What The Matter Is

This week I’ve been going through a heap of texts over and over again, trying to get them all ready for print. It’s like a balancing act, persuading them all to work on their own and correspond with one another at the same time.

Sometimes one of them drifts towards being finished. And then once that’s happening, sometimes it continues to drift until it stops being worked on at all. Sometimes it’ll come unfinished again a few minutes or days later.

I have this misplaced idea that things should go shiny the minute they’re completely finished, or wink at me or change colour or do a little dance, so I’d be able to know, once and for all, that that’s that. And then once that was that it would stay that, and not keep coming unfinished again.

My ISBNs have arrived!

Now I have a single ISSN for the whole Homologue series, and sufficient individual ISBNs for the first ten issues. They should last me a couple of years. The first five issues are launching all at once at the beginning of July (at the MFA show) and after that I’ll probably put together two or three a year.

There’s still the matter of the actual writing for issues three and five, though, which I have yet to finish.

Right. I’m going to try to conjure the solution to this documentation problem by writing this post.

All day I’ve been trying to write a text that stands in for a performance I developed and realized earlier this month, but without the text becoming a document of the performance. I want the text to stand on its own as a self-sufficient thing, so that it can operate on a par with the other self-sufficient texts to be printed alongside it.

I think my solution to the equivalent problem with the radio broadcast is working (see last post), and I’d like to think about whether an equivalent solution would work for the performance.

The solution for the radio piece was to replace the radio script with a similar piece of writing that addresses the reader in the way the radio script addressed the listener.

But I can already see that won’t work for the performance. The performance was genuinely reciprocal in a way that the radio broadcast was not. The broadcast elicited responses from listeners, but it did so by playing on the fact that any subsequent feedback could not be reabsorbed into the broadcast. It was a one-way exchange, and that translates quite straightforwardly into the one-way communication generally going on between writer and reader in a text.

But the performance wasn’t one-way at all. Quite the opposite. (There’s more about the performance in posts #13 and #14, but briefly: an orchestra conductor stood on the South Bank, observed what was going on around him, and conducted everything he observed. In fact, the things around him were ‘conducting’ him, and he had to swiftly respond to appear to conduct them; but to complicate things, passers-by frequently noticed and responded to his conducting, which meant he was, at times, truly conducting them. In diverse ways, the conductor authored the movements of the passers-by, while the passers-by authored the movements of the conductor.)

Unlike the broadcast, the performance depends on real-time response which is, moreover, reciprocal.

Real-time response is possible in writing. Or you might say, that’s traditionally all there ever is in writing: as soon as you look at a word it stares right back at you and reads itself out. It’s possible to co-opt or emphasise this simultaneity between the text and the moment of reading – John Barth is good at this:

http://homologue.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/ekphrasi…

and here’s part of a text I wrote last year experimenting with similar possibilities:

“Imagine just as you’re reading the start of this paragraph your screen goes blank and you get one of those error messages you’ve never seen before and you know it might mean your hard disk has died. During this sentence imagine you start to think through all the things you didn’t back up, and now imagine you try to remember when you last backed up, and imagine now you try to remember what month it was, and imagine that takes a while because you have to try to remember what else was going on in your life at the time that you backed up last, and then try to work out what month those things happened in, and now in this last part of the sentence imagine trying to remember what things you’ve done since that month on your computer, which might be lost now.”

Etc. (the whole text is below) http://homologue.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/imagine-…

.. this kind of approach is a start, but it lacks the reciprocity and mutual authorship of the original performance.

….. . . .

I’m conscious as I write that I might be straying too far from the central core of the collection of texts I’m developing. The texts set out from the central idea that literary discourse lacks an acknowledged equivalent of the role of the orchestra conductor. Through these experiments I’ve wanted to explore possible analogies for this role in literature, and the performance had a good go at that. I think things are going to start unravelling if I wander too far from the idea I’m trying to approach.

Not much of a solution yet.

I think I’ve solved part of the problem.

In my last post I was concerned about misrepresenting some of my work by putting documentation and original works together in the same publication. I was concerned that if the works were operating on two separate levels, they’d have trouble communicating amongst themselves.

Today I rewrote the opening of my February radio performance as an instruction to a reader rather than a listener. The original radio script began like this:

“Now to keep you all together, I’d like you to bear in mind that not all of you will be hearing my voice at the same time. If you’re listening to this on the internet the sound will reach you with something like a 384 millisecond delay, so you’ll hear what I’m saying just under four tenths of a second after any listeners on analogue radio will be hearing me. If you are listening online you can account for this lag by playing almost four tenths of a second after my beat. My beat will be exactly on the count of the second hand on my watch, so you can either synchronize your watch with mine (or the clock on your mobile phone) or you can just account for any difference between my second hand and yours as you’re listening.”

