artists as writers

I don't know what this says about me or my career as a writer, but the writing that most inspires me to write is seldom writing produced by other writers, but more commonly by visual artists who write.

This happened in the fall of 2004, when I was reading Robert Smithson's collected writings (some scavengings and related riffs here), and it happened again just yesterday, in the John Cleary Library at the Houston Center for Photography, when I was looking at Spiritual America, a collection of Richard Prince's photography, painting and writings. The exact writings in Spiritual America don't appear to be online, but this bit, at Prince's website, is perhaps indicative of the sort of aggregation of narrative fragments, factoids, aphorisms, and plagiarized bits found there. I read this stuff for five minutes and for the first time in over a year I wanted to write something that someone might call "fiction" or "poetry." Stay tuned.

Labels: art, personal, writing

Friday, May 30, 2008
2:49 PM
1 comments

film club XXIII: adaptation

Adaptation (2002) is ostensibly a film adaptation of New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean's 2000 piece of nonfiction, The Orchid Thief. But it's really about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's struggle to translate the book into a film. The film brings Kaufman in as a character, and spends a good portion of its run-time dramatizing his confusion, hesitation, distraction, and doubt; as such, it's one of the most memorable, and I would say accurate, depictions of the creative process ever brought to the screen.

Kaufman—at least the character Kaufman, as we see him in the film—struggles with a handful of distinct challenges in the adaptation process. One of them is that Orlean's book doesn't have a strong narrative arc, and furthermore, being highly meditative and reflective, the book doesn't have a lot of material in it that translates well to a visual medium. (The end product uses a lot of voice-over, and explicitly debates the merits and drawbacks of voice-over at more than one point in the film.)

Another problem is that Kaufman seems to have varying additional agendas for his screenplay that go beyond merely wanting to adapt the book successfully. He repeatedly says that he wants the finished film to be a genreless film "about flowers," that will have the end effect of showing audiences how "amazing" flowers are. ("Are they amazing?" Kaufman's fictional agent asks him at one point, to which the fictional Kaufman responds, despairingly, "I don't know.")

In addition to that, Kaufman wants the screenplay to be a work of realism. The desire for a truly realistic fiction, one that shrugs off the various artifices of fiction in favor of the "real stuff" of life has been an obsession of experimental writers for well over a century—it's clearly articulated as early as Zola—but it's no less a grail today than it ever was. (I'm not immune to the pull: nearly all of my own fiction written over the last ten years has been organized around this impulse.) Kaufman declares, early on in the film, that he doesn't want to write something "artificially plot-driven," without "sex or guns or car chases or characters learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like one another or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end."

And this raises yet another problem, namely, the demands of commercialism. The hypothetical adaptation that the fictional Kaufman proposes (within the space of the actual adaptation) sometimes sounds amazing (I, for one, might go to see a genreless movie about flowers) but also runs the risk of being an enormous mess, and looming constantly in the background is the threat of not only creative failure but also commercial failure. The danger that Kaufman might be taken off the project or that the project itself might entirely fail is never really stated outright, but it's underlined constantly by the inclusion of Kaufman's fictional twin brother, "Donald," who is crashing with Charlie and writing a screenplay of his own.

Donald's screenplay is for an unbelievably trite thriller called The Three. Trite, yes, yet also seemingly far more bankable, and towards the end of the film Charlie elicits Donald's help to finish the Adaptation screenplay, and the entire narrative lurches nauseously towards a passably commercial finale. There's some very sharp satire embedded here about the kinds of stories that a massive capitalist industry like the film industry is willing to invest in telling.

Ultimately, Kaufman seems to want to celebrate the power in the creative process: writers, after all, have a literally infinite number of ways to tell a story. At one point, Kaufman makes a decision that the film needs to incorporate a history of life on earth, and, indeed, the finished film dutifully provides this as a montage:

And yet this near-omnipotence is held endlessly in check, not only by the accompanying neurosis and crippling self-doubt, but also by the strictures of capitalism, the existence of a "professionally skeptical" financing system that determines which stories get told (or at the very least produced, or distributed). In its sharp-eyed analysis of this point, the film has a real tragic dimension to accompany its comic moments and metafictional playfulness.

Next week we continue with reflections on the art of adaptation with Skunkcabbage's pick, The Hours. His write-up on Adaptation is here.

Labels: capitalism, media commentary, narrative, writing

Saturday, March 08, 2008
9:00 AM
5 comments

tiny hopes

I'm actually pretty happy with the slightly fevered tone of yesterday's Virgin Suicides write-up, and am giving some thought to re-tooling it into a piece for the Bright Lights Film Journal, whose self-described identity as "a popular-academic hybrid" feels like a pretty comfortable fit for the film stuff that I've been writing lately.

I've also been giving some consideration to submitting my "ludic failure" paper to Game Studies.

There's also been some behind-the-scenes activity circulating around "the book" this week, the results of which will be announced here as soon as some paperwork settles. Stay tuned.

Labels: novel_of_adequacy, personal, projects, writing

Friday, February 15, 2008
1:12 PM
0 comments

j. k. rowling, pirates of the carribean, and world-building

One fact that has not escaped mention in the cloud of discourse surrounding the Harry Potter phenomenon is this one: there are certain metrics that traditionally characterize "good writing," and viewed through some of these metrics, J. K. Rowling does not appear to be a very good writer at all.

A few examples: she abuses space-filling adverbs, she circulates through the entire array of distracting synonyms for "said" (including the especially unfortunate "ejaculated"), she relies enormously on wordy expository dialogue (often at the climax of a book), her sense of prose rhythm is clunky, her metaphors are rarely vivid, she intermittently dips into cliche, her combat sequences read like a transcript of a Dungeons and Dragons melee round... etc etc etc. I could continue to populate this list, but really, any fan of the books (and I count myself among their number) could tell you that these things detract from the enjoyment of the books only marginally, if at all. And the unprecendted size of her global legion of fans suggest that there is a whole other unspoken set of "good writing" metrics that Rowling is in fact the undisputed contemporary master of.

So what might that be?

