http://jottify.com/

Social networks for writers come and go, but a new one has come.  It’s called Jottify. Like the ones before it, you can share what you’ve written, find new readers, and have discussions. It also allows you to create a group, but it seems that the group doesn’t have any privacy settings. 

I’m looking to replace my very favorite notebook, which is all filled up now. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to make these anymore.

I’m posting this in the hopes that someone can help to point me in the right direction. I contacted the manufacturer, whose website suggests that they no longer make these, but they never replied. I’ve done all this because I loved that notebook so much and I want another one.

It is a hardbound book, with a cloth covering of some sort. The spine is sewn such that the open book lays flat. The paper is smooth and thick and white; it is acid-free (I think) and does not bleed through when I use a pen. The paper is narrow ruled (1/4 in (6.35 mm) spacing between ruling lines), with no vertical margin line. It measures 8″ wide by 10.5″ high and 1″ thick.

This is my favorite notebook.

When opened, my favorite notebook lays flat.

I have filled my favorite notebook with words and drawings

It has a hardbound cover, with cloth on it

http://vidaweb.org/the-count-2010

Incendiary headlines aside, take a look at this research. They counted authors and book reviews in most of the major literary publications. The results show that men get published and written about more often than women do.

How do we fix this?

This is a recipe for a poem I wrote. Now you can write a similar poem. Enjoy!

1. Choose a word at random. (Maybe a noun?)
2. Using that word, generate a set of “is” statements. (For example, if your word was “boredom” then these would be phrases that begin “boredom is”.)
3. Copy the phrases and paste them into a word processor.
4. Do a find-and-replace to replace all instances of the randomly chosen word (“boredom” etc.) with a new, meaningful word of your choosing.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 above, selecting different words, until you have 100 lines or more pasted into your file.
6. Read all your new phrases.
7. Keep the ones you like.
8. Make up new phrases to replace the ones you don’t like.
9. Shuffle the lines. Or order them however you like.

The Baker Artists Awards celebrate Baltimore’s artists on the Web with an ongoing exhibition of its diverse artistic practice, and the Mary Sawyer Baker Prize will establish Baltimore’s reputation as a creatively rich and vital place to live with a civic commitment to value its individual artists.

Please take a minute to visit my work on the Baker Artist Awards web site. As a Baltimore artist, I am eligible to win the significant Mary Sawyers Baker Prize or maybe bragging rights as Baltimore’s Choice. Either way, please follow the link and vote for me… and, if you live in Baltimore, you could also Nominate your own work! Now go sign-up and vote to help me get my work out there!

Visit my nomination at http://www.bakerartistawards.org/nomination/view/dylan-kinnett

Lately, I’ve been Learning to Write Art Criticism. Along the way, I’ve discovered some useful advice from a variety of critics at The Guardian, an English newspaper. Here’s a useful passage.

‘Don’t trust your prejudices but believe in your instincts’

Adrian Searle on art

The only rule: look, look again, and keep on looking. If you don’t like looking, don’t write about art.

There are lots of ways of writing. Read other critics, and not just the ones who write in newspapers. You can be as creative and as mischievous, as serious or as funny as the mood takes you or the situation demands. Think about the details and also about the bigger picture. Find out how artists think, what they say and how they make their work. Find out about materials. Read everything: it’ll all be useful.

Context matters a lot, and don’t forget you are part of that context, too. Don’t always trust the things written on the gallery wall or in an exhibition catalogue. Never write about what you haven’t seen.

Don’t trust your prejudices but believe in your instincts. Respect your readers, many of whom know more than you do. Also remember that they might not have seen the things you have chosen to write about, so tell them what things look and feel like and what they make you think. Tell them why some things matter, and others don’t. Ask yourself questions. Remember that we live in 2008, not 1688.

And by the way, you might not know what you think until you’ve written about it. Writing is a voyage of discovery. You will get lost and you will get things wrong. That can be worth reading, too. Be honest, even when you’re making things up. Don’t worry if what you are doing isn’t exactly criticism. Critics work with what other people do; but don’t be afraid and go your own way.

Got any more advice? Post it in the comments!

This will be a zine with literature and art, in particular, but we’re open to anything, in general. We’ll consider artwork of any media, style, or subject. The zine will have an online component, as well as a paper issue, so feel free to submit video, audio, etc.

We reject the notion that great art comes only out of misery and that all good artists are filled with angst and frustration. We say: delight — rather than despair — in creation. Artists are still constrained by certain dogmas, or unquestioned “truths” about what art is or should be. We encourage you to question rules about art and literature. We prefer to explore sensory imagery. Create an innovative process, combine media; and remember: there are no categories!

As a contributor, your work remains your sole property, and you grant our zine one-time rights to publication. Compensation for your inclusion in this, the inaugural issue, will be in the form of contributors’ copies, your name in lights, everlasting glory, etc.

To contribute, or for more info:
zine@nocategories.net

One of the most important business skills a writer needs is the ability to track the submission process. There’s a maxim out there, variously attributed, which says: “serious writers should keep their work in circulation until it either sells or the ink wears off”.

It can be tricky to keep that circulation going, especially if you’re trying to get a variety of things published. The publishers and media have different requirements about what to send, how to send it, when to send it, the length of the overall process, and so on. This can be confusing.

It is important to record the details of each submission. Surely, there must be a bulletproof system out there, time-tested by professional writers, right? I have set out to find that system, so that I can use it in my writing career. These are the results of that hunt.

What to track?

Here’s a quick list of the information you might want to record about your submissions. The list was adapted from a guide on the subject during a recent conversation on Literature and Latte (thanks Amber).

For each submission

• the name of your manuscript
• the type of submission: magazine article, short story, poem, etc.
• A copy of, or an electronic reference to, the manuscript itself (as submitted)
• the number of times the particular piece of writing has been submitted to any publication
• the date you sent the manuscript to the publication
• a copy of, or link to, the cover letter that accompanied the submission
• the title of the publication
• the date you received a response from the publication.
• the kind of response you received, which can be anything from form rejection to published.
• (copy / linked follow-up correspondence, if any.)
• Many publishers don’t allow simultaneous submissions, so, for each submission, record whether the manuscript is “active” or not.

For each publisher

• the title of the publication
• contact details @ the publication
• a copy of, or link to the publication’s submission guidelines

For the writer

• A reminder to meet any upcoming submission deadline
• A reminder to follow-up on the submission after the expected turn-around time has passed
• The ability to easily sort the submission tracking information.

This basic list can get complex very quickly if you’re tracking this information for one or more submissions to one or more publishers. It would help to have some sort of system, to organize all this information, either on paper or electronically.

Manuscript Submission Tracking Software

If you prefer to use paper documentation for your submission tracking, index cards or file folders will do nicely. You may prefer to use computer software, like a database or a spreadsheet, to make the information more dynamic. There are about 20 different software applications designed for writers who want to track their submissions. None of them do everything listed above, but many of them might be useful. Here are a few of the better ones out there.

Writer’s Market

Writer’s Market provides a secure online service for Submission Tracking. You can purchase this service by the month, to try it out. The Writer’s Market software is easy to use, and it is integrated with the Writer’s Market directory of publications, which is quite useful. On the other hand, you cannot store information about a publisher who is not listed in the directory. Writer’s Market intends to add this feature, someday. Meanwhile, you might run into some trouble if, like me, you publish in obscure or non-paying publications. One-year access to this service is free when you buy a copy of the Writer’s Market Book. With an annual subscription fee, you would think this service would offer at least as many features as its competitors, but it does two things well — it helps you track submissions to the publications listed in Writer’s Market . It also helps you keep a list of those publications for yourself.

