Paradisatina
1.
I wish my life were more like the plot of a novel.
I wish the novel I am reading were my actual life,
that the story would lead to always
a place where the horizon met a large sky, under which I wander;
that the pages would fold there and liberate
and swirl and combine and disconnect and combine again in a perfect Jimi Hendrix sky of absolute possibility
I also wish that it were easier to imagine
a novel which reached so widely
that it would hold in its pages all camaraderie.
2.
Is it possible to have too much camaraderie?
When my room-mate talks, I stick my nose in a novel,
but her woes trail me so widely
I can’t help preferring literature to life.
Fictions are so much easier to imagine,
most often, but not always,
and illuminate the dense shadows with the cool effervescent glow of possibility.
The chords enlarge sound under a large sky, shimmer and wander
and liberate.
3.
Not the way the old and oily chiaroscuro started to liberate
light from dark, that most ancient form of camaraderie
unknown to me. Confined within myself, lost to paradise, I forwander,
looking for something novel,
less real estate than possibility —
a grand diversion which could fling my troubles, shooting widely,
knowing there will be Facebook. Always!
Although Facebook is hardly a substitute for life
and life can’t keep up with what I imagine.
4.
They tell me paradise is lost. So then imagine
Adam and Eve and their horned beasts themselves come to liberate
those lost in the compromised heaven of everyday life,
foundering in earnest committees and corporate camaraderie,
making profit under the guise of improvement. But not always
does Eve find salvation’s tedium sufficient. The same instinct that challenged ignorance leads her to outwander.
What to do when bliss is felt so widely
life feels like a twice-read novel
foreclosing possibility?
5.
But Eve and I are in this game for possibility.
She’s let me know she’s trying to imagine
I’m writing a “novel”
behind those gates too narrow to liberate.
Even emotions can grow outmoded when emoted widely
in the tumbledown garden of Eve’s allegorical life.
She cannot be inerrant. She must move within a constant question. To wander
as her mirrored image in my parallel Eden, I have left behind all camaraderie.
(I wasn’t a confessional guy always.)
6.
To water your lawn you need a garden hose, but not always.
A hose just points one way, but a sprinkler, ah, that creates a possibility
that when liquid life uncoils its length along the grass to sprawl in many-bladed camaraderie
it spreads many-minded Eve in ways not easy to imagine.
Like the way-faring stranger, her constant overwander
trespasses into my novel
muddling of the border between lousy writing and life,
while those who fear trespasses claim mere wandering would liberate:
“Better to find your own paradise than to surrender to the vision which is accepted widely.”
7.
How many on this earth are blind to life's folly? If only the remedy weren't agreed upon widely.
It’s a bad time for poetry, always
either too quick to condemn or too deliberate;
since repeating what’s been done seems the only possibility,
why not cover the bases by leading a multiple life?
yet how isolate, this camaraderie,
like everyone on the train reading the same bestselling novel,
frozen in fiction. This picture forbids Eve to imagine
to find an emptiness large enough within which her question can wander.
8.
Fierce. Acknowledging that death will stop her wander.
Yet death will freeze many things, and widely
clamp on our wriggle, and will it suffice to imagine
open doors before entering? But not always
announcing yourself is a novel
form of social silence: you may as well liberate
your hat from the coatrack, Jack; but, hey, what’s your hurry – isn’t camaraderie
among strangers the last best possibility
in this, the best of all possible sentences, life?
9.
Eve made this or that out of life
through the range of necessity. Her wander
brings ours into the domain of possibility.
Be kind to others; make it a trait that becomes coveted widely
enough to communicate a shape-shifting tale of camaraderie
moving at last to imagine
those blind to Eden, the sweetfool nostalgics who still berate.
“Have at least some scrap paper and a pencil stub on you, always.”
“Write what is beautiful and sad and put it in your novel.”
