page 600!

So, I am almost through with page 600. The past hundred pages or so have been very easy to do. Not easy like reading a magazine, but in the context of writing neat text onto a yellow rubber glove with a sharpie pen, easy. In approximately thirteen pages the party is over. There begins part three, and is the most difficult section in a difficult book. I think I read someplace that the last eighty pages of the book consist of just four sentences.
I have been able to do at least 1 and 1/2 pages each day for some time now, often getting through two or more pages. That's why this last hundred pages flew by. Soon my pace will slow down considerably. I'm trying to keep reminding myself that it is okay to finish just a half page, or three quarters of a page when the text is so dense, but it will be hard to keep myself from pushing to keep to a one page a day quote.

In equal parts I want to finish this project and not finish it. It will be hard to imagine what I'll do with the extra hour to two hours I now spend almost everyday on this thing. Also, there is the mounting anxiety about where this will end up...what gallery, room, space. Who will see it, write about it, want it, want to show it. For now though, I just have to keep myself in the right now, and today, make it to the end of page 601. A breeze.

page 519

The pillow above is what I use when I am so sleepy from writing Ulysses onto the gloves that I can't keep my eyes open. It happens especially on days when I have already driven my son and other kids to school, worked at the library, walked the dog a couple of times. I'll sit down to write and I have to force my eyes to stay open for each letter of each word. When the amount of effort is just too much and making the writing too slow I'll grab the ugly pillow off the chair and put it on my desk, right over whatever glove I am working on, take off my glasses, turn off the television or the audio book and close my eyes. Usually I fall sound asleep for ten or fifteen minutes and most of the time it does the trick.
At first when I wake up from my power nap I feel kind of groggy, but soon I have the focus and the energy to continue writing at a much faster pace.
I could probably be doing more than I am right now. I have had a lot of "free" time. But I feel like I need to make other sorts of art as I work on this project in case someone wants to buy something or needs something for a show.
I second guess almost every single thing I do. My art, this project, my housekeeping efforts, my past, my future and everything in between. That makes me tired, and so I grab the ugly pillow and sleep off the doubts.
Two days ago I was rejected, again, by RISCA. That stands for Rhode Island State Council for the Arts. I was rejected by a jury of my peers for this years grant for drawing or printmaking. I have never gotten this grant though I have applied more than a dozen times. It's not really a grant. It's really a contest. Anyway, I was so depressed that I gave myself a sort of sick day and decided to just draw whatever I wanted to draw and eat whatever I wanted to eat (scrambled eggs with Swiss cheese, toast with strawberry jam), and take my dog for long walks. It helped a little bit. I didn't need the ugly pillow at all. I had angry energy, sad energy and I worked all day long, until I had to pick up my son from school in the evening.
I did need the pillow today, but no matter how many doubts I have about everything I do not doubt for one instant that I won't finish this project.

Guilty Pleasure

Page 475. 

Right now the section of Ulysses I am copying is easy breezy. Many of the sentences are very short. It looks almost like the format you'd see in a play, and therefore, unlike the previous section, I am moving pretty quickly. I am doing almost two pages a day...sometimes a little more. Of course I feel guilty. I feel like I should be doing three or four pages a day right now. I should be zipping right along, but I can't bring myself to work on this more than an hour and a half a day. 

If I could eliminate guilt and worry and anxiety I would have so much extra space inside of my head. 

Late this afternoon I finally wrote out a short note asking to be paid for artwork that had been sold last April. I wrote the note on my i pad last week. I let my husband and a friend look at the note and edit it, slashing it to half it's original size. My husband took away all the bits about me feeling badly, about making sure the person who owes me money knows I don't hold any ill will, knows that I am probably more concerned about his emotional state than my financial state. But when the note was stripped of all the sticky goo I let it stay that way. Short, sweet, business like. I need to put it in the mail tomorrow. It is already stamped and the person it is addressed to should have it by Wednesday.  I already feel guilty about adding to his financial burden, even though if he sold every drawing of mine he has at the gallery it would add up to less than three thousand dollars. Anyway, I did write the note and I am going to send it and guilt won't stop me, because I feel more angry than guilty. 

