Journey into the unknown

A tornado warning, usually meaning that said type of storm had been spotted and yall gtf underground, drove us into my office in the basement. 2 sides are full height concrete walls. The 2 framed sides are both 18 feet inboard from other concrete walls. Diesel the dog has joined us. Actually by now the ladies have returned upstairs. I don't think a tornado had actually been spotted. Big walls of storms always break up when they get near Clinton Lake and part miraculously around Lawrence like carwash flaps sloshing around an SUV. I really want to take my shitty old truck to a carwash and see the employees flip out that the bed is full of compost and has been for over a year. It's petrified, buddy. Relax. This phenomenon has been called "The Tonganoxie Split." It's named after a city 25 miles east of here that is said to have mystical powers that deflect storms to protect Kansas City. Why you'd protect Kansas City is beyond me. And furthermore, the split more regularly happens around Clinton Lake where I am in a nearby basement. You know what else is right by Clinton Lake? You guessed it: Stull, Kansas. One of the purported gateways to hell and popular Spring Break destination of Satan. Slade Craven didn't try to crash an airliner into Tonganoxie did he? Slade Craven saved everyone on that plane I'll have you know. It was a lookalike that hijacked the plane. You think I don't know that? I've seen TURBULENCE III more than I've seen my family since COVID. It was just a cool-sounding shorthand to describe the scenario without having to unpack a bunch of pointless plot mechanics to people who think Yorgos Lanthanides is an artiste. Stull is much more mystical. Now it is just Charlie, Diesel, and myself down here. Boy basement! Charlie is feverishly drawing each step in Elsa's transformation from newly crowned queen of Arendelle to self-exiled ice queen. 

I was reading TOTAL DESTRUCTION for a minute but then was like hey I already wrote this. Why not keep writing? You have a blog, right? I probably wrote 8 words on the Jupiter book in about 45 minutes earlier today. Why Jupiter? The fictional person who's curious about my life asks? Several years ago, probably on the now defunct @trefryesque account, I queried about science fiction books without people in them. I like science. I like fiction. But the authors who seem to be drawn to the genre seem to have a pretty tenuous grasp on subtlety and realistic characterization. Take for instance some of the names these writers come up with: Duncan Idaho, Blast Hardcheese, Bastard Noise, Moist Lipwig, Archimandrite Luseferous, Big McLargeHuge, Arvid Engen, Sergeant Major Major Major, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hiro Protagonist. Not surprisingly these are all dudes. Women fare far worse, essentially being ogled at best or factory bred. The first writers' crit group I joined in Atlanta had a dude writing a scifi book about a guy who crash lands on a planet of women. Lord. You can imagine where it goes from here. He fixes their cable? If you're looking for a genre to sink your slide-rule into, why clog it with cardboard humans? I got a few responses. STAR MAKER by Olaf Stapledon stands out. Also B.R. Yeager recommended reading a Warhammer 40k players' guide, which was great. Still these were from the POV of somewhat living entities. I grew up with a father who was an academic scientist. I've read his papers. I still read scientific papers. I mostly don't understand them. I miss that feeling when I read novels. The attraction of Jupiter is that the human mind, the human storehouse of experience, the context of Earth cannot help us elaborate on what is going on beneath the clouds of Jupiter. Even the data we have is largely theoretical. So how can you write about it? I still don't even know. I've started with the things we do know. At the moment that is the rings that surround the planet. But once I get beneath the cloud deck, I anticipate the text will need to come apart quite significantly. Not that it would be illegible or disobedient, but it's values would need to unshoulder the desperate anthropocentrism that has characterized literature for its entire history. I don't even know. I will think about it when and if I get there. 

