Every poem that works as a poem is original. And original has two meanings: it means a return to the origin, the first which engendered everything that followed; and it means that which has never occurred before. In poetry, and in poetry alone, the two senses are united in a way that they are no longer contradictory. – John Berger
We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes return them as faith. Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surround them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.
[btw, if you’re interested in getting the entire text of Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos in regimented daily doses via email, sign up here. Not a bad way to get a bit of refreshing thought in the clutter of junk and business.]
“And besides, it’s a kind of game, a kind of game like dice. You ask what’s this? No. 15? You never or only rarely will you know what it is, because for example when you think … well here, there are twenty or so bottles, and …”
– Daniel Spoerri
Last week I finished reading Daniel Spoerri’s An Anecdoted Typography of Chance. It is a worthy addition to the series of BSRAYDEKWTDWT (as defined – by me – in this post as Books So Ridiculously Awesome You Don’t Even Know What To Do With Them). I don’t remember in what context, but I know that this book was recommended by friend and all around recommendor of awesome things, Tosh. I encourage everyone to check out the books he publishes as creator of Tam Tam Books.
In any case, the description on the back of the book will best explain how the Typography functions:
What is the Topography? Hard to explain an idea so simple yet so brilliantly executed. Following a rambling conversation with his dear friend Robert Filliou, Daniel Spoerri one day mapped the objects lying at random on the table of his room, adding a rigorously scientific decription of each. These objects subsequently evoked associations, memories, anecdotes; not only from the original author, but from his friends as well: a beguiling creation was born. Many of the principal participants of FLUXUS make an appearance (and texts by Higgins, Jouffroy, Kaprow, Restany, and Tinguely are included, among others). It is a novel of digressions in the manner of Tristram Shandy or Robbe-Grillet; it’s a game, a poem, an encyclopaedia, a cabinet of wonders: a celebration of friendship and creativity.
The map of the table-top has been reproduced as a fold-out at the back of the book.
As Spoerri writes, “Without the outline the Typography wouldn’t make any sense, and without the text the outline wouldn’t make sense.”
It’s not really a secret that I’ve long been a fan of experimental literature and the way folks like the Oulipo play with form. What I liked here was the way this single momentary unit of items functions as a portal into stories. As one object refers to another, we are chased down one rabbit hole of story to another. We twist into etymology and are thrown back to autobiography with a tube of glue or an inauspicious collection of bread crumbs. Though Spoerri’s credited as the author, the interplay between the other contributors both across translations and across time elucidates the way stories unfold unexpectedly based on the personal stances we take towards objects.
It doesn’t look like there are any cheap copies of this floating around online – I’m not really sure where or how I acquired my copy, but it is the same version as the link at the beginning of this post. In any case, I can imagine students creating their own Typographies of Chance as a useful means of telling concrete stories. I can imagine entire constellations of student typographies overlapping haphazardly and inculcating the youth in a network of authorship.
[because one of my more neurotic routines is that I keep a small notebook with the books I’ve read arranged by date.]
Books read in 2009: 91
Comics and graphic novels included in reading total: 12
Books of poetry included in reading total: 5
Books reread included in reading total: 6
Education related books included in reading total: 28
“YA” books included in reading total: 7
Clearly, a significant chunk of the books I read this year were related to school and to school. The thing about grad school is that there are often a whole bunch of articles and papers I’ve read that aren’t reflected on this list (they become part of the collective flotsam that is my EndNote library – itself another haphazard list of materials read). Why do I keep such a list? Most practically, because I’ve come to accept that I have a terrible memory: flipping through the notebook, there are several titles I don’t even remember (I read this? And this? Really?).
A few highlights in my year of reading:
As far as music goes, considering that I got this computer a third of the way through the year, my iTunes most played list serves as a useful indicator of what was what (how Squirrel Nut Zippers made it so high up the list is beyond me… though I think frequent use of the song to wind up Sadie may have something to do with it).
I fear that maybe in thinking about counter-narratives and the role of storytelling, I’ve been thinking too small. Maybe we need to start with a macro-vision of life in the classroom.
What would it look like for students to develop their own creation myths? In disrupting the “single story” of their neighborhoods and various cycles and pipelines that scholars say move our students around on a vast conveyer belt, perhaps it’s about having students reinvent the entire foundation from the ground up.
