Another batch of diary collages. I’ve made 18 so far, going to see how many I can make, until I get bored. Then maybe we’ll make a fake Zillow website and sell prints? I dunno. There’s a book to write, and I’m procrastinating. (Noticing in this batch how each house is really just an excuse to make a garden.)
See more houses here.
A decade ago, I read an interview with Jessa Crispin, talking about her work on Bookslut, and what she said stuck with me:
I’m very Midwestern in that I just do the work that is in front of me. I just did the work that was in front of me for six and a half years. Somehow, there were just always readers, and I’m appreciative that they exist.
I don’t know if she’d still say she works that way (I should ask her) but it’s the way I’ve worked all these years, and the way I continue to work: I just do the work that’s in front of me.
In 1939, C.S. Lewis gave a lecture to some students called “Learning During War-Time.” (Collected in The Weight of Glory.) He addressed whether it was worthwhile to think about literature, art, etc. — what we might, in the contemporary vernacular, call “non-essential” work — when civilization seemed on the brink of collapse. He thought it was.
At a certain point in the lecture he talks about the various enemies of doing our work. One of them is frustration, the idea that we might not have the time to finish everything we want to get done in this life.
“Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment,” he said. “It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”
It is my 37th birthday today, and what I really crave, more than anything, is a continuity to my days. Not an accumulation, the sense that they’re adding up to anything, not necessarily, just a continuity. The sense that one day leads into another leads into another leads into another on and on and on. That they make some kind of chain.
Robert Creeley has a poem, a kind of haiku, really, called “One Day” that goes like this:
One day after another—
Perfect.
They all fit.
Quarantine be damned. I did yesterday’s work yesterday. I’m doing today’s work today. I’ll do tomorrow’s work tomorrow.
And so on.
Doing the work that’s in front of me.
I started Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind this morning, but I had to stop and copy out this passage from her introduction, explaining why she likes to use collage and juxtaposition to build up her text:
But as a reader myself, I have always most enjoyed books that I can be interactive with. I like to fiercely agree with one idea—and fiercely disagree with the next. That kind of dynamic relationship requires a lot of ideas coming at once, from which the reader can pick and choose. Nothing bores me more than the one-long-slow-idea book, and I promise to never write one.
Yes! That’s it! The “One-Long-Slow-Idea Book.” What a snooze.
I, too, promise never to write one, not on purpose. (Though, I don’t begrudge anyone who does — it can be quite lucrative.)
I would like to write a One-hundred-Short-Fast-Ideas book.
Better get back to it…
Here are some collages made with my 5-year-old’s discarded drawings of Humpty Dumpty.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
My copy of The Annotated Alice tells me that the original Humpty could’ve been a cannon which was on top of a tower that collapsed after bombardment, an alcoholic drink, and a children’s game. I like what Humpty Dumpty tells Alice about using big words: “When I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra.”
Errol Morris once said of journalism, “It’s the Humpty-Dumpty dream of putting the world back together again, to make sense of it.”
(He could’ve been talking about collage.)
Our morning walks have been particularly good this past week. The Texas spring is still going strong, and it’s not too hot, not yet. I thought I’d make a “joiner” (from my Instagram stories) in the style of Hockney to celebrate.
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