Sequence...the book?

So, now, there's this idea of a book. Taking the blog, a collection of undirected, unstructured musings, and turning it into a book. A small, oddly-shaped book -- I'm thinking some kind of irregular polygon -- filled with small, odd reflections and impressionistic reportage about...whatever. Sneezes. Toupées. Street shouters. Triathlons. Execrable Mexican food. Yes, I like it. Going to move forward with it. It is, unless I want to change the way I write, which I don't, the only way to go, and I'm well on the way via my blog. I mean, the blog is the book, in the process of being written.

A colleague has stepped forward with moral support and the offer of designing the book! I am psyched. She has suggested a pithy title: On Sneezing.

The main problem, as I see it, is not so much that my writing is monumentally pointless -- it's that it's offensive.

Within a mere eight blog entries I re-read this evening, I managed to denigrate Catholics, poor people, victims of Tourette's syndrome, the homeless, Chinese gang members, and the proprietors of the La Imperial restaurant in Hayward, California.    

But...well, it was all very loving. In the spirit of fun. Or, that is to say, not insulting in spirit...really. Except perhaps for the La Imperial piece. And...OK, I showed the entry about Easter services to the Catholic friend I attended them with, and she was not happy.

But you know...I can only say that I am a slave to my art. These things are not necessarily things I think about, hold deeply or have any desire to propound for the sake of simply propounding them...it's what comes out. It's my voice...no, more accurately, it's what my fingers do when I let them. It's intuitive. Reflexive. Spinal.

Jackson Pollock, now, there's an example. Lord knows he had his critics, but when you think "American Art," when you think "abstract expressionism," who do you think of? Who's the man? Jackson Pollock. And how did he become immortal? He let it all hang out. He let the muses use him completely, thoroughly. He was an unapologetic vessel for the creative sense. He was who he was and he did what he did and that was it.

So OK, maybe I have a mild degree of literary Tourette's syndrome. But often, I find I craft shapes with my prose that trace the lines of societal templates -- mocking them, caressing them, turning them on their heads. And I think after so many years of not doing things, of not knowing which way to go, of rejecting my voice as an…all right, as an artist, a writer…it's time for me to reject doubt. To close my ears to the imagined scolds of critics.

I remember the words of the master sculptor with whom I apprenticed in days of yore: "Be ruthless in the pursuit of your art." That is what I must do.

Of course, he did end up leaving his wife, taking up with another woman, alienating his children and moving to Maryland.