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
3:04 PM
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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
1:47 PM
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I brought Rudy Rucker's Seek!: Selected Nonfiction with me on my Milwaukee trip and, as I said over there in the sidebar, I found it a pretty good "geek vacation book": heady enough to be interesting, breezy enough to be fun.

At times, though, Rucker seems to fail to fully think through his arguments before setting them down on the page. This is most notable in the book's final section, "Art," where he makes a few attempts to talk about literature by viewing it through the lens of information theory or chaos theory. This might be a promising approach, if handled with intellectual rigor, and so it's especially disappointing to find the arguments here particularly flimsy.

For example:

"In [both paintings and novels], the information has a kind of fractal structure. I would define a fractal as something that has this property: when you look twice as hard at a fractal, you see three times as much. Language is fractal with words suggesting words suggesting words, while paintings are fractal with their details within details within details. A basic problem is that in either case only a limited amount of information is really being given. Fractal nature has an essentially infinite precision, but a novel or a painting is radically finite. ... The seeming reality of a novel or a painting is an artful construct that only pops into focus at a certain distance. It is only the cosmic fractal of real life that allows for endless zooming."

I think that the point that Rucker's making here is that the "reality" in a novel isn't truly fractal, that you can't immerse yourself in deeper and deeper layers of that world. You can't "endlessly zoom in" on it. Fair enough—but initially, when he's describing why he thinks of language as fractal in the first place, he says that the key piece are those "words suggesting words suggesting words." By this I take him to mean the chains of association and allusion that language triggers in the head of the reader: if this is in fact what he means then a novel is, essentially, infinite, by the way that it engages symbiotically with (fractal) human consciousness. The depth of the novel's world is almost irrelevant, what matters is the resonance and complexity of the triggered associations. One could argue that Finnegans Wake is the perfect example of a fractal novel and simultaneously argue that the book makes little or no effort to establish the "artful construct" of "seeming reality."

Then there's his re-working of information theory into an aesthetic philosophy:

"What is information? [Claude] Shannon measured information in 'bits.' If someone answers a single yes-or-no question, they are giving you one bit of information. Two yes/no questions are two bits. ... He estimated written English as carrying about seven bits per word, meaning that if a random word is excised from a text, you can usually guess it by asking seven yes-or-no questions. ... In a crap genre books, generated by a low-complexity intelligence with a very short runtime, the information per word is going to be low, maybe as low as three or four bits. In a high-complexity work the information per word will be higher...

"The point of all this is that a pattern's information level is a quantity that is absolute and not relative. The pattern can be a book, a record album, or a person's conversation. If I say something is boring, it's not just my cruelty speaking. It's objective fact. It may be that the book really is stupid and boring, as can be witnessed by the fact that the book has a very low information-theoretic complexity."

Tempting, but I don't agree that boring/interesting is really a question of mathematics (much less stupid/intelligent). Again the piece that seems to be missing is the element of human consciousness and the way that art interfaces with it.

"Boredom + attention = becoming interested" —John Cage

"[W]hat some see as a single moment repeating, others see as a nonrepeating series of similar moments." —Matthew Goulish

"We step and do not step into the same rivers, we are and are not." —Heraclitus

When we hear, say, a piece of music with a repeating motif, the second time we hear it is not the same as the first time we hear it. When dealing with an extremely repetitive form of music, such as a hypnotic drumbeat, a drone, or a raga, you can potentially say that the hundredth time you hear the motif is not the same as the first, or the ninety-ninth. The neat logic of information theory makes no allowance for the shifting perceptions of the receiver, and, by extension, neither does Rucker: this is an error. An information theorist might say that Cage's widely misunderstood "silent piano" piece 4'33 contains no information at all, but actually listening to 4'33 (which you can do right now, sitting right where you are) indicates that the piece is in fact teeming endlessly with information.

Given that Rucker is a mathematician, it makes sense that he would attempt to make this argument, but given that Rucker is also something of a mystic, who argues eloquently elsewhere in Seek! that the universe is suffused with consciousness and intelligence, it's disappointing to see him take an aesthetic stance that is so arid and lifeless. (It's worth noting that in a postscript he gives up on discussing a text's "algorithmic complexity" and instead moves to discussing the fuzzily-presented concept of its "logical depth," but, again, leaves consciousness filtered out of the equation.)

Labels: art, information, language

Monday, July 12, 2004
4:26 PM
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Today I plan to once again try to get the site commenting system working.

In the meantime, enjoy this comment from Raccoon reader Kat McLellan:

"[In Raccoon] you said: 'As I understand it so far, apophasis seems to be a mode of religious discourse which confronts the problem of language's inability to express the inexpressible event at the heart of the mystical experience.'

At its best, poetry seems to work this way. In Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, there is a line which attempts to capture the soul's ascendence into heaven. The words are ordinary, but it is the only line in the poem which is not in iambic pentamenter... it has an extra foot. Beyond words, its structure attempts to lead the reader to the brink of something of which language is incapable.

It's not always a religious event... but the value of poetry seems to me to lie in its ability to express an awareness of the incapacity of language... to lead a person to the lurching experience of approaching the space just beyond the edge of where language breaks down.

This seems to me also to function as a passable definition of consciousness: an awareness of the limitations of language, a desire for language to do something which it cannot."

Labels: language, poetry_commentary, spirituality

Friday, February 28, 2003
3:51 PM
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Well, now that I have your attention...

No, seriously. Many Imaginary Year entries over the past two years have dealt with sex, and today's deals explicitly with the inability of language to adequately describe the experience of sex.

The last several entries have been leading up to this one, and over the past few weeks I've been thinking about how I wanted to handle it. At the same time, I've been engaged in this business of pulling the old fiction out of the files and revising it. All of this has reminded me of a dormant project, a book that I've wanted to write for some time now, a book of short stories which all deal with human sexual behavior.

We human beings think about sex an awful lot—at least I do—and yet there still seems to be a surprising shortage of good sexually-explicit literature. I'm not talking about erotica and porn here—those two genres certainly have substantial cottage industries. But the goal of stories within those genres is to titillate the reader—to get them off, in short—and I'm more interested in a literature that attempts to represent sexuality in a way that's honest, to communicate the ways human beings actually explore sexuality, experiment with it, mess around with it, play with it; a literature that is interested in sexual failures as well as sexual accomplishments, that examines the ways people integrate sexuality into their everyday lives. I have trouble thinking of many authors who have pursued this theme extensively—the only examples that leap to mind are Henry Miller and Philip Roth (both of whom are problematic, at best). Also Anais Nin (also problematic, but in a different way), and perhaps Jeanette Winterson?

If you have a favorite author, novel, or story, who deals with this kind of material, feel free to let me know via the comments link (or e-mail, if you're shy).

Anyway, I've been working on this book on and off for a few years now. I've written two stories for it, and about half of a third, and I have notes for a few more. The fact that the project continues to nag away at my mind must be a sign that there is some promise there.

The book's working title is How We Come.

There are all sorts of difficulties involved with representing sexuality in fiction, but I'll go into those more in a later entry.

Labels: language, sexuality, writing

Monday, May 20, 2002
2:04 PM
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