Human and unassuming
“We do not like work that says, “Like me; I’m human and unassuming just like you. I ask only a little of your time, a bit of appreciation for my hip intelligence, my sentiments, my (you may be pleased to discover) clever way with words and sounds. I ask for passive acceptance.”” — Cal Bedient
It’s been said and said, but David Lau and Cal Bedient say it all strikingly in this interview with Sandra Simonds about Lana Turner, one of the best lit spaces going for telling the moment where to go mow itself.
Day Writing for Prosumers
A very pure example of deceleration: “Atomization”
Let’s continue reading Viktor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose (1925/9), seeing what lessons it contains for those of us writing and reading today. To quickly recap the previous installments: Shklovsky posits that all art is built from devices (priem), which get put together in patterns. Those patterns can adhere to normative conventions, or they can be somehow disrupted; Shklovsky calls that disruption “defamiliarization” (ostranenie). We, the audience, can perceive those disruptions because we have some expectation of the conventional ways in which artworks are patterned; for more on this, see my discussion of “differential perception”.
One type of defamiliarization is deceleration: the artist uses one or more devices to delay a pattern’s familiar (and therefore anticipated) resolution. I’ve already discussed how artists can use repetition and tautologies to do that. Today I’d like to look at one more example of deceleration, a very pure example that I call “atomization.” I will demonstrate it using an example from Yuriy Tarnawsky’s novel Three Blondes and Death (FC2, 1993), which also happens to be one of my favorite books of the past 20 years.
What follows is the entirety of Chapter 3 of that novel’s first part: “Hwbrgdtse Makes a Portrait of Alphabette.” I think you’ll quickly understand why I’m quoting it in full; remember, we’re looking for how Tarnawsky delays the resolution of the very simple plot that structures the chapter. All you need to know at this point is that the novel’s protagonist, Hwbrgdtse, has just met and become enamored with the first of three blond women, Alphabette:
Soros And The European Poetry Crisis
Billionaire hedge fund manager and democracy advocate George Soros recently received the social media equivalent of a standing ovation from the world of finance. Instead of remaining in charts and data, or even in their value synthesis re: analyzing Europ’s sovereign debt crisis, he did what few money men had (and none in his position) done: he effectively used a metaphor. It was the kind of poetry that moves markets.
“Bubble” is a common enough term in popular finance, but it lacks a quantitative definition. It’s an existential state, or a spiritual one: a bloating, a swelling of the imagination glands (Dickensian?), a cultural feast that becomes a fiscal implosion. We fondly remember the Tech Bubble. We feel the presence of ghosts and of animated furniture (Marx?). Here’s what Soros wrote about on his personal blog (yes – indeed dear readers) . To be completely fair, he was reblogging his speech from the Festival of Economics in Trento Italy – but this is what “went viral”:
Another way to generate text #6: “word splitting”
“Split the stick and there is Jesus.” —John Cage
This is a simple technique and I will demonstrate it with this very sentence. First you take some language and split its words up. Then you write through it:
Th is i s a sim ple techn ique an d I w ill demon stra tei twi th thi s ver y sen tence
One of my favorite websites is OneLook, a dictionary search engine with wildcard functionality. Using it, I “completed” the split-up fragments:
The role tautologies play in writing; or saying the same thing a different way when making a story or a poem
AKA, "the wordy guys"
So far in this series, we’ve been looking at Viktor Shklovsky’s early book Theory of Prose (1925/9), asking what insights it might have for us as writers today. In Parts 1 and 2 I provided an overview of Russian Formalism and Shklovsky’s concepts of “device” and “defamiliarization.” Then, in Part 3, we started applying those ideas to writing, looking at how repetition allows artists to both build patterns and deviate from them. We also saw how repetition can be used to decelerate a pattern’s advancement—how repeating text delays the work’s inevitable conclusion.
Today, I want to examine another “rule” that Shklovsky identifies: tautologies, which are essentially repetitions, but repetitions using synonymous language. And I want to demonstrate this principle, and some of its potential effects, with examples taken from Donald Barthelme and Raymond Carver. (I chose them because it’s in their stories that I first learned to see this.)
