rolling credits

fall 2011, my very first semester of grad school adventuring. I took a Bibliography class and a Publications Management class at Tech, where both instructors assigned Foucault's “What is an Author?”

amusingly, they each sent out very different PDF versions of this Foucault. this semester, spring 2015, in Postmodernism class, I have collected yet another version.

this Michel Foucault guy. he is undeniably prolific, and not just of his own accord either. these are three different English translations. the essay has been collected and recollected in lots of places.

he shows up in snippet-form in a million other people's work. quotations and paraphrases and summaries and re-purposings galore.



look at all that proliferation, uncontrollable and unending. [sidenote: prolific/proliferate. hmmm. those are cool words.]

speaking of unending proliferation... when we read this Foucault (in company with "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes) for Postmodernism this week, I saw these theorists from the seventies prophesying the messiness of internet culture.

Barthes gets prophetic with the assertion that

“In a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, 'threaded' (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it.” (5)

this reminded me a bit of our class discussion the other week about memes (in particular, this one, which requires advanced Superbowl XLIX background knowledge to even attempt to make sense of--I still don't know if it's parseable, really) and their funny, short-lived, nonsensical nods at “meaning.” and I thought of Tony’s paper day presentation on Wikipedia. what is Wikipedia if not a floating, threaded, tagged, metadata-ed parade of version upon version upon version of writing, editing, responding, and so on? (this whole Barthes piece also reminded me of Doctor Who, for some reason. I think it was the talk of dimensions and eternally present texts and utterances that are always “here and now.” weird connection, I know. I'm not even any brand of a Whovian.)

Foucault's foreshadowing peeks out here, where he tells us that

“as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint--one that will no longer be the author but will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced” (222). 

he doesn't know or say what exactly would replace the standard model of authorship, and neither can we... yet. we are in this very moment. (maybe the 1970s were in it too. I don't know.) one version of my online self, a few weeks back, made a copy of a statement by some unknown writer on Tumblr about this whole idea: "we live in a post-copyright society," the guy says. Tumblr itself seems to be exactly the world Foucault is describing. on Tumblr it doesn't matter who is speaking.

I now interject with a complicatedly relevant and timely example from an (overly popular?) author/vlogger/whoever:


(for the record, I saw only seventeen--actual seventeen, not seventeen hundred--likes when I checked on goodreads the other day. there are eighteen now, and it's been reattributed. that was quick.)

later on in his essay, Foucault admits that he has “unjustifiably” limited his definition of authorship and discourse (216). what about so many other forms of creative work, he asks? what if we're talking about painting or music? what if? what if we're talking about pixels and code?

the (really awesome, I think) postmodern tendency to keep widening and broadening everything, always chopping down boundaries, tearing up labels, smashing traditions, etc. makes me want to ask so many questions. if everything counts as discourse, what then? leading up to this, Foucault also explains that “all discourses endowed with the author function possess this plurality of self” (215)... as if the self is a text, also. not only is everything discourse, everything is plural. me included. from there, it’s tempting to imagine a "death of the self" along the same lines as this famous "death of the author." someday we may only have self-functions. hmmm.

in our class forums, colleague Beth made a very cool point about the roles and threats and newnesses of technology in this whole shifting authorship/compositionship situation, citing a fellow named Friedrich Kittler on the topic of typewriters. and then friend John posted a link to this awesomeness, which I found delightfully mindboggling. I have a machine that in theory could do such cool things. perhaps I should learn.

back to technology though. technology + humans = cyborgs. and that reminds me of Neil Harbisson. and it reminds me of David Eagleman's Sum (a pretty blue paperback that I actually own). of death-switches. functions without selves. hmm.

so far so endless

finals week has ended.

semi-frantic emails from my students about their grades have begun.

