SNR Editor’s Blog , Blogging about Writers and Writing, Links to an interesting article.
Another Writing Trend?
In an article for Canada’s Globe & Mail, Tralee Pearce argues that more authors are writing what amount to be 12-month memoirs, that being memoirs covering a annual span. There’s A Year in the World, The Year of Magical Thinking, A Year in Provence, The Year of Yes, and My Year in Iraq.
My Three Friends
Originally uploaded by dylan_k. These three came to see me, all the way from Tennessee: Christine, Anne Marie, and Ian.
For the first time in what has become a few years, I’ve got a poem published. The acceptance letter marked the end of a happy work week, which also culminated in a visit by three of my friends from college. On the first day of their visit, I checked my email to find:
We are happy to inform you that your work, “Eviction” has been accepted by our editors.
Now, I wonder, do I leave that poem online @ nocategories.net, or do I take it down?
Well, it’s finished, or at least I’m done with it. Maybe my cut-up poetry wasn’t a success. I found myself “cheating” (not that it matters) by rearranging the randomness, picking deliberately, editing the results, etc. In the end, there were only three results I could call a finished poem, and they’re short.
The lackluster feeling I have about this “experiment”* is probably related to the feelings that led me to cut up those old poems in the first place. I took the relatively few salvageable lines from a sizeable pile of discarded poems, and, like cut fruit, the pieces themselves quickly turned brown and unappealing.
Anyway (without further ado, and without any further, hemming, hawing, excuses or other dalliance, I bring you), my cut-up poems:
Cut-up is one of those avant-garde literary tricks that probably gets discussed more than it is done, read about more than it is read, etc. I imagine the initial inspiration for it was well intended. Someone looked at a collage and thought: why don’t I say that? Well, you can’t exactly say a collage. Or, you can, but it won’t make sense. A collage doesn’t need to make sense, or, it does but not in the same way. If the items in a collage look good together, as an arrangement, then the collage is aesthetically pleasing. I think it is difficult for words to be arranged rather than composed together, if they are to be pleasing anyway. Yeah, sure, words don’t have to be pleasing. Eat a fart! Go away.
I think it would help “ease the pleasing” so to speak if there were some relationship among the parts before they are randomly chosen. Perhaps each part pertains to a theme, like having a box of blue things to make a collage with. Maybe each snippet of text describes an emotion, like having a pile of objects with a certain texture. Then, just as I could sit down and make a collage that is blue and bumpy, I could make a cut up poem that achieves an effect, while retaining its spontaneity.
* I hate to use the word experiment with regard to anything creative. (Now that I’m not in school, I’ve had to watch my mouth in general.) My friend Lindsay certainly summed it up well, at a recent party. We were drawing on things with her favorite paint markers. Someone asked her, “Oh, are you experimenting with those markers?” and she retorted, “No, I’m drawing with them.”
Stunned
By the look
Of another
This is what was and what never will be
Life is rhetoric from strangers
Imagined-spoken
Slower
Than hurry scurry all around
Look how close to one another
They don’t notice each other.
Be, for a brief moment
What makes
Drums and heartbeats
Blood, motion.
The sun was dead
You were singing
Nevermind your eyes
You’re lost in the differences
Lost in the phrases and situations
Wrong when it feels right
Thoughts in the dark
Stars in the night.
You were singing.
I thought I heard you say
What I wanted to hear
I can’t see the differences anymore
No boredom, no sorrow
No pain, no tomorrow
No dreams, or thoughts of water
No questions, answers or wonder
Never mind my eyes
It always ends up like this,
I chase but never catch bliss.
On Saturday, Sunday, and Monday (3/11 – 3/13) the Armory Show: the International Fair of New Art, was visited by the Physicalists – a group of artists who are challenging what has become the “norm†in contemporary art – art that is “deep,†angst ridden and visually uninteresting.
The Physicalists passed out over 300 balloons printed with the tenets of Physicalism (“refuse to bullshitâ€, “delight in creationâ€, “question art dogmaâ€, “invent visual ideasâ€, and “emphasize beauty.â€) Along with the balloons, they passed out over 400 copies of the Physicalist manifesto – see attached.
People were delighted. They exited the crowded Armory show and were greeted by sunny skies and smiling Physicalists in white jumpsuits.
The Armory show was the Physicalist’s second installation (the first was at Miami Art Basel and involved eggs). The Physicalists have installations already planned for Los Angeles and Berlin later this year.
