linkfarm XXVIII

1. Meomi: taking the concept of "engineered cuteness" to the next level

2. All Men Like Birds Must Die, the sketchblog of illustrator Jason Sho Green

3. Gallery of visualizations of complex networks

4. Week of Otomo Yoshihide performances (Dec 25-30 in NYC at The Stone)

5. Photos of dumps, recycling yards, and masses of technological waste

6. Photos of lime-processing architecture

7. Christian cosmological infographics (circa 1919)

8. Bibliography of constrained works of literature and books about literary constraints

9. Ubuweb's Anthology of Conceptual Writing

10. Syllabus for Charles Bernstein's graduate seminar

5-7 (inclusive) were purloined from Boing Boing

Labels: linkfarms

Sunday, October 30, 2005
1:02 PM
0 comments

strategies of accretion III

Been thinking about more examples of linguistic accretion:

First up—didn't really care for the album, but I love the cover, which captures the general texture of our age of panic terrors better than many short stories or poems:

Related is the Google Newsmap, which I've written about here before but which still impresses me:

And then finally, there's Ecotonoha, which aggregates a million banal comments into a gloriously dense biological model:

Can something like this be "written?" Can any of these examples be said to be "literary?" They use language—but do they fulfill the functions of literature? What are those functions again?

Labels: language, writing

Saturday, October 29, 2005
2:04 PM
0 comments

strategies of accretion II

I can think of a few literary works that use the aesthetic strategy of subtraction (Radi Os, Ronald Johnson's erased Paradise Lost; Srikanth Reddy's work-in-progress, which allegedly erases Kurt Waldheim's biography) but I'm having trouble thinking of ones that work consciously with the strategy of accretion in a way comparable to the Washburn assemblages I talked about last time.

One could make the argument that all novels work "accretively," in some form or another, being built up from a thousand little data-points and observations as they are. That said, the rules of conventional realism usually require authors to mask whatever accretive practice went into the making of the novel, which means that few novels end up really looking like a vast beaver-dam of accreted material (the Burroughs cut-up trilogy may qualify as a nominal exception here).

I wonder if the reason for this dearth has to do with the fact that a novel is still traditionally designed to be read in a linear format. Most assemblages or installations have the advantage of a certain "all-at-onceness"--a room filled with debris hits you with a certain force the second you see it, in a way that a thick book simply doesn't. To experience the full "weight" of an "accretive book" you'd need to actually plow through pages of accreted material, an experience which I'd imagine many people (although not everyone?) might find to be laborious.

Is the best strategy for producing an accretive work, then, to step out of the domain of the novel and instead into the domain of visual poetry, hijacking the "all-at-onceness" of visual aesthetics? Steve McCaffery's poster-sized "typewriter poem" Carnival is still a masterwork in this regard; a beautifully dense agglomeration of language.

From here it starts to seem easier to find examples from the realm of visual art: can, say, Robert Smithson's Heap of Language be interpreted as a piece of accretive literature? What about some of Glenn Ligon's blackened text-works? What about Tom Friedman's "Everything," which is simply [?] every word in a dictionary written on a single largish piece of paper?

Labels: art, creative_process, language, writing

Friday, October 28, 2005
12:47 PM
0 comments

strategies of accretion I

Sorry about the lack of regular posting over the past week; I've been busy with a guest in town and also finishing up a Number None submission for the Belgian Sloow Tapes cassette-only label. (More on that in a future post.)

In my "spare time" I've been thinking a lot about Phoebe Washburn, a maker of massive assemblages who I learned about in an issue of Frieze that CJO recently picked up. Frieze writer James Trainor describes Washburn's process as being a "calculated accretion" of everyday detritus, interesting in and of itself, but the part that really grabbed me is the way that she recycles previous works into new ones.

In his article, Trainor writes:

"Washburn is not just a salvager but a recycler of her own work: in 2003 the filleted cardboard from Between Sweet and Low was dismantled, packed up and transported to Rice University in Texas and refolded like cake batter into an even more ambitious four-ton work, True, False, and Slightly Better, which in turn was demolished and carted off to Grinnell College and reconfigured as a massive shingled wall of debris titled Heavy Has Debt, where the dead weight of exhausted, screw-riddled cardboard finally gave up the ghost."

