notebookery

The purpose of this notebook is to grow, to spread, to pursue an existence as meaningless as any other organism's.

I, like many, after reading-- be it a novel, play, poem, or philosophical treatise-- find upon re-perusal one or many noteworthy passages or lines which I have marked in the margin with my pen-- a beautifully irreducible image, a profoundly imaginative insight, a solid piece of reasoning, etc. I then find that all the passages I have left unmarked strike me as contrived and superfluous. I ask myself, "Did the writer elaborate so for the sole purpose of completing a form of literature-- an act which will inevitably force contrivances? Or could he only have arrived at these insights and images through such elaboration?" If the latter is the case, so be it; but then let him isolate these insights, burn the rickety bridges he has erected between them.
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I am striving to write a notebook that will be, in essence, an anthology of excerpts from a lifetime of deliberately unwritten literature.

To know thyself, to portray oneself truthfully, to improve one's character, to plan great works for the benefit of all . . . May my notebookery never lapse into any such ambition.

Those who write as a means to an end-for wealth, fame, even understanding . . . Writing for me is a byproduct-pared nails, mental droppings, fallen eyelashes.

My preoccupation with reading and writing is in essence a preoccupation with the or a notion of time. There is no more obviously temporal activity. Whether reading or writing, sentences pass like seconds, pages like minutes, chapters like hours, and books like days.

As for reading and writing, I have gravitated from totality to the fragmentary: rather than try to follow the tick of a running clock, I settle in the spaces between the parts of a clock dismantled.

He has collected some of his notebook entries under the heading "Assembly Required."

He began by dating the entries in his journal, then numbering them consecutively, then simply calling them "sun" or "moon."

On journal writers' chosen increments of time:
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Year, month, day, hour, minute. . . . Those journal writers who record all such nonsense only wish to show us what restless, insomniacal souls they are, and how they conquer time by breaking free from diurnal existence.
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The briefest increment of time that a writer should use for a journal is the month; zero numbers, only the single word that is the name of the month. True, the year is a number, but a number large enough in connotation to be read as a word. Jules Renard's journals, segmented by year and sub-segmented by month, are perfectly proportioned.
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My journal (a notebook, really), exists, at least superficially, outside of time. Rather than chronologize, I insert entries between previous entries, as one inserts pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.
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None of my puzzle pieces have straight edges: my puzzle has no borders.

Memoirs of a Journal of a Diary of a Notebook.

Just as writers of free verse viewed writing sonnets, villanelles, and iambic epics as artificial and restrictive, so he, keeper of a notebook, writer of notes only, views writing poems, stories, and novels; to him they are just another set of formalists.

A writer, skilled, talented, writing a novel, partially inspired by my notebook.

A casual writer.

Reading a notebook is more like walking through an art museum than reading a book.

I look at my own work, this notebook, in relation to visual art more than to literature. I approach the notebook more as a conceptual artist than as a writer.

Frames. Margins. My visual art dreams of being writing; my writing, of being life; my life, of being art.

Or the culinary arts. As a writer (waiter), to serve translucently thin slices of a voluptuous experience.

One writes a novel, play, poem; one "keeps" a notebook, journal, diary. The former creates; the latter preserves that which already exists, a bit of language one dusts with the brush of an archaeologist, with the makeup brush of the mortician.

The writer of novels is one who tap-dances on stage; the keeper of a notebook, one who paces the floor. The latter wins my attention.

Clouds swirling over the earth like language over reality; the result, so much thunder. During storms he lay on the ground and imagines viewing from reality the underbelly of language.

Torn between archive and composition.

The temptation to revise this notebook into five sections: notes one line in length, one to two lines in length, three to five lines in length, six to ten lines in length, and longer than ten lines.

Fragment versus aphorism/ maxim/ epigram and their pretensions to truth. All thesis and conclusion. Product sans process.

Hypertext, for which the reader determines the sequence of lexia, sections of the text; when those lexia are individual words, the reader becomes unequivocally the writer.

The notebook, even when printed on the page, provides certain hypertextual freedoms. The reader is not obliged to read the notes in the sequence in which they appear, that is, can jump around as much as he or she wishes, nor is the writer obliged to lead the reader along a path of successively developed thoughts. Each note potentially is the beginning and/ or the end.

A web-essay in which every literary figure's name that is dropped is hyperlinked to a photograph of his or her gravesite.

How many of these entries parody.

Postmodern Cake Decorating.

A writer's collected literature is a petrified forest with the pretense of permanence and is visited by readers with awe. The notebook is a fresh field beckoning the reader to rush into it, then to stop and stretch himself out on a section of his own choosing to meditate, to dwell. From the seeds of his eyes looking up at the sky will grow a tree of imagination. Such is the living, invisible forest of the notebook.

Shattered clay tablet, shredded parchment, I marvel at the record 21st century civilization will leave in ageless cyberspace. But future civilizations also will have but fragments of the past; that is all we can produce.

Forget the melting of genres, even the concept of "book" is becoming passé. Thankfully, a move from the static to the dynamic. The website, available to all, everywhere, and which can be forever revised by its writer. Writing freed from the physical page.

