11/12/12

Blake Butler, Vanessa Place & Christopher Higgs - two writers have produced textual bodies, one speaking for the interior and the other describing the exterior, while a third writer has assembled these two bodies into a single grotesque symphony of chimerical language







Blake Butler, Vanessa Place & Christopher Higgs, One, Roof Books, 2012.


'From the room inside the room, from the house inside the house, memories of a one-legged father and various acts of jurisprudence haunt the mysterious creature who writhes in somatic isolation from one waking nightmare to another. In ONE two writers have produced textual bodies, one speaking for the interior and the other describing the exterior, while a third writer has assembled these two bodies into a single grotesque symphony of chimerical language. A hitherto unprecedented collaborative experiment, ONE defies categorization and heralds a new approach to exploring the boundaries of authorship and narrative.' -- Roof Books






'What you are about to read is the product of a collaborative experiment: what if one writer (Vanessa Place) wrote a narrative composed entirely from the interior landscape of a character while another writer (Blake Butler) wrote a narrative composed entirely from the exterior landscape of a character, neither writer communicating with the other until both writers gave their finished product to another writer (Christopher Higgs, Me) who would then assemble the two narratives together to form one unified piece? The project originated in the fall of 2009, while I was studying Alfred Jarry’s Pataphysics, reading Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget, and watching a gluttonous amount of Jean-Luc Godard films. My work at the time revolved around an obsession with remixing preexisting material, specifically turning stage plays into prose poems. The idea for this book arose from those conditions.

'One night in October, I emailed Blake to explain the basic premise and ask if he might be interested in participating. He agreed to join the project and enthusiastically encouraged me to pursue it. Soon thereafter I contacted Vanessa to ask if she might be interested. Unlike Blake, with whom I had a prior relationship, contacting Vanessa was a shot in the dark. I sent her a long email, introducing myself and the concept for the project, which concluded with, “What do you think? I know this probably sounds absolutely insane, especially because you & I don’t know each other, but I’m hoping you might look past those minor glitches.” Shortly thereafter Vanessa replied, “Dear Chris, I adore minor glitches, and the project sounds like potential fun. In spite of that, I’m in.” ...

'What follows, then, the product of our experiment, could be described as a grotesque symphony of chimerical language, a fever dream of so- matic isolation that depicts the gore of loneliness arising from persistent waking nightmares and an obsession with the history of jurisprudence. As a textual body, you may consider our text akin to Frankenstein’s creation. Recall, if you will, the way Shelley describes the creature as an amalgam of materials “from the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse,” and perhaps conceive of Blake as the slaughter-house and Vanessa as the dissecting table, or vice versa. Of course, that makes me the Doctor, the unpardonable villain.' -- Christopher Higgs 







 Excerpt

[l]

One has a plan. One did not have a plan previously, when the dimensions of one’s situation were not known to one. This is always the case. Say something to remember. Say something by which one would remember. Say never again, again. Plans are made retrospectively, if they have any hope of working at all.

I have to know how to get back here when I am done with wherever else there is. One has considered a schematic representation of one’s situation, which is no more euphemism than the predicate possessive pronoun, and in this way reminds one of a dream one once had about a man with one leg who insisted on riding a bicycle.

Memorize: I say I say I say I said, one method of flight involves the cre- ation of the simulacrum, often out of bits of whatnot, soap, lather, foam, hair, air, oysters and thatch. Soot is also good, if one can find a hearth. If no hearth, wait till the next Lent and stand in line five or six times. You can also simply weep till ashen. One day, perhaps the story of the family will be told, and how they came to be in the various institutions. There were numerous complaints that various authorities had exceeded their power. One is a proud people, though pointless.

Here’s a joke. Stop if one’s heard it before. Equity grew in its desire to deal with the de facto failings of the common law courts, and did not con- cern itself with doctrinal differences. Acts of jurisprudence, again. Of jus- tice. Again. As one was saying, one day there was a one-legged man on a bicycle riding by, one swore it was one’s father, it looked just like him, from this perspective, of course, that is to say. Horizontal. Lateral. When in relation, as he used to say—what was it? Something about a bicycle.

