Write a poem in five parts.

Each part must be written in a different American city.

Monday, September 27, 2004
8:29 PM
0 comments

Imaginary Year begins its fifth year today. Welcome to autumn.

Friday, September 24, 2004
10:43 AM
0 comments

MetaFilter post griping about the the Mayday Mystery texts.

"If I had money I would offer a reward to anyone who can demonstrate that the ads refer to anything other than themselves. Anyone can go to a library and clip passages from books and periodicals to make a collage of disparate meanings. The reader will then bring his own context to the work and will find meanings in it ... I actually think that the ads are shallow and that the whole thing ... is either a somewhat mean-spirited prank or a symptom of insanity."

I'd quibble with the wording here: it's obvious that the ads "refer to [things] other than themselves"—being (at least in part) a collage of images and texts the ads (at the very minimum) refer back to the source texts. But I think what the author here is expressing is doubt that the ads can be "solved" in such a way that yields a coherent statement about the world. This complaint raises a good question: does an amibiguous system of meaning need to have a decodable worldview behind it in order to be worthy of attention?

Frankly, I lean towards "no." Even if the Mayday Mystery system is ultimately undecodable, there are undeniable aesthetic pleasures to be gleaned from it. I enjoy being immersed into the welter of a thickly-referential text, just on the level of the individual reference: even if the references don't "add up" into a statement they still point me towards areas of knowledge that I'm not proficient in; they remind me of the immensity, complexity, and, ultimately, the unknowability of the world as a whole, which, for me, is a pleasing reminder. (I'd rather live in a world that was infinitely, richly unknowable rather than one that could be rather easily "solved.")

It also seems undeniable that the Mayday texts aren't wholly random: on at least some level there is a human consciousness selecting and arranging this material (regardless of whether it is in accord with an internally consistent "plan" or not), and thus it allows me a glimpse into the subjective consciousness of another human being, which is one of the things that art is able to do. As for dismissing the work on the grounds that it might be a "product of insanity," I'd have to admit that whether an artistic subjectivity is generally considered "sane" or "insane" is not particularly important to me: we all know that the line between the two is more akin to a large, diffuse grey area. Furthermore, if we accept that one of the things that makes art valuable is its ability to expose us different points of view, then certainly artworks that help us gain access to "insane" points of view—those most different from our own—are more valuable, not less.

For instance: artist Paul Laffoley, whose diagrammatic artworks are a kind of cousin to the Mayday texts, is rumored to have struggled with mental illness, but this does not make his pieces any less beautiful or compelling, nor does the fact that I can't figure them out, nor does the fact that I'm not even certain that there's anything "there" to "figure out" at all.

(I'd also say, by the way, that just because a piece of art is "a symptom of insanity" doesn't automatically mean that it hasn't also been built according to a discernible plan. Schizophrenics often seem able to maintain worldviews that adhere to a kind of consistent internal logic: the problem comes when they find out that that worldview is incongruent with that of the culture that surrounds them.)

Labels: art, knowledge

Wednesday, September 22, 2004
3:46 PM
0 comments

In the comments area of Saturday's post, D. Bauler writes: "Can the Mayday Mystery be considered a narrative?"

The short answer is yes, but I'd qualify that in various ways, since the cryptic texts that constitute the corpus of the Mystery can categorically "fit" along a number of different axes.

First off, the Mystery texts may have a practical purpose: the webmaster of the Mystery site is attempting to interpret them as encoded "rules" to a "game," which would suggest that they're more comfortably classified under "instructions" or "puzzle," fields that aren't traditionally thought of as "aesthetic." (This may be a failing: elements of the aesthetic can be located in puzzles which are finely-crafted, as any fan of "enigmatologist" Will Shortz will readily attest to. And categorizing something as a "puzzle" doesn't
necessarily mean that it can't also be categorized as a narrative: certainly all mystery novels are "puzzle-narratives" of a sort, and other "book-puzzles" exist: as a child I logged a lot of hours looking at Christopher Manson's Maze, a "virtual space in the shape of a book.")

