Commonplace Book Time Machine #1: Novus Ordo Seclorum

One of the two chapbooks I initially proposed creating in conjunction with my Aggregate Space & Featherboard Writing Series writing residency will not be produced. Because the residency is only five weeks long, I've decided I must devote the lion's share of the period to the more substantial of the two projects, a meditation on my childhood comprehension of death and killing. Still, rather than let the preliminary work I'd done for the commonplace book chapbook go to waste, I thought I'd share a few of the scanned pages here, on Hungry Hyaena, along with some editorializing. The first of these posts follows.

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2-page spread from one of my commonplace books, 2000

Just after my twenty-second birthday, I began a new commonplace book. At the time, I was living in the basement bedroom of an Alphabet City apartment in Manhattan, laboring five days a week at a Soho art gallery and, nights and weekends, drawing and painting in my bedroom or working on a solipsistic vampire novel titled, appropriately, Me. My income was meagre; I'd grown used to dinners of white rice (generously seasoned with soy sauce) and I socialized just one night a week (not counting too many hours spent watching recorded episodes of Mr. Show with my roommates). Necessarily thrifty, then, I elected not to purchase a new journal to use for the commonplace book; instead, I picked up a journal that I'd cast aside a couple of years prior after filling its early pages with adolescent agitation.

Aggregate Space Summer Writer-In-Residence

Miscellaneous chapbooks

I'm delighted to announce that I'll be the Aggregate Space Writer-In-Residence this summer. I'm honored to be the first participant in the artist-run space's new program and I'm looking forward to my time in West Oakland! (For readers unfamiliar with Aggregate Space, I recommend reading Kelly Inouye's interview with Conrad Meyers II and SD Willis in SFAQ. As Inoyue writes, Meyers and Willis "basically created a gallery, artist studios, metal and wood fabrication shop, small theater, and office space out of an empty warehouse.")

Commonplace books

"Cobbled together by literate peoples, commonplace books served as repositories for whatever someone thought fit to record: medical recipes, jokes, verse, prayers, mathematical tables, aphorisms, and especially passages from letters, poems, or books. Ben Johnson kept one; so did John Milton, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson. In fact, one might think that most writers would have fashioned such handy compendia, yet Shakespeare's has never been found."

-Artur Krystal, "Too True," Harper's Magazine, February 2008

Small wonder blogging suits me.

For years I diligently updated my commonplace books, carefully taping into place images and passages clipped from magazine articles or transcribing those found in books.

Blogs might be considered the contemporary equivalent to the commonplace book, but where the books are tools of edification, blogs are essentially ego-driven affairs. Still, since I started posting to HH, my commonplace books have been neglected. Maybe I'm just an egotist.

Commonplace Book Excerpts #1

I apologize for the dearth of posts in the last two weeks. Despite having ample time to write, I've lacked the inclination. The same is true of painting. Whenever I prepare to work, it's as though my hands won't cooperate with my mind; the process becomes frustrating.

I assume that both creative struggles are linked to my still nameless illness. After several blood tests and many “negative” results, I know only what it is not; it is not Epstein-Barr (or “mono”), CMV (cytomegalovirus), Hepatitis A, B, or C, or West Nile virus. All these ailments were suspected at one time or another, but have since been ruled out.

To date, I've missed eleven days of work at my laboratory job and, though I plan to return to work on Monday morning, I don't expect to work an eight-hour shift for some time. Even a simple cat-sitting job just six city blocks from my apartment exhausted me such that I slept from 2:00 until 6:00 PM today! Not surprisingly, alcohol is prohibited, as is exercise until July 1st. If I’m not socializing (and I’m certainly not), I don’t feel the need to nurse a beer, but not being allowed to run or work out is particularly frustrating. My arms and chest have atrophied and everything seems to sag. I've lost nearly ten pounds in the past few weeks.

