Here’s another image from the stack of old disks in the shoebox. I made this on an old mac, when I was maybe ten years old. If you know me the way you might, you’ll look at this and think, “gee, this is surprisingly colorful” But you know well enough to keep that kind of a comment to yourself, don’t you? (after all, most of my readers keep all their comments to themselves).
I created this image, digitally, when I was in high school. It later became the cover of the first issue of “Apocalypse Playground.” I thought I had lost the file years ago, but it turned up while I was digging for the script I mentioned in my previous post.
In 2001 I was a sophomore in college, with a bit more time on my hands than I can imagine now. I wrote a play called “Street Preacher”. You can read the complete text here:
We don’t want to mention the hundreds of people who died, all in the collapse of two buildings, the tons of concrete and metal crushing them. We’re leaving it up to posterity, perhaps, to consider whatever rationalle there might have been for “the attack” — the attack on us — the attacks in quasi-retaliation. We don’t hold on to the names, the faces, the lost lives themselves. We’ve branded the thing with a handy sanitized acronym, “9/11,” a miserable date — its too diffficult, or less newsworthy, to mention the thing otherwise.
And now, I bring you this, cracked from the mind of my friend J.Rock, who noticed:
The War Against Terrorism has the coolest acronym.
After all, we laugh at what strikes us as absurd.
My friend Christine mentioned over on the NoCategories Forum that she is working on her thesis.
I’m looking at the discovery of “low literature” in the later part of the 20th cent. That shines new light on the Harlem renaissance and where the renaissance actually was happening–with normal people. This is in pretty much direct opposition of what was reported to have been happening then, because people like Locke and duBois were trying to combat old stereotypes and promote a new image of an elite, sophisticated, and intelligent “New Negro.” so i’m looking at some Ellison right now. That’s about it.
Now, I wanted to take a minute to share whatever I can that might be of some use, because I know what a pain all that research can be. I had lots of friendly people point me towards all kinds of stuff, without which I never could have succeeded with my own thesis, so I’m trying to repay the favor.
My ulterior motive here is to try to show Christine, and others, that keeping a thesis log online can do absolute wonders, by bringing treasures from the far flung community of ideas and conversations out there.
I guess, to start with, I would question Christine’s association of the Harlem renaissance and Ralph Ellison with “low literature.” Considering that I have had both subjects explained to me by a Ph.D. and in a classroom, I would venture to guess that even if those things were “low” literature, they certainly aren’t now – and that might be Christine’s point. I’m not sure.
In case its “low literature” she’s after, I’ll start with the assumption that the “low” stuff isn’t the stuff we hear about in class. I found an interesting explanation of the distinction between “high” and “low” in the arts over at pseudopodium. The article, entitled, On the Internet, No One Knows You’re an Ex-Abstract-Expressionist distinguishes between Painting and Poetry vs. Comics and Science Fiction, with an eye toward the unifying these distinctions. After all, art is a verb, not a noun.
A few months ago, there was a firestorm of this kind of discussion, sparked by an article in The Washington Postplebaum’s who observed a divide between “high culture” and “low culture,” The Reading Experience, one notable literary weblog decided “to take up the gauntlet thrown down by Kevin Holtsberry at Collected Miscellany, who apparently agrees with Anne Applebaum” And thus we have a paper trail of the issue explored at some length, possibly useful to students like us.
I wouldn’t be worth my opinionated merit badge if I didn’t throw in my own two cents on the issue, which is a bothersome one, to me. I think that the existence of this distinction between “high” and “low” in the arts and humanities is a very dangerous one, and it makes of a whole lot of art that sucks. The “high” art ends up being too egg-headed to be any good to most people, and the “low” stuff, since its “under the radar” of the critical eye, misses its chance to mature into something better. I devoted quite a bit of my own thesis to the subject, and rather than link to it and force you, poor thing, to read all of it, I’ll throw you these three little paragraphs.
It is Eliot’s contention in the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that, first of all, there is an aesthetic responsibility to be mindful of whatever expression has come in the past, and secondly, that art “is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet” (1374). A contention like this would not find much quality in the vast majority of what passes for cultural expression in the modern world: television, pop music, homepages, etc. These things are all too new to have a tradition, too removed from aesthetic thought to be in keeping with its standards, too product-driven to be more expressive than communicative, and these things are too focused on innovation to share Eliot’s regard for tradition.
