Jack Kerouac was either stoned or zenned out when he wrote the entire manuscript of On the Road without paragraph breaks on a scroll (how he fed this through his typewriter still confuses me). Stream of consciousness is a nice conceit, one deserving to be hosted on a scroll, as long as toilet paper — the most imperative scroll of modern time — isn’t evoked. I remember reading a 1/4 way into On the Road and thinking “where is he going?” Dharma Bums was much better, especially for people in their late twenties who are living with their parents, a plight shared by the narrator.
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Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print (1953) is a 100-ft. print of, um, a tire. He created it with John Cage, who no doubt was mumbling 4’3″ to himself while driving the car. In museums it’s displayed horizontally, mostly in part due to ceiling clearances probably, though this strikes me as a “western” way of seeing things: we read and write from left to right, and stuck on this earth without notions of above, we walk and drive horizontally. Rauschenberg is a more playful and earnest Warhol; his tire print traces the volition of our time — driving nowhere, from left to right.
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I don’t know much about the Torah, except that it’s rules of Judaism. I don’t understand why Jews are the only white people who aren’t white; what the hell happened? I once looked up a list of common Jewish surnames and was like “holy shit I know a lot of Jews!” even including girls I had crushes on. I recently learned that Jews only date Jews; where was wikipedia when I was 17?
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Okay, let’s talk about Asians. I feel like I can freely talk about Asians because I am. Asians read up and down in columns, as it’s easier to pivot your neck up and down as supposed to left and right. I may seem biased, but Asian ways are usually more logical than western ways. If you take a Chinese character written in calligraphy and zoom in, it looks like a Franz Kline. (I had a Greek friend who would argue with me about who invented what first, the Greeks or the Chinese. Stupid ass dunno that Gorillas invented everything.) Do you know what the Chinese character for “patience” is? A knife forever suspended above a heart. The heart looks like a heart; the knife a knife. And the character for “good”? A mother next to her child. I will admit the alphabet is more useful, but Chinese breaks my heart.
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HTMLGIANT contributors have been instructed to insert “READ MORE >” breaks within a 1/3 of screen space out of consideration for the other posts; thus, a sort of “politics of page breaks,” where the longer it takes for a contributor to place a break, the more selfish he or she is deemed. It’s funny how so much time later, devoid of past sacred ties, we use the word “scroll” to describe the act of descending deep and deeper into a website page. Most mouse’s have a “scroll wheel” to help with our profane endeavors. My finger often gets so tired, running across the wheel blindly like a hairless guinea pig. If you’ve made it this far, I think you know what I mean. I worry about this post, for hogging so much “front page,” but I hope you understand the vertiginous verticality of this post is simply in aid to the point offered by its title.
(With this writing prompt, I have provided a badge. When you have completed the prompt, feel free to print out the badge and pin it to your jacket. Or maybe shrink it and turn it into a 1″ button to put on a sweater. Or maybe print it on that iron-on transfer paper and put it on a shirt. Because, good for you! You’ve done a thing someone on the internet told you to do. Good for you!)
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