Skinny Dipping

[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

One of the reasons I write is to calm the swirling, seething storm in my mind. Admittedly that sounds dramatic, but it’s accurate enough. Before I begin typing, it’s as if I’m sitting cross legged before a churning cyclone that has caught up an assortment of images, words, sounds, feelings, impressions, phrases, intentions, desires and there they all are, going around and around and nothing will stay still long enough for me to focus on it until I make the first keystroke : at that moment, time slows or switches into a different gear and I find a track along which to glide, or a slender thread I can follow with my fingertips as I wander through dark, twisty passages. V.W. writes, “How often I have said this! An odd psychological fact—that I can write when I’m too jangled to read.” I write to become unjangled, to dejangle the mental field. And yes, it’s true, if I’m too jangled, some clearing out and calming down must be imposed before I can find the proper reading gear, otherwise my childish attention will errantly chase pretty little butterflies rather than sticking to the task at hand. V.W. continues: “Moreover, I want to leave as few pages blank as possible; & the end of the year is only some three weeks off.” Oh how alike we are, Virginia—in some respects.

Last December [2022], I purchased one of those nice little Moleskine diaries for 2023. My original plan wasn’t to keep a diary like V.W.’s in it, but it was to be a place to keep track of my writing, a place to record what I work on each day, to be also a kind of word account book so that I could see how productive I’ve been, and also to hold myself accountable : no day without a line, write something so that no goose eggs are entered in the tally box for that day. But this Moleskine diary came with something like 50 blank pages (in addition to the calendar apparatus) that I now feel responsible for filling. I don’t like to leave notebooks unfilled. Call it a superstition. Any notebook with blank pages is a possible site for an unwelcome incursion. There’s no telling what might end up in those pages left blank. Best to fill them so the monsters can’t creep through or find some foothold, an entry point for a secret invasion. Perhaps I will end up writing a “Year in Review” in the 30 or so pages that I still have left with only about three weeks left to go. And maybe I will fill a few pages with my hopes, dreams, and aspirations for the coming year.

Yes, yes … a hot bath would be welcome on this cool, rainy day. A perfect day to sit by the fire and read after I’ve sufficiently unjangled.

During this month of magical writing ,, I’ve let my French translation and French writing slide (a lack of discipline or will, or maybe that’s the same thing). V.W. writes : “Heres my book in French. I daresay it reads better in French.” A second or third writing does seem to do the trick. The “facts” that V.W. mentions (see 16 Nov 1923) are the details of everyday life it seems. Visits with Hugh Walpole and with Edward Lytton, a trip to the Tate. (Up for two hours now and all I’ve done is read a few pages, make a few notes, and write this paragraph. How will I ever … ?) Not that I want to write a book of facts or even about facts, but for the past few days I’ve felt like I should write more plainly about what … the ideas that swirl and congeal and then dissolve again, I can feel them inside me with labels attached, keywords to approximate a filing system, a record of connections, but what do all the connections add up to? Gee whiz! I feel that I should write poems, so why don’t I write them? I feel I should work on my French so that one day I will be able to translate Jacques Roubaud’s  the great fire of london. and why not start this morning? The big fat book, all 1666 pages of it, is right there. No time like the present! / “Now I lose interest in these facts, much as I do in writing my novels, & thus have to find a way out of saying them.” Yes, I want to write my novels. I do enjoy writing my novels once I’m writing them. Getting started each morning is the most difficult part, but I have a few tricks : just begin typing or moving the pen across the paper, it’s almost as if I can’t think before I am writing, the thinking and the writing must come together, at the same time. If I think : what shall I write about now? nothing happens. But if I type a few words, anything really, then the rest seem to follow — like Moses striking that rock in the desert with his staff. Whether those words are worth anything is another consideration, but it’s easier to throw something away than it is to throw nothing away.

so many distractions … V.W. is concerned about finding a new house, thinks she’s found one and even draws a plan of the rooms in her diary, but nothing comes of it, the dream of the house fades … I don’t want to write about it at the moment. Alice and have our house dreams too, but ours involve staying put ,, our mortgage is all but paid off, just a few more months and then … and then … but the house needs things. The current stress has to do with upgrading the heating and cooling system to something more modern and which will require less maintenance. But such things come with a price tag and it seems that the purpose of every contractor and “service” provider is to liberate as much money from your wallet with as little in return as possible. Where’s the pride in a job well done? The world of my grandfather is gone forever.

