notes

1.

The material in this section is posted without my usual fastidious re-reading/re-writing, a process which, eventually, finds all of the grammatical errors. It's amazing how many times I can read over an obvious error and never see it--because the mind fills in what you want to be there, if you don't read word for word in order to avoid being distracted from the meaning. Editing is a tough business. If you'd like to do it, feel free to point these errors out via e-mail. I'll fix them--if they are errors.

(Sometimes, like commas, I like to use "errors" for their poetic effect, but these are usually punctuation oddities, not grammar per se.)

I appreciate all input. Meanwhile, I'll fix the errors myself, eventually. Or I won't. The purpose of this section in my mind is to get some of my newer work into "print" as soon as possible, while it's fresh.

2.

Maybe I put these pieces on the website because some unconscious part of me says, You're never going to finish this anyway, so you might as well post it unfinished. I'm a great procrastinator. It's amazing to me that I have finished the books I have. But they're not really finished, are they?

"Art is never finished, only abandoned."
(I'd credit this quote, but I've seen it attributed to at least two artists, maybe more. I can't remember. I have a poor memory, another reason why I write, to document what otherwise might be forgotten.)

3.

Despite what I've said in notes #1 & 2, these are not really raw journal entries. They are, but they aren't. This is not an "online" journal--except that it's online. The entries are not so much spontaneous as rewritten. Still, the content is nearly as serendipitous as if it were left untouched. It's just that, when I see a mistake, or a better way to say something, I always change it. I'm not a performance artist, but I'm becoming a "post-performance artist." I abstract these posts from my (real) journal. I pick and choose that which I would reveal. You can only imagine what it is I leave behind.

4.

The "pastiches" in this section are loose collections of thematically related (or not) material that I am weaving together more tightly as new material from other journals (past and present) and introduced transitions are added. Each pastiche begins as a monthly or bi-monthly journal out of which material that fits into already existing projects, such as novels or other pastiches, has already been extracted. I next extract into the pastiches the stuff that is most thematically (or intuitively) similar. This is a very personal process that, more than anything else, has as the basis of its art, if I may call it that, the mindset, or mood, or type or style of thought I happened to be in during the timeframe in which the journal was written. This is a very vague concept that I don't feel I am adequately able to express in words. It's a feeling for the material. What fits into the pastiche and what does not is not definable in words, but in feeling. Next, I begin to add material from other places, usually from other journals, as I recognize how it fits in. This is a very fluid process. I am constantly moving back and forth between pastiches as if they were canvases to which I add a dab or two of paint as the mood or feeling strikes me. This is exactly the process I use to write my novels also, except that they tend not to originate in journal time, but in a concept that generates journal pieces. I write (almost) everything into my journal, and then I extract the pieces to other places. As a consequence of this (anti)procedure, any given pastiche may be at any level of completion at any given time. Finally, I write transitions between the pieces, forming the work into a more or less continuously flowing whole. Once I consider it to be complete, I will remove a collection (which by this time should be not so much a collection as an internally integrated work) to another place, probably posting it as a main website entry, or more rarely, including it as a section of a novel. But, to re-emphasize the nature of these collections: these are, in their current state of development, unfinished.

5.

Once again, I have become completely disenchanted with my artistic
expression. So, once again, I resist the urge to tear this website down.
I am so far split apart, my art distributed into an ether of discontrol like
a numb feeling I can't feel, reinhaling again and again everything I am
doing, more or less coherently to myself, watching myself as the world
looks on wondering how I can stumble around so obviously out of it
yet manage to still stay on my feet. I am a total mind/body disconnect.
I should have been an architect. I was always good at mechanical art.
At least then I would have had a concrete outlet for self-expression,
a definitive means of directing my eternally tangentializing tendencies.
Imagine it, long low buildings with erratic bat-like wings extending off
onto the outer reaches of the property, a Klingon warship-like paradise.
I am at my best when reporting about my own disinterested half a life
and at my worst when trying to be conventionally prolific. I write novels
that meander like well-constructed mausoleums with corpses hanging
out of half-closed drawers, each scene, each chapter perfectly in place,
a masterpiece of proper form whose contents are distorted like decaying
bodies. And these are not gothic novels, but ordinary simple-minded
tales whose characters just happen to have had the misfortune of being
abstracted from the real-life anti-drama that is borne in a distended mind.
And that's the normal stuff. My art is distributed around like metaphors
mixed with the pseudo-similes of attractive blond valley girls wandering
through life as if they know where they are going. When I was young,
just out of high school, I had this vision of a perfectly constructed book,
which was my life before me, all of the things I would ever want to write
tucked neatly into the multiplicity of a single expansive volume spanning
my developing career. That vision has long since been abandoned. Now
I am discontent to throw it all anywhere and hope it lands somewhere where
people will find it. The construction is no longer so relevant; important
now is the collection, which is a futile dream. I am not an artist so much
as I am a disenchanted logician. My life dream is disheveled. I am lost.
And now, in the midst of yet another near-abandoned artistic project,
I see this experiment failing, because I've not taken it as seriously as I
intended, as I leave it hanging, as I move off on other erratic anti-pursuits.
I'll get back to it, from time to time, maybe. I hope, eternally doubting.

