Call & Response & Paraliterature & a Little Place Called Kootenay

Only a few days ago, I wrote about Call and Response, a zine put out by Gianni Simone, so I thought it time to mention Call & Response, a chapbook of sorts by derek beaulieu and Jonathan Ball. I thought this especially in tune with the coincidences of the day since I also received today (via derek beaulieu himself) a request for submissions to the paraliterary issue of W put out by the Kootenay School of Writing.

derek sent me a copy of Call & Response late last year, but it promptly disappeared into my workspace only to rise to the surface of my reading material days after the arrival of Gianni Simone’s almost identically named publication. The beaulieu/Ball C&R is the simplest of publications and the most demanding. It arrived in my mailbox in a brown envelope, and the title and author’s names were affixed to a label affixed to the face of the envelope. (Being frugal, derek flipped the envelope over—much as I would—and wrote my address on the backside of the envelope before mailing it off to me.) Inside are eleven loose sheets of smooth white cardstock. On what we might call the recto side of each card, derek has created a set of characters, none of which join their neighbors to become anything resembling a word. On the verso of the card, Jonathan Ball has manipulated—usually only slightly—the text derek has presented him. This happens eleven times, and only on the cover sheet do the author’s names appear, so I might have misconstrued who was the creator of each piece below.

But before we get to the matter at hand, let’s start to take a look at this call for paraliterary endeavor from the Kootenay School of Writing:

The Kootenay School of Writing is seeking submissions for the 13th issue of W magazine, to focus on "paraliterary" or nonliterary writing projects.

The thesis driving W13 is that as the parameters of poetic practice/praxis are reshaped in coming decades, more and more writing that now seems unclassifiable, except as "interesting, but not literature", will become imaginable within expanded, and culturally more pertinent, definitions of poetry.

Whatever “nonliterary writing projects” are we’ll learn presently.*


derek beaulieu, “ba” (Call) in Call & Response (2005)
From this illustration, we can see that derek produced this piece by strewing cut-out letters on a table, placing a sheet upon them, and bringing to light some spectral representation out of those bumps on the table by rubbing a pencil across the page using a technique we call frottage. There appears to be no semantic meaning behind these letters—and not even any suggestion of meaning because of the arrangement of these letters in space. The letters simply are what they are:† shapes on a field. We accept them as visual signs divorced from their usual linguistic meaning.


Jonathan Ball, “ba” (Response) in Call & Response (2005)
Ball follows up by modifying beaulieu’s original, but the modification is slight. Ball appears to have photocopied the original to increase the contrast of the image. The copying process adds some visual static, but otherwise little changes the original. So at the end of the process, we have virtually the same thing. If these on two sides of the same sheet are not paraliterary, I don’t know what it. These pieces work with the atoms of literary art (letters) without doing anything to make them literary.

Kootenay continues [with extensive bracketed comments by me]:

Below is a brainstormed list of paraliterary possibilities, by no means exhaustive. Note that for the purposes of W13 it doesn't matter if the texts are legit or faked, fact or fiction, personal or impersonal, creative or uncreative.

1. informational texts (surveys; polls; maps; statistical charts; chronologies; diagrams; conspiracy theories; research results) [Inside this opening list lies the concept of information art, art that achieves most of its esthetic punch via its focus on information alone. I believe some of these could be quite literary, though in less than expected ways.]

2. notational projects (diaries; ongoing notes; classroom notes; records; lists; inventories; specialised glossaries and lexicons) [I’ve become more and more convinced over the years that dictionaries created by one person are always literary because of the idiosyncrasies they exhibit. See Johnson’s dictionary, my Familiar Words, or Richard Pearce-Moses’ recent Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, which I reviewed for the latest issue of The American Archivist]

3. annotational projects (annotations of other texts) [There is a small but real tradition in recording and studying the marginalia of famous writers, so many such texts often have a literary inclination. I’m reminded most forcefully of the marginalia of Herman Melville, who left behind too few literary manuscripts, forcing scholars into a desperate search for any of the books he owned and the marks he left within them.]

4. pseudo theory; pseudo poetics, pseudo philosophy; pseudo theology; pseudo manifestos; pseudo research; amateur science and pseudo sciences (investigations into: linguistics; etymology; astrology; astronomy; biology; 'pataphysics or "pataphysics) [Haven’t we always considered the pataphysicians literary? Aren’t their games always played on a field of language? Don’t they always conform to certain subliterary forms as they work?]

