Demeter, nurse and mother of my art,
Let me be worthy of thy Mysteries.
-- Aeschylus from Frogs, Aristophanes
It may appear that I'm spacing on this blog. That's partly true. My schedule has taken a manic turn and I don't have the time I'd like to devote to my writing here. It would be wonderful to be at this full time, but there is likely even less support out there for writers and artists than there was back when Ezra Pound was slowly drifting towards alternative economics and ultimately fascism in the hope of solving the problem of funding the arts. Pound failed in his mission, and I'm not anywhere near about to go fascist.
I am up to something, though. Several people have been prodding me for quite a while to get my blog, or parts of it, out in book form. And that's what I'm working on. I'm not sure when the actual tome will be available, but it's presently in the pipes. The main reason for doing this is to have something tangible, something to hold. I've been doing this blog for almost four years and it still seems abstract to me. It'd be nice to see it as a single, colourful object that I could cart with me to the toilet or on the train.
When I recently squeezed all of this onto a single word file, without the images, I was amazed to find that it was over 800 pages. That's a ton of work, although it doesn't seem like it to me, for an effort that could just vanish into the ether with one peck at a key. And if an event like that did happen I don't know what would happen at this end.
But can a blog be a book? Pound, again, said somewhere to never present a work in one medium that could be better expressed in another. I hope that this venture will not be a case study of this. Yet this blog is already bookish, I guess, and maybe a book can be bloggish. And so far the transition seems to be going smoothly.
And it won't be 800 pages, maybe 500 tops, but I'll try to strip it down as much as I can. I'm selecting a bunch of "posts" from the past few years and squeezing and tweaking them into "chapters." The book will also likely have three new unblogged, wholly booked, pieces: an introduction, one chapter on time and a final chapter on sex. These three will round out the book, complete or tie together a whack of themes, and hopefully provide enough of a draw for people to bother reading a book full of stuff that they might have already seen, or could see, in a blog.
Anyway, it would be nice to hear from you about this. I keep wavering back and forth on whether this is a good idea or not. I mean, I'm going to do it anyway, but some feedback would be wonderful and a welcome spur to action. The present post has the same purpose. Fire on the ass, as one wise woman put it.
You know, I don't normally have these kind of dear reader, state of the union, posts. I usually just begin in the thick of it without much explanation or commentary, but I felt like I should at least make an appearance. Thanks for reading and commenting and challenging. I don't know exactly who I'm writing to, but I'm awfully grateful that there is anyone at all.
