Wanted to plug a new Youtube channel I’m following…
The more things change…
Wanted to plug a new Youtube channel I’m following…
Tag: Writing
Writing comes naturally…
For those of you intrigued by yesterday’s article about writing as a technology – here I’ll attempt to balance it with another fascinating article supposedly providing an “opposing view” to Walter Ong, et. al.
Drawing, Writing and Calligraphy by Tim Ingold
what do you think?
Is writing “technological” artifice natural or unnatural?
I’ll tell my thoughts in time…
Influence : Fragments from the Introduction : “Nothing is quite as real as nothing”
I am currently reading Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution by Pascale Casanova, introduced by Terry Eagleton
Beckett has always been a favorite of mine – for economy, humor, profundity, examination and exploration. The following exemplify elements of this – quotations from simply the Introduction (by Eagleton) of this study…
“His work, in short, presents us with the scandal of a literature which no longer depends on a philosophy of the subject”
“every sentence of his writing keeps faith with our sense of powerlessness”
“nothing is quite as real as nothing”
“sublimity includes that which is barely visible as well as the immense and immeasurable, since both are equally ungraspable”
“there is no more truly historical phenomenon in art than form – which is quite as much saturated in social signification as so-called content”
Beckett presents “questions addressed by texts to themselves, queries about their own procedures and conditions of possibility”
“clear-eyed attempts at an exact formulation of the inarticulable…the extreme scrupulousness with which it sculpts the void”
“writing itself becomes for Beckett the very signifier of the failure which so gripped his imagination”
“places the very impediment to writing at the center of his writing, transforming the question of failure into the very form of his art, telling incessantly of the failure to tell”
Thanks Samuel.
Thinking Literac(ies)
“Ultimately we find that the cognitive consequences are more about the new meaning systems and activities that occupy our minds than they are just about the character of work with symbols…”
“Whether one form of inscription is more efficient or more easily learned than another (the asserted alphabetic advantage) may be less consequential in its cognitive consequences than if a society has developed a large bureaucracy, literary culture, philosophic tradition, technology, commerce, and educational system using whatever form(s) of inscription it has historically developed”
“The world we know, think about, and act within is saturated by and structured on the texts that travel from place to place and have some durability over the years. The built symbolic world on which we have elaborated new social meanings and relationships and that is the object of our thought and attention as we try to live our lives as successfully as we can within it, in that we find the consequences of literacy.”
“literacy is part of the stuff out of which a way of life is made”
-Charles Bazerman, Social Implications of Writing-
Anticipating Leaving the Sea
As with bated breath I anticipate the January 7 release of Ben Marcus’ newest collection of stories…I sate myself with these two complex tidbits of his alchemical languaging talents, and invite you to swim in them as well…
Ben_Marcus_Notes from the Hospital
and
click images for full texts
New Arrivals, with poetry and music
Submerged in due dates.
Here’s what’s arrived in the center of (my) radar:
and then, from Roberto Bolano
DON’T WRITE POEMS BUT SENTENCES
Write prayers that you will whisper
before writing those poems
you will think you never wrote
Strange gratuitous occupation To go losing your hair
and your teeth The ancient ways of being educated
Odd complacency (The poet doesn’t wish to be greater
than others) Not wealth or fame or even just
poetry Maybe this is the only way
to avoid fear Settle into fear
like one inhabiting slowness
Ghosts we all possess Simply
waiting for someone or something in the ruins
and finally,
MY LITERARY CAREER
Rejections from Anagrama, Grijalbo, Planeta, certainly also
from Alfaguara,
Mondadori. A no from Muchnik, Seix Barral, Destino… All
the publishers… All the readers
All the sales managers…
Under the bridge, while it rains, a golden opportunity
to take a look at myself:
like a snake in the North Pole, but writing.
Writing poetry in the land of idiots.
Writing with my son on my knee.
Writing until night falls
with the thunder of a thousand demons.
The demons who will carry me to hell,
but writing.
all poem like creatures – Roberto Bolano
What Follows
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the notebook I grabbed in case of moments of free creative scribbling contained prior forgotten reflections that carried me into further reflections…recorded below:
The wonderful thing…
The wonderful thing about writing…
The wonderful thing about writing is that you can always begin. You always face opportunity. BEGIN.
