The Notebook Problem

I writing mostly pen and paper in notebooks.   Different types of notebooks often foreign and fetishized in some way.   For a long time I wrote in Belgian refillable notebooks made by Atoma.  Buying more and the refills on every trip to Brussels.  Now I am using a refillable notebook from Japan for which I have only a few refills so that will likely end soon as I write almost everyday and a lot of pages get filled up.

The problem is the extraction of the writing to somewhere else.   Because of the effort to retype and the need to have a computer on which to do that handy by the time I retype the writhing the topic is out of date.  The story no longer interesting.

Somehow I need to adjust this practice to continue to write with pen and paper--simply too sensuous to give up--while keeping more or less current on the digitization of these words

Melancholic Birthday Blog

Time markers everywhere.  Sign signifying the passing of the past.   At Oak Street Cafe.  An old standard in a so gentrified neighborhood.  Not busy like Vinyl.  Disordered unlike the sleek cool Siteglass.

So many generations of coffee.  So many next waves it is impossible to navigate degrees of hipness with any certainty.  But I am certain the Oak Street Cafe is not hip and this Americano is old school expresso with unattributed origins. 

I came here with the idea of organizing BentBoyBooks projects especially some involving my writing and am now already distracted.   First the coffee shop browsing and now the ever present anxiety that pairs with melancholy to make my mood these days. 

I feel the anxiety like a panic waiting to take over everything and reveal me as the failed fraud I am certain I have become. Time up on the lies to the self.  The stories told to comfort my aging self with reassurances of creativity kept and possibilities still out there.  Time up on the manic distracting of the self from the self.

Time to tell a different story one built of truth and possibility.  Time to stop fearing and being afraid.  Nothing is the worst thing that can happen.   Unfinished stories and untold tales are for telling.  Publication is an act of putting the work into the world.   Not doing that is making nothing happen.

Today on this melancholic birthday I will make something happen and begin putting out the work starting with a list of project to publish.   In no particular order:

VassarBoy
The Boy Brothel
Voluntary Queers
The Market
To Sex A Story
Poet's Theatre Texts:  Hamlet Variations, The Vitrines
Bell Book and Scandal

And lots of poetry and some of my more essay like writing on Sophie Calle and collecting.   Maybe those will just go here...For sure the considering of The Colonial will start here.