I Wanna Womp

I wanna womp! Set to the Twisted Sister song. So here I am thinking about how to express my feelings in a potential meme I could make with Dee Snider holding a big greasy animal bone and me crossing out "Rock" and scribbling "Womp" over it. The fact is, fuck. In between writing the "the fact is" and having to write the next phrase I was asked to fetch some apple juice while I sit next to the tub with my son in it. And in walking to the kitchen and back realizing that "the fact is" is a cliche, a stock phrase, something that I've done my best to try to avoid in my writing. Womping can liberate a lot of things in a writing practice but jesus titty I still need to have some dignity. What I was trying to get at was that since finishing Total Destruction, which was a fucking frenzy that somehow resulted in hundreds of pages written in one summer... but since then, and since that ellipsis I drained the tub, which you have to hold the stopper up manually so the pressure doesn't sink it, certainly a metaphor for parenting or writing or something else equally banal and repetitive, and have also put Charlie to bed and am sitting in the dark on his bed listening to Philip Glass's "Solo Piano" CD that I bootleged onto a blank Tonie several years ago and is one of maybe 4 chunks of music that he listens to while falling asleep. Another of which is Beethoven's 9th. I've listened to it with him hundreds of times. I thought maybe he'd enjoy seeing it performed so we drove to Wichita last year. We didn't make it through the first movement but I was glad to break the cultural ice. "Wichita Sutra Vortex" is playing. Glass, not Ginsberg. That summer I blew my proverbial word wad womping in the dark at bedtime like this, and like this, generally writing about myself or my interests. No topic was barred. Off-piste was a prerogative. And it set me free, I guess you'd say, from the idleness of being incredibly ill. But what did I lose in re-indenturing myself to the habit of constantly working? The other kind of freedom that promotes napping and watching Michael Chrichchtchon-directed films in the middle of the day. It was freedom to be someone else who didn't give a shit about time withering away. And busting my ass to get entrenched in the work again, it was thrilling because it was just a runaway train, but, permit me the Homeric simile, as it pulled into the station, what was left was the bureaucracy of the kind of work my writing practice had previously been on a collision course with, that being composition so strained, so alienating, so turgid, that there is very little joy in it. There is satisfaction, pride in doing something nobody has ever done, but also the realization that nobody has done it because nobody would want to and nobody would want to read it. So I find myself missing the womp and it's frivolous messiness as I trudge inward to the core of Jupiter where my hopes, as with the secret hopes of most writers, are that it will crush literature altogether, forever. 

Transferable textures

I've talked about this before but I'm waiting for my daughter to admit she needs a nap. Do you listen to music when you write? I do. I can't work effectively without it. I generally listen to metal, usually caveman slam or black metal that's got really suppressed vocals. Maybe play that with Merzbow over it. There was a stretch where Id open like 5 YouTube windows and play a different album on each at the same time. 

5 YOUTUBE WINDOWS

Part of that was working in public and not being able to bear hearing the sound of human voices. I don't like seeing people gesture when they talk either. I don't like seeing the shadow of a person gesturing while they talk. I pull my hat down so I can't see over the top of my computer. I enter the work. Immerse in the texture. 

Undifferentiated noise. No signal. 

Why? I think it's the kind of texture I aspire to in work. Whether it's writing or design I always seem to seek a granular, repetitive, somewhat syntactic process. The periodicity of the rhythms of the outside world is too long to creep into the subconscious. I think the best books are those that you forget you're reading, and not because you're "transported" to Hogwarts, but because something about the text and its texture slips from the activity of reading to the passivity of being. So I work under conditions that seem as though they themselves might seep into my process. I look at that artificial noise as a kind of smeared metronome that I have to find the structure for in my work. If you have the misfortune of having me design your book I'll probably try to turn it into that. 

collaborative processes part 2

Given my background, i approach writing and designing and publishing and working with authors, where possible, in as collaborative a way as possible, there have been some inside the Castle books designed in house that are simply a close transcription to the authors intention as possible, perhaps they had a distinct vision but needed our skills for technical realization, and then there are other books that are much more about a therapeutic prying forth of latent paratextual attributes that the author perhaps was unconscious of, this usually involves asking some very simple questions about the proportions of the book (aspect ratio), typeface references or goals, page detailing (numbers, running titles, situating textblock on page, etc), and of course cover vibe... 

