wearing hats

Its unbelievable, the number of hats I wear in a day. They are big heavy hats and I'm getting tired. I got sick last week, it's bound to happen again. I feel like I'm wearing every hat but my kate hat. I must have left it on the bus when I got off... if you know the electric kool aid acid test, you know what i mean.

All Cut-Up

In undergrad I had a lit class where we did an exercise where we took passages and blacked out certain words, leaving others (whatever we chose) to create a new piece. The Cut-Up Method that Burroughs examines in his article, "The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin" reminded me of this exercise. In that class we also had to keep a journal, and in that journal I took a Sarah MacLachlan song and chopped it up, putting it in my own order to create my own "song." Here I took the Rimbaud poem that Burroughs cut-up and did the same. I did leave out 2 words, 10 points if you can figure out which they are.

CUT-UP 

HAPPENINGS

I wrote a little bit about this on the class blog, but I am going to go into more detail here. I just loved this article by Kaprow. LOVED IT. It made me want to paint on the walls. A wall is a fabulous canvas.

I like the fact that these happenings have no structure. They don't seem to point you to what is important, but rather let you figure it out yourself. If there is even anything to figure out. Perhaps I should substitute the word, "experience" for the phrase "figure it out." I think that we live in a society where many people need to be told how to experience something or how to "figure it out." Here is problem A, here are some tools and hints, now go to town. Like a puzzle, it was all put together once, you just have to do it yourself this time. I think this also relates back to the arboreal way of thinking that I wrote about in the last blog. I think this is some of the reason that people have a hard time with new technology. With new technology there are no specific rules in place.

Kaprow also takes about "the creator as an indomitable hero who exists on a plane above any living context." For some reason this got me thinking about the "reader-response" theory and how that might relate to the Internet. Or if it even does. I am going to contemplate that and see if I can't write about it at a later date on this blog.

In this one, I get on a soapbox, unwittingly

Last Thursday's conversation about the rhizomatic v. arboreal ways of thinking was very interesting to me. I really think that the arboreal way of thinking with categories is part of the reason that racism, sexism, and any kind of prejudice exists. Having to categorize something means if you're not one thing you must be the Other. If you are not a man you must be a woman. It gives us very definite explanations of what is what and that's now how life works. I remember a conversation much like this in my Women's Studies intro class. I believe the excercise was to get into groups and define "female" and "male." Everyone came up with different ideas, different ways to define and categorize each gender. Of course, as each idea was read it could be questioned. For example, someone might say, "Females have a uterus." And the question would be, "so women who have had hysterectomies aren't female?" It was a great exercise.

I never leave our class without being amazed. I think this is because I have been online since before it was cool to be online. (is it cool?) I was on chat programs like compuserve in 1994. Your "screenname" was your IP address, when you signed in you just picked a different name. You could have the screenname "katemary" one day and the next you couldn't use that one because someone else was using it. So we're talking 11 years of computing. I have learned by trial and error and by now pick up quickly on most programs I use.

I have notice that my way of thinking is a little bit different. I abbreviate and don't have complete thoughts a lot until I have to write them down or type them. I think it's had a lot to do with my development as a person, too, because anytime I hear about something that interests me or that I don't know about I can get online and check it out.

I don't have a hard time with the fact that computers are readily used in our society or that "times they are a changin'." I'm excited about it and I think that people sharing ideas around the globe is incredible. I know that there are "scary" parts to that thought. It means that the "bad guys" can commuicate more quickly, too. But, look how it helped voter turn out in this past election and think about how people can share their information and create new ideas from that. I don't think that the Internet or "new media" is going to kill original thought and it REALLY amazes me that people think that way. It's hard for me to understand, but I'm glad I am being exposed to that way of thinking, because it makes me think from a different point of view. Its hard to do though. Its hard to sit there and listen to people say things about "this is scary" when a lot of this way of thinking is what keeps people "in their place". Do you think that the conservative, old, white, rich men (OR WOMEN!) want us to stop thinking in a hierarchical way? Heck no, that's the only way they stay on top! God save their souls if the world starts thinking we all might be equal and intertwined in different ways.

I will now step down from my soapbox.

Project #1

John and I started on our project last night. We had a lot of fun and I'm super excited about putting everything together. I noticed that we had a lot of questions as to how webpages worked. For example, how do you put music on a webpage? My comment was, it must just be magic. I know that's not true but it just made me realize how I use the Internet day in and day out and I am really clueless as to how it works. I'm glad I get to figure it out though, and with a partner.

I am also a little worried that our project is too lighthearted. John actually brought it up first. Are our classmates going to be upset that we used a classic piece of literature and made it into something to be laughed at? I'm trying to convince myself that I don't really care, because this is our vision of it. I don't think grad school projects only are good if they are serious. I hope I'm right. If I'm not I will be thoroughly disappointed.

Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman was recently interviewed in Progressive. I just read this article and it got me thinking about the process of remediation and how just getting your thoughts onto the paper might be considered remediation. I'm not sure if it is, but the questions of what to represent and how to represent it come into question. Just like with our Sherlock Holmes remediation we have to take an excerpt of thoughts and represent it in some form or many forms. Does this work? I'm unsure, but its an interesting premise for me.

I've put an excerpt from the interview below:

Q: You often are quoted talking about how long it takes you to complete
a page of graphic work. How many drafts of a single page will you do
before you're satisfied with it?

Spiegelman: I can't even tell you. It's just like a mush on paper until
it comes together. Sometimes I'm drawing onto a computer directly,
sometimes I'm drawing on paper and redrawing on the computer from there,
so I can't really talk about drafts. It's just like having soft clay
until it hardens. At least as much of the problem has to do with the
decisions of what to represent, how to represent that, and how to reduce
it down. The words in the balloons aren't particularly poetic
necessarily, but it has the same problem as poetry, which is that one
has to do great reduction. If I say things the way I say them in
interviews, we'd have forty-page balloons. And if I tried to draw
everything, you'd just have a tangled mess of a picture. The stripping
down takes much longer than building up.