Bridges-Build-Burn - Barry

I choose to take “bridges” literally and refer to the Tay Bridge, a lattice-grid design made of cast and wrought iron, which collapsed in 1879, killing either 74 or 75 people. The collapse led to a lengthy investigation and was followed by a major transformation in the design and construction of bridges. Its replacement, the Forth Bridge, used a cantilever design and was made of steel. It was voted Scotland's greatest man-made wonder in 2016 and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In this story, a disaster became a source of wisdom. Not all disasters lead to wisdom, though. Sometimes disaster leads to denial, delusion, doubling down, rationalization, and justification.

Fig. 3: Fallen girders near the Tay Bridge. National Library of Scotland. (CC BY 4.0) 1880.

I choose to take “bridges” figuratively and refer to the way that the arts and disciplines create “bridges” as evolutionary steps within traditions (i.e. between blues and jazz). I am most excited by bridge-burning inventions in music and the arts in which artists like Louis Armstrong or the Beatles or Pablo Picasso learn traditional forms, then burn the bridges (many of them, at least) to these traditions and invent new vehicles to take them to new lands. “Weather Bird,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and “Portrait of Kahnweiler” are examples in which the burning of a bridge was key to the invention.

What are the “disasters” of literacy? What are the structures that we need to burn so that something better can replace them?

I can list a few:

1. The exclusion of females and non-whites from literacy education for hundreds of years.
2. The hold that print literacy modes have on our educational institutions and the inability of literacy education to keep up with the challenges posed to a democratic society by public relations, advertising, and propaganda.
3. The failure of the humanities to prepare for the age of electracy (thereby ceding the lead to public relations, advertising, and propaganda).
4. The failure to adequately defend literacy education from right-wing and corporate attacks that have led to its marginalization in educational systems.
5. The failure of literacy education to effectively challenge mass delusions.

To move past these disasters, I propose a massive investigation into their causes and consequences, as occurred after the collapse of the Tay Bridge. I also propose that we pour resources into a process of reimagining and reinventing literacy education, based in part on the invention methods practiced in the arts by such figures as Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Picasso, keeping in mind that their inventions were not purely works of genius by individuals, but also required the participation and collaboration of others.

I have reversed two items in the prompt to suit my desires. Instead of Bridges-Build-Burn, I opted for Bridges-Burn-Build. The new bridge will replace the old collapsed bridge.

Bridges-Build-Burn - John

There is something paradoxical about bridges. As literary critic Richard Gill notes, “They suggest both union and separation, distance and contact. Linking and joining what would otherwise remain separate, they also evoke the ‘transitional,’ the state of being in-between. Crossing a bridge graphically accentuates the passage from one stage to another, just as pausing on a bridge offers a vantage point for looking backward or forward, localizing the uneasiness of indecision or the finality of commitment” (Gill 147).

I would add that you can simultaneously burn and build bridges.

Fig. 4: Venecek, John. The Palace Bridge in St. Petersburg. Personal Archive. July 1997.

Responding to a question about creating music for an exhibit at the Great Gallery of Venaria can act as a bridge, Eno asks, “can we do something that will detain them in the gallery for a bit where, instead of just walking through and seeing it as a conduit between palace one and palace two, can they be slowed down so they start paying attention to that building?” In discussing that work, he evokes feelings like stillness, belonging, and freedom. “It was the sense of wanting to make something that felt like it had a place in the world,” he says, “rather than something that you just kind of stuck on for a little while to see how it works” (Anderson).

The common theme among both these prompts is the sense that a lot happens in those liminal in-between states symbolized by the bridge. Playing off that idea, I reorganized the list I created in the first prompt by adding a few new terms and combining them into dualities that highlight those in-between spaces.

