I am back home in my studio after a difficult ten days in New England. Difficult for many ways I would rather not talk about here, including a minor car accident in which thankfully no one was injured. The Electron Car is unharmed; the accident happened while I was a passenger in someone else's car. Some of the good things about my trip were that I got to go to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where I saw an exhibit of David Hockney's portraits. And I did a lot of shopping.

I always shop when I'm up in New England, usually for books and art materials. I also acquire (am given) stuff of various kinds from my parents' collections. This can include everything from housewares to boxes of pasta to clothing. There is a lot of just plain bulk material goods lying around in my family's house, ranging in quality from the shabby to the useful to the unrecognized treasure.

I loaded up the Electron and brought some of the bulk back to my home. Now it is all over my floor. There is a pile of old rags, used to cushion art work in transit. There are magazines and books and clothes. And then there is the art, left over from my Massachusetts show in the late autumn, which is now back with me to be re-cycled into other shows. It's bulk material art product, but it will be someone else's treasure someday soon I hope.

It is not proper (Bostonian) to work in a messy studio. I must put everything away before I can start new work. That's what I've been doing. But after fourteen years of living in my current apartment, there just isn't much room left to stash stuff. That means I must get rid of some of it. I have to sort it out. I don't think I need my algebra homework from 2001, but what if there is some artistic sketch or interesting remark scribbled among the polynomials? I can't just pitch it out without looking at it. Same for other archival papers. If you think that scanning archival papers into digital files and dumping all the paper is a good idea, think again. The paper may last longer than the CD's or DVD's that hold the digital files, not to mention the obsolete machines that read the discs. And what a waste of bytewidth and time to put non-critical documents into digital form. I'd rather concentrate on the more important task of digitizing old sound recordings, which are already almost lost.

Throughout my trip I did at least some work on math, even if it was only one or two problems a night. Solving math problems is so much easier than solving problems of sickness and old age. But right now I must consider the shifting geometries and proportions and configurations of too much stuff and too little space.

Posted at 2:18 am | link