Corduroy Mansions: The implications of publishing an online novel

This paper examines the online publication of the serial novel, Corduroy Mansions, by Alexander McCall Smith, as well as other online novels, and their implications for writing, publishing and the cultivation of a global reading audience.

[This paper was delivered at the 7th International Conference on the Book in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Oct. 18, 2009.]

On September 21, 2009, the Telegraph Media Group embarked on the publication of a second serial novel, The Dog Who Came in from the Cold, by Alexander McCall Smith. Like Corduroy Mansions, the author’s and the UK’s first publisher-supported online novel, the sequel is a complex production that makes use of most of the media formats available on the Web. The site includes illustrations by Scottish artist Iain McIntosh of the novel’s characters and setting, organized in professionally rendered graphics within the familiar telegraph.co.uk page layout; downloadable audio readings of the daily installments; and links to related sites. One link to the home page of McCall Smith’s official website. And another to a Google map of the novel’s London setting (the previous novel had a link to a YouTube video of McCall Smith, bareheaded, walking through a perfect weather day in rainy Pimlico). There are also links to an ex-pat book club and to the Telegraph Bookstore. A summary of Corduroy Mansions on the site provides a kind of preface to this second novel, and an appraisal distilled by the Telegraph staff from readers’ comments continues the first novel’s precedent for reader interaction, not only with the Telegraph but also with McCall Smith himself.

All these forms of online promotion have been developed over the past decade through individual and corporate practitioners’ use of the Internet. Online novels themselves have been on the Web for some time—if not from the Internet’s Big Bang then at least since the beginning of its Jurassic age—and they are part of the vexatious issues constituting the Sturm und Drang that has plagued corporate publishing and individual copyright and intellectual property rights on the Web.

The e-novel’s lack of material form and the general unruliness of the Web make them a capitalist’s nightmare. For theoreticians and academics, the format has quixotic paradigm written all over it. But the e-book’s most obvious feature is that it eliminates the author’s—and the reader’s—need for a publisher and all the paraphernalia that goes with making a printed book. Unlike the Internet, the bound book promises sustained endurance and duration in the material world. The fact that e-books lessen the need for a publishing elite that mediates between author and reader unburdens them from the detailed work of corporate publishing while contributing to its economic floundering.

The Internet is filled with websites for online novels, such as www.onlinenovels.net, which claims to “provide links to any and all novels, short stories, and poetry that can be read or downloaded on the Internet.” The novels on this site, which I’m using as characteristic examples of online publications, take several forms, from blogs with serial entries to downloadable and compact e-books. Even in the blog format, however, these novels are, for the most part, structured to follow the traditional form and concepts of the twentieth-century print novel.

Occasionally, in the supplemental information available around an e-novel, the author will address issues of online publishing. Novelist Cory Doctorow writes about the issue of copyright on his website for Little Brother, his free downloadable e-book: “E-books are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it’s in their nature. … Hard drives aren’t going to get bulkier, more expensive, or less capacious. Networks won’t get slower or harder to access. If you’re not making art with the intention of having it copied, you’re not really making art for the twenty-first century.”

Doctorow redefines e-novel publication as a practice in which reproduction is given over to the reader, and then makes a leap of understanding in use of the Internet as a medium for art—one dependent on multiplicity rather than uniqueness. Multiplicity extends not only to the copying of manuscripts but also to the participation of the author, as an abstract concept. Potential readers sort through material and select by either author or genre. Since most online writers are unknown to either the print or the cyberspace reading community, selection by a reader is based on descriptions of the book, or rather, on the genre the book seems to inhabit. The practice is similar to choosing books from a section of a bookstore or library with all the high-profile writers’ work pulled. Shifting text selection to genre rather than author is reminiscent of a time before nineteenth-century Romanticism, which brought an emphasis on the artist as a unique and gifted solitary, and before the twentieth century’s emphatic legal institutionalization of intellectual property.

Mainstream publishing has both used and misused this shift—wavering between conservative possessiveness and liberal attempts to redirect and adapt to the Web’s amorphous and exponential growth of immediate community. Time-Warner and J. K. Rowling have been extremely aggressive in their development of licensing for the Harry Potter books and in their control of copyright, going so far as to threaten legal action against fans who have used Rowling’s characters to develop their own Potter stories in online fanzines—a switch from the fanzine policies of American television and movies, where writers scrupulously avoid using fanzine ideas for shows. The attempts by Time-Warner to assert provenance over Rowling’s property within this community of mostly young fans were thwarted when some more savvy Web users brought the news media into the fray.

These property issues reinforce the notion that a text is not inviolable. But for online authors such as Doctorow, the use and reuse of text found online is a secondary issue. He writes, “For me—for pretty much every writer—the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.”

The HarperCollins website Authonomy (www.authonomy.com) uses the Internet to support the costly publication process entrenched in the publishing industry by putting editorial responsibility for the development of novels in the hands of authors and the peer groups they develop online through their postings. Shared manuscript readings and commentary are an active though not obligatory practice throughout this online community. Publisher-run sites like Authonomy also put in place a kind of ad hoc marketing study by asking participants to evaluate one another’s writing skills and book popularity.

This sense of developing and maintaining community is the earmark of many online groups, even those not openly connected with fiction and literary writing, such as Facebook and Twitter. At the moment, though, publishers like Time-Warner and HarperCollins continue to consider the making of the book as a material object and physical possession the final stage in publication of a text for its widest possible audience.

The Internet’s first publisher-sponsored online serial novel, Naomi, by horror and fantasy writer Douglas Clegg, was launched in May 1999, when the Web was only a few years old. Clegg continues to produce online serial novels, like Naomi, that are free and downloadable and available by subscription. How he writes his books seems to vary little from the standard fiction model; however, it is clear that Clegg views his work as a creative act scheduled primarily by inspiration. To his subscribers, he writes: “I will send out The Locust as each episode is finished. That means, ‘not like clockwork,’ but ‘as soon as I can’ … The episodes may go out twice a week, once a week, or even twice a month. It’s [or, writing is] not like delivering groceries.”

Stephen King was the first high-profile best-selling author to write a book that had the Web as its primary publishing format, but his attempts to use the medium have been spottily successful at best and bumbling at worst. Like Clegg, he used the writing model developed in print publication, which he has practiced for some 40 years; the only change was the medium the book would occupy. In 2000, one year after Naomi, King posted the novella Riding the Bullet online for free downloading; Amazon pulled the book not long after, reportedly because customer demand exceeded the online bookseller’s ability to meet it. Simon and Schuster now carries Riding the Bullet as a $2.50 e-book for downloading. In March 2002, the story was included in the hardcover collection of King’s stories, Everything’s Eventual. It is currently available in hardcover, softcover, e-book, audio, and Kindle formats.

