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process Thinking about diaries reminds me of Laurie Langbauer's interesting book Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850-1930. In that book, she looks at the way serial novels focus on "the everyday," and she discusses the political and cultural ramifications of such a focus. While diaries (and the related diary-based forms I discussed on Monday) are not novels, they could certainly be thought of similarly: as a serial literature of everyday life. Langbauer: "What distinguishes [a term like the everyday and a form like the series] from other terms and forms ... is that they foreground repetition and ongoingness. They prompt me to insist on process." The notion of process is an important one to me. I''ve begun to grow less and less interested in artworks (writings, paintings, songs) that present themselves as a completed, standalone work, and more and more interested in artworks that document the way a mind holds a nagging idea up to the light every which way, works and reworks particular sets of material, pursues themes, makes mistakes, tries strategies, abandons some, salvages others. Georges Perec: "Exclusively preoccupied with its great capitals (Work, Style, Inspiration, World-Vision, Fundamental Options, Genius, Creation, etc.), literary history seems deliberately to ignore writing as practice, as work, as play." As Chris and I were putting together the Number None CD, we considered the model put forth by albums like The Faust Tapes or the Tower Recordings' Folkscene, albums which are less about presenting a particular set of "finished" songs and which are more about compiling a pile of promising odds and ends, weird experiments that blur into one another, unfinished bits and pieces, a portrait of the studio-in-process. (We eventually decided to err on the side of the more traditional album, but the model here still holds potential, and may be something that we explore more in the future.) (Idea: the "process" album as a kind of companion-piece to the "official" album. I can say with great certainty that I'd love to hear a disc of, say, whatever was left on the cutting-room floor after the recording of Vision Creation New Sun, or abandoned experiments from the Beck/Dust Brothers Odelay sessions, and I can't be alone in that.) Josef links to the Praystation CD-ROM, which contains 397 folders which hold all the data that Praystation mastermind Joshua Davis collected over the course of a year: "All original source files, art files, text files, accidents, epiphanies, etc." This SaskiWoxi album, also linked to from Josef, seems to be set up similarly. These ideas seem hot with promise. Labels: creative_process, writing

Thursday, May 02, 2002 1:37 PM   Comments: Post a Comment