I'm not a sculptor, but this sort of process feels familiar to me in terms of my music-making. In Number None, practically everything we improvise gets recorded, and before the archival recordings finally get "retired" I spend a lot of time cutting them up into samples or making loops from them, which then get worked into new pieces, which then might get cut up into new samples or loops, which might then be transferred to audiotape and fed live into a performance (which then, of course, gets recorded and added to the archives to be cut up once again). Any piece that Number None might perform live is represents a certain process of digestion and redigestion: it would be interesting to go through and chart the genealogy of bit of sonic cud that we're mashing together, although at this point some of these genealogies are so tangled and gnarly as to render this process functionally impossible.

Since one thing that's been hugely on my mind this fall is the Big Question of What To Write Next, I've also been musing on whether the strategies of monumental accretion and redigestion couldn't be put to use as a textual strategy: I think I'll save that post, however, for next time. In the meantime, here's a short interview with Washburn for y'all to take a look at, with some nice photos.

Labels: art, creative_process, number_none

Thursday, October 27, 2005
10:09 AM
0 comments

writing opacity

In a piece on Gertrude Stein and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Guy Davenport describes the main movement of twentieth-century lit as being "a movement from assuming the world to be transparent, and available to lucid thought and language, to assuming ... that the world is opaque. This would seem to be the assumption of Joyce, Borges, Beckett, Barthelme, Ionesco."

To this list, you could add most major American poets since probably Charles Olson. My short list would include poets like Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Rae Armantrout, Leslie Scalapino, and Charles Bernstein: all writers who seem to me write in a way that acknowledges the inability of any written work to articulate the totality of the phenomenal world (to make it "transparent") and so accepts the reality that both author and reader exist in a state of near-total occlusion. Taking this reality as a given allows these authors to write in a way that plays off of it, that in effect depends upon it in order for their work to take on its particular set of qualities.

Davenport again, on Olson's long poem "The Kingfishers" : "[The Kingfishers'] seeming inarticulateness is not a failure to articulate, but a declining to articulate images and events which can be left in free collision."

This idea of "declining to articulate" the relationship between things is of increasing interest to me: one of the difficulties with what I've been calling the Novel of Adequacy is that it has to describe all the linkages that connect that suburban American teen to that woman in China in a way that both feels mimetically true and retains narrative interest. This is an enormous task, and one that leaves out far more important connections than it manages to illuminate. I feel like most of the poets I've discussed in this post would be more content to leave the woman and the teen in "free collision": to simply juxtapose the two of them, and jettison all the laborious claptrap-construction involved in drawing out the link narratively. A reader would grasp the point that the two figures are interrelated, even if he or she were unable to fully articulate the exact particulars of the relationship: in fact the work would partially be about the fact that for the vast majority of us, these networks of interrelationship are best characterized by our partial (or total) ignorance of them.

Labels: novel_of_adequacy, poetry_commentary, writing

Thursday, October 20, 2005
9:32 AM
0 comments

linkfarm XXVII

1. Massive archive of scanned mail-art

2. Books in the library of Mark Lombardi

3. Danish Air Force kills Rudolph

4. Unicef kills the Smurfs

5. Technologies of paranoia

6. London exhibition of the "unseen art" of William S. Burroughs (one, two)

7. Implicasphere is a magazine of "cultural fragments" from the fields of "anthropology, fiction, folk legend, art, reportage, biography, philosophy, astronomy and hobby craft"

8. Manifesto of the Necronautical Society

9. Sketchbook pages from Kozyndan

10. A Beautiful Scrap Paper Project

(thanks to Angela (#3))

Labels: linkfarms

Sunday, October 16, 2005
9:26 PM
0 comments

agnosis

"One of God's greatest mercies is that he keeps us perpetually occluded."
-Philip K. Dick, in Valis

"[Max] Ernst shares with [Ernst] Mach the phenomenological doubt that we witness anything except in agnosis. What we understand of an event is very little compared to our ignorance of its meaning. The greater our sensibility, the sharper our skepticism, the more we are aware of the thinness of the light that is all we have to probe the dark."
-Guy Davenport, in The Geography of the Imagination

This is part of what makes any attempt to write the Novel of Adequacy so inadequate. Because any facet of the Big Big Picture that you focus on means (necessarily) that there are an infinite number of other equally important facets that you'll ignore.

