CHECKING IN WEEK 3

Whoa this has got to be your classic Monday morning!

I'm just touching base for the purposes of class preparation this week.

Read to the end for a request regarding homework.

I hope you've found time to read Kafka, "In the Penal Colony."  Amanda described it as "really chilling," which seems apt.  We'll discuss it on Wednesday.  I was struck, when reading it yesterday, by the writer's ability to describe the imagined thing, whether the machine or an exchanged glance or gesture; also by the extent to which the story is embedded in thought, e.g., the observations of the narrator and the speculative projections of the Officer.  It is almost an exercise in building castles in the air, I suppose that's what writing is, as well as being a material thing, it snatches out of time the passionate transitory, as Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh said, or gives local habitation and a name to what is otherwise fugitive, as Shakespeare kind of said (airy nothing).  

If you happen to be stuck for a sentence, there are many excellent examples in "In the Penal Colony."  Excellent sentences are, in fact, widely available.  You just have to keep an open mind.

Thinking about the assignment: Write your sentence, some of Odette's notes for her introduction to Susan Stewart's On Longing come to mind:

1.  Writing & writing by hand

• Writing is by hand; thus linked to the personal (p14)
  
• Writing obeys the speed of the body
• Handwriting is to space what the voice is to time
• The record that cannot be recorded: the time that cannot count in the diary is the time of writing the diary
  
• Whereas speech unfolds in time, writing unfolds in space (p21)
• The printed word having a life of its own (p22)
• Writing promises immortality (p31)

Bullet point #4 reminds me that if I did not understand writing as living I could be said to have no life.

Odette's On Longing notes continue:

2.  Speech (p31)

• Speech leaves no mark in space
• Like gesture, it exists in its immediate context and can re-appear only in another's voice, another's body
• In contrast, writing serves to caption the world
• The space between letters, the space between words, bears no relation to the stutters and pauses of speech

I include the notes on speech here as one way to think about writing is to think of what it is not.  Or writing as speech / speech as writing.  Like in a few months when the air is so cold the word you speak are written on it as they issue from your mouth!  And I think Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy, and many of his books, incorporate speech as writing.  One book that bears thinking about is Fidget, where Kenny G makes an audio recording of his own account of every single movement his body makes over a 13 hour period on Bloomsday (June 16), 1997.  It ends with him getting drunk, exhausted by the tension of having to record everything his body does, and as he ceases to be able to do so, the text reverses. 

Actually here's something hot off the press from Odette on handwriting

[Now what does hot off the press mean?  Is it something to do with

a) a closet?

b) a cabinet?

c) newspapers?

d) a hug?

e) trousers?

f) pants?

g) dogs?

h) dichotomy?

i) sodomy?

j) all those footballers on the blog?

k) okay

And are those curly brackets? 

No, square]

I've put a new section: ideas emerging from class, at the bottom of the blog.  These are just short notes on vivid ideas I'd like to write more about.  Feel free to park your bright ideas here.

Request regarding homework:  It would help me to have some record of the homework you do each week.  While some people gave me paper or pdf files, not everyone did.  In fact I refused Ian's "paper" on the grounds he would make better use of it.  But I remember it.  Still I would like something written, or an image, so I could look at it again.  And some of the difficult writings I neither have a record of nor remember that well!  This is undoubtedly because I was absorbed in listening and didn't take notes.  So everyone: be sure to give me something to remember your work by each week, even a title.  I'm all set with Odette, Keith, Francisco, Katelyn, Dan, Amanda, and Ian for last week.  Everyone else give me something to act as a record for last week's difficult writing.  And everyone give me something for this week too, on Wednesday, so I know your sentences, like next week when I think about the class.

couscous@tazza will be happening before I see you, 109-11pm Tues night.  Come if you can.  Your fellow grad students Phoebe Stubbs + Jason Huff are among our readers.  It's short.  It's sharp.  It's packed.  And it's free.  A high-protein blast.