Sonar

Sonar is a manuscript submission tracking program that does pretty much everything that the Writer’s Market service does, for free. Sonar isn’t integrated with a publisher’s database, so you’ll have to enter that information in yourself, but that won’t kill you. The author of this program says it was created in order to:

“show which market has each story, whether a story has been sold or rejected and which stories are gathering dust instead of earning their keep. If you decide to use it, you will be able to view a list of all your stories and then filter them in various ways (e.g. only show stories which are available to send out). You can add markets, stories and submissions and best of all it’s completely free!“

Sonar is software for windows.

Luminary Writer’s Database

The Writer’s Database is a web-based service for submission and publication tracking. It is free to use, and includes a function whereby users can share information about publishers, with listings and comments. This isn’t a very popular website, judging from the number of user-submitted publisher entries. A few “coming soon” announcements littered throughout the website indicate that good things might be in the works for The Writer’s Database, so you may want to keep an eye on this one.

The writer’s database gets honorable technical mention for the use of VCARDs and RSS feeds. Its free, too.

Slushomatic

The Slushomatic writing submission tool is compatible with windows and mac computers. Its author describes it well. “Slushomatic is a tool for writers to create and track their submissions to magazines. In addition to being a database for tracking stories/articles, publications and submissions, it will also format your document in the standard style required by editors (i.e; headers, line-spacing, font size, etc..), and auto-create cover letters based on the fields in your database.” Personally, I like to use a word processor for word processing, but it is nice to have a copy of the article stored inside the database. Its also nice to be able to create pdf files, but again, a modern word processor can do that.

Slushomatic is open-source software, so it has the potential to grow into an even more powerful writing submission tool.

InkLink

InkLink is one of the more popular software programs for Submission Tracking. It’s easy to see why. This thing is loaded with features. The interface is easy and simple, and so is the user’s manual. In addition to listing manuscripts and publishers, InkLink will help you catalog the resources you used in order to create a manuscript. These could be anything from text references to expenses.

The “reminder” feature is good, letting you know that its time for a submission’s second inquiry, etc., but it doesn’t send you an email, which would be ideal for me. (an ical might be nice, too).

Inklink will also help you create a writer’s resume, with the data you have entered. That could come in handy.

Inklink costs $90, which seems steep, at first, but it is a one-time fee, unlike Writers Market.

The Inklink website sure is difficult to look at, and their software isn’t going to win any graphic design awards, but inlink delivers where it counts. This is useful software, for windows users only.

Matthew Cheney, author of The Mumpsimus, poses some interesting questions about the part of a story called the exposition, or “infodump”.

I’ve been wondering about exposition recently, particularly exposition of the infodump variety, wherein an author needs to convey a lot of information and does so by coming out and stating it. Telling vs. showing. Choosing efficiency over subtlety.

Here are some ideas, questions, and assumptions about exposition…

Cheney asks for examples of infodump vs. exposition. I can think of one example that successfully combines the two: Shakespeare’s Ricard III Act I, Scene i.

In a previous post, I outlined some ideas for a spoken word routine where I’d like to emulate the lyric qualities of one of those sideshow, carnival “barkers”. I’m also interested in the role: being outside of some place, pitching the sensory experience to be had within, where description is everything.

I’d like to continue outlining those ideas, this time by considering subject matter, now that I’ve got a clear idea of voice.

I left off with the question: “what’s in the tent?”. In other words, I’m wondering, what the object is — what are these lyrical words about? For example, Mercutio’s rant in Romeo and Juliet, it’s about Queen Mab. I’m not much closer to an answer yet.

I’ve kinda taken up physicalism, particularly its emphasis on beauty. People I’ve pitched this idea to say, “fine, great, but isn’t it kinda, well, UNphysicalist?” People think of carnivals, and they think of freaks, and they think dark thoughts. People also tend to expect dark thoughts from me, and that’s pretty much my fault, but it’s also why I’m trying to move in this new direction.

I try to explain that the only thing I’m interested in is the lyrical quality of these characters, because I think it can be beautiful, but people scratch their heads.

It’s as if there cannot be anything beautiful inside that tent. People refuse to believe it. They’re more apt to step right up and thrill to the sight of a fish with a human body. Will they ever be able to gawk and awe at real beauty? Can I put it there for them? They don’t want to see it, or even think it possible. They’re incredulous.

That’s the thing about a fish with a human body. Tell a person to see a fish with a human body — even if I stitched the two together, just before the show — and that’s what they’ll see alright. Tell them you’ve got something beautiful, and they’re inclined to disagree, because they can disagree. Now there’s no mistakin’ it: that’s a mummified mermaid … but that other thing, well, it just isn’t to everyone’s taste.

Perhaps what I need then is the hall of mirrors, where the only thing to see is what you brought with you.

I have been invited to attend the release party of this edition of The University of Baltimore‘s Literary Magazine, Welter (on Tuesday, May 16th) and to perform “Eviction.” My poem by that name was recently accepted for publication by the Magazine.

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.

Kyle Neath strikes again! He and James Robert Mortland have created what promises to be an invaluable resource for poets, Poetry With Meaning. Here, writers can post poetry online, and read others’ poems.

Poetry with meaning is here to help you share your poetry with the rest of the world. We are here to help you share your thoughts and emotions. Here at Poetry with meaning you’ll find tools to help you write, and articles on how to become a better poet — but most importantly, you’ll find a sense of community.

One of the more curious features of Poetry With Meaning is the rhyming tool. Type in a word, and it will find words that rhyme with it. Its free, and fun, although I do prefer the somewhat old-fashioned metaphor tool, the imagination.

Yesterday began a new website, Good Copywriting. Lanched by Kyle Neath, the intorduction proclaims:

Good Copywriting is a blog about just that: good copywriting. Too often our eyes and ears are plagued by uninspiring, lackluster copywriting. Here you’ll find tips about how to become a better copywriter, and examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly of copywriting.

Its about damn time for something like this! I hope it gets more regularly updated than the very similar Notable Words.

I think I’ve ranted before about the prohibitive cost of the most reputable literary journals out there. That’s why I was excited to learn about the literary journal subscription discounts offered by the Emerging Writers Network.

The offer is simple – pay for one less journal than you order. Subscribe to 3? Pay for 2. Subscribe to 4? Pay for 3. And so on, right on to those truly dedicated souls out there who subscribe to all 23, but only have to pay for 22 of them! In all cases, simply remove the price of the lowest priced journal and you have your total cost. Emerging Writers Network

The announcement of this offer also inclulded some worthwhile notes about the relationship between wrtiers and these publications.

Literary journals. They are frequently where authors of literary writing first publish. Think about it. You pick up a book by a first time author and read the notes beneath his or her photo. They frequently mention having published stories, poems or essays in two or three journals, the names of which you recognize. Recognize, but perhaps have not ever read, or even seen.

Why not? Why have you not read any issues of Kenyon Review or Ploughshares or any number of other literary journals? Maybe your local bookseller doesn’t stock some (or most) of the titles you read or hear of. Maybe you find the price (typical range from $7 to $15 for a single issue) a bit much considering you can find a book in the store for only a little more?Emerging Writers Network

Surfing the links to all these literary journals should prove fun for a while. This is a list of the Literary Journals that are participating:

• A Public Space
• Absinthe: New European Writing
• Agni
• Arts & Letters
• Cincinnati Review
• Colorado Review
• Georgia Review
• Harvard Review
• Hobart
• Idaho Review
• Kenyon Review
• LIT
• Michigan Quarterly Review
• Orchid
• Other Voices
• Ploughshares
• Prairie Schooner
• Rainbow Curve
• Rosebud
• Salt Flats Annual
• Small Spiral Notebook
• Storyquarterly
• The Journal
• The Laurel Review
• The Southern Review
• Iowa Review
• Land Grant College Review
• Barrelhouse Magazine

I’m gearing up to make an audio recording of poems read aloud, and along the way I found some very interesting stuff.