I am still in the middle of the last bits of grading. relax, students. there is pretty much nothing you can do about your grade at this point.

this is the pile of borrowed books I want to read in the next month or so. it's about 60/40 academic/non-academic, I think. the Gilbert is one I read about during the most recent tournament of books: The Signature of All Things. the Gibson is one I may have read already (his books have a dejà vu about them, more often than not, weirdly), but I wasn't sure. it was the only Gibson the library had on its shelf that day, so I brought it home just in case.

finals week is behind me now, but this academic treadmill has no end. life goes on and it is full of things. there are articles to write and proposals to draft and next semester to plan, and so many goals and ideals to make sense of. German to practice and songs to sing and sunrises to watch. some of all that is prescriptive--shoulds and expectations. some of it is deeper than that, and my little brain is anxious for reading and thinking and enjoying the work of it. most of it is a little bit of both. half-want, half-ought. that makes me pretty lucky, I guess. or congenial and submissive toward my chosen lot. or at least delusional enough to find (slash hallucinate?) a little bit of want into the efforts this context currently expects of me.

speaking of hybridly fun-required projects, this here is the very first draft of a game I developed for Dr. Blackmon's class this semester. it is roughly based on a very long, very random, very adventuresome story I started writing ten+ years ago (more info). there is an island. a mystical ocean. pie. yaks. sock-related conflict. the main character in the story wears lots of plaid. a game doesn't really have a main character, and while identity is a major game element, plaid doesn't really play into it as much... so I'm not really sure if it should keep the name The Plaid Identity, but so far no better name has suggested itself. my colleagues and classmates who have play-tested the draft versions agree that the name seems to suit the randomness of the game itself just fine.

Dr. Blackmon's class is all finished now, but I'm still fiddling with the game, its little pieces, and its design. since there is no main character, I'm experimenting with making the board wear plaid. bright orange plaid for zombie-river spaces, deep green plaid for yak-meadow spaces, brown plaid for pie spaces, sandy beach plaid for fulgurite spaces, and a small grey plaid for sock spaces. and then lots of blue for the ocean. I'm not sure how practical this design is at the moment--it needs testing. I hope to get my family and old friends to play it a few times with me when I'm home next week. I hope there will be time for it between the camping and the theatre and the dinner parties and maybe a little sewing/crafting stuff. 

oh and all that reading I have piled up. there will need to be time for that, too. 

effective

gone are the days when my siblings and I had to play silly alphabet scavenging games to keep ourselves occupied during long trips in the family van (such as when dad refused to take us home after church and instead made as many wrong turns as possible, all in the name of exploring the countryside).

now our vehicle is equipped with a DVD player.

unfortunately, I in the passenger seat am only able to enjoy the soundtrack of Pirates of the Caribbean and not the entire film.

as the illustrious Captain Jack Sparrow repeatedly demanded the return of his effects and his hat with each suspense-filled turn of the plot, I pondered what items I might demand, if I happened to find myself in comparable situations.

things that came to mind:

notebooks
box of pens and pencils
camera
favourite sandals

these are the things with which I daily attempt to change the world. in my current position they are all very disorganized and rarely on hand when I want them, but they are my effects. well, except for the sandals. I suppose they would be my version of Sparrow's hat. i'm not much of a hat person. though if I had a hat like his, perhaps I could be converted.

an affinity for amnesiacs

the longest work of fiction i have ever pulled out of my own head is (today) 106, 494 words long.

like several of my other writings this one began as a frivolous way to entertain a few friends, to keep my mind in a playful mood. i never thought it would get so long, but as it turns out, writing in first person this way means keeping secrets from yourself. secrets like the way it should end.

today i tried out my crazy mythical universe on a third-person narrative. i traded my female protagonist in for an eleven-year-old pirate. for the last few weeks i've been turning several plot ideas over and over in my head and finally, this morning, i came out with this short little thing, about 1/100th of the size of the piece it's based on.

unlike the original unfinished story, this spinoff had the luxury of being revised several times. i like it. it sheds a rather eerie light on several things i've been trying to think into The Plaid Identity. strange, what another perspective can do for a story.

oh. did you want a crack at those hundred thousand words?

hold on a second...

there:
The Plaid Identity
as of July 4, 2007