Envoi
Always wander widely
Liberate novel possibility
Imagine life, camaraderie
Friday, September 24, 2010
Paradisatina
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
The Manivelle
A manivelle is a hand-crank. I took the name for this constraint from an item described by Georges Perec in his short novel Un cabinet d’amateur (1979), translated by Ian Monk as “A Gallery Portrait” in Three By Perec (Godine/Verba Mundi, 2004). Before I come to the constraint, a little more about this book.
Un cabinet d’amateur uses the “gallery” constraint I described in Administrative Assemblages (Proteotypes, 2009). A picture gallery is organized as a sequence or an array of pictures, and a written gallery (what the French used to call a “salon,” a recognized literary form) is a sequence (hard to do salon hanging in writing) of descriptions or analyses of or responses to those pictures. The sequence in which the pictures are “hung” may or may not create a narrative, but a “gallery” will certainly create a sequence and use it to comment on the nature and use of the art image. Perec has used the form in a nearly exhaustive variety of ways: first, description as in a catalogue of an exhibition (the collection of the German-American brewer Hermann Raffke is being shown at the 1913 Pittsburgh celebration of the anniversary of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s accession); thereafter a detailed description of one painting, Un cabinet d’amateur, by the German-born Heinrich Kürz, which represents a gallery in the manner of Willem van Haecht’s Art Cabinet of 1628
or Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre (1832-3), or a number of others, all known to Perec and listed by him.
The “cabinet” Kürz paints is that of his patron Raffke, and includes all the paintings shown in Pittsburgh, which hung alongside his and were therefore already present twice in the exhibition. Like his predecessors, Kürz puts human figures into the gallery, or rather he includes one figure, Raffke’s, in the clothes, the chair, and the very posture in which, some years later, when dead, Raffke has himself stuffed and buried in a sealed vault with his collection, all disposed as in Kürz’s painting and including that painting. The Borgesian theme of infinite regression further appears in Kürz’s including his own painting in his painting of Raffke’s collection, and so visitors to the show in Pittsburgh saw the entire collection a third time, still including his own painting, and so the entire collection a fourth time … Perec has fun with this.
But the novel continues after the exhibition closes. Perec summarizes art-historical analysis, the contents of an auction catalogue from the first sale of work from Raffke’s collection and the prices realized, Raffke’s autobiography including his account of building his collection, a book on Kürz’s painting, in the course of which the author produces evidence authenticating every painting in the collection represented in Kürz’s great work; finally, we are given an account of a second sale of the Raffke collection, all its treasures, and the prices realized, and a final shocking revelation. Perec continues to have fun, largely at the expense of a connoisseurship too focused on the extraordinary images of art, and on its authenticity as established by provenance-stemmas, and too prone to set a value in dollars. At any of a score of places in this novel, stories far more interesting than the one being told start to take form around a suggestive structural element, such as one of those provenance-summaries that list how a work of art passed from one hand to another, or around the excited spectators advancing with their loupes to examine the third-generation copies of masterworks in the painting nesting inside the painting nesting inside Kürz's painting. Perec does not allow any of those stories to develop; he sticks close to his matter-of-fact descriptive account.
In the first sale, one of the items sold is a “paysage à manivelle” — a long scroll-like canvas painted with a mostly continuous landscape, and wrapped around a pair of standing rollers turned by hand-cranks. (Presumably some sort of frame supports rollers and canvas.) Perec’s commentator speculates that it was used as the back-drop in a marionette theater, the scene being changed by a sufficient number of turns of the crank. Where the landscape is continuous, the scene changes gradually, and one imagines the characters in motion, a displacement that is already more novelistic than dramatic. Yet at certain points there are vertical bands of canvas, termini at which the scene changes abruptly and completely. What there is no record of at all is the theater or the play for which this scenery was created. All Perec gives us is the flat description, which moves from the banks of a canal past a lock, past fishers, into a forest and out onto a lane that gradually becomes a city street, which becomes a road leading into “hot country,” passing an oasis with a painted Arab, then finding the sea and a port, before the scene jumps to a carpenter’s shop and carries on. We are left to imagine the story that was enacted before this backdrop and the characters that enacted it.
