moment, moment, moment.

MOMENT(um) (or) just a moment, is the last book I made for the spring contemporary book binding class. However, I have the feeling I will be making this book for the rest of my life, because it begins to touch on how I want to tell stories, sequentially, visually, combining and overlapping layers of information. The process of making this book started to clarify how my brain has been working through ideas about storytelling, sequence and maybe ultimately how memory works.

I think amy hempel (big big crush) said it best in an interview with the Paris Review’s Art of Fiction (no. 176) back in 2003 when asked “So what do you think a story is?” She replied, “Years ago, Lenny Michaels was publishing some really fine short-short paragraph-long stories in good literary magazines. And I asked him if he took some heat from people who thought they weren’t really stories. He said, “You tell them what a story is. They don’t know.” This corroborated what I already suspected. It harkens back to the way you examine experience. Some writers have a more defined sense of cause and effect. Plot. My sense of life is more moment, moment, and moment. Looking back, they accrue and occur to you at a certain time and maybe you don’t know why, but you trust that they are coming back to you now for a reason. And you make a leap of faith. You trust you can put these moments together and create story.”

This is a book about moments….initially inspired by yet another passage from the book Einstein’s Dreams, but ultimately enriched by the interview above.

The text is a mixture of fragments written by me and found text excerpts by other folks like pablo neruda and his book of questions, amy hempel, alan lightman, and two great volumes called the tiny book of tiny stories volumes I + II by HITRECORD and joseph gordon levitt. I think there is even a little neko case in there somewhere.

I can’t really say much about the format of this book except it is an accordion with sewn signatures on the valleys of some areas and the mountains of others. Some pages interrupt one another, become jumbled and blurred. Some overlap to accumulate in areas while other areas remain sparse. It is another one of those books you have to really see in person, but here are some images for the looking.