Write Really Small | My Analog Life
Still image ©1999-2011 Sony Music Video
There’s that scene in The Wall, after Pink wrecks his flat (One Of My Turns), when he’s crawling around the floor collecting and reconstituting (re-curating) the bits and shards of his life as map mandala mausoleum and shrine (Is There Anybody Out There?)—which is more or less the position I’m in, cobbling Monk Falls together from the fragments (::bits shards) [I have {possess} housed] in my travel journals.
When I was Pink’s age, in the days when I famously stayed up nights in booths at 24-hour restaurants and delis around Hollywood famously writing my first famous book, I ordered omelet-y things and black coffee with sugar to keep me going and then I spread my notes and outlines and drafts over my table like an apprentice helmsman charting a course to literary stardom.
I laugh about that now because the difference between Pink and me is that twelve, thirteen, fourteen, twenty years down the road, my struggle is more to do with re-framing collected events and objects to serve the plot of a fiction; and not—not like Pink, I mean—so much an attempt to invest these writings with truth or infuse them with some greater meaning. It’s not that I haven’t tried it his way; I have, but it didn’t work out too well for me, either.
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Overview of journal contents and methods
I never kept journals per se before I went out on the road, but what I learned famously writing my famous first book in public served me pretty well in my travels. If I stayed anywhere long enough, first impressions being what they are, my journal writing became the basis of my identity and a sure-fire conversation starter for local people and fellow travelers alike.
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Items bearing on the journals’ value (content::artifact)
My journal writing has been both envied and called a “neurotic habit” by people I know, both valid responses to these books as
artifacts. Notwithstanding their intrinsic value, and no matter how interesting it may be to watch me write in them, their appearance has no bearing on how well or how poorly they may read (which is what’s important here).
If what I write reads poorly (or worse), as compelling as it may be to peek at from the next table, the efforts I took to create my journals will have amounted to a monumental waste of time. I don’t expect that things will turn out that way, but the possibility is always in the back of my mind.
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Practical aspects of pre-portable-digital data entry
Just to mention that there was a practical aspect to this theater of mine, too. Here for example is some of my thinking (over dinner at
La Dolce Vita restaurant in Kathmandu) about a three week trek to the
Solu-Khumbu District of the Sagarmatha Zone in Nepal.
(The bit at the bottom left might better read: “I think that I would be less embarrassed if someone caught me talking to myself and at least gave me the courtesy of listening to what I was saying before they laughed at me.”)
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Memory value of sensory and 3D objects
My books contain all of the staples of travel diaries: bus and train tickets, pressed flowers, collections of matchbook covers and all manner of other easily transportable graphic-y bits, but there are also a lot of spontaneously created entries: food spills: smeared curry, drips of honey and so on; pages I painted in fragrant oils and ashes, and pasted with found items like flowers and leaves and this specimen of fluff dust and lint from between the tongue and instep of my left boot which I discovered while changing my laces. It was accumulated over one year, exactly.
Think of what’s in there after a year on the road! These were new boots when I left!
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Pre-portable-digital database tabulation methods
At one point, I thought it would be a good idea to color code my journals by theme to help me better organizize my thoughts on Monk Falls. At the time, I only had the four colors of highlighter available, plus plain page style, so I used blue to represent passages related to my life’s meta-narrative; yellow for passages related to my novel, Hubcap Halo, To Go…; green for dreams; red for my love life, and plain-page for entries actually related to my journeys. Up to now, I’ve only done this to one journal, one covering the first three or four months. The later journals are prettier, and I’d like to try and photograph some more of them before I give them their makeovers digitize the good parts and throw them on the fire—which is really all I’m living for here.
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This entry was posted by Tuttle on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 11:30 AM
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When did this blog stop being about the restaurant?
Also, when did you make it public? I see a reservation form and social bookmarking links. Posts and comments are missing. What the hell is going on here?
Is it uninteresting? I put a lot of time into it.
t
Come to think of it, 0bey, I’m going to disable the comments on Monk Falls items.
If you haven’t already, also see http://tuttlescorner.com/?p=2226