A clue is provided by Chris Stangl, of the great Exploding Kinetoscope film-blog, who has not written on Harry Potter as such (at least not that I've seen) but who understands something about that sprawling subculture we call fandom (just as a for-instance, note his in-depth appreciation / critique of the comic-book-only Season Eight of Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

Anyway, in his 2006 year-end list, Stangl writes about, of all things, Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest, and in doing so he says:

"The story is built out of the elements that satisfy and inspire fan-fiction writers. Careful, obsessive attention to the arcs and quirks of every periphery character, piling on the backstory and complicated relationships, until the puffy summer blockbuster assumes Wagnerian proportion. Every character combination would be a potentially interesting pairing for slashfic. Holes in character histories and the timeline are left open for imagining more adventures. New fantasy elements and characters are introduced with such color and variety, they expand the Pirate-verse in every direction. Any Pirates fan gets a three hour cruise on the funniest, sexiest, most breathless, dreamiest galleon on the water. The rest of you may be lost at sea."

Interesting, I thought: and it reminded me of the "mixed or average reviews" that the new Pirates movie, At World's End, had been receiving. Complaints of the movie being over-plotted, talky, tedious, and cluttered made me wonder if these critics weren't just judging it, like some have judged Rowling, by the wrong metric. So let's pop over to see what one of fandom's primary academic champions, Henry Jenkins, has to say:

Unsurprisingly, he calls it "one of the best summer movies that I have seen in a long long time."

More:

"The film ... throws a lot of stuff at us and expects us to catch it. ... [T]he parts add up to a satisfying whole if we connect all of the pieces. For someone really engaged in watching this film, the result is epistemaphilia, a mad rush of information being brought together and being clicked into the right mental category."

And still more:

"The modes by which we consume [franchise] films have shifted. Most films don't warrant a first look, let alone a second viewing, but for those films that do satisfy and engage us, a much higher percentage of the audience is engaged in what might once have seemed like cult viewing practices. Once we find a franchise which floats our boats, we will settle in for an extended relationships and we want to explore all of the hidden nooks and crannies. We want to know everything we can possibly know about this world and contemporary franchise films are designed to accommodate our interests."

And still more:

"Plots cross each other: a choice which seems to bring resolution to one plotline opens up new complications for another; a decision which makes sense from one perspective seems enigmatic from another; and the reader must be alert to all of these different levels of development, must think about what the scene means for each character and each plot if they are going to get full pleasure from the story."

And so all those negative reviews?:

"[I]f [people] suddenly realize that the film is much more complex and layered than they anticipated, they may start to flounder and ultimately drown, which seems to be what happened to a high percentage of the film critics. They went into the film expecting a certain kind of experience; they hadn't successfully learned how to take pleasure from its world-building; they don't want to dig into the film more deeply after the fact, comparing notes online with other viewers, because their trade demands constant movement to the next film and a focus on their own private, individualized thoughts."

Hmm. Nice. I haven't seen any of the Pirates of the Carribean movies, but I think that all the praise that Stangl and Jenkins are loading onto the franchise applies perfectly to the Potter books. People don't care about Rowling's work on the level of prose style, because the books offer a different pleasure from the pleasure of simply reading stylistic prose. Rowling has created a world that people engage with and enjoy. The vast networked ensemble of characters attended to within that world provides a staggering number of points for further engagement. The fact that, ultimately, the amount of information she can supply about these characters is finite is not a disappointment but rather explodes the universe into a practically infinite number of jumping-off points for further imagination, participation, and still deeper engagement. This is what Rowling is good at. To judge from the success of her books it may be the thing that primarily matters. Teachers of storytelling, take note.

(Film club this week was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), a film that engages in world-building narrative in its own fashion. But more on that later.)

Labels: book_commentary, fandom, media commentary, narrative, writing

Saturday, August 11, 2007
12:59 PM
0 comments

where i've been and what i've been up to

It's been a pretty busy couple of weeks around here: between teaching, personal commitments, work on the novel draft, and a cluster of Number None shows, my free time has pretty much been maxed out, no time to create much in the way of substantial new blog content.

I haven't even mentioned, for instance, that the first draft of the "Novel of Adequacy," now titled Meanwhile, is completed. If you want to see how complicated it got by the end, you can check out this crazy interactive diagram I made with IBM's fun little data visualization website, Many Eyes. (Make sure to zoom in by clicking-and-dragging or the thing will just look like an undifferentiated dense heap of datapoints.)

Parts of the novel are still pretty messed up (for instance, there's one cluster of characters who haven't yet been integrated into the main mass) but it's getting close to the point where it is maybe ready to be put out there for comments. I'd like to get all the chapters through a second draft first, but in any case, if you're interested in reading some of it, just ask.

The other thing I didn't manage to get around to mentioning recently is that Number None got a nice mention in Time Out: Chicago, as part of an article on the Chicago "drone scene." It has a photo and everything (I'm the guy with his head cocked in the back row). It's nice to finally be mainstream, I guess.

I've also been quietly posting more book reviews over at LibraryThing, I'll post a bunch of those here tomorrow.

Labels: novel_of_adequacy, number_none, personal, writing

Tuesday, March 20, 2007
2:56 PM
0 comments

this week's thoughts on seriality (part one: comics)

Finally (last night) got caught up to the present point in the ongoing Lost narrative, a project that took probably about a year. Suggestions are now being taken for new televisions shows to start in on, with priority being given to long serial- narrative-type shows over shows more made up of stand-alone single episodes.

Some of my associates in the world of fandom are pushing me to watch Heroes, which I haven't seen a single episode of yet. This plan has three big "pros" in its column:
1) it's a serial narrative, but one that only has, what, a dozen or so episodes to its name so far, so catching up should be relatively easy
2) I have, already in my possession, a DVD containing episodes 1-9 (thanks greenapricot)
and 3) hey, superheroes.

Although I still consider myself a comics reader (100 things I love about comics, here), I read superhero comics nowadays only intermittently. There are probably lots of reasons for this, but one of them might be that (most) superhero comics don't seem to have developed a solution to the question of long-term continuity. I have less of a sense now than ever that any given comics arc is part of a continuous narrative that stretches back in any meaningful way. In today's comics industry, with rare exceptions, plot arcs seem designed to function as stand-alone narratives, essentially interchangeable in order, leading to an overall feeling of stasis in the universe and reducing the amount of import or weight that any given arc might carry. (Old-man griping here: this felt different during the 80s when I was reading Claremont's famously long-form run on the Uncanny X-Men.)

