READING DIARY: APRIL 2023- TT SESSION 26: SHARING AS MAKING AS THINKING
SATURDAY 29 APR 2023- PHD WORKSHOP
MAKING WRITING: EXPERIMENTS FOR VOICE AND LANGUAGE WITH LYNN BOOK
1. Bernadette Mayer bio, writing and prompts Because I am an avid list-maker, and a poetry-prose lover, I find Bernadette Mayer's works and prompts inspiring. My favorites from her 'Experiments List' include her 'Journals of':
* ideas for architects
* city design ideas
* round or rectangular things, other shapes
* color
* skies
* sounds
My favorite 'Other journal ideas' is:
* Write once a day in minute detail about one thing
Of all of those listed, I find these 'Bernadette Mayer's Writing Experiments' most interesting:
* Using phrases relating to one subject or idea, write about another, pushing metaphor and simile as far as you can. For example, use science terms to write about childhood or philosophic language to describe a shirt.
* Construct a poem as if the words were three-dimensional objects to be handled in space. Print them on large cards or bricks if necessary.
(*I recently saw a painter's IG post of bricks that he painted, and have since been thinking of painting on bricks myself. After reading this I consider painting a single letter per brick, and stacking them in a dimensional pyramid to create the piece, which from each of the four sides, might read something like:
race is a construct that benefits the few who created it) * Take an already written work of your own and insert, at random or by choice, a paragraph or section from, for example, a psychology book or a seed catalogue. Then study the possibilities of rearranging this work or rewriting the "source."
* Explore the possibilities of lists, puzzles, riddles, dictionaries, almanacs, etc. Consult the thesaurus where categories for the word "word" include: word as news, word as message, word as information, word as story, word as order or command, word as vocable, word as instruction, promise, vow, contract.
* Write what cannot be written; for example, compose an index. (...love this)
* Write, taking off from visual projections, whether mental or mechanical, without thought to the word in the ordinary sense, no craft.
* Make writing experiments over a long period of time. For example, plan how much you will write for a particular work each day, perhaps one word or one page.
* Write on a piece of paper where something is already printed or written. (Maybe this is the best one...)
* Experiment with writing in a group, collaborative work: a group writing individually off of each other's work over a long period of time in the same room; a group contributing to the same work, sentence by sentence or line by line; one writer being fed information and ideas while the other writes; writing, leaving instructions for another writer to fill in what you can't describe; compiling a book or work structured by your own language around the writings of others; or a group working and writing off of each other's dream writing.
* Dream work: record dreams daily, experiment with translation or transcription of dream thought, attempt to approach the tense and incongruity appropriate to the dream, work with the dream until a poem or song emerges from it, use the dream as an alert form of the mind's activity or consciousness, consider the dream a problem-solving device, change dream characters into fictional characters, accept dream's language as a gift.
* Create a journal that is meant to be shared and commented on by another writer--leave half of each page blank for the comments of the other.
* Write a series of titles for as yet unwritten poems or proses. (I have written multiple lists of titles for paintings...I keep wanting to make something more of them...realizing reading this that they may actually be poems.)
* Write a work gazing into a mirror without using the pronoun I. (This reminds me that once, when at age 26 and a new mom, while reading a book about the Ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, things around me remained while my inhabited body disappeared. This prompted me to get up and look in a mirror, which revealed no-one standing before it...all that was visible was the reflected counter below me, and the wall behind me.)
* Attempt to become in a state where the mind is flooded with ideas; attempt to keep as many thoughts in mind simultaneously as possible. Then write without looking at the page, typescript or computer screen (This is "called" invisible writing).
* Etymological work. Experiment with investigating the etymologies of all words that interest you, including your own name(s). Approaches to etymologies: Take a work you've already written, preferably something short, look up the etymological meanings of every word in that work including words like "the" and "a". Study the histories of the words used, then rewrite the work on the basis of the etymological information found out. Another approach: Build poems and writings form the etymological families based on the Indo-European language constructs, for instance, the BHEL family: bulge, bowl, belly, boulder, billow, ball, balloon; or the OINO family: one, alone, lonely, unique, unite, unison, union; not to speak of one of the GEN families: kin, king, kindergarten, genteel, gender, generous, genius,
genital, gingerly, pregnant, cognate, renaissance, and innate!
* Write a brief bibliography of the science and philosophy texts that interest you. (Doing this within my thesis bib. these few years. :)
* Diagram a sentence in the old-fashioned way. If you don't know how, I'll be happy to show you; if you do know how, try a really long sentence, for instance from Melville.
* Turn a list of the objects that have something to do with a person who has died into a poem or poem form, in homage to that person.
