+ Let’s go for a walk and talk with a Story in Mind +
Hey whatta fun conversation! Riffing about creative projects from 1970s to current days and how all the threads connect together in the most unexpected ways. I.e.: fanzines, chapbooks, paintings, mustaches, Ayurveda, Dead tour, grain barns of mystery, goat farms, hemp #theusual
From Moss Whelan / writer, papermaker, renegade & podmaker: “Back in the swing—talking with {Dave Olson} about writing, art, and health”
Sent to a friend who was feeling confused about how to get started archiving and documenting one’s own creative life ~ shared here for edification – sorta for business-y types i suppose
In brief: Gotta just start… choose the things which are important to you and interesting about you, but make this easy by “meta documenting” your documentation.
what may look like *too much* and clutter-y is really a delightful afternoon or 3 of discovering and contextualizing your projects and life
Ergo: Regarding personal archeology… Rather than feeling sh!tty, start by doing the *easy things* to chronicle the things you’ve pulled off this last bunch of years.
i.e.
List of all the speaking engagements you’ve done
List of all the events you planned/ wrangled/ coordinated/ hosted
List of speaking gigs you rocked
List of all the media, tv appearances/ news write-ups List of all the publications/articles you are in or wrote etc
List of all the jobs/positions you held
Then you can start to chronicle/ archive the particular artifacts from each of the above as available.
You might fall into a very nice rhythm – practical meditation in a way.
Turn off the TV, put on the music and space out with yourself and you’re fascinating history.
These kinds of things are good mental exercise but also I put forth somehow “important” and future *you* will be grateful for present day *you* for doing so.
Of course some examples at my website #NotAPlug Let me know if you require further encouragement or advice.
Continuing the story of the Olympia SM9 typewriter (from 2018 at Wonder Hotel) simply to show the difference a year of diligence and intrepidness can bring.
Yup, it truly was the most difficult of times, pulled in directions i didn’t want to go but then… states and provinces crossed, affairs sorted, planes and memories faced, trains and ferries joined / turmoil, bureaucracy, paperwork, disrespect and frustration, all well, just sort of sorted itself out. I mean, I know how but the point is: the time came when i was reunited with this typewriter and all was different from when i left it.
changing the ribbon, over and over for some reason…
Still the keys get jammed, the ribbon inexplicably requires flipping/rewinding after barely a page of typing but, now smudged with thumbprints from changing said ribbon and supplied with aerogrammes from often lost countries, used envelopes with franked stamps (and sometimes intimate thoughts), and the usual hotel stationery, I made things.
Aerogramme loaded on splendid work table
Mostly poems and erstwhile letters, quite literally banged out without regard for perfection, just passion! Rapid transcriptions from scribbled journals, imagined lives of a doppelgänger, and notes from undergrounds.
Then joyfully accessorized with inky stamps and collages of postage stamps which may or may not have anything to do with the poem at hand (actually, they were all very intentionally consciously chosen but hey… that’s for the art to say). Oh, you can find evidence of these sessions in Items: Forgotten cycle vol. 7 Espionage and bits in vol. 6 Circumnavigation.
from Items: Forgotten, vol. 7, Espionage
Now, the burly beast sits in a teakwood closet awaiting another opportunity to resist my indelicate fingers. Reminding me to touch gently with nuance and care.
waiting in teakwood closet (behind)
All this is to say, art saves lives (in some cases anyhow).
…I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of “thinking” and “enjoying” what they call “living,” I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds
— Jack Kerouac
Alone On A Mountaintop Lonesome Traveler
Photo Note: This is the Fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades of Washington State where Kerouac spent 63 days in the summer of ‘56. Taken from an on line article. More great pictures from John Suiter’s Poets on the Peaks, 2002. h/t Kenneth Morris
“Civilizations east and west have long been on a collision course with wild nature, and now the developed nations in particular have the witless power to destroy not only individual creatures but whole species, whole processes, of the earth. We need a civilization that can live fully and creatively together with wildness.”
Gary Snyder in Etiquette of Freedom / Practice of the Wild
More Jack #Kerouac riffs – this one from the mighty Jerry Garcia
 “I can’t separate who I am now from what I got from Kerouac. I don’t know if I would ever have had the courage or the vision to do something outside with my life – or even suspected the possibilities existed – if it weren’t for Kerouac opening those doors.”
Jerry Garcia, remembering Jack Kerouac who was born in Lowell, MA on March 12, 1922
PS Remember Jack Kerouac’s “on the road“ scroll is coming to Kobe in May with my workshop kicking things off on April 29.
Some years ago (1996 maybe), poet Gary Snyder was doing a reading at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington. Folks are lined up with stacks of books for him to sign, including, books not by him but my other “associated“ writers. Thought this was very cheesy.
Anyhow, I only took a ragged copy of “Passage through India”. He gave a big chuckle and says “I don’t see many of these anymore” as he signed. Told him how i’d rambled with his books tucked in my rucksack through and arriving in Japan and reading Backcountry in Kyoto waiting for a bus to make me to Mochigase and start work on a mushroom farm.
Also, I had mailed him a documentary film I made (Hempenroad), and he recognized me from that and talked for a while about hemp and ecology while others waited impatiently to have him sign some Burroughs book or something. Felt so incredibly proud that he was aware of my existence.
“Humans can’t live in the present, like animals do. Humans are always thinking about the future or the past. So it’s a veil of tears, man. I don’t know anything that’s going to benefit me now, except love. I just need an overwhelming amount of love. And a nap. Mostly a nap.”
