When COVID-19 hit, I was working on a novel—trying to find my way into a new novel, to be more precise. I had been for a while. Sometimes I felt there was promise and other times I didn’t feel much of anything about it. But the shelter-in-place order (to be referred to as ‘quarantine’ from now on) manifested as an opportunity to really figure it out. So I committed to writing 50,000 words in April.

Right around the end of March, I was turned on to visual artist William Kentridge’s “Six Drawing Lessons,” apparently the 2012 edition of the ongoing Norton Lecture Series. I watched the first two-and-a-half lectures while I sewed my first mask (an indication of how good I am at sewing) and was enchanted. They were playful and meaningful. They were well-written and incorporated interesting visuals—much of those were representations of his work, but he did some interesting things with the lecture aspect as well. Most of all, as I spent that month of April trying to figure out how to evoke in the form of a novel the things I was interested in, I felt the pull of the structure of the lecture, a form that felt at the time as if it offered what I was looking for, the flexibility and perhaps the rigor.

I finished the 50,000 words, and it was the wrong decision. I still don’t know what that novel is. And as I was writing those words, a vision was growing in my mind, of smart and creative people, home alone, cut off from their normal conversations, the daily outlets for their interesting thoughts denied them, channeling all that creativity into lectures that they would release to the world like messages in glass bottles floating from quarantine island to quarantine island. A whole network of lectures speaking to and past each other, snapshots of minds in this peculiar state recorded for posterity, a form perfected, broken down, reinvigorated. The Corona Lectures.

I thought I should make one, to show what I was thinking of. That turned into “Instructions for Building a Simple Machine to Construct Content During Quarantine.” The machine owns me for the moment, so expect more. If you are interested in contributing to the Corona Lectures, I welcome it. Please contact me through the link on this site.

The second of three planned schematics, the Wave Machine Schematics are available now at AnthelionProjects.com/shop

Keep an eye open for the second of three Machine Schematics, available Wednesday 8/31 at AnthelionProjects.com

New arrival at the AnthelionProjects.com shop

Available now! Simple Machine Schematics (pdf) Your connection to inspiration is spotty. Your perfectly envisioned story lacks life on the page. You have the growing suspicion that you’re phoning it in, playing it safe, up to the same old tricks. You’re bored of the methods you’ve been using, but don’t know what to try next. Though no one else may have responded in as ludicrous a manner as we did here at Anthelion Projects, we know we’re not the only artists who face these issues. The Simple Machine was our answer.

Tonight at 9:00 at Bleeding Hearts Studio (1135 6th St NE) will be the public premiere of two new sound-based Anthelion Project videos. At 7:00, Julie Johnson will be performing on flute, bass flute, and looping and effects pedals. There will be art and music and fun all weekend, so stop by.

Amor Fati This is what I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. I took a Sound Design for Film class at Slam Academy through Filmnorth (can’t say enough about either organization), and I’ve been dealing with these boxelder bugs, and decided to put some of what I learned to work. Here’s what I came up with.

Sometimes this is what it feels like going out. And sometimes this is what it feels like staying in. So I guess this is just kind of what it feels like.

The Omicron Oracles - new blog post at AnthelionProjects.com Well, it’s January. The start of a new year and my birthday month. That combination has traditionally made January a good month for me to try to create new habits, restart old routines, and decide on new directions. But this year it has been exceptionally hard. Usually my new year’s motivation will carry me into March, when the second half of the semester starts dragging me down and the end of winter won’t come soon enough. But in 2022, I can already feel the effort. Which isn’t a great sign.

Anthelion Projects: Where We Think We’re Going To - new blog post available at AnthelionProjects.com/blog My goal for the final post in this series is not to brainstorm every form a future Anthelion Project might take, but to offer some of the possibilities that occur to me in the hope that they might entice an artist into collaboration.

Anthelion Projects: Where We Are New blog post available at AnthelionProjects.com/blog Last week, I described the Anthelion Projects as one of the natural possible evolutions of the Corona Lectures, so perhaps that’s where I should start. Though they’ve been reimagined as the first Anthelion Project, when the Corona Lectures began, I had little idea what they were. With one unpublished novel under my belt and unfinished drafts of several others hanging around, I had been trying to work my way into yet another one when COVID-19 hit and the stay-at-home orders were issued. Among the factors contributing to the change in format, the isolation of novel writing, compounded by the pandemic, has to be one of the prime motivators. The Corona Lectures ended up being twelve videos, released monthly, that roughly covered the period of greatest isolation—from the issuing of the stay-at-home orders through my vaccination. (keep reading at AnthelionProjects.com/blog)

Anthelion Projects: Where We’ve Come From - new post at AnthelionProjects.com As I felt the original Corona Lectures winding down after a year, I developed the sense that I wanted the next phase to be something more collaborative. I was already using quotations from writers I admired and, most of the time, asking friends to record these quotes for the videos, so it’s not as if the original lectures were wholly solitary affairs. Foregrounding this aspect—inherent from conception—felt like one of the natural evolutions the project could take. I had not done much if any collaboration in my creative life, and a move in that direction held out the promise of a new and enjoyable category of creative activity. Read more at AnthelionProjects.com.

The Stain That’s Left Behind Available now at AnthelionProjects.com/absence. With this video, we close out the collaboration between Anthelion Projects and painter James Holmberg with, among other musings, a dream.

Nothing Is Worth Your Attention New video available at AnthelionProjects.com. There is no audio in this fifth video in the collaboration between Anthelion Projects and James Holmberg. Instead, we have the text of quotations from some Anthelion Project favorites accompanied by the Operator’s annotations.

All Is Not Lost available now at AnthelionProjects.com/absence. With the fourth video based on the Absence series of canvases, the Operator of the Anthelion Projects takes a step back and gives center stage to the Artist and his musings.

Need Makes a Compromise available now at Anthelion projects.com/absence For this third video in the series of collaborations with the painter James Holmberg, Anthelion Projects has leaned on the machine a little harder than usual.

Disparate Images and an Experience of Alternate Paintings Anthelion Projects presents the second video from the collaboration with James Holmberg. See the video at AnthelionProjects.com/absence

First video available Please go to AnthelionProjects.com to view the first video in my collaboration with painter James Holmberg.

I took this photo a couple of weeks ago when the smoke from the wildfires in Canada was about its worst, at least here. I don’t believe it was a cloudy day, and there are no filters being used. This is just the haze. No metaphors this time. Just the sun as it appeared that evening.

I was struck by the shape of the leaves at the center of this photo while talking to my sister on the phone. I kind of half-noticed it, with my eyes unconsciously returning to it a few times before it really registered as an image. What a strange shape for leaves to make, the sharp edges guarding the absent center. And then I realized it’s kind of like a corona, which made me think of the logo I made for the Corona Lectures, except in negative.

Dreaming the Imbocceable Dream There are twelve teams in the Wednesday night edition of the Northeast Bocce League, and the top eight make the playoffs. Well, everyone gets to keep playing, but only a team in the top eight can win. My team, the (variously spelled) Imbocceable Dream, has been lingering in ninth place for weeks. (Nearly every team’s name is a pun on the word “bocce.”) My sources tell me that after two strong weeks we’ve busted into eighth place. This is pretty exciting news. We can play pretty well when we focus, so if we can stay in the top eight, we just might have a chance to make some noise in the playoffs. See more on my blog at TheCoronaLectures.com.