For more information contact physicalists@physicalism.org
After enough spare time spent sorting through old files and notebooks, I have produced a pile of unwanted writing: drafts, failed poems, etc. The pile is large enough that I would regret throwing it away. It is so much. It occurred to me that I could cut out anything remotely salvageable, and then make a collage out of the pieces. This should be fun, if not productive.
I have scanned the first result, but I will probably type the others.
the Lazurus’ Corporation‘s brief explanation of cut-up for the uninitiated
The Cut-Up technique is to writing what collage is to visual art. Its recent use was pioneered by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and later David Bowie used it during the 1970s. The basic method is simple – write a piece of work, cut the paper up with scissors, and rearrange the pieces to form new phrases and new meanings.
“The best writing seems to be done almost by accident, but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit … had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.”
William Burroughs, RE/SEARCH #4/5, 1982Obviously, using this method can and will produce results which you’re not happy with, but the surprising thing is how many of the results are successful. Sometimes all that is needed is a quick read through of the results, adding punctuation and deleting the occasional word to produce the finished results. Purists might complain about editing the cut-up text, but this process is a tool which you can choose to use at any stage in the process of writing.
The Physicalist manifesto is complete, but the fun has just begun!
Having been complicit in the composition of that document, I am conscripted to assist with its delivery: to the unsuspecting crowd assembled for New York City’s Armory Art Show.
There is a brand new physicalism.org website waiting in the wings for anyone who reads what we distribute, or for anyone else who is curious.
In addition to my help with all that, the physicalists volunteered me to assist with the composition of a press release, attracting attention to our endeavor. It reads essentially as follows.
Physicalists Distribute Manifesto at Armory Show
Physicalism endorses beauty and is against the belief that art must contain meaning beyond the visual. The balloons are printed with the five tenets of Physicalism (“emphasize beauty,” “delight in creation,” “question art dogma,” “invent visual ideas,” and “refuse to bullshit”). Each balloon will be accompanied by a copy of the Physicalist Manifesto.
The Physicalists will be at the Armory Show (Piers 90 & 92, 12th Avenue at 50th and 52nd Streets) beginning at 2 pm on Saturday, and at other Manhattan art locations throughout the weekend, including the Armory satellite fairs and the Whitney Biennial. For more information contact physicalists@physicalism.org
It was a pleasant surprise to see the favorable response that the press has shown so far to the press release, and the copy of the manifesto included with it. Reporters have asked some interesting questions of the physicalist they interviewed. “How are you paying for this endeavor?” For me, its $40 bus fare, which I might’ve spent in the bar this weekend instead, plus incidentals, which I definitely would have spent anyway.
That’s the reality of it, isn’t it, giving up time and money in support of a cause, because you believe in it, or in its potential, anyway. I’m going to New York, to wear a crazy jump suit and pass out balloons to strangers. For fun? For profit? Out of curiosity? Hoping to get some sort of gonzo journalism out of it? Yes. I suppose. Sure. Why not.
I really have no idea what to expect.
Last night, for example, I spent a couple hours hollowing out eggshells. They call it egg blowing. First you puncture two tiny holes on either side of the eggshell. Then, you use a coffee straw to blow the contents from the shell, saving the contents to cook with, and the shells for whatever purpose you have in mind. If you’re a physicalist, that purpose would be to print upon each shell one of the main ideas of physicalism and then to “lay” that egg some place where a person who needs to learn those ideas might find them. We made a few dozen of these eggs.
I ate the largest omlette in Baltimore last night.
Two paths, one line that parted:
They end sure as what started.
It’s raining in Mecklenburg again
And I’m walking past the same old streetlights,
Through the same monotonous alleyways.
The first storm of the season is here.
I’m still crying like winter rain,
Nursing bruises from other spring times.
May the rain wash away what I’ve not forgotten!
May those midnight noontimes blind me!
Fluid, Stoic, and Gas like,
It steams in the springtime,
It freezes.
From the hot ground in August,
It hisses,
Falls like lightfoot angels,
Descends heavenly cherubim and seraphim
Atop black asphalt factories.
Train came calling by
As radio kept crying did
So I slept soundly
Window by my bed
Held moonlight.
Streetlights slanting over
Light from them fell from them
Soundly out.
The silence: stout,
Lost, thoughtful.
Paperworks lay the-place-wide
As ignoring, I closed eyes.
Words got lost on time.
The meaning of dream disguise
Was reason.