I think Pynchon maybe understands this better than anyone--

"Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she ... might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back."
-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Part of what makes Pynchon so great is that he basically decides, counterintuitively, to take our state of perpetual occlusion and play it for laughs. There are other kinds of responses out there: the history of postmodern fiction (from Tristam Shandy all the way up to, say, Ben Marcus' The Age of Wire and String) can be read as a series of responses to the realization of how inadequate our interpretive mechanisms really are.

Still more to come.

Labels: novel_of_adequacy, writing

Saturday, October 15, 2005
1:37 PM
0 comments

characters vs. information II

It occurs to me that the protagonists of most "whodunit" novels or (some?) noirs are engaged in turning information into knowledge, and that part of the pleasure of reading this kind of story is that we get to sift pattern from noise along with the protagonist . I haven't read enough murder mysteries or detective stories to really be able to speak with expertise here, but thinking this way definitely allows my list below to expand to include figures like Jake Gittes from Chinatown or Case from Neuromancer (a loosely-disguised noir); it also makes Rorschach (from Watchmen) stand out more clearly as Ozymandias' mirrored reverse.

In looking over my list some more, I notice that almost all these books presuppose the existence of conspiracies and dangerous secrets. Does trying to fit all the world's complexity into the totalizing structure of a novel always necessitate including a conspiracy to help make things fit? William Burroughs writes "The paranoid is the person in possession of all the facts," but I'm not sure I agree: I might argue that paranoia grows from the refusal to accept a fundamental state of occlusion and ignorance. When faced with a fucked-up world, it's sometimes easier to blame the Jews than to try to sift through the innumerable details of What Really Happened. (Thom Andersen's great documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself criticizes conspiracy films like Chinatown or L.A. Confidential for obscuring the real history of Los Angeles; I've written on this before, here.)

More on a state of perpetual occlusion next time. Stay tuned!

Thursday, October 13, 2005
9:08 AM
0 comments

characters vs. information

Still thinking about how to write the big, complex, "globalized" novel. It occurs to me that one (obvious?) way to cram a lot of information into a novel is to have at least one character whose job or obsession is working with information. Grappling with the process of turning information into knowledge.

Spent a little while in the bath thinking of characters from 20th-century fiction who fit this bill especially well, and came up with the following:

• Nicholas Branch, the JFK expert from Don DeLillo's Libra

• Ozymandias, from Alan Moore's Watchmen

• the conspiracy hobbyists from Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum

• a couple of Borges protagonists (the ones from "Library of Babel" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in particular)

• Francis Wayland Thurston, the protagonist from H.P. Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu" ("The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents")

• possibly Oedipa Maas from Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 (I'm re-reading it right now)

• probably someone in the Rob't Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy (which I haven't re-read in a decade)

• possibly Travis from J. G. Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition (need to think more about that one)

Information in poems works totally differently, and I'm thinking about that, too, so another post will take that on, probably soon.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005
12:10 PM
0 comments

tonight!

Special note to Chicago-area Raccoon readers:

Expect a manifestation of bad drone magic tonight at Chicago's famed Empty Bottle, as Number None (my band) opens for the semi-mythical White/Lichens (Jeremy Lemos from White/Light in collaboration with Rob AA Lowe aka Lichens).

Also on this bill will be The Zoo Wheel, the solo project of Liz Payne (from Thrill Jockey minimalists Town and Country) and Maths Balance Volumes, a "black-clad teenage cult" from Minnesota. And, oh yeah, lest I forget, it's free. Stuff starts around 9:30.

The Zoo Wheel, White/Light, and Lichens will all be contributing material to Lead Into Gold, a compendium of alchemical confusion which should be available from Rebis sometime around the dead heart of winter.

Labels: number_none, personal

Monday, October 10, 2005
1:22 PM
0 comments

a fiction of adequacy II

When trying to think of novels that contained something of the sweep and attention to detail that would qualify them as examples of the type of fiction I talked about in yesterday's post, I came up with the following (very short) list:

Don DeLillo, Underworld

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (and possibly The Crying of Lot 49 & Vineland)
[Pynchon's fictional worlds are recognizably one step removed from our own, but their unfathomable complexity makes them ring true to me in a way that more ostensibly "realistic" representations don't]

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
[The main problem here is that Stephenson and I have ideological differences: I think of him as libertarian Right whereas I'm anarcho-communist Left, so although Cryptonomicon has a grand scope and a definite sense of "the fine grain of everyday experience" it's still not exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for. But close.]