A pilgrimage, after ten years, to the university where I began to write, to the library where I read as if I'd written every word, where I tried to write as if reading. A pilgrimage after ten years, but not before I place what I since have written in cyberspace, so that I can call it up, across 500 miles and ten years, as that university student, at a library computer, looking for his future.

The notebook is a basin of sea water, an impossible piece of sea, a consciousness which evaporates, leaving a book of crystals of salt and grains of sand.

When notebook entries touch the mind as salt touches the tongue-- when they are dissolved and absorbed immediately on impact!

In the notebook there is nothing elaborated and nothing suppressed.

Do I mean to make clouds crystals; crystals clouds?

Runway concrete abstracted by speed, rushing river of runway concrete; single leaf lost to the spreading pool of greenery; the world becoming gradually more abstract as you rise; inside the clouds, above the clouds, where the sun blinds you with the illumination of the million thin scratches in your window. . . .

Some say that a man's decline after maturity leads him back to the womb; that the man again becomes a child in old age; that, if all goes well, he will grow old enough to be as bald and helpless as an infant, and eventually die in bed, the traditional place of conception-- though you, reader, like myself, may have had especially daring parents. Given this, I should like to write a story of the man who, in his dotage, has the delusion of his being a prolific child prodigy-- a genius. I should like to write it, but I would not; I plant this seed, bury this coffin, believing the reader's imagination at least as fertile as mine to imagine the story. My entries are just that-- entries, but also exits; they are seeds and coffins, and seeds don't dialogue-- as roses in full bloom dialogue-- seeds monologue, as coffins, sub rosa, sub terra, at various depths within the earth.

"Once upon a time, a woman stood waiting at a bus stop. The bus pulled to the curb and stopped. The woman got on, and the bus drove away." My father made up that bedtime story most likely for those nights he was too tired to tell a longer one. Much to his fortune, this became my and my sister's favorite, the one we clamored for night after night. As I look back, it must have had a profound influence on my taste in literature.

I have always appreciated more the most brief, concise form of any genre: I prefer the novella to the novel, the lyric to the epic, the shortest of stories, the one-act play.

The notebook is the ultimate collection of brevity and conciseness; it is a collection of conceptions. It contains those moments of conception before the development of self-sustaining genres, the moment of conception at which various genres are indistinguishable.

The book, writer-concluded; the writer, notebook-concluded.

The notebook, sustained by its reader through an umbilicus of imagination.

A notebook perpetually rearranged and revised, to be perceived instantaneously as a living presence, rather than temporally as writing.

From successive to simultaneous, from time to eternity. . . .

A notebook without chronological formality: undated and without numerical progressions.

Rubble of constructions composed of closures as mansions are of corners for the huddling.

The notebook: toppled column in tall grass, unkempt cemetery.

A mind of neither architect nor mason, a mind akin to wind and wave.

A bird clings to these lines as to the bars of a cage. Sometimes it appears, from the other side of the page, when I offer it crumbs from between my lips. I often wait for it in vain, though, and am left to swallow the crumbs myself, left to vacillate on the point of which of us is inside and which of us is out.

The desire to capture, cage, record one's existence. . . .

It is my soul molting this mass of notes?

When picking through a nest full of feathers there is always the fear of finding attached to a few an underlying infant skeleton.

The notebook is a substitute for the soul.

The notebook, practically speaking, is a collection of last words.

The hope of earning a place in immortality with one's writing. To write oneself into the script of eternity. Consciousness occupying pages white as the plains of any afterlife. An athanatism of bleached and pressed pulp. A plane easily turned, in turn, to ash.

Any interest in my notebook surely would be posthumous (O hilarious hope); so much of it is last will and testament. (Written on the eve of submitting some notes for publication, all of which will most assuredly be rejected.)

Even the reclusive writer needs the release of submitting his works for publication. How like an ejaculation they are when first mailed out, and how like spermatozoa, so many failing so quickly, until all but three, all but two, but one submission upon which hope rides strives to reach the ovum.

Amoebic Notebook, Immortal Engulfer, I await rejection letters from publishers to whom I've submitted you. They trickle in over time, arriving suddenly, unexpectedly (though fully expected), as thoughts arrive in one's mind; this afternoon, however, I find satisfaction in the knowledge that you could engulf and incorporate every last rejection if necessary.

The non-chronological collection of notes continuously revised and expanded practically is more suited to the electric than the paper medium.
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More suited too to web than paper publishing. And the dissemination process is more interesting, with its interconnections/ synapses/ hyperlinks. Makes books look more and more like bricks.

Have been waking with the Cioran "daily affirmation" that I am merely one of billions each day dragging myself across the earth's crust.

Even fame, which has become so much more common and fleeting, loses its attraction.

Notebook entries: poems from the wrong side of the tracks: poems in black leather.

The only club to which I would belong is the one that would have only me as a member.

I'd never join a club I took seriously.

He wrote 25 pages by age 25, 55 by age 30, 80 by 35. Five pages per year. One one-hundredth of a page per day.

It's a funny assumption readers have that the writer believes what he or she writes.