Adam Cadre summarizes what I'm talking about in his sharply-written distinction between the X-Men runs of Stan Lee, Chris Claremont, and Grant Morrison, respectively:

"[A] problem that has always plagued superhero comics is that of stasis. Though there are some amazing writers on a few of the titles, these are still commercial properties they're writing. In the early days, characters' status quo changed enormously over time: characters grew up (Spider-Man went through high school almost in real time and then went off to college, for instance), their relationships with one another changed, as did their looks and powers... but then that all stopped. Marvel's core business is no longer comics; it's maintaining a stable of properties that can be turned into movies and toys. These properties have to stay recognizable. So if a writer dares to allow characters to grow, to overcome their problems — the hard-luck college guy ends a string of bad relationships and is happily married, the android develops human emotion, the villain goes straight, a character dies a noble death — someone else gets brought in and it's 'back to basics!' Divorce the wife! Wipe the robot's memory! Make the reformed guy go bad again! Resurrect the dead chick!"

Nicely put. This isn't entirely bleak: it just means that comics characters are functioning more as mythic figures / archetypes / symbol systems then as "characters," per se. (One could argue, in fact, that the best comics creators are the ones who work with this in mind—Morrison here would qualify, and possibly Paul Pope (more notes on that here)).

Still, there's a way in which I can't help but feel like Marvel and DC missed the chance to do something amazing (amazing artistically, not so much commercially) by having their characters "age out." The analogy I keep thinking of is with sports: why not have the Justice League of America be a storied institution like the Chicago Cubs, with young rookies, older vets, and elderly players bowing gently into retirement? The idea of sport as long-form narrative has been explored thoughtfully (see this essay on "Hypertext and Baseball" over at the Eastgate site, or, more poetically, Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association). And it's notable, I think, that two of the most beloved and critically-acclaimed graphic novels of all time—The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen—are both centrally about being a superhero in middle age.

All of that said, here's the Comics Should Be Good editors' picks for 2006, in two parts (one, two). Lots of superhero stuff on there, some of it even looks good. Part two of "this week's thoughts on seriality" will be on videogames, although whether I'll finish it within a week is anybody's guess.

Labels: comics, media commentary, narrative, writing

Friday, January 05, 2007
8:59 AM
2 comments

where i've been and what i've been up to

Not a lot of activity here on the old blog lately, sorry about that. It's been a combination of a lot of factors: the semester shifting into high gear, a weekend spent out of town, and some emotional stuff that has frankly sucked but that I don't want to go into here in any degree of detail.

I'm also still writing a book. People who have been following the progress of the new novel on this blog know that it involves a rather complicated network of characters, that in fact part of its very reason for existence is to try to give a powerful sense of the diverse human experience happening simultaneously, attempting a fragmented version of the "super-omniscience" that Don DeLillo shot for in Underworld.

Yadda yadda yadda. Point is, the cast is up to about 100 characters now, and such a big canvas has allowed me to turn to give brief cameos to some of the Imaginary Year characters, as a sort of "what are they doing in 2006"-type thing. I doubt I'll get to all of the characters, and some of the ones that have made appearances in the novel served more as bit players in Imaginary Year (for instance), but I know some of you readers of this blog served double duty as Imaginary Year readers, so if there's any character who you'd like an update on, I am happy at this point to take requests.

Labels: personal, writing

Wednesday, October 04, 2006
12:55 PM
0 comments

recent reading II

Sorry things have been so quiet over here in blogland lately. I've been writing a lot elsewhere, mostly in the form of steady progess on the Novel of Adequacy (currently titled Meanwhile, although that might change). I just wrapped up Chapter Nine, and the chart has been complicating pleasingly. I'm working on a few other visualizations of the book's network; expect them to appear here if I ever finish them.

In other news, still broke, which means I've been continuing to churn through summer reading. Who wants capsule reviews?

Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World by Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu
This book lucidly debunks the notion that the Internet inherently possesses territorial independence or extra-legality, mostly by clearly laying out various ways that governments can (and do) enact enforceable restrictions upon Internet content and behavior. Recommended.

Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness by Chris Kraus
A curious book, collecting essays which straddle the line between art review and memoir of alienation (book club question: is Kraus' BDSM practice a cure or a symptom?). The institutional critique is sharp, the observations on LA are witty / bleak, and the overall grimness is leavened by Kraus' obvious yearning for meaningful human interconnection (and art that can express it). Bracing, enticing.

Demonology by Rick Moody
A frustratingly uneven collection, containing one story which I'd consider to be a modern classic ('Demonology') and one story so torturously overwritten as to be unreadable ('Pan's Fair Throng'). Sometimes I found myself suppressing the feeling that these stories exist primarily as an excuse to showboat, that they're really more about Moody as a stylist than they are about the people they are ostensibly about. In this way the book ends up reminding me of the Coen Brothers movies: inventive, flashy, often entertaining, but with little sense of human urgency.

Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, by Steven Johnson
Breezy book making what essentially amounts to a three-point argument: that video games engage mental skills such as problem-solving and pattern recognition, that a lot of contemporary TV indulges in fairly complex narrative strategies, and that online discourse rewards writing skills and in-depth thinking. I'm pretty sympathetic to these arguments, so the book's conclusions felt a bit foregone to me, although certain examples felt freshly cogent (the diagrams of character networks in a show like 24, for instance).

On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
This slim volume attempts to develop a theory which will position bullshit in the framework of moral philosophy, and along the way answers questions like: how does bullshit differ from the lie? A blast to read, although I disagree with almost every major conclusion Frankfurt makes (with the anti-postmodernism argument that closes the book being particularly unwelcome).

I might write up a more thorough critique of the Frankfurt at some point, we'll have to see. And, despite the fact that I finished the Moody book only under some (self-imposed) duress, my interest in literary fiction does seem to have re-awakened after the slumber of the last few years. Consequently, I'm looking for recommendations: use the comments link down there if you want to plug anything.

Labels: book_commentary, novel_of_adequacy, writing

Sunday, July 02, 2006
9:15 PM
0 comments

what i've been doing

There haven't been too many substantive posts on this blog lately, sorry about that. A lot of my online time has been spent doing research for an attempt to write the so-called "novel of adequacy" that I first started talking about back in October. At the time I was feeling pretty down about my ability to write such a thing, but in March, coming back from the East Coast microtour, something suddenly "clicked" in my head and I thought "I know how to do this."

We'll see if my intial confidence is borne out by the actual thing itself, once it comes into the world. I will say that the writing process is going remarkably speedily: I've been working on it for only about a month and I've finished six chapters, or what will be probably about a quarter of the book.