• Experimentation & Risk
• Idealism / Doubt
• Reading / Writing
• Risk / Rejection
• Creativity / Curiosity
• Engagement / Indifference
• Faking it / Failure
• Stillness / Solitude
• Color / Textures
• Boredom / Bubbles
• Listening / Drifting

Cluster Analysis - Barry

Cluster analysis or clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (called a cluster) are more similar (in some sense) to each other than to those in other groups (clusters). – Wikipedia

Clusters replace categories since they depend not on definitions but rather on affinities. These affinities form based on what Plato, the inventor of the definition, considered non-essential attributes. To Plato, a cow is still a cow whether standing or lying down, brown or white, long-haired or short haired, etc. The cluster can be heterogenous.

One strategy – begin with a gathering of items that are as seemingly heterogenous as possible. I am currently working on a project that emerged from my reading of Ulmer’s Internet Invention, which is structured like a textbook with exercises and assignments. I completed all of these tasks (Ulmer told me he thinks I am the only person who has ever done them all). Thus, I have gathered and produced an enormous amount of raw material: 166 pages.

The Ulmer strategy of clustering is to privilege the similarities among signifiers of those of signifieds. Thus, the following signifiers in my exercises became clustered:

• Lens – lentils – puls (a porridge that can be made of lentils)
• Pulse – impulse – repulsive
• Nuts (all the meanings) – testosterone - testify

Fig 5: Still from The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. Dexter’s skull is the shell of a nut. The valuable stuff – the computer – is inside. See figure here.

Patterns emerge – in this case, the pattern I identify is about bullying and impunity (it’s a long process, but somewhere in there is a news story about the secretary of the interior doing illegal lobbying work for cashew interests in California, hence the connection between nuts and bullying/impunity). Does this pattern emerge from an analysis (finding what’s there) or is there an imaginative leap in which I produce something? I tend to think it is a combination of both, but the word that seems most to describe this process is emergent. The words become attractants, both at the level of signifier and signifieds. As Ulmer notes in his gloss of Jakobson, “whatever resembles, assembles” (Ulmer, 2003). If I could illustrate this process, it would be through an animated GIF showing items moving from a field into clusters with networked pathways emerging to link other items. The list becomes dynamic!

Cluster Analysis - John

I first became interested in lists when I read Joe Brainard’s I Remember for a creative writing class. While his book is a common brainstorming activity, I took it as much more than that: An ethnography of the every day. Since then, I’ve read I Remember countless times while exploring like-minded authors such as Georges Perec, another documentarian of the ordinary, who wrote his version of I Remember that focused more on public events than personal memories.

There is something uncanny about the structure of Brainard’s book. As Paul Auster notes in his introduction to The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, “whenever I open Joe Brainard's little masterwork again, I have the curious sensation that I am encountering it for the first time. Except for a few indelible passages, nearly all of the memories recorded in the pages of Remember have vanished from my own memory.” He also says, “The book remains new and strange and surprising—for, small as it is, / Remember is inexhaustible, one of those rare books that can never be used up” (Brainard).

I would agree with Auster and add that I can’t read more than a few lines before being transported from Brainard’s world into my own. Without any conscious effort, I am flooded with memories or ideas for new lists. Brainard’s technique is both elusive and ephemeral, but it’s engaging in a way that blurs the line between author and audience. To get a sense of the type of marginalia that Brainard deals with, watch Matt Wolf’s short film adaptation of I Remember:

Fig. 6: Zev Weider, Avi, and David Chartier. Still from I Remember. YouTube. https://youtu.be/1ypRBhYsMDc. (Zev Weider) 1999.

While the similarities between Brainard and Eno might not be immediately apparent, there are some similarities between their methods. Eno, for example, has compared his composing style to gardening, which, he says, “is essentially the idea that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden … carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, planting them and then letting them have their life.” Regarding the distinction between composer and listener he says, “I'm deliberately constructing systems that will put me in the same position as any other member of the audience. I want to be surprised by it as well. What this means, really, is a rethinking of one's position as a creator. You stop thinking of the situation as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included” (British Council).

