Abstract
The past decade has seen a remarkable proliferation of new works of constrained and
appropriated writing that prominently incorporate, and in turn investigate, metadata
schemes. I argue that these works ought to be of considerable interest not only to
critics of contemporary avant-garde writing — but also to media theorists, librarians
and textual scholars. By emphasizing classification protocols, conceptual writing
makes an implicit case for the interrelationship of these fields. Each of the four
main books under discussion here — Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled
Vocabularies, Craig Dworkin’s Perverse
Library, M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong! and Simon
Morris’ Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head — draws upon
pre-existing textual archives. In doing so, these books suggest that processes of
data storage, classification and transmission are key to how poetry is created,
recognized and disseminated. Conceptual writing’s attention to information
classification protocols offers not only a critique of contemporary models of
authorship, but also of contemporary frameworks of personal agency and intellectual
property.
In the past one hundred years, people in all lines of work have
jointly constructed an incredible, interlocking set of categories, standards, and
means for interoperating infrastructural technologies. We hardly know what we have
built. No one is in control of infrastructure; no one has the power centrally to
change it. To the extent that we live in, on, and around this new infrastructure,
it helps form the shape of our moral, scientific, and esthetic choices.
Infrastructure is now the great inner space.
[Bowker and Star 1999, 319]
The estrangement of schemata and classifications from the data
subsumed beneath them, indeed the sheer quantity of the material processed…has
become quite incommensurable with the horizons of individual experience.
[Adorno 1974, 140]
We are, it could be said, in the midst of a metadata revolution. By the term
metadata revolution, I mean to describe the extraordinary proliferation
of powerful online catalogues and finding tools. The most obvious player in the metadata
revolution would be Google, but in a larger sense most current media distribution
platforms — Amazon, eBay, Facebook, iTunes, Mediafire, Pirate Bay, Youtube, library.nu —
operate as gigantic catalogs. We have entered into a new age of cataloging and data
aggregation at every level of society: governments, corporations, universities and
individuals have access to unprecedented quantities of data, and they require metadata
to access, classify, and prioritize that data. The effects of the metadata revolution
are too complex to detail here; without doing full justice to the concept of a metadata
revolution, this paper examines recent works of conceptual writing which foreground
questions of classification. In what follows I hope to show that conceptual writing
ought to be of interest to media theorists, librarians and textual scholars — as well as
to critics of contemporary avant-garde writing. By emphasizing classification protocols,
conceptual writing makes an implicit case for the interrelationship of these fields.
Each of the four main books under discussion here — Tan Lin’s Seven
Controlled Vocabularies, Craig Dworkin’s Perverse
Library, M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong! and Simon
Morris’ Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head — draws upon
pre-existing textual archives. In doing so, these books suggest that processes of data
storage, classification and transmission are key to how poetry is created, recognized
and disseminated. This essay argues that conceptual writing’s attention to information
classification protocols offers not only a critique of contemporary models of
authorship, but also of contemporary frameworks of personal agency and intellectual
property.
The past decade has seen a remarkable proliferation of new works of constrained and
appropriated writing that prominently incorporate, and in turn investigate, metadata schemes.
[1] Many (if not most) of these works depend on internet
sources for their content — even if the works themselves for the most part have
culminated in print rather than digital works. Marjorie Perloff (who in other contexts
has been supportive of digital poetries) has recently written:
E-poetry never quite got off the ground, the compositional process of an e-poem
(however much animation might be used) not being essentially different from that
of a “normal” print poem.
The revolution that soon occurred was not in writing for the computer screen but
writing in an environment of hyperinformation, an environment, moreover, where we
were all authors. [
Perloff 2010, xi]
Notwithstanding her abrupt dismissal of e-poetry, Perloff makes an important observation
about what she calls “poetry by other means in the new
century.” This new poetry takes much of its content, as well as many of its
constraints, from the “environment of hyperinformation.” Even
if it does not take the end form of
e-poetry (the designation is
problematically general and already sounds obsolete), conceptual poetry relies heavily
on recent technologies such as email, blogs, Facebook, search engines, Twitter, iPad
apps and data visualization programs.
[2] Much of this writing is
profoundly self-conscious of processes of remediation and transcoding. Collectively
these works demonstrate a distinct fascination among poets with the “organization of knowledge.”
The most widely cited definition of metadata — “data about data” — is clearly
inadequate: information could be said to be data about data.
[3] In information
theoretical terms, data is the most basic form of signification — thus any organized
data could be construed as metadata. If we qualify our definition, as the
OED does, by requiring that metadata be “a
set of data that describes and gives information about other data,” then we
come closer to a useful definition. In the collection
Introduction
to Metadata, Anna Gilliland suggests that a “useful,
‘big picture’ way of thinking about metadata is as the sum total of what one
can say about an information object at any level of aggregation,” and she
defines “an information object” as “anything that can be addressed and manipulated as a discrete entity by a human being
or an information system”
[
Gilliland 2008, 2]. According to the recent volume
Metadata and Semantics, “Metadata can be
defined as structure data about an object that supports some function(s) related to
that object described, achieving a degree of uniformity in description by means of
schemas. Metadata schemas are structured representations of information for a given
use or domain….”
