Dear Bill

I don't think it's embarassing at all that you made your drawings in a mental hospital. I'll tell you what, there's probably a large percentage of artists and writers who would love to be able to admit that they had spent time in a mental hospital. It's a well-known fact that much of the world's powerful, visionary, and timeless art was made by people who had mental problems. And even you have written yourself that mental illness can give a man a rich world of visions and ideas to write down, or draw. Did you write something like that or did I imagine it? Either way, it's true. Anyway, I've always admired people who have written or drawn or made things as a way to ease the torment in their heads. It's like a pressure valve. Creating in this way is not only good because it brings interesting art into the world, it's also beneficial for the man with his 'madness'. I understand this not from some removed point of view, but from my own experience in this respect. The world of art (mostly writing, for me) is perhaps the greatest comfort in those times of deepest torment; those dark nights of the soul. That's also why the best art comes from pain and torment, and not joy and a comfortable life, with a stable, well-behaved brain.

Personal Book II

On these pages are some Australian stamps; some information about the Durham Cathedral 'Sanctuary Knocker' (the knocker was probably used by those seeking sanctuary. These fugitives from the law were allowed to take sanctuary and confess their crimes. They were then allowed to travel to a port and leave the country without fear of arrest); there's an address for a zine called 'Spaghetti Dinner and Dancing' which I liked the name of but never got around to writing to; some drawings by comics artists Ricko and David Miller; movie tickets for X-Men 2, Phone Booth and The Core; a diary entry where I went and bought a copy of the Good News Bible and noticed a sales chart of the 1oo Best Selling Books and noted that the Bible was #9 (Harry Potter was #1); a news clipping about a 57-year-old man whose house was searched and they found 2000 photos of dead people. The photos were believed to have been taken in a London hospital mortuary where the same year the family of a Muslim woman found her body covered with slices of bacon - an affront to Islamic culture. There is also a Ren (from Ren & Stimpy) tattoo and a Manga-style picture I cut from a free street magazine. There is also a note I made that I had just heard on the radio (11:15am 25 May 2003) that a woman was found "wrapped in plastic" somewhere in South Australia.

Personal Book I

Personal Book
I found out how to post pictures! You may laugh, but for me it's exciting and new. So anyway, this is a picture of some pages from my personal book that I have been working on for three or four years now. You can see pictures of Martin Landau, Roy Orbison, an ad for Ghost World, a Thomas Pynchon article (which I clipped because it revealed that Pynchon has done no interviews and allowed no current pictures and that almost nothing is known about his life after 1959), and a description of a museum exhibition of music - this part is about "The Darkside". e.g."While entering the Romantic exhibition would be uplifting, the Darkside would present a feeling of going down." It is a mystery how this information came to me. Well, on these pages are also transcriptions of a couple of dreams I had, along with a quote from Automated Unit 3947 from Voyager: "According to my observations, there is now sufficient reason for greater optimism." Which I thought was amusing, since most of the time - as far as I'm concerned - the opposite appears to be the case.