When searching for recorded poetry on the internet, it is difficult to decide which keywords to search with. It seems that the recorded poems out there in the world get classified differently, and since I firmly believe that “There are no categories”, the creative challenge here is to find a way to take my favorite elements of each of these groups, and go my own way with them.

It seems, in general, that recorded poetry can take one of three forms: cultural, sub-cultural, or pop-cultural.

Recorded Poetry

I’ll call “recorded poetry” the works of the so-called “major poets”, for lack of a better term. These are works that are typically published in print first, and later read aloud by the authors, who typically have some amount of literary notoriety.

Poetry Archive is an excellent primary source for this material. Poetry Archive an internet collection of, in their words, “the voices of contemporary English-language poets and of poets from the past.” The archive allows its audience to encounter the contents in a variety of interesting ways: poems organized by poetic form, for example, or poems organized by theme, in addition to the traditional organization by title or by author. Unfortunately, there is no chronological arrangement, yet. The Poetry Archive project is still in its youth.

Amardeep Singh, Assistant Professor of English at Lehigh University recently blogged an introduction to the archive: ” If you’ve never heard Yeats or Tennyson reading in their own voices (on wax cylinder recordings), now you can for free.”

Andrew Motion, the Poet Lauriate of England, is involved with the Poetry Archive project, and has written about it in “Hearing the Masters’ Voices” for London’s Times.

I thought it was a pity that no one had thought to record poets in a systematic way, from the time that the technology first became available in the late 19th century.

That way, some of the lamentable gaps in our sound heritage would have been filled…. “The living part of a poem,” [Robert] Frost says, “is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax, idiom and meaning of a sentence. It is only there for those who have heard it previously in conversation . . . It goes and the language becomes a dead language, the poetry dead poetry. With it go the accents, the stresses, the delays that are not the property of vowels and syllables but that are shifted at will with the sense. Vowels have length, there is no denying. But the accent of sense supercedes all other accent, overrides and sweeps it away.”

These convictions lie close to the heart of the Poetry Archive, which at the time of launching contains almost 100 voices: the great majority being new recordings that we have made ourselves, alongside a good many “historic” ones. (By “historic”, we mean recordings made before we began our project, ranging from the late 19th century to more recent times.) We intend to record many more contemporary poets and also to track down and add all the significant historic recordings we can find. If anyone has Hardy’s voice in their attic, please tell us.

Spoken Word

In an informative article that interviews major players in The Spoken Word Movement of the 1990′s, Mark Miazga takes a stab at the diffficult task of defining the spoken word movement.

It was a renewed fascination with the Beats in the 1990′s that was an important catalyst for an oral poetry movement that swept through the United States youth culture scene. … This has a number of similarities with the 1990′s oral poetry movement, … The term given to this visceral, in-your-face style of contemporary poetry of the nineties was spoken word. Up until then, the term only described non-music sections in music stores that contained non-music comedy, plays, or famous speeches. In fact, there have been a number of issues with the breadth of the term spoken word, which The New York Times has called “pointlessly stiff,” and the relationship of the term with poetry. For example, all poetry read aloud is spoken word, but not all spoken word is poetry. Sometimes, it is difficult to discern where spoken word ends and poetry begins. … This issue of defining and classifying spoken word, and how much of spoken word can actually be termed as poetry, is a problem even for the artists themselves. … that spoken word is, “a blanket term that cover(s) monologues, poems, stories, rap, etc. I like the term precisely because it is so ambiguous and broad.”

Maggie Estep is one of the important names to remember in the spoken word scene. Maggie has recorded two spoken word CDs, NO MORE MR. NICE GIRL (Nuyo Records 1994) and LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL (Mercury Records 1997). She has given readings of her work at cafes, clubs, and colleges throughout the US and Europe and has also performed her work on The Charlie Rose Show, MTV, PBS, and most recently, HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam“. (There is an interesting interview with Maggie Estep published at Suicide Girls.)

Speaking of Def Poetry Jam, it seems to be the last basion of major media coverage for spoken word preformance, after the demise of MTV’s Poetry Unplugged in the late 90′s. NPR also created one of their patented miniseries on the subject, entitled “The United States of Poetry”

While it may not be media-friendly enough to remain in the rankings of pop culture, Spoken Word performances are still supported globally by audiences of the poetry slams, and in places like The Nuyorican Poets Cafe

One of the major fascets of spoken word poetry that’s touted around is the fact that it is decidedly not as literary as the published variety of poetry. Caryn James wrote a New York Times review of the aforementioned MTV Poetry Unplugged show. The review posits Spoken Word as a bridge over the gap between Rap and Poetry, (a relationship I’ve borrowed here) and says:

But most of this is disposable, evanescent poetry. The special is called “Spoken Word,” not “Written Word,” for a good reason. Most of the poems won’t endure for decades, and why should they? Their purpose is different. “Unplugged” assumes that rap is street poetry and that street poetry is a vocal, visceral expression of contemporary life.

“Spoken Word” is just one manifestation f the renewed interest in poetry. In John Singleton’s current film, Poetic Justice, Janet Jackson plays a young woman from South-Central Los Angeles whose poetry expresses her emotional isolation and heartsick response to the death of everyone she has loved. As Mr. Singleton has written in “Poetic Justice: Film Making South-Central Style,” a new book about the making of the film: “Most of the girls I knew growing up, their main creative outlet was writing poetry. Whether they were good at it or not.”

Justice is obviously supposed to be good at it. Her poetry was written by Maya Angelou, now known as the Inaugural Poet.”

So there you have it, Maya Angelou can write, has written, some of this stuff. Do you suppose it will stay “disposable” forever?

Hip-Hop

I’ve said this before, in my thesis:

The realm of aesthetics is one of the playing fields for the ongoing question of meaning in the modern world. For example, the new modern generation uses hip-hop as a form of discourse, often as an expression of anger. By comparison, The Iliad is a similar expression of anger. Both are long and lyrical. Both use death, violence and the possession of women as central themes. Now, bring both forms of discourse to your typical literary pundit and he or she will call one of them art, extolling its universal themes and virtues. The other item will be largely ignored, except perhaps to be passed onto a sociologist. The Iliad, being an immaculately crafted example of the oral tradition epic formula at its best, does deserve its reputation as a beautiful work of art. Any given hip-hop song might even deserve to be dismissed, on the grounds that it doesn’t say anything that every other song in the rather formulaic genre hasn’t already said. However, it should be noted that the genre is new, still formulaic, and while the formula may have some serious problems, there is an undeniable potential there for unrivaled lyrical beauty. Nevertheless, the genre gets largely ignored by the critical eye.

If I were to turn my critical eye toward Hip-Hop, to examine its literary merits, it might help with the task at hand, which is to look for anything helpful for my upcoming poetry recording, but I’m afraid the task would be a daunting one. I’m largely ignorant of the genre.