5. occult writings (automatic writing; ouija board transcriptions; transcriptions of divinations; predictions; tarot readings of persons or texts) [Try as they might, the Dadaists still made art and still made literature. Automatic writing is often identical to regular writing, but the idea behind that method of creation still holds some allure.]

6. found texts and found text-objects (scans or transcripts of interesting documents; posters; ephemera; ads; letters; notes; signs; report cards)

7. collections of texts (blurbs; phone messages; subject lines; typos in famous works) [Such as commonplace books and pillow books, but note how the editors have expanded the idea to include the least literary of such compilations.]

8. interviews from interesting social contexts (faked or real; raw transcriptions of speech) [I like how this confronts the definition of literature head on. We see interviews of litterateurs as literature, but what if we change the game slightly? What then?]

9. documentary writings and mockumentary writings

10. alphabetic projects (new alphabets; spelling reforms; codes; encryptions, stereograms) [Many visual poets work in this realm, especially alphabets. I spent much of my middle childhood self-encumbered by ciphers and codes.]

11. scriptural projects (i.e., investigations of how scriptural systems and technologies interact with writing)

12. excerpts from artists' book projects (incl text-based photographic projects; photos of book sculptures) [These which might skirt the definition of literary, as much visual poetry does.]

13. photos/snapshots with significant textual content/context [See, pointedly, the shots of peeling layers of posters Daniel f Bradley has posted in the last few months to his blog.]

14. conceptual writing; text-based conceptual works [I think this belongs in this list, but why wouldn’t we consider it literary?]

15. uncreative writing [What creative writing is not itself somehow uncreative? But I grant the editors their point.]

16. text-based visual art [What we might call the far end of visual poetry, which is pretty much what beaulieu and Ball are creating.]

17. outsider writings [Because intent may be lessened in such works.]

18. graphic musical scores [Visual music is Dick Higgins’ term for these, which make up an interesting, though little examined field.]

19. certain cut-ups, aleatoric and erasure writings [So many possibilities of creating writing out of others’ writing and chance.]

20. certain visual/concrete poetry [Probably those examples that include some random element or those that are found or at the far end of visual poetry. My Found & Aleatoric Poems (in constant progress) seem candidates here.]

21. certain flarf [Those, I imagine, that are dependent on creating texts through some kind of text mining]

22. certain song lyrics (if appreciable as "outsider" texts)

That’s a long list, so I wonder what kind of magazine will arise out of this cauldron of ideas, and I look forward to it. But we still have derek and Jonathan. What are they doing in their looseleaf chapbook? Is their work paraliterary?


derek beaulieu, “ddddddddd” (Call) in Call & Response (2005)
Definitely. In this example derek has chosen the ostinato, a relentless drumbeat of the letter d. Here, we might imagine the d as hoofbeats, pounding, noise roiling around us. Or we might hear it in our heads as stuttering. But it doesn’t matter which it is, the simple visual aspect of this piece is all there is, so it is all we have to go by. The piece is a dance of the letter d.


Jonathan Ball, “ddddddddd” (Response) in Call & Response (2005)
And Jonathan takes this dance and distorts the texts into a system of pixels in gridspace. The bare outlines of the letters endure, but without the example of the d’s earlier, we might not recognize many of these letters. Jonathan has pushed this chapbook even farther beyond the world of literature, but maybe not quite into the world of visual art.


derek beaulieu, # 14 from calcite gours 1-19 (2004)
Derek did enclose another “chapbook” in the envelope that held C&R, his own “calcite gours 1-19,” which takes up the entirety of issue 38 of Stanzas. Here, again, derek retreats beyond the pale of literature, but still with a sense of letters, still dragging behind him (or pushing before him) the ghost of literature. This piece I find most interesting simply because it is the one in which the letters are most visible. Besides this one, almost every other letter is completely subsumed within an inky gour.‡

The W folks end their call:

If you're still unsure whether what you have in mind or on hand is right for the issue, direct queries to paratext@kswnet.org. We can point you to examples of interesting paraliterary works and writers, or talk to you about specific projects and ideas.

In the meantime, the easiest ways to look into the paraliterary might be to pick up a copy of McCaffery and Rasula's anthology Imagining Language, or to check out the Conceptual Writing and the Outsiders sections of UbuWeb. You might also give a thought to the forthcoming anthology Against Expression (Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds.) that will feature a historical range of so-called "uncreative" writings, or look at some of the transdisciplinary writings published in the Western Front's FRONT magazine, and in the better indie zines and micro-magazines. You could also look at the found texts in FOUND magazine, or read up on text-based projects by visual artists.

