Secret Ballet: comment by D.W. plus reference points
Hey P.,
I finally had a chance to look at Secret ballet. I can't say that I read the whole thing, but what I did look at provoked a bunch of ideas/reference points in my head:
- Some of it reads like Burroughs/Gysin's cut-up stuff in the sense that the text seems to want to coalesce into a meaning but always stops before actually becoming explicit about what that meaning would be. The difference being how successful Detlev's attempt to make the text flow smoothly is, not jaggy at all, the weirdness is at the level of successions of paragraphs and not successions of phrases. But still, I find my attention floating above the text the same way I do with a lot of Burroughs' experimental writing. It's a disturbing feeling, like visiting the bureaucracy (or living your life, for that matter) and waiting forever for someone to explain exactly what you are waiting for. You have the feeling that every observation is important in the moment when it appears, but that it will never appear again. Actually, there are some writers today aiming for this kind of alienated feeling of articulate disconnectedness (Haruki Murakami, Mark Leyner), although they both add a lot of jokes and Murakami (one of my favorites) adds a plot and a real human emotional subtext.
- In music, turntablism and remixing use existing sounds like Detlev uses existing text. The result is a way of writing songs so pervasively recombinant that the question of "intentionality" (Detlev's word) disappears. My initial reaction to Detlev saying that his text has no intentionality is that this is exactly what people said 15 years ago in music, but today it is clear that recombining fragments created by others is definitely an intentional act, the mantle of originality is passing from writing to arranging. This isn't avant-garde anymore, it's pop music: the Avalanches' current MTV hit "Frontier Psychiatrist" builds a small story out of found spoken word fragments. In the UK, there's a big fad going on around what they call "bootlegs", new songs made by recombining existing ones that everyone knows. One hit is made up entirely of 15-second intros to something like 50 songs, most of which you recognize, but they are woven together into what is obviously a new song. So I think maybe I disagree with Detlev about what he is doing. I think he's remixing the dictionary into a novel, the writer-as-DJ. An interesting question for me is: why is this such an obvious and universal concept for anyone creating music today, but it remains an avant-garde idea in literature, despite decades of post-modernist theory urging us to create our own meaning out of every text we see? Music thrives on formal innovation, why is the novel such a conservative form?
- Also makes me think of Alice (http://www.alicebot.org/). Alice is an AI chatbot filled with thousands of prewritten sentences. There's a truly interesting (if sometimes maudlin) article about Alice and her creator. From the article: "Wallace had hit upon a theory that makes educated, intelligent people squirm: Maybe conversation simply isn't that complicated. Maybe we just say the same few thousand things to one another, over and over and over again." Wallace is in some ways doing the direct opposite of Detlev: he wrote the sentences and imbued them with meaning, but Alice uses them in a conversation according to strictly defined rules (which are pretty easy to figure out if you talk to her for a while). Or maybe that's the point Detlev is trying to make: the meaning is already in the sentences, you just have to use the right one at the right time.
- Also made me think of Racter: http://www.ezine.melb.net/~saul/essays/09racter.html [URL no longer valid]. Racter is an AI program that generates sentences; they published a book made up of stories made up of sentences generated by the program. I gave away my copy many years ago, it's now a collector's item selling for $100 on Amazon.
- How does Secret Ballet not infringe on the dictionary's copyright? I actually believe that copyright issues are one of the really important political issues of out times, Secret Ballet could be very interesting as a political commentary on the legal concept of "fair use". Especially interesting since the dictionary culled these sentences from other sources (there's a strong legal precedent in the US for aggregators owning the aggregated results of their compilation work). Reminds me of the US agit-pop band Negativeland, whose experiments in recombining existing (musical) texts got them a lawsuit from U2 a long time ago that did wonders for their reputation. If Detlev is lucky he'll get sued and become a cause celebre ;-)
- I found Detlev's explanation far more interesting than the work itself, and even more interesting to me was the interview that talks about the process and the mental structure that Detlev has built up in his mind that represents a "reunderstanding" of the dictionary. I think Secret Ballet becomes interesting only once all the levels become apparent. I know that he says that the "failure [of "smooth narration"] constitutes the form of the work", but I am an optimistic American instead of a pessimistic German, and so I'd like to think that the real challenge lies in overcoming the limitations of his novelistic form to find a way to present all the different "meanings" that Detlev has uncovered. Some random ideas: - The Web is a great format for recombining fragments into a new structure while still keeping links to the old one. I can imagine the list of words as the introductory page, each one linked to its place in the text, as a way of starting reading from anywhere. Or you can read linearly if you want. Both the dictionary and the novel are present in the same text, the reader chooses his meaning by choosing where to click. - Detlev says he think's he'll need 12 years and much madness to carry it through, why not open up the process? Put the remaining sentences on the Web, let people come and add them to the text themselves, see how many different characters and scenes people can extract from a single set of sentences ... - ... and then make this process applicable to any text. Suck in an existing text on the Web (there's lots of nonlinear reference material out there just waiting for someone to come along and extract the hidden narrative), let people recombine its sentences in order to create a new text, maybe let them start by creating a character page and populating it with sentences to describe the character, then creating narrative pages that animate those characters. It's kind of like a more directed version of a Wiki (see http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb), users can only choose sentences from a existing text instead of writing their own. It's a collborative system for letting other meanings emerge out of any existing text. The ultimate goal is to see which texts are fruitful and what kinds of limitations/rules lead to interesting results. Or maybe it will fail most of the time, and you will discover that it only works if a single mind like Detlev's imposes his own unified vision of the text's hidden meaning on the first 66000 words (I can't get away from the idea of his intentionality being fully present despite him being unaware of it, many novelists will say like Detlev that at some point their characters take over and begin to act without the writer's full intentionality. Creating sentences may turn out to be a very minor element of the writing process.). - For an example of this type of approach applied to a different idea (really avant-garde in its structure but rather overinspired by American television and videogames for its content), check out: http://www.warehouse23.com/basement/ . Note that anyone can add an item to this site. The real killer thing would be if you could take some items and combine them into a story.
