What The Matter Is

I’ve been drawing handles. They’re for AS HANDLE, one of the five booklets I’m working on.

I’ve been making handles and holders since 2008, but until now they’ve been objects rather than drawings.

Photographs of my three-dimensional handles won’t work for the AS HANDLE booklet because of the documentation problem I wrote about in post #15. I want the idea of the handles to remain propositional (the idea of a handle) rather than particular (the instance of a handle). Drawings seem to do this more successfully.

Nevertheless the drawings I’ve made are somewhat particular. They refer back to the specific things I was drawing, which I had to collect and construct and fix and pose before I sat down in front of them with pen and paper. Moreover they aren’t perfect static and faithful renderings of their objects: they are sketchy and the lines wobble, telling something about the particular moment of drawing. If they step away from the particulars of their originary physical objects, their medium brings a new particularity.

But this kind of particularity is different.The distance these drawings make from their objects is the aproach they make towards their author. The drawing, and its wobbliness, make a story on the surface of the page: the proposition is no longer ‘the idea of a handle’ but ‘the idea of drawing a handle’.

It brings to mind the particulars of the fictional characters in some of the stories of the AS MACHINE and AS CONDUCTOR booklets.

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.