Bartography

I just finished a complete draft of the first chapter of my Alan Lomax biography, overshooting my target of 2,000 words by a mere, er, 1,266.

I’ll take it. On to Chapter 2.

This evening, among several years’ worth of my collected materials on Alan Lomax, I found a note I wrote to myself: “MAYBE IT’S NOT A PICTURE BOOK!”

See? I knew it all along. I just pursued this project as a picture book for five years in order to prove my point.

Sixteen thousand words. Eight chapters at 2,000 words each. Plus a preface, afterword, bibliography, etc.

That’s my very rough estimate of the word count I’ve got to work with for my Alan Lomax book, based on my quickie analysis the other night of a comparable book, Elizabeth Partridge’s Restless Spirit: the Life and Work of Dorothea Lange. (I counted paragraphs in each of its 12 chapters, then counted words in the fourth paragraph of each chapter, then did the math for fewer, longer chapters.)

I couldn’t have told you how long I’d expected my text to be, but it would have been more than 16,000 words. (And it may still be. We’ll see. Oh, and this just makes my 6,200-word draft of The Day-Glo Brothers seem all the more laughable.) But whatever the length, I’m glad to know these parameters — they’ll help me gauge what to include and leave out as I begin writing.

But more than that, I’m glad just to have parameters — the physical parameters of a 128 page book printed on paper. There are limits to what I can cover in this book, and that’s fine with me. Every day, it seems, I get an invitation via Facebook to try out some new application. It seems so endlessly expandable — there are no physical limits to what purposes and functions and features can be tried, so why not keep adding, and adding, and adding (and inviting, and inviting, and inviting)?

It makes me crazy. And so I take great comfort in having so simple a purpose: to tell a story, to share my fascination with Alan Lomax’s life and make his life and work meaningful to an audience that, with few exceptions, will never have heard of the guy.

And to do it in 16,000 words.

I’m waiting at the gate at Washington Dulles with a carry-on bag bulging with a ream or so of photocopies. All that paper is my harvest from a week of researching Alan Lomax within the marble halls of the Library of Congress. Being loaded down never felt so good.

My research in the American Folklife Center wasn’t all paper, all the time. I got to see a piece of 1940s-vintage recording equipment — ostensibly portable, but you wouldn’t want to be the one lugging that thing around. I got to listen to the very first recordings of Leadbelly, his showmanship and musical skill gleaming through the gravelly surface noise of the aluminum disc used to capture those sounds in 1933. And I was able to see silent but full-color footage of 1937 Haiti and Kentucky, viewing everyday dancers and musicians through the eyes of my subject. That, especially, was something else.

But for the most part, I read — old letters, manuscripts, radio scripts, field notes, and so forth. What I’m bringing home is just a sliver of what I saw this week, yet it’s a ton more than one might think necessary for a 128-page book about someone whose seven-decade career has been pretty well documented elsewhere. The most important thing I’m returning to Texas with, though, is understanding — a sense that, through all these materials, I know the person I’ll be writing about and that I can finally grasp the way his life is intertwined with the larger story of the cultural shifts and technological advances and global developments that took place during his 87 years.

I’m also returning to Austin with a whole lot of gratitude — to my family for putting up with my absence this week, and to the generous and truly helpful staff at the Folklife Reading Room for putting up with my presence. I’m going to give them all — and myself — a break by taking a week off from this project and most other writing-related stuff. After that, I plan to start putting all this paper to use.

With my enthusiasm for my Alan Lomax project, I’ve had no problem motivating myself to make some progress on it every day. And even if I weren’t so excited about it, the frightening volume of materials by and about my subject — and the daunting task of finding, sorting through and synthesizing the most significant of these — would keep me working on a regular basis.

But if I needed a boost or a strategy for self-boosting, “Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity secret” (which I found through Good Experience) strikes me as a good one. Of course, there’s no reason why his approach — “Don’t break the chain” — shouldn’t apply to non-creative efforts as well, and goodness knows there are other areas of my life where I could use more of this sort of sticktuitiveness.

There’s something to be said for unsticking, too. After years of keeping to a schedule of getting up at 5 a.m. to do my “writing” work (which more often than not involves researching or reading instead of actual writing), I recently realized that my early-to-rise ways weren’t getting the job done.

(I’ll pause here while you recover from the shock of learning that getting up at 5 a.m. six days a week just wasn’t working out.)

Starting about three weeks ago, I’ve been routinely working after the boys have gone to bed, making progress like gangbusters, shutting things down around midnight or so, and then getting up six or seven hours later sans alarm clock. Often it’s 3-year-old F who is waking me up, but I feel much more charitable toward him and the rest of the world than I was when he was disrupting my work rather than mere sleep.

In the past 48 hours or so my research has drawn from books, recordings, an online photo gallery, and a digital encyclopedia, and the dots are getting connected in such a rush that I can barely keep up.

It’s exhilarating stuff, but it can’t compare to the most exciting development of all: my purchase of a plane ticket to Washington, D.C., where I’ll soon spend five straight days here.