[
Lytras and Sicilia 2009, v]. Although metadata is typically associated with
digital artifacts, the term need not be restricted to digital contexts. According to
Stephen Ramsay,
[T]he seeds of the modern computerized database
[are] fully evident in the many text-based taxonomies and indexing systems which have
been developed since the Middle Ages. Whenever humanists have amassed enough
information to make retrieval (or comprehensive understanding) cumbersome,
technologists of whatever epoch have sought to put forth ideas about how to represent
that information in some more tractable form. [Ramsay 2004]
As tractable as those forms may be, they are never value-free. Johanna Drucker has
recently written that “metadata schemes must be read as models of
knowledge, as discursive instruments that bring the object of their inquiry into
being, shaping the fields in which they operate by defining quite explicitly what can
and cannot be said about the objects of a particular collection or online
environment”
[
Drucker 2010, 11].
Analogues to a number of claims made in this paper can be found in recent writing on
data visualization, and in particular within Lev Manovich’s influential notion of
the database logic of new media [
Manovich 2001].
[4] Expanding upon Manovich’s account,
Mitchell Whitelaw’s essay “Art Against Information: Case Studies in
Data Practice” argues:
Manovich suggests that one of the
roles of data art is to reflect on data subjectivity; I would go further and say that
data art is involved in the construction of that subjectivity…. It pulls us away from
information, from the well-formed messages that dominate our experience of digital
media. [Whitelaw 2008]
Conceptual writing similarly asks us to reflect upon, as well as reconstruct, patterns
of “data subjectivity.” Poetry, as the literary genre linked most closely to
expressions of direct, “authentic” subjectivity, presents a particularly rich forum
for exploring the construction of personhood. Metadata has an important role to play in
Whitelaw’s account of the potential of data art to reconfigure notions of subjectivity:
By directing us instead towards data, [data art] opens spaces for
potential, for the distributed reconstruction of information. Yet in the process it
invariably encodes its own metadata — data about data — that can be read out through
the artists’ processes, as this paper has demonstrated. This metadata must in turn
inform us as data subjects, if we are to move past immersion and navigation to a more
critical, and active, agency. [Whitelaw 2008]
Whitelaw offers an optimistic appraisal of data art, and I believe much the same could
be said of conceptual writing. All of the works surveyed in this essay thematize in some
manner the relation of the writer to a data set, and these works raise important
questions concerning privacy, authenticity and identity. These works are not
necessarily, for the most part, directly prescriptive of social change. They could even
be said to take the form of parodic compendia — substituting reclassification and
remediation for direct expression.
The title of Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin’s
Against
Expression
[
Dworkin and Goldsmith 2011] suggests an outright rejection of traditional notions of
poetic sincerity and lyric confession — or what is often described as the individual
poetic “voice.” This rejection of expression is clearly aimed at the creative
writing establishment — as an overarching rubric, however, it is somewhat misleading.
The writings of Goldsmith and Dworkin themselves (as I have argued elsewhere) are often
surprisingly personal.
[5] Perloff suggests that “Paradoxically, this new citational and often constraint bound poetry — a poetry as
visually and sonically formalized as it is semantically charged — is more accessible,
and in a sense, ‘personal’ than was the Language poetry of twenty years
earlier”
[
Perloff 2010, xi]. Conceptual writing acknowledges its debt to
Language poetry, and, like Language poetry, attempts a critique of a naturalized poetic
voice. But the critique is not so much of expression
per
se, as it is of either the
naturalization or the
industrialization of expression. Language poets of the 1970s challenged
direct poetic expression at the level of syntax, arguing that even poetic language was
inherently ideological.
[6] Conceptual writing continues that critique of
poetry as direct expression, but it does so with a new awareness of the extraordinary
changes brought about by digital technologies in the past two decades.
Many of the practices explored in this essay have their origins in 1960s conceptual
art.
[7]
Dan Graham’s 1966 “Poem-Schema,” its creator claimed, “defines itself in place only as information”
[
Graham 2009]. The writings of Vito Acconci, Lawrence Weiner, Lucy
Lippard, Sol Lewitt and others could be cited as exemplifying conceptual art’s interest
in information technologies and the representation of “raw” data.
What is different about conceptual writing of the past ten years — according to
proponents including Perloff, Goldsmith, Dworkin, Fitterman and Place — is (in
Goldsmith’s words), “the sheer quantity of language”
[
Dworkin and Goldsmith 2011, xviii] made available by the emergence of the
Internet. “Digital media,” according to Goldsmith, “has set the stage for a literary revolution”
[
Dworkin and Goldsmith 2011, xvii]. Whether or not Goldsmith’s rhetoric is
hyperbolic, conceptual writing exists in a kind of dialectical tension with recent
developments in information technology — depending on improvements in information
storage and dissemination for much of its content, and yet at the same time remaining
attached to the print book as its dominant vehicle.
