Yeah – What She Said
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am a profoundly lazy individual. Which is why I’ve developed elaborate alternative methods to get simple things done. When it comes to blogging, my approach is no exception. Why reinvent the wheel? Surely the inherent merits of any idea I express are not dependent upon my having actually typed the words out myself. With so many intelligent, eloquent, quick fingered people out there, it seems a pointless waste for me to hunt and peck at my keyboard while my real talents are waiting in the wings. Cruel, when the exact words I wish to employ are right there, arranged into perfect sentences, begging to be cut and pasted.
I find a similar thing is true of thinking. Isn’t it weird how one is always in total agreement with the most brilliant opinions--and the more brilliant the opinions the more you’re in agreemen--until they’ve become indistinguishable from your own opinions. We’ve all had the experience of reading something so ‘right’ it appears ‘obvious,’ as if we had always known it--only we didn’t know we knew it. But now we know that we always knew it even before we read it. That happens to me A LOT!
What should it matter who formed the thought or typed it first. If an idea expresses my own exactly and I reciprocate by expressing exactly that idea as my own, well, what’s the harm?
I’m claiming no professional credentials here, so I feel no obligation to limit myself with notions like “standards” and “copyright infringement.” Plagiarism is an ugly, greedy word employed by small-minded people and their lawyers. I prefer the term “Involuntary Ghost Writing.” I see no dishonor in it whatsoever. Look at Ann Coulter. She seems to make a perfectly decent living doing it and displays absolutely no shame.
It has been said that collage is the art form of the Twentieth Century and that pretty much sums up my blogging process. I express myself and state my positions through preexisting works and other people's typing. Often rearranging and re-contextualizing the pieces until the words take on new meanings; my meanings. These are not the disordered juxtapositional explorations of the surrealists in search of secret “truths.” “The chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” is not my goal (although regrettably it is often the result).
My intention is that these carefully selected “readymades,” when recombined, successfully form a new semiotic material that adheres seamlessly to the surface of my as yet undefined thoughts. Like painting the invisible man into shape, the “textual matter” reveals the fully formed but previously hidden idea beneath.
Think of me as less a writer and more a curator, arranging and rearranging my collections until they read differently, until they reveal my own ideas. I am shifting the creative act from the “authorship of meaning” to the “transmission of meaning.” Like shopping, my choosing becomes the creative act.
18n or Please Don’t Make Me Repeat Myself(when n is an expression #47)
In addition to “Involuntary Ghost Writing,” I also practice a kind of auto-cannibalization. Again, my thinking is, “Why reinvent the wheel?”
I “write” texts that consist primarily of references to other texts, including elements from those texts, such as links to more texts. In each informational element there is an implicit reference back to the original text, its container. My hope is that through these containers I might eventually articulate even the most convoluted point in a series of symbols and links. Oft repeated positions, such as “religious fundamentalism is one of the greatest threats we currently face,” will be shortened to #56 and will link to the “original” text for those unfamiliar with my thoughts on the subject. Eventually, my posts will become a formal system;
Given B3 = #22 but consistently displays #17 (when #17 is an expression of X), B3 will eventually win the nomination--despite her ugly shoes.
Hopefully soon, given the recent improvements in voice recognition technology, I’ll be able to yell the theorems at my computer from bed.
Yeah, Well... You’re Fat!
As I stated elsewhere. there are numerous reasons that I blog. Some of those reasons are deeply personal, some are related to my sense of civic duty and some are simply self-indulgent. Whatever my motivations, they do not include malice. While I have no problem with heated conversation, I agree that much of the debate in this country has degenerated into dysfunctional rancor, and there’s a lot in the blogosphere that inflames this. In this regard I intend to never join the fracas, but contribute in some small part to the peace. I intend to be as respectful of others views as I would have them be of mine and, in those rare instances that common courtesy fails us, I will at the very least keep a civil tongue in my head. That is always my intention.
However--despite my better angels--there are days an orphaned, agnostic, gay, chemically unbalanced, undocumented alien of mixed race wakes up in Bush's America and just. flips. out. On those days I may become belligerent, irrational, obscene or just go Circus Freak Crazy on someone's ass. My humble apologies in advance.
And Lo, My Little Pony Saw the Angel
When I was young(er) I was strangely compelled--as many in the “Socialist Workers Gay Men’s Writing Collective” were--to write truly gawd-awful poetry. I don’t mean the awkward, mawkish, gawd-awful poetry that you wrote as a teenager. I mean revolutionarily bad poetry that left even my S.W.G.M.W.C. Comrades speechless.
Mine was a purple prose that galloped unbridled across the limitless expanse of parchment. Where metaphysical events ‘erupted’ and ‘engulfed’ in torrents that poured by candle light from the tip of my quill. A feather--fallen as grace from the wing of “Wednesday’s Flashing Angel”--exalting from the milk truck in the sound of breaking glass. Flags unfurled and banners snapped as thundering cavalries charged forth from a Gnostic math of subatomic revelation. And lo it was scribed with much archaic ‘behold’ing and ‘thine’ing in contorted Germanic/Yoda sentence structures that ran on and on and on and on and on.
In my defense, this was during a major manic episode. It was really no worse than Nick Cave on a good day. I swear I don’t do it anymore.
However, on rare occasion--I don’t know if it’s biorhythmic, biochemical or caffeinational--I relapse. It usually occurs when I’m struggling to isolate some miniscule point from the mundane, because I’ve fixated that it carries some Great Truth. The smaller the pearl, the bigger the language becomes as I strain to pry it free until suddenly, without warning, my little pony has kicked down her stall and galloped across my keyboard.
I’m aware that even on good days my writing can be overly elaborate and pretentious. I’m prone to the melodramatic and strident, my tone affected and haughty as if I were storming the stables in boots and jodhpurs to flail at the stable boy with a riding crop “damn your insolence boy!” I’ve never met a metaphor I couldn’t mount and ride on a run on sentence past punctuation and over grammar until it collapsed dead from sheer exhaustion. Where upon I take my crop and whip it mercilessly “damn you, insolent ass!” before finally grinding it into unintelligible dog food.
I know, I know and I’m working on it. It’s not that I intentionally try and circumvent the basic rules of grammar, punctuation, composition and sanity. It's just that all the complexity constitutes a strata of detail I’ve never been able to focus on. "Math is Hard" and, try as I might, it all becomes a roaring blizzard of ticks and squiggles over which I shout to be heard. And I’ve got something to say!
Of course it’s compounded by the fact that I’m pathologically lazy. Which is why, in lieu of any actual improvement, I’m developing strategies like “#18n”, “Involuntary Ghost Writing” and “Text Collage” in the hope that we are all spared the worst of my torture. By this point you’re probably wondering why I even bother writing....
Anywho--as for the occasional eruptions of purple--I’ll have the stable boy shovel what he can, but inevitably a little whiff and stain will remain. The sad truth is that it’s probably best to politely avert your gaze, there’s nothing much that can be done when “Sparkles Rides Again.”
