Kathy Acker; the cut-up technique and other things that blew my mind last night...

This is Kathy Acker. She might just be my new favourite find whilst researching out here in Norway. In a nutshell, she focuses on experimental literature and some of her books take a very non-linear narrative path. She also uses collage in her literature. So letters, newspapers, photography etc. can be used together to make up one complete narrative structure. I love this. Like, really love this. I'm not saying that I could recreate it but it's definitely something to be open to. I love the idea of realising the limitations of language and trying to overcome it. There is no reason why we shouldn't overcome it with what is available today technologically.

I have also been researching electronic literature a bit. However, I'm not sure I'm there yet. Or ever will be.

Looking at Acker led me to read up a bit more on William S. Burroughs who I touched on vaguely at uni but was probably to concerned with what I was going to wear that night in town to pay much attention (!)

He came across a way of writing called the "cut-up technique" and basically it's just cutting words from a sentence and rearranging them and hey-ho - new sentence. He did this in the 70's but it had been going on strong long before then. Dadaist poets of the 20's would put written words into a hat and pick them out one by one to create an entirely new poem in order to showcase the basics of the Dadaist manifesto. However, Burroughs was one of the pioneers of it's revival later on.

He was also a fan of the "fold-in" technique which would take two pages of words; fold them both vertically and join them both together to create a new, fully understandable work.

This ability to technically construct your work so that it can work successfully on a variety of levels surprisingly is a new thing for me. I mean, I've always known in would work poetically but I can't write poetry for shit and I don't intend to try now. But being able to do this successfully with prose just seems like such a hard task. Maybe I'm not there yet. I can give it a bash though.

To be continued, once I wade through the pile of information I've tried to catalogue today...

Old Words #2: Porcelain

Porcelain

She was breakable. I knew that as soon as I saw her. She just had that look about her. You know the one, the one that screams “I’m fragile so you’ve got to take care of me.” All pouty lips and flat hair that didn’t sit right. She was so pale too. Not a mark on her. I liked that in her, that untouched purity in her skin. It made me want to talk to her. To find out what her deal was. To see if she needed me.

I first saw her standing outside the video store; sucking on a lollipop in a ridiculously strange fashion. Like it would dissolve her teeth if she left it in her mouth to long. When I eat a lollipop I get bored after a while and crunch it down as soon as it will let me. I figured we were very different people that way. She was standing perfectly straight up against the wall, even her back didn’t arch. From far away it looked like she was standing still but as I got closer I could see her upper body moving slightly from side to side.

“Whatcha doin’?”, I asked because well, I was curious and I didn’t have anything to lose did I?

“Re-aligning my back”, she replied, like people come up to her outside video stores all the time and ask her things that are only her business.

“Erm...do you do this a lot? I mean like, shouldn’t you go to a chiropractor or a doctor or something?”, I made sure that I looked a suitable amount of concerned for a kind but still strange person attempting conversation.

“No they can’t help me anymore,” she said, as I heard her back grind and crack, “I’ve got porcelain bones. I’ll be able to fix it in a second.”

“Oh yeah?”, I asked her, “Like they got low density or something?”

“No”, she said, “I mean all of my actual skeleton is made of porcelain.”

“But how can that be? Porcelain is like a man-made product...”

“I don’t know what to tell you, it just is the way it is. Always has been. I came out that way.” You could tell that she’d been asked these types of questions a million times before but she was nice to me. Not angry like some people would be when a stranger comes up to them when they’re trying to minding their own business and questions their body make up.

I should have left it there and walked away. That would have been the polite thing to do. To let the girl be. But I couldn’t. I had to ask her. I had to know how she came to be. “So what happened? Like did your mother fuck a teapot?”, I didn’t mean it to come out so crude. To be so blunt. But there it was.

“You know what? I’ve never been asked that before.” I was about to feel very pleased with myself and my ability to come up with genius comedic lines about obscure medical conditions like that on the spot when I saw her pouty, fragile lips upcurl slightly. She looked different when she sneered. Maybe she wasn’t breakable after all.

