Last weekend I moved on from my flimsy spiral-bound Muji diary (no. 61, Oct 04 - Feb 05) to a hefty book bought at Green and Stone (no. 62, Feb 05 -) in December.
And you know what? I've scarcely written a damn thing in it. You have to be sitting down in The Troubadour Café for an hour, woolgathering and sorting out your life, to write in a book like this. (The Troubador, in Old Brompton Road, springs to mind because I visited there about a half-hour before I bought the diary in question.) This difficulty is not bad or unexpected. Diaries that are convenient for occasional jottings tend to fill up quickly with a lot of premier-cru crap that needs to be sifted and sorted. I usually carry a tiny notebook with me just for this purpose.
Big diaries are intended for more considered, refined work: long-form composition and blocking out comic strips. To use them properly you have to develop the habit of taking them to a bar or coffeehouse for a few hours a week, and focusing more on organizing your random thoughts than in simply generating them in the first place. (You can also do it at home or in a library or in an idle hour at work, but I find too many distractions in those places.) In this way the physical form of my diary actually shapes my thoughts and the outward form of my life. They emphasize finished, rounded thoughts—things that can be transmitted to other people—and commercial-style illustration rather than fleeting thoughts meaningful only to myself.
[Rosie Evitt phones. Perhaps we shall do something tomorrow, Monday, but looks as though the Met is out because aren't they closed Monday?]
But some of those fleeting thoughts—stuff in the flimsies—is precious and useful. It's tragic that a lot of it gets buried under the high noise ratio. Just looking through Book 61, I see I never culled out or developed most of my pensées and notes. A few of the comments on the TeenTime novel got typed out and now reside electronically in a big bin with hundreds of others, but most of the stuff in Book 61 hasn't been looked at since I wrote it. On page 20 (Nov. 10) I find a pensée that had no immediate practical application but needed to be written down so it wouldn't be lost forever. It's a good theme for a short-story or novel, but probably never will be because it is so forbiddingly subtle. Typing it out, I see the entry is also forbiddingly convoluted, almost to the point of inaccessibility...
Crazy/addlebrained/mentally deficient people who are otherwise of functional intelligence find ways of coping with the world...much as I go 'yes yes" and nod as my eyes glaze over and drift off. They talk about art & literature and people you've never heard of—maybe people who never existed. There was Therese Schroeder at Mesa Vista (talked abt great German lyric poet of whom I kd find no record later, there was Bill Lable (with his pseudo-scholarly digressions abt Tristan Tzara, and his Paris expatriate gallery of photos)—both deranged, Lable virtually illiterate. This method of coping is, I suspect just a more extreme and unsuccessful version of something we all do at times.
....and much of my diaries go like that. Boiled down to essence, it describes how crazy and feebleminded people pretend to have great intellectual interests, and this is a method of coping; and perhaps it's not a crazy-person thing at all, it's just common syndrome, and I've noticed it in crazy people because their affectations are incompetently assumed.
Will I ever use this pensée in a story or novel or piece of journalism? I don't know. There are too many other notions competing for attention.
Likewise with ideas for gag cartoons and comic strips. I've done lots of both, but never pursued either one seriously—I mean to the point of devoting myself to THIS THING and nothing but—because neither one seemed to have real depth of possibilities. They're just narrow forms of commercial art, often clever and memorable, like an ad slogan or visual, but by nature derivative and parodistic. Any new strip, any idea for a single-panel gag drawing, is a parody of and commentary upon the ones that have gone before. (An apparent exception, the graphic novel, is really just illustrated literature and thus not an exception at all.) Nevertheless, I intend to get a strip or series of cartoons launched, at least in a small way, in the near future, just to keep my drawing hand in shape. And since I'm always thinking along those lines, I've built up a ton of scribbles and captions in my notebooks. New Yorkerish captions, and notions for strips that are inevitably influenced by the kind of thing that have populated the alternative weeklies for the last fifteen years. Stuff like:
SURF GIRL. Like Harry Haengisen's PENNY in style and line, only it's only three panels. A teenage girl strip, with no attempt whatsoever to reflect the contemporary pop culture. The girl never goes surfing but she is always dressed in a neoprene wet suit. A very nice neoprene wet suit. Nobody comments on it.
NANZI. A one-off or short-run, where Nancy and Aunt Fritzi and Sluggo are all in a cartoony Nazi Germany circa 1936. You see the possibilities immediately—Sluggo as a disused stormtrooper, Nanzi and Fritzi always trying to do the right thing (for the Fatherland).