I found a clue to where those merits might lie in an essay entitled reverse-gentrification of the literary world, which is the preface of a book by Miles Marshall Lewis

Hiphop as a culture and art form graduated from subculture status during the early 1990s, significantly figuring in the lives of worldwide youth and ending its standing as an underground phenomenon. With its mainstream success came more radio-friendly beats and rhymes, and certain characteristics that appealed to its wider audience were forefronted: crass bling-bling materialism; violent rap rivalries that extended beyond records into real-life shootings, stabbings, and murders; the objectification and denigration of women in videos and song lyrics. Furthermore, most modern rap music aficionados had no appreciation for aerosol art, deejaying, or breaking–sidelined aspects of hiphop culture whose former prominence I remembered fondly from the seventies and early eighties. I began to embrace more of a post-hiphop aesthetic, as if a new youth subculture was right around the corner and hiphop was on its deathbed.

Conclusion

My intent was to discover the best elements from a selection of recorded poetry styles, but I’ve only begun to understand the styles themselves. The next step would logically be to find examples of each, and learn to tell what I like from what I don’t like. I welcome any comments that might help with this.

I’ve found the poems, entrusted to me by a friend who has died, now. The question is, what do I do with them?

A couple months ago, I posted an entry called Platitudes. It was about the death of a friend and:

a pack of poems my friend had written, in the back of an old notebook. I had always meant to return the poems to him. I would see my friend, in town, on occasion, and ask, “Did you know I still have those poems of yours” and “would you like me to return them to you?” I can still hear his voice, as it would sound, reading the poems. I cannot find the notebook they’re in. They are all I have of him, and they’re gone. The only thing left is the memory of a tone, and the memory of a tone fades.

What’s really disturbing: on the back side of this little piece of ephemera, my friend had written his father’s and his mother’s address, so that I could mail them back to him at some point. He wanted me to edit them.

I’m re-reading the prologue of Moby-Dick, by Herman Mellville. (I’m recalling some thoughts I had about it in a recent class.) It’s odd that a novel would begin with a prologue like that. Are there other novels that begin with prologues like that? Sure there are! Do any of those novels actually publish their prologues? Few, I wonder.

In addition to the writing about strong language mentioned in the previous post, incisive offers reviews of writing tools: software that helps writers. The list isn’t very long, but it’s a great idea. So far, only Macintosh software has been reviewed. Unfortunately, Tinderbox hasn’t made it on the list yet.

Not all the “writing tools” out there are software. ScribblingWoman provides a link to Writing Tools, little tips like this one:

“Good writers move up and down the ladder of abstraction. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like “freedom” and “literacy.”

There could be more writing tools out there. Some questions come to mind:

• What’s out there, other than Microsoft Word?
• Are there better spell/grammar/style checkers?
• Is there an html (standards?) friendly word processor?

If you heard the phrase “strong language”, you would probably think of profanity. Profanity is not the only example of strong language, but it is a good one. Strong language is not weak. It gets your attention. It conveys its meaning directly.

Dervala.net gives a few examples of what is not strong language.

When a software engineer writes vague instructions, her program breaks. When a scientist notes observations imprecisely, her experiment suffers. When a Green Beret commander gives a rambling order, his guys are put at risk.

But a literary theorist who expresses his ideas in clear language betrays the expert mystery on which tenure depends. An MBA student who avoids crass jargon might fail for seeming not to know it. A marketer who relies on simple, direct language must know exactly what the product can do for the customerand understanding that takes effort.

It seems to me that engineers and scientists are also willing to approach writing humbly, as a craft in which they are not expert. To them, clear prose is not a gift or a luxury, its a skill that can be learned with careful practice; a skill that makes them better at their jobs. They share this view with old-fashioned advertisers like David Ogilvy, fiction teachers like John Gardner, and great essayists, like E.B. White, who said, The best writing is re-writing.

Both dervala.net and incisive have recently added content about strong language, because it is important. Erin Kissane is the author of incisive, who writes:

Its not about being right on principle. Its about the reasons that The Elements of Style is relevant to corporate strategy as well as corporate copy. Its about nailing the structure weve built for thinking and communicating and using it to speak, write, and act humanely.

Kissane begins writing about Strong Language with A Call to Arms, about why strong language is important.

source: Notable Words

I am very proud of Garrett Dimon for saying something that has been on my mind for a very long time.

There are more than enough sites that showcase excellent visual design or discuss different ways to write code, however it seems that very few people honestly care about writing… No successful web site was ever created because somebody had a visual design in their head and wanted to create a web site for the design. Sites are created when people have ideas and want to distribute content. Why then does writing almost always play second fiddle to design on the web? I don’t think it should, and I don’t think I’m alone.

You’re not alone! Garrett Dimon is the creator of Notable Words, which is a website that exists because “The web was in sore need of a champion for good writing.”

I’m inspired, again, to quit tinkering around with plugins, code, and design, and to get down to the real reason this website exists, which is to write. In addition to being inspired, I’m also a little bit embarrassed, because Notable Words gives me a whole list of people who have succeeded at what I haven’t been able to do just yet.

My writing professor told me something about deadlines, once. “Deadlines are a metaphor for death” he said.

I’m not in school anymore. There is no homework. There are no deadlines. There’s no grade, no arbitrary standard against which to judge my success or my failure — no carrot dangling in front of this donkey’s face, and so, like an ass, I seem to have stopped along the path, stubbornly refusing to move forward against even my own best intentions and against my own good.

This is very unlike all the other times I have been done with school. Every other time I have finished or quit school, I’ve felt elated, immortal (for a while). It scares me a little. The decision to feel free is a powerful one and a dangerous one. There is a temptation to let freedom reign, that is, to let it run amok, either into excess or into oblivion, or both. I suppose we can all relate to that. We are all always free to do whatever we want. Then again, we are all always limited by the fact that we cannot do whatever we want forever. We’re free and we’re not free. And on the day freedom stops for me, I’ll be God damned (literally?) if I don’t make the best possible use of what I’ve got on this earth to make use of. For me, its writing.

I am writing now, but I can only write to say that I cannot. This is yet another pity party about writer’s block. To think! I could once pride myself for never having pity parties like that. I remember staying up nights, hammering out prose and poetry, just like that. It isn’t coming so easily these days.

In a little bit more than a month, I’ve been invited to give a public reading. This is something of a homecoming for me, to read in Shepherdstown after all those years of being away in college, getting a writing degree, supposedly honing my craft. I feel like all I really have to show for my time is a list of psychopathic girlfriends as long as my arm. I feel like my arms are too long. Of course, that’s not entirely true. I’ve earned a writing award, written a play and a novella, and I even had a job in publishing. (I’m trying to psych myself up here) What I have not done is prepare anything for this reading. I want to get up there and read something, something new, something un-academic, rather, post-academic. So far, I’m empty handed.

Woe is me with the writer’s block already. Here I go, indulging in self-loathing. To what end? For its own sake I suppose. I’ve reached the half-page mark, and I’ve told you what I would say, and I have said it. Now, it’s time to get to the point. I’m writing this as one of those prayers to the muses. I’m writing this as a form of catharsis, or exorcism, to get rid of that deathly fear that I fear along with this deadline I’m facing.

That’s all it is though, a deadline. It isn’t an assignment. For me, that has made all the difference lately. Usually I’d have some professor filling my head with shit, for hours and hours, so that I had no choice really but to have something to say. Sometimes I couldn’t get to the keyboard fast enough, I couldn’t stay there long enough to get it all out. My head is empty now. That’s the problem.

Since this is a prayer to the muses, then you, reading this, must be one of the muses. You, reading this, are also part of the audience. (I do hope you’ll attend the reading if you can). Maybe it would help to disregard altogether any kind of writerly or academic approach to the thing. Instead, I’ll be a DJ, and, like a DJ, I’ll take requests. Are there any requests?