I soon realised that dating a porcelain girl was not without its drawbacks. The girl can’t eat like normal people for a start, it’s all soup and eating lollipops like a crazy person. When I looked closer at her face I saw that her teeth were filled with hairline cracks and chips from years of overestimating what she could handle.

“I once chewed on a piece of granite for 3 whole minutes,” she told me one time. When I asked her as to why she would bother she told me it was just to see what could happen.

“And what did happen?” I asked.

She just smiled her broken smile and said, “Well, I don’t have any back teeth anymore.” And that was all their was to be said on the matter. Both her front teeth looked like they had been smashed head on. An overenthusiastic fourteen year old brace wearer, she explained. Among her handbag essentials were little tubes of super glue for all those just incases. The girl had some stories. The kind that make you want to bite the inside of your cheek to stop your body tensing up in imaginary pain. She told me that when she was seven she fell over and smashed her knee cap in to smithereens, shards of ceramic poking through her skin spurting out a lumpy concoction of crimson dyed porcelain dust. They gave her plastic knees after that like the kind old ladies get when their bones have ground down too much. More resilient that way. I asked her once why she didn’t just keep out of the way of trouble and spend a lot of time sitting down instead of eating gravel, kissing boys with braces and running in dangerous ways. She told me that there was no fun in a life like that and that she wished that someone would break her properly one time just to see what it felt like.

“ You don’t mean that,” I said even though despite myself I could feel my heart beating faster, “As soon as it happened you would freak out and regret it.”

“Would I?” she asked and held her arm out in front of me, “Why don’t you try it and see?”

I held her arm lightly with my hand and ran it up from her wrist to just below her shoulder, my eyes briefly went from where my hand was to her face and I could see her lips parting in a sharp intake of breath. Her eyes imploring me to press harder. I began to do as she wished and she closed her eyes. I saw her lips press together and moved my eyes back to her arm, my fingers had gripped her upper arm tightly and I could see her skin paling even further under my touch. Reluctantly but necessarily I released her, seeing her skin immediately purpling and moved my eyes once more to her mouth. Her lips had upcurled again, mockingly:

“Don’t think for one second that I believe you didn’t want to.”

After that things changed. She meticulously and regimentally set about trying to see how far she could push me. Exactly what it would take for me to break. She would set out traps for me. Leaving big patches of her skin exposed as we watched TV, with some sort of overly violent implement beside her. A hammer or something equally as subtle. Like I was just gonna smash her back in as soon as she turned around.

“Why don’t you just do it?” she would ask me in the middle of the night, “I know you want to.”

“It’s not the right time my love,” I would reply as I laid butterfly kisses all over her body.

I decided to wait until she stopped asking me to do it. I knew I would do it eventually, I would have to. It had gone too far by then, but it’s no fun breaking someone when they expect it to happen. I waited until one night when we were lying in bed. We had spent a nice day together at the beach.

“I do love you, you know,” she whispered.

“I love you too,” I replied.

Then I placed my hand firmly onto her breastbone, I spread it wide. I could see her eyes flutter closed and she tilted her head back further into the pillow. I pressed harder and her lips parted to gasp softly when I heard the first crack. Her eyelids shot open, her eyes big pools of black. “I’m going to do it now,” I said as I pressed even harder. She nodded silently but I knew as soon as it became a reality she would change her mind. It was too late now. I had already done it in my head. I will always remember the gulp she took as her chest gave way. In a clean break, an uneven circular dip formed between her breasts. It looked as though her whole chest must be completely hollow inside. I remember vaguely hearing her gurgling screams but it didn’t sound like her. It sounded as if someone was re-enacting the sounds that she could have made. Sounds from another point in time spliced with the image of the red and purple blotches rising up underneath her unbroken skin.

Old Words #1: Remember This.

For Miss Laura who wanted some old words up on here. They are old and thus now I think they are dreadful. However, we can't be ashamed of our roots now can we ;)

Remember This

“Remember this,” I said, "Right now, our kiss so that when we are old with dresses that match our shoes you won’t forget what we felt like."

