Metagraphs

Would Guy Debord consider Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School a metagraph? I did a google search for metagraph, a term that Debord brackets as [poem-collage], and found nothing about poetry or collage. I'm going to use the term anyway. If Acker's book is not a poem-collage, then what is it? Well I know it is certainly a form of writing I would love to try sometime.

But maybe I am already trying to 'write' collages. I have found that all I want to do is 'write' metagraphs, whether it be in the form of the live web spinna performance (where I suppose this technique is implied) or a poem I have to write for my traditional creative writing workshop (maybe its implied here too!) Today I met with the professor of my workshop about the direction my poetry should go for my thesis. My problem is, I have so many different projects that I am working on all at once, that I can't seem to focus on one. He suggested that rather than picking a project, I should orchestrate them all into one. The more he continued explaining what he thought I should do, the more I realized that what he was suggesting was that I remix my projects in order to fuse them together. My favorite part of this exchange was that he danced around the idea a little bit and he said he was worried that I might not like what he was going to tell me. Obviously the suggestion was quite the opposite (it was very exciting!), and I am beginning to realize that I use the same strategies and impulses that I use to write and edit a poem as I do when I sit down to remix something. So how different can it really be? Remix is like a permission slip to simultaneously fail, play, create, destroy, rethink, plagiarize and resurrect. I have found remix as a technique artistically very freeing.

To switch gears slightly, I wanted to talk briefly about my experience with the web spinna performance before I end this since no one seemed to want to speak up about it at the end of last class. The whole process really surprised me. First, I was surprised that I could actually come up with something that was at least mildly pleasing in spite of my nonexistent musical background; second, I was surprised at how nervous I was before the performance, my hand was shaking on the mouse at the beginning of it; third, the consistency of tone (both thematically and sonically) of the class performance as a whole was really incredible to me. During our discussion on Acker, we talked a little bit about our minds and how as meaning making machines they attempt to make associations, narratives and sense out of what they are presented with then fill in the gaps accordingly. It is possible of course that the consistency I observed was just that, my brain creating the patterns out of the performance, but of that I am not yet convinced- and I don't know if there is any way to know for sure. Or if it even matters...

Web Spinner + SpringGun Press

Here is a link to my sound project:

Erin's Web Sound Palette

Also, artists and writers: We are now accepting submissions for our second issue of SpringGun Press. We accept digital art, poetry, flash fiction and more. Please check out our site and our first issue.

Who speaks through you?

It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent. Today's notion of creativity and originality are configured by velocity: vectors play host to the agent, the agent within the vector animal (thought vector, sound vector, vector of a sound of motion), the vector has a fixed property, vectors are capable of transmitting the disease of the vector that moves through an architectonic environment. The future will leak through a fax to yourself of sonic debris and the copies will transcend the originals.

Poetry is nothing but a machine made of words, double movement, binary stratification, transience of meaning - text and textuality switch place with blinding speed. Creating seamless interpolations between objects of thought to fabricate a zone of representation in which the interplay of the one and the many, the original and its double all come under question.

In the binary world of place, is sampling the digital equivalent of Feng Shui? Technology is a collective hallucination. What would happen if place, memory, exponential aspects of perception just vanished into our collective dreams? Why do I want to write? Because I grew up with the want to communicate with fellow human beings. Any you can be you. Art and the imagination transform individual creation into a kit of interchangeable parts. Art and the ideological work transform individual creation into a kit of interchangeable parts. Of interchangeable parts.

By being a flaneur, I push writing, or music or art through a cycle of extreme flux, catchphrases and real contexts reconfigured. There is a ruthless logic of selection to create a sense of order, to be a flaneur, to look at an image or listen to a sound. The millions of bits of information streaming through two million fiber bundles of nerves is like writing history with lightning. Sampling is a new way of creating overexposure to the transparency of the world. And that's a good start.

It would be like living some kind of death if too many people continue looking backward: One hundred years ago, 1687, the ancients, 1875, sixth century Ireland, Emerson, Edison and Gould. What differentiates today from yesterday is Emerson could write. It's not just boring, it's against everything.

Parallel soundscapes are more willing to create psychological collage space. Stories disappear and evaporate and there's so much shit that your memory will never remember anything exactly the way it happened. Memories become dematerialized sculpture.

