Not Writing | HTMLGIANT

June 16th, 2011 / 6:27 pm Lincoln Michel—

Most internet blog comments leave me thinking “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

June 16th, 2011 / 6:27 pm Scalise—

Yes. Mostly self-authored.

June 16th, 2011 / 6:29 pm Ben Roylance—

Most instruction manuals. Most things not in the language that I speak, too.

June 16th, 2011 / 7:36 pm letters journal—

That poems in helvetica website thing that was written about here awhile ago.

June 16th, 2011 / 7:53 pm Guest—

http://chax.org/eoagh/issuesix/tanlin.html

June 16th, 2011 / 8:35 pm postitbreakup—

well as long as the dream was “vivid and continuous”….

June 16th, 2011 / 8:47 pm postitbreakup—

I will probably never come around to enjoying Tao Lin’s writing, but I would never consider it “not writing.” It’s just “writing I don’t like.”

The example of seemingly random words is interesting, though. I think I would consider poetry that seemed to be random words to be writing if composed by a human (who probably at least has some subconscious reason for selecting those words, or a subconscious reason for selecting the method of randomization) vs. a computer that is literally outputting the randomized results of a database. Another similar example: I consider a Burroughs cut-up is “writing,” but the output of one of those online “cut-up generators” is not “writing” until it’s been passed through a human filter who tweaks it, etc.

But again, as I said to Blake, it seems almost like a “straw man distinction” or something. If you don’t like a text, the way I don’t like Tao’s work, just don’t like it… but why try to say “This is so bad it’s not even ‘writing,'”?

Like I don’t like a lot of techno, and only like some rap… but I would feel like an incredibly pretentious tool if I said to one of those artist/performers, “I dislike this so much that it’s not music.”

June 16th, 2011 / 9:18 pm Laurachristinecarter—

I think where speech is concerned, and writing is often “speakable,” our sense of making it “full” of meaning or even, to the converse, “empty” as a strategy of failure, is bound to fail. Blake’s question implies that a standard exists; the “gold standard” is not necessarily gold, maybe it’s shit. But if we are capable of judging “writing” not to be “writing,” that question implies a high standard. I don’t think it’s fair to assume that all writing is measured against an ideal, but some is, and the strategies of failure and exhaustion that are so common today are part of emptying out this standard. In that sense, that type of “not-writing” would be measured against itself, or against the base of gold, which is nothing. And then everything would be writing….

June 16th, 2011 / 9:26 pm postitbreakup—

Bah, as much as I loved his dream idea, I loathed his moral one. So ambivalent about that book.

June 16th, 2011 / 9:39 pm Tummler—

About the “human vs. computer” binary in regard to randomized writing, I’m interested to know why you feel that a piece of “random” literature ought to be considered writing when the output method is exerted by a human but not by a computer/machine/program. Even if the content of the work is generated completely algorithmically, it is still a human who takes the computer’s product and attaches a sort of literary context to it. Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and Timo Tuhkanen’s “it’s late now for volcanos” is a prime example of such a balance between the writing of man and the writing of machine. Two human beings, each with their own “subconscious reasons,” combine forces with computerized outputting in order to create a work of verse that, in my opinion, very much deserves to be called “writing.”

June 16th, 2011 / 9:53 pm Troyweav—

No, I don’t think I have ever read something I didn’t think was writing. But the other day I looked at a painting for hours, and, I swear to god, there must have been at least six novels in there, among other things–some of the best I’ve ever read, felt, listened to, carried home.

June 16th, 2011 / 9:56 pm Hyruledungeon—

There are times with Burroughs where I feel like, this isn’t writing, it’s just energy, or violence…something torrential.

June 16th, 2011 / 10:07 pm postitbreakup—

So it’s energetic, violent, torrential writing.

June 16th, 2011 / 10:13 pm Janey Smith—

Blake? Writing is not writing–thankfully, it never is what it is.

June 16th, 2011 / 10:20 pm kt—

I have two folders on my computer for generated text. Writing. Typing.

