UNCLEAR (CLEARING) NOTES ON NOT INTENT III

“aka notes on working something out in public”

Unintentionalism/understructuralism (the other meaning), though a bit like a human getting out of his/her skin while still in it, is in some way a form of conceptualism, but then saying that is not saying anything, and yet saying it is saying something, admittedly.  It might also be considered a bit like the “messiest” conceptualism, or the most Zen (whatever). 

Is this related to Spicer’s Martians?

--No.  And, as I’ve often wondered, are the Martians simply a projection of the Self as Other?  Or are the Martians the parts Spicer didn’t understand about himself and therefore these were labeled as such?

Is this related to Yeats’ mysteries?

--Mystery is always good.  Yeats or otherwise.

Is this related to Flarf?

--Perhaps.  But it wouldn’t be looking for a laugh or to shock, but it could, to put it another way.    

Isn’t this what the Surrealists were doing?

--No.

Can it look like a poem?

--Preferably not. 

Is this related to Bruce Andrews’ work?

--A bit.  But not really.

Isn’t an author supposed to believe in himself-herself?

--I think it may be best not to.

Is this a new form of collage?

--Unthematic collage, if so.

Is this an extreme version of Burroughs’ cutups?

--In pursuit, but not the effect.

Like in Maya Deren’s films?

--I wish.  And yet it must extend beyond this.

Like in Pedro Costa’s films?

--I don’t know.

--to be continued

UNCLEAR (CLEARING) NOTES TO A NOT INTENT (II)

I STOPPED BELIEVING MY OWN STORIES

for Lissa Wolsak

Factually, my own stories must be partially false because they do not include the other’s perspective.  That perspective—the other’s—must also contain a falsity for the same reason.  In addition, we must consider the possibility that the storyteller is not reliable, and thus the facts of his stories are fictions.  And, likewise, the other-storyteller.  We also may not know whether the one or the other are reliable all of the time—they may seem reliable one moment and not the next, and so on.  Once more, and finally, let us consider this:  that both the storyteller and the other-storyteller have not perceived something that might have been perceived, that was to be perceived, and so the story, in singulars and plural, is not the full story, because of this piece that wasn’t perceived, and so the story to be told was lost.

*

(Written in conjunction with various conversations with Lissa, Amina, Paul, Steve and Andrea).

(And Haecceity).

--to be continued 

UNCLEAR (CLEARING) LIST OF TEXTS OF UNINTENTIONAL WRITING (TO GREATER AND LESSER DEGREES)

--aka “notes on working something out in public”

Rodrigo Toscano, Platform [“ALL THOSE OVERDETERMINED SOAP BOX CRATES”]

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project [though too carefully arranged]

Anne Boyer, The 2000s—A history of the future in advance of itself [moreso as originally written on her blog]

Tan Lin, Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) [though a reduced variety of themes, the sense of it is here]

Amina Cain’s, I Go To Some Hollow [by which I mean syntactically, leaving no explanation] [and none necessary] [between leaps]

Mathew Timmons, The New Poetics [the sense of it is here, without the structuring element of the consistent “New” frame]

—to be continued (and added to)

UNCLEAR (CLEARING) NOTES TOWARD A NOT INTENT

I have been exploring something in my current manuscript, trying to get some grasp on it, where it will go, what it may be, and I have this sense of not wanting it to return through thematic tissue.  I think that I am through with it.   I don’t want a connect-the-dot narrative, however disrupted, however self-reversing.  I don’t want it textually, syntactically, and I don’t want it structurally.  I want a sense of the unintentional.  I don’t want intent to be there.  I want to let the work go like a carpet.  Whatever happens, happens.  There will be no need to explain why. 

It also fulfills a wish I have when watching movies—and how irritated I get when the movie has to go back and sew up each incidental encounter.  I like it much more when the person passes on the street, says something to the main character, let’s say, and it doesn’t tie into anything.  I want that comment to just sit there, enter in, and the work goes on.  There is no need to explain it.  There is no need to flip back and catch the first instance of this.  There is no need to find out why the character said it.

I think what I’m getting at is not Cageian or MacLowian, because there was quite a bit of understructuralism going on in their work.  Even in these, that rigorous overdetermination of thematic structure can be seen.  I see it even in current avant-garde work:  use six or seven key themes, thread them, disjunctively, alternatively, and create a whirling sense of things.  I don’t want six or seven themes—I want hundreds, thousands.  So that there is not a sense of theme anymore.  I want to somehow get the author’s intentions out of the writing.

The work must disperse.  It must accumulate sources.  It must not speak in one idiom—the social/cultural/respectable idiom of the author.  It must not wink.  This is the author intruding, self-importantly.  The work must just let go of itself.

—to be continued

                                   Figure 2 - the DCMI description set model