In addition to that…”in other words”…
In other words, you can always start over.
Begin. Start over. Begin. Start over.
It’s a wonderful thing.
Language. like moving your body, there’s a kind of body to inhabit. A world. A way of being. You wake. You move. You remember…by dis-membering.
In other words.
You sleep. As you cease to sleep, you remember. You remember by feeling your limbs, your breath, by seeing, by feeling things (Dismembering). As you dismember (stuffy nose, neck-ache, coffee smell, pain behind the eyes, the need to potty, and so on…) – you also re-member (stitch together, sew, seam, canvas, invent) and become (again). Writing is like this.
Language. A body dismembered – waiting for membering (memory, membership) – invention, use. Beginning. Again.
In other words, like organs instructured in-skinned, awaiting awareness, the fabric of socio-cultural symbology (languaging) lies: in wait: to be animated, enlivened, embodied: woke up.
The substance, the atoms and organs – await. Circulation, enervation, emergence – to live – animate –
to be possible
And become.
In other words, to create, to move, to motivate.
There is no such thing as starting from scratch.
But a scratch is a beginning.
In our bodies, within matter,
in the world – moving gauze, filling quilts,
sensing flesh, donning clothes, filling whispers…
I’m alive. I begin.
The wonderful thing about writing…
…to awake into a way of being.
p.s… i’m thinking that each begin includes a hope to mean
A Kind of Credo : Intertextuality : “Art is Difficult” : Manifesto?
“perhaps our arrival at interpretive conclusions participates in that process and affirms the inescapability of attempting to read the world in an empowered way, even if we are always missing the point”
-Anne McConnell, Approaching Disappearance–
But then there is a reality to writing – the unexpected, the making-up, emergence and invention. I believe in it, in spite of my theories, in spite of acquired knowledge. Something like the terms of paradox. Little matter, much substance (not really).
For fun, let’s say (in the manner of a credo):
- “I believe…
that language is a socially constructed resource recursively constituting and innovating meaning potential
- “I believe…
‘the notion of meaning potential can be characterized as a heterogeneous totality of knowledge of conventionalized patterns of normatively correct situated verbal behavior which manifests itself and emerges from social practices of a given social community’ (-Mika Lahteenmaki)
- “We believe…
that actual meanings are emergent from meaning potentials – are jointly created – recursively and interactively dependent – in their situatedness and perspectivity, unique and irreducible
- “We believe…
‘reality works in overt mystery’ (-Macedonio Fernandez, via JL Borges)
- “We believe…
that to live ‘is to make all these repetitions coexist in a space in which difference is distributed’ (-Gilles Deleuze)
- “We believe…
that living occurs via the ‘conservation of autopoiesis and the conservation of adaptation – a constant and mutual structural coupling of continuous transformations betwixt organisms and environments (envorganisms)’ (-Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Paul Kockelman)
- “We believe…
in complexity and meaning, difference and repetition, redundancy and novelty, structures and contingencies, openness and change
Measures of reality (situated and perspectival…partial and relative to) – our As-if-oscope and Toxic spoon-deep. A hurly-burly and chaotic entanglement – intertwingled – adjoined in movements (writing of writing) to use an outdated metaphor: textuality and trace.
- “We could believe…
that ‘texts record the meanings we make: in words, pictures and deeds…shaping and shaped by our social relationships, politically, as individuals as members of social groups’ (-Jay Lemke)
That no effect is not mutual, recursive, intermingled and intertwined. Life is ambient, writing of writing.
In other words.
- “We believe…
that ‘Art is difficult’ (-Viktor Shklovsky) and meanings dialogic/multilogic / multimodal/multivalent (-Mikhail Bakhtin, Gunther Kress, Bruno Latour, semiosis)
Empiricism regarding ourselves is impossible (the situation and perspective necessary are not available) so we rely. i.e. we need one another and beyond. Envorganisms, we. We believe (we could say. I might).
“When we leave each other, we leave.”
A text composed is intertexuality – an Irish monk illuminating a copy; a modern blogger mashing-up – bricolage, meaning – I write, WITH.
To say I instantiate a social practice. It becomes.
Thank you. And welcome.
-a glyph is a hunt for optimism-
Slideshow of works cited:
All my Words are Silent 