There is no such thing as an immaculate perception. We inherit ancient syntaxes, basic primal languages and rhythm scientists operate under a recombinant aesthetic with roots that were planted over a century and half ago. Filling space in becomes a dance with emptiness, there's always something to think through when you create a mix. We do not even know what we want. Why not? It all depends on your perspective, but as I like to say, let it be like a record spinning.

Blood Guts and Cancer

Not since reading Georges Batallie's Story of the Eye have I encountered a work of literature that so masterfully combines sexually (deviant) explicit content and a psychological/sociological commentary on youth, culture, sexuality, gender, economics, art etc. Acker's "novel" (I put novel in quotes here because although I think novel is a useful descriptor for Blood and Guts in High School I think it could easily be called many other things: poem, collage, drawing, cut-up, remix) has been called post-punk feminist writing, but is undeniable surrealist heavy (like Bataille) and therefore can be placed in modernism but was written in 1978 and therefore may be classified in the postmodern. So maybe Acker's work is a surrealist post-punk postmodern modernist "novel" that isn't even really a novel. Maybe (most likely) it doesn't really matter. I wanted to play that out so I could see for myself how Acker's (Burroughs's) cut-up method, collage and the melting together of genres and literary movements work terribly hard to resist classification. Why is that counter intuitive? Maybe because we are encountering material we have experienced before, we have certain predisposed expectations about what they are so we assume we know what we're dealing with. But the reality is that the works that are made new (Hawthorne, Mallarme etc) cannot be themselves anymore instead they get stuck happily in an infinite circle of definition and classification. By accumulating more and more influences/playgarisms, Acker's writing is more and more difficult to pin down and talk about as a whole; yet, the unifying element, the narrative, serves also as the map for readers to navigate her collage (literally and figuratively).

Acker seems to jump head first into the sewers of the psyche, bringing back with her a collage dripping with moral dilapidation, extreme violence and cancers of every variety. I know from reading a brief biography on Acker that she herself died of cancer and the anxiety surrounding cancer was a common theme in many of her works. I started thinking about how much cancer, collage and cut-ups all have in common (in addition to their consonant sounds.) They are all new entities grown and derived from the changing and/or destruction of an original entity and they are usually unexpected. Although Acker's cut-ups and collages are controlled, they feel and take on airs of being uncontrolled, which is of course a cancerous characteristic. If her technique is cancer-like, then perhaps the book itself should be thought of as a body- one that has been sliced, manipulated, penetrated, marked, mutilated and appropriated.

Before he is mentioned by name and by title of his work, Mallarme entered this book. As soon as I saw varying font sizes, he appeared and Acker was at the very least in dialogue with him. Her decision to remix One Toss of the Dice seems appropriate even if only thinking about the Janey's narrative. Both works are violent in form and content and it seems impossible for a reader to not wonder whether Janey could have been them if the dice had been thrown differently. My apologies for simplifying Mallarme and Acker for that matter, in this way. More on this in class...I feel as though I am taking on too much in just one post.

Before I end this post, I wanted to include the following relevant links:

Remix/Reenactment of Blood and Guts in High School by video artist Laura Parnes

Mallarme's One Toss of the Dice Never will Abolish Chance on Ubu

Borges Remix

Mary and I

It is to that other one, to Mary, that happens to things. California walks through me never ceasing its currents, one did say, electric, to ignite laughter in my gaze and its inner door; of Mary I receive news and olds in binaries and I see her name in doctrine we used to believe relevant to our biographies. I like the way food works like wine on my tongue, the warmth of winter, large light rooms, textures of papers, textures of poems, and the mysteries of motions; the other shares these preferences, but would never name them. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that our relationship is familial; Mary lives, Mary lets myself live so that I may sculpt mirrors into ladders, and my literature justifies me, and my relationships justify me. It poses great simplicity for me to admit that she has put me together, she has saved others perhaps because I never could say what was good, or because I always could say what was good and I belong to everyone. In every case she is destined to lose all that I am, distinctively, and she sews herself through me with dropped stitches, with well worn accuracy.

Un-applied philosophy bores me like calculus; I do not wish to be anything eternally. I will endure in I not in Mary who is other, but reflections of echoed words paint themselves on mirrors without me knowing and I wake to find us enduring. Music is an attractive temporary.

I and Mary don't understand the vortex of abstractions in freedom, most families don't. We do understand infinity. In this way, my life is running away and I lose everything and everything is turned over to oblivion, or to the other.

I know I am writing this piece.

Queneau Remix

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