1 April 2004. Today nothing but the image I made at Paint Shop a little while ago, and some notes I want to make sure to record (although I'm sure I already have somewhere) about Harbor View, the pluraesthetic epic poem I mentioned yesterday that I hope one day to compose. I conceive it as having at least five levels. Actual levels. The first will be a Hardy Boy novel (a first version) that I plan to treat in the manner of Tom Phillips and Doris Cross. My aim will be to capture what my boyhood reading did for me, but also carry out a Hardy Boy detective-thriller narrative. My second layer, and second collection of texts and images, will be an impression of my years as a boy living in a Connecticut community on Long Island Sound. My third layer, also with its own texts and images, will be a narrative about my personal quest to become an poet. My fourth layer will be some kind of history of man's progress in understanding nature. I hope it will do for scientific materialism what Homer did for paganism, Dante for medieval catholicism and Milton for protestantism, to borrow and extend an old literary-history comparison. A fifth layer will be simply a sequence of interrelated visual imagery. Of course, all the layers with share material at times.

There may be more to it, but that's all I can remember right not. It's close to all there is of the project, too: I've sketched a few pages of the poem, but have no full draft of anything yet. I'm hoping that the Hardy Boys will inspire me, once I get going, which won't be till the summer of 2005 at the earliest, I'm sure.

Okay, now for this entry's throw-away decoration. As should be obvious, I haven't made any progress at Paint Shop for a while. I'm still enjoying it, though.