That's about it, really. If anybody else has suggestions that they think might qualify, use the ol' comments link down there.

The shortage of good examples underlines a nagging concern that I have when talking about this stuff, which is that I'm not even entirely sure that a novel is the right fictional form for representing the Big Picture of the present. But if not a novel, then what?

I still kind of believe that it might be "do-able" with a serialized form like Imaginary Year—I was happy with the way that I was able to integrate a ground's-eye view of big geopolitical events (9/11; the war in Iraq) into that work.

There are other fictional forms that might also be well-adapted for telling "this type" of story, too: maybe an "augmented reality" fiction like 2001's Majestic or 2004's I Love Bees? Or maybe a graphic novel, full of complicated Chris-Ware-ish diagrams? Ware is a master of drawing out an impossibly complicated Big Picture and then zooming in and transfiguring a data-point into a narrative. If only I could draw better.

Labels: novel_of_adequacy, writing

Sunday, October 09, 2005
1:32 PM
0 comments

a fiction of adequacy

I composed this post in my head as I was lying awake last night between 4 am and 6 am.

I am looking for a fiction that can both adequately (not sentimentally) represent the experience of a woman in China who works removing copper wire from discarded computer monitors and adequately (not ironically) represent the experience of a suburban teenager who does chaos magic rituals online. A fiction that charts the complex global movements of capital (see Mark Lombardi) but which hasn't lost touch with the fine grain of everyday existence as lived by actual people.

I have a vague sense of what such a fiction would look like, but I seem to increasingly feel like I lack both the research skill and the imaginative capacity to produce it.

Labels: novel_of_adequacy, writing

Saturday, October 08, 2005
12:55 PM
0 comments

everyone loves mail II

The first Project 29 envelopes started coming in last week.

First up was one from Nancy P., which contained the following:

• vinyl gloves (later used to move dead bird)

• cassette tape (Side A: T. Monk, "Brilliant Corners"; Side B: T. Monk, "Monk's Music")

• envelope containing book darts

• menu (Neko Sushi & Hibachi)

• index card bearing sandwich recipe

• 2 pipe cleaners

• printout of graffiti imagery

• Post-it flags from Sigma-Aldritch

• a copy of Go Winds magazine

• envelope of catnip seeds

• photo of mysterious microorganisms

• wrapper for "Parafilm M" lab film

• "Sacred Symbols : the Stone and the Animal" by C.G. Jung

• 2 cards bearing various puzzles

• 2 business cards (Wild Hearts Lesbian Erotica, in Provincetown, MA; Villas Nicolas Ocean View Rental Suites in Costa Rica)

• 1000 Colones note

• 4 Costa Rican coins

• catalog page from Sigma-Aldritch advertising a variety of available meths [!]

• postcard depicting a FirstDay Cottage (kit house)

• unopened pack of Pokemon cards

• score and instructions for Terry Riley's "In C"

• metal clip-on badge imprinted with the word "Dia"

• train schedule for Hudson Line train to Poughkeepsie

• token from "Fun Central" (no cash value)

• translucent stone

• piece of what looks like oolite

• 5 pieces of plastic with no readily apparent function

Second envelope came from Angela, which contained:

• letter

• pack of Tarot cards

• patient information sheet

• Consumer Guide to Food Safety at Home

• grisly anti-abortion postcard

• juror information questionnaire

• Jury Selection Commission postcard

• knitted cozy

• plastic rat

• poster of "Boss Hog" from "Randall's High Diving Racers" (not really sure what that is about)

• origami dog

• Super Fresh receipt (heavy on the Goya product)

• Powells postcard (with Lewis Carroll quote)

• drawing of various cats

• drawing of various sex toys

• M.F.K. Fisher quote about cheese

• Philadelphia Weekly article about Found Magazine's Davy Rothbart

• mix CD entry from her latest Mix CD challenge

• piece of "Gin-Gins" ginger candy

Utterly fabulous. Thanks to both of you for playing. My envelopes are all nearly full and will be hitting the mails today (for some of you) or Thursday (for the rest of you).

Labels: projects

Tuesday, October 04, 2005
1:31 PM
0 comments

image-matter

Photocollage 2
Originally uploaded by jbushnell.

Doing a lot of work with photocollage lately--

Monday, October 03, 2005
12:55 PM
0 comments