When I go to social functions here at home, where the older crowd is present, they always want to know if I’m writing anything. I usually lie, or say that I am editing something. (I am, actually.) I blow them off and talk about the weather. The drinks flow and people circle the room shaking hands, examining laughter, cutting deals, whatever they do, and then, inevitably, one of them circumambulates back to me with some idea or other. “You should write about this,” or that, or the other thing. It’s always something. I always ignore it completely.

I’m starting to think that I shouldn’t ignore it. In life, as in college, its good to have people fill your head with things to write about.

Are there any requests?

Seriously, if you were one of those strange kind of gods that can have a poet at their command, what would you request?

It seems as if the realm of the literary blog is already beginning to diverge. There are the so called “literary blogs” that discuss reading and writing, and then there are the ones that serve promotional purposes for a struggling writer, the so-called “author website“. Need I bother to mention that I prefer the former to the later?

In recent discussion of this diversion, a few of the problems have already been pointed out. Some of the marketing strategies employed by an “author website” can be questionable, such as the one where a webring of book reviews is established by a group of writers helping each other, leading to questionable reviewing practices. Proprietors of the marketing machinery, begging for advertising space, can bother the literary weblogs’ readers and writers. Need I bother mention that an advertisers worldview is bunk?

To combat the growing divide between literary web logs and marketing garbage, I would like to see a respectable list somewhere of the blogs that have yet to succumb to the “Buzz, Balls & Hype” What I really want to read is something literary: notes on reading, writing, etc. and not something commercial.

My Creative Problem

I always thought it would be easy to have my very own Website. I thought, gee wow, now I can write whatever I want and have it right up there for all to see, my very own “writing on the wall” I get to be William Blake when I grow up, passing out my work however I wish… and all at the push of a little button. Yay! desktop publishing, information superhighway, blah blah blah…

It isn’t that easy. The first difficulty I have encountered is that I can think of what I would like my “book” to be, but I cannot make it. If I really were more like William Blake I’d have a press in my basement. If I could picture a book of a certain size, I would cut the paper to a certain size. If I wanted certain pictures, I would draw them. I would ink the plates myself, print with them, etc. well, I don’t have a press in my basement; I have a laptop on my bed. Things are a little different. It’s as if the press is too new. The thing I am to use to make my book is not so self- explanitory as a physical object, and it relies on code, which can be… counterintuitive, to say the least. I get confused in the space between what I can think of and what I can bring into being. For this reason, I thought I would take a moment to talk about that space, and my frustration with it.

The Raw Materials

What kind of thing am I writing anyway? The big trend these days is to call it a “blog.” If I’m lucky, some of my readers won’t even have heard that silly sounding term: Blog-short-for-”web-log.” The electronic journal is just one more step in the right direction, toward a pushbutton press… but it has already taken on some genre qualities that make it different from what I want to do. There are the superficial qualities, which are really the only things that separate the thing from a conventional diary, and then there is the one big quality that a web blog site seems to have: it takes over. It becomes all that there is to say, and pretends to be the best way to say anything. Its as if, if we would write in this new way, we would write like Anne Frank — The way she wrote, in stolen moments, in a diary – it can’t be the end all and be all of writing., and perhaps even she would have gone on to put her observations in another form, an even more powerfully captivating one. This newer kind of writing is both melleable and instantaneous. I prefer the former to that later, and this is where I differ.

For a writer, the journal is only a part of the art. There are several different kinds of things that I write, and all that I really want for them is a place to keep them all together, and a way to put them there as easily as is absolutely possible. At first this might not seem like too tall an order, but, in a moment, I describe things that I want to be able to do with them that I am not able to do. I am writing these thoughts out for two reasons: to think the problem through carefully in order that it might be solved carefully, and in case anyone else out there might be able to help or sympathesize.

Here is a map of my “whole journal”

• The things that I have written:
• Poems
• Short Stories
• Essays
• A Play
• A Zine
• A Journal
• General Observations
• Research Notes
• A Thesis
• A Hypertext/Novella
• A Newspaper Column
• Accounts of my travels

There are other things, too. I don’t think of them as “writings” but perhaps I should start…

Emails

Letters

There are lots of writers who save their letters, and I am one of them. However, about a year ago, I had all my emails deleted. Years of correspondence disappeared. I’d like a “backup”to guard against this. Now, letters are personal things, so perhaps I want to be the only one who can get at them. Perhaps I don’t even want them to be online, but so far as I am concerned, they are also a part of my whole journal. I want it all in one place.

In that vein, I might also like to have:

Instant Messages

Comments on blogposts

Discussion Board Contributions

Imagined Possibilities

Now, as soon as I start to think about putting this stuff in an electronic format, I start to think about some redundancies. I can think of two redundancies, appropriately enough.

The first redundancy is that certain things are like the others. For example, research notes, general observations, and a journal: these are essentially just your average web log. They are only categories of the same thing. ‘Nuff said.

The second redundancy is: once things are arranged online, certain things might end up appearing in the same place at the same time. What I mean becomes apparent once you start making that list above into the map of a website.

For simplicity’s sake, lets say there are three directories that contain my writing:

/prose/

/verse/

/journal/

these directories have contents, of course:

/verse/
1. index
2. poem
3. poem

/prose/
1. index
2. essay
3. story

/journal/ 7. weblog

I want to be able to do “magic” things with my new kind of book. If I write on page four that I have just added a new “rant” to go along with the stories and the essays, I would like that writing to magically, also appear on page seven, which is my journal. Also, I would like my writing about that new rant to serve as an incantation, of sorts. Obviously, a rant is unlike a story, or a letter to the editor or whatever, and perhaps it is unique enough to deserve its own “section” with the “chapter” that is full of prose.

There, that little bit of magic, that one little imaginary paragraph that I wrote on a hypothetical page four… I described it in one paragraph. Now, does it really have to take hours and hours of my time in order to make it happen? This stuff is supposed to happen at the push of a button, but, in my experience, it has been more like the push of a button, the scroll of a menu, the correction of an improper command, the purchase of a manual, and the waste of a weekend that I would rather spend writing. Can’t I have it so that “it just works!”

My (vague) Ideal Solution

I don’t want to spend my time building a printing press in my basement! I want to hand interesting books to my friends! And that brings me back to the idea of William Blake again. He wasn’t just someone who made his own books. If it were just that quality about him that I wish to evoke I would have defered to the term “self-publishing”.

Another reason I picked him as my model is that he made his books with a certain appearance. He illustrated them the way he saw fit, with colors and drawings and typefaces of his choosing, and every copy of every book was unique in its own way. That’s beautiful!

Why can’t I have that! I want to focus on what my book looks like. I do not want to focus on learning a new mathematical kind of language, one which represents a visual way of things… I’m a verbal person dammit!

I guess what I am asking for is more “magic.” I want to say: “make it blue” and have it be blue. I want to draw it and have it be there, just the way I can write it and have it there.

Sadly, this second kind of magic is one that I am definitely going to have to wait for. Instant publication, built-in redundancy creation and control, automatic categories… these things can probably be done for me with existing technology, if only I had it at my fingertips. As for design considerations… I am so tired of trying to do that work myself that I am willing to comprimise total creative control for a whole lot of help.

And, speaking of a whole lot of help… That’s why I am writing this. I am hoping that maybe there are some friends out there who can help me build a press in my basement, so to speak. I know that there are lots of technical aspects to the nature and solution of my creative problem, but I have deliberately avoided them here, on the off chance that someone out there who is less technically inclined might be more able to sympathize with me.

