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apocalypse, pain, and writing
From an interview with Nick Harkaway, whose The Gone-Away World is a book I still would like very much to read: "It's not really enough any more to say "this will destroy the world", because that's sort of a given. You have to show what that means, why it matters. You have to show pain. We all know about pain on some level. Apocalypse is a gag. Pain is real. Contemporary issues - albeit dressed up and taken sideways - they make you feel. You have a stake in the action. And without that sense of investiture, action is just noise. " Labels: advice, creative_process, writing
Thursday, February 02, 2012
six things that bugged me about heroes S3.E01
So last night was the season premiere of the third season of Heroes, a show that I have a sort of love-hate relationship with, albeit one that is increasingly slipping towards "hate." I should preface this by saying that even when the show was at its best I always thought of it as little more than junk food. Even junk food has its hierarchy, however, and by the end of the second season the show had slipped in my mind from being somewhere around "basket of cheese fries" to somewhere around "fistful of jimmies." The third season is being promoted as a return to form, but as I settled down to watch it I sent out a Twitter update predicting that it would make me cringe with dismay at least six times. Did it? They didn't rely on their most aggravating plot device, that of having major characters run into one another at random, but there were still some serious annoyances. Roughly in order from most to least "cringeworthy": 1. Hiro's unwillingness to travel backwards in time still doesn't really make sense. Every time-travel narrative, from Primer to Back to the Future, inevitably touches on the perils of messing with the past, and those perils are real enough that we could reasonably expect a character to be reluctant to do it. But a blanket refusal under all circumstances strikes me as a Lazy Writer's solution to the problem of having invented a character who is too powerful. We should be able to expect that where the reward for going backwards is great enough (or the risk of not going backwards is severe enough) that the temptation to do it should at least be acknowledged. In this episode, Hiro takes a secret formula out of a safe only to have it stolen out of his hands by a gamine with super-speed, yet he never even considers going back in time to stop himself from taking it out of the safe. Recall that it is only Hiro's willingness to bear messages into the past in Season One that allows the other heroes to "save the world." 2. Mohinder's current plotline is cribbed directly from David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly. Crawling up the wall, amping up the sugar intake, becoming hyper-masculinized and -sexualized, and then... observing hideous transformations in the bathroom mirror! If you're going to be derivative, The Fly is pretty good material, but it's such a lift that it smack of laziness. 3. Giant shockwave that destroys Future Tokyo. Pretty cool-looking effect, but isn't that really only one degree removed from the "giant shockwave that destroys Future New York" that governed Season One? Come to think of it, Season Two's "apocalyptic plague that destroys Future New York" was also only one degree removed from Season One. It's like they're using a broken combinatoric wheel to write this stuff. At this point, I'd love to see a season from this show that wasn't based on Having to Avert an Apocalyptic Future. 4. Nathan's "religious conversion" at this stage seems... random? This strikes me as the kind of thing you do when you aren't sure what to do with a character. It would bug me less if the Heroes writers weren't already struggling with writing consistent characters. 5. Subtitles have Hiro say "discrete" when they mean to have him say "discreet." In reference to detectives. "These detectives are very discrete." As in they do not blur together into a single detective. 6. Usage of standard-issue black street thugs and introduction of a black "Level 5" supervillain doesn't improve the show's track record in terms of African-American representation. There are a few more, but those are some of the big ones. Should I stop watching this show? Labels: heroes, media commentary, rants, writing
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
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.
Friday, May 30, 2008
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
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
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
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
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: 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
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.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
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 Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness by Chris Kraus Demonology by Rick Moody Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, by Steven Johnson On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt 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
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
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
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
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
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
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?
Saturday, October 29, 2005
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
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
agnosis "One of God's greatest mercies is that he keeps us perpetually occluded." "[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." 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." 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
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) Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon 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
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