Anybody who wants to read it as a work-in-progress, don't be afraid to get in touch.

In other news, Chris and I have been working on finishing the new Number None release: the fifth "official" full-legth, to be entitled Edison | Orison. I'm not exactly sure when it will be released (we're thinking of shopping it around to other labels instead of self-producing it) but it's good to think of the thing as almost done. We're working on track order this week, and when we're done I'll post a listing: hopefully the track titles will seem appropriately provocative and cryptic.

Labels: novel_of_adequacy, number_none, personal, writing

Thursday, May 18, 2006
4:47 PM
0 comments

future of the book

I finished reading the Nichol / McCaffery collaboration Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine about a month ago, but I'm still picking it up and pulling good quotes out of it.

For instance, there's this 1831 gem by Alphonse de Lamartine: he's writing on journalism, but the quote seems even more trenchant when taken as an early prediction (and critique?) of the emergence of the "blogosphere":

"Before this century shall run out, journalism will be the whole press—the whole human thought. Since that prodigious multiplication which art has given to speech—multiplication to be multiplied a thousand-fold yet—mankind will write their books day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will be spread abroad in the world with the rapidity of light; instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood at the extremities of the earth—it will spread from pole to pole. Sudden, instant, burning with the fervor of soul which made it burst forth, it will be the reign of the human soul in all its plentitude. It will not have time to ripen—to accumulate in a book; the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a news paper."

To be fair, it seems like Lamartine was slightly off the mark—books still get written, after all—although Nichol and McCaffery couple the Lamartine quote from Lyotard, which seems to even more precisely (if cynically) predict the status of the book in the current state of the mediascape:

"[I]n the next century there will be no more books. It takes too long to read, when success comes from gaining time. What will be called a book will be a printed object whose 'message' (its information content) and name and title will first have been broadcast by the media, a film, a newspaper interview, a television program, and a cassette recording. It will be an object from whose sale the publisher (who will also have produced the film, the interview, the program, etc.) will obtain a certain profit margin, because people will think that they must 'have' it (and therefore buy it) so as not to be taken for idiots or to break (my goodness) the social bond! The book will be distributed at a premium, yielding a financial profit for the publisher and a symbolic one for the reader."

Less dire takes can maybe be found at if:book, the blog of the Insititute for the Future of the Book, although it's worth noting that the top post as I write this is a post about war documentaries, gamer theory, machinima, and Sony TV commercials: quite interesting, but not a book in sight.

Labels: poetry_commentary, writing

Friday, May 05, 2006
9:51 AM
0 comments

macrosyntax

I just recently finished reading Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine, which collects the writings of the Toronto Research Group, a group founded by the great experimental poets bpNichol and Steve McCaffery.

Although most of the "research reports" collected in this book date back to the Seventies, there have been few people in the intervening three decades who have rivaled Nichol and McCaffery's committment to interrogating the form of the book, the form of the poem, the form of the word, etc.

Part of their project hinges on developing more ways of thinking about syntax. If syntax is defined as "sentence construction or its rules," then it follows that rules governing units smaller than the sentence could be thought of as a microsyntax. Once this idea is established, it follows that, just as poets can choose to formally investigate / play with / reject the "rules" of syntax at the sentence level, they can similarly investigate / play with / reject the rules of microsyntax. McCaffery and Nichol also identify a macrosyntax governing "elements and combinations that occur in a context greater than the sentence."

Particularly inspired, to my mind, is this description of the largest possible macrosyntactic unit:

"As a macrosyntactic unit all literature is seen as one huge, spherical sentence, continuously expanding, whose grammar and arrangement is continuously permutated and modified... This macrosyntax is the given context of reading: it is the huge block of unread letter sequences that make up textuality."

More:

"Obviously, from the point of view of readership, the paths through the macrosyntax (which is itself constantly growing and changing) are infinite. The sequence of things read can be as significant as the actual things read. Any path creates valid reader experiences. The notion of any absolute reading is ridiculous. Intertextual travels that cover Husserl, Reader's Digest, Robert Filliou and Maurice Sendak ae as valid as those covering Max Brand, Stan Lee, Jacques Lacan, T.S. Eliot and Robert Crumb. The writer can never know the entire macrosyntactic context from which her readers draw. The only certainty is that they will all be different."

From this, McCaffery and Nichol conclude that "[b]oth reading and writing are activities of foregrounding from a ground of potentiality, and the history of a person's reading can be seen to constitute that person's own writing through the macrosyntax."

Of course, if that is true, it raises the question of "why write at all when one could just be reading?" but that's really a question for another day.

bPNichol died in 1988, but McCaffery is still around, most recently spotted writing about "parapoetics" for the North American Center for Interdiscipliary Poetics.

Labels: poetry_commentary, writing

Monday, April 17, 2006
2:50 PM
0 comments

everything devices | acepos

Sniffing around Kio's links at del.icio.us, I came upon a free e-book (by Lion Kimbro) called How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think. ("I'm going to miss you," is what CJO told me when I told her I'd started looking at this book.)

I haven't read much of it yet, but I've been enjoying the pages of acronyms in the back. The first acronym in there is ACEPOS, for "Absolute Cosmic Eternal Perfect Ontological Structure," a product that Kimbro warns us is outside the scope of his notebook-based system. "The structure maps an individual's brain, not the universe," Kimbro says. "Don't even try," he continues, "madness that way lies."

Those of you who know me will probably not be particularly surprised to know that I'm immediately tempted to hack Kimbro's system to create an ACEPOS, madness be damned. I'm sort of being tongue-in-cheek when I say that—I don't really believe that a totalizing system can, in fact, be made (at least not without stopping time)—but it's true that for a long time now I've been intrigued by structures / forms / frameworks / systems which can position all sorts of disparate information into some sort of meaningful relationship. Imaginary Year readers may remember Fletcher's desire to write a book-length poem, Everything, which is one manifestation of my desire to build an ACEPOS-like system; my blog-posts back in October about the "Novel of Adequacy" are another.

I don't think I'm the only artist-type out there tempted by this idea: I just got done reading Proposition Player, a Matthew Ritchie monograph, and throughout it Ritchie speaks in ways that seem driven by a desire to illustrate or model the entire universe. (Ritchie also references Joseph Beuys as an inspiration in this regard.)