King continues to flirt with online mega-bookseller Amazon. His latest e-book, Ur, was released in early February 2009 to coincide with the launch of Amazon’s upgraded Kindle reader—an electronic device that Amazon advertising describes physically as “thin as most magazines” and “lighter than a typical paperback,” and functionally as “reads like real paper.”

Ur is about a professor who receives a supernatural Kindle that gives him information from other eras. One reader of Ur in Kindle format, J. Gremillion, commented on the Amazon site, “Numerous times throughout the book the professor is told to ‘Just read books on the computer like everyone else’ … King also goes into lengthy detail describing … how awesome all the Kindle features were … You cannot get through more than 2–3 paragraphs without feeling like you’re reading an infomercial for Amazon.”

According to Ralph Vicinanza, King’s New York-based agent, Ur will eventually go to print, even though Kindle “sales of Ur reached ‘five figures’ after barely three weeks on the market.”⁷ Ultimately, however, Kindle and competing devices account for no more than 1 percent of overall book sales.

King’s most controversial online publishing adventure, however, was The Plant. In January 2000, King offered the book as a work-in-progress on his website. Again, the idea was simply to change the means of distribution by eliminating print and the corporate editorial and production services around print. The problem was how to ensure that readers paid for the book—a problem that had sprung up around the distribution of Riding the Bullet. To prevent copyright infringement, King offered the book unencrypted and in installments. Each installment cost $1, and the total cost of the book was set at $13, no matter what number of pages were eventually written. King vowed to drop the project if the percentage of paying readers fell below 75 percent of the readership.

After three installments, King and his publisher decided to double the cost of the fourth installment to $2, at the same time doubling the size of the installment to 54 pages. Paying readers dropped to 46 percent of those downloading the fourth installment, and the number of downloads decreased overall as well. During the experiment, King posted his hopes for The Plant and gave an accounting of the number of “copies” sold in the message section of his official website. The last installment of the unfinished novel was published on December 18, 2000, leaving those who had paid in advance for future installments with unfulfilled promises and, judging by some posted comments, feeling bereft. JRM posted the following message on Sept. 7, 2009: “For the love of all your fans. PLEASE finish this story as a novel!” Other loyal fans stated that they would wait, and pay, for The Plant, in whatever format it appeared. King claimed that other more pressing projects had taken over his schedule but that he would complete the project in the fullness of time. A shift in creative focus later became King’s final defense for abandoning the project midstream.

In his comments about The Plant, King criticized online publication in general—or, rather, criticized online readership: “I see three large problems. One is that most Internet users seem to have the attention span of grasshoppers. Another is that Internet users have gotten used to the idea that most of what’s available to them on the Net is either free or should be. The third—and biggest—is that book-readers don’t regard electronic books as real books.” It’s unusual for an author to so directly criticize his readers—or grasshoppers. Also unusual was King’s unabashed recounting of his sales of The Plant, which clearly indicated that the e-book was an experiment in publishing rather than in fiction and that King’s concerns were financial rather than artistic.

An op-ed piece in the New York Times suggested that ultimately the failure of The Plant came about because it deviated from his plot-driven writing, which appeals to readers based on the feelings of horror and anxiety it elicits and which demands a quick and continuous read or resolution. King produces “suspense of a kind that cannot be drawn out over months. It is far better consumed in a single sitting, like a bag of hot popcorn or a bowl of cold cereal,” the article asserted.

If we assume that capitalism will prevail in discovering a means for online writing to be profitable and that it is not the primary occupation of writers to discover how to manipulate the profitability of such writing, the questions to be addressed by and for writers are: what kind of writing is suitable for the Web, and how does the Web dictate how writers write?

No one has suggested that Alexander McCall Smith should be writing something other than serial novels. On the contrary, the description of him as the “Dickens for the digital age” has become a critical cliché. His first serial novels—the 44 Scotland Street series—appeared in print in 2004, published by the newspaper the Scotsman, and were later put into hard- and softcover print editions. In September 2008, when the Edinburgh-based author began his first online novel, Corduroy Mansions, it was published on the online site of the London newspaper the Daily Telegraph. He was brought to the Telegraph by the former Scotsman editor, Iain Martin, who had joined the Telegraph Media Group in 2006. The publication rights for Corduroy Mansions were split between the Telegraph Media Group, which had online rights; the Scottish publisher Polygon, which published the hardcover edition; and McCall Smith’s UK publisher Little, Brown Book Group, which held the UK paperback rights.

Almost every day for 20 weeks, McCall Smith published a 1,000-word episode, concluding the novel on February 13, 2009, with its 100th episode. Reportedly, the author wrote the installments as the days passed, the novel developing through a process in which the readers were able to read the book’s installments as immediately as they were written. But because the Telegraph Media Group was recording the downloadable audio files in groups of 15 installments, McCall Smith maintained a lead of some 25 episodes between writing and online posting.

Clearly the writing of this novel varies greatly from preceding e-novels by best-selling authors, if only because of its harrowing deadlines, which preclude the caprices of inspiration. McCall Smith followed a similar practice in print when he wrote the 44 Scotland Street novels originally serialized in the Scotsman. Those ran for more than five years, appearing every weekday for six months of the year.

To write that series, however, the author was aided by knowledge of his hometown, Edinburgh, which allowed for embroideries of place and setting. All of McCall Smith’s writing is aided by the fact that he is a deeply well-educated man with a wide range of social and cultural expertise.

McCall Smith has claimed that serial writing with this demanding frequency becomes “addictive.” Notoriously verbal, the author is known to write between 3,000 and 4,000 words per day. In a January 15, 2009, interview he stated, “I realise that I am very fortunate in the way in which I write without redrafting … I find that I do not have to think a great deal in advance about what I am going to write; I sit down, and it just seems to come. It is a little bit like being in a trance.”

The publishers’ editorial staff, however, shared the pressure of the schedule, as it transformed each installment into a flawless text. Telegraph Assistant Comments Editor, Ceri Radford, wrote in her September 23, 2008, column, “The daily podcasts will be turned into an audiobook by Little, Brown next year without any anticipated re-recordings, so we’re committing ourselves to turning out a final, edited version of Corduroy Mansions to rolling deadlines. We quickly arranged a loop so that the chapters pass through editors at Little, Brown, and the recording studio, before ending up with the online arts team here.”

Part of the writing process for Corduroy Mansions, and an aspect that differs most radically from the usual writing and publishing of a novel, was that it was ostensibly interactive: readers were encouraged to email suggestions to the author about the novel and the directions they thought it should take; their suggestions were recognized and responded to. Because of the production schedule, however, there was a time gap between when suggestions were sent and when they could be integrated into the story, making the assimilation of readers’ ideas into the plot less practical. Nonetheless, McCall Smith emphasized that he listened to readers’ comments: “I take them seriously,” he stated. And he especially listened if readers protested that “one of the characters is unsympathetic.” More than in his print novels, he found that “readers have an emotional stake in the [online] characters,” a phenomenon that he ascribed to the immediacy of the Web: “It changes the relationship of the readers to the characters. It increases the reader’s sense of ownership of the characters.”

