(Re)Assessment

Something I've noticed about my own blogging (that is, the actual act of blogging, not the accumulation of entries and paratextual effluvia that could be [is?] metaphorized and nounified by the word "blogging"), is that it's almost completely impulsive. This is to say that the frequency and topic of any given blog entry has a lot to do with a) where I'm located (that is, directly in front of a computer or not), b) usually what I happened to read immediately before I begin writing, and c) a certain level of either circumstantial (rather than existential [or perhaps micro-existential (which kind of collapses circumstantial and existential, I guess)]) boredom (I'm writing from work right now) or frenzied desperation re: my own feelings towards my learning curve as a writer.

The impulsiveness of my blogging, of course, works as an antidote to the first part or Item C (the boredom part), and probably, I'm guessing, a hindrance to the second part. It's hard to think about (that is, to write about, which is a form of thinking about, maybe the only form of thinking about we can talk about [unless we get into boring cognitive sciences lab rat work, which is actually talking about rats] - i.e. the way that, when philosophers [I'm thinking (writing) of Heidegger here] write about other philosophers' "thought," what they really mean is writing) structure, lexical coherence, and all of the other things that make good writing good, when you're doing it by the seat of your (my) pants.

Sometimes I think long and hard about blog entries I'd like to write. For instance, I've got about 1,500 words about Robert Coover (which is projected to extend to about five times that length, and include Henry Darger and outsider art) sitting on my computer, but I can't really bring myself to finish it. Likewise something about Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary (and how awesome it is) lingers in my Blogger Dashboard, but the time for that has come and gone.

And so what results is a kind of mess of abstraction that lacks a certain concrete topicality, that has little external reference. I've lost my connection to thingness, I suppose, and found a sort of dumbed-down fractal abstraction in place of that solid grounding. And for all of my willingness to buy into (and the pleasure I take in) ideas and theories about the relationship of writing to reference, of signification, blah, blah, blah, I still find myself feeling more than a little guilty, more than a little solipsistic. Note how I don't seem to care that my use of parentheses makes my writing kind of unreadable at times (and the fact that, to me, this use of parentheses is an attempt to work against certain temporal facts of the reading experience, and to try to imagine what a manner of reading other than the one in which we're forced to participate might look like). Note how far we've come without a hyperlink.

Needless to say, it's just a matter of deciding to work harder, or at least work differently. While I like the fact that this blog probably isn't that interesting to anybody but me, I dislike the autobiographizing I'm doing, and that my self-critique here is just another way to autobiographize and that, really, as much as I would like to think that this isn't a "personal" blog, really it couldn't be anything else. Certainly this blog is in its adolescence, struggling with a question about identity that it can't quite articulate yet. And let's not even think about what that means for me, the writer.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I sat down to write this entry about David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, which Little Brown published earlier this month. I began to think about how I want to write about it even though I'm almost exactly only halfway through it. And about how I get that urge a lot when I'm halfway through a book. Maybe next time>

The Corporate Reading Room

Things I was paid to read this week:

1. Two chapters of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler

2. 60 pages of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Pyschoanalysis by Jacques Lacan

3. 25 pages of Cartesian Meditations by Edmund Husserl

4. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, in its entirety

5. The Radical LEAP: a Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership (a corporate leadership book [that quotes Bukowski and Michael Cunningham (for some reason, because who reads those things for their literary validity? [and let's not forget that you are, indeed, utilizing the transitive property of literary validity, Bukowski and Cunningham aren't necessarily your best variables . . .])]) by Steve Farber, in its entirety ( . . . and really the saddest thing is that Farber uses the majority of Bukowski's "Artistic Selfishness," which runs thusly:

what's genius?
I don't know
but I do know that
the difference between a madman and a
professional is
that
a pro does as well as he can within what
he has set out to do
and a madman
does exceptionally well at what
he can't help
doing.

and then has either the balls or the obliviousness to compare himself to the poem's "madman." Yes, Stephen Farber, leadership consultant, once divorced, beachfront San Diego living yuppie, you certainly are a madman.)

6. The Tuesday edition of The Chicago Sun-Times in its entirety

7. The Thursday edition of The New York Times (everything except the Thursday fashion section)

Free to Constrain

Yesterday I found out that 826 Chicago accepted my workshop proposal, which is really good. Essentially I'll be teaching high schoolers about constrained writing techniques (a couple of which I tried out on this blog). I think this will be my first official teaching experience, so I'm a bit nervous and I have to actually write a syllabus, which shouldn't be too bad, as the workshop only meets three times.