I've also been reading two books of poems that might be said to function as "Everything Devices" of a sort: Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs and Geraldine Kim's Povel, both of which take very different approaches to the predicament at hand. Expect me to write some more about them later.

Labels: creative_process, novel_of_adequacy, writing

Tuesday, March 21, 2006
12:32 PM
0 comments

algorithmic fiction and the i ching

As I was drifting in and out of sleep this morning, I spent some time brainstorming about strange algorithmic models for narrative generation. (Some previous notes on algorithmic / generative writing can be found here and here, although this most recent batch of thinking about it was almost certainly inspired by reading Proposition Player, the catalog for a Matthew Ritchie exhibit which was generated, at least in part, by a set of combinatoric strategies.)

Thinking about the use of generative strategies always leads me to the idea of chance operations, and so I got thinking about ways in which the I Ching could be used to develop plots. (Similar work using the Tarot has been done by Italo Calvino's famous Castle of Crossed Destinies, in which he refers to the Tarot explicitly as a "machine for constructing stories.")

I like to think of a "plot" as some kind of disequlibrium: something happens and an initial state, more-or-less "stable," becomes unstable. We read a story, in part, to see how this disequilibrium will resolve. The I Ching, being very fundamentally a book about flux, has a readily apparent application, then, as a sort of index of disequilibria. A casual browsing of the table of contents (Wilhelm translation) reveals nearly a dozen hexagrams explicitly about transitioning from one kind of state to another:

• Biting Through

• Splitting Apart

• Retreat

• Progress

• Decrease

• Increase

• Break-through

• Gathering Together [Massing]

• Pushing Upward

• Development

• Dispersion

with another five defining a variety of types of stasis:

• Waiting

• Holding Together [Union]

• Standstill [Stagnation]

• Keeping Still, Mountain

• Treading

Map a dozen of these to a twelve-sided die and roll it a couple of times and you've basically got a plot outline.

Labels: writing

Wednesday, March 08, 2006
11:03 AM
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

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

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

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

half-decade

It is with some sadness that I have to announce that as of Thursday, September 22nd, the autumal equinox and the five-year anniversary of its first installment, my serialized fiction project Imaginary Year will go on a hiatus which will (most likely) be permanent.

I've enjoyed having Imaginary Year as a project, but I've grown increasingly interested in writing other things, and attempting to write two pieces of short fiction a week, hopefully pieces which are of decent quality, doesn't leave much time for writing anything else.  I've written basically the equivalent of a novel a year for the past five years: it seems like now might be a good time to take a breather.  I don't know, yet, whether I'll spend my time writing something new, or whether I'll spend it revising Imaginary Year and sending it out for publication, but it'll be nice to be able to think about my next move without a deadline for new material always just four days away.  

I don't want to say that I won't return to these characters at some future point—I've worked so much with them that it's hard for me to imagine trying to make sense of the world without making use of them as my front-line tools for interpretation.  But if I do return to them it probably won't be in short format pieces like those that make up Imaginary Year—there's only so much they can do in the constrained space of a couple of pages.  It'd be nice to have a little more room to let them breathe.  

That said, over the last year I've tried to get each character to a point where you can more or less feel like their story has “concluded,” at least inasmuch as the events in people's lives ever conclude.  They don't, which is why I wrote this story this way.  I hope you've enjoyed it.

If you want to be added to a mailing list to receive news about future writing projects or Imaginary Year news, just send an e-mail to “projects” at “imaginaryyear.com.”  If you want to make a donation, feel free to use this button:

But I've never really been in this for the money. It's been great having you guys as readers: I certainly would have given up on this project years ago if it hadn't been for the thoughtful and kind responses I've gotten from people who were enjoying it.  That's really all I have to say.  Thanks so much,

Jeremy

Labels: personal, writing

Sunday, September 11, 2005
1:05 PM
0 comments

more on literary "risk"

So I've been trying to clarify, in my own head, just exactly what constitues literary "risk."

For me, there are two axes involved. The first is essentially the axis of "predictability" vs. "unpredictability": I think it's safe to say that a "predictable" piece of writing is less risky than one that's unpredictable. In order to assess what constitutes a "predictable" piece of work, I've relied on the concept of genre conventions: the more a piece of writing adheres to the typical standards of its genre, the more predictable it becomes. (This gets slightly tricky when you're dealing with a genre like language poetry where a certain level of "unpredictability" is, in fact, part of the genre, but that's really a discussion for another time.)

The other axis has to do with subject matter: "risky" subject matter being all things taboo or esoteric, anything that's antithetical to subject matter that we could describe as "mainstream." Somewhere in the middle of this spectrum we'd find stuff that is mildly scandalous, vaguely "controversial," stuff that would seem "edgy" to an NPR listener.

For me, for a work to be genuinely "risky," it be found in the quadrant where "risky" subject matter meets the formally unpredictable. Someone like William S. Burroughs, writing in his fragmentary cut-up style about junk addiction, pederasty, and erotic death scenes. Or Kathy Acker.

Risky subject matter with an adherence to genre conventions yields someone like Stephen King; writing about topics which are nominally taboo in a format that's been proven to be crowd-pleasing.

Something like the book I'm reading now, Helene Cixous' The Book of Promethea, is formally experimental but thematically it's essentially a book about love, a pretty mainstream topic. It drifts up towards the more "taboo" regions because its take on love is that love is essentially indistinguishable from agony and slavery, not exactly the conventional take (although probably more so in Cixous' native France).

Stuff that's both thematically safe and formally safe would be something like, I don't know, a Bond film, adhering diligently to the format of its genre while not exactly providing subject material that's especially challenging to anyone.

Scatterplot time!

My own personal tastes tend to gravitate to "risky" work in the top right section, followed by the "genre books on esoteric topics" in the top left. But stuff in the lower left can certainly be fun at times.

Note: "physics textbooks" in the top left are esoteric, not taboo; if you want something totally genre-bound yet which also deals with the culturally taboo, insert "Penthouse Letters."

Labels: writing

Wednesday, August 31, 2005
12:36 PM
0 comments

the trouble with litmags

Why are most literary magazines so bad?

[Note: I speak here as a former litmag editor and as a person who's investigated (I can't legitimately say "read") at least a hundred different litmags.]