You laughed in that polite-but-scared way and asked where I was going when we were old with dresses that matched our shoes. I said that of course I would still be here, or somewhere else with you but that our kisses might be different so to remember this one for I liked it, it felt nice – like that time in the pub when we hadn’t long met and you kissed me just because you thought I looked pretty.
“You won’t think I’m so pretty when I wear beige blouses with purple hats and have grey eyebrow hair.”

You said that I have had a grey eyebrow hair for a while now, you saw it shining in the light the other day when we were in the supermarket and you didn’t want to tell me in case I caused a scene and that no, you wouldn’t think I was pretty in beige and purple together, for I would look altogether frightfully strange. (You didn’t say the phase “altogether frightfully strange” at all really, I just like to put unnecessary words in your mouth when I tell stories about you. You probably just said “strange”, you’re more to the point like that.) You then asked, on that particular day, would I choose purple shoes or beige shoes for really it was that answer which mattered. I told you I hadn’t yet decided and that it would depend entirely upon the season and that obscure colour choices aside, we would feel differently one day and that I was scared.

“Scared how?” you asked, with the furrowed brow you use which I know means concerned but after all this time still makes me think you are annoyed with me somehow.

“Scared in the scared way.” I replied as I didn’t know quite exactly what I meant, only that I had a feeling. A feeling that one day you would kiss me and it would feel differently – like in the night I would have become an entirely different person to you. I told you that I imagined that it would happen gradually and suddenly all at once. (I didn’t know what I meant by that either but I said it. I think I liked the idea of an oxymoronic sentence, for atmosphere.) I told you that one day we would have babies and cats and a garden, with actual plants and “water features” and all these things would eat into our time to make fun of people on the TV and drink coffee in the night time.

You then looked at me strangely and said that if all I was going to miss were times to watch TV and to drink coffee at odd hours then children and plants really were not going to be an issue for us. Then you reminded me astutely that we have two cats already and that, despite all the pressure we do fine as we are.

“That’s what I mean!” I said, for I felt like I had an epiphany and I got very excited.

“Remember before the cats,” I said, ”Before anything grown up and scary, we would kiss like today every day and it was nice. But now we only kiss like this maybe once a week because we have to look after the cats and go to work and see our friends and bleed our radiators – I mean what was that? We had to bleed all the radiators and because we are so undomesticated we didn’t have a key or any sort of tools so we had to use the side of a spoon to do it and it took us like four hours! And then we had to buy a hoover when the old one broke and it was bagless and had a warranty. Then we had to find out what those words were and if they were good words. A warranty? I’m still not convinced we know what that means but we know that we’ve got one for a large amount of time and apparently we’re “very lucky” to have it. And then after all that we have to sleep and then we have no time!”

By this point I was getting very animated and quite shouty in the around-you-but-not-at-you way, so I stopped myself and noticed that you were sitting very quietly. I looked at you for a long time but didn’t know what to say so I just waited. Eventually you spoke, you were steady and quiet and very much like you in these sorts of situations.

“Do you want to send our cats away?” you asked.

“No”, I said, “I love them.”

“Do you want to send our hoover away?”

I pondered this for a moment and said, “No, I love it too. It picks up dust really well and is easy to clean out. All in all it was a fine purchase.”

“Would you like us to have no jobs and friends and wander the earth randomly together, just the two of us?”

“Well kind of”, I said, “That would be fun for a while but then we’d miss people and we’d need new jeans or some hats for the summer, which I would have of course forgotten to pack when we were leaving or something so we’d have to get jobs and then...”

“Then what are you talking about?” You said this before I had finished the sentence which I knew was going nowhere. By now you were doing the furrowed brow with the one swift head shake as you spoke, which meant you were frustrated with me. I knew this for definite because I was frustrated with me too.

