2026-06-08 23:24:51
- Here, I will treat of the many novels that I have designed over the years, and also why most if not all have been abject failures;
- Unbeknownst to me, there was a fatal flaw in the Novel-as-a-System;
- Essentially, the novels I designed were far too grand in scale and scope; they would require me to write 1000 pages for each;
- I decided, then, since I have literally dozens of unfinished novels in varying states of disrepair, that I would just start documenting the design concepts for my novels;
- I will try to stick as much as possible to a kind of design science, even though I am not a scientist by any standards; I did get a degree in design, specifically Computer-Assisted Sound Design; I eventually came to apply the design principles that I learn, but to my writing AND my visual art practice; it was easy, it turns out it's the same thing for any discipline, mode of expression, or genre;
- In the past, whenever I architected my next masterpiece and begun working its theory and outline, the course of history itself, and much grief and loss, interrupted me and interfered with my work, in such a way that the work was abandoned and scrapped, and I was never to return to it; it ended in trauma and the death of the artist's soul; now my biggest fear is being interrupted and losing my soul again;
- There's something wrong with the system, the works ate too grandiose; they should be encapsulated in much shorter pieces; the novel, such as The Nihilist or In The Name of Beauty & Truth, are Design Concepts; in any given day, I can only write one single facet or module for the (Cultural) Software Library; I can't finish a 1000-page novel in one sitting, but I can "write" ("design", the concepts of) 1000 novels in one sitting; there is a tragic flaw in the narratological system that must be patched, corrected;
- I began treaing novels/novellas as *"databases-of-images" back in 1998, back when I was working on a concept of Textbook Art, textbooks which weren't really textbooks, but were a kind of disciplinary allegory" where the textbook that you were ready of whatever discipline was actually a mystical allegory; it looks like, say, a Physics Textbook, except everything is slightly wrong as you get deeper into the text; then you start having epiphanies; I also developed the concept of a "Surrealist Textbook" and also an "Abstract Handbook"; I've written countless pages about these design concepts, yet was never able to get around to actually writing them, and its a really difficult concept in the first place; then I thought of just writing a massive Glossary of Art History where I would treat of every known concept in art history and art historiography, aesthetics, the philosophy of art;
- These days, I'm thinking less about these grandiose mega-projects much of the time as I try to focus on more quotidian things;
- Don't get me wrong, it's great, I think, to try to build a Cathedral of Dreams, to have a Grand Vision, an artistic vision that you work towards with what I call holy ambition for the sacred journey;
- It literally takes a microsecond to come up with the design concept for a new novel, at least when you practice what I call the novelistic phenomenology; that is, it's really the Novel-as-a-System, a kind of simulation one runs in one's mind; the actual novel itself can take on a multitude of forms; the design concept is necessarily pluraL, as it can take many forms; I think, however, that I'm just going to try to write a page per day towards these novel-concepts, working on many different novels on any given day; I figure if I can write 10-20 pages per day, in 100 days, that's at least 1000 pages, if not 2000; or another way to look at it, 10 pages per day is 3650 pages per year, and so in 10 years I could potentially have written 36,500 pages, which is a lot of pages, more than enough to finish the totality of my novels that are extant, and then some;
- [...]
2026-06-09 06:14:49
- It really does seem as though History has a mind of its own, its own Geist, and that she intervenes in people's lives; in my case, my career as an artist was characterized by a long sequence of catastrophic failures; it couldn't have been worse than it was; as a visual artist, I had my work stolen, defaced, lost, damaged by water, everything that could go wrong, went wrong, and horribly; the thing is, I'm still here to tell the story, my story which is limited, imperfect, yet unique; I alone am the First Witness of my life, I alone can testify to what actually happened; and yet even I can get it wrong sometimes, remembering events in the wrong order or omitting critical pieces of information; that's why I always refer back to the Records/Recordings (The Refcards-System), as they cannot lie; the problem is, one displaces the problem of the integrity of the experience to a whole, and most often difficult, problem of hermeneutic triangulation;
- It's partly why I believe so fervently in design concepts as well as design science in general; Essentially, designers today are engineers of what Buckminster Fuller called livingry, a new category of design in opposition to the weaponry that humans have been working on and optimizing each new generation as far back as we can remember; livingry, I believe, can heal the wound of History, of what I call historical pathologies or historiopathies; the experiences I relayed above, of the many ways disaster has struck me in my career as an interdisciplinary artist-researcher, are historiopathic at the microscopic scale; design, though, was how I made it out of the labyrinth each and every time; it was my salvation in many ways; again, I stand before you, giving you my first-witness testimony of what really happened, as I sit here in my studio, The Historiotheque, which has been conceived, and designed, as a Witness-Box; should anything tragic happen to me, I hope The Historiotheque, if only as a design concept for a kind of historical Art-House, a veritable Temple of Memory, can be passed down to future generations of artists and designers; it is in this way that we balance out the Invisible Forces of History, through a succession of design principles, design concepts, and the distributed ledger of the actual designs themselves across time and space; it's why I had to reinvention myself as an amateur archivist, in order to combat entropy and disorder; I never knew that the basic Project would lead me to so much greatness, not in heroic feats, but in the *discipline of quitidian things; SEE: Paul Otlet’s design concept of a Mundaneum as a kind of living archive;
- And so I will be keeping logs and documenting here the ongoing and open-ended history of these countless design concepts for my novelistic phenomenologies, the *NOVEL-AS-A-SYSTEM*.