“”What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life””

Octavio Paz

More on the production and details of the project from the LA Times.

Working with a team of nearly 30 student actors, designers, musicians and technicians at the experimental suburban L.A. art college, Morett is striving to create a roughly 75-minute piece that will immerse audiences in Paz’s aesthetic and intellectual universe. “Piedra” also contains interpolations of other poems by Paz, dramatized episodes from his life, and fragments of works by the Surrealist poet-theorist André Breton, whose writings deeply influenced Paz.

“When you sit in that show, it’s an experience,” said Michael Vanderbilt, one of the work’s student producers. “It’s not just the words, it’s not just the video or the costumes or the choreography. It’s a Surrealist experience. It’s all about the feeling that you’re getting from all those things that you’re being bombarded with at once.”

One can read the poem here and can obtain tickets here.

It’s quite strange that so much sonic technology is so tightly tied to military inventions and purposes, and even more fascinating how much music has been able to appropriate the initial intentionality of that weaponry towards its own creative-minded purposes.

In a decade where it looks like we’re going to become closer to the cyborgs that so much sci-fi art predicted (my eyes are practically glued to the laptop these days), I imagine we will need to start thinking through the notion of technology beyond the conventional poles of “man versus the machine”. These books make a great start. And with the new nuclear reduction arms pact, perhaps there still is some hope for humankind to avert self-destruction.

For now, enjoy the Jonzun’s Crew “Pack Jam” (1983).

Enrique Vila-Matas and David Shields

While I  wait to hear back from MFA fiction programs — I am expecting nine more rejection letters — I am not writing short stories, barely reading, and the New Yorker bill has laid to waste. My reading list is following suit. Afraid of being told I can’t write, lately I’ve been reading books that question writing’s value. In the midst of writing a story I often consult a shelf of ‘Why Literature Rules’ but as I await rejection I have moved those books over for a stack of ‘Why Literature Sucks’ and haven’t looked back. It’s a great comfort to find in Bartleby & Co., by Enrique Vila-Matas, that “Robert Walser knew that writing that one cannot write is also writing.” Sometimes the best kind of self-help is commiseration, gloom, and Schopenhauer.

Enrique Vila-Matas’ Bartleby and Co. and David Shields’ Reality Hunger posit my aversion to fiction-writing — what I tended to call self-doubt — as aesthetic maturation. Both the narrator of Bartleby and Co. and Shields published books years ago but haven’t (been able to) since. Fittingly, the books are not cohesive narratives, but collages of paragraphs — long stories and quotes, like tumblr. At the end of his life, Oscar Wilde uttered inspiring words for the non-writer, something like: “When I did not know life, I wrote; now that I know its meaning, I have nothing more to write.” The book is littered with successful failures: “Duchamp’s life was his finest work of art. . . Duchamp abandoned painting for over fifty years because he preferred to play chess. Isn’t that wonderful” Bartleby and Co. is not “Writing for Dummies” but rather “Writing is for Dummies.”

Similarly, David Shields’ Reality Hunger: a manifesto, with its 600+ uncited quotations, tears down genre-loyalty, especially to the novel, in favor of visceral and direct writing that takes in “larger and larger chunks of ‘reality.’” He riffs on poetic non-fiction, collage, rap, lyric essay, memoir. A writing instructor and graduate of Iowa himself, Shields disavows the hubristic fiction the public loves. See #321: “Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, ‘No, it doesn’t.’”

With no will to write and little reason to read, I passed my purgatory happily befriending Vila-Matas and Shields. I am no longer beholden to the version of myself that wanted to go to graduate school! The uncreative man, according to Vila-Matas, “has the power to create and, at the same time, the power to decide not to.”

But of course, part of me does want to get into just one MFA program, any of the ones I spent months, I must admit, applying to. I endured the sadism of writing an essay on why I want to write (I realize now that I should have compiled a list of quotes, like “I have never begun a novel without hoping that it would be the one that would make it unnecessary for me to write another” from Francois Mauriac or Hemingway’s “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.”)  And thus do I find myself browsing bookstores, purchasing a book on writing, full of literature-hope and fiction-thirst: The Writer’s Chapbook edited by George Plimpton, thematically organized selections from the Paris Review interviews. This should be the opposite of Bartleby and Co. and Reality Hunger, quoting John Gardner and William Faulkner instead of Pessoa and D’agata — and at times, it is. However, writers paraded in the Paris Review have their doubts too. “I have always regretted having gotten involved with literature up to my neck. I would have preferred to be a monk; but, as I said, I was torn between wanting fame and wishing to renounce the world.” — Eugène Ionesco.