6.

All of my writing life I have struggled with the idea of bringing my work as it exists, in pieces, together into a unified whole. I tried to do it with books, but I could never get it together. I am too scattered.

Now, I see, with websites it is possible. Websites allow me to post pieces piecemeal, and to work toward building a unified whole by bringing the pieces together slowly over time via links instead of trying to meld them into a (most often false, but at best, literarily artificial) thematic or, worse, structural device, a book perhaps, which is a stagnant artifact once it is set in print. Websites allow me to correct mistakes and revise according to my whims, as they occur. [This "advantage" is a function of my antipathy toward a permanent commitment, which rigidifies life, renders it less flexible, less capable of responding to changing circumstance, and most importantly, less responsive to the wisdom of the universe, which always requires a completely open mind.] With websites, I can publish the work much nearer to the time of its creation and polish it later. This is not true postmodernism, which never revises, but it's the next best thing.

And websites serve another, even more satisfying function: I had always had trouble with my daily routine, because in order to bring work to the stage of being finished, I had to get it through several stages of revision, each of which took up valuable time, so that I could never structure that time (schedule it) in such a way as to do a little bit of everything every day. [The nature of my psychology dictates that if I do not do something every single day, seven days a week, I can become distracted and may not get back to it again for a very long time. I can't help it. This is the way I am. Well, maybe I can help it. But I don't want to. I like my waywardness, despite its detrimental effects. It's a fundamental part of my self-image.] If I wrote new stuff first, it took up a lot of time (and motivation). If I did rewrites and/or revisions first, I didn't feel like writing new stuff later. If I processed old journals, mining their content, I might get caught up in the planning of even more projects and never get back to what I intended to do. And, of course, there was the continual problem of never wanting to finish anything because publication seemed so far away and all but impossible to achieve, even under the best of circumstances. But publishing to websites automatically incorporates the two middle stages into its process. I can publish to my sites on my computer, formatting the code and rewriting and revising as I proceed. And while I am on the pages I am publishing to, I see errors from the previously entered stuff, which I correct. And afterwards, I tend to add time to my daily work just reviewing the "finished" product in a kind of reverie that seems like a non-productive afterthought (although it isn't), which results in further changes. As a result, my work procedure is down to two steps, writing and posting. It's a miracle! I'm actually finishing work now on a daily, routine basis, instead of doing it as a marathon to meet a deadline date.

7.

Not only is mainstream art boring, but the forms that artists are poured (or pour themselves) into for public consumption (stories, novels, narrative films, rectangles hung on walls, ditties squeezed into three or four minute segments) are confining to the point of de-individualization. The homogenization of artform narrows freedom of expression. When only certain formats are socially supported, alternative and idiosyncratic formats are marginalized and art in general is impoverished.

Websites are a developing format that promises to remedy this situation, until they too become gobbled up by the overriding culture. But at least it's one more added form/forum. If only culture could expand continually in this way. Maybe it does. Maybe I am too myopic. Maybe my self-exclusion narrows and jades my own perspective.

8.