June 16th, 2011 / 10:26 pm Guestagain—

medium and message, jeez

June 16th, 2011 / 10:33 pm johnselvidge—

Dig it, Laura. I think I hear you. If so, Beckett’s good here: “Fail again. Fail better.” It’s all writing but then again it all fails (eventually) because that standard never arrives or is being constantly emptied out.

Back to Blake’s question, I’ve had the experience of “this ain’t writing” with a few things that don’t seem to care if they fail or not, that don’t seem to intrinsically adopt or generate a standard within themselves of what success or failure might be. And even if there’s an artful, will-to-failure going on (“I’m going to fail spectacularly, gloriously with this, so enjoy the show), it’s still a standard, btw. And that can be lots of fun, for sure.

I think of Frederick Mark Kramer’s _Ambiguity_. Two hundred pages or so but only ten paragraphs written at what seem like quick bursts, and a great read. I like the book and think it’s good (yeah, it’s “writing” and a worthwhile project) but several times I objected along the lines of “Dude, did you even read this part after you wrote it? Before you submitted it to your publisher? Did you read this part even once?”. With that reaction, I had the “this ain’t writing” sense and was a little pissed. I want someone I’m reading to have read the book I’m reading and demonstrate this with a little care taken.

I mainly had that experience with the Kramer book because of all of its low-grade, high-school errors in grammar, punctuation, etc. that kind of embarassingly weren’t edited out and weren’t accounted for otherwise in what I could read of the aesthetic he was setting up. Maybe a bit priggish and I ended up calling myself on it because I thought the book was fairly brilliant on the whole. It maybe even made what seemed like “oversight” part of its mode by the end, but I’m still not sure about that.

So I get the “not writing” sense when there’s no evidence of revision. If a writer’s not concerned how something reads or doesn’t want to treat the text to some tweaking in order to either “succeed” or “fail better,” why should I care?

June 16th, 2011 / 10:46 pm Laurachristinecarter—

Why are you looking for a point? I simply wrote and said a few things. Point de capiton?

June 16th, 2011 / 10:51 pm 34b9uhbsdf—

Happens every time I fail as a reader (not to suggest it’s always the reader’s fault).

June 16th, 2011 / 11:01 pm MFBomb—

I feel like I have read something and thought, ‘this is not writing,’ but I can’t remember his name and wish I could remember it but feel like I can’t because I was too busy having sex with Megan Boyle. Sweet.

June 16th, 2011 / 11:44 pm Ken Baumann—

Artaud. It doesn’t feel written.

June 17th, 2011 / 12:12 am postitbreakup—

It’s not about taking the word literally, like some kind of prescriptivist argument… it’s not about the word, it’s the pretentious implication behind it… it’s about not being a big snob and saying “since I don’t like this, it’s not writing at all.”

The “writing” vs. “typing/’not writing'” [non]distinction is just a way to privilege the kind of writing you value, and discredit the kind of writing you don’t.

You can’t say it’s just about taking a word literally when it’s all about value judgments.

Blake could have just asked, “What’s a book you read that you didn’t enjoy, or didn’t think it was as good as others thought?” But instead he phrased the question (and many people replied to it) in a way that establishes this ridiculous class system in which there’s “writing” and “not writing.”

That kind of false distinction removes the personal responsibility when you disparage something like Dan Brown or those Helvetica poems or whatever else people have mentioned. Instead of saying, “I don’t enjoy this book and here’s why,” you get to avoid thinking altogether and just say “This is not writing. He/she’s not a ‘real’ writer. Only I and what I like are legitimate.” It’s lazy and arrogant.

June 17th, 2011 / 12:17 am Tummler—

Yeah, sorry about that. I was in a rush while typing that first comment and I guess that the crux of what you were expressing outright escaped me.

Even though I didn’t read your comment very closely, I’m nonetheless happy that you addressed the field of algorithmic literature and brought it into this discussion. It seems to me that much of algorithmic/computer-generated/randomized writing (or at least that which incorporates more visually reliant, purely abstract forms such as mojibake and the like) possesses asemic sensibilities, developing and presenting an end result which rests upon the continuum between visual art and writing, I.E., between what is seen and what is read and how they intertwine with one another. Numerous people today look at works of post-literate ideology and think, ‘This is not writing,’ and I am 95% confident that that reaction will remain as it is for centuries to come.