You asked me if I know about publishing options for Secret ballet. I don't know much about the publishing world, but do know that it has now become a business with no possibility of publishing on intellectual or artistic merit alone. This means that I can imagine two options: - Self-publishing. I found lots and lots of options by Googling for "short-run book publishing". To get a publisher interested in footing the bill, you've got to play their business game. I would suggest the path of marketing the Web site first. Add some graphic design, make the intro page far more inviting and explicit about the idea, speak with more confidence about why this is an important and interesting project, maybe make it more interactive. Once you have some traffic, a book deal becomes a possibility ("look, people are interested in this, we've got some hits, now is the time to publish"). Of course, the copyright issue might kill any chances of doing anything but self-publishing.
I actually think its pretty fascinating what he's doing, I'm just not sure about a published novel being the right form for the final result. You know me well enough to know that if I start poking holes in an idea, it means I really like it. If you think Detlev can understand that, please pass this on. I like things that make me think. Thanks for the link!
D.
And this is my reply:
Dear D,
Back from my holidays I just found your tremendous comments about sb forwarded by P. Thank you very much indeed; so far, no one has ever gone into it in such depth. Thank you also for the many links to related stuff, which I will investigate.
You commented on my notion of intentionality (or rather, my claim of ridding myself of it). Of course you are right in observing that my intention still permeates the text and that the act of writing has simply moved from writing proper to the arrangement of found material. I guess I will correct my 'about' text to make this clear.
Being confined to the material of this one dictionary simply imposes a strong constraint, an antidote against unbridled 'creation' (of plot, style, etc). At the same time, the material aspect of the example sentences provides a surplus. My intention is to make the text as smooth as an airport shelf novel, but of course this is not possible; that's why I called executing this failure the form of the novel.
I feel what is important about sb is that it takes a quasi canonical body of text (called the 'Bank of English'), and just that, with the hypothetical aim of incorporating it fully (ALL example sentences). So in a sense you get a statistical representation of all actual language acts, sentences, utterances in a society in a particular period and through that, a kind of blueprint of its ruling ideology and recurrent themes. Having to 'fit it all in' works against intentional choices directed at complementing a particular plot. Such choices exisists, of course, and I exercise them more deliberately now as I am trying to shore up the text and close gaps before publication. I have actually given up on the idea of ever completing the work according to its theoretical premises (that is, including _all_ sentences).
In contrast, the cut-up techniques I know of (whether Burroughs or Debord) usually seem to choose particular sources over others; those that fit into the tone/tune of the intended overall result.
I appreciate your idea of opening up sb to a collaborative web-based activity open for all, but the core of the method is resonance on the _entire_ text to 'reconstruct' it in the best possible way - in the way an archeologist reassembling fragments of an ancient vase needs as many pieces as possible to identify the right place of any particular piece. So to be true to that approach, everyone would have to read the whole text repeatedly before starting to assemble - something no one will be prepared to do. Those that would participate might stick in a sentence here or there lightly, but without being able to appreciate the overall context, the ambiguous style (keeping a balance between plain narrative account and irritating or 'absurd' clashes) and the development of the overall plot (because there is a proper plot after all, albeit a deranged one).
A final note about publishing strategy: I want to keep this as far away as possible from a web design thing or the advertisement of a general concept. For me, the concept works as a piece of art only on the basis of the particular choices I have made, and the singular commitment of myself as author. Anyone else is free to take up whatever arrangement or cut-up technique they like, with good or bad results. I am not the one to promote the technique at the expense of the particular result. I hear what you say about the explanations being more interesting than the text itself, and this is a big worry: that you might need to know something about the context of the work and approach to appreciate the outcome fully. Didactic kills discovery; I hope that the form will reveal itself gradually to the careful, dedicated and interested reader (and this is the only reader I take into consideration). I don't want to convince anyone that this is a great thing. For me as a prototype reader, re-reading sb keeps being an interesting and rewarding experience. This may be too little by way of proof of concept, but something tells me that what I am doing in sb is worthwhile.
(..)
Kind regards, and thanks again,
Detlev
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