So the “manivelle” constraint, I infer, consists in reducing a narrative to its setting; in creating a spatial narrative attentive to scenes and objects, but not people, where the time-dimension is present purely as sequence, perhaps of rate as well. Time passes as the crank is turned, and places change but what took place is not represented. The causal sequences of plot must be imagined. We are left some latitude for such imagining by the absence of many very marked features that might suggest actions. The places that Perec describes are not extraordinary, like the works of art collected by Hermann Raffke, and this particular piece is “more a curiosity than a work of art.” The scene represented is, in Perec’s word, “infra-ordinary.” It is an unframed landscape, at least on the sides; nothing is foregrounded because it is entirely a background, but it multiplies the banal realities of every day, which might include an orientalist cliché like the oasis and Arab. If the crank stopped turning, some element could become important by receiving sustained attention, but of course it would depend on just where the crank ceased to turn. For Perec the importance of the infra-ordinary was just the noticing of what we habitually overlook because it is the continuous, hardly varying backdrop of our lives. He wants us to question the habitual, and to give a tongue to common things, which will articulate an anthropology of our own everyday life, what Perec calls the “endotic,” the anti-exotic.
Perec would, I think, have enjoyed the “myriorama” discussed a few posts ago: also a landscape framed between two horizons, but sliced into strips that can be recombined.
2.The first practice for the manivelle constraint, then, is to create as nearly endless a continuous description of setting as is possible. It could be your own creation, this linear world, or you could abstract it from someone else’s story or even a folk tale or Arthurian legend or the Bible or Odyssey. Such a setting should change at a steady rate, so that some limit must be enforced upon amplifications, which will slow things down, and on cursory listing, which will speed them up. Metaphor and other figurative language must be rigorously excluded; this is to be a literal description, and numerical measurements and compass directions have their place in it. The setting should contain objects in such numbers and describe them in such detail as one might notice while walking past them without stopping.
In short, this writhing exercise is a different from one I used to assign, the description of a room in which a murder or some other calamity was about to happen. For that assignment I actively encouraged adding attention-value beyond what the infra-ordinary contents of the room would normally call for, stressing that moods are not created by naming them but by the intensity and color of the description. The manivelle landscape should not project a mood at all. It should foreground nothing. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends, but a story set within this landscape must choose where it begins and where it ends, and where in the middle it comes to a boil; and that will be the work of the reader.
So then a second stage would be to pass one’s manivelle to a reader and have that person write a story without adding any description of setting, using only what occurs between some starting point and some ending, but adding characters and actions. It would be interesting, for that second writer, to choose at random a place to start a story and a place to end it.
A “gallery” would lend itself to a similar exercise. Create a series of descriptions of pictures, which could be landscapes, portraits, history-paintings, still lives, abstractions — but your job is limited to description. Then give what you wrote to someone else to create a story from it. You can come to an agreement whether the “pictures” should be used in the order given or may be rearranged. When we practiced the manivelle in the last meeting of the Writhing Society, one writher, Angelo Pastormerlo, created a written storyboard, drawn from Howard Hawks’ movie The Big Sleep. The story that Casey Soloff derived from it was quite interestingly different, though it shared an atmosphere with the original, perhaps because Angelo had left some dead bodies and suicide notes in the description.
Here is what Jacqueline Cantwell produced by way of description, followed by my narratization of it. Both were written without revision in a space of two hours.
The wave’s edges cast shadows. The lines, shadows of dense water, move across the sandy shore, inches below the water. The shadows are edges, borders in the littoral zone. The shadowlines are shaped in ripples and rhomboids. Glare spots fall on the bottom — question — are the lines reflections from the water’s surface or do the lines also repeat in the actual water? — does the water between the surface and bottom contain changes in density equal to waves on the surface? How much does the edge influence the whole? How is the edge between water and air measured?