These things exist separately from anything in our culture that has a regard for aesthetics. They are products of our culture’s capitalism and are only incidentally artistic. [ … ] Rather than disregard the majority of what passes for culture around us as worthless, it would be better to look, as Heidegger, at the meaningless world into which we are thrown as a world full of things that are potentially useful to us [ … ] It does not make sense to tell those people to disregard the culture of the very world in which they must endeavor to make meaning. That world is the embodiment of their tools for meaning. It does not make sense to say, since “low” culture is meaningless in comparison to “high” culture, that it should be ignored. To ignore it would be to deny it the opportunity to be used for any meaningful purpose, if all those in search of meaning were to look the other way. It would be a huge mistake to ignore a huge supply of potential tools for meaning and expression. [ … ] What if Picasso had drawn Saturday morning cartoons? What if a comic book deserved the Pulitzer by the same old standards? What if the poet laureate was an eloquent rapper?
If any of these were possible, perhaps the modern predicament would not exist. The problem seems to be that the culture of most people is devoid of the meaning inherent in “real” art. However, that very culture is overloaded with things that are almost art, like the Saturday morning cartoon. There is something that separates a cartoon from a “real” work of art, and that something could very easily be nothing more than a prejudice. Remove the prejudice that separates them, and suddenly someone like Picasso can contribute to humanity with a cartoon as easily as with a canvas. Perhaps the Saturday morning cartoon could even offer an improvement to what we now think of as art.
Last night, being a saturday on a college campus, confronted me with the same dilema I’ve seen during every weekend since my freshman year. Do I want a hangover in the morning or do I want to be bored all night? It seems, there is little to do, otherwise. I opted for going to bed early, since the decisdion proved much too much for my addled brain. (It had been a long, frustrating week )
I put my head on the pillow.
Then, suddenly, this pair of fools pounded down my door, and took to terrible singing with guitar and bongo drums in hand, laughing madly… “Its time to get up! Its time to have fun!” I gave in to their demands. Several of my compatriates and I played Yahtzee all night. It was fun.
After a long summer vacation, I give you “To Win, Simply Play.” I have made a new version of the hypertext novella I submitted for my undergraduate senior thesis.
A professor of mine once half-joked that the immediate benefit to a liberal arts education is the ability to engage an audience in a cocktail party. Well, graduation is in sight, but the cocktail parties aren’t. There was a party last night, though, with mixed company present. A professional photographer asked me how I had been since we had spoken last, and he asked me about thesis.
I’ve decided that I don’t like to talk about what I do at parties. Rather, it is impossible to talk about what I do. I can only ever explain what I do, answer questions, defend against the fact that a “work of hypertext fiction” or “nonlinear writing” or whatever I’ve chosen to call it – it sounds ridiculous to most people.
“Why can’t you just write an ordinary novel?”
“They call it a novel for a reason.”
And so, this is my cautionary tale to all those in the world who would consider devoting time to any kind of very new endeavor. Don’t do it to impress your friends. It might not work. They might not even understand, or if they do, they might not care.
The real reason to do anything experimental, creative, or new lies elsewhere and I think my professor was wrong. It isn’t an education, but a half-glance at the newspaper and an opinion that will win the crowd at a cocktail party.
jill/txt mentions the frustrating part(s) about trying to work with what she calls books in boxes The LitCrits often call the books in boxes by other names, ergodic literature or, my favorite, artifactual hypertext. But its true, its alot easier to spin out funny names for these things than it is to actually read them.
Its odd, there’s a way to mass-produce something like a toy castle, complete with catapult, court and cavelier — but they won’t make books in boxes.
Just as it is difficult to find the works themselves that fit in this category, it is similarly diffficult to find information about them. So, difficult, in fact, that an attempt on my part to write a paper about them was thwarted by the lack of sufficient reading material. I did manage to find a sufficient list of vaious works of ergodic literature, and in that book, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, I also foud this: “for an exhaustive historical inventory of ergodic literature see: “Vuilllemin, Alain. Informatique et literature 1950-1990/ Paris: Champion-Slatkine”
I wish I could get my hands on some of this stuff.
I agree with Maud Newton that Tom Robbins’ new literary manifesto might be missing a few things. Namely, the long and thriving tradition of the satirical and otherwise whimsical writing styles in literature. Robbins’ manifesto, published in Harpers, decries the kind of “weighty” writing that is typically prized by publications like The New Yorker:
Among our egocentric sad sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation. Taken out on others, depression becomes a weapon…
And that’s where Robbins has a point.
