"a story that didn't go back or forward but went in."
Slowly processing Saturday's Long Relayinternet writing event (described here), though I think it may take some time to untangle in my head. I was really pleased with the rich mix and inventiveness of the work, and with the strange drift of the text through the 24 hours.
One thing I liked very much, was the sense of fiction more or less blossoming (not quite the right word) as different writers turned their attention in different directions. Like Tom's intensive magnification of the first part of the story, or Deborah's conjuring up a fragment of plot about the girl, who'd been more or less 'undeveloped' prior to that. It reminded me of that old Phillip K. Dick (?) /paranoid idea of a world in which nothing exists unless you decide to go look at it; that some mysterious 'they' are busy constructing building bits of the world in time for you to go see them.. An idea that crops up explicitly in Peter Weir's The Truman Show. I somehow had a similar feeling watching the original text expand, contract and transform through the long hours.
What I liked most though was the liveness, the unfolding of it all. There was something very beautiful watching the document change each time the page reloaded as different writers were working. Shame it wasn't changing keystroke by keystroke as we had originally hoped, but the jumps - a sentence here, a few words there, the occasional paragraph here - were always great to see; incomplete moves, signs of another person working on the text, a person starting to move things around. Also a strong sense at times of the text as a living thing; growing, shifting as an object on the screen.
Connected to this, in watching from long distance as other people worked on the project in the stuttering real-time of its updates, there was always for me a sense of working-out, guessing or anticipating which way they were headed. These were moments of 'oh I see where she is going' or 'I get it, I see what this is going to be' - predictions that were sometimes right, sometimes not. I guess in that sense the project succeeded for me - in showing writing as a process, as an unfolding set of decisions. I loved the sense of something materialising (a view, a take on things), and of seeing someone else (via their emerging take on it) slowly made manifest. A kind of dramaturgical staging of sensibility. I'm still struck by the act of Tom slowly adding his initial notes, annotating/commenting on my text, flagging things he'd use, things he'd want to get rid of - musing to himself about it, how it might work, or what it all might want to be. It reminded me a lot of notes I've written to myself whilst working on things. And I also remember watching mesmerised as Shelley was working; pasting in new paragraphs from previous versions of the text and then slowly scalpeling into them, shifting the words, adding things and taking away to make something new. There was something really sculptural about that.. And the results were beautiful.
Perhaps most frustrating to me was the feeling of the fiction in the end trapped in itself, in its own exoskeleton or in its own initial footprint, a feeling of growing confinement, an inability (somehow) in the system or game of it to make new space, to expand, to breathe or walk in some other direction. Tom's focus on the start, Mike's story - a very smart and delicate shifting the timeframe and looking back on a transformed version of the supposed incidents, or Deborah's shift to the female character - were all useful attempts to do this, as was Adrian's great final move of writing the 'protagonist' as a ghost. Shelley, Simon and Fiona, in their inventive and assertive foldings back on the writing and on its process, also opened the text of course, finding new things in its tangled tracks and traces. There is perhaps a limit to the amount of energy in the system though. As if the serial/relay calls essentially for an integrity of relation; for a certain level of continuity. And as though the time frame in the project, of both individual and collective duration, is maybe too small for it to travel to a radically different place without threatening total disconnection. Even knowing this though, (wanting my cake and wanting to eat it too) I could have taken more change somehow, or more space and more air, and would be interested to find a structure that encouraged this.
I'm certainly left curious about what the project might be like with a different balance or emphasis in the rules. And I'm wondering now if starting from a complete narrative by me was such a smart idea. Perhaps something more open or skeletal might have been better, or something that (somehow) more invited difference by way of response. I'm not sure for the moment what this would mean - but I'm guessing that Adrian and I will go back around the project several times in discussions now, trying to figure what the next move or incarnation of it might be.
OK. Better late than never. The Long Relay 24 hour serial writing project can be followed continuously online from 1pm Uk time on Sat 13th to 1pm UK time on Sun 14th at this site. Don't go there before tomorrow lunchtime as its still rather under construction!
Timetable for the writers is below. Looking forward to it. Big thanks to Ben and Eva at Serpentine for helping to pull the whole thing together this last ten days.