Travis, my SLC’s 9th grade English teacher shared with me the success he had in getting his class back on track through an introduction of mythology. Peter, our 10th grade teacher, will be starting Ishmael with his students later this year (a book also about creation myths). As my 12th graders delve into The Awakening, I borrowed a suggestion that Mark made for a different class, and showed my students this TED talk about the problems of the “Single Story;” it seemed most appropriate as a way of connecting Achebe, Conrad, and Chopin within the past month. I think also of Daye’s interest in Cargo Cults and the way they may act as a metaphor for deception in South Central.
I think the students would be properly situated in a foundation of already studied (as well as lived & experienced) creation myths. How about now reinventing them?
“But the thing is, the marvelous thing is, when you first start doing it, you don’t even have to have faith in what you’re doing. I mean even if you’re terribly embarrassed about the whole thing, it’s perfectly all right. I mean you’re not insulting anybody or anything. In other words, nobody asks you to believe a single thing when you start out. You don’t even have to think about what you’re saying, the sarets said. All you have to have in the beginning is quantity. Then, later on, it becomes quality by itself. On its own power or something. He says that any name of God – any name at all – has this peculiar, self-active power of its own, and it starts working after you’ve sort of started it up.” – Franny
********
“I don’t care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, in can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I’ll tell you a terrible secret – Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know – listen to me, now – don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? … Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.” – and Zooey
[btw, I always imagined the dialogue in these two stories to be the more suitable adaptation for film than Holden’s whiny jaunt around New York. Glad to find out a good friend actually took a stab at such an effort.]
Will old Kindles also have a distinguishing odor that suggests research, history, familiarity?*
*Likewise, one of the best aspects of doing research at the Clark was being able to look at beautifully bound material dating back five hundred years or more and – there, right there – seeing marginalia in scripts that put my handwriting to shame. Seeing people historically dialogue with the same text I was working with suddenly helped place me in a continuing communal dialogue across time. As I jotted notes on my laptop, I knew that, years ago, someone else was also communicating through the English Reformation-era poetry that my research focused on. And will this dialogue within marginalia (more frequently in library books with notes that are either confounding or mind-blowing) end if the Kindle-ers have their way?
So it starts with this:
And then I get this:
So I send this:
As I think about the many conversations happening around YA literature, youth literacy, and reading efforts in our schools, it’s more and more obvious that the people that matter most in these discussions are not being included. I couldn’t be more thrilled to get someone as knowledgeable in the Twilight series to add such an astute addition to the current discourse. If you’re wondering, Sam’s a natural writer and voracious reader. Already with a few completed drafts of novels under her belt, she will be helping me co-teach a unit to her fellow seniors in a week in conjunction with National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO).
I know my email said this would be a conversation, but I’ve written enough and want to yield the proverbial mic to Ms. Diego for the duration of this post (your comments are encouraged to further this discussion with a true expert).
Defaced of Embraced?
Everyone has had to read them. Many have been asked to analyze the writing. Some of us even read them for the sole purpose of a good book. But, have our classic novels become a victim of this Twilight epidemic?
Sure, many girls are going crazy for this newly famous Edward Cullen character. Yet, you have to wonder what Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Benett, Cathy, Heathcliff, even Romeo & Juliet have to do with Twilight. Although these classic stories have been mentioned in the series, it leads me to believe that what was once a nice reference has become an act of violation.
Recently, our classic novels have been reprinted with different book covers; those which resemble that of the Twilight series. While they may look new and shiny, the same story remains. However, I can’t help but realize that that feel of the authenticity of the book has been defaced. And yes, Pride and Prejudice may not have had the best cover to begin with, but the story itself was so different than anything read before. Which is what made it that much lovelier.
Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight Saga, was inspired by five different books throughout her skyrocketing writing career. Classics such as Romeo & Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, The Merchant of Venice and even A Midsummers Night’s Dream. These are all wonderful classics that, let’s face it, have inspired many other writers, but to take that inspiration to a new level is to be questioned.
By now it is obvious that Meyer is a big fan of our wonderful classics. We welcome her to our club with open arms. Does that mean that what she does afterwards will affect us? Of course.
Everyone is different, everyone likes things and appreciates them differently. Meyer’s reprinting process is an act of embracing those wonderful novels that once inspired her. To others, like myself, it has become an act of defacing such wonderful novels that will remain fresh and great for years to come. I do not wish them to become sellouts.
There’s just one more question: Do we want our spectacular novels to be known as the books that inspired Stephenie Meyer? Or do we want them to be known for the writer’s who did anything and everything to put a good book in our bookshelves?
