Teaching Alert! Read This...

Sideways is an asymmetrical word.

My last post mentions Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing, which I’ve just finished reading. I don’t always enjoy reading theory, even when it makes those lightning bolts go off in my mind as many of them do. But I genuinely got into Goldsmith’s writing in this book, because while it contains much delicious food for thought in terms of how we define plagiarism, the nature of revising the work of others, the possibilities of writing in the digital age, and the ways in which that age influences the forms that art and poetry take, there are also occasions when the author breaks into metaphor and lyricism to breathe life into his ideas. The ideas and concepts he describes are interesting for sure, but what really made this book fun was the language Goldsmith uses. There are many examples, but here’s one from the chapter cleverly titled “Revenge of the Text,” in which he describes the way in which text is cycled from one digital environment to another:

“Those words, sticky with residual junky code and formatting, are transferred back into the local environment and scrubbed with TextSoap, which restores them to their virginal states by removing the extra spaces, repairing broken paragraphs, deleting e-mail forwarding marks, straightening curly quotation marks, even extracting text from the morass of HTML. With one click of a button, these soiled texts are cleaned and ready to be deployed for future use” (33).

This book manages to describe complicated digital processes related to words and text that’s very enlightening and yet explained in a language that creative writers can understand and relate to. It’s definitely academic, and might represent a challenge to college-aged readers, but I still think I made the right decision in including it in my fall syllabus. As long as they take it slow, I think they’ll get a charge out of the way it makes them think about the way words operate behind the scenes in cyberrealms – the “dark data” as Goldsmith puts it.

Goldsmith made a controversial figure of himself recently, remixing the autopsy report of Michael Brown into a poem (as per his theories on intertextuality and repurposing texts.) He also appeared on the Colbert Report. All that aside, I’m happy I read this book, and I assume Kenneth won’t mind if I give you a rundown of some ideas that should totally enhance the work I’m doing with my students on digital writing in the fall. I’m also putting together a conference paper on writing-intensive workshop in creative writing pedagogy, in which I propose students revise each others' work. Uncreative Writing generated a lot of material for me. Here are some ideas:

Take an image (a jpg or tif file) and convert it to a word file. Insert a poem (or something) into the alphanumeric code that appears. Then convert it back to an image. You can do the same with an MP3 file. (I had trouble because my version of Word is set up to keep me from making such conversions, but Goldsmith did it and it produced an interesting distortion in the image.)

Of course there’s “patchwriting,” in which you just take bits and pieces of other texts and put them together into your own cohesive whole. This is the most obvious one, but it will play a huge role in my class on digital prose in the fall.

Psychogeography: Compose an alternate map of a place based on specific emotions. Or walk a route, and write down the words you come across as you walk (signs, ads, flyers, etc…) Or follow a person as long as you can and make a map based on that person’s path (creepy yes, but neat, right?) Or assign a map to a purpose it wasn’t intended. Use a map of Milwaukee to wander through Kalamazoo. (These are forms of dérive, where you write what you encounter as you follow a certain path.)

Détournement: Remix a video clip in a foreign language with new subtitles. (I'm reminded of DJ Spooky's remix of the very racist film The Birth of a Nation called Rebirth of a Nation...gotta revisit that!) Replace a comic strip’s bubbles with your own text. Take the source code and graphics from a news site and populate it with your own text. Take an image with text, remove the text. Then make a concrete poem out of the missing text that redraws the picture. Record all the words you speak in a week and put them together in a poem. (Or do this with a collection of recordings from something else.) Do a Google search of a noun and adjective (Christi’s move from her essay – see last post.) Goldsmith did it with “red circle,” I did it with “blue square,” and found this interesting list.

Hyperrealism: Replicate and reframe a transcript of something unedited, like a summit, or a trial. Take a list of something (KG’s example is of countries, AKA Your Country is Great by Ara Shirinyan) and do a search of each thing within a sentence you choose (like Armenia is great.) and form a text with the comments and/or other text you find. Take a text like an ad or article and replace a particular word or phrase all the way through. (I did it in my last post.)

Make a text out of “refuse and detritus”: stuff like dreams, news articles, weather conditions, descriptions of objects, shopping lists, etc…This is like Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, which is longer than anything I would do this way, but is supposedly a neat read. Kind of like a scrapbook made into a regular book. A real hoarder’s way of writing, but even easier thanks to the Net.

Here’s an assignment for the revision/workshop: Give the directions or the recipe to your poem or story to a classmate and see how they reproduce it. I would say include not only plot points and/or rhyme scheme and things like that, but also process details like when you write (morning or night?) and whether you have noise in the background, etc…

In the chapter titled “Infallible Processes,” he talks about Andy Warhol and some of the exhaustive biographical work done on and by him. The ideas is to include a bunch of mundane details that almost forces the reader to look away. This reminded me of my myspace page on the character of Pootie, the protagonist of the novel I plan to finish this summer, and made me want to get back to filling it in.

There’s also a number of passages on retyping, which might also be a good approach in the revision/workshop. It sounds horribly tedious to me, but this wouldn’t be the first time that a professor has praised this method as a way of teaching writing method. Retype a poem or story by someone else? Sounds SO boring, but apparently it teaches the re-typist a lot.

Flarf: Put together what Goldsmith calls “Internet spew” and make it into a poem. Better yet, take a bunch of tweets or status updates. (Maybe all the ones that occurred the day my mom died is an interesting thought.) Put together lines of text in a chat room. Put together the tweets at the bottom of a show like American Idol.

A list of pedagogical experiments:

1) Make a code that stands in for things people do when they speak, like pause or clear their throat, and include it in a transcript of that speech.

2) Take an outdated slogan and graffiti it in a non-permanent way in public.

3) Take a platitude of some kind and make a typical greeting card out of it, complete with a bar code, and put it in the store with the other cards.

4) Take a YouTube or home video and make a screenplay of it.

On that note, I’d like to include a picture of my mom here, who I missed terribly this past Mother’s Day. I really miss our conversations. I just know she would have loved this blog and that I could talk to her at length about things I talk about here, so in some ways, this blog is for her. I love you Mom, and I wish you were here.