1. Lack of editorial focus or stance

1a. Obeying the oft-issued edict to "read a few issues of our magazine to familiarize yourself with the kind of writing we publish" more often than not reveals no information greater than "this litmag publishes the same kind of writing that all the other litmags publish"

1b. Submissions guidelines that say things like "we are committed to publishing the best contemporary fiction and poetry being produced today" in practice tend to really be saying something like "we will publish 1% of whatever comes in through the mailslot, although what those pieces share by way of similarity is anybody's guess"

1c. More magazines need to produce guidelines which function as statments of genuine editorial purpose, like this one, courtesy of Diagram: "We value the insides of things, vivisection, urgency, risk, elegance, flamboyance, work that moves us, language that does something new, or does something old--well. We like iteration and reiteration. Ruins and ghosts. Mechanical, moving parts, balloons, and frenzy."

1d. Even half of that suffers from vagueness: "work that moves us" is especially onerous in this regard

1e. Part of the problem: university-associated litmags afflicted with revolving-door editors. Even those who have an editorial 'vision' (a comparatively small percent) have little time to build it into the magazine before they, too, move on

2. Preference for "safe" stories / poems

2a. "Safe" can also be read as "tasteful," "bourgeoise," "liberal" or etc.

2b. Most litmags want to publish the same sort of New Yorker / Iowa-Writer's-Workshop-type lit that MFA programs tend to want their students to reproduce. This system works harmoniously insofar as each half of it answers a need of the other half, but the end result is a madenning blandness and predictability

2c. Fiendish corrolary: literary material that makes a point of being quote-unquote "risky" runs an equal danger of falling into bland and predictable patterns: you can only read so many heroin stories, "dirty realism," neo-noir pieces or intentionally shocking or squalid pieces before they, too, begin to seem like they're "safe" in their own way. Same goes for pieces that express "risk" through the means of formal experimentation

2d. Questions for further consideration: here at the outset of the 21st century, what constitutes genuine literary "risk"? Who is a genuinely "risky" poet working today? A genuinely risky novelist? [Note: First person to answer Will Self or Bret Easton Ellis gets punched.]

2e. More questions: Is "safe" / "risky" even the right question? Is it the same as "predictable" / "unpredictable?" Is an "unpredictable" literary magazine something the world really wants? Is it something I want? Is it compatible with my desire for a magazine with a coherent editorial focus, or is this a paradox? What happens if you try to exert a consistent desire for unpredictability? (See also: Novelty and Habit.)

Labels: writing

Saturday, August 27, 2005
5:31 PM
0 comments

Great post over at the indispensible City of Sound, wherein Dan Hill takes the emergence of the iPod Shuffle and uses it as a jumping-off point for an essay about the collage zeitgeist that so dominates late-twentieth / early twenty-first culture in general. Hill slots "shuffle mode" (or, more broadly, "the mix") into its rightful position next to such other cultural pursuits as "photomontage, cubism, pop art, tape loops, multitrack recording, hip-hop culture, sampling, mixtapes, Ocean of Sound, filters, quotations, hyperlinking, blogging, Photoshop, layering, aggregators, adaptation, recombination, [and] reappropriation."

The post also contains a wonderful quote from Brian Eno, taken from this long Wired interview:

"An artist is now a curator. An artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention, and says, What I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things. ... [P]ostmodernist thinking is suggesting is that there isn't one line, there's just a field, a field through which different people negotiate differently. Thus there is no longer such a thing as 'art history' but there are multiple 'art stories.' Your story might involve foot-binding, Indonesian medicine rituals, and late Haydn string quartets, something like that. You have made what seems to you a meaningful pattern in this field of possibilities. You've drawn your own line. This is why the curator, the editor, the compiler, and the anthologist have become such big figures. They are all people whose job it is to digest things, and to connect them together."

Nicely put. (It's worth nothing that "making a pattern in a field of possibilities" is as good a description as any for what I'm trying to do with my own more experimental writing.)

Labels: writing

Friday, January 28, 2005
12:02 AM
0 comments

Chicago-area Raccoon readers may want to come out into the cold to check out either or both of the following events:

1. Tomorrow (Sat 18) Chris Miller and I, performing as Number None, will be debuting a new drone piece, "Pacific Metals," at Hotti Biscotti, 3545 West Fullerton in Logan Square. We'll be performing with improvisational vocalist db Pedersen and Madison-area psychedelic collective Davenport.

2. On January 9th, 2005, I'll be doing a reading as part of the Sunday night Myopic Poetry Series. I plan to read some Imaginary Year entries, as well as some more experimental writing, maybe even some poems. Save the date!

Labels: number_none, personal, writing

Friday, December 17, 2004
2:25 PM
0 comments

November has long (in Internet-time, anyway) been known as NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, in which participants attempt to write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. This past November, Lacunae's Douglas Wolk initiated NaSoAlMo, National Solo Album Month, in which participants attempt to complete a solo album with a running time of at least 29:09 (the length of the first Ramones album, "the shortest inarguably awesome album" Wolk could think of offhand).

Anyway, time's up. Links to completed albums are available here.

If the NaSoAlMo albums are too polished for your tastes, check out the Album-A-Day project, which has documented the creation of 166 24-hour albums since 2001.

To complete the cycle, here's Douglas Wolk writing on Album-A-Day, for Spin.

Labels: writing

Sunday, December 05, 2004
2:04 PM
0 comments

I've been meaning for a while now to reveal Concordant Opposition, a collaborative project that I've been working on with poet Eric Burger, which currently takes the form of a poem in six parts.

We gave ourselves a month to write each section, so the six sections reflect a collaboration that ran from May to October. We took turns adding words to the poem, and the number of words we'd add on a given turn was constrained by the number of the section—in May, writing the first section, we each added only one word each turn, but in October, writing the sixth section, we each added six words with every new turn. The number of turns taken during a month was governed by the number of days in that month: in a thirty-dayer like September we took thirty turns, fifteen each. Theoretically we each went once every other day, although conditions almost always conspired (as they do) to keep it from playing out that way. In any case, we made it through the six months, and I'm pretty happy with the result, which gets increasingly giddy and unhinged as it proceeds.

Concordant Opposition is currently entering its second phase, another six-month-long project with a wholly different set of constraints. More on that later.

