Text

Later I read the work of anthropologist Paul Stoller, who argues that we must include the tactile, the auditory, the gustatory, and not just the visual, in our scholarship. He quotes Walter Benjamin on "corporeal knowing," a useful concept; I now see that the suicide note added nothing to my textual knowledge, but it added enormously to my corporeal knowledge, a knowledge difficult to quantify or describe, but not for that reason to be dismissed or ignored. It did make me aware of Leonard's place in all this. I had become the recipient of the note. Part of the reason we work in archives is, I'm convinced, for the archival jolt, a portal to knowledge, and, in itself, an assurance that we have connected with something real.

Ted Bishop, Riding with Rilke, on finding Virginia Woolf's actual suicide note, which he had read the contents of many times, with a note in green ink on the back, by Leonard Woolf, giving the date he had discovered the note, "11/5/41."

Thursday, January 11

I'm a writer.

I write books.

One distinguishes between the process, writing, and the physical artifact, books.

In fact, not everything I write becomes a book.

Some of the books are manuscripts of books.

Sometimes I publish excerpts of manuscripts--of books--as pamphlets, and give them away.

For the last seven years, almost, I have serialized the books I write, online, daily, as I write them, at a web site on the worldwide web, and a reader can go there and download, print out, and read them, as they are being written, on her own computer and printer, or his employer's computer and printer, if at work.

I call what I write my stack, or the great long continuous book of my life, or a correspondence novel.

People write to me about books I am in and I respond to their comments, in the book.

Thus (1) I am writing, and publishing, in real time, and (2) the work is interactive, in that a reader may influence the content, and the style, of the book, by writing to me about it.

These are not usual features of a book.

Either their unconventional form, and content, has made them unpublishable, by traditional publishers, and forced me to publish them myself, in pamphlets and on the Internet, or by publishing them myself, in pamphlets and on the Internet, I have made them unpublishable by traditional publishers. The end result is the same.

If you want them, there's only one way to get them, but if you know how to get them, they are free.

I once entered a pile of books in a mail art show with a sign on them saying, "Free--take one."

Now, I put a price on them, because people who don't intend to read one will take it, if it's free, but if they pay, they might read it.