ConText

The Tyranny of The Real

In writing, Language is so often assumed, no, required, to point, to indicate, to replicate, to represent and stand in for, the prior real world.

   

The quick brown fox jumped over the log.

We, the reader look for the log and the fox in our mind.

However,

    If the lily leaps in song of the otter sleeping on the Wurlitzer.

leaves us with a few untangled root vegetables.

A more Open text.

The Author's First Person

What happens when we shed the authorial first person. When the reader is no longer looking through the eyes of the author, no cinematic sweep of the camera? Do  we find the multi-verse of possibilities opening?

Language and Ego

John Cage used the i-ching as a random number generator to select parameters in his art and music. He did this, he said, in order to reduce the influence of his own ego on the art.

Bruce Andrews says "Empowering of the language works as a self-disempowering."

The goal seems to be aligned in these two. To reduce the influence of the artists ego (self disempowering).

But LANGUAGE poetics takes on this struggle not through random chance, as Cage worked, but by empowering language to assert it's many powers and allow multiple readings. This empowers LANGUAGE and the reader.

Editing is the reading moment.

Bruce Andrews writes: "Editing is the reading moment."

Which peaks my interest. Implies I think that each reader is an editor, running down lines of meaning and composing them, each word, on the spot.

Goes to the role of the reader.

Given that.

How to write?

Language Poetry

Bruce Andrews (in THE POETICS OF L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E ) writes:

"Faced with Collage & Noise,

Reading can be set loose from its usual anchorings (and hankerings).

Making it hard to recuperate it, or reterritorialize it"

When we fracture, fragment, the text, we deterritorialize it, create lines of flight.

“Lines of flight are everywhere. They constitute the available means of escape from the forces of repression and stratification. Even the most intense strata are riddled with lines of flight.” – Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book

I just started reading "The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book", a collection of essays written for a Bi-Monthly Magazine back in the 60's/70s edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein. It is a thought opener for somebody that was too young back then to pay attention to language, I was just trying to get high and get laid in the 70s. In the sixties I was watching Leave it to Beaver and playing football. SO this book is interesting for one delving into Language and textuality now.

Larry Eigner's first essay, it's meandering, antiparsingness, is a fun read.

The Literary Work As Interface

In reading about Ingarden (Iser, "How To Do Theory"), Ingarden proposes two poles: The Artistic which is what the writer composes, and The Aesthetic which represents what the reader receives as meaning. The Literary Work Of Art, falls between, at their confluence.

In this sense, the work is an interface.

Pleasure arises not from your skin or the skin of your lover, but from the confluence, the interplay, the sliding of surfaces. Meaning, related to THE WORK arises from this same surface play. The artist and reader essentially become lovers.

Dynamics and the "Time thing"

Once, Lama Tsedrup Tharchin said to me "Oh! You still believe in that TIME thing". This had a profound effect on me and my concept of time and therefor on the concepts of change and thus dynamics.

LP Glazier states ""Dynamic" is not here meant to simply mean text that moves. Neither is it meant to mean text that merely has computational origins. The object that is at the center of this inquiry is one that does not just sit there (or sit there and move). Rather a poetics of dynamic text seeks to engage that delicate edge where language apparatuses meet, slip and engage, to further the possibilities  of the poetic text."

14 ways of looking at space

L.P.Glazier says:

"In digital media, textuality is equally a function of the meaning of space. This occurs at various levels: There is the space of the network, the fact that texts can exist across nodes and that physical space, though dramatically compressed, is inherent in the process of reading net-based literature. There is the space of the screen, its two dimensionality and luminescence, the way it can be navigated through scrolling, linking, and/or paging. There is the space of the hard disk, the way data is stored in scattered fragments on the disk and only appears to be coterminous on the screen." ..more

Code As Language

I am reading Code As Language by  Loss Pequeño Glazier. A very thought provoking article on the textuality of computer programming languages viewed as "language". More precisely it is really about the act of writing and viewing writing as "an agency of mark-making to produce meaning in a given medium."