Other palette elements: the news, news newsletters [Is that redundant? I don't think so. I receive non-news newsletters. But some of them are still 'news,' yet not the news; they're particular news about a narrow concern, such as a specific company or organization, and by 'news' here I mean to mean (Is that redundant? I don't think so) that news that we see on tv or read in the paper, the mainstream stuff that sates our minds--although, now that I think about it, all of those other kinds of newsletters are palette elements too. So, even though 'news newsletters' may not be redundant in and of itself, this solipsis* certainly is, and, since I am backtracking to include other types of newsletters, 'news newsletters' becomes redundant, as a result of this explanation. The problem is, if I leave this explanation out and revise the orginating text to read just 'newsletters,' then the reader will have lost all sense of the subtle variations, the "colors" of this palette element. News is more than just the "news." It's like mixing crimson with a tinge of ochre, and then a slight bit more ochre, and then. . . and so on to produce a wide variety of tints and shadings, qualification upon qualification to produce an intricate complexity hardly visible at all in the original two colors, except to the trained imagination of the painter. Understand? It's news because it's new (at least to me.)], music (of course), personal fantasy [Is that redundant? Isn't all fantasy personal?], comics (especially those I get over the Net), [more list items to follow, as I think of them].

* If solipsism is a purely subjective, self-referential awareness of self only, then a solipsis is an element that depicts this state. (But to whom, if only the self exists? Well, to me, of course, because, after all, I am my best, and maybe only, loyal reader.)

9.

An Exercise in Patience

I hit what I hope is a only minor snag in my system for posting to and maintaining my Website. This has to be dealt with now. It's only going to get worse and worse as the content increases:

1. Problem: how to handle the links when recombining pieces in the pastiches after the initial post, when a particular piece is moved from one pastiche to another, or to a different project altogether. (This is also a problem in other documents, but to a lesser extent because pieces are less likely to be moved.)
2. Solution #1: Find and notate all links to all pcs on every pg. This would be a bear.
3. Solution #2: Let the links break and find them later as I discover them, or as they are reported. This would be an even bigger bear. How do I find them after they are moved? [later: downloaded a program that searches for text strings through multiple files at once. Maybe I can use this to search out old links.]
4. Solution #3: When you move something, put a note in the old file as to where it went. What a pain in the ass that would be.
5. Solution #4: Have dinner, take a hot bath. (I'm cold; It's ten degrees outside), and think about it later.
6. Solution #5: [Later. Slept for four hours, but didn't take a hot bath yet.] Okay. This is the way it will have to be done. It'll take some time, but I think it's manageable:

• Locate all links on all pages. This is easy, if time-consuming, via "Find" in my html editor. [Later note, after I've begun: Actually, it's not turning out to be so bad. Many of the pages, such as the stories, the novel excerpts, and many of the 'system' pgs, don't have any text links on them.]
• Log each link to a spreadsheet, excluding general pg navigation links; text body links only. (Col 1) [See complete list of exclusions below.]
• Log the document name. (Col 2)
• Log the a-name tag of the piece that the link is in. (Col 3)
• Follow the link to see if it has a link back to the document. If it does, log it. (Col 4) [Later; I decide that this step is unnecessary.]
• Log the theme, if any. (Col 6). [Might as well kill two birds with one spreadsheet here.]
• Log to the spreadsheet each future link as it is posted.
• Should footnotes and other obvious internal links, such as page-internal menus or links like on the FAQ page, be included? Probably not.
• Links excluded:
• -FAQ
• -top/bottom of page navigation
• -internal menus (studio/films/autobio/etc)
• -footnotes
• -all links to Nai (address/fai, etc./¥, etc)
• -pastiche banner image

Then, when I want to move a piece, I can go to this spreadsheet, sort it by link, and locate and correct all the links to it. Then change the references on the spreadsheet to reflect the new page. [Check a-names within file names and a-names listed independently. ALSO, check all a-names within the piece, not just the one at the beginning.] This spreadsheet can also be used when I want to rename a file. I can trace all of the links to the old file name and change them. [Note: when choosing a-name tags other than date/letter codes, refer to this spreadsheet to see if the name has been used already. If it has, choose a different one.]

[This is the kind of anal thinking that I've practiced all of my life, but have been trying to abandon lately. This is the kind of exercise that made me valuable as a production employee early in my life, and as a manager later. This is the kind of nonsense that inteferes with learning how to be a good (as opposed to a productive) human being.]


[later note: The freeware download, Link Sleuth, has eliminated the necessity for maintaining this spreadsheet. All I have to do when I move a piece or change a page name is run Link Sleuth, find the broken links, and fix them.]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
¹ sources


• an e-mail from Deavours Kemp
• a poet listed in the Open Directory whose site or identity I can't find since my web browser (IE) screwed up and lost half my favorites links.




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