The fact that McCall Smith’s novels are serial, meaning that they tell a story through smaller stories presented over time, with few shifts in the direction of time—no flashbacks or flashforwards—makes them suitable for reading on the Web. But his novels are not serial in the same manner that Dickens’ were. Although Dickens wrote his novels in sections that were published in print monthly, the stories were highly structured, leading to one conclusion or resolution, whether or not Dickens had committed himself to that conclusion at the beginning of his writing. McCall Smith’s writing is episodic, but the stories do not necessarily lead to a final conclusion. Rather they are strung like shiny beads on a string.

The regularity of postings, the evenness of their length and the similarity of structure among episodes that deal with an event within a somewhat rambling text create a basic symmetry in Corduroy Mansions, which most people find pleasing. It is neither too rigid nor too random. This basic formalism, when coupled with accessibility and the ability to respond and comment instantly, sets up a simple scaffolding over which more complex language, ideas, and actions can be draped. The security of the structure trumps the amorphous irregularity of the Web.

In developing his approach to the serial novel, McCall Smith’s practice was to “let it [the novel] go wherever it wished to go.” In the writing of 44 Scotland Street, a clear pattern developed within the simpler thousand-word structure: three chapters would deal with a character and his or her dilemmas, then the next installment would switch to another character. The result was a group of stories “running parallel and contemporaneously.” One main issue is addressed in each chapter, and within that chapter the prose can “meander.” This meandering gives “an intimate feel” to the writing, so that the reader feels “caught in a bit of a conversation.” It’s an organic form that follows of the flow of thought without becoming, like stream of consciousness, locked into the writer’s point of view. As McCall Smith comments, “writing comes from the subconscious.” This approach to the novel form runs against the current logic of literature, in which no detail is accidental and every incident builds toward a conclusion. A meandering flow is an aspect of journal writing, however, and the journal’s online sister, the blog.

McCall Smith used an episodic narrative style in his hugely successful first series of novels, The Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, although the episodes there are longer, giving the novels a more leisurely pace. Unlike the typical genre mystery, the novels deal with small mysteries that are interwoven and solved throughout the book. The standard huge and bloody crime, often followed by other bloody crimes that are related or subordinate to the initial murder, which is solved in a final turnabout and revelation at the end of the book, simply does not exist in the series.

What ties the Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency stories together is the setting of Botswana and the personality of the lead character, Precious Ramotswe, as a woman of Botswana. All of McCall Smith’s series have followed this commitment to place and character: the 44 Scotland Street series and the Isabel Dalhousie series, both set in Edinburgh, the Professor Dr. Von Igelfeld series, set in the rarified metaworld of academia, and Corduroy Mansions, set in the Pimlico district of London.

Place is the overarching narrative of McCall Smith’s books—it impels the characters. For Corduroy Mansions, the selection of Pimlico was suggested by Iain Martin: setting the novel in London made sense not only because the bulk of the Telegraph readership is based in London but also because many people living abroad have traveled to and have memories of London. Corduroy Mansions is set not in a city as much as in a small corner of that city, a house in a district where groups of strangers live tangential lives to one another. That this would have great appeal to a global community, in which individuals are both restricted to the local, where they were born, were raised and now live, and yet have wider connections to a community that is without territory or physical surroundings, is understandable. It was common practice in comments on Corduroy Mansions for readers to state where on the planet they lived, to revel in their locality in the midst of global anonymity. In the immaterial world of the Web, place becomes magnetic, and setting an identity.

McCall Smith’s series call attention to character rather than plot. There are few cliffhangers, a plot device Dickens used amply in his serial writing to entice the reader from installment to installment. The cliffhanger has since been used in media adaptations from the earliest TV serials of the ’50s and continues to be a feature of soaps and other TV dramas. How many times was Flash Gordon left in dire straits before the evil Ming? How many times has a soap opera housewife staggered before a revelation at the last second of supposed or real infidelity? The device used by McCall Smith to move the reader from episode to episode is less a cliffhanger and more a hesitation at a crossroads. His characters are everyday folk with everyday concerns muddling through their dilemmas in a kind of post-angst existentialism that has slipped from the avant-garde into the middle-class. The readers, like the characters, may recognize their own questioning in the self-questioning of the characters: “Where is this going?” “What does it mean?” “Is there a conclusion or a closure?”

More likely, though, readers recognize the impulse for storytelling that grips us all in the face of our perpetually separate loved ones and the inscrutability of life. It is the same storytelling that inhabits the world of the campfire and the saloon, in mythologies gone commonplace and confessions made in the therapist’s office.

In this palette of human relationships, narcissism, not murder, becomes the ultimate crime between individuals. Narcissism is often the bloodless crime that stalks the darker sides of McCall Smith’s characters and that confounds them and creates sorrow. The closure of his novels—the resolution of transgression or the abandoning of distress—comes in the final scene, which unites the characters in a celebration of community.

The Telegraph’s Assistant Comments Editor, Ceri Radford, writes, “I like to think of Corduroy Mansions as a microcosm of what the Internet is doing for lovers of literature as a whole: connecting people divided by geography, allowing them to share their interests and exchange ideas.” Though Radford maybe idealistic in her perception, there is some truth in her suggestion. Her vision mirrors McCall Smith’s ongoing consideration of his readers and their desires and his relationship to them as a writer within a community.

In Defense of Difficulty

Adolf Wolfli,
Mental Asylum Bandhain,
1910





A talk given as part of "In Defense of Difficulty" panel at the 2007 AWP conference held in Atlanta, Georgia.

In 1895 a thirty-one-year-old man was sent to Waldau Clinic in Bern, Switzerland, after attempting to sexually molest a three-and-a-half-year-old girl. Judged “mentally ill, unaccountable for his actions,”1 Adolf Wöfli was to live as a patient at the clinic until his death in 1930. An often-violent inmate who was constantly plagued by hallucinations and voices, Wölfli would calm himself by drawing and writing. During his thirty-five years at Waldau he wrote 25,000 pages of text and created over 3,000 illustrations, which he bound into large folio-sized books. Although his work is quantifiable and has been sifted through and examined by a number of experts—both psychiatric and artistic—his position in the world as an artist and a man remains mysterious because of our social need to define and evaluate the visual and verbal work of artists: to place that work in some hierarchy of creative legitimacy.