We're looking for new works/texts, but will gladly consider previously-published material, depending on when, where and how it was published. It can be helpful if the work is accompanied by a brief statement of method, means or intent.

Send submissions by email or by meatmail to

KSW - CFS - W13
309-207 West Hastings St., Vancouver, BC, V6B 1H6, CANADA
paratext@kswnet.org
Submissions due by: December 01, 2006.
If sent by email please write "KSW - CFS - W13" in the subject line
Include SASE and an email contact if sent by snail

W13 pays: $25 CAD per published page, to a maximum of $75 CAD. (And yes, you'll be paid for found texts/text-objects.)

W is published in pdf only, long works are therefore acceptable. There is no particular page-count or word-count requirement or limit, but the budget for W13 is not unlimited. Remember that pdf can accommodate full-colour images, embedded audio files, and weblinks.

Publishing in W means that your work will remain virtually "in print" much longer than in a paper magazine, and will be accessible to a more geographically dispersed audience. Almost every issue of W, including back issues, is downloaded from the KSW website dozens of times per month.

Derek and Jonathan’s play with these letters has an innocence to it that I like. They don’t ask much of their letters. They just experiment with them to see what tricks they play. I might not see these as great works of visual poetry, but they are quite important examples of what visual poets must do. They must continually explore. They must carry out experiments. Theirs must be a totally experimental art.

As a visual poet, I need no literature and I need no visual art; I need only their hybrid child, maybe crippled, maybe sterile, but somehow new and strange and full of the promise of hope. Because even if there is no way for these artworks to function effectively or find an appreciative audience, they can still try to show us a new way. As Jeff Geldblum said in the movie Jurassic Art, “Art will find a way.”

_____

*Which my training in British English forces me to believe means “soon,” though I almost never hear the word used in that sense in American English. I can’t remember anyone ever using the term when I was in Canada, so I leave it to someone else to explain to us the state of the meaning of “presently” presently.

†To quote my sometime correspondent, the Canadian esthetician Ted Warnell.

‡ A gour (also known as a rimstone dam) is a mineral barrier that grows around shallow ponds or streams in caves. These can also form stairlike steps when they occur in a series.

---

Below the Bar

Since I had the day off, I took a little bit of time today to wander the aisles of The Book House (an independent bookstore in Albany) with Nancy and Tim. As soon as I entered the store, I stopped at a table of new titles to browse. Suddenly, a woman came up to me with a graphic novel in hand asking me to comment on it. She was a reporter from WTEN Channel 10 News, and the book was The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, which was released today. As I looked up from the book placed beneath my nose, I realized I was being taped, so I tried to make sense of the book quickly. How, I wondered, was I supposed to comment on a book placed in my hands seconds before?

As expected, I wasn’t a very adept on-the-spot commentator, even though I had the critical acumen to address the issue at hand. One sentence of mine, a response to a direct question, made it to the news: “Some people will like it. Others will hate it because it seems unserious.” This book is, simply, the Classics Comics version of the original 800-page report, and the goal of this graphic reimagining of that report is the same as the goal of Classics Comics: to give people the story so they at least know that much about the piece of literature—paraliterature, again—and encourage them to read the original.

While looking at the book, I was struck by what I imagined people would think while reading this book. They would believe that the pictures were lies (because they would not be accurately representing reality) but that the words were true (because they would be accurate). People would see a picture of a building falling down and think, I’m sure that building didn’t fall down exactly that way, but when they read the words (which would be vaguer in comparison) they would assume their veracity.

During my interview, I did manage to say something about the fact that most of the information people process is visual, explaining that there is nothing wrong with pictures. But people tend to believe that pictures are shallow. A colleague once chastised me, for instance, for reading Time magazine (which is filled with photographs, charts, and drawings) instead of The Economist (a magazine so bereft of visual stimulation that the thought of flipping through it brings me to the edge of tears). We believe the world of words is always more intellectual and, therefore, always more valuable, deeper, more satisfying. But I swim in both ponds.

The cameraman also took some video of Tim, so both of us showed up in the news report this evening. Tim did a great job. He was quite sure of himself, and the reporter even commented that he was eloquent for one so young.

I didn’t tell her that I almost never watch local TV news because I find it so shallow.

ecr. l’inf.