These questions typically lead down allusory pathways or have to do with how these mechanisms can inflect the presentation of the text, a recent example is Joanna Walsh's AUTOBIOLOGY, the book is squat in proportion although not square with the textblock conventional if not slightly narrow in proportion, sitting in a wider than normal page this textblock takes on a sense of verticality that promotes a sense of downward momentum meant to echo or celebrate the relentlessly scrolling nature of the digitally generated text, something i am struggling with right now is the swiping nature of tiktok for McManus's book culled from audio transcriptions of tiktok. What does swiping look like in a book. Superficially or seems like the book form its already a swipe left kinda form, so how do you use the form of the book to make the reader conscious of the fact that the book is the precursor to the digital experiences they now take for granted. 

These are questions. But even in the most design centric books, like Grant's giant full color beast, there are agreed upon terms. In any collaborative environment the terms seem crucial. In the experimental architectural practice I had for a decade + our agreement was a methodology of "obstructive collaboration." It involved a lot of tennis-like blind back and forth with the idea that the thing you get back is aggressively affecting your contribution. It resulted in very odd stuff like this SRO hotel that was built on the site of the Pantheon in Rome. 

The ITC 2: REVENGE OF THE CASTLE FREAK is a collaboration of its own sort that I'm working on now. It's interesting because there was a set of parameters that Kyle Booten built for the generation of the text, both by authors and by AI, but the actual editing approach I'm taking is a completely distinct thing that looks at all the content of the authors and trying to find something to do with it. It feels like Burroughs cut-up meets Phil Spector putting together Let It Be... (2 murderers?)

I have worked with people in the past, whether it's through literature or architecture that simply didn't understand collaboration in even the most elementary sense. It isn't even about ego, because some of the most egotistical musicians to ever walk the earth can still jam with someone. I think it is a strange limbo between talent and ego, where neither are in control, a middling defensiveness that is prone to shutting off the outside world as if art its something pure, like a fully armored Athena busting into the world like the Koolaid man. I prefer a mess.

THE LAST TRAIN by Ryan Madej

There is something incredibly familiar about THE LAST TRAIN by Ryan Madej... not that it is derivative, it is not, it's very distinctive, more a familiarity to the world that it inhabits or perhaps the world that it constructs, because although it's a novel, fiction, and there is certainly a narrative unfolding or undulating, it seems far more content in allowing the narrative to be a mechanism for gazing at the world, like the narrative is a means of perception, like those illfated google glass things, the narrative is almost a walking tour, but not in the manner of something exhaustive like Butor's DESCRIPTION OF SAN MARCO, trying to specify or delineate, because Madej's perception is fragmentary, fragmented by what i could only call academic references (of his world, not ours (think Borges)), yet rather than feeling fragmentary these provide a sense of connective tissue, imagine you're walking along reading an encyclopedia and glancing up and down at the city and people around you, the information, or the way Madej articulates and situates the information makes it objectlike, this is the character of the prose, deceptively tale-like, but read with crossed eyes, what does he do with this, well that is where another stratum of familiarity is deposited, this physical world is very familiar to our own, this might sound derp, but it is familiar, not identical, there is a strange parallelness to it that i started to attribute to the frame of reference of the book, much in the way a vagrant might perceive the exact same city we are perceiving in a very different way, their immediate needs are different, the way they use and feel connected to the city are different, their landmarks are different, they coexist with ours yet they are in some way skew, Madej allows those skew landmarks and details to arise our come into focus over an otherwise blurry vista of a familiar North American city, and with this sense of skewness, this mechanism of distorted or selective perception, is deposited the final stratum of familiarity, in an era where literature is valued for its sincerity and fidelity, where the unfiltered experience and reflection of the author is the prize we seek, Madej is scratching the itch of mythologizing (think of the overlay of ULYSSES on Joyce's own life armature), dare I say, fictionalizing, what seems very possibly to be a series or convolution of his own experience (or very likely not, i dunno but that's how i enjoyed reading it) used as an armature to tell a more vast and dilating tale, to depict a more lucid environment, and to amplify or caricature readerly emotions and perceptions, because in the end, a book should be about a reader's experience yes? not just a platform to concretize a human presence distinct from the reader. 