In his writings on Wölfli, art critic Carter Ratcliff defines the logic behind this hierarchy: “At the apex, stands the genius: he can flirt with madness, even embrace it, so long as familiar definitions of art suffer no substantial change. But madness occupies a place too low for reciprocity. Art can be mad but madness cannot be art.”2

In 1908, after almost ten years at Waldau during which the self-taught artist evolved not only a method of drawing and writing but a set of symbols, icons, and musical notation, Wolfli began his first book: From the Cradle to the Graave. Or, through work and sweat, suffering and ordeals, even through prayer into damnation. In this 2,615 page hand-written narrative Wölfli retells his childhood, and transforms its unbearable realities: his brutal and drunken father’s abandonment, his mother’s inability to keep her children, especially her youngest Adolf, from fierce and shameful poverty, Adolf’s hiring out as a laborer at the age of eight, and his mother’s death when he was nine.

In his retelling of his childhood from the age of two to eight, his family not only remains intact—gaining two imaginary female children—it becomes part of a group of traveling relatives and scientists: the Swiss Hunters and Natural Explorer Traveling Society. Among the travelers are princesses and dignitaries, all humane in their treatment and alliance to the young Adolf, or as he is nicknamed, Doufi. The family travels through the cosmos, and Doufi is able to buy planets as well as countries, which he outfits with a host of utopian structures. His story is filled with lists, for the universe that Wölfli creates is densely populated—like his drawings—with materiality.

“…endless eternity is neither round nor square, has absolutely no limits. On a stretch of absolutely not less than about: 420,000,000 German miles or 1,680,000,000 hours along which, in 1868, with my very own beloved parents, brothers and sisters, friends, under the constant presence of God Almighty the Fatther, I traveled in the infinite spaces of creation by the most manyfold means of transport, as for instance gigantic and majestic carrier, luxury and transport birds, island-mothships, giant-fountains, lightning serpents, omnipotence-moths, etc. etc., always in quite comfortable riding information, I saw during every staar-bright night a chaos of staars of the most manyfold kinds such as the most skillful writer’s hand is unable to describe and explain.”3

Just three years before Wölfli was confined, Henry Darger was born in Chicago. Like Wölfli, he would lose both his parents—his mother through death and his father through illness and poverty—by the time he was eight. When his father entered St. Augustine’s Poor House, Henry was institutionalized in a Catholic boys’ home. A doctor, who claimed that the fractious young Darger’s heart was “in the wrong place,”4 had him transferred to the Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Illinois when he was twelve.

A recluse who attended Mass sometimes four and five times as day, the adult Darger was a janitor at local hospitals. At night, sequestered in his room, he worked on an epic story about an imaginary world in which Christian countries battled to defeat Glandelinia, a country that trafficked in the violently abusive slavery, torture, and murder of children. The heroes of his story were the seven dazzlingly beautiful, often naked and hermaphroditic Vivian girls, who were aided in the child-slavery wars by adult male soldiers and a genus of innocence-loving, butterfly-winged serpents.

During the course of his life Darger would write, illustrate and bind into books over 15,000 pages in The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal.

Filmmaker Jessica Yu, who made a documentary of Darger in 2005, explained the reasons behind making the film In the Realms of the Unreal: “. . . there was something about the combination of strange subject matter and innocent presentation, the total lack of irony in his bizarre imagery, that stuck with me . . . I was drawn to tell his story finally because he created this world of images only for himself. I kept asking myself, ‘Can imagination be enough? Can one replace real human relationships and community with those invented in one’s mind?”5

Darger’s ability to function in the world, no matter how minimally, has been used as an argument for his being a more “legitimate” artist than Wölfli. But in the world of art there is in fact little difference between Wölfli’s madness and Darger’s “innocence.” Both remain on the margins of literature and art.

A more interesting parallel between Darger and Wölfli was their need to move inward, to create an intricate, complex world in which they could somehow heal the injustices that had occurred to them as children. Any writer can identify with this impulse to move inward to create other worlds; it’s an essential imaginative form of the practice, and one that both writers and readers delight in. Perhaps it functions as a form of healing for most of us, if not an exploration of possibilities.

Louis A. Sass, a professor of clinical psychology at Rutgers, brought forth the topic of schizophrenia and literature and art in his meticulous and wide-ranging study, Madness and Modernism. Sass likens the symptoms of the disease to practices of perception and techniques in art developed in the early twentieth century and in use today. He does this, he claims, not to “denigrate” or claim that modernist and post-modernist art is schizophrenic, or to “glorify schizophrenia … as conducive to artistic creativity” but rather to “clarify” what has been named the “quintessential form of madness in our time.”6

Schizophrenia, writes Sass, begins with changes in perception, the first of these is an experience of the external world as an “unreality” in which “Reality seems to be unveiled as never before, and the visual world looks eerie and peculiar—weirdly beautiful, tantalizingly significant, or perhaps horrifying in some insidious but ineffable way.” The perspective includes experiencing the very existence of objects in reality as unbelievable and as fragmented: “objects normally perceived as parts of larger complexes may seem strangely isolated, disconnected from each other and devoid of encompassing context.”
Sass finds “such experiences can be akin either to the exalting feeling of wonder, mystery and terror inherent in what Heidegger considers to be the basic question of metaphysics—“Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Finally, “a certain abnormal awareness of meaningfulness or of significance” accompanies the individual’s new perceptions of the surrounding world.

As one moves deeper into schizophrenia, the trend is for unremitting self-awareness, an increasing sense of isolation, and solipsism. Sociologist Brigitte Berger’s explains Sass’ thesis:

“. . . both the modernist artist and the schizophrenic are characterized by a pronounced thrust to deconstruct the world and to subjectively reconstruct human experience without reference to objective reality. Layers of reality exist side by side, frequently fusing into each other, and the acute self-awareness Mr. Sass calls hyperreflexivity, as well as a profound sense of alienation from the empirical world, run rampant.
And there is the crux of this provocative book [Madness and Modernism]: the contention that there is a tenuous, though clearly discernible, connection between modern culture and madness.”7

Wölfli, in his schizophrenia, claimed that he was “only copying what he had drawn before at God’s bidding, during his travels round the cosmos before he was eight years old.” What kind of truth we as readers and observers attach to his words, however, is somehow irrelevant. By saying that I’m ascribing to neither an ideology of inwardness nor to one of laissez-faire creation and interpretation. What I’m reaching for is something closer to what the German psychoanalyst Hemmo Muller-Suur suggests when he states:

“With his art Wölfli mastered his fate with a naïve but deep earnestness, imperturbably devoted to his artistic mission. And just as for him this art contained the task of ‘commemoration,’ it contains this task for us as well . . . We understand it only when we also consider how in this art the theme of Wölfli’s being insane is developed as a human fate, and we thus experience therein something of the mysterious essence of being insane.”8

We also understand something more of the essence of being human, the core of its fragility. Wölfli and Darger lie at the extreme end of the spectrum of writing and art. However, wayward their impulses may seem to us, writing served to save them. Who would deny them this? And if we allow that their writing has validity, not simply to themselves but to all of us who struggle with the dilemmas of writing and living, then how can we not extend that validity to others? If we make an exception in their cases, give them legitimacy because their work is directed by an inner need that seems to endow them with a less rhetorical and purer motivation than that of a writer who seeks an audience, then we undercut the legitimacy of the rational writer. Can we also designate experimental and difficult writers as less legitimate because their writing is less accessible? Perhaps even less accessible than either Wöfli or Darger’s writing? Why would we do that? Why would we deny validity to any writer whose work comprises one more intensely human act; who, in concert with other writers, forms the human community?