In his analysis of Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, John Lysaker states, “On this view, listeners are many, each an assemblage territorializing: playlists, collections, playback systems, maybe playback rooms, actions such as reading or tidying, even a misplaced gesture of adolescent seduction— “You have to hear this ambient record. . . .” The point is that these assemblages, or clusters, “remain cohesive sites of becoming and, like the weather, predictable across a range” (Lysaker). The notion of lists, or assemblages, as sites of becoming that is cultivated like a garden is similar to the reaction I have when reading Brainard and when composing lists. Brainard plants the seeds that blossom into lists that reveal new patterns, contours, and currents.

Don't Be Frightened of Clichés - Barry

1. Writing instruction
2. Information theory
3. Coca Cola
4. Advice
5. Heat death

The cliché about clichés is that they are the opposite of invention. Clichés are old hat and invention is shiny and new. But what if we’re wrong about clichés?

Writing students are told by their instructors to avoid clichés, but this instruction makes no sense to me. What if instead we teach people to use clichés? There’s a reason why clichés work. They reduce complex information to simple formulas. To that extent, essays are formulas. Narratives are formulas. Metaphors are formulas.

One of the Coen Brothers’ most successful films, Fargo, was built on a series of stereotypes about Minnesotans drawn from Howard Mohr’s humor book, How to Talk Minnesotan, which is, as you might imagine, full of clichés.

Information theory posits that pure information is pure noise. No information = pure redundancy: “Roses are red, violets are ___________.”

I had a professor during my graduate studies at UF, Donald Ault, who drank roughly a six-pack of coke a day. One day I mentioned to him Andy Warhol’s Quote about Coke:

You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Ault responded, “No two cokes are the same. No two sips of Coke are the same.”

I understand where both Warhol and Ault are coming from. Warhol is thinking of the machinery of production eliminating difference. Ault is thinking of phenomenology and the Stoic rejection of category systems; nothing is even “itself.” Instead, as Deleuze states, there are “series.”

No cliché is ever the same twice since it is in a new “place” each time. Even the same cliché twice in a row is not the same. See for yourself: “In the nick of time. In the nick of time.” What changed?

Clichés oppose one another –

The early bird catches the worm.
All things come to those who wait.

YourDictionary advises:

In the end, have some fun with clichés - they are easily recognized and understood - but use them sparingly. The first conclusion people jump to when they read too many clichés is that the writer is unoriginal. While that may not true, you don't want to set yourself up to be knocked down.

This advice is itself a cliché.

The heat death theory of culture – the new form is “hot.” Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Link Wray. They burn! Then the form cools into mass-marketed mediocrity: Pat Boone, Paul Anka. Then people get fed up with the cold stuff and they invent something hot again, like punk rock! But what is invention composed of but recycled materials, arranged, adapted, and mixed in new ways or in new contexts? Garbage in; genius out!

Take a urinal, put it in a museum. A mass-produced item is now an emblem of modern art.

Fig. 7: Duchamp, Marcel. Fountain. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz. Wikipedia. (Public Domain) 1917.

Don't Be Frightened of Clichés - John

One of my all-time favorite punk bands is the X-Ray Spex. In the pre-Internet days of my youth, my fascination was fueled by their obscurity. They were a somewhat mysterious band who released one studio album and a handful of rare singles that were nearly impossible to find in the U.S. As a young record collector, one of my white whales was their first single, Oh Bondage, which I eventually tracked down at Chicago’s Reckless Records for a tidy sum of $40. That would have been a quarter of my paycheck from whatever crappy job I was working. But that was okay. I had to have it. Although the A-side is considered a classic, I was equally fascinated with the strange B-side, I am a Cliché.

At the time, I was all about rebelling against the clichés and the suburban stereotypes that dominated existence. It wasn’t hard because there were so many to choose from and so many of my bands like the X-Ray Spex confirmed my attitude:

I am a cliché you've seen before
I am a cliché that lives next door
I am a cliché you know what I mean
I am a cliché pink is obscene

In isolation, many of the lyrics now seem nonsensical:

Yama yama yama yama yama yama
Boredom boredom boring boredom

- Poly Styrene

Fig. 8: Styrene, Poly. Cover art for “I am a Cliché.” Amazon. (Fair use) 1977.