Saturday 13 October
13.00-16.00: Tim Etchells in Bergen, Norway
16.00-19.00: Tom McCarthy in London
19.00-22.00: Deborah Levy in London
Sunday 14 October
22.00 (Sat)-01.00: M. John Harrison in London
01.00-04.00: Shelley Jackson in New York
04.00-07.00: Fiona Templeton in New York
07.00-10.00: Simon Bayly in London
10.00-13.00: Adrian Heathfield in London
Curator Adam Budak has invited me to take part in Manifesta 7in Italy next year. Adam is organising the exhibition in Rovereto. Site visit coming soon.
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Tom McCarthy's new book Men In Space has a nice review in The Observerhere. Looking forward to reading it. Tom's taking part in this weekend's Long Relay event hosted by Serpentine gallery (see below). Also confirmed for Long Relay now are Simon Bayly (Roehampton University/Theatre Pur) and Shelley Jackson whose as yet incomplete Skin project - a story published (as single-word tattoos) on the skin of 2095 volunteers - looks pretty amazing.
My performance/lecture in Frankfurt a couple of weeks ago jumped from its supposed topic of dramaturgy to a story about an inexplicable bout of crying that I'd experienced last year in front of a Cy Twombly painting at Guggenheim NY. As a follow up my friend Christine Peters just sent me info on a book called Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings by James Elkins, an art historian at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Great title at least - will have to track it down. Amazon calling.
Found the fragment below (via Boing Boing) in some New York Magazine collected 'Top Ten Most Incomprehensible Bob Dylan Interviews of All Time'. It's from an interview with Playboy, February 1966 and Dylan's speaking about how he chose his career. Nice text.
Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chilli and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy — he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?
In the same place there's a link to a clip from D.A. Pennebaker's brilliant 1966 Don't Look Back in which Dylan lays into a Time magazine journalist with a barrage of questions and statements. "Will you see the concert? But are you going to hear it?"
Now looking forward to Todd Haynes's forthcoming Bob Dylan biopic - I'm Not There — in which Dylan is played variously by Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Christian Bale and an 11-year old boy (amongst others).
This coming Saturday I'm writing in a project called Long Relay that Adrian Heathfield and I have set up for the Serpentine Gallery in London as part of their Experiment Marathon.
Long Relay is a kind of real-time call-and-response writing project conducted over the internet in which an initial text (written by me and frequently updated online as I write) is then re-worked, re-written or entirely re-invented by the next writer, and whose work in-turn in re-written by the next and so on, continuously over a 24 hour period. I start writing at 1pm Saturday 13th October and the project closes at the same time on Sunday 14th with a final piece by Adrian. In between (and working three hour shifts) are Tom McCarthy, Deborah Levy, Mike Harrison and Fiona Templeton (plus two more in final process of confirmation!). You'll be able to follow the whole project, live on the internet as well as being able to access the individual parts/chapters as they are completed. I'll publish the URL here as soon as I have it.
I'm looking forward to the project and nervous about it in a way, although, it being a live thing and something I want to approach very much as live there's nothing I can really do to prepare. I plan to sit down with no plan and simply see where I go. If things work out I will have one thing to guide or inspire me me - a question provided by Olafur Eliasson whose Pavilion with architect Kjetil Thorsen is the physical base for Experiment Marathon.
It's great to be joined in Long Relay by Tom McCarthy who I've met just a couple of times and whose Remainder I liked a lot and wrote about here. As well as Fiona Templeton whose You - The City was a huge inspiration when I saw it maybe 20 years ago, I'm also really happy to have writers whose contributions to Barabra Campbell's ongoing 1001 Nights Cast have been so great. Long Relay definitely wouldn't have been in my mind as a concept without the inspiring introduction to live writing, and text as call and response that Barbara's project has been. I'll be writing again for 1001 in a month or so.
More details on Experiment Marathon which also features work and presentations by Marina Abramović; Simon Baron-Cohen; John Brockman; Peter Cook; Sophie Fiennes; Armand Leroi; Gustav Metzger; Steven Pinker; Pedro Reyes; Matthew Ritchie; Israel Rosenfield; Tomas Saraceno; Angela Sirigu; Andreas Slominski; Luc Steels; and Lewis Wolpert, at the link above.
And finally if anyone happens to be in London for Frieze my video show One Hundred and Three People is still running at Sketch until 3 November. More details here.
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