As for writing more, I feel like I am doing enough for now. Maybe when I am really close to the end I'll do more. Maybe not. Haruki Murikami wakes every morning at around 4:00 a.m. and works each day on writing for five or six hours. It makes me feel guilty for not waking to do the same. If I did that I would be done with gloves each day by nine or so, and I could use studio time to make drawings, instead of sacrificing one for the other. But at four in the morning I want to be asleep. And Murikami goes to bed at nine, which would never do in my house. I would never see my husband and barely see my son. And that would make me feel more guilty. 

Oh well. Maybe I can figure out a way to use all this guilt to spur me to action. 

In the mean time I continue along, getting things done, slowly, but most definitely surely.

Page 417

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4Wm5JYBaHY
It has gotten longer between posts. The pages I am writing in Ulysses are covered with type...long words, short words, almost no paragraph breaks. Just page after page of thick, dense type. It hasn't been that fun to transcribe lately. In part this is because I don't have an audio book at the moment. Stories can take my mind off of what I am doing until I become lost. The last book I listened to was The Sun Also Rises. I had always hated Hemmingway, but after a while of listening to William Hurt read about Jake and Brett and Spain, bullfights and fishing I found myself looking forward to going back to it, and therefore to writing on my gloves. When I finished listening to the book I was sad...I miss those characters.
A lot of the time I listen to television when I write. The best show to listen to is Sex & the City because I have seen all the episodes numerous times, they usually make me happy, and I don't really have to pay much attention to the plot. But that isn't always on (unless someone knows of an all Sex & the City channel I may have missed), so much of the time I listen to the news, which seems sadder and more upsetting each and every day. Between the economy, Obama's worrisome poll numbers, and the lunatics running the republican party, I can barely stand to pay attention. It is like watching a Stephen King book acted out on the screen as a reality show.
I am writing almost a page a day right now. I had been doing more, but between the back to school schedule for my son, plus the denseness of the pages, plus the lack of distraction, I have slowed down a bit. I think on page 428 things lighten up in Ulysses, and maybe, with any luck, it will be the same out there in the news world. I can only hope.

Page 363 - August 5, 2011

There are only 27 more pages to write until I am halfway through this project. Sometimes when I am writing on a glove my mind wanders to the time when I will be really close...like a few pages from the end. But no matter how much time I have each day to work on this, even if I do get a residency (not likely) it is going to take at least another year, and probably closer to two. I pretty much work on it every single day, writing anywhere from a page to a page and a half. In a way it's a good thing that it is so time consuming. There is something peaceful about the time it takes to do this. I can't speed through it. It just takes a lot of time to write word after word after word, onto a rubber glove that needs to be turned over each time I run out of space on one side. Write and write and write, then turn. Write and write and write, then turn. The glove is a little smaller down towards the fingers but also more difficult to write on, because of the thumb sleeve, which starts higher than the other finger sleeves. So, no matter what this is just very time consuming and labor intensive. And I can't make the book fewer pages than it is (783).  I have learned how to incorporate this hour or hour and a half of writing on a glove each and every day, same as I spend time each day brushing my teeth, showering, doing the dishes, walking the dog, eating and sleeping. The time has always been there. If I weren't doing this I might be doing more of my other artwork. But probably I would waste it. I could probably even find two hours a day to do this, but what's the rush?