The fact that playfulness – a kind of divine playfulness intended to lighten man’s existential burden and promote what Joseph Campbell called “the rapture of being alive” – lies near the core of Zen, Taoist, Sufi, and Tantric teachings is lost on most Westerners: working stiffs and intellectuals alike…
I think that there is something to be said for the notion that the literary canon often confuses “worthwhile” literature with “serious” literature. I think that there is also soemthing to be said for the kind of whimsical curiosity that Robbins is advocating here. Daniel Green is discussing a very similar notion when he says:
I’m reasonably sure [curiosity enough to engage in literature] can’t be taught to indifferent younger students either, even if school curricula were actually to designed to encourage serious reading in the first place, which as far as I can tell they certainly are not. Encouraging them instead to indulge in “happy fantasy” will only result in their continuing to insist on happy fantasy, which means most will eventually turn to movies and tv anyway.
But wait, isn’t this “happy fantasy” akin to what Robbins is demanding more of? Robbins’ manifesto could easily be read as an aggreement with the need for that “happy fantasy” — even though it favors, instead, a kind of mystic whimsy — but it is difficult to distinguish between the two.
So, which will it be: a literature that is too heavy to carry, or one that is to light to hold? The answer, of course, is somewhere in the middle.
I hope, dear reader, that you love zombie movies as much as I do. That is to say, if you really really enjoy them for their gore, their violence, the shotguns and the way its alright to blow half the head off of a zombie, to hear the slurping sound as its parts slide off — then you don’t enjoy zombie movies as much as I do. I like them for more than that. I like them for their potential to make a kind of social commentary. The image of “living dead” … America, that’s you!
Sadly, this is an image that has been discarded in favor of the images most often prefered in most movies. (David Bowie once described American movies as “Tits and Explosions”) From the film review posted in the archive:
Romero and his disciples like Raimi somehow missed the point of their own beginnings and went on to make ludicrous self-parodic gorefests in the 70′s and 80′s (e.g. Evil Dead, the most trivializing title imaginable for a horror film). But the problem of the “living dead” remains–we must incorporate them into our cultural narrative, at our own psychic peril.
The one, and only zombie movie you’ll ever need is “Night of the Living Dead” you may like to know that the movie has entered the public domain. You can download “Night of the Living Dead” on the internet movies archive.
To Win, Simply Play, my novella, has received a positive and a negative critique this week. Some friend of mine in my hometown told another friend who told their sister that I had written something like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, and she decided to read it. While visiting my hometown last week, I ran into my new reader, who said, “I dunno, it just didn’t really follow that the stuff that follows, followed – do you follow?” and I do. I agree, actually, I do. I’ve learned, though, that it is difficult, if not impossible to agree with a reader who intends to be critical. Its as if a writer and a reader aren’t somehow allowed to share the same negative criticism. I said “I agree” and my reader seemed to say “yeah, right.”
Then, I got a different review. This one comes to me from J. Nathan Matias, who writes in his Notebook of Sand:
When you read the novella, don’t just think about what he does structurally. Think about the kinds of things he can and can’t talk about. For example, chronology isn’t a big part of the novella. Why not? Because he can’t give the chronology direction, and anchoring stories to time would just force the reader to keep track.
I guess that this marks the beginning of some real discussion of the novella, which hopefully will lead to a better version, someday.
An eight-hour bus ride from Winchester, VA to Knoxville, TN is a frustrating one. First of all, it was difficult to package my computer, a desktop model, in such a way that it would conform to the strict regulations governing what will or will not be accepted into the belly of the bus. Then, there was the ogre, stretched out on top of me. Encumbering luggage, the delirium of half-sleep – it will all lead to a strange state of mind upon arrival, which took place at Dawn.
It occurred to me that I had never seen the Greyhound bus station, or its surrounding, dilapidated, environment, in daylight. I walked away from the place in a trance, completely forgetting that my favorite pair of sandals, and my set of fancy headphones were still on the bus! Luckily, I remembered and managed to call the bus station in time for an attendant to retrieve my things while the bus was still refueling. I was relieved, and now I love my sandals a little more, having thought that I’d lost them.
There is no dorm room for me, yet. I woke for my first day of classes today at the flop house. The flop house is an loose, impromptu kind of commune, I suppose. Last night a romantic pair of gypsies came passing through, and also sought to flop at the house. They played a concert for us last night: she on her flute, and he on guitar.
That cat, Dharma, is a white cat with continents of orange on her coat. She has kittens this week. I helped her build a nest for the babies today. I gathered pillows in a way that would be able to walk on while carrying babies, and I arranged the blankets to make it soft for the wormy little ones. I think my efforts were appreciated, because when they were finished the little family immediately commenced with purring, milk, and naptime.