Existential Dumpster Diving
This post is a response to Nathan Matias’ response… Screw it, it is part of an ongoing conversation.
Nathan used a colorful metaphor…
To use a warfare metaphor — we are much more willing to buy computer systems that are like pistols (simple — just pull the trigger) than something elegant, like a Katana. We go for the least amount of effort on our part. This is why I like Tinderbox, which is a piece of software that takes discipline and training to master, but which is much better suited for precision information handling than Saturday Night Specials like word processors.
I am imagining an old warrior, late in the game, whose family swords are no match for those new guns, and I sympathize with his frustrations. The sword itself is well crafted, so that it is a work of art, just as the use of the thing is an art as well. I think it be quite some time until all this new technology rises to the level of art… a time like that between the bronze age and the samurai? maybe less.
I’m on a tangent.
I think its a matter of existential dumpster diving. What I mean is, we live in a culture full of “quick and dirty” means to quick and dirty ends. Things that take discipline and training to use, unfortunately, also require discipline and training in order to appreciate, and that’s not very American, is it? How then am I supposed to communicate with Americans? Am I making any sense here?
They might be crude weapons, but they are the tools at hand. I’m tempted to pick them up and to use them. That is very American, isn’t it?
I tried to express an idea like this one in the second chapter of my academic thesis.
If thinkers like T.S. Eliot had made the point that we should have genuine expression and thought-provocation, while at the same time accepting our inevitable being-in-the-world, a world too colossal to stop and not all of it bad, perhaps we wouldn’t be in the predicament we are in now. Then, perhaps the cultural wasteland we are thrown into would not be as bad, if the nature of its mediums had been defined by something other than a creative power vacuum. We can fix the bad; we can even use most of it as tools. We can keep the good. There’s no need to ignore it all.
There’s more to it than the difference between a kitana and a shotgun. Nathan also said:
Some of his readers disliked feeling disoriented. But for me, that was key to the novella.
I wonder about that”key”, about non-linear narrative.
I recently came across Originality and the Younger Poet by Dana Levin. It address the issue in a way that I have come to agree with.
True innovation, of course, is impossible without experimentation–those usually intuitive operations that counter or skew prevailing methods of making. Yet the earmarks of today’s “experimental” styles–fragmented narrative, random jumps in space/time, multiple voices and points of view, disrupted syntax and abrupt shifts in diction, to name a few–are century-old gifts. Once truly new tools for Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and other Modernists, these methods often seem now to be appropriated as much for how they seem new (after fifty years of plain-style narratives) as for how they might aid poetic composition–assuaging authorial anxiety at the expense of accessing what makes a poem, in Wallace Stevens’s words, “say the little thing it says,//Below the prerogative jumble.”
For today’s emerging poets, Pound’s exhortation to “make it new” has become a kind of whip, with stylistic “originality” becoming the test of a poet’s mettle. Yet, ultimately, “new” and “experimental” tell us little about the quality and character of an emerging writer’s work and the context in which it is made.
I was initially drawn to hypertext writing as a way to make an interestingly fragmented narrative, as something “new”, “edgy” or “experimental” more than I was drawn to its qualities “for how they might aid poetic composition” — which they can! I want to focus on that in the revision, that’s all.