Think about that next time you hit your local Barnes and Noble and see Pride and Prejudice with a flowery cover.
As mentioned earlier, I’ve been helping out with an intersession class being taught in our school’s bookroom – a cavernous wonder of boxes, dust, and occasional cockroaches.
Mr. Carlson and I have found a few noteworthy discoveries during our time in the room. I will be highlighting two or three of them here.
The first discovery of note:
Yes, that’s 100 copies of The Making of the Rugrats Movie. It’s out of print, so, unless you’re at Manual Arts, you’re going to have to score your copy second hand. In any case, with a cover price of $25 each, I wonder what the story is behind these books (that are now 11 years old and never even taken out of the boxes). Often book publishers throw in extra reading books when our school makes a large textbook order, so these could have been such a situation. However, while I think we can find value in most books being available in our classes, could we have gotten a better use out of $2,500 in book value?
Outdated, severely below the age range of our high school students, and forgotten in the back of the bookroom, here’s yet another example of lack of communication and allocation of resources.
Life is a series of stories.
We are long unpredictable strands of narrative – here we intertwine and mesh, there we crosshatch and dither in little checks, we are not a uniform pattern or even a patchwork quilt. We are intersections that occasionally knot and collapse and move in dissonant trajectories.
What do we tell other people of the stories we’ve lived?
We do not quest for narrative, it is simply what we are. We take a left and the unseen narrator makes a note: Francine made a left up the hill, her steps guiding her to the park, to the reunion, to the funeral, to another day, to her escape.
We can’t force narrative into a thread it isn’t supposed to mend. We can’t imagine some natural order to the messy haphazard way life unfolds. We are a narrative, not a plot in three or five, neatly crafted acts – that’s for the birds and for the Hollywood editors mercilessly chopping what isn’t and what is into a nonsense parable that guides some toward foolhardy steps.
And again, to return to the question: what do we tell other people of the stories we’ve lived?
In some ways such a question is moot – we do not tell because our lives are their own, natural telling. The arrhythmia of life and its unexpected bouncing – from phenomena to tragedy to moment of dullness to fleeting urge of irresponsibility – is spoken in and of itself, we cannot change such tellings except in only the falsest of senses.
A book on the shelf next to me tells us that history is typically written by those that dominate, that conquer, that oppress others with their willful power. But even such a statement is a prologue to the counter narrative of a dominated people
That said, every story is a finality. Sure, it is a multifaceted story and one that cannot be viewed without the pink laser-tubed vision of someone other than us, but it is still narrative.
And so, again, what do we tell other people of the stories we’ve lived?
Again, we do not. We let the stories speak for themselves. Our retellings smooth the sharper edges, they warm the colder nights, and they grasp with greater strength at the tenuous frailty of loss that we hope cannot be.
Perhaps more importantly, we are not without agency in this narrative paradigm.
You, even as you read or type or be a part of this missive, have strength and willful power to move your thread. Try it – move it closer to someone nearby. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You have the strength to live the parable you want or to approximate the rom-com you wish you were. You cannot go back, but don’t worry about that. We are a large people – our threads feel seemingly endless, don’t they? We can be confirmation and refutation at once. We can be contradictions and illogical beings and not have to suffer any consequences but our own. We are the viceroys of our own rules.
And narrative is not some magic trick to change what we do or change what one sees as relevant or the life choices we make.
Narrative is simply the way we move about – by becoming story we are inculcated into a world bigger than just ourselves. That should be comforting.
We wish we were tied to only those choices that are easy. However, those narrative steps that create provocation, those steps that might be outright tendentious are the moments that define who we are.
And does love play a part in narrative?
Sure. But only in as much as work and play and death and creation and ineptitude and bureaucracy and wonder are also the natural ingredients of narrative. We may stare in eyes and furrow brows and assume that that is what one’s narrative is about, that it is what gives purpose.
But we forget.
Narrative is purposeless.
Narrative is without plot.
Narrative is not guided by an invisible hand or the kind of meant-to-be talk that elevates only illusorily.
And this is not without relevance to our classrooms. They are the natural extension of our own narratives. What story am I helping weave for students each day? What stories do they guide my narrative toward? How am I inspired by the work in my classroom – the love that burgeons in our classes – to better guide my actions?
What are the narrative hopscotch flip-flops that will define your area of the non-patchwork weaving your thread becomes?