I’m halfway through another November novel. I have a working title already: Dream the Endless Road. I’m anxious to get to it : to see what will happen (yesterday’s chapter “The Crisis” was totally unplanned and I discovered it in the writing) and I’ve made some important connections in my research which I’ve spent about an hour before breakfast writing out by hand in my notebooks. My Eureka moment came when I picked up The White Goddess by Robert Graves to p. 173 after reading pp. 807-809 in The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Alphabets! yes. Dick writes about the 22 letter Hebrew alphabet used to write the Torah and then asserts the existence of a 23rd letter that when added to the Hebrew alphabet completely changes the Torah: The 23rd letter is not just added on; the Torah returns to its jumbled matrix state and then reforms anew: differently. A hint of Burroughs’ cut-up procedure there too. The jumbled matrix is the word hoard and the writer/editor extracts the raw material from the womb and shapes it. / The operation of adding letters to an alphabet reminded me of my 1996 March Madness novelette, No More I Love Yous, in which the narrator writes about adding six new letters to the latin/roman alphabet, say ß, ∂, ∑, Ω, ∆, and ø, and then using those letters to invent new words which would then become part of the language in which he writes his books. E.g. a word like Øaceny which would indicate a contemplative way of being leading to a generative active visualization of multiworld overlays. / What led to the Eureka moment was connecting Dick’s project (one in which books can become worlds through the reading of them, the alphabet being the basecode of reality) with Graves’ tree alphabet. In Graves (a thesis explored in depth in Elizabeth Sewell’s The Orphic Voice) the poet serves/worships the goddess and poetry is a mythic system, the poetic images themselves are the alphabet of myth and that this alphabet is linked with trees. I’m moving in a shifting connective space of associations and maybe I don’t need to solidify the thought any further, but what’s essential is that I continue to push in deeper. (Somehow Le Guin’s novel, The Word for World is Forest, should connect with this.)

My problem is that I want to do everything that comes into my head : it’s a problem of time, yes. If only I had a little more time : the writer’s concept of heaven is the time (and energy !) to write everything. / The title for this chapter/post comes from a letter V.W. wrote in mid-October (the precise date is unknown). She’s talking about a play that she’s written and now she’s backpedaling : she doesn’t want others to waste their time acting in a play that is not up to V.W.’s standards … if she only had more time !! :: My childhood dream of becoming a writer was built on an image of the serial novel. I didn’t just wish to write trilogies or septologies or even dodecaologies (why stop there !?) I wanted to write The Neverending Unfolding Story in Color! Now that I’m a big boy, all grown up, and living in a time when the future is already the past, I have all the tools I need not only to write the serial novel, but to publish it in installments also. But if I start … it’s like MTV, it was never intended to end. No, the real issue is not the fact that my neverending story will certainly end (we all have to die someday), my trouble is with the necessary and unavoidable decision : the decision not to write something else—if I write this, I cannot also write that. And what is it that I will be giving up? A pernicious little question ,, it’s like “Let’s Make a Deal” : I’ve already picked Curtain #1 and I see where that’s got me: Curtains 2 through 3 are waiting. but time isn’t.

