Introductory Matériel
The Octopus is as expressive with his skin as we are with our voices. They create undulating and complex patterns along with texture. Simply magical.
From the pages of the Paisley Octopus Notebook. 64 Pages, text and images…
April 12, 2011
Is this a journal or a fiction? I’m guilty of lying to myself. So it could be either
Here we are in the gleaming Future, aboard equine androids, downloading our consciousness, mingling our sexes, mingling our minds.
Here we are in the Past, cringing before the storm outside.
Our houses and manors and monasteries are all that are keeping us from the darkest of darkness
Here we are in the… distant Past?
Before the term existed, barely human, simply appetite, sleeping in the lee of natural monoliths.
But this book shall be dated the pages numbered one through 64 so if any are missing it is due to some editor unseen.
These are the pages of a narrator-scientist: implacable, astute and neutral. A watchman bound to poverty but also freedom. No stake in the events unfolding, only in the dated pages.
As Isherwood intimated “I am a camera”. A recorder. Little did he know of the editing of images; Erasing cosmonauts who are ill, or those who ran aground on the shoals of the realpolitik.
Is that the right metaphor? Perhaps not. But I mean photos were edited for politics or weakness or both or even whimsy.
***
April 20, 2011
Jonathan Franzen writes about David Foster Wallace his friend and mentor died not long ago from his own hand. Of depression. It’s in this week’s New Yorker.
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Franzen’s koan over having loved someone crazy and suicidal – someone who designed his own demise for maximum effect – is healing and revelatory and sad and true. [I leap here, brachiating from a simple précis to second limb of argument in the article] Overall, his words talk about action (read by me as art)as communication between two islands of consciousness.
These notebooks are like lab notes: These be records of my experiments in fiction and storytelling my adventures in entrepreneurship my effort to lead a meaningful purposeful loving artistic life so I’ll start and meddle with one variable at a time.