“I just mean that now we kiss like today maybe once or twice a week but maybe if we had kids we’d only have time to kiss once a fortnight. Then what happens if our garden gets green fly one July and we only have time to kiss one day that month, or if kid number two gets a weird parent attachment thing (for he’d be the middle child and therefore have issues) and won’t leave us alone and then we won’t have time to kiss ever. So then one day we realise that we haven’t kissed for a whole year and in that time I’ve taken to wearing beige court shoes and eating Ritalin laced Snickers for breakfast and you have the kind of hair that doesn’t move in the wind and you’ll make awful jewellery choices like creole earrings with pearl necklaces...”

“Hold on,” you said, “Why do you get to be the basket case in this scenario and I have to be the PTA attending, golfing Mum?”

“Would you like to trade?” I said.

“Of course,” you said, “everyone knows that kids prefer mentally unstable parents to a supermum type.”

“Super Mum? With the ability to spot a dangerous kitchen utensil from 8 miles? That is you!”

“Hmm, I guess so...can I have super human strength too?”

“Like “The Hulk”?”

“No, not like “The Hulk”... on second thoughts you can be Super Mum.”

“Ok that’s fine with me.” I said, “I suit green better then you anyway and I think one of those golfing jumpers would be fun...”

“You can even get a green one since it suits you so much better.”

“You know what? I think I will. And you can get a tin foil hat...” I looked at your face and you were laughing. “I’m glad you find your impending insanity amusing,” I said, “I’m the one who will have to collect you when you wander into the neighbours garden and steal their macramé plant hangers.”

“How do you know that word?”, your eyes grew wide and startled.

“What word? Macramé?” You nodded silently, “ I watched a TV show and it had them on it, they looked fun. I figured we might need to know these things soon. You know, for when we are old ladies.”

I looked at you. I mean I was looking at you before but this time I really looked at you, in perfect focus and everything and I saw that you were smiling at me.
“What?” I said. Always ready to ruin the moment.

“Do you think we’ll be nice old ladies together?” you asked me.

“Of course,” I replied, “I’ll have a blue rinse and you’ll wear tights that bag around the ankles. We’ll fill all the clichés.”

“Can we live in a small town by the sea and all the local kids will make fun of us because they’ll think we are witches?”

“Yup,” I told you decisively, “And you can own a shopping caddy with millions of dogs on it.”

Your smile was quickly fading.

“Dogs we’ve never wanted or seen before...”

I could see the colour draining from your face.

“It really will be the shopping caddy of all shopping caddies...”

“I don’t think I want to be an old lady with you anymore.”

“Why?” I asked, “Is this all because of my choice of old lady accessories.”

“Yes!” you said, “you imagine all sorts of hideous “accessories” entering our lives for the next fifty years, it’s scary!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, for I really was. I never meant it to snowball into such a vivid picture of the rest of our lives, “How about we live for right now?” I said.

“Right now?” you said.

“How about I make us some coffee?” I said, “And you can go find some sort of overweight people running on TV programme or one where people eat really horrible things for money?”

“How about one with overweight people running towards horrible things to eat for money?” you said.

I smiled, “I’d like that.”

You smiled back, “Me too.”

O

Me- Can…can you hear me?

You- No.

Me- You just replied.

You- I’m choosing not to listen to you.

Me- Well listen. I said, “I’ll put it into words for you, if you like?”

You- We always said that we wouldn’t.

Me- I know but…

You- Sshhh! Not now.

Me- Well when?

You- Um…sometime around never.

Me- But I love you.

You- Too direct. Try again.

Me- Well, um…see sometimes you get flightless birds and…and well, they are kind of like a metaphor for…

You- Too flowery. And also too many undecided words. You are taking up all of my headspace. Try again.

Me- I don’t know you.

You- No you don’t.

Me- But well, you don’t know me either…

You- I don’t want to.

Me-But you can feel it right? You can say that?

You- Maybe.

Me- That’s an undecided word.

You- I’m not saying I am decided. You are.

Me- I don’t have words for how this feels.

You- Why do we need words? We were fine as we were.

Me- But I wanted to tell you.

You- What? What I already know?

Me- Maybe…I don’t know what you already know.

You- Don’t worry. I know.

Me-Oh. And do you feel it too?

You- I don’t know.

Me- How can you not know how you feel?