Labels: writing

Thursday, December 02, 2004
1:49 PM
0 comments

In the archives of The 20' x 20' Room, an interesting-looking blog dedicated to talking "thoughtfully" about role-playing games, there's an intiguing little game simply called Lexicon, in which all players play lexicographers contributing to an encyclopedia, detailing a (collectively-invented) historical event. The rules of the game govern the creation of entries, but, even more importantly, they govern the creation of a system of cross-reference between entries, establishing networking and collaboration between players. "At the end of it," writes Neel, "you'll have a highly-hyperlinked document that details a nice little piece of collaborative world-building."

Brilliant! I came across this through Kevan Davis, who is in the midst of playing a Wiki-enabled game of Lexicon with a group of about a dozen players here.

Labels: writing

Friday, November 12, 2004
3:17 PM
0 comments

My friend Eric Burger was in town last week for the Wire's second annual Adventures In Modern Music festival, which was great fun (I may yet write up a belated list of highlights). During the day, we sat around talking about stuff, and the topic of poetic constraints came up.

In the course of these conversations, we began to notice the outlines of a sort of taxonomy of constraints. The three constraints I've posted to the site this week illustrate the three primary levels that we began to feel out in those conversations.

The first constraint is purely contextual or situational: its influence on the actual language, content, and structure of the poem is difficult to pin down precisely. We feel intuitively that a five-part poem written in five different cities and over a correspondingly broad span of time would differ from a five-part poem written in a single sitting, but even if we had these two hypothetical poems side-by-side, it might be difficult to determine which one was written according to the constraint and which one wasn't. This raises the question once again of just how much context influences / should influence our reading of a poem, a question raised a fair number of times in this blog over the past year (here; here).

The second constraint is more typical, in that it partially governs the language, content, and structure of the poem, while still leaving substantial room for creativity and maneuverability. This is what most people think of when they think of a "constraint," and most poetic forms fit comfortably within this category.

The third constraint, by contrast, governs almost all elements of the poem. A few bits of subjective intentionality persist here and there but mostly the constraint functions as a kind of "poem-generating machine": once it has been kicked into gear by the chance operation of opening that first book to a random page, the poem basically "writes itself." It's perhaps more proper to think of this as "algorithmic writing."

I think E.B. is most interested in the first sort of constraint, whereas I think I'm most interested in the third—

Labels: writing

Monday, October 04, 2004
4:38 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

This has been a terrible month for Raccoon updates. With only two updates in the past seventeen days, August 2004 looks like it's shaping up to be the most thinly-updated month in this blog's entire existence.

I'm not even exactly sure what's been keeping me so busy. I've taken no trips in August (except for a jaunt this weekend out to Madison/Baraboo to help various relocating friends) and I certainly haven't been working on my syllabus for the looming fall semester...

Let's see... I spent a bunch of nights attending Steve Krakow's brilliantly-conceived Million Tongues Festival, and a bunch of days hosting K's mom, brother, and half-sister who were in town... I've been continuing to enter index cards into the database... writing some poems... working on a few odd pieces of fiction...

Does that really account for half the month?

Labels: personal, writing

Tuesday, August 17, 2004
10:24 PM
0 comments

While I'm in the process of digitizing the card file, I'll periodically post the text of certain cards here if I think they'll be of interest to the Raccoon reading audience...

We'll start with this one, from November of 2001, filed under "Algorithmic Writing" (crossreferenced under Erotica, Narrative, and Oulipo):

there is much that can be done with the idea of alogrithmically-produced erotica

for a while now I have been thinking of an Oulipan generative mechanism for porn--OuPornPo. I believe it was K's idea to create an online automated porn generator

the Oulipan 'who is guilty?' piece or the Cain and Abel piece especially could be adapted to erotic combinatorials (the possibilities abound!)

but I am also drawn to the idea of generating a nonnarrative erotica. Thought of this last night while reading Forche's polyphonic fragmented war poems. With a suitable database of fantasies and an algorithm, nonnarrative polyphonic erotic texts could be generated

Is there anyone on earth who might have the time and wherewithal to pursue this idea?

Labels: writing

Thursday, July 29, 2004
10:21 PM
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Noticed the following passage in Tony Kushner's Afterword to Angels In America, and I thought it was relevant, given that in May I'm going to be entering my first long-term collective living arrangement in five years, and will also be embarking upon a collaborative writing project with poet Eric Burger. More on that later, for now here's the quote:

"Americans pay high prices for maintaining the myth of the Individual: We have no system of universal health care, we can't pass sane gun control laws, we elect presidents like Reagan, we hate and fear inevitable processes like aging and death. Way down close to the bottom of the list of evils Individualism visits on our culture is the fact that in the modern era it isn't enough to write; you must also be a Writer, and play your part in a cautionary narrative in which you will fail or triumph, be in or out, hot or cold. The rewards can be fantastic, the punishment dismal; it's a zero sum game, and its guarantor of value, its marker is that you pretend you play it solo, preserving the myth that you alone are the wellspring of your creativity."

Labels: personal, writing

Saturday, April 24, 2004
12:16 PM
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The Creeley reading was pretty amazing. He struck me, charmingly, as a person who is utterly bewildered by having produced the work that he's produced: he reiterated several times that he doesn't have a clear sense of what his own poems mean, or even that he himself is genuinely the author of them. He suggested that writing exists outside of one's self, and then comes into the world by being sort of channeled through the artist, who may exert no more intentionality than just sort of stepping aside.

From my notes:

"Writing is as much how do you get to it, how do you find your way to it—once you get to it there's no problem."

"One thinks that because one wrote something that one wrote it—not so simple!"

This seems in accord with what Sluk wrote about ideas coming from the unconscious mind—if I train myself, as a writer, to "find" my unconscious / let those unconscious intuitions through (harder than it sounds), then, in a very real way, "I" did not write the poem (if we take "I" to mean the bundled assertions / beliefs / strategies / whatever that constitute my conscious self).

There's another interesting thing that Creeley does that I still can't quite put my finger on: something to do with the way he freeley uses words that other poets might reject as banal or exhausted. There's an argument that I want to make here about individual words as "machines" ("micropoems?") and Creeley poems, aware of words functioning on this level, operate as assemblages of these independent units—but then I wonder if I'm not thinking too hard about it.

I also enjoyed the reading because I knew a lot of the people there... people I know from UIC; people familiar from Discrete Series events; people I met in Arizona during my UIC days who are now in Chicago. Going to an event an recognizing a fair percentage of the crowd always gives me a good feeling, there's something vaguely communal about it. Or maybe it is recognizing my membership in a closed cultural group.

