matthew goulish : lecture in the shape of a bridge collapsing |
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4. uncreativity B: I am spending the 39th year of my life practicing uncreativity," A: so writes Kenneth Goldsmith as he embarks on his latest writing project: B: "On Friday, September 1, 2000, I began retyping the day's New York Times, word for word, letter for letter, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner, page by page." "Imagine a book that is written with the intention not to be read." I'm interested in quantifying and concretizing the vast amount of "nutritionless" language; I'm also interested in the process itself being equally nutritionless." "I've long been an advocate of extreme process in writing - recording every move my body has made in one day, recording every word I spoke over the course of a week, recording every sound I heard ending in'r' for almost four years," A: - this last project produced No. 111.2.7.93 - 10.20.96, a 606 page long sentence collecting and alphabetizing sounds, words, phrases, or sentences, ending in the linguistic schwah, into chapters organized by syllable count, of which the following is an excerpt from Chapter 7. B: a small mammal with big ears, a sorry state of affairs, a stranger in yukatta, a way to spot a liar, accommodation collar, acquire other ideas, actress/model/whatever, adaptive gonkulator, add some sliced paranoia, Addicted to your partner?, addition to your chancre, ah Satan sees Natasha, Ahhh. So that's what tears are for!, Ain't that right my bald brothers?, Akira Kurosawa, all and all is all we are, all apes are sprayed with water, all inspected have no fear, all is fair in love and war, all my bras have underwires, all previously acquired, All right! I'll cook you dinner!, Alois Schicklgruber, Am I my brother's keeper?, ambush fickle-ass finger, amor vincit omnia, amusement parks are a bore, an awed whisper reached my ears:, an endless sense of wonder, an eternal amoeba, an evening to remember A: Two summers ago, as we walked through lower Manhattan, I thought, Kenneth walks the way he writes; not waiting for a crosswalk or even checking for oncoming traffic, but simply following his trajectory, whether that takes him across sidewalk or street is irrelevant, he navigates public terrain according to the dictates of his own system, confident that cars, if there are any, will stop, which they do, a confidence born of accepting the world as he finds it, without hesitation, the way he accepted me as a friend. from these observations emerges something we understand as reality> A: Now for three weeks I wonder if Kenneth has survived, until I receive an email: B: "I had a crash and lost all my email addresses . . . Too big, too complicated, too much to talk about here . . ." But in those days of doubt, I thought of him: his presence more ear than voice, his mode one of collection and assessment without judgment, his world a field of singularities, irreducible, his credo a simple question: what if all language is poetry? - and I wondered, with a creative life of such perfect transparency, what kind of ghost would he have made? |
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