We back and we back and we back, and as “Shia LeBeouf” suggests in this #stopcreating essay, the quickest way to write now is a bit of Ctrl+C, Alt+Tab, Ctrl+V. Why be at home, noodling, worrying about how to turn on your genius switch, writing “as if the Internet had never happened”? Forage through your faves, pull, rip, rearrange, cite accordingly (or don’t, as in this essay’s case). “LeBeouf” taught a very successful ‘Uncreative Writing’ course at university, and this here post is paying homage to such reproductions, remixes, plagariarisms.
First up with this meticulous, intricate beast by Ryan O’Neill in The Lifted Brow, which is An Australian Short Story with a whole heap of footnotes, because every sentence is plucked straight from a classic Australian text. While even the fact that this text exists (and has done since 2012) is impressive, given how extensive it is, it takes plenty of time to consider flow, evocation, and tone; which makes for a trip-i-ly interesting reading experience of: history lesson + seamless cut & paste + gorgeous piece of writing. I’m also working with Mr. O’Neill on a series of multimedia fictions morphed out of a Henry Lawson yarn, that will make their appearance on Seizure Mag’s AltTxt project in the next few weeks and throughout the year.
Something lovely for your ears here too. This is the prose poet Rosmarie Waldrop reading extracts from her Reproduction of Profiles, recorded at the Bowery Poetry Club in NY. Waldrop uses the notion of ‘palimtext’, a kind of writing that is both an ‘inscribing and a reinscribing…the still-visible record of its responses to those earlier writings’. (Quote from Davidson, the guy who coined that cheeky term.) For Waldrop in this piece, the source texts are Wittgenstein and Kafka’s A Description of a Struggle, and while I haven’t read Wittgenstein I can feel the steady painful throb of Kafka’s torture-machine even through Waldrop’s pretty prose:
“I was not sure I understood. I was naked enough to disappear in the shops’ windows. Your weight on me sank through my bones, and I didn’t know where I had lost my body–as if it had no vowels, as if the construction were faulty, the mesh too coarse–when you felt a sneeze coming on and fumbled for your handkerchief. I traced the law of sufficient reason down your spine. Your skin was delicate, like a retracted confession.”
And on a whole different plane, there’s also Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (pictured), which is a moving piece of fiction in its own right — full of layers of nuance, shadow, and suggestion — quite literally layers, because it was cut out of Bruno Shulz’s book The Street of Crocodiles. This ‘making of’ video where they show the book’s printing and binding process is pretty amazing in itself.
More internet fictions weekly! Hit me up at @jbwolfers or jbwolfers@gmail.com if you see any bangers out there in the deep web.
penguin plays rough 
Posted on January 24, 2014
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