Or is it so closed after all? I've grown really interested, lately, in how the Internet is affecting contemporary poetic culture. The Internet is enabling a national (international probably) discussion among poets on a scale that has not really been seen before—we could say it is intensifying the culture. But we could also say (arguably) that it is opening the culture to outsiders: the Internet is, after all, an open network.

Poetic culture, in the past, could perhaps be described as an invisible college, a "group of peers ... who band around a shared interest" (thanks to Black Belt Jones for my introduction to this concept).

The Internet turns invisible colleges into what people are calling "echo chambers": social networks which allow like-minded people to come together to agree (or to argue).

As you might guess from the pejorative name, echo chambers are often critiqued as being insular spaces, feedback systems where all of the participants mutually reinforce one another to the point of myopia. But others point out that since echo chambers operate within an architecture which is accessible and open, other people can look in, comment, and critique, injecting a heterogeneous element that keeps the system evolving...

Tools for thought, anyway.

Labels: poetry_commentary, writing

Friday, April 02, 2004
11:06 AM
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I have successfully lived for 31 years without yet once owning a mobile phone. But in under a month I'm going to move into an apartment with two other people (a story for another time), and I decided that this marked a good point at which to finally give in and pick one up.

I'm glad I waited, because the Nokia 7610, just announced two weeks ago, might be the one I want. I'm particularly drawn to its Lifeblog software, which "automatically organizes your photos, videos, text messages, and multimedia messages into a clear chronology you can easily browse, search, edit, and save."

This is very appealing to me, because I'm basically obsessed with chronology as a means of organizing various sorts of "life material." I can date this obsession back to reading this idea of Rudy Rucker's in the Mondo 2000 book, back in the early 90s:

"I want to have my life's work on a CD with an access system that can call up any part of it, key on it with a cursor, and then go out into my journals, see what was happening, or get into my essays, see what I was doing then or find other stories that used a particular item and have it all be totally seamless ... I'm trying to merge my life with my fiction and essentially create a word model of my consciousness."

Although my various creative projects each end up stored in separate archives (my drawings, for instance, are kept in sketchbooks whereas my Noah Opponent material ends up burned to CDs), each of these archives is maintained in chronological order. If I ever felt like going to the trouble of digitizing it all I could, with some effort, organize it all into a singular chronological archive. This is (currently) too much trouble, because no single interface that I've seen can adequately display and allow for intuitive navigation of all these different types of files—photos, visual art, writing, notes, sound and multimedia. Lifeblog isn't that interface—but it seems like it's at least groping in that direction.

No word yet on how well Lifeblog "entries" will export to HTML. I'd say that this is a desirable application—see how well it plays out in an environment like Flickr, where you can easily use the "Blog This" feature to grab an image from the stream and plug it into your blog.

I'd go a step further and say that if the Lifeblog people (aka Nokia) are smart (and I suspect that they are) they would do well to think about giving users an easy way to integrate their Lifeblog with their weblog. In theory, this shouldn't be too hard: any number of digital archives can be combined into a single archive as long as each individual item has its own time-stamp. They already have the data that allows them to be arranged in a single structure. Chronology is a very effective organizing conceit because it already enjoys global adoption and has since 1884, or 1918, depending on how you look at it.

(Term paper: discuss the way that an obsession with Rucker's idea influenced the structure of Imaginary Year.)

Labels: writing

Wednesday, March 31, 2004
4:51 PM
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The famous Lord Sluk has written an interesting post on dream-journaling as a sort of negotiation process between the unconscious and the ego. This jibes with my own experience of dream-journaling, and also with my current project, where I've been writing poems in a semi-conscious state.

My response, in part, reads:

"In [my] semi-awake state I have a greater ability to allow unconscious material / intuitive connections into my mind. I have been looking at the process of writing these poems very much as a process of training—ideally I am trying to learn to trust the value of these sorts of intuitions and impulses... I'd like to be able to coax them out / access them more regularly during waking hours. As it is, they begin to emerge sometimes and then I (the ego) just immediately clamp(s) down on them.

Sometimes even in my semi-awake state the conscious mind barges in and begins to question the value of the unconscious material / juxtapositions, which tends to bring the entire process of the poem to a screeching halt.

In short, I'm trying to let my unconscious mind colonize my conscious mind, rather than vice versa. But perhaps Sluk's metaphor of the two establishing dialogue is the more generous metaphor here.

I promised that if I worked up the nerve I'd post some of the poems here, but probably a better place for them is my dormant LiveJournal, which had previously been my dream journal. Here's today's.

Labels: writing

Monday, March 29, 2004
2:10 PM
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A few days ago, I wrote about how I enjoy reading poetry that, in some way or another, resists the impulse to directly communicate meaning.

Critics of this type of poetry will often be found voicing some variant of the familiar "anybody could do that" complaint. Just throw some random words together, how hard could it be?

Now, poetry of this sort isn't always as "random" or "meaningless" as it might first appear, but I'm going to set that aside for the moment and just point out that trying to create something that doesn't rely on familiar structures or meanings is actually more difficult than it might appear.

Homer: Jazz, pfft. They just make it up as they go along. I could do that: dee dee-dee dee dee dee dee, dee dee dee --
Marge: That's "Mary Had a Little Lamb".
Homer: OK, then, this: doo doo-doo doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo --
Marge: That's the same thing; you just replaced "dee"s with "doo"s.
Homer: D'oh!

Part of why I find poetry very difficult to write is that I'm primarily a narrative writer—that's great for fiction, but I'm not particularly interested in writing narrative poetry—if I want to write narrative, I'm going to write fiction, or maybe a prose poem. When I try to write something more lyrical or something experimental I have enormous difficulty resisting the tide pulling me back towards narrative, towards meaning.

My solution, recently, has been to take a tablet with me to bed, and to write out a quick draft of a poem as soon as I wake up in the morning, or when I wake up in the middle of the night. I've written maybe a dozen of these poems over the last two months, and while I'd stop short of saying that they're great poems, I do find that they show more strange (dreamlike) juxtapositions and unexpected associations than my normal writing, with an internal coherence that's quite loose, a refreshing change from the forwards-moving narrative logic that keeps the fiction integrated.

An interesting experiment, all in all. If I work up the nerve I'll post a few of the better ones here.

Labels: poetry_commentary, writing

Friday, March 05, 2004
11:21 AM
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