Next, I went to Lewis Hyde’s The Gift expecting optimism and inspiration, but again found a new angle on the argument between art-making and resignation. Hyde’s artistic icons turn away from their creative gift in order to receive it. Being lazy is creative. “Fecundity is idle.”

Two Monoliths of Creative Idleness

Gary Snyder said, “I just dropped poetry. I don’t want to sound precious, but in some sense I did drop it. Then I started writing poems that were better. From that time forward I always looked on the poems I wrote as gifts that were not essential to my life; if I never wrote another one, it wouldn’t be a great tragedy.”

The two bookshelves were becoming one. Writers enjoying success hate writing as those pissing on literature love it. After all the glorification of fiction’s futility, Shields and Vila-Matas encourage writers to write about our extra-literary lives — the moments that are post-epiphanic, seemingly unpoetic, lost in the wind but curious to the eye.

Finally, a short story broke my spell of non-reading, the original Bartleby. Melville’s Bartleby refuses to do anything. A non-conformist with no set of ideals, he merely doesn’t. And yet, the relentless bafflement of the narrator, Bartleby’s employer, is so funnily rendered that I felt myself wanted to write, despite all of Vila-Matas’ valid points about the superiority of abstinence.

Ultimately, no book about writing neglects to mention its travails, and likewise, books that try to criticize literature chip at a block that reveals a better form. Like the ourobouros, refusal can’t eschew creation.

In other words, being discouraged from writing shouldn’t be seen as a barrier but as a gateway. If only I convince myself of any one thing from these books, I’ll have more and better writing on my hands, even if that conviction is to not write.

Better known for his novels, Roberto Bolaño shirked from the nomen of NOVELIST. . . until a hungry first child forced him to think about making some money--ergo the novels. But it seems that even then he liked to think of his business as POETRY (himself, a detective of poetry)--with or without much white space on the page. But what is so entrancing about the protean referent ‘poetry’ that it might lead a writer to forensically seek poetry beyond the mediocre logic of literary terminology?-- into and through the silence of the universe when we call out the name, POEM? Bolaño’s first collection of poems translated to English, The Romantic Dogs, generates a response (if a response can be offered in aether) by cleaving the high reactivity of volatile friends, lovers and poets, to a solvent flow of poetry in its unconstrained-because-uncontained sense: the silence of the universe when we . . .

Imagine, as Bolaño does in the last poem of the collection, the poets of Troy:

Poetas troyanos
Ya nada de lo que podia ser vuestro
Existe

Ni templos ni jardines
Ni poesia

Sois libres
Admirables poetas troyanos

The poets of Troy live in a cosmos of silence and still, Bolaño’s poem tells us, they live. And they not only live--but they live in liberation. But liberation from what? What keeps a poet from liberation?--so that we might seek to avoid the same . . . Names, in the swarming overgrowth typical to his novels, link Bolaño’s celestial musings to his heritage and associations on this planet: Juan Ramon Jimenez, Dario Galicias, Ernesto Cardenal, Mario Santiago, Orlando Guillen, Nicanor Parra, Archibald McLeish, Archilochus, Anachreon, Simonides, Edna Lieberman, Dino Campana, Lupe, more Mario Santiago, Roberto Bolaño. These are the names of the people of a lifetime; there are places too: Loch Ness, Lake Balaton, Northern Mexico, el hotel Trebol, el bar Los Marinos in Barceloneta, D.F., the kingdom of Heaven, the lecture hall of Hell. But if such saturation collides against the liberation in silence, of the poets of Troy and of poetry uncontained, why disturb the silence? Why collide upon the infinite with a world amassed in particulars?

Because, the poem “Musa” reveals, we cannot collide upon the infinite; the infinite collides upon the poet:

Era mas hermosa que el sol
y yo aun no tenia 16 anos
24 han pasado
y sigue a mi lado.

. . .

Musa, adonde quiera
que yo vaya
tu vas.

. . .

En las relaciones enfermizas
y en la crueldad,
siempre estuviste conmigo.
Y aunque pasen los anos

Y el Roberto Bolaño de la Alameda
y la Libreria de Cristal
se transforme,
se paralice,

se haga mas tonto y mas viejo
tu permaneceras igual de hermosa.
Mas que el sol
y que las estrellas.

. . .

Musa,
mas hermosa que el sol
y mas hermosa
que las estrellas.

I have left the poems in the original Spanish, although the published translation works--Bolaño’s voice so strong that it transmits despite a fuzzy effort of carrying it over.

Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv's Text Rain (1999)

I’m always so shocked when I ask writers what they think about digital poetics and they either say: “I don’t know what that is” or “That’s for young people” or “It has nothing to do with me.”