But stop one if one has heard this one. A one-legged man is riding a bi- cycle when he comes across—one’s father, horizontal. It was bound to happen, an accident like that. There’s nothing like alterity. Nothing at all. Fate, in other words. Does the other believe? Naturally. What’s not to? Nothing. Nothing doing. If one had a nickel for every bit of nothing one cradled and put to bed, there’d be a sea of change, that’s all. Don’t mistake this, though, for one does love a bit of nothing. Warm nothing, nothing with syrup. Say nothing. Say no more. Nothing for nothing, that’s what one’s father used to say. How the other could laugh as he rode by on his bicycle. One should like a sequence of numbers played at this moment, a-harmonically, as if this were possible. There’s harmonics in it, all the others say so. For example, returning back, as if there were an- other way or direction to it, referring back one means to say, referring back to one’s earlier statement on equation. Take a simple proposition, one sure to warm the cockles of any well-tended member. Such as, dogs are like people. No argument there. From petting to pounding, and hap- pily brown-eyed in between. Dogs are like people, ergo people are like dogs. There. Mathematically proven. Collar ’em, leash ’em, license ’em, implant chips for their safe relocation. Call them Jake, Princess, and one’s own true bitch, it’s all well-organized. This is the great fact of epis- temology, by which is meant mathematics. Truth is math, math is truth, not understanding one, except for in the grossest, simplest formulations, makes one a better one. Truer, as if the eyes were bluer. Impossible. There is none more azure eye than I. I’ve a critique du rhythme, counted out in the metronome of an augenblich, nicht, nicht-ich, nicht, nicht-ich.

Lovely. It must be getting on a quarter of there. Or somewhere. Surely we can submeasure in minutes, if we can grasp the hours. Often, a suitor who was dissatisfied with the result in a common law court would refile the case in Equity or Chancery. This seems to be the point, at least from where one squats, to seize the mechanism by which the other parcels out one’s particulars. As previously mentioned. One mentions the particulars because they have that grainy quality so common to the commonplace. Like old photos. Non-existent, in other words. Like in other words. Like old photos. One has to admit of something. Speaking only for oneself, one can allow as one has been many places, and hopes for more. Say thirty-one. Then again, there’s also the call of no place in particular, or rather in particular, no place. As one was saying, this is a mathematical proposition, a measure of means, meaning: meaning. When one was younger one had various items that one would associate with mathemat- ics, imaginary items to be sure, but real nonetheless—four pieces of chocolate plus three pieces of candy equals what, if one has six jacks and two hands, and one gives a red ball to another, what does one have on hand, and so on. The point is there was methodology, by which is meant taxonomy, and this is where liberation begins. Systems. Plans. No secrets. No troves for treasuring. Things to be spoken of. These latter courts saw their role as being ‘equalizers’: socially, legally, economically. In this position, and encouraged by Roman law traditions, they were al- ways creative in producing new writs which could not be found in the common law courts. Good as done. Like lunch on a Monday evening or a fresh set of slippers, the plastic loop looping them together still in situ. There’s a French word for it, meaning avole. As one recalls, it was Tues- day one had lunch last. No supper. Sardines in tomato sauce, with a salad of wild rice and fava beans. One wishes. Feta or somesuch was intro- duced to collegial effect. The sardines went off while one was eating, which lead to this, the plan. Subtraction. The take-away. It was in this spirit that Justice Berrewyk in 1302, ordered an infant to be brought be- fore the court with a writ subpoena: ‘under pain of (forefeit) of 100 pounds’. The less as lessor, the entailment being another form of more. So that if there is growth, there will necessarily be elimination. Take cancer, for example. Take the rising tide of public sentiment and the corresponding lack of real feeling. Take two, if you like. There’s a mesh tote bag available at the front desk, if there was a front desk. Due to the recent decrease in funding, one has had to make due with simply leaving a small side window open during business hours, which one no longer has. The other saves a tremendous amount of money by spending more—see how the logic is impeccable. But there is evidence that ‘threat of penalty’ had been attached to writs used by the government to induce behavior as early as 1232. It’s all a matter of product placement, and the strategic use of feta cheese.

