HyperCriticalWriting: November 2013

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

A slow down

I've been hugely hung up by technical problems this last week (like the death of my computer and the concurrent disappearance of hundreds of photos and studio files that went down with the hard drive). These have also caused big workload shifts, so I am missing deadlines aplenty...

I have a few interesting things to share...first, I was taken by this conversation on The Takeaway about the way social media use affects student writing. My teaching career started only a few years before Facebook, but blogs were already a big deal. At the time I felt (and I still feel) that students are very good at writing about their feelings about a given topic, but not so much good at writing about that topic. I doubt social media can be blamed for that. And anyone who equates texting with writing is looney.

They other notable item was a conversation on WHYY's Radio Times with poet Kenneth Goldsmith, whose book, Seven American Deaths and Distasters, is on my Christmas list (hint, hint). I am torn about what I think about the avant garde poet some call Kenny G. I enjoyed his book on Uncreative Writing, but when I heard him speak on the radio, he came across as more flippant than I would have hoped. It didn't help that from time to time he sounded like William Shatner...

...I will be back to this soon, and with photos. Thanks for your patience!

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Playing by rules

One of the main objectives of this break was to find a way to use my own writing in my work.

I still hate that idea.

But it's necessary, given one can't read enough to have endless material at one's fingertips, and there is a rather narrow spectrum of things that seem paintable to me in what I read. Also, it would be nice to read for pleasure from time to time, rather than to always feel like what I am doing needs to be used in the studio...

But I can't just sit down and write something for a painting. It seems there needs to be some kind of structure. Structure provides important guard rails for creativity and no one knows this better than the writers and artists of the Oulipo.

So I looked at my paintings for rules. One obvious rule in the signal flag paintings is that three letter words work well (I've known this for a while, but been unable to act on it). I thought it would be okay to allow six, nine, and twelve letter words, too, as those fit nicely. I decided to take the cue from the size of the canvas on which I wanted to work instead of letting the text dictate the scale. So I chose four-foot squares somewhat arbitrarily (as in, I had these stretchers and they weren't doing anyone any good without paintings on them...).

I mapped out a number of arrangements of flags, some with thirty blocks, some with more. I have settled on a thirty five-block arrangement, which means I need to come up with 105 characters in three-, six-, nine-, twelve-, or fifteen-letter words.

Easy right?

I've been posting about the progress of the first one, and here is a picture of it nearly complete:

It reads:

Before the end, you forget all the images and sounds placed before you Deceitful script surrounds you and cryptography begins.

I am starting the second one, and just composed the text:

The secret languages you use are sad and opaque metaphors camouflaging poetic worlds and revealing our tragic aestheticism.

I suppose it's predictable that they would be about language, but I found it a little funny that they are so consistent. Working on them is pleasantly maddening, like trying to solve a puzzle. I think I have a few more left in me, and I imagine these will go one for a little while yet. I keep coming up with fragments...