The new version I’ve written is an attempt to transfer these problems of synchronicity from listening to reading:

“Now to keep you all together, I’d like you to bear in mind that the end of each line is falling exactly on the count of the second hand of my watch. So you can either synchronize your watch with mine, or just account for the difference between mine and yours in your head as you read. If you’re a particularly quick or slow reader you can accommodate the lag by setting your clock just behind or ahead of mine, and then incrementally adjusting the time as you progress down the page.”

The effect of the new piece is quite different, because the impossibility of it is distinct from the impossibility of the original piece.

There is a (slim) hope, with the radio broadcast, that the listeners really could synchronize their watches and clocks, and hence really keep in time with one another. What’s impossible is that the listeners should be able to hear what one another are playing in all their separate homes, and in the light of this knowledge, interact in the particular ways demanded by the instructor.

With the written text, on the other hand, there is no hope of synchronicity. The second hand on the watch of the writer is lost to the reader at the point of writing, and worse: the readers themselves are spread across time. Though they might hope to read the text at the same speed, they won’t be reading chorally.

So the text presents and withdraws the hope of this synchronicity. What I’ve quoted above is the entire text, which means it halts as soon as the instructions are completed. Once you get to the bit that says “as you progress down the page”, there’s no more page to progress down. It reminds me of the “applause” ending of the conductor text I wrote a while ago (and am still editing over and over) –

http://homologue.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/musica-p…

I plan to put today’s text at the opening of the AS CONDUCTOR booklet, immediately following a double page spread with the word APPLAUSE written across it in large letters. It seems to work alright. I’ll have to look at it again once the other texts in the booklet are nearing completion, to make sure they’re all sympathetic.

—

This documentation problem is still lingering though, because I still haven’t solved the problem of the performance on the South Bank, which I think I’m going to have to replicate somehow in text alone.

I’ll have a go now.

Last week’s conducting performance is one of my attempts to find productive analogies for the operations at work in reading and writing a text. I’m putting together five sets of these attempts, each set compiled into a booklet of its own. Here are the names of the booklets:

AS HANDLE
AS LINE
AS MACHINE
AS CONDUCTOR
AS PIVOT

At the moment I’m having trouble compiling the AS CONDUCTOR booklet. Three of the experiments are texts, one is Thursday’s performance (or any other iteration of it) and one is a radio broadcast.

The trouble is that the texts work as themselves, while the radio broadcast and the performance appear in the booklet as documents of their originals. This poses a problem because the booklet is becoming some kind of artwork of its own, and it’s important for its elements to cohere so they can communicate amongst themselves. It seems to be difficult for them to do this if some of them are ‘originals’ and some are ‘documents’ (note scare quotes).

Something needs to be done. But the more I think about it, the more complications I find in the distinction this booklet makes between originals and documents. I want to develop those complications rather than suppress them, particularly given that this booklet is specifically concerned with the prospect of reciprocal authorship between reader and writer.

All three text pieces complicate the matter because they are instructional (“you can…”; “you should…”; “you could…”). The effect of this is to background the primacy of the texts themselves: as instructions, they act as documents to some original act, only the original act is potential and in the future, rather than actual and in the past.

The radio piece complicates things because it was specifically designed to be broadcast at a particular moment, and depends entirely on the premise that all the listeners will be hearing it at the same time. The piece instructs all the listeners towards creating a communal piece of music together in real time, which of course nobody – even if they all played along – would be able to hear in its entirety. If you listen to an archived recording of the piece, knowing that nobody else is listening along in time with you in their separate homes, the special productiveness of the piece is deactivated.

You can listen to the archived recording here:
http://homologue.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/listen-t…

This deactivation is a point worth making in itself, and the archived recording of the broadcast is interesting for this reason. But my concern is that the other works in the booklet are self-contained and start from the ground of the booklet itself, rather than elsewhere. I think including a piece written for radio, and which mentions the date, time, and the name of the station in its opening words, would come rather out of the blue.

Horribly, I have a feeling the only way to make the radio piece work in this context is to recreate it as a site-specific piece for the booklet itself, just as the original was site-specific to the radio. Listening to the radio is a private experience rendered communal because the broadcast reaches everyone’s radios at the same time. Reading a book is private and communal too, but the community is not temporal. What is the community then? Spatial? Durational? Intellectual? Or is the communal readership of a text characterized by its not being temporally bound? What would it be like to create a new version of the radio broadcast but given the specific limits of reading? And do I really have time to make this work before my ever-approaching copy deadline? Is this a cliff-hanger?

The conducting performance is a whole nother kettle of fish [sic] which I’ll have to come back to another day. This is quite enough to worry about for now.