My thanks to Dr. Robert Ehrlich for pointing the way.


NOTES

1. Carter Ratcliff, “Adolf Wölfli,” from the catalog The Other Side of the Moon: The World of Adolf Wölfli (Philadelphia: Moore College of Art, 1988) accompanying the exhibition at the Goldie Paley gallery, 17.

2. From the Ratcliff essay cited above, 25.

3. Harald Szeeman, “No Catastrophe without Idyll, No Idyll without Catastrophe,” from the catalog Adolf Wölfli (Berne: Adolf Wölfli Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts, Berne, 1976), 63. Quotes from Adolf Wöfli are from this catalog unless otherwise noted.

4. From the introduction by Michael Bonesteel, Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings, (NY: Rizzoli, 2000), 9.

5. From the PBS site: http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2005/intherealms/about.html.

6. Unless otherwise stated, all the quotations referencing this book are from Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism (NY: Basic Books, HarperCollins, 1992), 9, 44-49.

7. From the review of Madness and Modernism by Brigitte Berger, “Schizophrenia: Chicken or Egg?” New York Times, December 13, 1992.

8. Hemmo Muller-Suur, “Wölfli’s Art as a Problem for Psychiatry,” from the catalog Adolf Wölfli (Berne: Adolf Wölfli Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts, Berne, 1976), 105.

An Evening of Songs

More reviews by Jaime Robles can be found at Repeat Performances.

Nora Lennox Martin, vocals
Jerry Kuderna, piano
January 26, 2007


This second concert in the Berkeley Arts Festival could easily have been titled “Flowers and the Blossoming of Modernism,” for the work featured, except for a couple of forays into the postmodern, fell under one of those two headings. Pianist Jerry Kuderna presented a selection of contemporary piano pieces from Schoenberg to Helps and accompanied soprano Nora Lennox Martin in a selection of florally thematic songs, written primarily by twentieth-century composers.

Kuderna began the concert with Prelude and Song from Robert Helps’ 1977 Suite for Piano, which was later titled In Retrospect (Op. 26). This is a composer he clearly feels great sympathy with, for he negotiated the piece with emotional sensitivity and care.

Martin next sang Milhaud’s Catalogue de Fleurs. Because it imitates a flower catalog, the text of these short songs has a flatness that makes interpretation a challenge:

The Aurora Begonia has a full double blossom,
Apricot, tinged with coral; very pretty color;
It is rare and unusual.

The music supports a certain loveliness but beyond that it’s up to the singer to individualize each of the seven flowers and then to tie them together in an ending whose irony—“The price list will be sent to you by post”—could easily undo the charm that has gone before. Martin uses her opportunities well, spanning the host of traits ascribable to flowers from demure to seductive, and shows her ability to handle humor with lightness. Because of her youth, her voice has the freshness necessary to give the song cycle a springtime warmth and airiness.
Kuderna completed the first half with a piano piece by Lani Allen, “Soquel Sunrise,” and Alban Berg’s landmark Sonata for Piano, Op. 1. Kuderna flew through this formidable piece, bringing its agitated and wandering center to a satisfying completion.

The second half of the program was devoted primarily to vocal music and began with Fauré’s “Les roses d’Ispahan.” This bit of late Romantic orientalia with its seductive melody and soft, rhythmically mesmerizing accompaniment was especially good for revealing the sweetness of Martin’s soprano voice. It was followed by two pieces by Respighi—“Notte” and “Nebbie”—that showed the darker side of love lost, ominously connected to despair and death.

Kuderna followed with Schoenberg’s Sechs Kleine Klavierstuecke, and he gave the lyricism in these brief pieces an interesting quality that bordered on the light and quixotic, while at the same time suggesting a seriousness, a “reaching for,” as if the composer were listening to the tick of a different neurological clock just on the other side of the perceivable.

Kuderna and Martin then presented five of Schoenberg’s Das Buch der haengenden Gaerten—1, 2, 5, 9 and 10. These pieces taken from Stefan George’s atmospheric tracings of desire—realized and lost—are notable as Schoenberg’s first clear realization into atonality, and it is interesting that Schoenberg was able to find his way into this sense of sound through the poetic word. The first song, which begins with a simple direct pattern startlingly disrupted by a single dissonant note, establishes not only the world of atonality but the disruption of an easily definable inner state: a strangeness compatible with the symbolist text as it defines the imaginary world of the poet’s Babylonian hanging gardens.

As the musical agitation continues, the poetic line establishes itself above the music as a separate “other” emotional place whose boundaries are drawn by a voice very close to spoken word. The poetry is fairly regular rhymed iambic pentameter and Schoenberg set it very carefully, recognizing not only the line breaks but also delineating between full stops and enjambed lines, or lines that continue on without syntactical break.

Despite that, the listener is never aware of metrics, rhyme or line breaks—so subtle is the treatment.

Martin, with extreme sensitivity to the text, has followed Schoenberg’s lead and further interprets the vocal line in a way suggestive of how Stephan George’s own readings have been described by the writer-translator Rudolf Kassner:

… murmuring word after word, avoiding emotion, as if he were reading magic spells or prayers in language that no one needed to understand, because it is holy and designed for purely magical effects.

Regrettably, only five of the 15 songs were sung, which leaves this duo with a mission for the future.

The program closed with a wonderful selection of four blues songs by contemporary composer Logan Skelton. These difficult songs, three of which were settings of poems by e.e. cummings, showed a range from exquisite to just plain fun vocal gymnastics, as Martin used her voice to dive, dip, slide, and shimmy while telling us stories about Jimmy’s “goil” and a woman who stores her life savings in her gold fillings.

Nora Martin not only has a beautiful voice, but she uses it deftly, assuredly and with great joy. She abandons herself to the music and to the moment. Further, her great sensitivity to text—a trait unusual in many singers, who are often concerned more with tone and phrasing—allows her to make the most of the emotional sense of words.

Martin and Jerry Kuderna, as able accompanist, make an excellent duo, exploring and presenting the vocal intricacies of contemporary music.

On theory and death

It is difficult to consider theory seriously in the light of death.

The feral cat who has lived in my yard for years is dying. I define my
relationship to her in terms of how long I can keep her alive. And in comfort.
She lives inside now. By the radiator, which I leave on.

