idea zero

My greatest fear is that I will contradict myself.  -Robin Hobb  ...I never sweat that...I contradict myself constantly, I have no idea what I'm doing nor why I'm doing it...I just do more and -oh yeah- after I'm done I look it over with a keen appraising eye like an art critic or any of my stupid high school teachers ...examining it and deciding whether it fits my artistè d'ouerve, whether it is worthy to be included, and after I decide that point (I've hardly ever excluded any, well one this year...and I'm making it part of a new one) I toss it on the stack and go -christ I gotta sign all these? Uh yeah you do...but it seems unfair to have no artistic aspirations and idea zero not only of what to do next but of what I just did...I mean zero idea of anything...

I can't give a talk on anything especially art.  You know what pisses me off?  Well this stupid teacher I had in college for one:  He told us to take our notebooks and write in it every day "different pens and pencils whatever" of everything we were gonna read as we read it..."and at the end of the quarter, turn it in as your final exam!...well I was going along for a couple of weeks and I had read everything on the syllabus when I found a wonderful notebook from the fifties with an Indian on the cover. Perfect!  So I moved everything to the new notebook while a sat there with different pens and pencils, increased the number of scratch-outs and crossed off whole paragraphs and "re-wrote" them...and included a bunch of doodles as if I had been drawing idly while I read, I further aged the notebook so it would ring with authenticity, and added a section at the end as I "reread" one of the books, I "even" got excited and read additional books by the same authors -and at the end of the class I turned it in...my girlfriend had written her whole thing on the last night and wouldn't even change her pencil!  Well goddammit, she got an A++ and I got an A-- and a note! that said Doug you you could be really brilliant if you just put a little more effort into your work...!

She was delighted and laughed and laughed (lovingly).  I was irritated.  Still am! ...and I had even found a bookmark from the early fifties which I put in the notebook which would "fall out" when it was opened...

ink  bfk rives 11x15

ink  bfk rives 11x15