Against the Proprietary
Poetry, like the affective system, is a medium punctuated by
couplings and a few meta data tags.
[Lin 2010d]
Tan Lin’s cumbersomely titled book
Seven Controlled Vocabularies
and Obituary 2004.
The Joy of Cooking
[
Lin 2010c] features the term metadata twice on its cover, as well as
all of its cataloguing data including its call number (
Figure
1). Of particular interest is the book’s Library of Congress
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data, which offers fourteen possible subject headings.
Lin’s headings force us to ask questions of categorization related to nationality,
genre and language before we have encountered a single image or blurb. As he
describes the cover in an interview,
it has metadata layers for bibliographic control. The LCSH is
an old-fashioned thesaurus, and 7CV references
dictionaries and other classification/reading systems. Subject headings are
conflict prone near ethnicity/identity issues, and I tried to highlight that
with China-Poetry as a disappearing first term.
[Lin 2010a]
The overall effect of the cover is that the clichés of the poetry book and of
the poetic persona are subverted in advance of our encountering any of Lin’s poetry,
much of which consists of appropriated texts and images.
Lin describes his work as an “ambient poetics,” about
which he writes “[Today] a work architecture [or film] or [poem] or [novel]
should have as fluid and standardized an ID [OBJECT ID™ SYSTEM] as possible and
function like a waiting area, time slot, universal market/currency or metadata
standard”
[
Lin 2010c, 131]. Lin is clearly mocking the rhetoric of genre hybridity, but he is also
pointing out that in an era of media convergence, poetry, while it may evade a
specific use value, is still implicated with homogenizing systems of distribution and
classification. Lin’s ambient poetics acknowledges its place with a hypermediated
society, and yet attempts to resist being instrumentalized in the interests of any
single cause or subject matter. For Lin, “A book should be the
weakest information pattern that is visible to the eye. Only in that way can it
outlive its data”
[
Lin 2010c, 130]. A book is, of course, in many ways one of the
strongest information patterns with which we are familiar — compared to electronic
documents, the book is a relatively stable artifact. By emphasizing the metadata
protocols of the book as physical object, Lin subverts the unit of the poetry book,
and by extension places poetry within a far wider discursive field. That field also
extends beyond American Written English, as well as beyond categories such as Asian
American and Chinese American. Lin has even made a Google translation of
Seven Controlled Vocabularies available on lulu.com. No
pretense is made of it being an authoritative cross-cultural document. Lin’s output
over the past several years has been prodigious: there are a number of companion
volumes to
Seven Controlled Vocabularies: an entire
Appendix volume, a critical reader, a book of blurbs,
a book of mini-essays, and even a handmade book. Lin has made collaboration a key
feature of his work — in the “EDIT: Processing Network
Publishing” event at Penn in which Lin participated last year, for
instance, different media technologies were employed to produce work on site. One
product (or byproduct perhaps) of the event was the volume (available as a pdf and as
a Lulu print-on-demand book)
Selected Essays About a
Bibliographyedited by Danny Snelson. The book features mini-essays by
nearly fifty contributors; among the contributions are two essays titled “Metadata.” One essay, credited to Kareem Estefan, simply
reprints the definition provided by the National Information Standards Organization.
The other essay, by Dan Visel, explores paratexts, such as book covers, as forms of
metadata. According to Visel, “A book is not a text. It’s more
than a text. It’s a text and a collection of information around that text, some of
which we consciously recognize and some of which we don’t”
[
Snelson 2010]. This description captures well the radically open-ended
nature of Lin’s project.
Lin’s 2007 book
Heath: plagiarism/outsource, Notes Towards the
Definition of Culture, Untilted[sic]
Heath Ledger
Project, a history of the search engine, disco OS is a particularly rich
text in terms of exploring issues of intellectual property within a global
marketplace for ideas. From Dada to Situationism to conceptual writing, appropriation
practices have long presented an overt critique of intellectual
property.
[8] Appropriation reconfigures source
material and yet typically a residue (or metadata layer) of the source
remains.
[9]
Though many of Lin’s practices have a long lineage, they are also very much enmeshed
in the present. His appropriations tend not to be nostalgic or historical, and they
tend to be extraordinarily self-reflexive with regard to remediation. As a whole,
they go far to enact Marcus Boon’s recent advocacy of copying as an ethical practice.
For Boon,
What the internet offers is not so much new forms of economy,
production, and exchange, (although the open source movement has certainly made
efforts in those directions), but the opportunity to render visible once more the
instability of all the terms and structures which hold together existing intellectual
property regimes, and to point to the madness of modern, capitalist framings of
property. [Boon 2010, 245]
In a sign of the times, Boon’s book is being given away as a free pdf on the Harvard
University Press website. Like much of Lin’s work, Boon enacts, as well as theorizes,
a critique of an intellectual property system replete with contradictions.
