inspiration from Lynda Barry
Tag: Writing
Sunday: 3 new things (to me) as gift recommendations (to you)
I have never engaged “graphic novels” much in a kind of snobbery for text and misunderstanding of modes of expression. This weekend, visiting the library with my children, I snatched out titles that looked interesting and have truly been gifted by them. I have needed a weekend for rest and refreshment, I am thankful it has come. Here are my recommendations:
Picture This by Lynda Barry
What it Is by Lynda Barry
Trouble Will Find Me by The National
Seriously Mimicking Birds
combined with Bach, Beethoven, Brahms…
if I had to select an album from my lifetime….
perhaps?
As relates to…
I have wanted to share (for years) the significance and import of Mikhail Bakhtin‘s manner of thinking, writing in the formation of my own worldview and understanding of the confounding irritations of working in language and the interactional miracles of the medium. C.S. Peirce and Bakhtin strike me as two composers with whom I do not encounter a brilliantly organized thought or true-ringing arrangement of letters that they are not echoed in. I discover re-presentations and simulacra of their models, but rarely extensions, corrections, or improvements.
With that in mind, I have been poring through a multi-authored volume entitled Bakhtinian perspectives on language and culture: meaning in language, art, and new media edited by Bostad, Brandist, Evensen and Faber. Note-taking, underlining, cross-referencing, formulating, and it has occurred to me that these texts are SO mesh-marked with mnemonic traces for me, that I should simply provide interested readers access to all I can link. Setting out to locate a Pdf of the introduction and chapter 2: “Rhetoric, the Dialogical Principle and the Fantastic in Bakhtin’s Thought” I came across the entire collection available online – and so I offer it here. If you begin, and the perspective captivates you – read on – to the chapters that carry concepts you are passionate about. If not, never ye mind! I am happy that texts like this can be available – not easily “stumbled upon” in contemporary bookstores and libraries (unfortunately).
To life:
par example: “Language is to be experienced as an interaction of signs neither neutral nor innocent: the word bears the burden of the contexts through which it has passed. And every speaker or listener bears the consequences of signs put into circulation, of signs he perceives and answers, of signs he picks up and makes use of for his own ends. One cannot stifle the traces stored in them. One has to face the cultural experience a whole language underwent in its history. Speaking this language and listening to it one unwittingly responds to this experience – the ‘word that lies on the border between one’s own and the other,’ the ‘word that is actually half someone else’s.’ The one meaning cannot maintain itself in the face of the many meanings. B’s concept irritatingly links the atomizing intrusion of the many meanings into the one (an act that atomises this meaning) with the idea that meaning ‘explodes’ in the contact of two different meanings. In other words: splitting up and differentiation, accumulation and trace must be thought of as occuring in the word simultaneously…Because meaning is always a recourse to another meaning and a project for creating new meaning, it doesn not achieve a decisive, definite presence.”
And so forth….!!!!
Mirror-Mirage
“Contemporary authors who construct a thick barrier between themselves and their readers such that authorial vulnerability is revealed negatively, i.e., via the construction of the barrier.”
“The scientist and philosopher are like identical twins in a world without mirrors.”
–Evan Lavender-Smith
Experience, anyway. sector 4
The following being part 4 of the growing mycelium that happens when I’m alone…
if interested, to-date is accreted here
4
Relatively speaking, it will all be over soon. For some sooner than others, but soon all the same.
I’ve seen a lake filled with upright sticks and trees.
What’s written on the body dies with it.
There are reasons to stay alive.
A mysterious pressure arrives with “real.”
To think of recounting, embellishment. A pressure to remain “true.” Wherefrom do these come? If I transcribe only facts as they are agreed to – collaborated – I do not accord with “real,” for imagination is always active and participant. It would be like deleting affect.
Emotion.
And yet. To consciously create a re-telling – devise a version – something’s different from experiencing’s bricolage. The positing of author, I-collage, selection of pieces. The pieces also selecting – opportunities for perception.
Only another experience. Another form of framing. A novel utility.
I write – construct a world – at times aiming for mimesis, but, as it happens, the interaction required between resources and agency = experience anyway.
