Today is the day we start binding the anthology for Monstrous Possibility, my literary arts and theory program. Using InDesign, we worked as groups to put our individual books together, with each group member getting twenty pages (five 8.5 x 11 folded sheets) to display their writing projects. Merging all our pieces into one giant book, my group decided to call our compilation "Acephale", which means "headless" in Greek.
The word 'manuscript' is little bit intimidating, especially when it stands alone, as in: "You'll all be writing manuscripts this quarter."
Manuscripts about what? Manuscripts following what guidelines? Fulfilling what ends?
None of these questions were raised, let alone answered, during the first week of my spring quarter program, Monstrous Possibility. The only thing we were told about our manuscripts-to-be was that they would be included in an anthology at the end of the quarter. There are no requirements about length, content, form, structure, or copy standards. The possibilities were monstrous.
This spring I'm taking a literary arts and theory program called Monstrous Possibility. A hybrid of creative and analytic writing, we're garnering inspiration for our work from an eclectic range of authors: Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Friedrich Neitschze, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and others. Our assignment this week is to write with constraints; that is, to establish a set of 13 rules and rituals by which to govern, not necessarily the content, but the direction of our work. (The assignment is dubbed "Toward the Zero Point", by the way, with our teachers encouraging us to "write toward meaninglessness").
Aside from the contract I'm doing on absurdist theater, I'm enrolled in a weekend class called “Conversations on Art and Politics”. And that's pretty much the gist of it—conversation. Each week a guest artist comes in to present his or her work and talk about its relationship to politics. The presentations are followed up by Q & A, but we get down to most of our business on the class blog, responding weekly to initial posts by our teacher and to the work presented in class.
Continue reading "The Art of Conversations on Art (and Politics)" »
Or so claims the Logician in Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros. Teaching his ill-conceived brand of logic to his comrade, he says, "Another syllogism is this: All cats are dead. Socrates is dead. Socrates is a cat." Ah, I see, his friend replies, at which point they launch into a ridiculous banter about how many paws two cats would have if you subtracted 2 from their collective amount of paws. This is the nature of my Independent Learning Contract, entitled "Investigating the Absurd." And although the above conversation is certainly absurd, I'm delving into a more specific definition of absurdity. Albert Camus, the first author I read for the contract, put it better than I ever could in The Myth of Sisyphus. "The world in itself is not reasonable," he admits, "...But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart."