The Next Thing. . . At Last.

I finished the last Ulysses Glove on June 16, 2012. It has taken me nearly two years to decide what to do for my next long term project. I had a few ideas,

but when I thought them through, they dissolved. I was frustrated.

All through the process of thinking thinking, as Pooh would say, I kept drawing and stitching. I have come to love doing small embroideries of mostly words. There is something liberating about stitching a word on cloth, rather than writing it. It's almost childlike...learning to write in a new medium.

I hoped I could come up with an idea that incorporated stitching. More important, I wanted this project to be about my mother, as the Ulysses Gloves were about my father. My mother is alive, but her mind is so debilitated now, that I can work on something to do with her without her caring a whit about it.

I knew she had notebooks. I brought them home with me. They are filled with short stories (the beginnings...she never followed through), diary entries, and lists. Some of the covers have sketches of the female figure she drew again and again and again.

In one week I'll be at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, for ten days. I can work and work, with no day job, dog walking, carpooling. I am bringing her notebooks and I'll edit them so that there is some order to them.
And then, I shall stitch her words.


At first I didn't know what cloth I would use for the embroidery. Not the small handkerchiefs or doilies I've been using for my current pieces. One night I remembered I had a box of her nightgowns, from when she was a young married woman. I thought I knew where they were and I ran to see if my memory was true. They were there.

And now I have my project. To stitch her words, onto the clothes she wore when she was young, and had a life ahead of her. Her stories, her night clothes. The gowns she wore when she dreamed.

In a perfect world these would be an a room that would also include paintings I make of her room now, including the dresser covered with pill bottles, cigarette ashes, books, envelopes, and New Yorker magazines. There would be a carpet with a flower design, because though she is an epic slob she always loved any textile with flowers. There would be a bookcase with multiple copies of Proust, which she read again and again and again.

I don't have the art career to get that kind of real estate. But I'll start editing, and stitching. I expect that part alone will take me two or three years. Maybe by then someone will want to help me realize this vision I have. I don't know if my mother will still be alive. But I know that this is the project I want to do, and even if she can't appreciate it, it will do her proud.

page 620

So, I have started part 111 of Ulysses, which began on page 613. I have still been able to write out one page a day, though I'm not sure I can keep to that goal. I hope so. If I can, I should be finished with this project in around six months, which will be in August.
This section is pretty hard going. The text is dense, a wall of words with only a few breaks for paragraphs and quotes. But it gets even harder toward the end, when Molly Bloom begins the 80 page four sentence stream of thought that has no breaks at all.
I thought it might interest people to know what audio books I have listened to so far, while I work on this project. A lot of times I just listen to CNN or MSNBC, but lately, what with each republican candidate leaning ever farther to the right, I have a limit to how much I want to hear.
So, the books are:
If I Stay
My Hollywood
The Sun Also Rises
Secrets to Happiness
Away
The Three Weismans of Westport
The Lakeshore Limited
The Widowers Tale
Heir To The Glimmering World
My Abandonment
The Septembers of Shiraz
Private Life
I'd Know You Anywhere
Strength in What Remains
This Beautiful Life
State of Wonder
Lost City of Z
It's quite a variety. Murder mystery, a couple of y.a. books, non fiction, lofty fiction, chick lit. Within this list I'd say my favorite was Septembers of Shiraz, which was heartbreaking and beautiful. The next one, coming soon from my library, will be The Sense of an Ending. Sometimes I feel a little guilty that I am listening to books while writing Ulysses, because I can't really focus on what Joyce is saying when I am listening to a story. But mostly I think it helps me to focus and I feel like it enriches my life. I am a fairly slow reader and this allows me to "read" more than I could if I kept only to holding a book in my hands. I feel that listening to a book maximizes my time, and there are so many books I want to read and re-read, that doing this helps chip away at my ridiculously long list.
Anyway, I have not yet completed my page for this day, so off I go. Sadly, my new audio book isn't here yet, so I am stuck with politics.

Page 544

Yesterday I realized that I will probably be finished with the Ulysses Project this year...the year 2012 (the end of the world according to some people). When I started it, the end didn't even seem like a possibility, and now, it is soon to be a reality.
Part of me longs to just plow through, doing three or four or more pages daily. But I am also thankful that I am not finished, because when it is done I have the expectation, the hope and dream of showing it someplace fabulous to great acclaim and glory. So, with the end comes the inevitable fear of crushing failure.
Meanwhile, I have been working on small slinky drawings on color aid paper, which I bought when I was in college. Each piece of 6" x 9" paper is silkscreened in some glorious saturated intense color. Any mark one makes with a pen, or with gouache, pops, and in real life much more than on screen the final works are just plain luscious. Real eye candy. I hope to have twenty of these eventually, but so far only have four.

It's always nice to have a couple of projects going at once. One to take me years, and some to give me more instant gratification.