[10]
Possessive Cases: The Metadata Protocols of The Perverse
Library and Zong!
Craig Dworkin’s
The Perverse Library purports to list
the contents of Dworkin’s library, as well as to list books he wishes were in his
library [
Dworkin 2010]. The book comprises a bibliography of 2,247
works, as well as a remarkable forty-page introduction entitled “Pinacographic Space.” Pinacography, or the compiling of lists, derives
from the
Pinakes, or tables of learning, compiled by Callimachus
at the library of Alexandria. According to Alex Wright, in his
Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, “this
elementary bibliographic constituted the first systematic abstraction of
metadata”
[
Wright 2007, 73]. Dworkin offers an exhaustive description of his
library, but at the same time his entire project recognizes the difficulties of
classifying and describing a physical library. The book includes two bibliographies,
“A Perverse Library” and “The
Perverse Library” — the difference between the definite and indefinite
article presumably denoting books the author would like to own as opposed to those
the author actually does own. Dworkin’s fundamental classificatory choice is to group
his books by publisher. He acknowledges that he has not provided a complete
bibliography of his library — many titles, particularly those of mainstream
publishers, are excluded. The effect of this is to present the reader with an
extraordinary cornucopia of recent avant-garde writing.
There is something of a voyeuristic show-and-tell feel to a personal pinacography —
perhaps that is part of what Dworkin means by the perversity of the project. On the
one hand, many of the likely readers of this book will look for books they own or
have written. On the other hand, this book has induced me to buy a number of books I
otherwise would not have, and in this sense the book could be said to have a
strikingly direct effect on its readers. Dworkin hardly mentions electronic
publication in his introduction, but it is clearly a specter haunting the book.
Dworkin is no technophobe, and has made much of his library available online at his
Eclipse website. He has even extensively theorized his own practices as an online
archivist.
[11] In some sense,
The Perverse Library shows that
no amount of metadata can stand in for the sensory data of physical books. The book
could almost be taken as a refutation of Goldsmith’s “If it isn’t on the internet,
it doesn’t exist” — except that ironically the maxim almost holds true in that
almost all of these books are online, in the sense that it is possible to find
instantaneous metadata, including prices and library access information, about nearly
all of these titles. [
Goldsmith 2005]
Dworkin both celebrates and laments the physical space taken up by the library. He
insists his project is an architectural one, a documentation not simply of the
library’s textual contents, but also an account of its materiality. In his
introduction, Dworkin engages in an extended excursus on the olfactory aspects of his
library — a form of sense data seldom recorded bibliographically. The catalog
presents us with a paradox — it makes information accessible, but it also deforms it
through reducing it to fixed categories. Dworkin’s book could be the most compelling
single volume account of small-press Anglo-American poetry publishing over the past
few decades, and yet it does not contain a single image. Despite its seeming
copiousness, it is a radically reduced representation of these objects and those
persons and institutions that produced them. The title suggests a sexualized relation
of the bibliophile to his books, but etymologically the word “perverse” — in the
sense of through verse — could also be considered entirely appropriate
to a poetry library.
M. Nourbese Philip’s
Zong!
[
Philip 2008] takes on a more serious topic than either
The Perverse Libraryor
Seven Controlled
Vocabularies.
Zong! retells — or refuses to
retell — the story of the Zong, a slave ship from which 150 slaves were thrown
overboard in 1781 so that its owners could collect insurance money. A lawyer by
training, Philip derives much of the nearly 200-page book from the two page text of
the
Gregson v. Gilbert decision. Derive may be too
strong a verb, however, since
Zong! is more of a dérive
than a derivation, which its author describes as a kind of “recombinant antinarrative”
[
Philip 2008, 204]. Philip describes locking herself “into this particular discursive landscape in the belief
that…the story that can only be told by not telling, is locked in this
text”
[
Philip 2008, 191]. In effect, Philip rewrites the
Zong! narrative
by reordering the categories upon which the case was based. “The
law,” she writes, “uses language as a tool for
ordering… I want poetry to disassemble the ordered, to create disorder and mayhem
so as to release the story”
[
Philip 2008, 199].
Zong! is a fantastically complex multi-generic work that
I can only begin to describe in this essay — what I want to note are the book’s
formal features and how they relate to questions of metadata and classification. The
first
Zong! (
Figure 2) is
one of 26 in the first chapter, suggesting an alphabetic microcosm of fragmentation
and erasure.