But of course now I'm in a position where, for the first time in my life, I'm directly responsible for teaching a group of people younger than me about something, albeit something rather esoteric and non-functional. I've been thinking a lot about the idea of constraint, and it seems to be one of those things that has a tendency to blur at the edges when you start to examine it. For example, the simplest constraint is to deny yourself the use of one letter (a la Perec's A Void). Easy enough, very constraining (if the letter is common). But the next step is to actually ask what consitutes restraint, or what kind of work constraint does in the field of meaning, or in the telegraphic or communicative aspects thereof.

An easy thing to say if you want to push it is, "Oh, well isn't all writing a kind of constraint on thought? Isn't all language?" and this sounds facile and like the sort of thing that gets people all riled up: "No, asshole, language is the condition of thought." At the same time, though, if we consider constraints, that is deliberate constraints, as a given condition of writing, then the frustration we feel when looking for that word without an e, or whatever, starts to feel a lot like the frustration we feel when we just cannot find the right wording for that clincher sentence when writing without constraint. Which leads me to believe that constraint isn't useful so much as a neat trick (though it is a neat trick), but really as an exercise in exploring the limits that language sets before us by constricting those limits.

This is where the telegraphic aspects of constrained writing comes in, because it seems to me that there is one major bifurcation in constrained method, and then probably a bunch of subsets after the split. One way to do it is to attempt to say what you want to say even in the face of the constraint. This turns constraint into an obstacle rather than a method (obviously I think I know what a method is), and it seems more fruitful as mere exercise. Practicing this kind of writing seems more (auto)pedagogical than experimental in the true sense, and so probably something I'll try asking the kids to do in the workshop.

The other way to go is to let the constraint guide the writing, and this, to me, is the more interesting way to do it. The experience of grammar, of syntax, of the rules of language, basically, becomes so heightened that whatever you end up writing has to sacrifice, perhaps paradoxically, a certain communicativeness in order to communicate more effectively. The negotiations implicit in all writings are pushed so sharply to the fore that whatever it is you intend to do as a writer ends up conflated with the rules of language (which, of course, have been augmented by the constraint, and this is where it becomes apparent that constraint is, in fact, not so much restriction but rerouting).

Needless to say, again, I'm very excited about the whole thing.

>>>>>>!!!!<<<<<<<

The Bush regime is like that guy who keeps poking you in the forehead and you say, "Hey, stop doing that," and they look at you like, "What? I'm not doing anything," and then keep poking you, and you tell them again, and again they say, "What, dude? What? You're weird. I'm not doing anything." Then they pee on your shoes. And you frown.

Ornette Coleman - "Lonely Woman"

I hadn't listened to this song in a couple of years, but I downloaded it last night. It's easy to forget the power of Coleman's bands at their best. Though Coleman is almost always the star of the show, this track is unthinkable without Charlie Haden's astounding bass work. While Billy Higgins's drums keep that rock, solid right-hand rhythm intact, Haden's bass adds an air of menace, playing way, way behind the beat, laying in those drone figures and seemingly threatening to derail the driving rhythm of the song. Characteristically, Haden provides the pulse, but it's a pulse out of synch with the general harmolodic verticality of the song. The moments that absolutely kill me are when Higgins gets his toms and snare all tangled up with Haden's bass lines, all while keeping that ride going with his right hand, like he's fighting off that darkness, freeing up Don Cherry and Ornette, allowing them to use the bass as a counter-rhythm to push those mournful lines even further (which bass, come to think of it, actually functions more like a drum than a bass, which makes sense, as Coleman's compositions famously rely far more on melody than on harmony).

Back Like Scraped Plaque - the Dental Hygiene Post

I'm gearing up to write something longer for something else, and to actually really for trues sit down and get a real job and stop this temping hokum. Cause I keep acing myself out of my gigs, applying Word and Excel shortcuts with blinding speed, formatting documents into textual tableaus worthy of the finest Roman frieze, and taking frequent breaks - so proficient are my temping skills that I finished the job early and fucked myself out of the $200 I would have made today and tomorrow. I am so awesome.

Well, time aplenty.