ANTILOG_18July26a

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ANTILOG_18July26a

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2026-07-18 04:44:23

- I wrote last time about an academic paper I was working on which was on THE PHENOMENON OF PAINTING or whatnot; I discovered a book that already does exactly what I was trying to do; it's called THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF PAINTING, by Nigel Wentworth;
- This kind of threw me off-guard; I was forced to start all over to try to find something worthwhile that I could actually contribute to the field; I wanted to write a phenomenological essay, on painting at first, and then thought maybe I could do it on the artist's workspace; I was going to take a phenomenological view of the Bateau-Lavoir, the space where Picasso had his studio in the early 20th century and many others, "la bande à Picasso" as they are often called, or "Picasso and friends"; I wanted to reconstruct the space with all of its ambient, atmospheric qualities; this proved difficult as I couldn't find enough sources that talked about the actual space qua space; usually it's mostly talked about in terms of Picasso's studio and what he painted while he was living there; his then-girlfriend Fernande Olivier documented a great deal of it, I just haven't gotten around to finishing the book;
- I have been working hard on new pieces of ambient, experimental sound design, which is what I call what I do, even when it's not digital work, like my works for piano and organ and whatnot; it's just what I've always called it; I took a piece of music, a famous, old medieval Gregorian chant known as Dies Irae, took just a section of it and looped it and added virtual instruments; I layered the instruments and then in the final mix, I added the sound of a Blackhawk military helicopter; I called it IN SEARCH OF SATIE: HISTORICAL RESCUE MISSION; as part of my ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM series of sound designs, I created this piece by Satie and several others; I made one with Mussorgsky's Meditation, another with Satie's Gnossienne No. 3; I just created one with Franz Liszt's Totentanz; the idea is a kind of Spectral Music; I take pieces of classical music and make a "re-arrangement", I call it, focusing mainly on the spectral qualities of the piece; I create layer upon layer upon layer of virtual instruments, often with slight effects like reverb, or some slight distorsion; then I work on the actual audio file of this, adding ambient/atmospheric elements, like the sounds of birds singing in the morning for the Gnossienne piece, a crowd of people chatting for the Mussorgsky piece; I plan on continuing this sound design series indefinitely;
- I'm  basically making a form of Sound Collage, but the fact that I focus on spectral qualities, the timbre of the overall sound, plus the extensive use of layering, makes it, I think, into something unique; I am calling them "variations", though they are only really variations in the spectral domain; I am also mostly using samples from the actual music that I loop in FruityLoops; in any case, here is the first piece I made the other day, called IN SEARCH OF SATIE: HISTORICAL RESCUE MISSION, which is a variation on the Dies Irae theme:

- The piece about the Bateau-Lavoir I mentioned above ended up turning into something else, a story about a researcher who finds some old journals written by an "unknown painter" who lived at the time that Picasso was at the Bateau-Lavoir, who actually lived IN the building, but who was entirely lost to history; I named him Gabriel Finch and he was a young Englishman; I also had an idea before that for a book I called The Cubist House which was a kind of comedy about the Bateau-Lavoir, with characters being on these sets with cardboard cut-outs or whatnot, something inspired by my many readings of the novels of William S. Burroughs, who often did the same thing or something similar; a friend of mine I was talking about it with at the time said it would make a great play and they were even willing to volunteer to play a part in it; this was, to me, proof that my idea was a good idea, but the concept behind it kept changing;
- I realize that what I call "design concepts for novels" keep transforming from one concept to another; I start working on a new book and it continuously keeps transforming into something else; I ended up with so many ideas for so many new books that it kind of paralyzed me; that's when I decided it would perhaps best be a selection of short stories, which are much easier to write in many ways, though also in some ways more difficult; the basic idea is that I figured no one would ever really read all my theoretical, philosophical writings, so it was better to "show" it through short fiction and whatnot, painting series, musical series, than to try to "tell" it via said very abstract philosophy;
- The story about the researcher discovering the journals I was tentatively calling THE WASHBOAT PAINTINGS, as the name of the Bateau-Lavoir in English translates to "washboat" or else "laundry boat" is perhaps a more common term; the researcher was actually researching the history in painting of representations of laundry boats/laundry ships when they found the private journals of Gabriel Finch in an old estate sale in London; anyway, I wrote a bunch of stuff and now am kind of moving onto something else, though I don't really know what exactly; I'm more or less working on several other novels I started recently, like THE CHRONOTOPIUM, THE NTH CRUSADE,  a book of short stories that I was talking about called HISTORIOPHANY, and a theoretical book called ABSTRACT CHARACTEROLOGY, which I thought I had talked about on here before, though it appears I haven't yet; the book of short stories, HISTORIOPHANY, is basically made up of stories where the main character has their own unique "historiophanic experience"; the first story, about the researcher finding the journals and whatnot, ends with a mystical-ecstatic experience where the main character has a vision of being in the Bateau-Lavoir, a very bizarre, and of course absurd, visionary experience, kind of like a Surrealist dream; I actually talked a lot to my friend about these recurring dreams I had in my life of this kind of "Cubist Dream-House"; my recent experience at the Abbaye Saint-Benoît-du-Lac had an influence on this idea of characters walking endlessly through the dark corridors of the Bateau-Lavoir; I didn't talk much about that experience on this antilog I don't think, I think I just mentioned it briefly in passing; in any case, it was a pretty powerful experience which I should probably get into at some point, as it has influenced by work a great deal in the last few weeks since I spent the weekend there;
- Here is the second piece I made in the series of sound designs of spectral sound collages of classical music; it is called ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM: MUSSORGSKY'S MEDITATION and is a variation on - you guessed it! - Mussorgsky's Meditation, though I only used the first 25 measures or so, if I remember correctly (Note: I used a field recording of a busy crowd of people talking in the sound collage):