Let’s start with Donald Barthelme’s well-known short story “Me and Miss Mandible” (c. 1964), examining how much language Barthelme devotes to tautological constructions:
contemp late
No story can be fully described, because the description would have to duplicate the story, and this is an impossibility. A story is only a story, not an abstraction, and it is the ultimate source of all writing; but since “the ultimate source of all writing” is a description of the inexpressible, which leads to making unreal distinctions, in order to speak of it we’ll call it “a story.” Once we single stories out and treat them as distinct from other stories, we find the idea of their opposite. Readable, for example, once distinguished, suggests its opposite, unreadable. A good story, when we think about it, is naturally opposed to a bad one. In fact, all distinctions naturally appear as opposites that get their meaning from each other. “Too abstract” and “like a teenage diary,” “holy fuck, another zombie,” “So what u cut n pasted your banal emails,” “didactic and obvious,” “talking animals doesn’t mean you’re a magical realist” “over earnest and shitty”-all derive their meanings from their opposites. Therefore, the thoughtful writer accepts how it is as how it is.
In seeking to grasp what it is, he does not devote himself to making distinctions that are then mistaken to be separate existences. He does not point out differences, he writes. A story exists, and he sees that nothing is gained by representing what exists by a description, a lesser, diluted existence. If someone interprets the story, he does not trust that interpretation as being equal to the actual story. If no distinctions of superiority and inferiority prevail among indie and mainstream, novelists and flash fiction authors, old fuckers and those annoying 20 year old blogger types, they will devote their attention to the stories rather than to rivaling one another. If no special value is placed on a writer’s awards, other writers will not covet them. If one writer doesn’t appear to arouse envy, other writers will remain satisfied with things as they are. Since this is so, the wise editor doesn’t choose to blackball genres of writing but satisfies the writers’ inner needs. He does not write rejection or acceptance letters. Stories contain nothing over and above the stories themselves. In a story, all nature originates, all conflicts are settled, all disturbances are quieted. No matter how many stories are written or read, more come. To look elsewhere is foolish.
fetal 9
Robert grew a beard and long hair and grew a fetus in his girlfriend and grew tomatoes in the backyard and let his girlfriend grow flowers in little boxes and let his gut grow to fit the pants that had belonged to his father. (Catherine Lacy)
I don’t like too much social life anyway. It is gossip and bad white wine. It’s a waste. Writing is like carrying a fetus. I get up in the morning, have a cup of tea, and come into this room to work. (Edna O’Brien)
He breaks a watermelon over his knee to show somebody, a melon-red fetus curled up inside the rind. Don’t swallow them bones, Grandpa laughs, I don’t know what would happen if you swallowed them bones. (Micah Dean Hicks)
“This,” I think to myself, “Must be what vegans feel when they see a calf with no dancing room.” I think to myself, “This is what the Christians must feel when they see a fetus with no living womb.” (Steven Miller)
9kms rips out the fetus with the fingernails of his hot fingers
13kms lifts it up like a torch
1km opening his mouth the soldier screams
(Juan Felipe Herrera)
By the fifth month, you will likely feel the fetus moving. (Bruce Holland Rogers)
He collects our broken pieces. He gathers our abusive fathers, our esophageal tears, our peanut fetuses. (Tia Prouhet)
With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle, (Sylvia Plath)
They put people on the floor, each fetal-positioned in a three-foot cube, for money. (Nicolle Elizabeth)
Also, come to think of it, being pregnant. The fetus nestling against your intestines, bending her ear to the music of digestion…. (Kirstin Scott)
The company writes a novel per year
The ancient art of the annual report. A book written to ensure investors that their money is safe, that work is being done, profits cleared, America marches forward to the beating of motion of the Invisible Hand of capital. Whether you’re a non-profit, a .EDU, a religious organization, or a major bank, everything is smooth and calm between these pages baby. It’a all less relevant now of course – investors need daily information, not yearly. But there is still something very nice about the idea of an annual report. The plot is always the same, the characters are mild, their decreasing quality of life is the small repetitive tragedy. These are the stories that organizations want to believe about themselves. I believe them.
Craft Notes & Excerpts / Comments Off on The company writes a novel per year
June 28th, 2012 / 11:43 am
June 28th, 2012 / 11:43 am