Starting to get squared away at office: so much space amazes me [my own room!] and then all the backup material, staff, and freedom of movement. I feel like I’m in heaven. Hard to readjust to open work scheduling. New freedom, large-vocabulary return: academic life and performance seem somehow foreign, though I’ve never really left it. Either I perform/deliver now or flunk forever.
Feels very good to work at a slower, more thoughtful pace …
“Have the girls fill this out,” Charlyne said, as I trotted down the hall.
Our administrative assistant, incredulous when I wickedly passed the word along while getting my three carbon papers: “Tell Charlyne the girls are very busy; tell her the girls send their love.”
Charlyne was the uber-feminist in the outfit.
Openly referring to myself as “Jnana” sounds strange again: kept starting to say the legal equivalent of “Boy.”
The leisurely pace of academic reflectiveness, gestation, can be guilt-inducing after the gut-busting pace of the Review-Times [or other newsrooms or assembly lines]. But guilt will only clog intuition. I must learn to pace myself so that I will be producing at peak quality [not quantity]. More than three or four hours of heaving editing or writing is too much for one day, since concentration slips.
Sometimes, on this slower pace, it seems I’m going nowhere, that I should be producing on an 8-5 shift and doing my homework – reading – at other times.
Workshop, a place where craftsmen bring design/theory/aesthetics/tradition/discipline to fulfillment/practice in diverse materials …
In our sense, a place of testing and integrity …
A whole garden to delight the mind’s eye and the physical touch …
Somehow, right after the “little stroll around the block,” I note, 13:XII:74 [a Friday], just back from St. Louis, much energy. [No idea where we stayed – out near the airport? – think we did go to a fancy German one evening.] Came back with a clearer sense of the newsletter, greatly simplified: more like our yoga newsletter!
I think we settled on WORKSHOP REPORTS, with the potential of designating different series such as a police or city government.
Lynn wants at least one foundation or funding source thanked in each workshop paper: it builds their files, gives them a sense that their work is going somewhere (even if only into a folder).
VO discussing difficulties he’s had in writing for publications and how he developed the strategy of writing to write and then usually delivering the work as a paper when invited. Using this approach, he learned he didn’t spend a year to find out the editor had “chickened out” and that if an editor is interested, publication is a byproduct. This way, we have a good backlog so that when the shit hits the fan, we will be ready to market.
He mentioned that Hobbes worked over several decades revising his work.
Another time, he mentioned that his most depressed period was in trying to write a water report and not being able to frame his words: the theoretical framework was weak.
Also, the difficulty of maintaining a creative tension while writing.
My pace is recovering my yogic …
Kat on VO and EO: “I couldn’t imagine them married to anybody else,” and he was now Kat’s favorite person. How curious, considering how upset she would get at my political discussions.
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On the side, Vincent enjoyed designing furniture with carpenter Paul Goodwin. Here’s a sketch of a bookshelf system in his house. I’m not sure now, though, how it connected to the floor, wall, or even ceiling.
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Etienne and Amelie could frame a novel.
Her mother from a very wealthy, steel-making family that lost and regained its fortune; her father, from immigrant Ukrainian miners.
Etienne, from a morbid, divisively argumentative peasant family. It was preoccupied with death. When he was 12 or 13, the grandfather was living in the same farmhouse, not knowing he was dying, though the house reeked of the odor of rectal cancer. The father, in a furious argument, told the old man, “It doesn’t matter, in two months you’ll be dead!” something the wife, Etienne’s mother, could never forgive. The fights that followed led to separation but also their remarriage a week before Etienne and Amelie’s wedding, “so it would be proper.” Yet they still fought.
America? “Here it is just eat your brother!”
France? The mad pace of Paris or the boredom of the provinces.
“I’ve broken many bottles over such cars,” the ones trying to run down pedestrians. “Oh? Did I do that?”
In an office, I feel trapped or cut off. Want to be closer to sun or wind. My mind is no longer original.
Perhaps I write this under the weight of Saturn: I feel sluggish, sedentary. I have piles there and here, projects I do not know how to resolve.
That “little stroll,” by the way, led to my Leonard Springs poems. The site has since been developed into a public nature reserve.
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From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
Jnana's Red Barn 