But you need to see the look and attitude of their flamboyant singer Poly Styrene for the full effect. I did my best to look as colorful and shocking as the X-Ray Spex and countless other bands right down to the torn clothing, painted jackets, and colored hair. But it wouldn’t be long before I realized that “being punk” is also a cliché. The same things that set me apart from my fellow suburbanites were all part of a uniform, a type of conformity. There’s no doubt about it: I was a cliché.

There was an article that recently went viral entitled, “The Hipster Effect: Why Anti-Conformists Always End Up Looking the Same.” In it, the authors cite research conducted by Jonathan Touboul, a mathematician who studied the phenomenon through which members of counterculture movements undergo “a kind of phase transition in which members become synchronized with each other in opposing the mainstream. The hipster effect, he says, “is the inevitable outcome of the behavior of large numbers of people” (Emerging Technology).

The deeper and somewhat paradoxical issue is how these movements begin organically, as authentic revolts against the clichés that dominate our daily lives before devolving into the very clichés they’re rebelling against. This dynamic is an inevitable cycle that has led me to wonder how and why the clichés we embrace shape our identities. Those of us in creative fields are trained to decry clichés as if they are the death of art even as we embrace them in our daily lives, almost to the point of necessity. Is the cliché, like the list, a form of invention? I will begin my analysis of this phenomenon by composing a list of the clichés I have embraced using the X-Ray Spex as my guide:

• I am a cliché
• I work 9-5 in an office with no windows
• I have a suburban home
• I enjoy cutting grass
• I have a Starbucks Gold Card
• I shop on Amazon even though I’m concerned about their working conditions
• I buy produce at Publix even though I’m concerned about how they treat local farmers
• I talk too much about the book I’ve been writing for five years
• I’ve binge-watched Stranger Things and Game of Thrones
• I habitually cycle through social media even as I claim to hate it
• I’m a proud pizza snob and will debate anyone about the best pizza in Chicago (Home Run Inn) because that’s what Chicagoans do
• I get nostalgic for home at Christmas
• I make New Year resolutions that I never keep… often about exercising more, decluttering, and eating fresh
• I think about going vegetarian but never do, although I feel good about myself for even considering it
• I’m always giving up coffee but never do
• I secretly like “Africa” by Toto
• I’ve blown stuff up on the fourth of July
• I’ve eaten at buffets
• I have an IRA
• I am a cliché

Emphasise Repetitions - Barry

Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.

This is the three Rs, The three Rs: Repetition, Repetition, Repetition . . .

The list has a basic form: descending verticality fused with the outline. It can be

• bulleted

1. numerical

1. alphabetical

The bulleted list is not hierarchical, but the numerical and alphabetical are. The descending verticality of the list paradoxically conflicts with the ascending numbers or letters that precede each item. In each numerical and alphabetical list, we go up as we go down. With this curious fact in mind, I emphasize the following list:

Fig. 9: Stanton, Gregory H. and the team at Genocide Watch. Democratic Underground. (Genocide Watch). 2016

In Samuel Beckett’s work, repetition coincides with decay. Between the first and second acts of Waiting for Godot, the characters repeat their actions and conversations, yet they also show a marked decline in their memory.

In the etiology of addiction, repetition begets escalation. The links between addiction and trauma have been well documented. See “Childhood trauma among individuals with co-morbid substance use and post traumatic stress disorder.” Trauma repetition morphs into addiction. Bessel van der Kolk writes

Trauma can be repeated on behavioral, emotional, physiologic, and neuroendocrinologic levels. Repetition on these different levels causes a large variety of individual and social suffering. . . previously traumatized people tend to return to familiar patterns, even if they cause pain.

Addiction is trauma repetition plus escalation. People not only repeat previous cycles of abuse but tend to escalate them to include increasingly dangerous behaviors. With each iteration of the abuse-trauma cycle, the payoff or “high” per unit of stimulus diminishes while the real-world damage increases.

