Saturday, June 21, 2003

I'm bored and my brain is empty, so I dug out one of my old notebooks (volume 18) and began reading bits and pieces. I used to write quotes I liked inside the front covers; the two in this notebook seem to sum up my entire aesthetic. The first quote is from photographer Ansel Adams: "I am addicted to the found object." The second is from 40's/50's newspaper columnist Matt Weinstock, "That's the trouble with real stuff, either it doesn't go anywhere or it's fragmentary or it's full of irrelevancies."

On page 234 of the notebook I mentioned the Weinstock quote again while droning on about Samuel Beckett's method of writing. (During this period (spring '97) I was obsessed with the idea of writing a novel, but I had no idea how to go about it. I produced very little.) Further down the page I found my own varient of the Weinstock quote, "The problem with real life is that there's very few beginnings and endings but a profusion of middle."

So I mainly experience the world as a series of found objects. It's fragmentary and doesn't go anywhere. It's full of irrelevancies. There's few beginnings and few endings, but lots of middle.

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