazz pianist has to know how to figure intervals at lightning speed. For the pianist there are three aspects to knowing : intellectual, tactile, and aural. I can know that the fifth above C is G, but I should also know what that feels like with my hands on the keys, and when I strike the notes, I should know what a fifth sounds like, not just to know that I’ve figured correctly, but when one is improvising, one needs to hear before one strikes the notes, the addition has to be done before the notes are heard if one wishes to play well. But three weeks was only how long it took for my intellect to learn+memorize the intervals. I should have spent three months on this rather than just three weeks.

Back to what Gide wrote in his Journal (1893) : “I have twenty books before me, every one of them begun. You will laugh when I tell you that I cannot read a single one of them simply because I want so much to read them all. I read three lines and think of everything else …” That is so true! My study is cluttered with hundreds of books of which I’ve read the first twenty to a hundred pages. When will I finish them all? Gide ends this paragraph-long lament of indecision paralysis with : “But I had promised myself to spend an hour at the piano.” Yes. That too.

[11.xii.23.a : lundi] With the gaps in V.W.’s diary and the conditions of my personal work suggesting certain modifications, augmentations to … the flow of text I call “Skinny Dipping” : as always, it’s a chain of coincidental discoveries, I follow the bread crumbs (manna) until I arrive. / For “my” Project (but this isn’t the best term anymore, Work : ? ,, the capital indicative that what I mean is the Unfolding Text, so why not call it that?) for “my” Unfolding Text, I’ve been collecting a set of concept words & phrases which will act as nodes in an interconnected web. This morning I thought I should add piano to the concept-map and since (i) I have been reading Fruits of the Earth by André Gide, and/or (ii) I chanced across a photograph of André Gide playing a piano :: mentally I drew a line between piano and André Gide in my notebook, but this posed a question: what was Gide’s relationship to/with the piano? A quick internet search provided a few answers and pointed me to The Journals of André Gide which I (of course) already have in my personal library.

The title for today’s skinny dip is from the 29 June 1913 entry in Gide’s Journal. Gide starts off with what he is reading “aloud, for hour” and then reports : “I spend from three to five hours (and more often five than three) in piano-practice (exclusively Bach and Chopin).” Then Gide adds up his reading time, his piano-practices, his correspondence “which every day takes one or two hours” so that there is “hardly any time left for personal work”. In my online search I found a quote from the 24 juin 1913 Journal entry in which Gide confesses that he’s getting very little writing done because he constantly quits his pen for his piano. This line is missing from Justin O’Brien’s “selection” which disappoints me because I want to read everything that Gide has to say about the piano, so I’ll probably have to procure a full set of Gide’s Journal [in the original {i}] : add that to my potential acts of translation.

new directions

With the gaps in V.W.’s Diary :: I see an opportunity to make more use of this space of writing which keeps contact with V.W. and her life in real time, to add new or fold-in already existing writing spaces to this one. One of the early titles I used for this writing project was The Blue Nile, the evocative image Larry McMurtry used to describe V.W.’s Diary : the Blue Nile of literature. And there isn’t just a single Nile of literature. Another is the White Nile, being Marcel Proust’s BIG NOVEL / roman à fleuve. Last year I encountered a few (random) references to the Green Nile, but without any specific connection to a writer. What is the Green Nile of literature? I asked. Well, obviously, the Green Nile of literature is James Joyce—all of his work or just Finnegans Wake? :: riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Let’s say at least Finnegans Wake. / In Skinny Dipping I had the intention of bringing together the three great colored Niles of literature, but I immediately knew that I should not write a book (blog) about three of the most written-about writers of the twentieth century. What could I say about Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, or James Joyce that anyone would care to hear? The solution to my expressed intention was to devise a mapping of Blue, White, and Green on to another set of writers. The mapping I devised looks like this:

Blue → Ann Quin

White → Jacques Roubaud

Green → Miklós Szentkuthy

Each of those writers is a term in my concept-map for “my” Unfolding Text. Ann Quin was inspired by her reading of The Waves by Virginia Woolf to see the potential of experimental writing to express what … While I am interested in the body of work of all these writers I would say Passages by Ann Quin would be the Blue entry point. For White, I have picked the great fire of london by Jacques Roubaud (like Proust’s novel, it’s an exploration of memory), and for Green, Prae by Miklós Szentkuthy (whose connection to Joyce is that he translated Ulysses into Hungarian).

But there are other (writing) spaces (that I seek out from/by instinct) : for several months I kept a Diary of the Eternal Novel (as a way  of reading Mario Levrero’s The Luminous Novel more deeply) and often I wondered if that diary could find a home here inside Skinny Dipping. And if I’m reading in real time the diary of Virginia Woolf, why not read the diaries of other writes too? if only to fill in some of the gaps: André Gide, Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Emilo Renzi, Henry Thoreau, The Goncourt Brothers, etc.

time management

…hardly any time left for… For the past three days I’ve been … not just the past three days, the process began on the 22nd of October with a long handwritten description of my process to produce “my” Golden Notebook. What this Golden Notebook is remains to be determined, and maybe I’ll leave it in some kind of suspended state : it could be the text that I type, the sum total of my typescripts, or maybe it is what I chose to place in the Museum of Transformation (“my” publication project consisting of Skinny Dipping, the serial novel (experiment), Orpheus (theory), and Twisty Passages / Zine (what I put on @theangler.writing.exchange)). For the past three days, I’ve been trying to work to my plan, the implementation of a method of production that will lead to (i) reading the books that I’ve collected as part of several interconnected reading projects, (ii) writing a series of short novels or novelettes or collections of poems, and (iii) writing a set of critiques of … how (ii) & (iii) differ (if at all) remains to be seen. / But like André Gide, I have to contend with my distractions, in my case the principle distraction is the time spent doing paid work. Housekeeping claims at least 90 minutes of each day (probably two hours isn’t exaggerating). Exercise, another hour. Piano, one hour (but maybe time spent playing the piano will increase as I delve more deeply into Gide’s Journal — where will that time come from? to do: invent time machine). Reading & writing get the lion’s share at about six hours per day. (And that is still not nearly enough!)

a note

{i} [26.xii.23.a : mardi] As much as I would love to add translating the journals of André Gide to my list of projects, Justin O’Brien has translated a more complete (I’m not sure if it is exhaustive) edition of Gide’s Journal published in four volumes by Alfred A. Knopf in 1948.

#piano #AndreGide #AnnQuin #JaquesRoubaud #MiklosSzentkuthy #TimeManagement