Telling of my son is never writing him, it’s composing MY. Which in no way obviates the Other off whom I riff. Only keeps him discrete from my perception and activates subjectivities for us. Unless I seek to define or contain – to account for him – ab-straction, object-ify. Caesura of love: to falsify.
Whatever one takes as “real” exerts pressures of false.
Demands one set one’s course for “proof” as opposed to “truth” – a demonstration.
It’s experience, either way, and a variant sort – the staking-of-real or searching-for-proof sort – joining a demonstration – no less fabric of experiencing than any other, no less interactive or “real,” ever unique.
Categories falsify. And enable. No matter, still they matter. I relate to them as things. As limits and opportunities. It equals changes. Equaling experience, anyway.
To look toward wife and perceive. To co-orient agreements. Perchance to be/have experience to-gether (to gather). Align what we share in kind.
“Real” being what we organize of reality, changing each moment’s notice (before-during-aft each the moment itself) – unlocatable present. As I collage it (now past tense).
I listen to your story, constructed-on-the-run, as it were. Me too. Co-being. I agree as I edit and reform. Agreements forming knots, not points or solid nodes. Tangles of perceptions, cast, re-cast, and still wet clay. The surface never hardens. When it “seems” there are still seams – a thoroughfare.
How we know that we’re alive, or better, “living” – curse the verbal nouns. There are no steady states – but constructed patterns. Sane inventions. At times. Experience, anyway, “experiencING” – seamingly changeless change.
The urge, in writing, to stay. To thwart or channel flow. Progression of narrative – a pressure. Another experience: the tension of process and now.
Why inscribing haunts us with false. Telling or speaking too. Even in song, something occurs. The fluidity cripples and hardens. We strive to trick it loose. Account for dangling threads at every touch, but even the threads are intangible. Change is a force of form.
I recall. To vocalize back or again. The loop a seductive model. And I fragment. The attempt to be impartially partial (or “real”) winds its way through every act. Acts don’t start and finish, English-infernal-nouning. To name is to kill it is said. To stop up beING. But it seams another example of change, going-on, the ever-activity experiencing. Why fight back (wards)?
Recall: back words? Assembling experience anew? Only different (our noticing change) – i.e., experience, anyway.
To loop is false, such lovely model.
Take it from here…
“If one wishes to describe the enunciative level, one must consider that existence itself; question language not in the direction to which it refers, but in the dimension that gives it; ignore its power to designate, to name, to show, to reveal, to be the place of meaning or truth, and, instead, turn one’s attention to the moment…that determines its unique and limited existence. In the examination of language, one must suspend not only the point of view of the ‘signified’ (we are used to this now), but also that of the signifier, and so reveal the fact that, here and there, in relation to possible domains of objects and subjects, in relation to other possible formulations and re-uses, there is language“
-Michel Foucault-
“The opening of speech – every time – presupposes the material site provided by that structure of exposure that defines the essence of human being ( at least insofar as we are dealing with human speech), and the problem of thinking that exposure requires a new understanding of what calls for thought and the possibility of thought’s answer…An offering occurs in language, but this gift and its historical unfolding – thought from the way language is given – cannot be thought apart from a usage of the human that it presupposes…The notion of an experience with language, in other words, pointed to a thought of the way the human being, in its essence, is itself given to the speaking of language – every speech event entails at its limits an exposure of the human – language communicates im-mediately – the human essence is relation“
-Christopher Fynsk-
Other Writing Wisdom
“Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience.
It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived.
Writing is inseparable from becoming.”
-Gilles Deleuze-
from article Literature & Life (read full here)
Writing Wisdom
This turns out to be the best thing I read this week on the art of writing…
“The friends could not agree which way to go. Pooh looked for answers.
“Perhaps if we tell a story, the story will tell us how to get there…”
– Winnie the Pooh
struck me solidly as the way so very many of us who write
go about looking for answers.
Write on…
New Publication – The Art of Salvage / Mining the Modern
An unexpected and happy surprise entered my day yesterday with the announcement of a terrific book highlighting a project I was lucky enough to be involved with – a group of artists utilizing materials being removed from an historical building in Wichita, KS during a renovation – and repurposing (creating them anew) into works of art! I wrote an essay for this and now it is available in a wonderful edition you can peruse here:
All my Words are Silent 