Mystery novels, of course, frame their puzzles with all the normal trappings of narrative, and even the nonlinear Maze has a setting, characters (it's told from the point of view of a guide) and dialogue. The Mayday Mystery corpus doesn't have any of these things: although it features various historical personages they don't "function" as characters, and at initial glance nothing resembling a plot or setting can be discerned. Its organizing strategy seems to be primarily collage / juxtaposition, producing something ideogrammatic rather than linear, which would seem to take it out of the realms of narrative or instruction and place it instead more into the realms of poetry (or magic).

Considered as a poem, the Mayday Mystery texts read as though they're using the strategy of recombining language from various disciplines into an ambiguous system of meaning. It can "function as" a poem with an exceedingly high order of experimentalism, far more experimental than the work of most experimental poets, but in terms of the current catalogue of poetic strategies it can be read in a way that "makes sense."

That said, there is something that distinguishes the Mayday Mystery corpus from a poem, and it is the same thing that I would say qualifies it as a narrative, namely, its temporal dimension. Time makes narrative: the fact that its inexplicability recurs in the world interests us, raises questions, unbalances us, and thus makes a plot. It is, to some degree, a contingent plot, that is to say, a plot that "happens" perhaps primarily in the mind of the reader rather than being dramaturgically represented in the corpus itself. Although this seems a little strange, it should be noted that we readily accept this idea in visual art, where, ever since Duchamp and ever-increasingly over the last four decades, the site where the "art" "happens" has been less located in qualities inherent in the object itself and more in the relationship (the dialectic?) between the artwork and the viewer's perceptions and context.

It's important for writers (and critics) to start thinking about narrative as a kind of four-dimensional construct, and to start producing writing that takes advantage of this, and this is at least one of the things that the author of the Mystery texts seems to be doing.

Labels: writing

Monday, September 20, 2004
10:24 AM
0 comments

Robert Smithson is well-known for his earthworks and his other artistic investigations of landscape, entropy, and time. He's remembered less well for his writings, which are also unusual and provocative. The first piece of his that I read was Strata : A Geographic Fiction, a piece which originally appeared in issue #8 of Aspen, the "multimedia magazine in a box."

I'm currently reading Smithson's Collected Writings, and was particulatly interested in an interview in which he describes his approach to his writing process.

He begins by comparing his writing to Virginia Duran's artwork Glass Strata, "very dense and kind of layered up," and goes on to clarify:

"I thought of writing more as material to sort of put together than as a kind of analytic searchlight"

"I was interested in language as a material entity ... just as printed matter—information which has a kind of physical presence for me."

"I was always interested in Borges' writings and the way he would use leftover remnants of philosophy ... kind of taking a discarded system and using it, you know, as a kind of armature ... another construction on the mires of things that have already been constructed"

Labels: art, writing

Sunday, September 19, 2004
10:09 PM
0 comments

I've sent a packet pitching The Collected Imaginary Year out to the first publisher on my list. Cross your fingers for me.

I have been thinking a lot lately, every day actually, about new methods for my writing. Most of the ideas that I'm coming up with are still incubatory and don't really feel ready to be "floated" in this blog, although they are mostly extensions and developments of the list of guiding principles that I posted here a year ago. And they're also extensions and developments of the questions that I've been asking myself for the last several years about the relationship between literature and information. At one point, I thought Imaginary Year would be a work which would allow to explore these questions, but even in the first year it only adhered tangentially to the polyphonic noise-collage cut-splice aesthetic laid out in the Manifesto, and in the last three years it's drifted even further away.

I've been writing some pieces this summer that are more fragmentary and strange, and although each of these pieces, upon completion, felt like a dead-end, I feel like they're enabling me to "zero in" on the kind of fiction that I want to write, to slowly develop a style that investigates the questions I've been asking myself.

Some of these questions include:

How much discontinuous information can be fit into a story before it ceases to function as a narrative?

What is the extent of the mind's ability to invent or "fill in" a narrative from the merest scraps of narrative material?

What is the extent of the mind's ability to integrate discrete, varied chunks of material into a single arrangement?