Edges and an edge. Always looking from edge — living on the edge, falling off the edge, needing an edge —
The undertow of the world pulling me toward an edge — Living on the edge without a net. Edges and borders require sharp observation. Reports of rain and storms so fierce that the sea’s surface merges into the rain. Swamped — where you can’t see the edge of the sky — A border without a horizon. Not my place — must always see the way out.
The horizon is an edge — the border between sky and water. Land doesn’t count unless it is empty. Space needs to be empty and clear.
The edge is it repeated against the sky just as waves repeat on a shore. The wind moves over the water’s surface and interacts on the edge — How far down does wind stir water — How deep is a surface — The underside of water
The surface is an edge — boundary — like reflections —
The surface — edge — boundary — reflection — spaces of intersection, mingling, ambiguity. The space between the horizon and truck a type of trick — balancing on the edge — because anything big enough to be interesting will overpower the onlooker. Nothing says you get to live. No contract for your life — quite the opposite. Winnding by how gracefully you fail when you get too far out.
Select the most productive edges — edges with swirls and loops and drapery and cures — edges that lead into a freedom — Avoid edges that limit and harm, that turn into cruelty.
Seeing this as a meditation on edges, I followed the directions in the last section.
Jacob and Anna walked along the beach. Each to each was still a silhouette, since they had just met. When he said they were in the zone between the high-tide mark and the low-tide mark, where some species of shellfish and crabs live out their entire lives, she saw beyond the remark to a life of science, unspeakably dull to her, and asked, “Are you studying marine life?” A flatness in her voice marked a limit he thought to turn aside from but then boldly attacked. “I am a crab man,” he said, and his words, the tone of them, the little flash of humor, sank into her soul, but whether she enjoyed them or loathed them was not clear, and his silhouette began to fill, but with two different aspects, one appetizing, one merely there, a generic man. “I cook them,” she replied, as a test, having rejected the much stronger test of telling him how she had caught a bad case of crabs once from a student. That she had suppressed that response led Anna to the realization that too bold a challenge always contains a sexual dimension, and she was wondering how he would have reacted. He noticed she was playing with a button on her shirt as she frowned, and, uncertain what this combination of gestures might mean, did not answer her, did not change his expression, but picked up a stick and walked to a tidal pool where he thought a crab might lurk, left behind by the receding ocean. She watched him wave the stick and wondered if he thought he was casting a spell or what the hell he was doing, when a claw sprang from the pool and gripped the stick. Jacob raised the crab into the air, turned, and moved toward Anna, across whose face amazement moved from the forehead down, chasing irony from the eyes, the nostrils, the mouth and the set of the jaw — it was as if he could see the terminator advance.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
First Line Indications
Indices means “indexes” and “indications.” Levin Becker’s pamphlet considers book-indexes, specifically the table of contents and the first-line index for a book of poems. Poems are very specific indications of meaning, the most fully intentional kind of writing, while the index of a book is a text not intended to be read in the same way as the text it indexes; not intended to be read at all. It is “apparatus” — a tool like the notes, the bibliography, the table of contents, the running titles, and in some scholarly works those pages that explain what various abbreviations and acronyms stand for: manuscript collections or journals or reference works. Like those other tools, the index is consulted at need. But it is printed on pages like other text and bound into the same codex as other text; it could be read. Levin Becker, like J. G. Ballard before him (see his “The Index” in War Fever), considers the ways of reading by which indexes can be made fully suggestive, if not indicative. By “ways of reading” I am of course saying “constraints for writing.”
