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:
I’m Gonna Liveblog ‘Rear Window’ Right Here
Hi folks. I’ve never seen Rear Window. I’ve seen Psycho (fell asleep for less than five minutes and I liked it. I’ve also seen an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents about Christmas and a toy plane I think. I’m getting a phone call
The credits ended. I like the way this looks. James Stewart sweating. People on a balcony. I had to pause the movie because too much was going on with the phone call. Seeing a bra-clad woman right now do stuff with her legs. The phone call was my girlfriend. She is coming by to get her wallet. James Stewart is sweating. Broken leg reveal. I saw the trailer for this movie a few days ago before I downloaded it. The way this movie is filmed is very impressive… is it supposed to be one long take? Nevermind.
I took a double shot of whiskey before I started this. There’s a helicopter. This seems very cool. He’s got a week left in the cast. I bought a Rolling Rock tallboy and a big bag of Munchies. My girlfriend is here, but she’s leaving soon, don’t worry. “The place is about to go up in smoke.” She’s gone.
Poured the beer into the jar I drank the whiskey out of. Gives it a full flavor. lots of women with their midriffs showing. Was that innovative? Opened up the chips. Chewing a lot of them right now. I am so very tired.
Walking home tonight I heard some people speaking a very weird language. It sounded like a mix between Arabic, French patois, and Australian English. There was a full moon or an almost full moon.
Some Thoughts on the Books I Checked Out of the Library Today
I am still in college. I think maybe you know that. Monday through Thursday I wake up sometime between 9am and 12pm and drag my sallow little ass from Ave C to Washington Square, where I study, predominantly, English and American literature. Today one of my classes was cancelled, so after sitting through a 75 minute lecture on Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Prologue and Tale” (what a laugh that one is, let me just say), I decided to stop by the university library to take out some books that I could enjoy in the park. Here is a picture of the books:
Below are some thoughts on those books.
A Craving for Swan by Andrei Codrescu
I went looking for a book of selected poems between 1970 and 1980 by this guy. The library said they had it, but the library says a lot of things. I flipped through all the Codrescu they had. As far as I can tell he’s a Romanian with quite a history and a track record of being funny and influential. He works for NPR and has for a long time. Nothing looked appealing. I was about to walk away when I noticed A Craving for Swan. I think maybe it was misplaced or something, or otherwise I didn’t care to look at it when I was flipping through the other books. Anyway, I opened it up. It’s a book of short essays, most less than two full pages, that Codrescu had read on NPR’s “All Things Considered” between 1983 and 1985. I opened to a random page and read one of the essays. I don’t remember what it was about or what it was like. Then I went to the first page. The essay started with something like “One day I found myself with a strong craving for swan” or something. I stopped reading and took the book with me.
HTMLGIANT’s Tournament of Bookshit
This year in place of our regular “Mean Week,” HTMLGIANT will be running something we’d like to call our Tournament of Bookshit, in which 64 book related shits will be placed into an NCAA style bracket to square off and determine, by the most arbitrary means possible, [something]. What that [something] is I have no idea, but I do know that our tournament will operate by the same wily-nily sure let’s do it this way found in most any literary competition, whether it be list making, book jousting, or whatever else you’ve got.
Below you’ll find a list of the 64 entities selected pretty much on a whim to be our contestants. They’re silly. For each round a guest judge of various description and sensibilities will analyze each in light of each other and then select one by whatever terms they like to go forward, with perhaps a Mean Week attitude in mind. In the end, we’ll crown a very special winner the King Shit Mountain of Super Bookshit.
We’ve also set up, for those taking score at home, a bracket system where you can fill out your predictions if you want. It requires you to sign up but only takes a second. At the end we’ll have a prize pool of literary stuff to give to whoever somehow pulls that magic high score out of the hat of darkness.
Any authors/publishers/etc interesting in throwing in on the prizes, please leave a comment with what you’d like to give away and we’ll include it in the winnings and link it in a round up of Kind Souls.
Registration and prediction is free and will be open until the first decisions begin posting on Wednesday around Noon. Playoffs will continue at whatever pace they continue at.
The contestants: READ MORE >
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November 28th, 2011 / 11:04 am
November 28th, 2011 / 11:04 am
An Old Junker: a senior represents
An Old Junker: a senior representsby Howard Junker
IF SF Publishing, 2011
144 pages / $10.00 Buy from IF SF Publishing
Rating: 8.7
Imagine that Holden Caulfield survived his adolescence to become a mid-century man of letters, knew some of the good writers, wrote for some of the good magazines, then headed West to found and edit an adventurous arts journal. Imagine that he rereads the best of the 20th century canon for pleasure and chooses to publish new generations of poets, storytellers, photographers and graphic artists solely on the recognizance of his own eclectic taste. Okay, maybe he’s inordinately proud of the prep school and undergrad classmates who made big waves in the culture that used to be, but he’s also willing to stick pins in the pretenders and tell stories on himself.
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October 13th, 2011 / 2:05 pm
October 13th, 2011 / 2:05 pm
The Time I Read a Lot of DeLillo Books and the Things that Happened
It was winter, and I took the bus home, or maybe it was the train, from Massachusetts to New York, so “home” is up for debate, and then a subway, probably, into my little apartment thing with a kitchenette and a big bathroom and no bedroom. Actually, maybe my sister drove me. It’s unimportant. I’d read Part 1 of White Noise, a copy I’d borrowed from the library over winter break. It made me feel happy, the descriptions, the opening chapter which I’d read on the internet several months earlier on a slow day at work. I already knew it was the novel I’d wanted to write the previous summer, the novel I’d abandoned at 30,000 words and character names that seemed true, but also false, and a number of edits that seemed confusing. I laid down on my bed. I think it was mid-morning, or mid-afternoon. The sun was in my window somehow, giving me natural light, but not enough to read by. I read Part 2, and it was about some sort of chemical disaster. I read it in a sitting that day, with the space heater from the bathroom on full blast. Then maybe I slept.