Outside in the yard, two trees are also dying. They are large
evergreens. Is it possible for evergreens to die? Doesn’t their name
signify forever green. That is to say, immortal, or more—forever fresh, alive.
A third one died in the spring, turned brown. Now, the other two
are slowly turning brown.

The hard drive on my computer is also dying. On Monday I will have it
replaced and all the data transferred over to a new 9-gig drive.

It will take years to replace the evergreens. Are they Monterey pines?
I think so. Or some kind of cypress.
Something that should have lasted centuries.

I can’t replace them with more of the same. I will need to try a
different plant. Perhaps a ceanothus, which will grow taller and
thicker and bluer. Or a manzanita with twisting branches, peeling red bark.

And there is nothing theoretical about the mass in the feral cat’s
body—the mass that is killing her. When she dies—which means
when I decide that she’s begun to suffer too much—I will bury her near her
brother cats—who died just two months ago—

out in the yard, not far from where the first evergreen—was it a
cypress?—died last spring. Which was only six months after my
father died—

just over a year ago.

Francesca's Complaint from 'Inferno'

The final aria from ‘Inferno’ based on the story of Paolo and Francesco in Dante’s ‘Commedia.’ Music by Peter Josheff, words by Jaime Robles. The staging at Thick House Theater in San Francisco can be found at YouTube.

You, poets, ask me what I have done.

What crime did I commit while licorice sweet earthly air
Still filled my lungs, rang through the long

Rhythms of my heart? What could I say? Why should I tell you?
Stories have unraveled me: false-hearted words now
Tangle across my tongue. Words, with breathless ease, undo

Us both, speaker and listener. I am restless to death
In this humid wind, I hunger for sturdy skin—
Thick flesh that could—with just a touch—stutter words and death

To a stop.

Let me breathe in

Solid skin, blood and bone, here in this icy air,
Where I dangle, hooked and shuddering like a fish,
Through eternal time, my hell-bound prayers

Chatter that love is no crime, no love is a crime.
Neither spouse loved us, ever: We thought we loved each other.
I, a girl they sold to a hunchback soldier—in time

Love’s pearl dissolved like a story told years ago.
—Speak new words to me.

A Question of Reading

A talk given as part of "A Continuing Discussion: Experimental Form and Accessibility" panel at the 2006 AWP conference held in Austin, Texas.

This past winter a colleague of mine asked me why I had objected to the term “aberrant” in his description of a poetic form he was planning to teach in the spring. He had written the following: “Studies in the first half of each class will include a close examination and practice of the traditional poetic forms of the ghazal, sestina, and haiku, as well as at least one aberrant form, such as concrete poetry.” What I realized in that moment of rereading was that I didn’t think of any poetic form as aberrant, at least not in the way we think of aberrant as meaning “a straying from the right or normal way,” a “deviation from the natural.”

The example of concrete poetry brought to mind that the earliest writing was based on the connection of sign to meaning as opposed to sign to sound, pictographs conflated the shape of things with meaning before they conflated those shapes to sound. Further, shaped poetry has been around from the earliest times of the phonographic alphabet and it appears throughout poetic history, although without reaching popularity or taking on the cryptic intensity of concrete poetry.
Most of the poetic forms that we think of as traditional, or “normal,” were at one time variations of a preceding form; form as such is constantly changing—mutating or evolving, depending on whether one looks at change as bad or good.

Today’s experimental poetry is the wellspring of formal change in our landscape of writing. It allows for mutation or evolution; and is validated by being named “experimental” in a culture that values science above all. I propose that most generations have experimental poets, and that accessibility to their work is contingent more on an ability to shed expectations about what poetry is or is not than on an understanding of literary trends. Reading experimental poetry requires a desire to attend to the words on the page, to be drawn in by a need to grapple with the work intellectually or to follow its mysteries into some relationship. Accessibility may not be the true issue. In order to explicate some of these thoughts I’d like to examine a more traditional poetic form—the sonnet.

According to British scholar Michael Spiller “the sonnet is probably the longest-lived of all poetic forms, and certainly the longest lived of all prescribed or closed forms . . . It’s identity is formal rather than thematic.” When we think of the sonnet we think of it as a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter, divided by rhyme into an octet and a sextet or into three quatrains and a couplet. The invention of the sonnet form is attributed to a legal deputy of the Emperor Frederick 2 of Sicily, Giacomo da Lentino, some time between 1208 and 1250. It’s unknown from which form the sonnet was derived, but scholars take the existence of a preceding form as a given. What they postulate is that the sonnet is derived from a much longer form—the provençal canson. The canson was a long song, usually of persuasion between a lover and his lady. It was divided into two major sections with a turn (or volta) between these two sections. The major sections themselves were divided into two sections, so that each comprised a proposal and response. Because the canson was a song, each division of each section was a rhythmic and rhyming mirror of its mate. The sonnet form is seen as a condensation of the canson’s metric and rhyming back-and-forth of the lovers’ persuasion. So the primary meaning of the sonnet was structural.

In our postmodern world, what may have remained of the canson and sonnet’s thematic structure is lost; the sonnet’s constraints are simply arithmetic, and in that lies the experimental writer’s fascination with the form. But before I move on to contemporary experiments with the sonnet I’d like to briefly look at the accessibility of the most valued sonnet sequence in English, and that is Shakespeare’s.

In Rowan Atkinson’s sequel to the television series Black Adder, a contemporary incarnation of the ever-foiled schemer Black Adder is transported by time machine to Elizabethan England, where in the halls of Windsor Castle, he decks a poet while fleeing a less than friendly court. Finding out that the poet is William Shakespeare, Black Adder turns in flight to give Will an additional swift kick, adding by way of explanation, “And that’s for making every school child’s life miserable for the next 400 years.”

In The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner quotes a song from Cymbeline: Thou thy worldly task hast done,Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.We feel that we can easily understand these lines. All children, all human will eventually die, no matter their riches or their poverties. The image “golden lads” conjures up fair-haired children with sun-browned limbs set in contrast to the soot-covered children we most often associate with Dickensian pathos. It’s interesting that any time there is a change in literature, what is written preceding that change is changed as well. Kenner remarks that the word “golden” so irradiates the line that we barely think to ask how Shakespeare may have come to his comparison. Kenner then goes on to tell that a mid 20th century visitor to Shakespeare’s Warwickshire met a countryman, who remarked as he blew the grey head off a dandelion: “We call these golden boys chimney sweepers when they go to seed.” Kenner asks is that what Shakespeare heard when he was writing—a portrait of “Death as the blowing of a common flower?” Kenner continues, “If there were no Warwickshire ears in the Globe to hear that Warwickshire idiom, the dandelions and their structure of meaning simply dropped out. Yet for 350 years no one has reported a chasm.”

