About
see also: about the author
“I hear all that there is to hear.
There is no noise but a lack of sound.
I am on the plain of Space.There are no spirits but spirits.
The room is empty of all but visible things.
THERE ARE NO CATEGORIES! OR JUSTIFICATIONS!
I am sure of my movements I am a bulk
in the air.”
So, there you have it, an explanation of a lack of categories. What, you think you’re going to have trouble deciphering that one? Imagine trying to faithfully reproduce the typography of a poem where the LAST thing on the author’s mind was reproducible tabs and margins, much less a coherent mission statement.
Three years after he had given his very first poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, a poetry reading that put West Coast Beat poets on the literary map, Michael McClure experimented with the psychotropic drug known as peyote. In “Peyote Poem,” he shares the experience of life without categories in the poem above.
A Treatise on Categories, and the Lack Thereof
Part of living an expressive and meaningful life involves transcending the categories that limit our ability to create new things and to express our thoughts and feelings. No Categories is interested in having a voice, giving a voice to others, and engaging in dialogue. At school we study literature, philosophy, and theology, but we have learned that these things and other things are useless without relation, without community. As cyberspace continues to revolutionize the means of creative production, it has trodden the ground of the printing press, the radio, the telephone, and the musical studio, etc. We pledge to break down the categories that prevent us all from expressing ourselves fully and to revel in the jouissance and the air of fair play and whimsical creativity and learn from other members of our community.
The No Categories Network began with a high spirit. It was declared “an open season on all of the “Categories” that keep us all from cutting loose, expressing our hopes, realizing our dreams, and knowing and expressing ourselves.” Life got in the way, in the months since then, as life often does. The categories crept back in. It’s easy to be a “student”, a “worker” an “excuse”. It isn’t so easy simply to be!
So, hear ye, hear ye! Invoking the ghost of Hedley Lamarr, this is a call for:
“…rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, sh!@-kickers and Methodists…”
… and all the other human miscellany. NoCategories is an Equal Opportunity outfit.
NoCategories is a website that collects writings by me, Dylan Kinnett, a 24 year-old writer living in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. There is one other active contributor to the NoCategories network, a webblog called Comhra by Trent Gilland. NoCategories began only a year ago as a forum for more than that, with a manifesto, which the previous paragraphs excerpts, but participation has ebbed, awaiting flow.
More practically, NoCategories was built to be “a collection of rants, raves, thoughts, observations, and writings.” It was built to have a forum, with hopes for the best of what a forum can do. NoCategories quickly became a loose collection of web logs. Some of those were very short-lived. The forum has been a ghost town for four of the six months since it was created. Honestly, most of this server has served as little more than a spam-trap for a while now.
That’s okay. There is plenty of time, and plenty of room to pick up that spirit, and the pieces of whats left, and to start again! Its a new year, so be patient, reader, things are just getting (re)started around here. Links might not work, or there might be too many of them here or there. You know the deal, “this webpage is under construction”.
So, this is your first time here, is it?
You’re probably reading this to know what to expect from this website, and you’ve come to this point because the previous section of the page did nothing to address that question for you. In that case, start browsing and form your opinion.
You might enjoy browsing through any of the stories, poems, essays, and ephemera that are the backbone of this website.
If you would like to settle down and read something with a bit more substance than an ordinary weblog, you can try reading a play about a street preacher, a thesis on the history and aesthetics of hypertext literature, or if that’s too academic for you, try the novella.
Stored in the archive, you might dig up some interesting tidbits like the travelogue written during a year as an exchange student in Kyoto, Japan.
Speaking of things in the archive, you might also like to check out the Apocalypse Playground zine archive.
As you can see, most of what goes up on this website is written material, but there is a humble little photoblog as well.
This is not your television. This is not your television.
On the Internet, it is all too easy to get caught up in the sights, the sounds, the colors, and the designs of everything. People come to the Internet and they expect something like television. They expect to be dazzled with things to see. Often, this expectation takes precedence over everything else that could be going on until, in many ways, the Internet has become little more than an advertising wasteland masquerading as “mass communication.”
I am just as guilty of this visual distraction as anyone. My own homepage has received countless hours of my attention to the colors of the backgrounds, the placement of the boxes, the links… and at the end of the weekend, all that I had to show for my time was: a pretty box with nothing in it! What is worse, I throw out all the hard work on that box of colors once the idea for a new one comes along. I have grown extremely frustrated with this. Don’t get me wrong, visual design has its place, but this isn’t it.
This is my space, and I prefer to tinker with words, not pictures. My name is Dylan, by the way, and I think that you will be more interested if you are a reader, not a viewer.