the ‘notebook[s]’ (aka ‘notes’ or ‘notework[s]’) {is / are} a selection of entries from a set of journals (notebooks - whatever) i’ve been keeping for over 50 years — i’m starting with a small selection and will be putting up more sections as i finish formatting them — i’m currently editing & formatting them all in adobe indesign and then preparing them for web publication using adobe dreamweaver

I have dozens of bound notebooks - hundreds of pages of computer print-outs and handwritten pages and a huge amount of text that was entered directly into the computer

the notes served various purposes over the years —
in part they are just journals — daily trivia — what i did (and more often what i didn’t do)
in part they were notes toward or about things i did or planned to do — entries on art - writing - music etc — some are focused on a subject other meandering

for a time i considered turning them into a ‘hypertext’ with different pathways through the text and links to explanatory text - (bibliography type material - images etc) — i may do some of this work in the future

i decided to divide the notes into one month sections and to work on them in a random order — the reason for this randomization {was / is} that i don’t think i have time to do the entire work —
i was afraid that if i started at the beginning i wouldn’t get to any of the more recent notes and that if i started with the recent notes and worked backwards i wouldn’t have time to get to the early notes —
i thought of reading through the text and choosing ‘the best’ material but this took too long and i was never really sure of what {was / is} the best material — my opinion on most of the sections was different each time i looked at them (ranging from pretty good to ok to just shit)

originally i made two separate timelines each with its own linking sequence — one was the chronological order of the notes and the other was the random sequence i had made for editing and posting the notes — this was too confusing and difficult to follow so i’m just using a chronological listing that will be updated as i add new notes

one problem with this method is that a lot of the writing continues from one month to the next and this continuity will be mostly lost until i can get most or all of the entries finished
ideally i would like to finish the entire text but there are many other things i want to do in the time i have remaining (which as noted above may be never))

i have no idea of how the text should or could be read — i suppose a reader (if there ever is one) can with a few random samplings — i don’t want to use cookies so there will be no way to mark visited links from one reading session to the next — maybe one could use a graph paper or old calendar

reading should be difficult not easy
i like making graphs and diagrams — ‘my ideal reader’ (a ridiculous concept) would make a notebook to go with the text for notes and annotations

colored text indicates different thematic aspects of the text (blue for art - violet for writing about writing etc) but the boundaries are fluid and i often have a hard deciding on a color —

for notes on punctuation see the site introduction