Shakespeare’s sonnets present another dilemma as well, and that is the narrative thread running between the sonnets, which seems to tell a story of adorations, patronage, and betrayals, between the writer and the two love interests he addresses. The order of the sonnets, which was probably not Shakespeare’s, does little to solve such questions as who is the fair young man? Shakespeare’s lover? A possible patron? A disguised portrayal of Queen Elizabeth? An idealization of love? All of these possibilities have been proposed and justified. Any of them would seriously change the meaning of sonnets and of the sequence itself. Having logged on to an e-list discussion between Shakespeare scholars I came across the following complaint: “Analyzing the sonnets feels to me like trying to hack a path through a swamp. The more I clear out of the way, the more tangled the underbrush becomes.”

Even if there were no lexical, cultural, or historical mysteries in the text of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the average reader would be baffled by the elaborations of syntax and grammar. Inversions, displacements, complex metaphors with frequent ambiguities, and language dense with repeating sounds separate Shakespeare’s language from the everyday, and by doing so hamper the work’s immediate accessibility. We learn to read Shakespeare’s sonnet, and by doing so understand more fully their inherent loveliness. How immediate does accessibility have to be to be truly accessible?

Contemporary writers continue to experiment, and experiment radically with the sonnet form. These writers are interested in time and its compression, repeating the sonnet’s impulse to condense the canson. The traditional constraints that have been recently discarded, however, are different than that of the open-ended length that was abandoned 800 years ago. More often twentieth century poets have discarded the iambic pentameter and the rhyme scheme, and what we now have is a sonnet formed in a culture where the predominant verse form is free verse.

In the early 1960s Ted Berrigan wrote a long sequence of short poems that was published in 1964 as The Sonnets. Alice Notley comments: “Ted returned to the strict form of The Sonnets several times . . . to make points about his life and the passage of time.. . . Ted liked to say that poetry is numbers, and maybe everything is numbers. The sonnet form is “about” the number fourteen, but Ted’s sonnets use fourteen as a frame for the disassemblage of the number, making a real advance in the form and its relation to the psyche. To the extent that Ted broke and remade the form, it became possible to use it for more than argument.”

In his sonnets, Berrigan occasionally uses the iambic pentameter line, if rhyme occurs it is likely to be happenstance. What Berrigan preferred to do as a formal pattern was to repeat lines across individual sonnets. If you look at the sonnet packet you will see four of Berrigan’s sonnets all of which contain some lines from the others. Sonnets 15 and 59 have exactly the same lines only shuffled. The original writing of the sonnet— number 59—has a linearity and coherence that is disrupted and presented out of sequence to the reader in the earlier sonnet 15. Other lines from sonnet 59 appear in sonnets 42 and 43. Isn’t that slightly perverse? Yes, probably, I won’t argue that there isn’t a streak of perversion to any experimentation or conscious deviation from canonical convention, but there are other reasons involved. In this case, a sort of playfulness on the part of the poet, who is turning a traditionally linear series into a set of non-chronological events. In a mnemonic and verbal challenge, on the one hand, the poet is asking the reader to decipher the lines that are repeated and tumbled together; on the other hand, he is making a serious statement on how cognition and memory work, challenging the idea that thought runs in a clean and straight line from the past into the future. Notley remarks on Berrigan’s internal relation to his sonnet form: “The form is suited to detached self-scrutiny, using lines and phrases from past and present poems, reading material, and on going mind, in an order determined by numbers rather than syntax . . . The pieces of the self are allowed to separate and reform: one is not chronology but its parts and the real organism they create. One could condense cognition into fourteen or so lines, if each piece, each segment of the fourteen, even each phrase in a line, meant enough.”

Berrigan’s fascination with numbers connected him in a way to Rexroth’s idea of “Natural Numbers,” which referred to a prosody that approximates the speech used from one person to another. This sense of diction—The “Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.” language—echoes Frank O’Hara’s exhortations on poetry, and finds its analogue in the use of the vernacular in the original sonnet form.

In a recently published sonnet series, Involuntary Lyrics, writer Aaron Shurin uses the Shakespeare’s 154 sonnet sequence to construct an experimental series of fourteen-line sonnets that are about San Francisco, gay life and the disaster of AIDS. In this project he takes the end words of each of the original sonnets, switches their placement in order to disrupt the rhyme scheme, and then writes into these words so that each of the lines of each of his sonnets ends with one of Shakespeare’s end words. Part of the game played becomes that between the two writer’s vocabularies. There is wit and humor in his reinterpretations of Shakespeare’s words: the “husbandry” of Shakespeare becomes Shurin’s “bodies—dry.” Woe—w-o-e—becomes Whoa—w-h-o-a.

Included among the experimentations of poet Laynie Browne are several series of sonnets, which also take their identity as sonnets from the constraint of fourteen lines. “The Daily Sonnets,” which is her longest series, is comprised of a variety of shorter series that are intermixed: Love Poems to Light, Alphabet poems, poems in collaboration with friends, sonnet fragments that are variously called things such as “half sonnet + 1” “six-fourteenth sonnet” all of these are part of a daily writing practice she follows. They are filled with the language, observations, and everydayness of family and children. Browne explains: “As a parent of two small children I invent time in order to work. Thus the one-minute sonnet.” Her desire to use the form comes from her sense of time: “There is an openness I am attempting to enter as an experiment, as a salute or recognition of time passing so that everything is included” [and] “I think of the modern sonnet as an increment of time within a frame. Something that often physically fits into a little rectangle (but not in thought). Something you can utter in one long breath or hold in your hand. When my hand covers the page, it disappears. It’s a controlled measure of sound and space within which one can do anything really. And then do it again.”

Perhaps the most radical of the sonnet experiments in the group I am describing is the “Transcendental Grammar Crown” by Brian Teare, a fifteen-poem sonnet crown that is meant to fuse the sonnet form with open field poetry. The poems pay homage to the what Teare describes as “four musico-logical minds: Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, and Ives.” The idea of open field poetry resonated in another, more metaphoric, way with Emerson, Thoreau and Ives. Teare explains his experiment: “I was really interested in and moved by the way that Ives placed his work as a bridge between centuries—Romanticism and Modernism—with his spirituality intact, and I wanted to place my own work in a similar aesthetic location. It seemed to me, as I read through the long history of the sonnet alongside Dickinson’s un settling syntax and during Ives’ Three Places in New England, that what I wanted for the sonnet had been there all along . . . suddenly it seemed as though having one volta [or turn between the octet and sestet] limited the potential energy of the sonnet: why not put a volta between every stanza? That way, the rhetoric could have more than one turn; the voice, more than one tonality or opinion; the form, more than one way of being on the page . . . Such a change would enable the sonnet to harness the energy of the open field, especially in the sense Duncan means when he writes, in The Truth and Life of Myth, “The Divine Will in Poetry is Creative and its inspiration never single-minded or strait, but creates a field of meanings.”