The last entry seems so long ago… and I hadn’t intended ,, it just : slipped by. Reality, so I thought, was unveiled : V.W. writes this in the context of her anxiety at having “missed” L.W. who was late arriving home. Yes, it is during those episodes when the arrival of the future surprises us with its difference. Suddenly we see reality for what it is, something that can’t be taken for granted, something malleable, changeable, susceptible to the whims of hazzard. / I’ve been collecting references to unveiling ,, not just of reality and not just in the writings of V.W. The notebook (T2) in which I began writing Skinny Dipping a little over a year ago has a title: “Beyond the Veil” , nothing specific to do with V.W. or her diary. I don’t even recall now … unless it had something to do with my intention to resume writing a (serial?) novel I started many years ago (and have yet to finish). This is probably an accident, meaning that “I” didn’t plan it, though the circumstances of my writing may have dictated it : “beyond the veil” could be connected to the principal theme of one half of my magnum opus, (codenamed : ) Eden. In William Blake’s prophetic poem, Jerusalem, he enlarges on the veil metaphor as that which separates Adam from Eve when they were in the garden, that is to say “hymen’s band”. In the next line, the same band is the one through which Jesus breaks to enter creation and also the veil of the Temple which rips in two at the moment of Jesus’ death, symbolically breaking open the gate of Hades so that the dead could (from henceforth) be led, if not back to an earthly paradise, then certainly a heavenly one. At some point, the veil and what lies beyond it becomes something of rorschach.

I wrote the 100th page today. Today being the 15th of October 1923 and the 100th page being one belonging to Mrs. Dalloway. By this time next year, V.W. will have finished Mrs. Dalloway. So goes on to say that “I’ve only been feeling my way into it—up till last August anyhow. It took me a year’s groping to discover what I call my tunneling process, by which I tell the past by installments, as I have need of it. This is my prime discovery so far…” Perhaps because we modern readers have a hundred years of other novels influenced by Mrs. Dalloway, the tunneling process seems natural. Before learning V.W. term for it, I’ve always thought of this mode of narration as a process of crystallization : the story begins as an amorphous solution, the essential elements are dissolved and float out of the sight of the reader, but slowly the parts begin to connect, to come together, and then one sees the picture … yes, it’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. V.W. refers to Percy Lubbock’s “doctrine”. Evidently (I’m only going by what I can find in V.W.’s diary and letters), Lubbock says that the working out of processes and form is a matter of conscious decision, a function of rational faculty. V.W. disagrees : intuition, feeling, emotion are what drives writing forward and form emerges out of feeling. But this is developing into an essay, and may lead much further than I intend.

About three times a week, sometimes while I’m writing, often afterwards when I’m doing the dishes or taking out the trash, I think, all this writing that I’m doing is worthless. Why am I wasting my time with … ? These moments of vertigo, doubt are just part of the process. The writer learns to ride them out. One feels about in a state of misery—indeed I made up my mind one night to abandon the book—& then one touches the hidden spring. The pendulum then swings the other way : I’m going on writing it now till, honestly, I cant write another line…

A few days ago, I began reading (again) The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. On page 7 he writes: “…it often happens that those who commit suicide were assured of the meaning of life.” (Perhaps it is ridiculous to insert this here, but when I encounter the phrase the meaning of life in the context of suicide, I think of an episode of Doctor Who, one of the episodes of “The Monk Trilogy” where a document is discovered in the Vatican Library called “The Veritas” and it confirms what Philip K. Dick expected all his life : that the world we live in is nothing but a simulation and it is therefore not real. Okay, fine. But in this episode of Doctor Who everyone who reads “The Veritas” decides to kill themself. But why should you spontaneously decide to kill yourself if you were shown proof that the world in which you live was some kind of simulation? So what? Does the artificiality of the world (life) drain it of all meaning? I mean, even if the beach and the Sun and the pina colada you’re sipping are all simulated, isn’t it still nice? The pina colada tastes good and the book you’re reading to pass the time, wouldn’t you rather go on reading it rather than killing yourself over some trivial matter such as the world not being as it seems? I could go on …) And there is an amusing footnote about Peregrinos. (Maybe it’s in bad taste to laugh, but Camus’ subject is “the absurd”.) The footnote reads: “I have heard of an emulator of Peregrinos, a post-war writer, after having finished his first book, committed suicide to attract attention to his work. Attention was in fact attracted, but the book was judged no good.” Ouch. I guess the lesson is that you should find out if you have, in fact, written a timeless masterpiece before you pull off a terminally irreversible publicity stunt. I couldn’t recall who “Peregrinos” was. Fortunately, we live in the time of instantaneous web search and, so in seconds, turned up his biography on Wikipedia. The Peregrinos, of which Camus writes, is Peregrinus Proteus whose biography was cruelly satirized by Lucian in The Death of Peregrinus. I won’t summarize it here since you can read the encyclopedia entry yourself, but the fact that Peregrinus immolated himself east of the Greek town of Olympia gives me a sense of personal connection since more than thirty years ago I spent a few days in Olympia and so may have even passed the place where Peregrinus carried out his final act. Though I don’t recall seeing a plaque.

