Distractions, shmistractions
Setbacks in my project of processing walking journey notes, preparing for an upcoming presentation in Sapporo, distractions, distractions, distractions, looking for Paul Salopek.
It’s been a while since I last wrote, and the project has had its fair share of setbacks and distractions, some of them very productive, others not so much.
The mess in the kitchen
I find it very funny and more than a little ironic that the process of reducing my notes very much parallels the journey that they’re about. My walk had uneasy beginnings. The first week was particularly difficult, and it wasn’t until I was around three weeks in, in late April 2017, that I began to feel a spring in my step. Last autumn, when I began thinking about going through my notes systematically, I imagined it to be a perfectly linear process: X days of notes per day, or something like that. The reality has been different and, unfortunately, also very boring to write about: this April I’ve spent a lot of time simply fiddling with the structures I set up to make sense of the data. A lot of back and forth with templates and workflows, re-writing, getting rid of stuff, re-structuring other stuff, and so on and so forth. Very frustrating at times. On bad days I think the whole project is completely pointless, an extreme case of yak shaving, and that I should just forget about it. Then I remind myself that almost every grand project I read about involves not months but years of background work.
But it has a direct impact of what this blog is and will be. My initial plan for it was to act as a sort of parallel diary to my private data reduction notes, where I would write about stuff that caught my eye in a particular day’s notes. But that doesn’t really work, and I already wrote about the stuff that caught my eye in the field diaries that I kept on the first two legs of the journey. I realized as I was working on my notes that reducing them is essentially a private process: in order to enter a state of mind where I’m able to re-live and re-experience events from 2–3–8 years ago, I need to allow myself to be completely honest with myself, to write about not just what’s awesome but also about what’s banal and cringeworthy. It’s the mess in the kitchen you shouldn’t see as you wait for your meal, and it won’t do as the subject of a public diary. But I have some ideas, and the focus, as always these days, is on fun (I’m aware it’s a bold statement after my previous long musings on what walking and writing and experience and memory and stories are, anyway).
Another thing I learned over the course of the last couple of weeks is that this project will take much longer than expected. I had — very foolishly and naively — thought that it will be possible to go through every note and photo and observation from my 298-day journey over the course of three distraction-riddled months (see below). I have a much clearer picture now. If I focus absolutely, I can process a day’s notes in 2–3 hours — which means I can probably process two days’ worth of notes in a day, or maybe three if I have a lot of energy on a particular day. This actually cheered me up quite a bit: it means that I can realistically finish the data reduction phase of this project by the end of this year, and be in a very informed position to decide where to go from there (in short: step away or write a book?).
A presentation, a translation, and a game of football
Distraction #1 is that I will give a presentation about the walk on May 4, this coming Sunday, here at Tenjinyama Art Studio in Sapporo. It’s going to be an expanded and much more polished version of the informal talk I gave here earlier this month, waving large sheets printed with maps of Japan:
If you happen to be around, please come and join. The presentation is going to be in English and Japanese, and we’re also going to have an exhibit of my photos from the Hokkaido parts of the walk, many of them never published before. Sapporo, while still remarkably cold, is now dressed in a magical early-spring palette of pinks and greens, and even on a dreich northern day it’s a wonderful city to visit.
Distraction #2 is the Hungarian translation of Alan Booth’s Roads Out of Time and my The Wilds of Shikoku that I’ve been working on since last December. It’s taken a lot more time and attention than I thought, but it’s almost done. It’s going to be published on my website when it’s finished, and I’ve set up a single-use mailing list where you can sign up to get an email when it’s online. The goal is to have it up before I leave Japan, in early June. Note that this will all be in Hungarian: if you want to read the originals in English, they’re available in print here and here.
Distraction #3: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Another walk in Japan (and elsewhere)
Paul Salopek, the American journalist who’s been re-tracing the entire route of human migration from Ethiopia to Patagonia for twelve years, landed in Japan last September. While it’s difficult to put together his current location from his dispatches, which are published several months out of date, and his map, which is updated infrequently and is not dated, my Fermi estimate is that he’s somewhere near Sapporo now! I’m going to keep an eye out for white-haired, wiry Americans walking at a brisk pace with a dusty rucksack. He’s one of my absolute heroes when it comes to walking and writing and observing the world as it really is, and I think if I spot him I’m going to break my rule of not approaching Famous People and go say hi.
Off to work on my presentation. Thanks for reading and see you soon — I hope in person on Sunday.