Following the title page one opens to a “Table des matières,” or table of contents. The first five items:
5. Lenteur de l’araignée [the slowness of the spider]
6. Préhistoire de l’amour [the prehistory of love]
7. Acharnements [instances of single-minded energy]
8. Soucis inédits [unpublished anxieties]
10. Bribes du sondage isoloir [fragments from isolation-booth soundings]
These are the titles of poems, and there are 64 of them. (My copy is No. 064, and it was mailed to me at Calle del Espiritu Santo 64.) But here another question rises, since this saddle-stitched pamphlet is only 28 pages long — seven sheets printed on both sides, two pages to a side. And it might be at this moment that you remember where the table of contents normally comes in a French book — after the matter it indexes — and notice that the page numbers run from 89 to 108. Where are the poems?
The table des matières is immediately followed by a second index, “Index des premiers vers” or index of first lines (vers meaning line and not verse in French). Such an index would come at the end of an English book of poems, such as the excellent anthology Lovers, Rakes, and Rogues. A new garner of love-songs and merry verses, 1580-1830, ed. John Wardroper (London: Shelfmark, 1997), to which we shall return in due course.
Following that index Levin Becker, on “p. 95,” raises the possibility that the poems named in the table of contents and first-line different exercise may not be found in this book, may have gone astray in the layout process, may even never have troubled to get themselves written. I should add that these are not found titles and first lines but were composed for the occasion by Levin Becker himself; nonce-titles and nonce-incipits.
And it’s interesting to pause here and think about the sort of poetry collections with first-line indexes. That piece of apparatus implies a use of poems that is no longer universal, namely memorizing them. If you’re going to look up a poem that begins with a certain line, you must already know that line. That implies study, or at least more than one reading, which in turn implies that the poem came to you with a certain charge of value on it, a compelling demand for attention to which you acceded. With much contemporary poetry, in English anyway, poetry is consumed as a performance primarily, a text secondarily. I looked in Eliot Weinberger’s Innovators and Outsiders. American Poetry Since 1950 (NY: Marsilio: 1993). No first-line index. Gross and Quasha’s Open Poetry (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1973) doesn’t have one either. When I went to try out Levin Becker’s suggested reading methods, I did not find a collection with a first-line index later than Wallace Stevens’ The Palm At the End Of the Mind (NY: Vintage, 1967). Wallace Stevens is literature; I don’t understand why Louis Zukofsky is not, in the eyes of publishers, but so it is. The French are less shy about placing their work in a literary context, and of course littérature is the li in Oulipo.
Back to Indices, this collection that is nothing but a table of contents and a first-line index. “Que faire?” asks Daniel Levin Becker. What do we do now? He proceeds to make several suggestions for how to use this gutted collection of poems. He begins with the first-line index, “something that can be read, potentially self-sufficient. Beneath its ostensible utilitarian servility it proposes a number of ways to read it” (my translation). He proposes four ways.
A. Ordinally. Read the "first lines" in the sequence of the pages on which they are listed. Here are the first lines for pages 10-12: "Vous a-t-on déjà dit/ La vous qui devint toi/ L'effet de votre toux" [Did anyone ever tell you,/ the You who became just you/ What the effect of your cough is."
B. In index-order. Moving through the index, which is of course alphabetical, select lines as you go that when sequenced in the order in which you found them make a poem.
C. By sound-value. Find lines that, regardless of length, rhyme. “Faute de lumière/ Tu fais le signet dans mon dictionnaire” [For lack of light/ You become the ribbon in my dictionary].
D. By length. Here Levin Becker profits from the regularity of French prosody, more syllabic than accentual. He is able to compose poems whose lines have six, eight, ten, or twelve syllables. Anglophone practitioners will either need to think about matching lengths and meters or about creating freer forms by mixing up a variety of lengths. What we get in each case is a constrained cento, limited only to opening lines.
After this Levin Becker moves on to the titles from the table of contents.