During this break in VW’s 1923 diary, I’m continuing with the 1917 diary which, on the 8th of October, VW resumed in a new physical volume. She writes, “This attempt at a diary begun on the impulse given by the discovery of a wooden box in my cupboard of an old volume, kept in 1915, & still able to laugh at Walter Lamb. This [diary] therefore will follow that plan—written after tea, written indiscreetly …” She goes on to record how that day (the 8th) she went with LW to Regent Square to buy paper & pens.

In the past week [from the day I’m writing this, a day early in October 2023], a hundred and six years ago, V.W. & L. are gardening, constructing walls and paths, planting Japanese anemones, daisies, foxgloves, and wall flowers. It’s mushroom season (on account of the seasonal rains) and the walnuts are falling. Aeroplanes over the house : “16 German aeroplanes have just passed over Richmond” V.W. writes in a letter to Vanessa Bell (on the 6th of October) ,, portents of a coming raid. (It’s 1917 after all and the bombs are falling on London.) Oh, and V.W. will be starting a new physical volume of her diary on the 8th (in just two days).

A. and I spent some time in the garden this week, laying down topsoil and mulch, but no new planting. Moles have invaded the yard and are pushing up dirt in circuitous subterranean tunnels ,, in search of grubs. The leaves have begun to fall in earnest.

This shiny new toy (write.as) has reawakened my dreams of writing a serial novel. Doubts immediately crowd in : “how will it be different this time?” The conditions for serial writing are different now, I’m in possession of a vast archive of material from which to draw, upon which to build. Many times, over the past years, I’ve attempted the serial novel under several titles. My greatest success was two years ago : a great flurry of work, a prodigious flow of words, and then … I don’t recall precisely what derailed me, but derailed I was.

Back in March (of this year) I was stuck at the airport (a delayed flight) and I sat for several hours at a bar drinking overpriced beer and writing sketches for a new serial novel about the strange goings on in a small rural community. Of course, the story involved time travel.

If I were to start writing my serial novel now, it would be called Leadworth. I’ve kept the idea of the small community, but I’ve folded in a university, but an unusual university that offers courses and degree programs that are considered impractical , useless in our world. For example, one could get a doctorate in poetry. Imagine that!

Several days ago, I took down from the shelf the volumes of The Diaries of Emilio Renzi by Ricardo Piglia. Often I’m possessed by an irrational passion to begin (in this case resume) reading a particular book ,, probably because I feel that by reading it, I will (vampirelike) feast on its blood and become rejuvenated. (I’ve just opened the third volume of Renzi’s diaries randomly and found this line: “Just now, twenty years after I started writing in these notebooks, I have the feeling that I’m recording my everyday life with caution and efficiency.” [p. 69]) Like Renzi/Piglia, I’ve had a lifelong curiosity about diaries, especially the diaries of writers. Piglia’s fixed idea was Cesare Pavese and his diary, The Business of Living (the principle subject of which, from reading Piglia one concludes, is suicide).