Skinny Dipping

§81 [18.viii.24.a : dimanche] V.W. is feeling “at a low ebb” with Mrs. Dalloway, and is beginning to “count myself a failure” … “its a question of getting up my steam again in writing” [sic.]. You see, that’s just the way it is, even when you’re writing a novel like Mrs. Dalloway : the fear that “there’s no way of going on after Jacob’s Room.” This is why I like writing along with V.W. (even if I am a hundred years late), she encourages me to keep writing along the lines that I began to follow in 2017/2018, to write the books that I want to read.

In the previous entry, I asked who I’m writing this diary for? Can a diary be art? Why not? / Back in April, I finally gave in and bought the book that everyone else has been reading for the past year: The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. I’m enjoying it more than I thought I would — my prejudice against self-help creativity books … creativity can’t be taught, you have to just do it … so I turned my nose up at it at first, but WMF read it and said it helped him along when he was “at a low ebb” in his current work-in-progress, so I got the book and started reading it … slowly … until I discovered that my son and his friends (musicians) were all reading the book like it was the New Bible. Every morning this past week, my son and I have been going on a walk along the beach talking with each other about our projects and Rubin’s The Creative Act comes up a  lot in the ensuing discussions. My son is currently producing an album for a good friend and collaborator. They’ve been working on the album all summer. I started writing a novel at the end of June, but for the past week I’ve been on a booklet jag. I’ll come back to the booklets in just a minute. Why I bring up Rubin in the context of “who am I writing X for?” (where X = this diary, novels, stories, essays, poems, etc. et cetera, &c.) is to quote him: “We create our art so that we may inhabit it ourselves.” Can a diary be art? If I inhabit it, it’s art. And what’s art? This is Rubin’s take: “This is the essence of great art. We make it for no other purpose than creating our version of the beautiful, bringing all of ourself to every project, whatever its parameters and constraints. Consider it an offering, a devotional act. We do the best, as we see the best—with our own taste. No one else’s.” [p. 215]

Booklets! Putting old projects into final form: I made an accidental discovery that’s changed everything … the word processing program I use has a “print as booklet” function. This might not sound like such an incredible thing, but for the last ten days, I’ve been editing and publishing (yes! publishing!) booklets … let me explain.

A few weeks back, I was sitting on the beach in the evening thinking about photography. Should I add photography to my art? I asked. Put photographs in my books like Breton did in Nadja? Or Sebald? A lot of my novelettes are narrated by guys walking around cities, so why not add some photos and lean into the whole Sebaldian vibe? The sun was going down and I was observing how the light changed and the colors caught in the clouds … clouds, I thought. A few weeks earlier, I’d written the words “cloud theory” in my notebook, not completely sure what I was going to do with them. Right about that moment, I reached for my phone to take a photo of the sunset. I’ve got hundreds of photos (going back for years) of sunsets from the same location on our beach. They are similar, but all different. The persistent feature in all the photographs is the stretch of beach, the bluffs on the left, Merde Rock (a tiny island about hundred yard offshore), and the setting sun … and of course the clouds. Sunset are always best with a few clouds, just enough to capture the orange of the sun and turn it shades of purple and pink. Then I thought, what if I just photograph the clouds? It was that one thought that changed my approach to my art work. I understood what “cloud theory” meant, not in words, but intuitively.

The idea of “cloud theory” took several days to take shape and what I arrived at was an art project that would produce a series of unique artworks, books that would be a collection of poems, short prose pieces (also poems), and cloud photographs. The plan or approach I sketched out was this: (1) the raw material: make a large collection of poems and cloud photos, (2) print out the poems and photos on 8½ by 11 paper, but select the “2 pages on 1 sheet” option so that I could cut the sheet in half and end up with 2 pages, (3) select at random 58 half-sized sheets and combine in any order, (4) bind the sheets to make a 116 page book of poems and cloud photos, and (5) release my unique work of cloud-poem art into the world. To test the procedure, I went to print out a few pages of poems and cloud photos and when I went to select “print 2 pages on 1 sheet” I noticed there was also an option to “print as booklet”. Then my brain began to whir and buzz and little bells started ringing … booklets … booklets.

I’ve been writing novelettes for years. Every March, I write a new novelette and I hadn’t yet printed out the one I wrote this year. Why not test out the “print as booklet” function with that little novel? It’s called Who Will Write the Great Poem of the Twenty-First Century? I printed it, folded it, and stapled it. At first, I flipped through it to make sure everything looked good, then suddenly I felt something … my pulse quickened. I was becoming excited … but what for? … Of course! I’d made a thing. I was holding something I’d made in my hands. This was the thrill of completion! I’d finished writing the novelette months before, but because the text was still virtual and not actual, I didn’t ever feel that it was complete. Now, holding this little booklet form of my novelette, I knew the thing was now complete. It was a mild intoxication, the sort of intoxication that I wanted more of … how many more novelettes did I have on my computer’s hard drive that needed completing? a dozen? thirty? eighty? I didn’t know for sure.

And so for the following ten days, I’ve been formatting and printing at least one novelette each day. This practice has led me to see in a new way the form which my future art will take. To be continued …