At the bottom of the page, significantly, are names of the victims chosen by Philip;
none of the slaves’ actual names were ever recorded. As if to undermine any notion of
a possible point of origin for the story, the first three letters of the poem are
www, suggesting world wide web, and yet these three w’s remain in a kind of
proto-semantic state, not syntactically subordinated, referring to no one or no thing
directly. The words that do rise off the page are monosyllabic, often are fillers or
homonymic, signs perhaps of dysfluency or of being heard by a non-English speaker or
even perhaps of being heard from below deck or from below the sea:
“our/go/goo/oh/one/won/dey/ah/ay/day s.”
Philip describes the composition of
Zong! as the product
of a number of serendipitous events, among which she lists her “laser printer for no apparent reason print[ing] the first two or three pages [of
one section] superimposed on each other — crumped, so to speak — so that the page
becomes a dense landscape of text”
[
Philip 2008, 206]. Philip claims that the laser printer did this
to the “beginning of each movement of the second part of the
book…the same thing happens”
[
Philip 2008, 206]. So far as I can tell, however, only in the
Ebora chapter (
Figure 3) does the malfunctioning laser
printer produce a palimpsestic overwritten text.
Many of
Zong!’s sections demonstrate an extraordinary
care and precision in terms of typography and layout. The book uses multiple fonts,
for instance, including a cursive script. It would seem that Philip exaggerates the
effects of her printer’s presumed malfunction. Philip’s printer introduces what
Benzon calls “the standardization of error” into the text
of
Zong!. The malfunctioning printer resists the
protocols of a clean, direct presentation of text. Writing of Andy Warhol’s
Aa: A Novel, Benzon suggests that “At both the microscopic and the macroscopic levels, the
systematization of textual production that inhered in the typewriter and
elsewhere in the office influenced writing and reversed its effects”
[
Benzon 2010, 96]. It is perhaps more difficult to introduce serendipitous errors into computer
texts than typescripts, and it would seem even more difficult to encounter such
errors in works which are extensively copyedited for publication. According to
Benzon, “Each typed document, each piece in the massive archive
of postwar corporate discourse, is a unique record of an individual sequence of
body-machine interfaces and technological inscriptions”
[
Benzon 2010, 96]. Philip’s printer performs a kind of violence
upon the page, crumping it — but it also leaves a trace of the author’s engagement
with technologies of textual production. It is worth noting that
The Perverse Library also thematizes the role of error in its
introduction, and that
Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s
Head, while it does not explicitly thematize error, seems to go to great
lengths to eliminate errors.
Zong! ends with a glossary and imagined ship’s manifest.
As opposed to the constrained English vocabulary of the court decision, Philip offers
a cosmopolitan list of words from other languages likely to have been used onboard.
She also provides a manifest which lists eleven African “Groups
and Languages,” a list of animals, a list of body parts, crew members, and
food and drink. The least likely categories on the manifest are “nature” and
“women who wait.” These lists undermine the well-known opposition suggested
by Manovich between database and narrative, in that the lists tell a story of
horrific absurdity and mistaken classification [
Manovich 2001].
Zong! also could be said to resist the general current of
recent scholarship on lists — found in books such as Umberto Eco’s
Infinity of Lists
[
Eco 2009] or Robert Belknap’s
The List: The Uses
and Pleasures of Cataloguing
[
Belknap 2004] — which tends to celebrate the plenitude of objects
recorded in lists, and which tends to skirt difficult questions of property and
identity.
Zong! and
The Perverse
Library both prominently feature what might be called
negative listing — that is to say that their lists are as much about loss
and misclassification as they are about possession and appropriation.
Zong! re-enacts wrongful classification at the same time
that it reconstructs the languages, names, and possessions of those whose history has
otherwise been erased.
The Perverse Library repeatedly
invokes the burning (or purported burning) of the Library of Alexandria.
[12] The list becomes a metadata
substitute for unobtainable objects and for information that cannot be processed.
Italo Calvino remarks of Georges Perec — perhaps the most famous compiler of
avant-garde literary lists — that for him “Terminological
exactitude was his way of possessing things. Perec collected and gave a name to
whatever comprises the uniqueness of every event, person, or thing”
[
Calvino 1988, 122–123]. The reverse process may also be possible,
however. Clark Coolidge writes in his aggregative prose poem
Mine: “it’s this insane listing that keeps you from
ever possessing anything”
[
Coolidge 1982, 29]. Lists can mark absences also, as for instance
in Maya Lin’s 1981 Vietnam Memorial, which arranges the names of the dead not
alphabetically but chronologically by date of death. According to Belknap, “In the inventory, words representing names or things are collected
by a conceptual principle”
[
Belknap 2004, 3]. The formal organization of lists and
inventories suggests order and coherency, but that organization can also display the
injustices of classifications based on flawed conceptual principles.
Please Enter Your Personal Data
Simon Morris’
Getting Inside Kerouac’s Head presents
an exemplary instance of a conceptual work that operates by means of remediation
and reclassification. The work began as a blog (
Figure
4) in which Morris retyped the entirety of
On the
Road in 298 days [
Morris 2009]. It was then published in
book form by Information as Material (
Figure 5) [
Morris 2010]. Pictured on the cover in the roles of Neal Cassady and
Kerouac are Morris and his comrade-in-arms Nicholas Thurston. The cover would seem
to emphasize the enduring power of male friendship.