E. Since these can be read sequentially in the order in which they are listed, select pairs of titles or longer units that make a pleasing statement. I tried this with Wallace Stevens but the index of titles was alphabetized (see next). John Berryman’s Delusions, Etc. (NY: Farrar, Straus Girous, 1969) had an ordinal table of contents:
Your birthday in Wisconsin you are 140
Drugs alcohol little sister
In Memoriam (1914-1953)
F. Alphabetically. Stevens works here:
Anything is beautiful if you say it is
Another weeping woman
A pastoral nun
Or:
Arrival at the Waldorf
Banal sojourn
Chaos in motion and not in motion
Dance of the macabre mice
Esthétique du mal
G. By sound, using titles that rhyme. Still Stevens:
The pure good of theory:
World without peculiarity
This is harder with found poetry. You could try this with a variation that allows slant-rhyme or simply repeats a sound from one line to the next, then a second from that to a third, or pursues a single word through several titles.
The prejudice against the past
The plot against the giant
H. By length, as for D, and presenting the same problems. I have converted to lines roughly in iambic pentameter:
Disillusionment of ten o’clock —
So-and-so reclining on her couch
Less and less human, O savage Spirit!
The bird with the coppery, keen claws;
A rabbit as the king of ghosts.
I. “Ready-made elementary moralities.” The morale élémentaire was a form invented by Raymond Queneau. It uses a number of adjective-noun phrases in a particular arrangement, together with a section of freer lines. Levin Becker proposes drawing all of these from the titles. Some day I will give this form some sustained thought; at present I don’t completely get it.
J. Freestyle. Simply construct a poem by making an unconstrained selection from the titles, in short a cento.
K. Couplings. Join the titles with first lines, using any of the above methods.
It was very interesting applying some of Levin Becker’s proposals to Stevens. Hunting through these indexes in search of lines or titles that rhyme or have the same meter made me appreciate the skill, freedom, and originality with which Stevens puts words together. While his aesthetic and his ideas remain quite constant through his career, these act as center to the most particular and vivid speech-creatures describing the most gracefully wild trajectories through his gravitational field.
Before looking at what the Writhing Society made of the first-line index to Lovers, Rakes and Rogues, we should think about some other kinds of apparatus that might lead to poetic results when abstracted from the work they adumbrate. A concordance lists all the verses (of the Bible) or lines (of Shakespeare) in which a given word or phrase occurs. If one went to such a concordance with a word in mind, then one could apply some of the Indices constraints to the verses/lines/sentences in which that word occurs.
The Writhing Society worked with either Lovers, Rakes and Rogues (this scanned page)
or another anthology. Since we were working within a time constraint, we opted first for the Freestyle procedure with first lines and then, using the Length procedure, we constructed “snowballs” (each line one syllable longer than the preceding one) and “melting snowballs” (each line one syllable shorter than the preceding. We discussed but did not put into practice an application of Marcel Bénabou’s “perverses” (his variation of Harry Mathews’ “perverbs”). To do this, you would go to a first-line index and choose some lines that please you. Then divide them in the middle, perhaps at the cesura. Then recombine the beginnings and endings. We had a very good time and were all grateful to Daniel Levin Becker for inspiring us. Here are some results.
A Freestyle poem by me from Lovers, Rakes and Rogues:
What a’ devil ails our poets all?
Oh stop the mill, stop the mill, stop it I say!
Really wherever one passes
Through nations ranging, raking elements,
Though I sweep to and fro old iron to find,
Note of me was never took.
Oh mercury pills — those teasing pills.
Oh could I by any chimic art
To be a whore, despite of grace!
The landlord he looks very big —
Was ever mortal man like me?
Prithee die and set me free.
What is beauty but a breath?
Oh smother me to death!
A brief application of the sound constraint (C) at the end. Erik Schurink FWS used The Best Loved Poems of the American People. He changed the lineation in places.
A stranger came one night
to Yussouf’s tent. A cloud
possessed the hollow field far out
beyond the city’s lights,
away from the din and roar
I cannot say, and I will not say
When I have a house—as I sometime may
I cannot say, and I will not say; ‘Roof-tops,
roof-tops, what do you cover?’
