Skinny Dipping

[9.x.25.a : jeudi] … & when am I ever not writing? :— at the end of August / beginning of September, Rachel & I … nous avons fait notre voyage annuel à Stonington … we’ve been spending that long weekend in the same cottage for many years now : a cycle. Like last year and the year before (perhaps) I worked on a novelette called Zen Cabins. This year the Stonington trip was the beginning of my summer vacation, rather than the ending … and so when we returned to Long Neck, I allowed myself to expand my focus … if that makes sense : mastering French was still my first priority, but since I had several more hours to devote to creative endeavors … the short version of this story is that I followed a thread that began in Zen Cabins that led to my 2020 March Madness novelette, Experience, which made reference to my “Eden Outlines” which I’d drafted the year before (2019) to put an end to my desire to have written a set of four books collectively titled The Eden Quartet … see §119.

I started writing Skinny Dipping on a whim on the 22nd of September 2022. The original, full title of this series of diary entries was Skinning Dipping in the Blue Nile, a reference to the Diaries of Virginia Woolf ➥ §0. I borrowed the term Blue Nile from Larry McMurtry who proclaimed that Woolf’s Diaries and Proust’s Novel were the Blue & White Niles of Literature … which begged the question: If there were Blue & White Niles, shouldn’t there be a Green Nile? Perhaps even Red & Black Niles? The candidate for the Green Nile was (obviously??) James Joyce. That’s as far as I got with color assignments. Red & Black would have to wait. I don’t recall how long it took me to arrive at the thought … :: hey! why should I write a diary about reading V.W., M.P., & J.J.? I mean, everyone has read these major figures of twentieth century lit. Wouldn’t it be better to write about the works of less studied writers? Very quickly, I came up with a new color mapping which assigned Blue to Ann Quin, Green to Miklós Szentkuthy, and Blue to Jacques Roubaud.

Again whimsically … I began reading Jacques Roubaud’s ‘le grand incendie de londres’ (gfl) in the autumn of 2018 and, true to form, I wrote a diary while reading Branch 1 of gfl which I called Into the Labyrinth of Forking Paths. Several aspects of Roubaud’s … J.R.’s project appealed to me: (1) the branching nature of the text where chapters linked in a nonlinear way with “Interpolations” and “Bifurcations”, and (2) (most importantly for today’s purposes) that the project appeared to be a chronicle of failure, J.R.’s failure to write a dreamed-of novel with the title Le Grand Incendie de Londres (whether the title is capitalized or not is significant since ‘le grand incedie de londres’ refers to the book (in multiple volumes) that J.R. actually wrote after abandoning the intention of writing Le Grand Incendie de Londres. Why this appealed to me is that I viewed J.R.’s gfl as a template (model) for how I might pull my own failed novel, Recovering Eden, from the ashes / out of the hats off & takes a bow…

It didn’t take me long to realize there was a big difference between J.R. & myself … well, between his project chronicled (carried out) in gfl and my own (still only an idea) re = ‘recovering eden’. The difference was that I hadn’t given up on the desire to actually write a novel called Recovering Eden. How could I write a chronicle of Recovering Eden’s failure or my failure to write it, if the failure was only that I hadn’t written it yet ??? or had I?

Fact #530 : on the 31st of December 2014, I completed a novel (537 pages, for what it’s worth) in four parts with the title Recovering Eden on the cover. On the back cover of my book, I claim that the four parts of Recovering Eden are each their own novel and so constitute a quartet of novels, so the other title of … or the other way of referring to Recovering Eden was the “Eden Quartet”. But that’s not all! The story continued after that final … page 537 … and continued in a second physical volume bearing the title RE: Search.

In what way hadn’t I already written Recovering Eden or a collection of books called the “Eden Quartet”? Perhaps we are sliding into the realm of psychology here, so allow me to skip over my 10 years of wandering in the wilderness (of indecision) to today. Today! This morning in fact, I wanted to write a poem and was looking for a notebook to write it in when I grabbed the big spiral notebook I called my “workbook”. I flipped until I found the first blank page, but one can’t completely ignore what one wrote on the previous page, can one? And what I found was that the final thing I’d written in my workbook was some notes about J.R.’s gfl and my attempts to understand and translate a chapter from the Branch called Poésie: (récit) … together with some notes about how I was going to begin keeping a translation diary so that I could document my first complete reading of gfl, so when it came time for me to begin translating the book (novel) from French into English, I would already have a set of notes to work from. I started this translation diary the day before Rachel & I went to Montréal where I … well, I’ve already written a great deal about my decision to finally master the French language. This serendipitous discovery of notes about my plan to document my reading of gfl in preparation for my own translation of gfl made me think : this is how I master French, je lis gfl et j’éris mes notes … mes bribes de carnet. But that’s not all! ➜ my Film Diaries. {i}