Poem Capturing a Bowl of Fruit

Who knew who placed the slice
of peach in the mousetrap—
its clear sweetness dribbling
on the wood slab where painted logos
marked the bull’s eye. The identity
of the perpetrator was irrelevant but
the evidence left behind was clear: a heart beat—
lubdub lubdub dub-dub-a-dub—
an eye’s iris wheeling nebulae and loose suns,
a fingerpad touch succulent as a breast.

Ah poet! My brother, my sister, my terrorist.

Counting Ways of Change

A talk given as part of "The Experimental Form and Issues of Accessibility" panel at the 2005 AWP conference held in Vancouver, B.C.


I’d like to briefly trace through the history of a project that I developed and show you how it began as a series of experiments that transformed over the course of a couple of years and through several disciplines. The initial project was a short book entitled Loop d’Oulipo, which was meant to be both an homage and a parody of the work by the Oulipo, a French literary group begun in 1960 by writer Raymond Queneau and mathematical historian François Le Lionnais. The Oulipo, which stands for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature, is comprised of writers, mathematicians and scientists, and includes among its members Harry Matthews, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec. The primary occupation of the Oulipo, besides meeting to eat elaborate dinners and drink appallingly expensive vintage French wine, was to devise mathematical manipulations that could be used to generate literature. In many ways these Oulipan forms are similar to the forms of a sonnet or villanelle, in which the rules of writing are arithmetic and objective, and the motivations behind the form are really pretty arbitrary. The sonnet’s fourteen lines of iambic pentameter riming in three quatrains and couplet don’t seem to carry any apparent intellectual or emotional meaning, at least that we in the twenty-first century know of. Many of the Oulipan formal ideas appear in anglophone experimental writing, especially among the Language poets. Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, which she wrote in her 37th year and which is comprised of 37 sections of 37 sentences, uses an Oulipan-like numeric tactic as part of her approach to her story. By using an approach to writing that is both mathematical and non-traditional, these poets hope to rid themselves of some of the political meaning that is built into narrative and traditional forms. Among other things.

In Loop d’Oulipo I use one of the more famous Oulipan forms—that of N+7, in which, taking a dictionary and a found text, you replace each noun in the text with the noun that is seven nouns below the original’s listing in the dictionary. Choosing well-known texts creates a comic resonance in the reader’s memory. And so we have:

Let me not to the marsh of true minefields
Admit impetigo. Lubber is not Lubber
Which alters when it altimeter finds,

Or

When in the chrysanthemum of wasted tin can
I see dessicants of the fairest wilderness


Part of the point of Oulipan forms is that as nonsensical as they are, they still sound like they make sense. They make use of the human mind’s need to organize information into meaning. Something to bear in mind when approaching experimental writing.

The second set of experiments in Loop d’Oulipo is based on the work of Lewis Carroll, who is recognized by the Oulipans as a member of their group even though he has been dead for a century before their formation. Carroll, a mathematician and logician as well as a writer, wrote a number of logic puzzles for his readers, some presented as stories, others as series of whimsical sentences that had answers, that could be “solved.” For the prose pieces in the Loop d’Oulipo I took logic puzzles from puzzle magazines that I found in the news racks at my local Safeway. These logic puzzles are the kind you may remember from the SAT or GRE. A short paragraph presents a story with a number of givens, such After the big snowstorm, all the families of Burrow street found their cars blocked in their garages. While they were waiting for the snowplow they decided to get together for a potluck. The Green children, who aren’t three in number, but who live next to the White family, brought baked beans. The four Brown children, who live across the street from the Black family. Etc. The challenge I set myself in my stories was to write logical information into a story in as seamless a way as possible, so that the reader didn’t realize they were reading a story that was actually a puzzle. The other challenge I set myself was to focus the story on some peevish part of human personalities, because the people in logic puzzles are always good natured and admirable. One of the rewritten stories is about envy, another about lust, and the third about a kind of lapse in compassion.

Along with these two Oulipan exercises, I devised a text-generating “machine” of my own, based on a set of puzzles that I had given my partner for a New Year’s gift. I’d like to look at this experiment more closely. Out of Sight! Mind-bending Visual Puzzles by Cliff Pickover is a calendar with a puzzle for each month. The puzzles are either mazes or arithmetic mandalas, which require you to find the correct set of numbers that add up to a specific number, say 200. Over the face of three of these puzzles I ran found scientific text so that each number or space in the puzzle was associated with a textual fragment of two or three words. One of the texts was the 1873 translation of The Atmosphere by Camille Flammarion. When you solve the puzzle you garner a set of textual fragments that you can then rearrange into a poem to suit your taste or sense of meaning. I found the poems generated often quite beautiful, though mysterious. Here is one of the shorter poems:

The sky. Now
Flame,

To fall

Not long after I put together Loop d’Oulipo, composer Peter Josheff asked me to write a libretto for a twenty-minute piece for female spoken voice, soprano, and baritone. Over the past ten years Peter and I have collaborated on a number of voical and instrumental piece, both improvisational and composed. I was a little perplexed about what kind of text to use for that unusual mix of voices, until I was talking one afternoon with the soprano, Eliza O’Malley. She mentioned that her grandmother had died recently, and that she had been reading her diaries. She went on to say that her grandmother never put anything personal or private in her diaries; they were all very matter of fact: I got up to feed the animals. I had lunch with Tom. Etc. We agreed that it was very odd that anyone writing a diary would be that emotionally restrained, but this became the idea, the plot, of sorts, behind Diary, the chamber oratorio that we produced in 2000. In the piece the female spoken voice takes on the voice of the diary: recording the everyday events in the passage of one day in a flat almost expressionless monologue. It’s hot again this morning. I ate lunch early. In emotional counterpoint to the spoken voice, the soprano and baritone enact the untold emotional events of the day, and it was in these lyrics sung by the soprano and baritone that I used the text generated by my poem-generating puzzles. We performed Diary at the Berkeley Art Center 2002 and at the American Composers Salon in San Francisco in 2003. Last year the small San Francisco opera company Fresh Voices performed Diary as a staged opera. The director and choreographer added another dimension to the piece by adding a female dancer. The choreographer saw the three women in the piece—the speaker, the soprano, and the dancer—as versions of the same woman at different points in her life, all interacting in a single moment of time as if time had looped back on itself twice.

What remains most engaging to me about this project is not only how this piece developed from a series of humorous experiments but how, as it moved from poem to lyric to opera, that it gained layers of interpretation that affected its accessibility: not only were the words heard by various audiences but they were reinterpreted by various performers. Music itself, which holds a kind of abstraction within it that we take for granted as accessible, is finally much less accessible in the ways that we expect language to be. Language placed within the context of music then takes on a different, more easily negotiable, accessibility. To demonstrate that I would like to play for you the soprano’s aria from Diary.

The puzzle-generated text for this is one of the simpler ones, consisting of six words in three phrases:

Suffer
The clear wing
Bright yellow