June 17th, 2011 / 12:33 am postitbreakup—

Well as long as we both agree that your post was lazy and arrogant…?

June 17th, 2011 / 12:45 am postitbreakup—

I remember reading that. It really did kind of make me want to throw up. But then I read her original post that he was riffing on about all the guys she’s been with. It seemed like a really uncomfortable situation. Like in any relationship you have to deal with the shadows of all the people that were there before… but when there’s an article on the net literally enumerating/describing it… Anyway. I need to take a shower now.

June 17th, 2011 / 12:50 am guest—

looksm lkike gthe begingn of anothet shitr storm alberto or somet8hig

June 17th, 2011 / 12:53 am MFBomb—

Yes, well, I don’t think Lin really cares about creating art; if exploiting his GF will his help PR campaign, then he’ll exploit his GF.

June 17th, 2011 / 12:57 am postitbreakup—

I don’t know if I agree with all that necessarily, I was just saying it seems like a potentially rough situation to be part of a couple who have both publicly written about all their exes, but anyway, I truly don’t know much about Tao other than the little I’ve read, but he has at least never been incredibly obnoxious and dismissive to me directly, so I’ve kind of let it go.

So… more to the topic of the thread, what do you think of the writing/not-writing thing? (Outside of Tao and all that)

June 17th, 2011 / 1:02 am MFBomb—

This sounds really interesting, and most of us (including Blake) probably prefer writing that doesn’t feel “written,” but it seems like you’re giving Blake’s post more depth than it deserves. I just read it as another drive-by type question like he’s written in the past.

June 17th, 2011 / 1:05 am MFBomb—

I didn’t read the question as some subversive way to get at the idea that the best writing doesn’t feel “written.”

For one, given Blake’s posting history, it’s difficult to assume that those were his intentions when posing the question.

Two, it seems like such a thing would be commonly accepted on a site for writers and literary types. Who doesn’t prefer writing that doesn’t feel “written”?

June 17th, 2011 / 1:16 am NLY—

We do. It was lazy, arrogant, and directly combative of your particular brand of energetic arrogance, which it certainly finds most distasteful.

And as for this post, it will no doubt resemble its forbearer in several ways (not the least of which in brevity, we can hope, for my sake and yours): I do not like your tone, demeanor, stance, or mission. Setting aside the question of humor, I think if your posts aren’t jokes then they are deliberately or naively self-righteous, and completely ignore the conversation they’re interjected into, by forcing it to instead conduct itself on your (community be damned!) terms, which you with haste and volume insist on at every turn. My initial post, though lazy and snide, contains the meat of my complaint: all of your dimly logical excursions ultimately hinge on exploiting the bald-faced paradox of calling a piece of writing not a piece of writing, in order to point out to us (shiiiit) that writing is writing, and we’re just being assholes. First, we noticed. Second, here’s a shot of your colon: Blake is using a phrase which describes a highly visceral reaction. By walking in and pretending that we just hadn’t managed to think about these things yet, and maybe you could just convince us otherwise, all you do is state the obvious while ignoring the actual question: which book makes you an asshole? Which book makes you lazy and arrogant? Which book grabbed at your gut and made you declare that this person wasn’t even worth sharing a job description with? Questions of moral imperative in relation to visceral phenomena are both irrelevant and impotent; questions of visceral phenomena in the context of moral imperatives are demanding and exploratory.
Blake’s questions had one of these two sets of characteristics. Yours had the other.

That being as much arrogance and brevity as I can muster for a subject as out of the way as this one, I’m going to let that stand, so in your next post you could call me a fag, too, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. Good night, sweet prince.

June 17th, 2011 / 1:27 am shaun gannon—

mfbomb did you just make another alternate disqus account or something

June 17th, 2011 / 1:33 am MFBomb—

Nope.

June 17th, 2011 / 1:37 am MFBomb—

But I’m not sure you should be cracking such jokes, considering how all of ‘you’ have the exact same style.