Fascism, the precondition for genocide, is a collective form of trauma escalation and we are living it now.

Emphasise Repetitions - John

I remember little league practice and the endless repetition of fielding ground balls and shagging flies. We would complain to the coach, why do we have to do this? You need to learn the fundamentals, he’d say. We’d groan and go back to fielding ground balls and shagging flies.

I remember learning to write in a notebook with dotted lines to guide you as you practiced making upper and lower case letters. I remember filling that entire notebook and getting marked down for every letter that strayed outside the lines.

I remember countless hours spent reading aloud from our textbooks. We’d go up and down the rows for an entire class with each student taking turns reading a paragraph or two. I remember looking out the window until it was my turn and being scolded for daydreaming.

I remember when my parents allowed me to start cutting the grass with our new riding mower. I was ten years old and that was the closest I would come to driving for six more years. I remember circling our yard, trying to align the tire tracks with each pass to create a uniform striped pattern. If I did it right, the last patch of grass would be the exact width as the mower… perfection!

I remember hundreds of early mornings, standing on the same street corner in all kinds of weather waiting for the school bus to arrive. I remember hoping it wouldn’t show up just once, and my heart sinking each time I saw that first glimpse of yellow turning onto our block.

***

A quick search on repetition reveals a complex array of ideas about the concept:

• Repetition and Learning
• Repetition and Memory
• Repetition and Compulsion
• Repetition and Chance
• Repetition and Possibility
• Repetition and Desire
• Repetition and Resistance
• Repetition and Capitalism
• Repetition and Untimeliness
• Repetition and Improvisation
• Repetition and Kierkegaard
• Repetition and Epictetus
• Repetition and Self-realization
• Repetition and Performance
• Repetition and Refiguration
• Repetition and Transformation

The list goes on…

***

Brian Eno has said, “Repetition is a form of change” and “repetition doesn’t really exist.” While these two points may sound contradictory, his point is that “As far as your mind is concerned, nothing happens the same twice, even if in every technical sense, the thing is identical. Your perception is constantly shifting. It doesn’t stay in one place” (Eno 1985). This paradox is what makes his music equally elusive and alluring. It may seem like simple ambient music, but each listen reveals new layers and textures. No two listening experiences are the same.

Eno’s thoughts echo my experiences creating lists. Not only is the process repetitious, I often repeat the same lists with little change to the content. But while the lists mostly stay the same, the experience is different each time. The repetition is the reaffirmation of my thoughts and convictions. For this experiment, I have returned to the interrelated themes of music, art, literacy, and identity. Within these themes, threads such as failure, risk, rejection, stillness, solitude, and boredom have emerged, all of which I plan to explore further in future writing projects. Each prompt provides a new way of looking at the repetition of recurring themes. In so doing, this process provides insight into how lists operate as an inventive activity and how the prompts have caused me to look at familiar topics in a new way.

Fig. 10: Weiss, Agathe. Rhizome. Flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). 2015.

In the Bridges -build -burn portion of this essay, I mentioned that I’m interested in exploring the spaces between the themes these prompts -- along with Eno’s music -- have generated. Gilles Deleuze speaks to this point in Difference and Repetition when he asserts that in every form of repetition, something new is created. Just like no two leaves, snowflakes, or raindrops are the same, so too is there something unique and different about each moment and each repetition. This sense of difference is what drives creativity and invention, so every time I make that list of, say, the 25 most important people I’ve known, which I’ve done more than 25 times, the process is different even if the names rarely change. Once again, I am far more concerned with the process over the product. It’s all about possibilities.

Faced with a Choice, Do Both (given by Dieter Rot)

• Fill Every Beat with Something – Barry

But? AND!

Two prompts, because “do both.”

Dieter Rot (aka Roth), who gave Brian Eno the “do both” prompt, made artist’s books and produced other works using found materials including from rotting food. He collaborated with Daniel Spoerri on one of the most famous artist’s books ever made, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, which Barry Mauer and Craig Saper drew upon for their article about lists.