Drop the pebble in the water:
Just a splash and it’s gone
Does the road wind up-hill
all the way? I cannot say,
and I will not say
I cannot say, and I will not say
When a feller hasn’t got a cent, what’s
hallowed ground? Has earth a clod, have you
ever sat by the railroad track? Gone is
the city, gone is the day.
A builder builded a temple. I wander’d
lonely as a cloud. The sea is calm
tonight.
My snowball from Lovers, Rakes and Rogues:
Thirsis to die desired
Walking in a meadow green.
She was so exquisite a whore,
Pillycock came to my lady’s toe.
What a thin, fine, cool, airy love at first!
The sun was just setting, the reaping was done;
The old wife she sent to the miller her daughter —
There was a buxom lass and she had a velvet ass.
Erik’s snowball + melting snowball from his anthology:
Give us Men!
A simple child
There was an old fox
No coward soul is mine
Two brown heads with tossing curls
Fifteen men on a Dead Man’s Chest
I’m Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines
Is it true, O Christ in Heaven
O good painter, tell me true
Miss you, miss you, miss you
The woman I am
The parish priest
I love you
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Kleiser-Cooperider Rhetorical Readymades
Last Wednesday the Writhing Society came out of hibernation and reconvened at Proteus Gowanus to take up a challenge posed by Carrie Cooperider FWS. She had found, in her collection of odd books, Grenville Kleiser’s 15,000 Useful Phrases, a self-help compendium from 1919. 15,000 Useful Phrases provides a set of readymade locutions, some as simple as an adjective-noun combination, some more elaborate, but all meant to be useful to a person lacking the Harvard vocabulary but interested in raising his or her station in life. Kleiser combed through the literature of the period to come up with — besides merely useful phrases — significant phrases, felicitous phrases, impressive phrases, prepositional phrases, business phrases, literary expressions, striking similes, public speaking phrases, and miscellaneous phrases.
Just this table of contents proposes a constraint, to extend the list in a sort of Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia entry (cf. “John Wilkins’ Analytic Language” in Other Inquisitions): phrases found on tombstones, phrases most often garbled by actors, phrases that sound like Finnish vulgarities, phrases popular with parrots, phrases with too many d’s in them, phrases that raise the dead, private speaking phrases, and so on.
You can download the entire text of Kleiser for nothing from: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18362. The page reproduced above gives you the flavor of his enterprise. The young Jay Gatz, on his way to becoming Gatsby, surely memorized a dozen of these every day. They bespeak that interesting moment in American history when working-class men and women who had been through the wars, either in Europe or in the battle for suffrage, who had been doing some reading and hearing some speakers, decided to challenge the oligarchy by appropriating their speech. (For a look into the same process among immigrants, in this case Jews, see Leo Rosten’s immortal The Education of Hyman Kaplan, in print from Prion Books.)
Carrie proposed a couple of ways in which Kleiser’s readymades might be used. The first, which we didn’t try but which we sense would be fruitful, was to take a published interview (and here I’d like to put in a plug for BOMB magazine, where artists interview other artists) and replace all the answers with phrases from Kleiser. The second requires the writer to fill in if… /then… constructions with phrases. Some results follow, after we note that other similar correlative constructions are equally attractive: neither… /nor…; not only… /but also…; on the one hand… /on the other hand…; there was a time when… / but now… ; shading into the oulipian Marcel Bénabou’s list of antitheses: “Maybe you [do or think or like something]; not me [followed by details].”
