Day/Book/One
An invocation for beginnings. A place somewhere between zero and one. Is it the act of writing that I love, or the feeling of having written which excites me? Am I more enthused by publication than creation? What’s the difference between the two? And in that limbic space, where am I? Do I determine just as much pleasure from basking in the body of work created than in the labor of creating it? If the body of the work is the most important piece, does it matter what happens to the individual markers of progress? I often think of my favorite bands like this. A band like The Fall, who produced dozens of albums, but for whom the question ‘what is the best Fall album’ is completely redundant. And as John Peel famously said of them, ‘if someone tells you they can name the best Fall album, it’s that they’ve missed the point completely. It is the entire body of work which is to be applauded.’ I feel my work is like that. Often more archive than artifact. That it is the entire arc of what’s happened rather than the discreet place arrived. I write inside of a space like this too. Surrounded by the artifacts of a lifetime of collection. Hundreds of books and a fierce resistance to the digitization of music and movies. My work complements where I am, both inside and out. I won’t write every day, but I am inspired by Didion’s notebooks to try.