Stray ideas

backup….

I said before that electronic text is malleable and that I enjoy this quality. On the other hand, I hate it. I’ve had too many school projects dissappear at the flick of an electron, and I have seen everything I have ever written go dark, most of it lost forever. For this reason, I will never entirely entrust my whole journal to the internet. I do love the ability to change, rearrange, etc. in quick easy ways, but I would like an archive, too. I don’t even trust CDs. They will probably become obsolete within my lifetime, or soon thereafter. Once a year, or so, I want to be able to print my work for the year, and store it in a nice box somewhere. It would help me sleep at night. I’ll print to paper, and I’ll “print” to a CD an electronic version of the state of the thing at that time. So, this thing that I’m building, it must be built for that.

full-stop

as a related note… I wrote this document in Microsoft Word. Now, if I were printing this document and passing it out to my friends, it really would be that easy. And I would have gloriously simple spell-checking bad-grammar underlining and formatting controls to help me get the document to be the way I want it to be. However, when i want to “print” to my webpage, there is a whole can of worms that open up… “Save As…” even to the sparse html … its a shitty feature! the html is terrible! All I want is for my “Heading One” text to become a level one heading , for my paragraps to become proper html paragraphs, and for my lists to be lists. Is that too much to ask for!

I can’t even talk about my frustrations without encountering them! (i suppose its also too much to ask for that i be able to retain the links to these footnotes.) related: Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient

I realize that i am spamming my own weblog, but get a load of this! in order to escape detection by spam protection, this piece of spam contains some real “language”

Sometimes behind oil filter sweeps the floor, but swamp living with always ignore from toothpick!Unlike so many mastadons who have made their raspy pit viper to us.dust bunny find lice on graduated cylinder living with.When you see defined by bubble bath, it means that taxidermist defined by minivan earns frequent flier miles.rattlesnake beyond boogie movie theater about prime minister, but particle accelerator over operate a small fruit stand with about crank case.For example, class action suit living with indicates that photon of abstraction tr to seduce dilettante from.
brownian consumptive lennox closeup

seriously, if you’re goint to go to all that trouble, why not tkae the time to tell me about your products. The only other thing that the spam contained was a picture of some stupid software, and “75% off” bugger off, i say.

Competition With Cacophony:

To help explain what all this is about, it may help to have a copy of what I used to explain this stuff to the Humanities Professors.

Imagine that, instead of you everyday speaker, I am an ancient European tribal storyteller. That would mean that you, my audience, would not be sitting there so placidly. You’d be eating big slabs of meat, crude food. You would drink mead. It would be considerably colder in here. And I, with my story, would have to compete with all the camaraderie and cacophony of an ancient banquet. I would stand up on the table and yell!

Hwaet!

Bringing the Mountain to Mohamed

In fact, ancient literature often begins with similar attention getting devices. Those devices are have trickled down into today’s texts in a few ways, the lead paragraph of a newspaper article for example. That lead paragraph is weak compared to the ancient method though. A lead paragraph, a bunch of interesting words in print, it assumes you’ve already come to the page of your own accord. It doesn’t bring you to the text the way an ancient storyteller could. Its my contention that nothing in print does.

With all the things competing for people’s attention in our world today, its easy to imagine that whatever doesn’t compete doesn’t get seen, not by most anyway, and whatever isn’t seen by most is lost to most. Today, I would like to propose a method I have devised to make my writing more accessible, because I feel it is the first part of my job as a storyteller. I have found my own contemporary equivalent of yelling from the table. I have found it, first by looking at the things that are already yelling at everyone in society, and which of those actually get their message across, and secondly by examining ways in which my writing might borrow from these things in order for it to communicate more effectively.

Competition With Cacophony

Its an age old problem for storytellers. By Chaucer’s time, he makes a comment about the state of storytelling by integrating his characters’ stories into a contest in order to make them palatable. The promise of a prize, and the thrill of a contest is what keeps them listening.

Shakespeare had to compete with cock-fights. A writer in that day had to capture the attention of the same group of people who could just as easily be down the street watching two animals rend each other to bits. Those people were the bulk of his audience. If a playwright at that time, failed to win the attention of an audience, he would make no money and eat no food. Worse, the words would fall on deaf ears, or none.

The history of literature is dotted with cries for attention, because it is the attention that keeps literature alive. That cry will have to be a lot louder than a measly lead paragraph if it is to compete with all the other objects of our attention. We sit back, say “people should pay attention to literature more often”?, and wish that they did, but people’s attention doesn’t come out of nowhere. A merely wishful attitude will never put food on the storyteller’s table. Even ancient storytellers knew that much. It seems to have been forgotten these days

The language of literature is drowned out in contemporary society. It is drowned out by advertising language. It is drowned out by Cinematic imagery. It is drowned out by televised imagery. It is drowned out by rock lyrics, hip-hop lyrics, country music ballads, all of which could be much more lyrical than they are. If we’re not careful, the language of literature could be drowned out past the point of rescue. That may just be the way of things. The cock fight may win out in the end. What are we going to do about it? Academia insists that people read more “real”

literature, but what if they don’t want to? Personally, I am about to embark on a life’s work that will go unnoticed by most of the people I grew up with, most of my friends, and perhaps even a few of my family members. These people, literature isn’t attractive to them. If they do read anything I write, it will only be because they know me. Contemporary Literature doesn’t do much to attract an audience. It stands on its own merit, but only for those that recognize the merit of literature in the first place. The quality of literature, these days, is a sermon for the choir. The only people who foster an appreciation of literature are the people who read it because they appreciate it in the first place. This is because contemporary literature has lost touch with its ancient attention getting tactics. Gone are the days when literature could coexist with the cacophony of everyday life.

What Does Get Through the Noise?

How do you get that sermon for the choir out to the rest of the congregation? After all, those people need it. The answer to that question lies among the things that do get through to those people, among the things that are communicated to those people. For the most part, the language that gets through to us more than any other is advertising language. Advertising language has published itself on every medium ever known, from telemarketing to Internet banner ads. Its everywhere. I think that those tactics of advertising language are an unused fertile ground for a better language, the language of story. Those are the words that still get yelled from the table. It should be possible to yell just as loudly, and just as well, with different words.

How Would Writing Benefit from This?

If the problem is that Literature is a text that is drowned out and not received, then perhaps the solution lies in a medium designed to receive text. I propose that it should be possible to publish a novel, with a screen where there would be pages, and an audience where there would be none.

Can Writing Adapt to This New Medium?

Of course, a screen in place of a page poses a big set of creative challenges. How on Earth can you honestly expect to fit literature of any merit, let alone substance, onto something that is essentially a television? Volumes of “hypertext theory” have been written about this new medium, and what kinds of texts we can expect to come from it. In general, the most important aspect of this medium is the potential for non-linear communication. I think all of us, as fledgling internet users, quickly mastered the concept of the link. It may take much longer to fully realize its potential. Now, we’re no longer confined by the forced-linear structure of a book, where one pages leads naturally into the next. We can arrange ideas by association, in print, the way we keep them in our heads. It will be difficult to use a conventional plot structure. That’s fine with me. I don’t like the conventional plot structure. I’ll tell you why. The rising-climactic male-orgasmic way of things can not possibly be the only way events unfold. That structure can not possibly be the only one for a story. Its time for something new.

Conclusion

I will be telling a large story made of many smaller parts. The “Plot” will only be apparent as a sense of things comes together in the readers mind, after seeing enough of the text images.

