Oct. 30, 2006

Oct. 30, 2006

I have begun a huge task, which I expect will take, at the current rate, as long as a decade.

I have, at my feet, two large suitcases filled with notebooks of prose and poetry, going back to 1988 or so. It amounts to somewhere around 3000 – 5000 pages. None of it has been published.

So, I’ve started opening the notebooks up, semi-randomly, and copying something into this hopped up blog that I’m calling ‘Sheddings’. Given that I seem to be able to write about a page or two a week it’ll be roughly a decade before I’m through them. That’s assuming, I suppose, that I don’t write anything else, which, actually, isn’t the case. So, make it two decades, assuming / hoping that I’ll persist that long in relatively good health, Inshallah.

I dreamed many years ago that I was driving a Volkswagon Beetle through a vast industrial skyscraper wasteland. The poor little car was stacked so high with baggage that it was almost tipping over. These suitcases are, I think, the majority of that baggage, and I’m toxic with having to haul it all over the place. So, the Sheddings blog is where I’m going to, piece by piece, offload it all: throwing frags of poetry and prose out the window, over the side, to lighten the load. Assuming, also, that folks will, perchance, come across it – roadside refuse, messages in bottles, songlines, blood on the tracks, my urinations marking out my domains – and possibly find something useful and interesting. Perhaps some paper to insulate your chicken shed, your ‘makeshift hut to receive the music…’; maybe a pry bar for the barred windows of your inscape; maybe some company for your windswept leaping through the fields of grace. Any either or, I’d be delighted!

So, keep an eye out on the dates in the entries.
I’m dating them to, very roughly, when I wrote them.
Ove time there will be a very large archive, which will be searchable in many interesting ways.
That, to me, is another of the objectives of this overboard overthrowing upchucking. To get almost two decades of notes into a database from which I can search it, recreate it, manipulate it, bake it, cook it, abuse it and re-use it in many different combinations and concatenations.

A Spherical Labyrinth.

Let’s get lost…