BLAKE BUTLER, VANESSA PLACE, and CHRISTOPHER HIGGS with S. Tremaine Nelson

ONE (Roof Books, 2012) contains two original manuscripts—written by Vanessa Place and Blake Butler—cut up and reorganized into a final document by a third artist, Christopher Higgins. Chris, the architect of the project, provided artistic guidelines to the authors: write in the first person, the present tense, and structure the work around the themes of Discovery, Secrecy, and Escape. Blake focused on the concept of “exteriority,” while Vanessa explored the realm of “interiority.”Neither author read each other’s work before the manuscripts were merged into a single text.  
In order to maintain the artistic integrity of the project, Blake and Vanessa were not allowed to view each other’s responses to these questions. Our email exchange, which appears below in abridged form, replicated Chris’s original role in the project, as he oversaw the edits and re-organization of ONE, cutting and pasting Blake and Vanessa’s manuscripts into a final product.
S. Tremaine Nelson (Rail): ONE is an aggressively experimental text. Are there artistic precursors you’d care to cite as inspirations?
Christopher Higgs: While I believe our project is sui generis, I can think of other artistic works that share an affinity with it.  Robert Rauschenberg’s erasure of Willem de Kooning; the collaborative word horde cut-up/fold-in work William Burroughs produced with Brion Gysin, Claude Pelieu, Mary Beach, and others; the Surrealist practice of cadavre exquis. Our book relies on certain constraints developed by the OuLiPo, or “Ouvroir de littérature potentielle” (workshop of potential literature), and therefore [is] at least implicitly in conversation with that particular line of flight.
Blake Butler: I tried to pretend I had never read anything before. I wanted to feel 12. I thought of nothing.
Rail: Chris, how did you come up with this idea? Blake, Vanessa, what were your initial reactions to his pitch?
Higgs: It arose from questions about the boundaries and limitations of narrative, and of the distinctions between interior and exterior perspectives. In their masterpiece A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari propose that “The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.” I wanted to explore this idea. 
Afterwards, other questions presented themselves, most significantly about authorship.  Is an author the person who creates the words or the person who puts the words together?  Is T.S. Eliot the author of The Waste Land, or is Ezra Pound?  Is Raymond Carver the author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, or is Gordon Lish?  In this 2011 interview with the Academy of American Poets, Kenneth Goldsmith claims, “It’s not about inventing anything new; it’s about finding things that exist and reframing them and representing them as original texts. The choice of what you’re presenting is more interesting than the thing that you’re presenting.” So, for Goldsmith, following Duchamp, to be an author now is to be a chooser or selector rather than a creator.
Vanessa Place: It sounded potentially pleasurable. However, this was not a deterrent. 
Butler: I was ready.
Rail: The premise of ONEpulling original content from two artists, mixed and arranged by a third artistseems more established in the music world. Did any specific musical collaborations influence this project?
Higgs: Many works of art, music, and literature seem to share an affinity with ONE after the fact, but I wouldn’t say any of them influenced or instigated the creation of the project.  Case in point, the work of Girl Talk certainly shares an affinity, but I wasn’t thinking about Girl Talk when I thought up the idea or when I was arranging the text. Likewise, Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, which takes The Beatles’s White Album and combines it with Jay-Z’s Black Album, certainly comes to mind.  Not to mention all the other combos using Jay-Z’s Black Album: Cheap Cologne's Double Black Album (with Metallica's Black album), DJ Mike's Jay-Zeezer (with Weezer's Blue Album), et cetera.
Place: Cage, Duchamp, Satie, Debussy, Callas, Puccini.
Butler: I don’t like music.
Rail: Is ONE a mash-up or is there a better phrase to describe this form?
Higgs: This is a good question.  Although I’ve just said I see affinities between ONE and various works of musical mash-up, I don’t think ONE is a mash-up because a mash-up, to me, is the process of combing two or more preexisting materials. Whereas, ONE is the combination of two new materials.  Does that make sense?  I mean, a mash-up would be if I took Vanessa’s Dies: A Sentence and combined it with Blake’s Scorch Atlas.  The material for ONE is all new.  So, yeah, we need to create a neologism for what we’ve done.
Place: Parfait.
Butler: A mess up a wartime a big child a trauma huddle a piss a what now a look a why am I here a headlessness a box of lymph a piss.
Rail: Extended passages of Utterance 2 rely more on aural repetition than syntactical clarity: would you cite Joyce as an influence on this project?
Higgs: Syntactical clarity comes in handy when reading a repair manual or a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, but when it happens in literature I get sleepy.  Aural repetition, on the other hand, can serve as a jolt, because it creates confusion and anticipation.  Why is this happening?  What does this mean or what is its purpose? When will it stop?  Et cetera.  In general, I’m not a fan of clarity.  I prefer opacity.  When it comes to art, I’m uninterested in understanding and totally interested in confusion.  I’m also much more comfortable talking about affinity rather than influence, which has probably become painfully obvious.  Joyce glows, but I feel like this project’s strongest affinities are with Gertrude Stein, David Lynch, and RZA.  Also, maybe, Diamanda Galás, Alfred Jarry, Parliament-Funkadelic, and the Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici.