At any rate, because I want to remain active on Hungry Hyaena, but seem to have trouble focusing for long enough to compose coherent rambles – the “Fairy Tale” post took me three cross-eyed hours to write – I've decided to add a new “feature” to the blog, one which suits my temporarily scattered state. Beginning today, I will sometimes present quotes or anecdotes without commentary. I keep commonplace books, journals filled with images, quotations, and notes of all sorts, some of which are really beautiful, but too often forgotten by me as I continue to add more.

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- Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Italian philosopher and alchemist; burned at the stake in Rome for heretical writing and pronouncements, including his faith in Copernican astronomy. “Man is no more than an ant in the presence of the infinite,” he wrote, and upon receiving the death sentence for his beliefs, he is said to have stated, “Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it." While he was burning, the customary crucifix was presented to him, a chance to repent, but he mustered the strength to push it away and look towards the sky.

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- The German city of Hamburg was fire bombed by the British Royal Air Force for several nights in July of 1943. Below is a selection from Hans Erich Nossack’s account of the bombing and the days that followed.

“…the convicts in striped uniforms who were called in to clear away ‘the remains of what had once been human beings’…could reach the corpses in the air-raid shelters of the death zone only with flamethrowers, so densely did the flies swarm around them, and so thick were the floors and steps of the cellars with slippery finger-length maggots. Rats and flies ruled the city. The rats, bold and fat, frolicked in the streets, but even more disgusting were the flies, huge and iridescent green, flies such as had never been seen before. They swarmed in great clusters on the roads, settled in heaps to copulate on ruined walls, and basked, weary and satiated, on the splinters of the window panes.”

I include Nossack’s writing not only to highlight the atrocity of war and our own human tendency to prefer neat history to the real mess, but also because I find the passage curiously beautiful, in the same way that a Hieronymous Bosch depiction of Hell might be. In all the copulating, feeding, and general excess, nature is at work, cleaning up what is, in effect, an all too natural mess, horrible though it may be.

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- Lastly, the image that leads this post is a stunning photograph. Unfortunately, I don't know the photographer or the year. It is taped into one of my journals, presumably before I began to keep track of provenance. At any rate, I thought it a nice companion to Nossack’s description of Hamburg.

Of Mice and Men

Searching for inspiration in one of my old commonplace books, I came upon the following text. I assume that it was composed in a fit of anger and pessimism but, reading it this evening, years after it was written, the bleak statement doesn't seem so extreme. In fact, despite the dramatic flourish, I feel that it is fairly accurate.

“If we are so linked to Nature, one might ask, why then do we continue to overlook environmental degradation? Why wouldn’t we, as the most powerful players present, do something to curtail our abuses?

The answer is simple, but troubling. Our exuberant abuse itself is natural. Like any other animal, we are driven to reproduce. If you put five mice (four females and one male) in a clean, large enclosure and take care to feed them and supply clean water, they will thrive. In a few months, you will have twenty or so mice on your hands and the cage cleaning will become increasingly challenging. Allow another few months to pass and you will be unable to count the mice without first removing them from the enclosure. Before long, the cage cleaning is a nightmarish chore. The enclosure must be cleaned daily, sometimes more often. As the mice become more overcrowded, the males begin to vie for females. They bully and bite one another, often targeting one individual and biting at his rump or lower back until they open a wound. The enclosure now becomes bloody. Adult males steal newborns from the squirming "nests," kill them and leave the dead bodies strewn, partially eaten, on the now filthy floor. The once clean coats of the rodents are now grimy and matted, their backbones seen easily under their sagging, unhealthy skin. Moments after giving birth, hungry mothers fall on their young, devouring them. If left as is, the urine stench will soon be mixed with the smell of rot and, within a year, all the animals will be dead. Humanity’s enclosure has afforded us more time and more transitions, but the situation is similar.”

In college, I bred mice in order to feed the snakes I kept. I was an irresponsible mouse owner - though a responsible snake owner - and the beginning stages of the above description were witnessed several times, though I never let things get so far out of hand.

While I accept the fatalistic text as an essentially fair assessment, it ignores humanity's potential. Our complex brains allow us to strive to balance nature with nurture. This desire, I believe, is what makes conservation a moral undertaking; good stewardship is good living.

Painting: detail of "untitled," by Boyce Cummings, 2003