[13] The cover invites a
simple transposition from Jack and Neal (or Ray and Cody) to Nick and Simon.
Thurston is listed as the book’s editor, but it remains unclear what this entails,
given that the project would seem not to require editing (although as I suggest
below, it likely did require extensive proofing). While
Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head may seem like a relatively simple
appropriation project of minor interest to literary scholars, the book raises a
number of important issues related to the production and reception of contemporary
texts. Morris does not purport to have written anything personal or expressive,
and yet the variables chosen for his project speak volumes about his intent.
The scene of
On the Road’s composition is perhaps the
most mythologized of any postwar American book. Significantly, Morris chooses to
retype (or reprint) the 2008 text of the (so-called)
Original
Scroll
[
Kerouac 2007]. In effect, then, Morris is returning
On the Road from codex form to scroll form. He does not,
however, adopt the formatting or the cover design of the
Original Scroll edition (
Figure 6),
instead opting for the design of the 2007 Penguin UK edition (
Figure 7), the text of which is based on the 1957
Viking edition (
Figure 8).
On
the Road has been printed in hundreds — if not thousands — of editions
worldwide since its first appearance. It may be one of the world’s most frequently
shoplifted books; it may also be among the most frequently bootlegged in
unauthorized foreign editions. One website alone features over 300
On the Road covers (see below) from around the
world.
[14] Many of those covers
emphasize an aspect of the novel — the road, alcohol, alluring women, Americana,
male friendship, etc. The various designs of
On the
Road, in other words, are a goldmine of data about the book’s reception
and dissemination. Kerouac himself even designed a cover (
Figure 14), which features a solitary figure and a description of the
book as “a modern prose novel.”
Morris’ choice of cover designs could hardly have been accidental. But what does
he mean by the book’s title? It could be interpreted as an ironic critique of what
Daniel Belgrad calls the mid-century “culture of
spontaneity”
[
Belgrad 1998]; it could also be taken as suggesting that the
process of recopying is a more active form of reading, allowing greater insight
into the mindset of an author. But given the hypermediated nature of the
On the Road text(s), as well as of Kerouac’s persona, how
can an act of remediation get Morris (or Morris’ readers) into Kerouac’s head?
Importantly,
Getting Inside Kerouac’s Head involves
at least two remediations — from printed book to blog, and from blog to détourned
book. The book reprints (nearly) the exact pages of the
Original Scroll book, only in reverse order. Thus it is possible to
read the entire text of the
On the Road scroll
(book), word for word, simply by turning the book’s pages to the right rather than
to the left. Although the book and the blog may contain exactly the same (or
nearly the same) words, they are very different works. Morris, it should be noted,
reproduces the lineation and exact formatting of the original scroll book —
although occasionally slight variations in lineation can be noted. He also
reproduces Kerouac’s errors exactly, as for instance “jaloppy” on the first
page [
Kerouac 2007, 109].
After considerable, but not exhaustive, examination, I have found only a few minor
errata in Morris’ “transcription”, but those errata demonstrate
that retyping the book was a labor of love, rather than simply a scanned version
of the original (which to the casual observer would appear identical). The most
conspicuous erratum is in the book’s first sentence. Howard Cunnell, the editor of
the
Original Scroll, has preserved a double met in
the famous first sentence of the book: “I first met met Neal
not long after my father died. . .”
[
Kerouac 2007, 109]. Morris does not preserve the double met.
According to Cunnell, the double met was “preserved because it
so beautifully suggests the sound of a car misfiring before starting up a long
journey”
[
Kerouac 2007, 101]. Whether or not this is the case, it is
unlikely that Kerouac would have preserved such an error. Morris may have
inadvertently corrected the redundancy. Aside from several other errata (a
reversed quotation mark on page 291, which can also be found in the blog’s
November 29, 2008 entry; a missing sentence on page 269; some missing text on page
275), Morris (and Thurston as editor) appear to have carried out an
extraordinarily careful transcription — contrary to what one might expect from a
blog as a casual form of instantaneous publication.