* Set yourself the task of writing for four hours at a time, perhaps once, twice or seven times a week. Don't stop until hunger and/or fatigue take over. At the very least, always set aside a four-hour period once a month in which to write. This is always possible and will result in one book of poems or prose writing for each year. Then we begin to know something. (Since last June I have participated in a weekly writing group, which, after 10 months amounted to my thesis intro, lit review, sample writings and 200 bibliographic entries= my Confirmation of Registration reports. I write on Thursdays from 10AM-noon)
* Attempt as a writer to win the Nobel Prize in Science by finding out how thought becomes language, or does not. <3 <3 <3
* Attempt to write a poem or series of poems that will change the world. Does everything written or dreamed of do this? (Yes.)
* Write occasional poems for weddings, for rivers, for birthdays, for other poets' beauty, for movie stars maybe, for the anniversaries of all kinds of loving meetings, for births, for moments of knowledge, for deaths. Writing for the "occasion" is part of our purpose as poets in being-this is our work in the community wherein we belong and work as speakers for others. (I find these the most motivating, inspiring of all impetuses for writing poems.)
* Plan, structure, and write a long work. Consider what is the work now needed by the culture to cure and exact even if by accident the great exorcism of its 1998 sort-of-seeming-not-being. What do we need? What is the poem of the future? (This is fab.)
* Write the longest most beautiful sentence you can imagine-make it be a whole page.
* Attempt to write in a way that's never been written before. (This is the definition of well conceived and originally executed abstract painting.)
* Invent a new form.
* Address the poem to the reader.
* Write while being read to from science texts, or, write while being read to by one's lover from any text.
2. CHRISTOPH MIGONE Untitled, Writing Aloud
Almost the whole time I read Migone's "Untitled, Writing Aloud, I was thinking, he's going to reference Alvin Lucier - I Am Sitting in a Room, but I don't think he did...did he?
3. Helene Cixous, Vivre L'Orange/To Live the Orange
Cixous is for me one of the most influential writer/thinkers of the last century, so I was excited to read her 'To Live the Orange', which is my first time through. In the intro, the editor states "Cixous compares those voices that obliterate what they express with those that “watch over and save (.,,) reflect and protect the things that are ever as delicate as the newly born.” This (feminine) writing entails a going beyond the borders of the self, despite the innumerable difficulties, listed here as blindness, falsity, injustice, error, murder, hypocrisy, distraction, death —and “holding words out” in the other’s direction, It is an inscription deriving from a level of being that precedes the automatic confines of thinking, “where each being evolves according to its own necessity, following the order of its intimate elements.”
And particularly interesting in the context of the PhD is, "Cixous’ account of feminine writing can be fruitfully compared with the work of Martin Heidegger. In an essay entitled “The Thing,” Heidegger describes how thought has aid claim to things with the result that “the thing as thing remains prescribed, nil. and in that sense annihilated.” The alternative, that “the thing’s thingness would have become manifest and would have laid claim to thought”5 has, consequently, become unthinkable [sic]. Heidegger concludes that progress involves a “step back from the thinking that merely represents — that is, explains — to the thinking that responds and recalls.”
Loving, saving, naming what would otherwise be annihilated is political in a more immediate sense, Cixous humorously recounts how her contemplation of an orange is interrupted by a telephone call reminding her of the plight of women in Iran. This reminder, and its incitement to action, are also part of the work of un-forgetting, of un-silencing, of unearthing, of unearthing, of unblinding oneself."7 To Live the Orange is Cixous' first tribute to Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Cixous' discovery of Lispector’s work in 1978 has had a profound and lasting influence on her as a writer and literary critic. Here she describes the joy of encountering a writer who is both feminine and female in a “ten year (,..) desert of books” authored by men.8 The passage is taken from pp. 8-30 (even numbers only) of Vivre L'Orange/To Live the Orange, Paris: des femmes, 1979. The translation is by Sarah Cornell and Ann Liddle and revised by Héléne Cixous. Vivre l’orange/To Live the Orange is reprinted in Cixous’ L’Heure de dance Lispector, Paris: des femmes Antoinette Fouque, 1989, pp. 8—113. The passage reprinted here is on pp. 8—30 of this edition (even numbers only)."
