0006

The intrinsic need for something tactile

If I were middle aged and married with children, maybe I’d take up scrapbooking. Full on. With scrapping parties and a Circut machine and pages upon pages of my children’s soccer games. That’s not to say I can’t take up scrapbooking now, but it would be all photographs of me in different outfits and skylines and piles and piles of books. That’s what this space of for. I don’t have to print much out. I’m saving that hobby for another time. Another life, really. Maybe I’ll get there one day. We’ll see about that.

I do though, get this itchy bug in my hand to have something I can leaf through. Something with pictures and tiny notes. I never was an visual artist, but I have always been pretty good with a pair of scissors and a pile of magazines. I’m great with a stamp pad. I collect paper like it is currency. I have too much of everything.

I take it back, in a way, I am a visual artist.

I have to see things to understand them. Even for my writing. I create books for things. To hold things. Pictures from magazines and maps I’ve drawn on the backs of napkins. Sometimes I sew the book up myself, and it is perfect for what I am trying to do. Sometimes, I pick one up with a craft store coupon and start gluing things to the cover.

When I plot, I doodle. I make timelines that lined paper tend to ruin. I like charts and graphs and lists. I write in roman numerals and only use one half of the paper. There’s a madness to the personal organization of a story. And I am highly organized of my stories.

I have two very bare works in progress. Steroport and The Eastern Undercurrent. They are similar but nowhere near the same. Both are very visual. Start out real simple and get complex. Fast. Both need a spot to be drawn and collaged and doodled. I can’t justify two sketchbooks though. I carry too much with me as it is. I need to condense, condense, condense.

So I bought one and decided I would start either story on one side and they may meet up in the middle. It’s a race to see which will fill up their side first. Some days I feel like working in one and some days, I feel like working in the other. Now I can. A picture I cut out can go on either side and I can still have it with me at all times. Usually I cut up books and make markers and dividers, but this time, I will work it naturally.

You start at one side and keep going. You keep going and going and going. In the end, you see where it takes you. This is my new little visual book and when there’s more inside, I’ll take some photographs. It’s for my knowledge, my understanding, my vision.

It’s my new favourite thing around.

____
if i recall correctly, pictures are from juxtapose’s brazil issue.