You- I choose not to. It won’t make a difference.

Me- It won’t?

You- Do you think it will?

Me- No. I guess not.

You- “Guess” is an undecided word too you know?

Me- I know. I don’t want to be decided anymore.

You-Are we finished now?

Me- I suppose.

You- Do you feel better now we have spoken our words.

Me- No, I feel worse.

You- I thought that might happen.

Me - Sorry.

You- Can you get out of my head now please?

Me- Yes. Sorry.

You- Don’t be sorry when you can be absent.

Me- Did you get that in a greeting card?

You- No.

Me- I was trying to be funny.

You- I know. It won’t make me want you in my head any longer.

Me- Ok, I’m sorry I’m going now.

You- Good. Goodbye.

Me - …

You-Are you gone?

Me - …

You-Hello?

Me - …

You- Ok, so you’re gone then?

Me - …

You- I…I love you too.

Me – [breathes]

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Dear You,
Please find attached a copy of the telepathic conversation I believe we had two hours prior. I took the liberty of transcribing it so I could email yourself and find out for definite if we indeed had this conversation. Please email back a confirmation or denial of such events.
Kind regards,
Me.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Me,
No more words now, telepathic or otherwise. Please.
You.

I see the Norwegian sea...

...which is of course the same as the Aberdonian sea except clearer and closer to my face as it is currently lapping up against the flat I'm staying in right now!

I arrived in Stavanger on Friday and spent the weekend in an awfully posh hotel as Mr Alan Wilson had left his flat keys in London where he was away on business. Silly boy! However, we made good use of the comfiest bed ever invented and I enjoyed generally finding my feet in the city centre. Everyone who knows me knows how useless I am with directions so I have already been lost approximately 812 times.

Today is my first day in Alan's flat so while he is at work I thought I should update this.

It is amazing being this close to the sea and everytime I lift my head up from typing there seems to be a new boat sailing past. The sky has been so clear since I arrived and apart from the freezing cold (which serves me right for forgetting any sort of winter wear) the weather and the scenery has been lovely.

I miss Laura and the cats immensely but this is okay. It's good to miss people and things and it gives me time to appreciate what I have.

It's good to have time time away. To be alone and to enjoy the silence and the pace that life should always be. Norwegians apparently enjoy a slower pace. No-one seems to be rushing anywhere and on Sundays practically everything is closed so people go for walks and just enjoy the simpler things in life. I like this.

I'm hoping to work on a fair bit of writing while I'm out here. I'm reading some Janet Frame and some Miranda July and trying to get myself into a headspace where my work is truly fictionalised. I think it's important to try and think out with oneself and that these things can be hard when real life (work etc.) is constantly in the way and you and your life is constantly in your thoughts.

I find myself getting consistently more and more annoyed with the way some writers I am reading just now (mostly newer writers, online and such) feel the need to dramatise every single word. I believe that trying to bring so much art and meaning to every syllable can get in the way of simply good storytelling. From personal experience I know that the stories I have read that have changed me the most are about the most mundane yet universal themes.

I am interested right now in the silence of people. How to describe people and situations without any dialogue. This is frustrating to me as someone who likes to write as I find my chosen medium so limiting yet it's all I can see and it's all that I understand and all that I want to understand.

I used to wish that I could appreciate visual art and music in the way that I do words. However, now that I have this I find that words can't communicate art and they can't communicate music effectively the way that art and music can enhance words.

Maybe I need to start working with all three, or maybe I need to realise my own limitations.

I'll keep trying for now. (this is not a dramatic sentence, k?)

I see the sea...

This is a picture of the sea and some boats that I took last week. There are lots of boats, but you can barely see them as they are so far away. I must learn how to zoom on my iPhone :)

When I was little, I used to live close to the sea and my bedroom window looked out at this amazing view of the water. I used to make up stories in my head about what all the ships were doing out there and what they were saying to each other. Apparently, I would just sit and look out of the window for hours without saying a word just making up these stories in my head. I vaguely remember doing this. I just wish I could remember what they were all about.