Rot also made a “book” in 1961 titled Literaturwurst (Literature Sausage). The first “copy” was made from an issue of the Daily Mirror together with food and spices from actual sausage recipes, which Rot stuffed in a sausage skin and sent to Spoerri.

From Wikipedia:

Literaturwurst (Literature Sausage) is an Artist's book, made by the Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth between 1961 and 1974. Each book was made using traditional sausage recipes, but replacing the sausage meat with a book or magazine. The cover of the edition was then pasted onto the skin of the sausage and signed and dated.

Fig. 11: Rot, Dieter. “Literature Sausage.” Dieter Rot Foundation. Wikivisually. (Hauser & Wirth and Staatsgalerie Stuttgart). 1961.

Gilles Deleuze, in The Logic of Sense, explained that “sense” is the boundary between the material world (nonsense) and signification. Sense keeps words from collapsing back into things. Thus, we can apply the term “book” to Literaturwurst, but in what way does this designation make “sense”?

The image above shows a picture of a man (who is on a sausage) pointing, but not at something. Rather, we read him as “making a point.” At what “point,” John Brady asks, does a hand become a hand that points? At what point does a book (or newspaper) become a sausage? At what point does a sausage become a book or become art? And what is the point?

Fill every “beat” with something. The skin of a sausage / the skin of a drum to beat: both made from animals. The beat is a key term in drama theory. As Bill Bruehl writes, “A new beat begins with a new action or a new mood, and we can identify new beats by that change of mood or action and often by the coming or going of a character. The flow of action is not limited to one action per beat.”

The sense – filling every beat – taking a piece out of an animal.

Faced with a Choice, Do Both (given by Dieter Rot)

• Fill Every Beat with Something – John

Lists are like jazz. They are both deliberate and improvised. They are as rooted in tradition as they are playful and spontaneous. As acts of invention, they are best when impulsive. Each has a sense of rhythm and momentum but they’re full of bent tones and blue notes. And they do what these prompts suggest: When faced with a choice, they provide the space to “do both” and to “fill every beat with something.”

In an interview about improvising within the rules, Brian Eno recalls his collaborations with Peter Schmidt and about how they kept separate lists of rules for what they thought made a successful composition. They drew from their lists during their collaboration, but they never shared their rules. In this way, the rules were the hidden structure within their work.

One of the rules Eno applied then and still uses to this day is to "Honor thy error as a hidden intention."

The concept of rules might seem counterintuitive and constraining, but Eno finds

that for improvisations, if each player takes one of those cards and keep them to themselves, don't tell anyone what rule they're operating under, that can produce some really interesting results. People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually … I wanted to set up a way to get people to shut up sometimes, because a big problem with improvisation is that everyone plays all the time unless told not to

Eno also discusses a more recent collaboration with Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams for The Lovely Bones soundtrack, a collaboration so productive that they had enough remaining music for a second album. On a similar note, in “Sew the Bear: A Meditation on the Place of the List in Academic Life,” Barry Mauer states that,

The muse did not learn to write by starting with the lyric or the epic. She first wrote lists. Bob paid his taxes with three oxen and two jugs of oil. He still owes a cow and three bushels of wheat. Literature came later, unless you consider the list to be a form of literature, which I do.

In response, Craig Saper writes

With every detailed list comes the inevitable stray-mark, what Roland Barthes called the asemic -- not yet signifying what's next in the literate list -- but signaling how even the most careful accounting has a remainder that will never make it on to the list.

I would make a slightly different point; that lists exist in the realm of the remainder.

As discussed in the Cluster Analysis portion of this essay, my list-making revolves around documenting the detritus of the every day; the fleeting ephemera that goes unnoticed or is easily forgotten. These are the marginalia, or the remainders of our lives. The list-making process can be contradictory, constructive, and destructive, but it always provides the freedom needed for self-expression with just enough structure to reveal “the error of the hidden intention” and, as this prompt suggests, “Fill every beat with something.”