Rail: In Utterance 1, the narrator (or narrators) offer the following: "I shoot myself, and me too, in the center of our mouths." This called to mind the final passage of Fight Club. Was this intentional?
Higgs: No.
Place: I can't say.
Butler: I would never refer to Fight Club intentionally I don’t think, I’m not sure I ever thought about that thing again after I saw it, I don’t think I ever read it, but I also think that all texts contain all other texts so, sure.
Rail: ONE is overtly and consistently sexual. Two writersallegedly without any personal interactionhave thrown text at each other in order to create a literary progeny. Is ONE, metaphorically speaking, most like: A) a casual exchange between strangers; B) a romantic moment of passion; C) drunken after-party hook up; or D) something entirely different (feel free to ad-lib)?
Higgs: I think it’s probably most like an artificial insemination between a robot and a ghost conducted inside a meth lab on a pirate ship.
Place: A glory hole.
Butler: I saw Vanessa briefly after we had agreed to do the project and I think were both beginning to write our parts and though we did not talk about the project we agreed that we were both doing our best to defend ourselves against Chris, and the other, to make it as impermeable as possible, even though we both knew that the intent here was to be permeated, which is different than penetrated. It might be the most sober-brained I’ve ever been while writing.
Rail: While reading the text, one is inclined to "guess" which writer's prose is which. When re-reading the text, are you both immediately aware of your own writing, or are there any moments when Chris cut up the text beyond recognizability?
Place: I am aware of what is not mine.
Butler: I haven’t read the text in its final state except a page or two at a time. I usually can’t remember who wrote my writing that has only my name on it and this was pretty much no different except that occasionally I could tell when it was definitely Vanessa, and sometimes I could tell when I wished it was me or wished it wasn’t.
Rail: Would you care to elaborate on the clause that appears in the text: "Dumb dicklicked days of backtalk, my mouth and someone else’s together purred." Is this just a friendly conversation between old friends?
Higgs: I can’t recall how much I manipulated that sentence.  Sometimes I left entire sentences intact, while other times I ripped them apart and spliced them word by word.  However, it’s a good example of how both Blake and Vanessa explored the concept of their duality, incorporating the knowledge that they are each speaking from one half of the assemblage.
Place: At least.
Butler: No, not friendly, not a conversation. More like walking down a hallway that doesn’t have a hall in it. I’ve never really felt aesthetic kinship with anyone, even despite the degree to which I respect and enjoy the work and personalities of others. I write alone in an unlit room facing a covered window for a reason.
Rail: Late in Utterance 1, some new "characters" appear called "the workers." Their battle cry reads: "Motherfuck your fuckhouse!” What is the source of these characters' hostility? Is this an overtly political passage?
Higgs: Political?  No. A thousand times no.
Place: It must be.
Butler: Not political on purpose, at least on my part having typed that. I don’t know what the hostility’s source is. The men just appeared there as I was typing and the words appeared and then they no longer appeared. I think I like moments when I am typing when I realize that something in the text doesn’t want me there and pushes me away, which is part of how I remember feeling during typing. I like areas that continue to exist well after you have left them.
Rail: An interesting history of medieval law provides the narrative backbone of the text. Vanessa, how did you research these sections? How do they characterize the narrator?
Higgs: From my perspective, there is no backbone to the text.  But I like that you locate a backbone there.  The legal history element strikes me as one of textures contributing to the beautiful strange richness that makes our monstrous character even more sorrowful.  It wakes and puts on its helmet.  It remembers, as though it will eventually be tested, or else as though it wants to hold on, to desperately not forget.
Place: We are all bound by medieval law as it is the law of the father and the law of materiality.
Rail: From a legal definition, is the narrator insane?
Higgs: In the companion text to A Thousand Plateaus, entitled Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari present their preference for "a schizophrenic out for a walk" over "a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch" as the model of subjective experience, which seems a propos. Further, to follow-up from the last question, perhaps our character suffers from Korsakoff’s psychosis.  I’m reminded (ha ha) of a line from an old Modest Mouse song, “I will remember to remember to forget you.”
Rail: Blake, Vanessa, can you talk about your revision process with your stories? Did you know how you wanted your sections to end before you started writing?
Place: There was no revision as there was no originary vision.
Butler: I didn’t know what I was writing until I wrote it. When I was finished with a draft I went through and edited mostly for sound or shape of sentence. I didn’t change anything about the arc, wherever it is. Now that it is finished I still don’t know where I want it to end.
Rail: Have the three of you met in person?
Higgs: Blake and I, yes. Vanessa and I, no.
Place: I don't recall.
Butler: I have met Chris and Vanessa both separately but never at the same time. Each time with each was in the public area of large hotels in states neither of us lived in, which seems entirely appropriate.
Rail: What would you like readers to know about ONE before reading?
Higgs: If you enjoy things that are awesome, you’ll enjoy it.
Place: It is everyone's autobiography.
Butler: My first thought was, “I am applying to dental school soon,” though no I’m not.




 




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