The original
GIJKH blog features a two-paragraph
project proposal, appropriated entirely from a pre-existing blog posting by
Kenneth Goldsmith. The book features an expanded introduction by Goldsmith. The
introduction is worth quoting at length, since it bears on the book’s genesis, as
well as its meaning:
A few years ago I was lecturing to a
class at Princeton. After the class, a small group of students came up to me to
tell me about a workshop that they were taking with one of the most well-known
fiction writers in America. They were complaining about her lack of
imagination. For example, she had them pick their favorite writer and come in
next week with an “original” work in the style of that author. I asked one
of the students which author they chose. She answered Jack Kerouac. She then
added that the assignment felt meaningless to her because the night before she
tried to “get into Kerouac’s head” and scribbled a piece in “his
style” to fulfill the assignment. It occurred to me that for this student
to actually write in the style of Kerouac, she would have been better off
taking a road trip across the country in a ‘48 Buick with the convertible roof
down, gulping Benzedrine by the fistful, washing ‘em down with bourbon, all the
while typing furiously away on a manual typewriter, going 85 miles per hour
down a ribbon of desert highway. And even then, it would’ve been a completely
different experience, not to mention a very different piece of writing, than
Kerouac’s. [Goldsmith 2008, 142–143]
[Morris 2010, vii]
Morris’ appropriation of this paragraph provides an ingenious “unoriginal”
point of origin for his project. As a repudiation of creative writing pedagogy,
Goldsmith’s provocation is rather standard fare. More interestingly, Goldsmith is
proposing a radically mimetic way of producing (or reproducing) a literary text —
requiring not merely the rewriting and rereading of the text, but the attempted
reconstruction (or imitation) of the author’s total writing experience. Setting
aside for a moment the playfulness (and impossibility) of Goldsmith’s Borgesian
pedagogical strategy, he makes an important point about how “very different” the student’s piece of writing would be from Kerouac’s.
Although Goldsmith trots out familiar clichés of
On the
Road’s composition, as anyone who has read the
Original Scroll edition knows, many of those clichés are false.
Kerouac claimed not to have used Benzedrine while working on the scroll. Kerouac
made no secret of his dissatisfaction with the 1957 version of
On the Road, but he did not claim the scroll was the text
to be preferred. He worked on editing the book for six years after producing the
scroll, and there are two extent subsequent typescripts by his hand that
incorporate substantial changes. Not only are there divergences between the scroll
and the 1957 text, there are also letters and journals Kerouac used in composing
the book. In effect, to choose a text of
On the Road
is a matter of choosing at what point in time one wants to get inside of Kerouac’s
head. One commentator [
Hunt 2009] has even suggested that
On the Road should be considered primarily an oral text,
a form of “typetalking.” Goldsmith’s snapshot account elides much of this
process — his syntax suggests that Kerouac was typing while driving (and
drinking!). Goldsmith emphasizes the bohemian dimension of the book, rather than
the three weeks in which Kerouac composed the scroll in his mother’s apartment, or
the complex collective editorial process that led to the 1957 text.
One effect of the scroll text is that it de-novelizes
On the
Road.
[15] By using real names, the book becomes a more direct record of Kerouac’s
experiences. The scroll text is more homoerotic and more misogynistic; it is, in
the words of its editor, Howard Cunnell, “a markedly darker,
edgier, and uninhibited text than the published text”
[
Kerouac 2007, 31]. Perhaps the scroll text does allow readers
to get further into Kerouac’s head, but the many layers of mediation and irony in
the presentation of Morris’ project would seem to suggest the difficulty of
undertaking such a telepathic procedure by textual means. Consider for instance
this exchange (
Figure 16) between Morris and a fan
of his blog, Jannie Sue “Funster” (a real person so far as I can
ascertain):
There is a healthy dose of English sarcasm in Morris’ grin, but there is also
politeness and empathy. Jannie Sue’s identification with the project is seemingly
at odds with the heroic masculinity typically associated with the book. In fact,
Kerouac misspelled LuAnne Henderson’s (Neal Cassady’s first wife’s) name
throughout the scroll (in the 1957 Viking edition she is known as Mary Lou).
Jannie’s identification is predicated on a mistaken homology, and yet her tragic
reading of the novel is to my mind oddly more accurate than the conventional pop
cultural reading of the novel as a celebration of bohemian escapism. Why shouldn’t
Morris share Jannie Sue and Kerouac’s sense that “everybody’s got this broken
feeling”? Perhaps that is just as authentic a response to the book.
Is Morris being sincere when he suggests that “chewing on
Kerouac’s words is the most thrilling read/ride of my life”? Retyping
one page per day of someone else’s novel into a blog would hardly seem thrilling —
in a sense it is the inverse of Goldsmith’s notion of vicariously retracing
Kerouac’s journey. Morris seemingly goes nowhere beyond his keyboard. He makes no
direct comment on the textual and cultural morass that is
On
the Road — rather he unimagines (and perhaps even re-personalizes) what
by now can only be read as a collective text, a product of millions of readings.
The blog — the most democratic and derided of publishing formats, as well as
perhaps the easiest means by which to violate copyright online — is a fitting
venue. Kerouac’s legendary typing skills are returned to the bureaucratic regimens
from which they emerged. To add another ironic dimension to Morris’ project, the
Kerouac estate has for decades been extremely protective of Kerouac’s letters and
unpublished manuscripts. Morris has thus republished a document that for over
fifty years was unavailable to readers.
