every song on the college station is new to me
Happiness may just tend towards silence - the Buddha smiles bliss, took him days to say it. But then this is typing, and... I go back again and again to the difference - although our language repeatedly inserts all written activity, all signalling, under the uber-designation "speaking".
I couldnt honestly tell you exactly how Derrida's critique of this phenomena goes, but I will "say" that mine notes that in oding so, in responding to a work "it speaks to me", in reading reading as speaking on paper, we ignore the perceptual difference - different sense organ, different path to the brain, different compoisitional experience (this is true between pen and pencil, btwn charcoal and ink, btwn typewriter and computer) - and place everything under a fairly unexamined category of the same (idem). (is that a proper use of idem?)
Writing - and reading - allow for pathways, distensions, contractions, condensations, maneuvers that are almost impossible in speaking - and when we ignore them, I am willing to bet we get 10,000 very similiar novels (rhetorically, narratalogically similiar) which imagine themselves to read like a film or oral story, but tend to most resemble other, earlier novels, but with a continual erosion of the distinctive features and possibilities of, not only the novel, but of writing itself. Pick up a dozen books in a Barnes and Noble or Wallmart, paperbacks prefered, Bantam trade editions, it is deafeningly familiar, as reliable as a Corona, or a Honda w/ 1,000 miles on it.
Not to say there are no pleasures in such work, but that, upon picking up the book, upon aggreeing with the packaging and reviews, they are predictable pleasures, the pleasures of the mechanical.
Wild writing would be a writing which is categorizable most clearly in its refusal to be categorized, a refusal which springs out - if examined - not some pose of dissent, not from a mere oppositional, contrarian mentality, but from the chthonic, chaotic desire to create, to follow creation, to run down a wild route, with all its unknowns and possibilities, rather than one planned in civic or marketting committees.
There is a duality here, and I dont knwo exactly what to do with that, except void it by saying that one never finds purely mechanic writing, nor purely wild. Purity is what the Pharisees were obsessed with, and their direct descendants the phrenologists, and today's conservative Evangelicals (be they Hindu, Christian, or Moslem). And with purity impossible, its always a border, always a place of interaction, a chance to test limits, and go both (all) ways. By trusting our desires, by all forms of rooted bodily trust (not the gullibility of mental faith in beliefs) - what happens? We as writers, and as readers, discover our -ever surprsing - routes. New is a weird, overused, misleading word (think of its cult in capitalism, conjoined with a !) but it points to that perceived freshness, the spontaneity, the intensity, of this experience in full flower. But wild work is also a practice - since at first it does not fit our expected forms, there is often a lengthy struggle, or apprenticeship, to get it - ie to come into a working relation. So Anselm Berrigan re-reads Olson a dozen perplexed times before smiling. I hope he smiled, thats hard work.
I write you this ramble after a morning in bed, and now Sarah is cooking pancakes. I usually do the cooking here, and we haven't made pancakes in years. Its a jolly morning.
If this manifesting isnt another red herring, another fall from grace (into K Kaufman's very own pursuit of predictability), another manifesto reedeeming/reifying only the work i like (or think i like), then its a sense that an interrogative, exploratory writing hopped-up on discovery, on discovering in language, offers... I piled up too many clauses there, and now its gone.
If it is another or not - I note now - I do this work at a distance from my presumed heart's desire - how to manifest wildness here? How to complicate, overlay the gap between writing abour and of/from?
Thoughts for the day, kids.
(Hope to see a few of you for Poetry in the Park @ 5PM in sunny dolores - there, friends, is an argument to move to SF in itself)
I couldnt honestly tell you exactly how Derrida's critique of this phenomena goes, but I will "say" that mine notes that in oding so, in responding to a work "it speaks to me", in reading reading as speaking on paper, we ignore the perceptual difference - different sense organ, different path to the brain, different compoisitional experience (this is true between pen and pencil, btwn charcoal and ink, btwn typewriter and computer) - and place everything under a fairly unexamined category of the same (idem). (is that a proper use of idem?)
Writing - and reading - allow for pathways, distensions, contractions, condensations, maneuvers that are almost impossible in speaking - and when we ignore them, I am willing to bet we get 10,000 very similiar novels (rhetorically, narratalogically similiar) which imagine themselves to read like a film or oral story, but tend to most resemble other, earlier novels, but with a continual erosion of the distinctive features and possibilities of, not only the novel, but of writing itself. Pick up a dozen books in a Barnes and Noble or Wallmart, paperbacks prefered, Bantam trade editions, it is deafeningly familiar, as reliable as a Corona, or a Honda w/ 1,000 miles on it.
Not to say there are no pleasures in such work, but that, upon picking up the book, upon aggreeing with the packaging and reviews, they are predictable pleasures, the pleasures of the mechanical.
Wild writing would be a writing which is categorizable most clearly in its refusal to be categorized, a refusal which springs out - if examined - not some pose of dissent, not from a mere oppositional, contrarian mentality, but from the chthonic, chaotic desire to create, to follow creation, to run down a wild route, with all its unknowns and possibilities, rather than one planned in civic or marketting committees.
There is a duality here, and I dont knwo exactly what to do with that, except void it by saying that one never finds purely mechanic writing, nor purely wild. Purity is what the Pharisees were obsessed with, and their direct descendants the phrenologists, and today's conservative Evangelicals (be they Hindu, Christian, or Moslem). And with purity impossible, its always a border, always a place of interaction, a chance to test limits, and go both (all) ways. By trusting our desires, by all forms of rooted bodily trust (not the gullibility of mental faith in beliefs) - what happens? We as writers, and as readers, discover our -ever surprsing - routes. New is a weird, overused, misleading word (think of its cult in capitalism, conjoined with a !) but it points to that perceived freshness, the spontaneity, the intensity, of this experience in full flower. But wild work is also a practice - since at first it does not fit our expected forms, there is often a lengthy struggle, or apprenticeship, to get it - ie to come into a working relation. So Anselm Berrigan re-reads Olson a dozen perplexed times before smiling. I hope he smiled, thats hard work.
I write you this ramble after a morning in bed, and now Sarah is cooking pancakes. I usually do the cooking here, and we haven't made pancakes in years. Its a jolly morning.
If this manifesting isnt another red herring, another fall from grace (into K Kaufman's very own pursuit of predictability), another manifesto reedeeming/reifying only the work i like (or think i like), then its a sense that an interrogative, exploratory writing hopped-up on discovery, on discovering in language, offers... I piled up too many clauses there, and now its gone.
If it is another or not - I note now - I do this work at a distance from my presumed heart's desire - how to manifest wildness here? How to complicate, overlay the gap between writing abour and of/from?
Thoughts for the day, kids.
(Hope to see a few of you for Poetry in the Park @ 5PM in sunny dolores - there, friends, is an argument to move to SF in itself)
posted by Kyle at 12:18 PM
3 Comments:
but you weren't there!
eep. was it because we forgot the balloons?
A duality, yes. A little "t" trouble, as I see it, is that there exists an equal & opposite danger in too-"wild" writing; that is, there is a ring familiar (all-too-familiar) to much "experimental" writing which, while dissimilar from that of certain types of trade paperback writing in tone, has all the marks of (snooze) repetition that so plague, say, the New York Times Bestseller list.
What to do with it? Well, no sense in a program, either way. The five-year plans weren't of any use to Mandelstam, for example. Go on your nerve, perhaps, as FOH said. Write things like tight pants so that everyone will want to sleep with you...or, er, your writing.
i would agree w/ peach's comment, and eric's distinction is fine, except i am not grouping experimental on one side and mainstream on the other. wild / mechanical is a differing lens, and one will find different groupings by looking through it.
i am thinking wild as in a wild river, wild as in the behavior of ants. the slop of a mtnside is wild, and its predictability (ie similiaritiy to other mtn slopes) has everything to do with the viewer and not the viewed.
as much as i want to maintain - am still interested in - this distinction, perhaps i should toss it to the birds.
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