May 1st

Page 262.
While I wrote Ulysses the movie All About Eve was on the television in my studio. There is hardly a better film to have on while working. The conversation is perfect...everything about it is perfect.
I only did a little over one page because I always have to think about whether or not to work on drawings. Today I wanted to keep going with my series within a series, the paintings on math papers. These are a few I'm doing with hearts and words, about saying the right thing and the wrong things. Also, I started a new slinky drawing and once I get going on those I become a little obsessed.
I thought about people who had a moment where they went from obscure, to famous. I thought of David Sedaris and also, more recently, Julie Powell of Julie and Julia fame. What must it be like to know that you are getting the thing you wanted? The attention, the money, the chance to be a success? I admit that while there is a tiny part of me that believes it's still possible for me, for the most part I feel like it is not going to happen. But if it does, I think it will be this glove project that turns things around. If not, I suppose I won't have to buy dishwashing gloves till I die.

Artist Statement for the Ulysses project.

Oh No! I forgot this most important piece of the puzzle.

Ulysses and the Gloves

            I have begun a project that addresses the crosscurrents between my need to make visual art and my awareness that my world view is shaped by reading (the instigator of empathy) and writing (a source of self-discovery). It has become increasingly critical for me to use words in my work in a meaningful and beautifully visual way. In this new piece I will engage not my own words but those of modernist master, James Joyce. Words once considered dirty; filthy; no better than household scum. 265,000 words so unclean that they were prosecuted for obscenity in the United States, and for 12 years after their first appearance in print, considered unfit for publication in the United Kingdom. I’m referring, of course, to the text of Joyce’s groundbreaking novel, Ulysses.

            My father died in 2007; Ulysses was his favorite book. I remember that he kept numerous copies in our house when I was child, and when he could he went to the annual Bloomsday reading of the book, which takes 24 hours. A reverence for reading—Ulysses in particular—is one of my family legacies; cleanliness is another: work of keeping the house free of every kind of filth.

            It’s from the intersection of these two legacies that my new piece derives. I am in the process of writing the entire text of Joyce’s Ulysses on pairs of workaday yellow rubber gloves—however many pairs it takes to copy the entire book. I expect it will use over 400 gloves in all, and will take me at least two years to complete. It may sound crazy, but I’ve not felt this passionate about my art for a long time; this is something I will do for myself, first and foremost. If others see and share in it, all the better.

            For me, yellow rubber gloves suggest the simplicity and quietness of most people’s lives—especially women’s lives. As cleaning tools they come into contact with the filth we generate on a daily basis, and are designed to protect us from it, to keep our hands pristine, dirt and germ free. Rubber gloves are the objects that not only distance us from the byproducts of human existence, but help us (help working women) make those byproducts—the waste, dirt, dust, stains, stools, footprints— invisible. By contrast, Joyce’s Ulysses called the very same muck to the fore of literature, put it on display, and told us that this is it: this is who we are and what we make. This is life.

            Writing the text of Ulysses by hand—by my hand, in my careful, calligraphic script—on the surface of hundreds of yellow rubber gloves is my way of asserting that we can never really make our filth disappear; like my ink it, too, is indelible. It’s also my way of questioning, like Joyce, whether the soot of our lives really is filth after all, or perhaps instead the raw material of art, and by extension, if the endless, unmeasured and unacknowledged work of women across decades, centuries, millennia is not, like modernist literature, a kind of performance art in itself.

            Finally, this project allows me, as an artist who pieces together bits of found time in a crowded life for thinking, reading, writing, and making art, to create something epic. I am not James Joyce, but the act of writing on the gloves—a difficult and time-consuming undertaking—makes me feel close to him and his words as well as to my father. I speak aloud every word to myself as I write it: an act of near-total artistic and solitary absorption.

           

the Ulysses Glove Project

This will be a blog devoted to my Ulyyses Glove Project. I am copying the entire text of James Joyce's Ulysses on to workaday yellow rubber gloves. I've been doing this for over a year now and I am on page 251. People ask how many gloves I have and honestly, I'm not sure, but probably around 125. I get approximately two pages on each glove, depending on how dense the text is on that particular page. Anyway, this is just the first post. After this mundane start I'll get into the grit of emotions I have while doing this crazy thing, and keep track of my progress. Welcome.