I like that it is unclear what that first word is, drips of water, or small cracks in reality. My intent was clear, but then as I write this, less so. I think it might be the water, and that was not the initial intent.

I have been buying books. 19, I think, in the past three weeks. I’ve read seven of them, so far. They are from two publishing houses, and all published in the past four years. I have attempted to buy only those who are around 120 pages long, the length I think nears perfection of form for prose.

NDP and Fitzcarraldo have “The Novel Prize,’ which is an annual prize and if one wins, said novel is then published in both of those houses, and Giramondo, an Asia/Australasian house I am not familiar with. Two of the many goals on my list of ‘wouldn’t it be nice if…’ list is to publish with NDP and Fitz. It is an alignment I feel to their writers, their founders, what they publish, and the design of their books. Thought Fitzcarraldo has shifted to books without the inner flaps of a slightly different dimension that makes me want to obsessively buy everything they have published to date in the original format, so they all look delicious together on the shelf. This is the same issue I have with Biblioteca Adelphi. I am so tactile and sensory focused, that that disruption of difference, especially to less lusciously tactile versions, well, it cannot be done. I’d have to shelve the books in different rooms in the house.

These books are interesting. The Dazai was beautiful, and as I wrote on instagram, I studied Japanese for three years, long ago and far away, and I cannot recreate the original language in my mind, I have a sense that the translator, Sam Bett, generated some magic with this translation. (It’s been a while since I wrote a lot about translators and translation though the importance and interest has not diminished at all.)

There is an interiority in these books that feels very different than books from twenty or fifty or a hundred years ago. I remember when I was working on Adelphi someone had asked if I had read a particular author, and I responded, “not dead enough,” meaning that I tend to read authors who have been dead at least a hundred years. Not possible in this research phase where I am curious what is catching the eyes and ears of NDP and F.

Not that this will change what I will write, this research. I will write what wants to be written, that which will write itself into being. And I don’t need to win the prize, I just feel compelled to enter it (though of course winning would also be grand). And more so, if I want to write something that doesn’t align to these houses, then that is that. But the hallucinatory world crossing lack of clarity of where lines are drawn and what things mean is very aligned to how I am in the world, how I see and experience the world. These books feel like normal days, to me. Especially the NDP ones. I tend to prefer to write non-fiction that cannot be understood by most to be non-fiction. I was gratified to see that Eliot Weinberger, and NDP author, is filed under non-fiction.

I haven’t written a book in five years, and I have not wanted to. I am not sure what happened six months ago, when I acquired sharp-pointed clarity on what I want to do with the visual and aural aspects of the Adelphi project, and have begun to start sorting through the textures and collections, so that when I have a studio again, I can move fast. Very fast. I can see what to make, I can feel the work in my hands and my heart, and I can move through the tunnels of time back and forth to weave what needs to come. I am sorry Roberto is not here for this, after all our conversations about what I would do with this, it took a few years too many to finally be able to see. Perhaps I can do some of the smaller work in Venice, and drop small pieces of the canvases on his grave. It pleases me enormously that I would have to take a boat to deliver these gifts to him.

But I slip away from the writing. Three weeks ago, The Novel Prize became another obvious next thing I need to do. I don’t yet know what it will be, but I feel like I’ve got an old slide projector in my mind, slowly flipping through possibilities. Click shift, click shift, click shift. I’ve been re-encountering all my former worlds and works. The Charlie stuff, the Diary of a Death I wrote one fall in Rome which disturbed even me, all the work and formats for the Mythologies of Wind. All these boxes of research that are in this space. Fragments and archives and maps and images and collections of sound recordings and dance notation, and more. All these things that layer together to create anything I create, even if the end result for others is purely visual.

The first novel I wrote was in my 20s, though I always wrote, as a child. A few years ago found a set of grammar school cards, where each year we wrote what we wanted to be when we grew up. Almost always I wrote writer (with the occasional ‘cat burglar’ as a second option, for which I practiced climbing roofs and trees, when I was in single digits).

My favourite part of the first book — the title is slipping my mind — is that I created a visual version of it first, on heavy scrap book paper. Images of the 1920s in Albania, French fashion design, maps, military plans, documents on Mussolini’s control of Albania. Photos of where Zog wanted to establish his court in exile in Long Island (customs turned him and his retinue of 2000 back; I suspect it was what they were wearing), and images of where he exiled in France before dying. In order to capture the sense of the times, I wrote a version of Zog’s diaries (these do not exist), also included in this scrap book. This is a book of homelessness of the heart, of constant loss, of abdication of meaning, of loss that can’t be seen and the loss that can. I spent six months in the Rose Reading Room in they NYPL reading books in Albanian, with a dictionary, and an extreme amount of patience. I never wrote the book, life swung left and I ended up living in Paris and the research and the ‘book’ of the book, in a storage locker in NYC.

Most of my writing starts out like this. Visuals, textures, sound, interiorities and sentiments, affect and emotion. Enormous chalk walls of meaning making and synthesis. Once I build the ‘book’, it takes me several months to write it in words. The collection and creation phase comes in the first, when it lives in my mind and my hands and my ears. I live in such richness of other worlds that it is discordant to function in a single channel where all the living people are present. I can’t go out without taking the rest of these worlds and people and all the all, with me. It’s an incredible and absolutely beloved creative process, but deeply solitary. Once I live ‘in the book’ I don’t really like to come out, I want to stay there until I have lived the entire shape of what is to come, and then the translation begins, from the visually experiential, to the words alone. And one day, I know enough, and then it pours forth.

I miss this process. I’ve two more months of writing in the dark, of completing this PhD thesis, and then I can return to me, to this, and I don’t know what, yet. Or where. It will unfurl for me, and I can’t yet tell if it will be backward or forward, but I cannot wait. The rebirth of mine.