Will writers be in for a rude awakening now that that the iPad will inevitably revolutionize the way we read and write? For the first time, everyone will be reading (and writing) on a screen. It seems unavoidable that our current definition of “electronic writing” will soon apply to everyone.

Currently, electronic writing is defined as any writing that is “digitally born,” or writing that is meant to be read on a screen, or something other than paper. Electronic writing can also refer to any writing that seeks to address how technology has impacted our lives and our relationship to language, such as twitter poems, wiki novels, GPS blog books.

Tan Lin's "Chalk Playground, LitTwitChalk"

The first generation of electronic writers included experimental novelist Robert Coover, who helped found the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) in 1999. The founders of ELO recognized early on that digital media was going to allow literature to grow in a completely new direction. While Coover was teaching in Brown’s Literary Arts Program, he taught writers like Shelley Jackson, who eventually went on to write what may be the most famous electronic writing piece today, her autobiographical hyperfiction work “My Body” (1997).

What is distinctive about “My Body” is not so much its language, but its fragmentation. Similar to what B.S. Johnson’s boxed book The Unfortunates did, and what David Foster Wallace’s footnotes did in Infinite Jest which came out only a year before, the participatory “clickual” demands of “My Body” forces the reader to jump back and forth from page to page, a choose-your-own-adventure-type version of reader self-empowerment. “My Body” is perhaps the first attempt to address the modern dilemma of how best are we to locate ourselves in hyperspace, and how people negotiate their bodies to discover boundaries, destinations, and whether or not there is a “bodied here.” Mark Amerika, another early practitioner of hyperfiction, believed electronic writing could “liberate” and “democratize” literature (whatever that is supposed to mean.) In his piece “Grammatron,” the first internet art to be presented at the Whitney Biennial (2000), the cyborg narrator declares that he will no longer “feel bound by the self-contained artifact of book media.”

Still from Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries' "Bust Down the Door!"

See Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ “Dakota,” a close reading of Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

See “The Sea”

Starting in the late 90s however, many readers who had initially been excited by hyperfiction slowly became bored. Hyperlink was becoming “uncool.” This fellow reader of e-lit describes the boredom perfectly:

“That feeling, however, quickly gave way to the loneliness of a reader in a maze of hyperlinks: Trying to make sense of what then felt like ‘postmodern’ writing in digital form, I was simply annoyed at the impossibility of arriving at a mental model of the digital rhizome that was spreading wider and wider before my eyes with each click…If a book consists of materially sedimented social antagonisms, unchangeable but contradictory, the problem with hypertext is that simply stays fluid.  In other words, my reading became socially meaningless in that it was only one among many; I was equally distanced from the text as I was from my fellow readers.” (1)

(Tweeted by Jurgen Habermas 1/29/2010: But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics)

Electronic writers moved away from hyperlink and became more interested in exploring what you could do visually on a screen that you could not do on paper. Many began learning Flash to create writing that was more like cinema poetry, or words roving around on a blank screen. In Brian Kim Stefan’s “A Car Drives to Rome” (1996), selected words beep and honk to catch your attention and also simulate the effect of being in traffic.

Still from "A Car Drives to Rome" (1996)

See Brian Kim Stefans’ “A Car Drives to Rome.”

Other works can be found on UbuWeb, a website founded by conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith.

For almost two decades, there were few knowing consumers of e-lit and fewer organized platforms distributing it. Eastgate was one of the first to publish and collect hypertext pieces all in one place. Yet E-lit didn’t receive the spate of young digital readers that had originally been anticipated.  It was presumed that part of the problem was that people didn’t read on computers.  “Are people going to bring their Apple Powerbook to the beach? Into the bathtub? No.” It was also over-specialized and insular:  Anyone who wished to read it often had to really search for it, and then download a special program at a price. Many complained that Eastgate’s Storyspace, a hypertext editing platform, was too expensive and the “books” that got “published” were heavy and inaccessible.

See the hypertext version of The Sorge Spy Ring.

The iPad "Bookstore"

But now, it seems that people might very well be bringing their iPad to the beach. And maybe even into the tub. In any case they will be reading on an electronic gadget. And if newspapers already have front pages that are interactive, with video and sound capabilities, why shouldn’t books? Writers will soon have to explain why they aren’t incorporating such elements, instead of why they are.

It should also be noted that despite the dearth of academic jobs there are more open positions than ever for digital scholars.

“Since so few people are familiar with it, every new work is so new and radically different,” says Ara Karpinska, a former student of Brown’s hypertext program (Reported in Boldtype). “So many jobs and practices require verbal communication in the digital space,” concludes Karpinska. “In a way, we’re all electronic writers.”

Will this finally be the decade of the E-lit Renaissance?

Upcoming: A discussion of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, an e-text in book form.