These little snippets, on the screen, are important because they can be read in stolen moments, in line at the grocery store, or while standing on the subway. It will be a good thing to put literature on a screen, because there are so many screens already conveniently in front of so many people. Literature must thrive there, in front of so many people, in the midst of the cacophony of everyday contemporary busy-ness, where a good story might be needed most, if only it were given a moment of attention. Thank you for yours.

What’s my thesis on? I studied a thing called hypertext literature. One day I sat down and decided to start on thesis. I concluded that it must be interesting to me, and involve as much of my education as possible. I am a writing and communications major with a philosophy minor, and so I wrote an aesthetics for non-linear literature. The premise behind hypertext literature is that storytelling does not need to happen in a this-then-that order.

Think of the old bard. He has come to a particular village, and there is a festival tonight. The noble’ daughter is getting married. Tonight would be a perfect night to tell a part of THE STORY, the part about when the hero comes home finally after all that time, and defeats all the other suitors, and is reunited with his long-lost son, and they all live happily after. But let’s not forget that there is a drunken heckler in this village, as there often is, and the heckler cries “bullshit! There’s no way he could defeat all those suitors”? and the bard knows that this heckler is bored with this bland little story, so he tells the one, also, by way of explanation, that the hero is a crafty man, who can outsmart a giant man-eater with one eye, and there are guts and there is gore, and still the wedding story has been told. That’s the nice thing about THE STORY. It has a clear beginning and a clear end, with plenty of possible beginnings and possible ends in the middle, and it is malleable.

Then, some monk or other showed up a long time later and thought, well, this sure is a cool story, I think I will write it down, and so he wrote it down. Think of it like this: your homework assignment is to write down the story of “star trek”? which is an old show and is only available in syndication. So, you sit down and you watch each episode. Which episode is the first and which is the last, these are obvious. The rest are just episodes. The hero(es) always land on the planet, (or the island) at the beginning, and at the end, they sail off again, so that the stories can come in any order. It doesn’t actually matter at all which one comes when in sequence. This is how syndication works, or episodes, or perhaps even stories in general. And yet, when you write something down in a book, you must have a this-then-that kind of sequence because it is paper, and one page comes before the next.

I argued, in my thesis that thing like hypertext provide us with a new way to write, one which might allow us to write down this aspect of a story, one which might make reading novels more the experience that heckler had, or like the experience of a child hearing a bed time story. I think it is so refreshing and delightful the way children interact with a story. I volunteered for a children’s library one summer, and those kids were merciless with their demands upon a story, and it was great. “this story needs a robot.”? “yeah, a robot named Steve”? “And pirates!”? “And a beautiful maiden”? I could throw up my hands and say “but this is a story about bears!”? or, I could have a whole hell of a lot of fun and try to make everybody happy, and this is how I earned my reputation as a storyteller with the children, as the one and only person that would allow them to heckle. How are they ever going to learn to vote, if they can’t heckle!

Look out!
I don’t mean the window,
I mean the helicopters overhead,
the buzz on the phone,
and the police at the door.
Achtung!
The sky is falling
from the atoms they have taken
from the air.
The trees cut to build temples
to oil.
The brown water no longer
fit for fish.
Look out!
When freedom is just another word
for what we have lost.
When peace is another brand
of bomb.
When the national animal is no longer an eagle,
but a sheep.
Achtung!
The Republicans are coming.
The Republicans are coming….
Coming to put us away
in the funny farm that’s not so funny.
In the nuthouse.
In the terrorist jail.
On my conspiratorial horse,
I am Paul Revere passing Dachau on the train.
And the Republicans are coming.
The Republicans are coming….
Look out!
The Germans are hip to White House tricks.
They punched the bully in the nose.
They cite Bukowski and Chomsky
as the philosophers of the age,
instead of Wolfowitz and Bush.
And Dachau is empty
just waiting to be filled up with
the American rich.
Achtung!
Let’s put them all on the Autobahn
without brakes.
On top of the Zugspitze
without skis.
On the bottom of Starnberg Lake
with mad Ludwig.
In the middle of Munich
without clothes.
In the throne room of Neuschwanstein
without thrones.
Look out!
Everything you see is not what it seems.
This is a bad dream.
And everyone is asleep.
Democracy is fascism
spelled backwards.
Politicians are speaking out
of the sides of their mouths.
TV is a frontal lobotomy.
Hollywood is a new religion.
Caesar has risen from the ashes….
Achtung!
Look out!
The Emperor has new clothes,
and it’s all the rage.
Achtung!
Look out!
It’s a new world order.
It’s an old world cage.

Munich to Pfaffenhofen
Spring, 2003

I attended a poetry reading this evening (14th) by Thomas Rain Crowe, with whom I had the honor of sharing my lunch today earlier today. He’s a real bona-fide beatnik, drinking buddy to the stars: Ginsberg and company themselves. That alone was impressive, I suppose. He shared with us some selections of his fiction and his poetry. He told us about his rock band. and his first volume of translations of the poems of the 14th century Persian poet Hafiz, ( Hafiz )According to his bio: “Following six years as Editor-at-Large for the Asheville Poetry Review, he is currently writing a memoir in the style of Thoreau’s Walden based on four years of self-sufficient living in the wilderness environment in the woods of western North Carolina from 1979 to 1982. He currently resides in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. His literary archives have been purchased by and are collected at the Duke University Special Collections Library in Durham, North Carolina.”

Lines I caught: “I will not live in a world without whales or dolphins” and “we are what we aren’t.. Or how else could we intend one thing and do another. We are what we aren’t” “Autchung!” was an inflammatory rant against the current political status quo, not however, against the complacency on the part of most people which what seems to have incensed more than a few audience members. One woman busted out: “and why aren’t the creative people of the world stepping up and doing what the media isn’t doing?” my question is, rather, why aren’t you, lady? You don’t get off saying “oh, I’m not creative,” I’m sorry but you don’t. If you want a world unlike the one you have, and you want it brought to you without being willing to do anything to create what you all – I shouldn’t assume that about her. She interrupted him. “Are you scared!” she meant him. he shook his head and grabbed the microphone “no I’m not scared, or else I would not have read that poem!” she was looking for someone to blame for something. She was a stranger. He spoke about four years living in the mountains, back-to-the-land style.

a Response to Heidegger

Sports cars in full glory, triple-X-electric sex, automatic coffee pots with built-in alarm clocks, rocket ships and ecalators, bent metal, graven images in chrome, and the human world modified, amplified, bigger, harder, faster, more than the tin-can can hold: these are the things I own; This is the world into which I was thrown. This is the world in which I am to find meaning.

Over the course of some time spent in that world, at a time when it, as we know it now, was in development, a variety of thinkers like T.S. Eliot have approached the developing situation known as modernity. They have asked, what does it mean? Their conclusions are diverse, and all of them are partial, but in general they lament the coming of modernity, for fear that it will supplant all of culture thus far. Their ideas may have been complete for their time, but modernity is no longer in development. It is here.

My reply to those ideas is informed particularly by the idea posited by Heidegger that we are thrust into the world, and it is there that we must find the tools to make meaning out of the chaos. Heidegger explains our being as a being-in-the-world, which means there is a relationship between the world we are in and our being. The meaning we make out of the world depends upon the world from which we make it. Wouldn’t it be better to look, as Heidegger, at the world into which we are thrown as potentially useful?