{i} [18.x.25.b] When the idea for a project comes to me, the first thing I do is gather source materials. So in 2011 when I began writing an Éric Rohmer viewing diary, one of those “watch along with me” blogging projects where I watch and then blog my thoughts … no, I knew no one would be reading and that this project was thoroughly self-indulgent … During the few months I worked on that project, I assembled a small library of books on and by Éric Rohmer, about half of them in French. I also bought a set of DVDs (shipped from France) so that I could watch two films that had never been released in North America (as far as I’m aware): Le Signe du lion and L’Arbe, le Maire et la Médiathèque ou Les sept hasards. This set of DVDs from France did not provide English subtitles so I had to rely on my (then very limited) facility with French. The seed of the idea that I had then was that one day I would know French well enough that I won’t need the subtitles … here we are, fourteen years later. So, for the past week, I’ve been spending my evenings watching Rohmer films without subtitles … and thinking that I should continue the Rohmer diary I began in 2011, only I’d already started writing a film diary during the summer of 2024.

… okay, the purpose of this interpolation is simply to note that in addition to reading and translating Jacques Roubaud, I’ll be doing the same thing with Rohmer’s films … and to connect Skinny Dipping with these Film Diaries. / Maybe the Red Nile is French film … and the Black Nile, music? Given that I’ve started another project: learning about the lives and music of Tupac Shakur & Kendrick Lamar …

[9.x.25.b] This is the sentence that I wanted to start with an hour and a half ago … the sentence was about how I’d spent two of the weeks of my September vacation working on my “Eden Outlines” … the document(s) are literally outlines where I’ve made use of the built-in outlining function of my word processor to automatically number the chapters … okay, that’s no big deal, but it led to something : read on … Also during my September vacation I began studying Japanese, but not as an English speaker, I began studying Japanese from French. French would serve as my bridge to Japanese. By connecting Japanese and French, (almost) immediately I grabbed two books off my shelf: Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes and Tokyo infra-ordinaire by Jacque Roubaud. Tokyo infra-ordinaire is a continuation of gfl as is Branch 6 La Dissolution. La Dissolution and Tokyo infra-ordinaire are distinctive books in that when you open them, examine the pages, you immediately notice that the text is formatted like an outline & each level of the outline is printed in a different color.

One evening last month I picked up Tokyo infra-ordinaire and it didn’t take me long to arrive at this train of thought : hey! I’m working on my “Eden Outlines” but what’s the endgame? What am I going to do with these outlines? Let’s say I work on these outlines for a few weeks, a few months, I expand them, provide more details, more story, more words, then what? What do I have? will the outlines only be the preparation for the novels or some other failed project where I began something that I (without knowing it or admitting it) never intended to finish? but eh voila! I’m holding in my hands here (a copy of Tokyo infra-ordinaire) a novel that looks like an outline (eureka!) … why shouldn’t the books of my Eden Quartet ,, the result of the work on these four outlines ,, not take the form of an outline … a novel using the form of an outline to tell a story.

I began experimenting … my “Eden Outlines” have now become works-in-progress rather than mere preparations.

This brings me back to my serendipitous discovery of the record of my intention to keep reading notes in preparation for the translation of gfl from French into English … and given that on the first of October (only nine days ago) I resumed “publishing” (some of? all?) my writing on my (write.as : readme!!) website … then isn’t it time that I allow Skinny Dipping to expand to encompass all the Niles? The Niles of Quin, Szentkuthy, and Roubaud? ➜ or Marguerite Young & Gertrude Stein

[9.x.25.c / 14 September] In a few minutes I will have to stop writing and do something that will actually pay the bills … so to round this diary entry out, I’ll add my notes from reading V.W.’s diary … her “disgraceful fact” is an admission that she’d got a late start writing that day … it’s 10 in the morning and she’s writing in bed, still recovering from her spell in Charleston … a long convalescence ,,, as I was reading V.W.’s words, I wanted to write a poem and rather than search for some more appropriate place to write my poem, I began jotting the words precisely where I was already at ::

a place that led me to the dodges & desires
of the Underworld : the quest is the … 
… a kind of fun in unraveling the twists & obliquities of …
the methods of that world,
one must learn to get along 
even though
this poetry makes me squint / in order to
find a haiku : now it is mine!
     in love again
in pearly mottled weather
          plunges me into the marshes
                Amen.