On the Road
provides ample proof of Jerome McGann’s claim that “Every
document, every moment in every document conceals (or reveals) an indeterminate
set of interfaces that open into alternate spaces and temporal
relations”
[
McGann 2001, 181]. Whereas
On the
Road’s marketing has largely sold readers on the prospect of getting
inside Kerouac’s head, Morris’ project rejects an unmediated entry into the
psyche. Though Kerouac’s writing process was often frenzied and sporadic,
On the Road took nearly ten years of sustained effort to
reach print. Morris’ rewriting, by contrast, takes the form of a daily ritual
practice. Every post indicates the date and time of its posting. For some twenty
minutes each day, Morris could be said to conduct a devotional exercise within the
highly regimented chronological format of the blog.
Morris’ book
Re-Writing Freud (
Figure 17) adapts and repurposes another iconic text,
Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams
[
Morris 2005]; he has recently released a further remediation of
that project, an iPad app (
Figure 18) which
scrambles, resizes, and overlays words drawn from Freud’s translated text —
culminating in a “mystic writing pad.”
The app points suggestively toward emergent metadata schemes and delivery formats.
It is now possible, for instance, to obtain the
On the
Road as an iPad app called an “Amplified
Edition,” in the iBooks (epub) format, in a Kindle edition, as well as
to download bootlegged pdf versions. Channeling Morris, Goldsmith raises the
obvious question in his introduction: “If Kerouac were alive
today, would he be publishing on paper, or blogging, or tweeting his way across
America?”
[
Morris 2010, xii]. Asking this question is a little bit like
asking if
On the Road could have existed if Kerouac
(like many men of his generation) had never learned to type.
On the Road is in many respects the sum of its textual and mythical
histories, rather than the singular production of a doomed genius. This makes it
more difficult to read
On the Road as a spontaneously
produced confessional narrative, but it makes the book no less interesting as an
iconic catalog of postwar American media culture and its global influence.
The sordid history of the Kerouac estate presents a fascinating case study in the
hypocrisies of current copyright law — although none of this specific history is
revealed in
Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head. When
Kerouac died in 1969, the bank valued the estate “at a nominal
$1”
[
Brown 2009]. On October 28, 2009 (on a day when Morris was typing
out his 400 words), a Florida judge declared Kerouac’s mother’s 1973 will a fake.
Thus, Kerouac’s entire estate (now estimated at
$30 million)
can be considered to have been misappropriated from 1973
onward. If Morris’ project pushes at the boundaries of fair use (or fair
dealing in the UK), it would be a rich irony to accuse him of copyright violation.
Exactly fifty years after its composition, the scroll sold for $2.4 million,
setting the world auction record for a literary manuscript [
On the Block 2001]. The scroll’s consignor was Tony Sampas, the nephew of
Kerouac’s third wife, Stella Sampas, the presumed forger of the will. The winning
bidder was James Orsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, who although he owns the
physical manuscript, is not listed as a copyright holder of the book version of
the scroll. As a result of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 2008,
the 1957 text of
On the Road will remain under
copyright in the United States until the year 2052 (95 years from the date of its
first publication).
The Original Scroll edition will
be copyright until 2102. Nonetheless, it remains uncertain who in fact owns the
copyright: control over the estate continues to be under litigation.
From the Prison House of Language to the Prison House (or Probation) of
Metadata
The readings of Lin, Dworkin, Philip and Morris that I have suggested here could be
extended to encompass a broader range of recent writing; I would mention in
particular the writing of Robert Fitterman, Monica de la Torre, Kenneth Goldsmith,
Vanessa Place, Kim Rosenfield, Caroline Bergvall, Nicholas Thurston, Matthew Timmons,
Derek Beaulieu and Ara Shirinyan — although this list (or meta-list) is far from
complete. Recent avant-garde writing from the US, UK, and Canada has a near obsession
with classification. The Listmania found in this writing challenges a passive
acquiescence to the cataloguing procedures we experience every day. Perhaps
avant-garde poetry has transferred itself from the prison house of language of the
70s and 80s to the prison house of classification in the Internet era. In saying
this, I recognize that I am awkwardly assigning agency to a number of overlapping
historical categories. The writers under discussion in this paper are careful not to
assume simplistic correlations between metadata schemes and ideology (or politics).
Though these works suggest that we are captives of classification, they do not
necessarily claim that we are deterministically imprisoned by our classifications. To
adapt the prison house metaphor, perhaps the door of the Bastille has been open for a
while. Contrary to enduring myth, only seven prisoners were freed in the storming of
the Bastille. This makes it no less important as an event, or rather no less
important as a shifting series of events, images, descriptions and
(re)categorizations.
In the words of Perec, “Taxonomy can make your head spin”
[
Perec 1997].
Acknowledgments
An early version of this paper was presented as part of the “The
Poetics of Metadata” panel at the 2011 Society for Textual Studies
Conference. I would like to thank my co-panelists Paul Benzon and Mark Sample. Andrea
Andersson offered helpful commentary on a draft of this essay.
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