I’d returned from Vermont. We’d stayed at a bed and breakfast, and that week I would announce I was single and she would go to Germany, and I would be unable to read Part 3 of White Noise for several months, glancing through chapters on the subway to Bushwick, feeling drunk after zero beers. By this time, I’d returned my copy to the library and been gifted one from a friend who’d found the author underwhelming. I wondered if I should feel the same. I didn’t. I looked at the words. The sentences. The long paragraphs and the short, sparse dialogue. The radio and the television saying postmodern things. Things I’d later discuss with a friend that seemed similar to Updike’s “A&P” despite his distaste for “postmodernism.”
The semester passed. I was back in the former relationship. Vermont, but actually the next time we went to New Hampshire, stayed in a tent, drank PBR and bourbon and pickle juice. It was 90 degrees and we sweated in a pancake house. This was about two weeks after I’d finished the novel, back in Massachusetts, on a rainy afternoon, within a rainy week, the week before I would start work on a farm and listen to first Blood Meridian on my iPod, and later two other McCarthy novels.
Iambik/LibriVox
I prefer reading a book to listening to a book. Even when I’m driving, I prefer reading a book to listening to a book. I once drove eight hours, from Pensacola to Lake Wales, Florida, while reading Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This horrified everyone who cared about me. This was before the days of education about texting and driving. I was doing a two-year stint as a traveling salesman of a sort (I peddled eighth-rate university educations), which was great for seeing the country. Most of the country I saw was country I saw after I arrived at a place. The bulk of my out-of-Florida driving was on interstate highways, and they all look the same. My in-Florida driving was on two-lane roads I came to know the way you know the neighborhood roads that lead to your house. It got boring, I mean, and I was in the best phase of a reader’s life — that time when you have discovered that there is a vast literature available for you to read, but you haven’t yet read most of it.
Something happened, though. I traded my father a car for a pickup truck. The pickup truck had a manual transmission. I wasn’t very good with the stick shift. The first time I took it out on Highway 27, I stalled it at in intersection. The light turned green, and I tried to go, but I blew it. A man in a tiny white car rammed into my back bumper. It wasn’t a high-impact accident, but his wife was nine months pregnant. She was okay, but I had nightmares for a week about killing other people’s babies. There are other kinds of accidents, my wife said. What if you had been going fifty miles per hour? What if you had been reading? READ MORE >
“Kill me outright with looks” : 139 Books I Read in 2010
MacGyver, that sexy-bellied genie show, and the show about California highway cops with the weirdly lowercase i—all of these television shows ran 139 episodes. In 2010, I read 139 books. I mean, I think I did. Most chapbooks I didn’t include in this list, even really good ones, so there’s that. Also there’s always an also, so who knows? Here are 139 books I probably read this year and what I spontaneously remember of them. As a bonus, I am sometimes unexpectedly or tangentially “mean-ish” in my notes, so if you have an idea of me as being “unable to be mean,” maybe this will change your mind (probably not): READ MORE >
2010: the books I didn’t read
Yeah, I read some books in 2010. I wish I had read more. These are my favorite 2010 releases I didn’t read.
Alumni Night at the Roundup
My old New School buddy, Melissa Petro, has an op-ed up at the Huffington Post about the closing of the Craigslist adult services section- Thoughts from a Former Craigslist Sex Worker. Also, you might remember Melissa’s previous piece about sex work, “Not Safe For Work,” which appeared on The Rumpus.
One of the classes Melissa and I took together at New School was a seminar on the 20th century novel, taught by Dale Peck. Dale is 1/5 of a new publishing collective called Mischief & Mayhem, whose site went live just today. From their hot, fresh statement of purpose:
The collective came together in response to the increasingly homogenized books that corporate publishers and chain retailers have determined will sell the most copies. We recognize that there are readers who want to be challenged instead of placated.
The other four M&M-ers, by the way, are Lisa Dierbeck, Joshua Furst, DW Gibson and Choire Sicha. The collective seems to have a raft of events and projects planned, and will bring books into the world as an imprint of O/R Books, publisher of the Collected Fictions of Gordon Lish (see our sidebar ad) and Eileen Myles’s Inferno: A Poet’s Novel.
Another school-friend of mine, our own Amy McDaniel, has a fantastic essay in the new issue of Tin House. The theme of the issue is “Class in America” and it’s a doozy from start to finish–there are stories by Benjamin Percy and Charles Baxter, an excerpt from Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary, poems by Major Jackson and Sarah Gambito, an interview with Luc Sante, A.N. Devers visits Poe’s house(s), and a whole lot more. I am enjoying this thoroughly & recommend it heartily.
And finally, there’s a new installment of Poets off Poetry, a series edited by Jackie Clark and published on Coldfront, which is run by Graeme Bezansen, John Deming & Melinda Wilson–New Schoolers all. In this POP-isode, Mathias Svalina (who did not go to NS, but looooves someone who did) writes about the time he listened to Side A of David Bowie’s Hunky Dory for a week straight.