This is the left-hand side of my desk. The window, from which the sun is coming in against my books, is to the right of the bulletin board, and it faces roughly south. I can see two contrails heading from the bottom-left to the top-right pane.
The inane details of what I use to write: a white, 15″ MacBook (about four years old at this point). Pilot G-Tec C4 pens (0.4) and Pilot C-Tech C4 pens (0.25) and Pilot Uniball finetip pens. Pencils for marking in books. A red Stabilo Pen68 for highlighting articles. I keep notes in red Moleskine notebooks, which feels kind of silly to admit but they fulfill this weird thing where they are both beautiful (so I like to use them) and consumer objects (so they are multiple and I don’t have to be precious about them–I feel free to use them). I also like how they look all in a row. My black notebooks are also Molekines; they are sketchbooks and datebooks.
I write with the help of licorice tea, Irish Breakfast tea, plain old black English tea, fennel tea, peppermint tea, chai, huge kopi kong (enamel coffee mug with a lid) full of water.
There’s a pile of about 60 articles on my desk (left side). They’re for the chapter I’m writing now, about deconstruction–mostly critiques and people in the early 1980s going ‘Huh?!’ about it. Also the book On Deconstruction by Jonathan Culler, which I’m mostly done with. A manuscript (mine) that needs work. A whole pile of lists, some expired, some active. At the moment there are three empty cups of tea and a bowl and a water glass.
On the shelf in front of me are little pictures, jars of ink. On my bulletin board, photos of my family/other important people; poems I like; a rabbit and mushroom I made; a house from my friend Caroline. To my left, all my important books (a pile of poetry, writing-life, and creative writing pedagogy ones; the rest are for this chapter or coming chapters or the dissertation more generally, like the MLA style guide, which is now unnecessary as I’m using Chicago…). Two little plants (cyclamen, spider). A milkjar full of water for my brushes. The shelf of notebooks, my paints. Below that a ‘file’ of old lists, art supplies.
I like to have everything out where I can see it. That way, I use it. This applies to my writing (style) as well, which means that sometimes things like hypertext and David Foster Wallace’s essay “Host” make formal sense to me in ways that other ways of laying out information don’t. This also means I sometimes write very densely. This is probably reflected by my space.
