“Jean would feel obliged if the editor would tell her if lawn billiards can be played on a croquet lawn?

Is there a book of rules on lawn billiards?”

LAWN AS CRAFT NOTE

AFTER FRANCIS PONGE

Lawn, a piece of land, a delineated piece of land, specifically referring to grass, specifically grass in a residential setting, each individual house with it’s own lawn, each lawn the responsibility of the owner or occupier of the house.

A piece of land separated from other similar pieces of land by intangible lines, ‘property lines’, ‘county lines’, ‘state lines’ or by tangible lines: buildings, sidewalks, roads, curbs, fields…

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1. Read more, write more, submit less
2. Buy other people’s books (seriously, do this)
3. Make books with people you admire
4. Never comment on the internet (just stop)
5. Don’t read blogs that piss you off (just stop)
6. Avoid Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr
7. Work on craft (it’s okay)
8. Review books written by people you don’t know (challenge is healthy)
9. Let someone know when they’ve written something you like
10. Care more

The Hanged Man is suspended, upside-down, by his still-incomplete thesis. Given the calm expression on his face, it appears he hasn’t been on any academic job-search boards yet. Around The Hanged Man’s Head is a yellow halo, depicting the fondness he feels toward his Freshman seminar students. This fond feeling will soon cease. The Hanged Man’s number is 12, reflecting the number of years he has spent in grad school thus far.

The High Priestess is high. She sits at the gate before the great mystery of experimental literature, passing beneath a narrative arc on ionic corinthian pillars. She no longer goes from point A to point B, but from point B to point J. She sits between darkness and light, half enlightened by the experimental text on her lap and half not knowing what the hell is going on. The tapestry hung between the pillars keeps punctuation out.

The Knight of Wands is an impulsive type of dude who frequently posts his rough drafts to Fictionaut. He provides status updates about his divorce roughly every four – six minutes. Drawing The Knight of Wands card in a tarot reading may foreshadow an unexpected event in one’s life, such as being cornered by The Knight of Wands at a “literary reception” and forced to talk with him about Bolano for over an hour. The Knight of Wands is the patron saint of open mic nights.

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CH: Now then, while your definition (in Part 1) is certainly more elegant than mine in its brevity, it seems problematic to me in terms of its three main assumptions: unfamiliarity, the dominant, and schism.

Jakobson’s idea of the dominant, for example, seems patently antithetical to experimental literature because it supposes an integrity of structure that I’d classify as akin more to orthodoxy than heterodoxy.  In other words, “a focusing component” tends not to be an attribute of experimental literature; in fact, it seems to me that the comportment of experimental literature stems from a distaste or distrust or disinclination toward such a notion.

ADJ: That’s a fair point, although I think even experimental fiction has its organizing principles. There are always some things the artist wants to do, and other things he or she doesn’t want to do—even if that changes from section to section, or moment to moment. The dominant is simply a record of those desires—and note that my definition does not require them to be conventional.

Would you say, then, that experimental fiction lacks any and all convention? Any and all integrity in its structure? And, if so, can you give examples of such texts (fiction that lacks any and all convention, any and all structural integrity)?

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