Obviously, some of the same “cast of characters” appear, some of the same locations, all encountered raw, before stepping onto a stage where all sorts of aesthetic and compositional issues come into play in terms of organizing what here, in its natural state, is a record that follows events as they occur, interruptions and digressions that are events in themselves, persistent returns to the interrupted event, new interruptions, returns and so on. I’ve elected to start this potentially endless process (chronicling is endless and now editing and publishing it here will be endless another time) in 1976. The two volumes of ABC STREET take place in 1977. I’ve never trusted memory, so I think I’ve written instead of remembering.

For me to stop on the path of chronicling to make compositions would be, of necessity, to interrupt the process that is ecstatically demanding in its own way. My art has never been concerned with being artful. My own lifework is, I think, more extreme and is more of an actual second life, a life lived again, a double, a twin to my life, than other records I know of. The title of one of Pasternak’s early works translates as My Sister - Life and of course that could be the title of any writer’s or artist’s record of life, no matter how far away it is from ordinary journal, diary, memoir and the like. 1, published by Green Integer in 2002, and HANK FOREST’S PARTY, forthcoming from Green Integer) are meant to explicitly raise questions about fiction and present themselves as models of something else. This is the Chronicle as it was (and is still) written: rough and unfiltered in the sense that it is different from every published or gallery-displayed form derived from it, when editing was allowed to go so far as reshaping and re-organizing the Chronicle’s record of the flow of events over time for artistic purposes, but also in order to make what we believe is a necessary aesthetic argument for a radically different basis for fiction, even more so than in the sense that every work of art is an argument for itself and against everything else.

New pages will appear with no particular regularity (website will have to be checked to see if something fresh is there). The Monica’s Chronicle that will begin here and that will be added to whenever pages of the original, single-spaced typewritten Chronicle from 1976, cramped and hard-to-read, have been reformatted so that we can edit them (lightly, to make them more intelligible and to untie some knots and tangles) will be rough and unfiltered. I have some ideas about its roots and about some novels, notebooks, journals and so on that don’t at all resemble it yet may have set me on this path, but I’m not interested in talking about that here. Monica’s Chronicle is absolutely a daily activity that did not begin on purpose. Certainly not undertaken with the “web” or the “internet” in mind (I began it, in some form, in the mid ‘70’s), it needed a medium that didn’t exist. I believe that the Chronicle is meant for this medium - and may be at least one artist’s revenge on the triumph of the democracy of chatter and commerce over what I take to be the original impulses of the “web”.

Technology has, thankfully, caught up with me: now there’s a way to “publish” the raw, unfiltered Monica’s Chronicle directly, without the shaping ideas of “book” or “publisher” intervening.

Roswell bookbinding reggy