Maps
1.
A fellow reader and writer asked me in an email exchange some months back if I’d ever written a book. I answered:
I have never written a book, but I have written and self-published three quasi-books.
The first, called London and a Year, was a book of photos and writings from London, where I lived for a year while studying journalism in 2011–2012. It wasn't very good, and I don't make much mention of it, as I don't count it as a success or accomplishment and am not very proud of it. But I did my best with it, and now life goes on. I learned from it and don't regret it, but most of the copies are where they belong: in boxes in a basement or storage space somewhere, and not in the way of anyone’s eyes.
The second was an ebook called There Were These People, which was a mix of journal entries, blog posts, and fictions written over a few years. Most of the things in it had been published on my (now defunct) website earlier, so it wasn't as though I set out to write a book from the start. I just took individual pieces from across a few years and put them in ebook form.
The third was a small batch of handwritten books containing short-to-very-short texts. That one was called Stories of Loneliness. What stands out to me most about it now is that it was a kind of monastic experience. I was like a scribe, sitting in the library in Chicago day after day, writing my pitiful words one at a time, over and over again in notebooks, and seeing their few strengths and many weaknesses appearing more and more along the way.
I added that I’d written a piece about Stories of Loneliness in 2022, before deleting several years of my writing from the internet, which I’ve done enough times now to know that it’s something I feel compelled to do every so many years. (Maybe this is foolish. Maybe it is wise. Probably it is just the ego chewing on itself for fear of being eaten. In any case, I’ve never regretted it. It’s felt like a wonderful death and cleansing and rebirth each time.) I then shared a copy of that piece with him, as I do keep records of the things I’ve written and deleted. And while I wouldn’t recommend looking directly at the past for too long, or, as with a solar eclipse, without protective (psychic) glasses, I have found that taking quick looks back here and there helps me to orient myself in my present surroundings, to find my footing in this weird space of self that never stops feeling simultaneously strange and familiar, old and new.
For the sake of providing a slightly fuller picture of what making Stories of Loneliness was like, here’s an excerpt from the piece I wrote about it:
About a month before I returned to the US from Colombia in 2014, I decided to put together a small batch of handmade books. Here's how I introduced the project at the time:
“I’m planning to release a limited number of handmade books in January 2015. The books will include some of my very (very) short stories and a few of my slightly longer ones (written between April 2014 and December 2014). Each book will be numbered and made to order from store-bought notebooks.”
I titled the book Stories of Loneliness from the Foot of the Eastern Hills and Elsewhere: Oh Land of Sun I Yearn to See You. A handful of friends placed orders, and I got to work on their books shortly after Christmas 2014.
The first few copies I made were pretty rough and should probably be burned if they haven't already been. But midway through I found my groove, as well as my preferred notebook, and from there the process became a kind of meditation.
Each book took about a week to make. I would go to the Harold Washington Library in Chicago and write until my hand stopped working. It was a learning experience. I kept thinking how glad I was that I was doing it and how I never wanted to do it again.
2.
In two other recent email exchanges, also with fellow readers and writers, I found reason to mention the Australian author Gerald Murnane. I have in turn been thinking a great deal about him. In particular, his book of short fictions Stream System has been moving regularly through the gyri in my brain. There are two main reasons for that:
It’s an eccentric, serpentine collection of texts that I would like to reread.
It was a huge (and in retrospect, too huge) influence on me and several of the writings that comprised a fourth quasi-book of mine that I’d somehow forgotten all about.
That quasi-book is a PDF of “words and photos” called Maps, which I self-published in 2019 and sold for $2–$5. Here’s how I described it then:
Maps is an 85-page PDF with three short texts and 47 color photos from Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, South Korea, and Taiwan. Three years in the making, Maps fuses fiction and nonfiction and blurs the lines between them. "Definitely read this one before you die," someone might say once.
As far as I know, that last point has yet to come to fruition. But the millennium is still young. And with every new piece of AI-generated art and literature that enters our brave new world via vacant and inanimate vessels, wholly untouched by amniotic fluid and all the substances of life that flow and follow, I feel my PDF’s chances improving.
Anyway, here’s Maps for free and in full.1
Acknowledgements/Addendum:
My utmost gratitude and respect to Gerald Murnane, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Teju Cole, Alex Webb, Louis C.K., Laurie Metcalf, Horace and Pete, Jim Carrey, Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sam Harris, Waking Up, Neal (RIP), my wife, my parents, my friends and family (here and gone), Southeast Asia, and the American Midwest. Your seeds and eggs are scattered all over this book. I stole them from you, but only because I loved them and/or you too much to stop myself. My apologies for taking so much and making only a PDF of maps with it.