- I was going over my Picasso notes the other day, notes that I began writing 25 years ago when I was studying Picasso's Demoiselles painting and subsequently studying Cubism; I spent two years studying just Picasso's painting and then another two years studying Cubism; I took several hundred pages of notes; this whole project, ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM started last month, give or take, when I started studying modern art again, modernism in particular, and Cubism also more specifically; I made a series of about five Portraits of Picasso, then several Portraits of Erik Satie, which was at the point I started thinking about the concept for a IN SEARCH OF SATIE series; that's what I called the Satie Portraits, which later became the series of musical pieces/sound designs; this was at the time I was working on THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT SERIES (of paintings), which I have mentioned here before (I believe I said at one point that the ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM project was actually a "subproject" of THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT; here, for the record, is the last piece I published online from the IN SEARCH OF SATIE series of Sound Collages, with the same title as the previous one, it's just version 2.0 ("v.2.0"):

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2026-07-18 06:32:06

- I mentioned above one of my new books which I am calling ABSTRACT CHARACTEROLOGY; I created a new GitHub Repository a short while ago which is dedicated to "Design Concepts for Novelistic Phenomenologies"; the basic premise thus far is that there was a fatal flaw in the system by which I wrote novels, or tried to write novels, over the course of the last 30 years; in the README.md file for this new GitHub Repository, I began writing about the need for having an abstract characterology; here is a short excerpt from that repo:

2026-06-15 14:19:37

One needs to have a complete characterology if one wants to get ahead in life; the behaviors that you will see people engage in around you in your life will never make sense without a proper characterology; each character comes with its own aesthetic/design problem; you need to work out that problem in your head if you ever want to truly understand someone; we ARE "naked problems, white signs on a blackboard", as André Salmon said of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon painting, which is probably, or so they say, the work of art that has been most written about after the Mona Lisa.

- I've actually been working on the characterology for a while, at least in some form I've been working on it for decades; it has to do with the phenomenology of the novel or novelistic phenomenology itself insofar as it involves the creation of authentic characters; my characters are an extension of myself in many ways; anyhow, I want to build this characterology from the ground up and deal with these many "design concepts" for novels in a formal way, and phenomenologically; here is a slightly longer citation from my recent writings in the NOVELS REPOSITORY on GitHub where I talk more about the problem and problematique which is at the heart of the novels but also which is the foundation for each and every character I create:

2026-07-15 18:54:23

- The abstract characterology has to do with defining each character's problem space which is connected with a solution space in that the P-Space generates the S-Space;
- A novel is just one of many possible "elegant solutions to aesthetic problems", to the aesthetic problem at the heart of the novel; so the story is an elegant solution to an aesthetic problem and each character also has another type of aesthetic problem linked to them; even the settings pose yet another kind of problem; everything is problematic, the novel is a problematique;
- As I said, the characters also have their own unique problems, one or more per character; usually the character actually also has, and is, a problematique, a (meta-)system of problems; the characters are what I like to call naked problems, they are walking, talking problems.
- The "character-as-problem" is also the "character-as-hypothesis";
- The character "makes a testable and reproducible prediction about reality", about its own reality as fictional object and device in the novel;
- The Novel-as-a-System is first and foremost a system; it has parts, moving parts, components, that are "nodes" in a complex network, connected by "interactions" between these parts, or the network's "edges";
- The character "interacts" with the fictional universe, with its objects and places and with other characters, and interacts as well with the Author's mind and the "mental furniture" that inhabit his mental space (of ideas);
- The metafictional character is self-aware, is aware of his existence as object, or subject, of fiction; he has sensations, feelings, and thoughts, and is always moving; in this way, the character is a "moving target" for the Author, is never quite where he's supposed to be, is always getting stuck in the margins, in the periphery.

- That's it for now; I want to get into some of the metafictional elements for my new stories and new novels, stuff that I've been working out in my head; as I was saying, the design concepts for all of these things keep transforming continuously in my imagination; it's hard to even put it down on paper at the speed that I experience the invention of new narrative material; I do my best, but a lot of it I can't quite capture just yet; I am really experiencing the novelistic phenomenology more than ever; I've been writing about it for at least 25 years, if not longer, but it feels like I am only now just experiencing it at a deep level; I always experienced it as I worked on my novels, but now it has really been formalized and integrated in a way that essentially was maybe not possible before; one lives and one learns, and this whole Art Operation of mine is always a work in progress;
- I leave you for now with one of the works I made in my series of Picasso Portraits as part of the ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM "subproject" as I called it; it is pencil on paper and meant to look as though it were a Transfiguration of Picasso: