The Ten Thousand Things

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The Ten Thousand Things

I'm taking a brief intermission from Ulysses, here, to make the announcement that sometime in the last few days I put up my ten thousandth sketchbook drawing on my website since March of 2007. Yes, I admit that some of the work is rubbish, but the intention was to generate as much imagery as possible. My original goal was to see if I could do this, starting at age 56, before I reached my 60th birthday, which will happen in July.

The work I have done and will continue to do here is the background pattern for almost everything else I am concerned with; it springs from my irrational mind and finds its way out into my other artistic pursuits, my teaching practice, my life. Most of these drawings have been done in the early mornings- a time between the dream state and the worries of the day, a time when I could allow my thoughts to meander and not need a direction or a particular attention to pressing matters of living. As a framework, the parts of the drawing practice that end up here, on the blog, are usually loosely concerned with imagery accompanying the text of Joyce's Ulysses- hence lots of Cyclops, Circe-angel, piano playing demons, cat, citizen dog, etc imagery- and meant to be counterpoints to the verses deconstructed from the text of the book.

I intend to continue this blog until I have worked my way through the balance of the text of Ulysses. I think this will happen around the end of 2011. I haven't decided, yet, how to handle the last chapter of the book, as it is really just one long rambling sentence- I have toyed with the idea of finishing up with a 44-line poem to bring an end to the project. At that point I will also stop publishing to this blog and move on to another project.

Thanks,

Mike