If/Then
If the adroit flatterer is the precursor of love, is the ambiguous grimace its apotheosis? (George Spencer)
If familiar sacredness, then air, woodland, water. (Jocelyn Hoshauer)
If each like a corpse within its grave then eyes like a very dark topaz. (Erik Schurink)
If exquisite tact, then a mind very like a bookcase. (Wendy Walker)
If enforced silence, then explosive violence. (Jonah Bloch-Johnson)
If lacerated feelings, then she permitted herself a delicate little smile. (Tom La Farge)
If pelted with an interminable torrent of words, then equitably governed. (Corina Bardoff)
A couple of further procedures were proposed by Jonah Bloch-Johnson, whom we knew in a former life and who here made his entry into the Writhing Society with great fanfare (he is a musician). Jonah began by identifying Kleiser’s phrases as consisting of clichés. Many of them are, certainly, though not many are current. Clichés, Jonah argued, point to some sort of concept in our minds or some sort of experience that many people have had. Flann O’Brien would agree: "A cliché is a phrase that has become fossilized, its component words deprived of their intrinsic light and meaning by incessant usage. Thus it appears that clichés reflect somewhat the frequency of the same situations in life. If this be so, a sociological commentary could be compiled from these items of mortified language." Writing as “Myles na gCopaleen” he compiled a catechism of cliché in his Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times. A sample:
When things are few, what also are they? Far between.
What are stocks of fuel doing when they are low? Running.
How low are they running? Dangerously.
What does one do with a suggestion? One throws it out.
For what does one throw a suggestion out? For what it may be worth.
What else can be thrown out? A hint.
In addition to hurling a hint on such lateral trajectory, what other not unviolent action can be taken with it? It can be dropped.
What else is sometimes dropped? The subject.
For more like this, go to: http://grammar.about.com/b/2008/10/01/the-myles-na-gopaleen-catechism-of-cliche.htm
As a first step, then, at Jonah’s orders, we were to choose a phrase, or more than one, and then for each phrase chosen write two or three short descriptions of situations that the phrase could be used to indicate, the descriptions to be two or three sentences long “and include some detail.” He left it to us to decide whether the activating phrase should be mentioned or suppressed. Then as a second step one would compose a narrative connecting all the descriptions of all the phrases.
The first of these steps could be practiced collaboratively. Each participant in a group could choose a phrase and begin by writing a single short description of the situation evoked by that phrase, and then, concealing that description, pass the phrase along to the next person, who would repeat the process. At the end of a round each participant would have a collection of situation-descriptions by various hands, and then could proceed to write the narrative connecting them.
What we actually did was another minor variation. We each chose two phrases from Kleiser. We then passed those choices to the person on our right. (If we were doing this again, I’d pass one to the right and the other to the left.) We performed Jonah’s first step for each phrase individually, but only describing a single situation. Then we wrote a longer description of the situation suggested by both phrases taken together. I was handed limpid twilight and shadowy vistas of sylvan beauty (both poetic phrases, as you can see). Too easy in combination; there wasn’t much tension between them.
Corina Bardoff took the phrase excretory secretion in the following direction:
There is always a longer way to say a thing, and longer causes a listener to stop paying attention midway through a statement, so the air feels delicate around the two of you. A conversation should be like a silk negligee - soft and almost imperceptible - a negligee that will rip obscenely if anyone says "shit!"
From faces pale with bliss, like evening stars Erik Schurink derived:
At the museum of clocks with fluorescent numbers, there were no visitors but one, enough for the motion sensor to shut off the light, to dissolve the walls and ceiling into Dali’s hereafter.
Here is how Jocelyn Hoshauer combined fatalistic belief and affected, pedantic, and vain:
For living a sinful life, I was condemned to hell in a lecture hall. Knowing I couldn’t do anything about it anyway, I learned what “sin” meant in every religion, first in practice on earth, and then in theory, in hell.
And Wendy Walker’s merger of erudite labors with engulfing waters:
She dove into books looking for she knew not what, and they swallowed her completely. She read each sentence so closely, and pursued it so far, that in the end she couldn’t find her way home. On she journeyed, each volume dropping her through a trap-door into the next, with a what then or why or could this be true, and if so, according to whom? Where was the proof? Where the final word? Down she dropped through the rustling tunnel, down, down, into the nethermost circle of ink.