I mean, damn, none of you are original at all, other than the progenitor.

June 17th, 2011 / 1:39 am shaun gannon—

who are you including in ‘you’
just so I can get a sense of how inaccurate you are

June 17th, 2011 / 2:03 am MFBomb—

‘you’

June 17th, 2011 / 2:05 am shaun gannon—

capital defense, good sir

June 17th, 2011 / 2:28 am MFBomb—

Sweet

June 17th, 2011 / 3:49 am guest—

alberto

June 17th, 2011 / 4:57 am bartleby_taco—

Reading all of this really stoned is making me think that the internet is really stupid and petty ahhh make it stop !!!

June 17th, 2011 / 5:23 am kt—

Not to discredit at all. I love the typing folder more. But there is a difference between them. As you said. They could be called film and porn. Red and blue. Chip and fry.

June 17th, 2011 / 5:58 am postitbreakup—

DC is unfailingly kind.

do you just lurk there or do you have a different SN, because i’ve never seen someone named janey smith going, “Dennis? Dennis?”

I didn’t issue a “take down challenge,” I was saying that NLY did an excellent counter/”takedown” to my posts, that was so awesome and humbling and above the level of most discourse in this entire thread including Blake’s initial post (except for the “fag” part he threw in), that it made me want to stop arguing about all of this. But the replies come to my inbox and I have no self-control, so here I am.

June 17th, 2011 / 6:25 am Janey Smith—

I like you postitbreakup. I like your writing, too. I really do. I was just curious about what was informing your intense responses, which I also happen to like. On DC’s I am not Janey. I am Steven Trull–also a pseudonym.

June 17th, 2011 / 7:43 am Janey Smith—

My feelings hurt my feelings sometimes, too. But, you will live through this. And you will find someone who loves you and whom you love, too. Make yourself ready for it. Give yourself a chance. And don’t give up on writing stuff. One of the benefits of not being employed is having time to write! A little bit each day. That’s all it takes–I mean, it takes a lot of other things, too. But, a little bit each day is a good start. “See” you on DC’s. And postitbreakup, I’m glad we had this conversation. You got me thinking about a lot of things–writing, logic, rhetoric, life, love, politics, friendship. Goodnight for now. Your friend, Janey.

June 17th, 2011 / 7:54 am postitbreakup—

goodnight

thank you

June 17th, 2011 / 9:21 am Sally Jenkins—

I just tried to write this essay about growing up in rural Ohio and the loneliness of discovering punk music and skateboarding on your own. after lots of editing and rearranging and other labors, I read what I had and thought something like “this is not writing. this is just typing.”

June 17th, 2011 / 1:48 pm Samuel Sargent—

I will probably never come around to enjoying Tao Lin’s writing, but I would never consider it “not writing.” It’s just “writing I don’t like.”

In a context such as this thread, I consider effort to be the primary factor that determines whether or not something is ‘writing’. I suspect that I produce a close approximation to Richard Yates while asleep on the toilet with explosive diarrhea, writing with crayon on a roll of toilet paper. I know for a fact that I can clone his style of poetry while playing Half-Life 2.

But I’ve come to realize that I have to consider the words in light of the author’s experience, not my own. Just because I could write a particular piece while in a coma doesn’t mean it didn’t require considerable effort on the part of the author. (I feel compelled to mention that I’m probably one of the few people who have read more of Tao Lin’s physically published work than his online writing.)

However, as I already said, I’m in the process of reexamining my opinion of his work as part of a personal project, which stemmed from reading several early reviews of Anaïs Nin that eerily reflected the dismissiveness with which many critics deride Lin.

June 17th, 2011 / 2:23 pm Trey—

this is funny because it reminds me of when you were posting on the experimental writing thread. in both cases of blake’s snippet posts you are real concerned with what would drive blake to post the question. my response in both cases would be that you should not focus on what blake was trying to get at with his question, but just engage with the question. this is similar to what I think was or is maybe your problem with experimental lit. you explained that you had trouble with it, and frequently (I think you said something like this? maybe not) had problems getting at the meaning of the text, or what the author intended to say. then a couple of people responded telling you, essentially, not to worry so much about what the author was getting at, and to just engage with the words. this is funny to me because it’s like this aspect of you noticeably carries over to other parts of life, like maybe it’s a personality trait or something.