I was born in 1980. I spent my adolescence with the Internet. I don’t remember a time before television, space walks, fax machines, urban sprawl, MTV or any of the other accouterments of modernity, or their accompanying ideas. There is a pre-established assumption in this world that meaning/end/purpose is to be found in profit, as it once indicated favor from God. This assumption is one of the things we’re thrust upon and forced to deal with. It’s a big one. Yes, all these things that surround us: materialism, social structures, and work ethics. They all exist for profit, which, if no longer regarded as a valid meaning, lends nothing to the meaning of the world around us. Thus, we are thrown into this world full of meaningless things. Our job is to make meaning of them. It would be a huge mistake to ignore our very tools for meaning. Lets look at the realm of art for example.

My generation uses hip-hop as a form of discourse, primarily as an expression of anger. For example, The Iliad is a similar expression of anger. Both are long and lyrical. Both use death, violence and the possession of women as central themes. Now, present both forms of discourse to your typical literary pundit and they will call one of them art, extolling its universal themes and virtues. The other one will be largely ignored, except perhaps to be passed onto a sociologist. The Iliad, being an immaculately crafted example of oral tradition at its best, does deserve its reputation as a beautiful work of art. Any given hip-hop song might even deserve to be dismissed, on the grounds that it doesn’t say anything that every other song in the genre hasn’t already said. However, it should be noted that the genre is new, still formulaic, and while the formula may have some serious problems, there is an undeniable potential there for unrivaled lyrical beauty. Nevertheless, the genre gets entirely ignored by the critical eye.

Thinking like this in situations like these results in real artists and thinkers, discouraged or excluded from any realm of discourse that is a product of the modern age. (The only exception to this rule is in the visual arts, where the commercial success, and upper-class acceptance of pop art opened the eyes of the associated thinkers to the potential for meaning in the imagery in the modern world.) Any idea that says to me that I should avoid modernity, with its lack of culture, is an idea that denies me the freedom to move about in the world into which I have been unwittingly thrown. If I am only relegated to what gets called culture/meaningful by those in the know when it comes to culture/meaning, then I’m resigned not to communicate with the majority of my generation. Deny me the world in which I live, and there goes my chance to make meaning from it. I’d prefer to make meaning with it.

As a result of prevalent intellectual attitudes we’ve got speakers denied proven tools for speaking. How many people listen to hip-hop on a daily basis, in this world I’ve been thrown into? And how many people read traditional poetry? The masses aren’t right by number, but when faced with the question of meaning in the world we’re in, my response is to communicate. This is probably a common response. Look at the vast realm of communication (if not expression) that has grown out of the modern world. Communication cannot exist without an audience. The larger the audience, the more the communication, the more people I can share my meaning with, the more I can contribute to the dialectic of history. Therefore, the more potential a medium has for reaching an audience, the more potential it has for expressing meaning. Why then must I relegate my expression of meaning to methods with a shrinking audience in order for my methods to be regarded as having any validity?

Furthermore, the continued critical assumption, held by thinkers like T.S. Eliot, that the modern world and its products are void of meaning and therefore to be ignored is perhaps the most dangerous idea a thinker could have. So long as this idea is propagated, it is true. If the thinkers of the world dismiss as meaningless the growing realm of modern communication, then so long as they are ignoring it they are denying it the addition of their thoughts, their meaning — and so while it grows, it grows thoughtlessly and wanting meaning.

This critical dismissal exists for noble purposes though. It cries out against the meaninglessness of our modern surroundings. Maybe it will go away. If all of us go to the theater instead of the television, perhaps the television will wither and die. But why should television die? Even if all the paintings ever made were hideous, it would be awful to throw out the paints and brushes because of the beauty that could be made with them. However, if everyone listens to hip-hop, and not to epic poetry, then epic poetry is not communicating, so it expresses nothing; it is rendered meaningless. Then, when it comes to epic poetry, the fear that modernity will supplant previous culture has been realized.

The lament: there is art, which is a lot of work, and then there is television for example, which is wasted work, for it is not art, and it is not art because it does not express a universal truth, they say, so they urge us to ignore it, precisely because the majority of us don’t. Ideas of objectivity and universality are still pervasive in the aesthetic discourse, more than they should be in light of what Heidegger had to say.

What is this assumption that in order to be real art, there must be some objective truth expressed? Art is experienced, as life is experienced. Heidegger has to say about the experience of life; (and perhaps vicariously on the subject of art) that it is not built upon universals.

There is no objective truth for us to glean from the experience of life. We’re supposed to get what we can from it, and we can no longer go around calling what it is that we do get a universal. Change is too much of a universal for that to be true, especially in the modern world in which we find our being. Universality isn’t what makes validity.

The problem, with art though, is that it is communicative as much as it is experiential. I think that the emphasis on objective universals exists as part of that larger desire to communicate a thing to humanity. Even if this is successful, though, even if something is communicated such that it is objective and everyone can see the thing in the message, every single member of the audience will interpret that single thing differently. With this in mind, I think its safe to assume that the thing being communicated could validly be “just a situation.”

By this I am not proposing aesthetics of spectacle. I mean that art, like life as Heidegger describes it, has the power to thrust human beings into a situation, who are left to make what they can of it. So I don’t see why, then, the artist needs to act like god, and plant a trees of objective universal knowledge within the creation. It might be nicer to have a fruitful garden with a plethora of delicacies, ripe for the choosing. That seems more true to life to me.

I think there is a better distinction to make. There’s no point searching for the objective universal in a situation like the experience of art, which won’t work any more than Heidegger has shown it to fail with the experience of life (certainly not if art is to last in a millennium begun in the midst of rapid and complete change). Instead of a distinction between objective truth and meaninglessness, there should be a distinction between communication and expression, and these should be the new criteria for meaning, when it comes to the products of our being-in-the-world.

The mere communication is actually a fertile ground for new expression. After all, expression doesn’t work without communication. The foundation already exists for expression on a colossal scale. We already have communication on such a scale.

As we enter the new millennium, we no longer have the luxury of denying our being-in-the-(modern)world. Television, etc.– these aren’t coming. It’s all here. The fears are now realities.

The time is now that, in my opinion, the modern-artist’s spirit of experimentation could be taken more seriously, and further. What if they had experimented with these new things, instead of blasting them as a cultural wasteland? Of COURSE they were a cultural wasteland. They were brand-new, and those in control of the flow of culture we too busy lamenting these new things to contribute any legitimate expression to them. What if Picasso had drawn Saturday morning cartoons? What if a comic book deserved the Pulitzer? What if the poet laureate rapped with eloquence? What if Eliot had listened to Heidegger? If Eliot had made his point that we should have genuine expression and thought-provocation, while at the same time accepting his being-in-the-world, a world too colossal to stop and not all of it bad, perhaps we wouldn’t be in the predicament we’re in now. Then, perhaps the cultural wasteland we’re thrown into wouldn’t be as bad, if the nature of its mediums had been defined by something other than a creative power vacuum. We can fix the bad; we can even use most of it as tools. We can keep the good. There’s no need to ignore it all.

I want to see everyone who would be creative, expressing in addition to the communicative foundation. I want to see turntable-DJs in the orchestra pit. (After all, these instruments function by the same essential principal: friction on a surface). I want poetry on the airwaves, paintings on the billboards. I want to see every critic examine the dichotomies among art and entertainment: meaning and statement: expression and communication: culture and situation. I want them to come to those dichotomies with less arrogance and more hope, more sense of possibility. I want meaning where previously there had been none, and I think we should make it out of the meaningless void into which we’re thrown, even if that void isn’t the culture we once had, which was also built from a void. I disagree with rejection of the meaningless. A blank canvas is meaningless. Reject it, and it never gets painted.