Can any two pieces of data, however disparate, be understood as being "in relationship" to one another simply by virtue of being placed side-by-side on the page?

The films of Kenneth Anger and the comics of Grant Morrison use an occult logic of visual juxtaposition to create startling (magical) effects: is there a way to do the same with the written word? (Is this Burroughs' project?) Would such a thing still be a "story?"

The Internet is a pool of collective language: what would a fiction that uses the Internet's open-access structure look like?

Poets are the contemporary writers who seem most interested in these questions, and my own poetry makes some attempts to approach these ideas (albeit obliquely). But I still think of myself predominantly as a fiction-writer, and I can't help but feel that the structure of fiction is supple enough to produce work that takes on these questions. But the vast majority of fiction writers still adhere slavishly to the model of the novel formalized over a hundred and fifty years ago, with superficial variations in topic, style, and genre accounting for most novelty in the form.

What happens when we think of the novel (or the short story) as a technology for creating effects that go beyond the dramaturgical?

Labels: personal, writing

Saturday, September 18, 2004
2:53 PM
0 comments

Made it out to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art last weekend. The main gallery was closed, but a side gallery held an interesting exhibit called "Soft Edge," a collection of a broad spectrum of pieces, loosely related by their use of organic forms or materials (fibers, etc.).

I liked a lot of the stuff I saw in that exhibit, but the pieces I made special note of were the "painting" by Michelle Stuart, a gloriously lush piece of rag paper imprinted with pigments made from earth and ground stone (it was similar to, but more "ambient" and less formally patterned than this milkweed seed series of hers); and the selection of objects from Claire Zeisler's series "Fragments and Dashes," mainly twigs and stones knotted and wrapped in elaborate fiber sheaths, resembling nothing more than a set of artifacts from a fictional civilization.

Also interesting (although part of a different exhibit) was Gabriel Orozco's Oval Billiard Table with Pendulum. Orozco's art resonates with me because he and I share an interest in games as self-contained formal worlds: "I think every game is a universe in a way," he says in this PBS interview, "or every game is an expression of how the universe works, for different cultures." Mmm yeah.

Wednesday, September 15, 2004
9:18 AM
0 comments

The new semester has begun; so far I'm enjoying it.

This new semester is especially exciting for me because I've radically reworked my syllabus, and, for the first time in my eight years of teaching, I've abandoned my grading rubric: I've instead set the course up on a system based on the Scout merit badge system.

The way that this works: I've identified 21 areas that I want them to demonstrate proficiency in, and I've associated each of these skills with a merit badge. As the semester goes along they can choose which of these badges they want to get; applying for one involves the completion of some set of assignments. None of these assignments are given a letter or numerical grade; they either earn the badge or are sent back for more revision.

For the most part, the students can do the badges in any order; getting fourteen or more gets them the "A." This setup offers them the ability to work at their own pace and play to their own (developing) strengths, and also enhances the sense of gradual progression towards a goal (as opposed to my old method, which involved them earning a certain number of points out of 1,000—although from one persepctive this could be seen as a similar process of accumulation, from another perspective it can feel like you start off with 1,000 points and get more and more chipped away with each misstep).

I've made actual badges for the students (they're stickers), which I hope will tap into the profound motivating force of the collector instinct.

We'll see how this works out. The students seem guardedly optimistic about it.

Labels: teaching

Thursday, September 09, 2004
3:36 PM
0 comments

The music reviews over in the side-column are getting longer and more elaborate, threatening to eclipse the attention I give to getting new posts up here in the main column.

*sigh*

1:34 PM
0 comments

Sorry I've been so quiet over the last couple of days: I've been busy putting together a 11"x17" timeline displaying the major events & relationships of the first four books of Imaginary Year.

I'm planning, this fall, to compile those books into a single volume—The Collected Imaginary Year, Vol. I—and start sending it out to potential publishers.

I have a short list of publishers in mind, but if anybody else out there has suggestions, don't hesitate to let me know.

Monday, September 06, 2004
2:50 PM
0 comments