June 17th, 2011 / 2:52 pm Ryan Call—

hey postitbreakup, i think, i mean, one thing that has helped me is to not think of a site as winnable or unwinnable. i dont know, thats helped me a lot. think of it as playground, not battleground?

June 17th, 2011 / 3:52 pm Drew Lerman—

While reading it I had an image of Gary Shteyngart blindfolded, grinning and chuckling at his little observations about facebook as he typed. Which makes his Youtube videos about being illiterate ironic in a more interesting way than he intended.

June 17th, 2011 / 6:09 pm bobby—

If it were a recorded dream it would have been awesome. Instead, it read like a creative index of his old-man-anxieties and his fear of stupid people.

June 17th, 2011 / 9:50 pm Randal—

dear postitbreakup

i like you too. and MFbomb for that matter.

dont sweat it. its just the internet.

remember that 80% of people who talk to you are selling you snake oil

15% dont know what the fuck they are talking about

and the other 5% may have a clue, but who the fuck knows unless you can have a drink with them and see the whites of their eyes?

i have drank with some of the people who post here, and i think i have a pretty good sense of the bullshitter vs bullfighter ratio.

if you need any further information, please send a blank check for 20 dollars to

Drunk Thursday night gringo
The Scorpion Bar
69-08 Roosevelt Ave
Woodside, NY 11377

June 17th, 2011 / 10:17 pm Remyg—

I’ll play. Caveat: If writing is about communication, not just expression (because if it was only expression, then why publish), then it does make this quite subjective. That said, when smart people don’t seem to try, when I feel like there was more effort made for a 3rd grade chapter book, I’m irked. Here are a few recent books that irked me. Are these emperors without trousers?: “Zeitoun”–Eggers, “Us’–Kimball, “Shoplifting…”–Lin.

June 17th, 2011 / 10:27 pm postitbreakup—

“bullshitter vs bullfighter ratio,” that’s awesome

it probably seems like i get down from being on the internet but it’s more like i start out down and try to bring the internet with me. shower curtain rings snapping one by one, chocolate syrup everywhere.

that bar sounds cool from the yelp reviews, i hope i can visit one day

June 17th, 2011 / 10:32 pm Frank Tas, the Raptor—

I just trudged through a bunch of comments simply to say: “My penis works fine, though.”

btw the ads have gone away since.

June 17th, 2011 / 10:51 pm davidpeak—

your handle rules

June 17th, 2011 / 11:19 pm deadgod—

Exactly: there’s the put-down – ‘that’s not even writing’ – and there are the questions of language and linguisticality of mind that underlie the put-down (and might be questions that the insult leads conversationally to).

If one reasonably uses the phrase “read something” – literally or as a figure of speech – , then one is saying that that “something” has been, literally or figuratively, ‘written’.

– so when one says ‘oh, I read that; it’s not even “writing”‘, they’re probably saying that the thing is so incompetently written as to be beneath being read.

– but one might go one to wonder – for example – , understanding being incommensurable with meaning, whether the failure of reading ever fully to grasp and control a text indicates how writing generates or participates in this ‘failure’.

June 20th, 2011 / 7:34 pm stephen—

http://downloadhelveticaforfree.com

June 20th, 2011 / 8:26 pm dole—

hella goofin’

this question makes me think about construction of narrative (or something else) in (nearly) wordless comics. When I read Yuichi Yokoyama’s TRAVEL, it struck me as writing that was not writing, narrative that is not narrative.

I would like to try to make this kind of sideways narrative with words instead of pictures. I think it would be very hard because you’d have to somehow expose the mechanics of the words as you use them. Maybe it could be done with grammatical repetitions, idk lol

June 21st, 2011 / 5:52 am James Yeh—

I think the difference between typing and writing is the same difference between hearing and listening.

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