buy THE LAST TRAIN here: https://www.lulu.com/shop/ryan-madej/the-last-train/paperback/product-nrg45w.html?page=1&pageSize=4

language lust pt 2

2 points make the prose of slam crucial to my contemporary language lust, (2) diction and (1) whatever rhetorical terms mean leaving words out or having clumsy grammar, i should say i never really read the lyrics, maybe i should, just the song titles mostly, and perhaps the compactness of a title, and sequence of titles, it lends a spare compactness that the lyrics do not because even in the shaky command of English the lyrics still frequently use articles and are not as charming, there is something so strong about a text fragment just being a string of nouns, shane Christmass talking to Bielecki saying he went back through a manuscript deleting adjectives (i think)... something akin to that sort of frustrating read, something about that stripping although unintentionally in the esl of the greatest slam lyricists, is a way of taking away the communicative intent of language and placing it in a pure visual concentrate shot straight into the part of your brain that doesn't care what things mean, 

My dear poetry teacher in grad school (oh to be the only literature professor in a freestanding architecture school) aino paasonen gently urged us to use specificity as thickening agent, i recall only an example, very simple, instead of "tree" say "Jacaranda"... of course my excessive lust for text potential turns that into a fascination with jargon, carcass was derided (by morons) for lyrics that were essentially copied out of medical textbooks, were they trying to make sense? did they know what they were saying? Doubtful doubtful, could you tell what they were saying lol of course not... what mattered was the juxtaposition of this insane indecipherable text with the music, gesamskunstwerk of atomization, each freestanding piece is resonating, so with the carcass stage set, we have all sorts of wild improvising on that model, my (not so secret) favorite of which is Drain of Impurity (see part 1 https://incastellated.blogspot.com/2022/11/language-lust-pt-1.html?m=1), the science fiction element added to the grotesque takes the diction way beyond the human, and batu's esl (he's Turkish) twists it just that sweet bit further by gloriously smashing subject/verb agreement & improvising on parts of speech, each song title is almost like a simple noun (made of 6 or 7 words) like a chunk, irreducible, meant to be gazed upon like a metaphor for language itself, like a stone of words, crushing your skull

he is in his own hell

I am not a trained writer.  I've never read a craft book. I've read theories on the potential of literature (not of writing), perhaps to my lifelong detriment.

One of the oulipo cats, Benabou? Queneau? Actually the mathematician guy... said something along the lines of,  in advocating for constrained writing, working within an established set of rules is better than being subject to a received set of rules you're unaware of, and as a writer to a certain extent i understand this, establishing a framework for the manner in which language will be performed, almost like the key of a musical piece, less like a sonata (or whatever a constrained musical form is, i have no clue), not prescriptive as much as chromatic, yes that seems crucial as long as it is in service of the project and not some unseen arbitrary ideal, perhaps the language should be performed like noise, the project is one of grating monotonous high intensity, perhaps it should be performed like a Richter squeegee painting, what are the language analogs to these, how can one be allusive without namechecking, how do you employ or misuse grammar in a rhetorical manner to foster that analog, what is the appropriate diction for that goal, so frequently language is seen as in service of something else, the something the writer is trying to tell (which makes show don't tell all the more hilarious to me) and the language is formed toward that goal under the mutated aegis of some hemingway handmedown notions of craft, sure there is a throttle in there, rachet up the tension, spareness, obliqueness, but never too much, although craft is presented (in the craft racket) as being a sort of constraint (since when is subjective standards of beauty a practical constraint), it it's in fact more the set of rules that you truly have no awareness of. If craft was solved how would the charlatans keep writing new craft how to books. No. It is far more valuable for a thoughtful writer to show through their specific use of language, because writing it's some thing you look at, to develop congruence of the langauage form with the specific piece, and reject some arbitrary standard for success. 

Getting people to read it... now that's a different problem.