Getting in your own way

It's hard to think or at least to mold thoughts productively--and when I write the word productively I mean transforming raw material, like an allusion or an observation, into something digested into a synthesized contribution that is, like a metaphor, something that juxtaposes the raw material with other first-person points or external precedents like works of art or other sociocultural situations--when peripherally watching a cartoon like Creature Cases or Youtube videos by someone like Jettkuso. In this case it is a faculty meeting. I feel like Pnin or Kohler or some other grouch who feels above it all but also is vitally dependent on the latent unprofessionalism of academia for their distracted sense of superiority. Or, for instance, cooking dinner, like now, while my children are screaming and bickering. For some reason, the desire to make some writing emerges, in a moment I know will be fruitless. I was reading about Isaac Newton earlier. It's pretty wild what kind of free time money and the patriarchy will give to certain privileged individuals. Was he intelligent? Most certainly. Was his daughter constantly pushing furniture around and ignoring the Gabby's Dollhouse movie she demanded while his son was moaning about messing up a Lego set. I'm just going to assume he didn't have children, or if he did he most likely foisted them on their mother. Along those lines I've often mused about how unlikely it is that any man in the U.S. congress has ever changed a diaper. Not they are doing anything important with the luxury of not spending time on quotidian mundanities. It's arguable whether I did anything important. I wrote a few books before having kids. I can say with some reasonable certainty that I didn't actively participate in making average peoples' lives shittier. But on the topic of simple cognitive freedom, without constant intrusion of bullshit, I rarely have the bandwidth to unspool some gray matter, so I think frenetically, generically, on vague and superficial aspects of current undertakings. 

A list of possible book titles:

  Reference Systems

  Fictional Reference Frame

  Reference Frame

  Fictitious Reference Frames

  Frame Indifference

  Objective Frame Indifference

  Material Frame Indifference

Back in Charlie's room listening to Beethoven.

"Simply put, the concept is the idea that constitutive laws describing the behaviour of a material (for example the relationship between stress and strain) should be independent of the frame of reference or the motion of the observer." How is this pertinent to literature? Well typically it is not. The subjectivity of the observer has been the crucial variable in fiction throughout its history. In poetry somewhat less. Even an instance of what we call an unreliable narrator is an assertion about the effect of the observer in the content/truth/reality of the situation. Is it simply because the observer (author) or their surrogate (even as a 3rd person cog delineated by a narrator) is placed into the text? Is that an admission that observing this particular situation was a choice and not simply the raw occurrence? Can a raw occurrence be embodied in text? Automatic writing you say? Some kind of digitally generative text? Perhaps yes to both of these, but it's really incumbent on the subject matter isn't it. Perhaps it's the prioritization of a POV, which seems to be inescapable in fiction, that doesn't support the principle of material frame indifference. Robbe-Grillet certainly argued for such distance from the text, but could not help himself from populating his books with sicko stand-ins for himself. Everywhere throughout literary history we've prioritized human subjectivity. Animal Farm, you say? You can't tart up a pig and call Napoleon and say it's not a human. Maybe the problem is earth in general. It's too familiar. But science fiction suffers from the same crippling predilections. Just look at the aliens in Star Trek. They're just all dudes with stupid heads. Even when an author strives to move beyond the scope of our experience they trick out the situation in the same hackneyed anthropomorphic societal claptraps (the Cheela who live on a neutron star in Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward for instance, are hokey af). Maybe we need to look outside fiction altogether. Nonfiction? Most nonfiction has some kind of editorial project associated with it. Hell, even scientific papers describe their methods. Could it be that we can't get out of our own way? No matter how hard we try, humans fuck everything up just by looking at it. 

Cloaca maxima

When there is work to be done but no work and no method is imminent, just an itch of boredom, or a feeling of uselessness, a sense that too much time has passed without concretizing, just slipping away into experiences like sitting on the curb with the kiddos eating popsicles, the first lawnmowing of the spring, watching the dog meet a new friend and flip the fuck out, and acting like they've just slipped away, but here they are enumerating themselves at if to say "fuck you for deligitimizing us." Which is fine. I stand by it. I'm not working on anything that requires me to be human. I think in this situation it is helpful to make a list. A list of what? What about a list of different types of lists that would be interesting to make. I don't know how many there were, but a lot of my time writing Massive was spent making lists: forms of concrete garden statuary, Russian snack food, people referenced in the Divine Comedy, all of the Emmanuelle films (and rip-offs), all the cities on the longest straight line that can be drawn entirely on land, all of the substances listed in Antoine Lavoisier's writings, Russian firearms, words containing the zh sound... that's all that spring to mind immediately. Now listening to 1000 AIRPLANES ON THE ROOF in the dark. The dog is snoring and Charlie is definitely asleep. I make lists of lists. A list of things to make lists about. Forgivably bad works of art. Last meals of real condemned people. Good options for last meals. Sea mounts by height above the seafloor. Movies where people call their vehicles 'trucks' when they are obviously not trucks. 'Very special episode' topics. Shades of brown. Lists. 6 degrees of Jm J Bullock. Books with unreliable narrators. Televised deaths. Words that start with K and end with B. Slang words for male and female genitals (or gennies). Spin-off television shows. Ways to pass the time without electricity. Things that cannot be viably made from plastic. Discovered and verified exoplanets. Shapes whose area is larger than the circle that circumscribes them. Canonical sandwiches. Novels written by more than 2 authors. Ways of organizing your home library. Things that have disappeared from society in the 21st century. Animals that secrete things as a defense. Types of brick bonding patterns. Fungal infections and their symptoms. Things that would be strange to buy in bulk (recalling the hubbub on the first Amazon "Prime Day" when a large drum of sex lube was highlighted for sale). Cities with streets named after famous racists. A family tree of Norwegian black metal. A list of lists whose subjectmatter spectrum and overall tone are enough to establish a complex character. And the moment the thrill of the list-making is exhausted, so too is the catalyzing power it had to add words to the screen. Those kinda textual kickstarts are deals with the devil. They sound amusing until the next thing you know you're chained to a rock being eaten by eagles. 

I love pareidolia. This map of the Cloaca Maxima has a pretty obvious dick and balls embedded in it. 

Concerning my previous concern (under a separate cover), chickens are literally buttfuckers.

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