Kirmizi_ada

Like the red carpet in Rex Carpin’s cheerful book, there is a glorious and ever-unrolling list of things I have to confess to. Hooray!

One is laziness. Another, relatedly, is checking the “Word Count” function under the Tools menu, as I continue to puff and fluff my weird dissertation toward the ionosphere.

A third is wanting to write. Often, always, well, more than I want most other things.

A fourth is that I am peeking ruefully out of the vanishing end of a period of voluntary inarticulacy, which lasted from about 1996 to now. I used to blame this on Neo-Conservatism, but that lost its currency and flair (not the movement, but the alibi). Nevertheless, I am somehow no longer really used to, nor used for, giving an account of myself.

Neither has living in Berlin for the past twelve months fertilized my first language in any regularly scheduled way, and I find I feel—at this salty moment—impoverished in a number of languages.

I listen to friends pruning their consciousnesses with finely animated concepts and observations. I jump toward their towering, italic art of speaking! What are they about to know, and with what words? Can I do the same? If not, what is that scrawny prohibitor, wishing to say less, until…

One thing I do to stave off the directive to write often, well, and passionately is to say: writing is long, it is imperiously plural, filled with glue and notoriety, it is a short story or a long story, a credible and trusty monograph like Margaret Thatcher’s (two-volume!) biography. You can bat it against a banister and hear something.

I wait though, as if gazing at a giant download bar behind the skyline called “Writing”.

But what if there were a plan, a good Weberian goal, a consequence? Otherwise than publishing. Why shouldn’t writing be entirely public—oh, some sudden second thoughts lay in.

Long story short: word count. Karmically, I’ve earned the beast. Each day, an enunciation, in ascending order, from one word, to two, to three, and so, forth.

And no genres: no aphorisms, no short talks, or novelettes. Just one unsuspecting enunciation after the other—with commas like chandeliers, adverbs like tax shelters, cataphorae like prayers, metaphors like commas.

I’ll break on Fridays and Saturdays. Start date, Monday, Aug. 20.