I find her a profoundly poetic writer, i.e.,
"A writing came with an angel’s footsteps, — when I was so far from myself, alone at the extremity of my finite being, my writing-being was grieving for being so lonely, sending sadder and sadder unaddressed letters: “I’ve wandered ten years in the desert of books — without encountering an answer,” its letters shorter and shorter “but where are the amies?” more and more forbidden, “where (is) the poetry,” “the truth?’ almost unreadable, messages of fear with no subject: “doubt, cold, blindness?;” I was afraid that I might become mad, I no longer dared to listen to myself, I was afraid that it might accuse itself of being the echo of my madness, myself discovering it so absolutely un-modern, unsuitable, un-recycled, so madly bent on demanding the impossible, on desiring, in our charnel-days, the coming of young songs as disinterested, rich and open, as vast and defenseless as in hymnal times, but such come no more to our lands, where all tongues have shriveled, there are no more habitable souls for their grandeur, I felt guilty that my writing was aside from reality, —busy searching for writings of the same age, of human origin, with which to learn how to call forth the tongues in which words still live, near by things, and listen to them breathe: guilty of naïvety, of pride, my writing, guilty of innocence, I alone responsible for all of its ills: and sometimes I judged it, sometimes I condemned myself; I acquitted it, I justified it. And thus: attacking myself, defending myself, attacking it. And some reproaching myself for having religious writing, — " (Cixcous, 1979)
...It continues as poetically as it begins. GD 2023
4. Madeline Gins, 1 page biography and links to various writings
Madeline Gins (1941-2014), an American poet, writer and philosopher grew up in Island Park, NY, and graduated from Barnard College in 1962 where she studied physics and philosophy. She studied painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1962, where Gins met Arakawa. Gins published three books: the experimental novel: ~Word Rain (or a Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says)" (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969)
~What The President Will Say and Do!! (New York: Station Hill, 1984), an excursion into identity, language and free speech using the devices of political rhetoric
~Helen Keller or Arakawa (Santa Fe: Burning Books with East/West Cultural Studies, 1994), an art-historical novel that took on a form of speculative fiction.
With Arakawa, Gins developed the philosophy of ‘procedural architecture’ to further its impact on human lives. These ideas were explored through three books that she co-authored with Arakawa:
~Pour ne Pas Mourir/To Not to Die (Éditions de la Différence, Paris 1987)
~Architectural Body (University of Alabama Press, 2002)
~Making Dying Illegal – Architecture Against Death: Original to the 21st Century (Roof Books, New York, 2006)
Arakawa and Gins endeavored to create buildings through which people would “learn not die.” They firmly believed that their architectural works would have an impact on the residents’ personal well-being and longevity and formalized their belief as the concept of “reversible destiny.” Together they designed a number of architectural projects including four buildings that were realized during Arakawa’s lifetime. After Arakawa’s death in 2010, Gins completed the "Biotopological Scale-Juggling Escalator" installed at the Dover Street Market in New York in December 2013. Gins also completed the manuscript for "Alive Forever," and the illustrated version of her poem "Krebs Cycle." ~ Lucy Ives on Madeline Gins
Early experiments from Madeline Gins, from Lucy Ives’, The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, Siglio Press, 2020...
From “Transformatory Power” BY MADELINE GINS
And Arakawa and Gins' Reversible Destiny Foundation
5. Fred Moten, Black and Blur
Upon completing my first read through of Moten's 'Black and Blur' preface, my initial thought was "this is radical".
"...Some may want to invoke the notion of the traumatic event and its repetition in order to preserve the appeal to the very idea of redress even after it is shown to be impossible. This is the aporia that some might think I seek to fill and forget by invoking black art. Jazz does not disappear the problem; it is the problem, and will not disappear. It is, moreover, the problem’s diffusion, which is to say that what it thereby brings into relief is the very idea of the problem. Is a problem that can’t be solved still a problem? Is an aporia a problem or, in fact, an avoidance of the problem, a philosophically induced conundrum predicated upon certain metaphysical and mechanical assumptions that cannot be justified? Let’s imagine that the latter is true. Then, this absent problem, which disappears in what appears to be inhabitation of the problem of redress, is the problem of the alternative whose emergence is not in redress’s impossibility but rather in its exhaustion. Aunt Hester’s scream is that exhaust, in which a certain intramural absolution is, in fact, given in and as the expression of an irredeemable and incalculable suffering from which there is no decoupling since it has no boundary and can be individuated and possessed neither in time nor in space, whose commonplace formulations it therefore obliterates. This is why, as Wadada Leo Smith has said, it hurts to play this music. The music is a riotous solemnity, a terrible beauty. It hurts so much that we have to celebrate. That we have to celebrate is what hurts so much. Exhaustive celebration of and in and through our suffering, which is neither distant nor sutured, is black study. That continually rewound and remade claim upon our monstrosity—our miracle, our showing, which is neither near nor far, as Spillers shows—is black feminism, the animaterial ecology of black and thoughtful stolen life as it steals away. That unending remediation, in passage, as consent, in which the estrangement of natality is maternal operation-in-exhabitation of diffusion and entanglement, marking the displacement of being and singularity, is blackness. In these essays, I am trying to think that, and say that, in as many ways as possible."
