Eradication

I have needed, for financial reasons, to sell my old computer for months. I might casually ask if someone knew how to erase everything but have, until now, not made much of an effort. Part of me was extremely depressed when I discovered that I am not as flaky as I might have thought- the software was filed neatly among everything else relating to my computer.

The utter banality of this particular green hanging folder depresses me a bit. I don't want to be someone who knows where their camera manuals are (speaking of expurgation, I am throwing all of these away in order to mollify this anxiety of affiliation). I might not want to be the person who deletes massive amount of writing that ranges from very bad to rather good. But then again I might need this departure very badly.

Part of the reason why this is particularly difficult to get around to is that I can only find certain chapters of my senior project- the rest are in there somewhere but I do not possess the technological savvy required to find them. This saddens me but it also very much time for me to let go of that, lest it be the last serious thing I write.

I would very much like to read it again someday and I hope that day presents me with the luck of a minute posterity; my mother will find it, it will turn up in the Bard Library eventually, a professor will have kept it (of course the last option would be the most appealing outcome). At the moment however, I need to part with it. So much unfinished business is making me nervous. I need to cross state lines. Put some official distance between myself and this past that insists on intruding. I need to make room in the archive for more valuable items and this requires the removal of objects that have either never been impressive or whose age has destroyed the one detail that had made it appealing to you so many years ago.

So I have transfered a few choice documents; stored them neatly in folders by category and now I am going to erase everything else that I wrote between 2002 and 2007.

Select Notes

Originally taken on June 12th, 2007, in pencil, on a white piece of Strathemore drawing paper measuring eighteen by twenty-four point five inches.

#1
I feel as if I may be attempting to obfuscate my writing proper by altering the physical space on which I write. Overcoming a self-conscious reaction to a terrifying audience by deflecting attention from the content- emphasizing its container.

#2
I am not allowed to throw any of this away- I have decided on a dedication to meticulous documentation. I can however hide it really well.... Perhaps this complicated process of retrieval will lend to these notes a certain exterior validity.

#3
I want to make a Book of Eventualities

#4
Writing Cramps: the physical reality of writing- the work- Its materiality and materialism begin to emerge through objects within an environment and is conveyed by the physical arrangement of their surrogates.

#5
All of this information will be cataloged in a consistent and usable manner but to a large extent this project is aimed at the complication of information: To make reading difficult- to make one conscious through this difficulty of the routes one takes through virtual and quasi-virtual worlds (i.e. physically existing surrogates such as card catalogs). How do these paths alter the information retrieved at their end?

#6
I spend a lot of time mindlessly thumbing through my books. Deciding what to read. It is good then, that I have sat down to truly consider them as objects with meaning that extends beyond their texts yet remains native to, embedded in or at least in constant reference to, its container.

#7
Why am I cursed with a love for "Walking in Memphis?" Why this rapport with a man who appreciates cat fish on the table and how Muriel plays the piano?

#8
Sub-category:
Ways to describe myself (or one): Beer swilling i-pod monster wearing American Apparel and gap and waddling around half drunk and barefoot contemplating political theories and wallowing in alienation that I have reformulated as singularity.

Does Nietzsche's Grocery List Constitute Writing?

It might be ridiculous to think that notes are worthy of publication- or my notes at least. What arrogance has overtaken me..... But I am not the only person fascinated by notes- those deceitfully transparent scribblings, the fantasy of automatic writing and great revelations of literary spirit. Notebooks and journals and correspondence, especially that between two literary icons, preferably men or men and their mistresses.

The public circulation of the letters and journals of ladies is simply improper; it ruins their good name re: always un-literary chick-lit and the memoir.

We do not want Flaubert's correspondence with his landlord but the documents and signatures that reaffirm our fantasy of an exclusive literary gild, an inaccessible cabal.

But we do not actually like notes- not for themselves. Only as supplements and explanatory aids and only as something to which one might refer after the fact; noted... notes are for.... notes are on.... they have no meaning when detached from their public product. Seeds may as well be rocks without plants? But what about the note as something other than a diminutive part of a seamless whole? The half thought. The epiphany itself regardless of material fruition. The evidence of a moment of significance if only because you admitted your own attachment to this particular formulation. To take another metaphor from my half-dead garden, it is a record of anticipation, the period of germination, the contemplation of the possibility of a plant that is always more impressive than the one that actually comes out of the ground. It takes years to cultivate a garden unless you are satisfied with Marigolds and other annuals often times found in parking lot centers, and I do not have that many years. They are the record of a potential life of infinite possibility- the day dreams of intellectual activity that one is prone to after a long day at work, a barely legible scribble crabbed between subway stops etc....

And notes are fun. They are exhilarating and for the person taking them they are, if not complete than an accomplishment wrought from a moment of intense physical activity; notes bear this trace of the body in their tendency to slant and vacillate between sign and pure line, the varied pressure exerted by the hand as weight is shifted to allay back pain. A raising of the blood pressure and a cramping of the hand that refuses to be both efficient and accurate. You rise, pace, smoke, sit. The urge to tell someone overtakes you and your compulsion towards this imagined body has a deleterious effect on gravity that requires an act of vast compensation by your muscles to keep you in place, eyeing that crabby creature moving across the page, filled with a senseless feeling of awe and inadequacy.

It Won't Always Be There

It might be wise to begin with an explanation of my intentions; a suggestion of my purpose but if this project is successful than the reasons should reveal themselves along the way, as they wish to be seen. And they are, furthermore, so numerous and variously connected that to provide a full written explanation would defer the actual project indefinitely. Possibly long enough for me to grow weary of it, having worked out my arguments through the act of writing. But I do not want to solve these questions of archiving and memory and objects through writing, or this type of narratively connected and internally ordered whole. This is not how information is organized or consumed. I am interested in the answers provided by the components of these processes and entities, in the effect of unnatural order that is not the order of an organically acquired language. Both its effect on objects and their influence on the shape these organizational schemas eventually take.