Day 1
In-class writing: a paratextual analysis of your favorite book, including any analysis of the book you agree or disagree with
Perec’s Species of Spaces opens with an image, “Map of the Ocean” from Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark. It’s a thin black square with only the blank space of the page framed inside it (or is the page behind it?). Right away, the question of space is undone. We enter this book through a hole, or the whole ocean, or everything between, and nothing. Our entry point, labeled “map,” resists orientation, scale, direction, and meaning.
The book ends with a definition of “to write:” “to retain something, to cause something to survive, to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.” Perec worked in the Bibliotheque Nationale and this book is librarian’s work turned writing project – to describe, taxonomize, and archive the ways humans take up space. I think this class wants us to do something like this with our own work, but to taxonomize ourselves as authors, to write about ourselves and our work in the way others wrote about Perec after he died, that now appear as the paratext in my penguin edition – an explanation of the book by an expert; Perec’s bio; a new page added at the end to tell us that in 1984, two years after Perec died, small planet No 2817 was named after him. (What does this add as a new ending: Wow he really took over space?) To frame ourselves before others do it wrong.
I once met a reader of Species of Spaces proudly sharing his takedown of anyone who loves the book, saying that because a) pieces for the book originally appeared in architecture magazines, and b) the book clearly works against the seriousness and monumentalism common in the field of architecture, that therefore the book is merely a joke against architects and not a serious book in any way at all. But this seems like a “Clever Academic Gotcha,” a takedown for takedown’s sake. A formal joke can also be genius fun and full of love for its topic.
DAY 3
Homework: Take a description of a work you love and want to emulate.
Ben Rivers’ Slow Action, revised into something I could do in writing.
Kristen Gallagher’s Slow Action is science-fiction horror-documentary-archive shot-written in four locations: Lansremote, Ireland, the site of both the oldest stone circle on Earth, said to be a portal for time travel, and the most bombed hotel on earth, from the Irish “troubles”; Gunkarima, a trash island off the coast of New York City, once inhabited by thousands of Trump voters until they were displaced so that Mayor Eric Adams could build a space station for Elon Musk’s X Rocket; Truforyu, a small itinerant nation made of a large gathering of boats tied together in the middle of the Pacific whose anarchist government has not yet been recognized by the UN; and the town of Somerset, KY, where UFOs, green men, and the Mothman are regularly observed. Slow Action is characterized by long slow descriptions of weird landscapes; it creates a feeling of walking or dreaming among the otherworldly effects of extreme locations. It presents archival documents referencing each place's evolution according to geographical, geological, climatic, political and spiritual conditions. It also imagines the future of earth: geography continually changing; landmasses removed by seas rising, visitors from other realms, perhaps here to help, perhaps to exploit the chaos – creating new forms of life, language, and government.
Filmmaker Ben Rivers, who was inspired by Gallagher’s work, says: "It seems impossible in our world today to not think about massive collapses, from technological disasters to natural disasters that inevitably call us to imagine wildly novel futures” (Halter 2011).
Day 4
A DREAM
Settling down to sleep, in one of those half dreams Breton loved, a voice warns me, “Sleep faceup! If you sleep facedown, others will think you’re prey and attack.” I startled awake. As I fell back to sleep, on my side, I considered the meaning: if others see you as capable of looking back at them, to see a self like themself, they won’t attack. But if they see you looking away – if they believe you can’t see them, if they do not see you looking back at them – you may become their next meal. The premise of this course: how others see us matters. How others see us changes things. Others interpret and represent us—in ways that can matter vitally to us. But perhaps this also means we cannot limit ourselves just to exploring how we are seen, but shld consider how we see others, to see them seeing us, and see ourselves seeing them.
Artist Statement
I began in color vision science, investigating the limits of perception. This evolved into an interest in the relationship of perception to language, which eventually became a focus on the evolution of literary forms from the grassroots practices of folklore and vernacular. These interests persist, and though most of my recent work is published as “fiction,” my primary methods of investigation are folkloric and vernacular, drawing on field research whenever possible. Real people, real situations and localities, and real voices attract me. I’m always working with narrative form, weird cultural and ecological encounters, and the creative processes of truth-making and survival. Blending strategies from memoir, folklore, journalism, poetry, and eco-horror, I play with narrative conventions and the conditions of plausibility they set. I like stories within stories. I like false artifacts. I like small local newspapers and libraries, I prefer testimony to “the news” any day.
FINAL PERFORMANCE (to be read in 3 mins or less):
I recently bought a book of spirit photography, Seance by photographer Shannon Taggert. I was surprised to find that the introduction was written by Dan Akroyd – comedian famous for, among other things, writing Ghostbusters. According to Taggert, he wasn’t invited to write the intro to the spirit photography book because he wrote Ghostbusters; he wrote Ghostbusters because he is a fourth generation Spiritualist. Spiritualists are mediums, people who communicate with the dead. They have a whole cosmology of how the dead and the living coexist. Spirit photography is a spiritualist practice, so Akroyd knows spirit photography. But more interesting, says Taggert, is that Ghostbusters is basically a documentary about how things work according to Spiritualism.
This all reminded me of talking about Cha’s Dictee in one of our early classes. My favorite thing in Dictee is the image in the paratext – the first image in the book, a degraded photocopy with some Korean script on it. In Cha studies people often focus on the Korean script instead of the fact that it’s a degraded photocopy. As MacLuhan says “the content of media blinds us to the character of the medium.” Many focus on this image as a representation of Koreanness, but it just as likely suggests a diffusion of identity subject to history, like the hard-to-locate center of the book. As its epigraph asks, can I make something solid of history and tragedy? The photocopy begins to answer: not really … solid for who? you have to know what you’re looking at, and how to read media. This haunted and particular collage, Dictee, is a work we enter through a question of legibility and memory as over-processed artifact-icity.
Cha’s edited collection Apparatus is a gathering of essays on cinema by practitioners from Dziga Vertov to Maya Deren, artists all concerned with apparition, illusion, specters, ghosts, and shadows, artists approaching film as an experience for which there is no clear marker to disambiguate illusion from reality, and how perception treats it as reality. (Marker, heh) Where do images, perceptions, memories come from? In Apparatus, it’s always a conjuring. This is why the past is as difficult to know as the future.
Dictee needs to be understood as the work of a filmmaker, someone concerned with filmic temporality, experiences where illusion and reality conspire. Could Dictee be a paratext for Cha’s film work, or vice-versa, a textual image of the projection involved in perception? Which brings me back to Shannon Taggert, who tells a story of going to Loch Ness, and after attending some lectures on the Loch Ness Monster, realized the lake itself was a living screen for countless people’s projections of the internalized legend. So she set out to look for it, to work with the ways Nessie is bound to appear. When a play of light appeared in one of her photos, with, loosely, the shape of a dinosaur neck and head, she “saw” it, the loch ness monster. Of course!
Final freewrite, after some questions for reflection by Holly
Must every word I write be the paratext to every other word I write? Must my life unfold as an organized project? So then my first work in this project was being born? Catastrophe! Trauma! As it was in the beginning …
re one desire of this class, to steer others perceptions of us
admittedly sometimes I feel haunted by things I wrote in the past
like the only-half-serious group-written manifesto from my youth
we wrote it trapped indoors, drunk in a blizzard
after the David Harvey talk on Neoliberalism had been canceled
I only had a small part in it to be honest
then we photocopied a run of only 10 copies,
but it went viral because someone scanned it and put it on their blog
and that person was popular so everyone read it and commented
then years later someone introduced me using it as a frame for my work
you cannot control your image – matter of fact, bet on it
it’s better to just play with THAT
I learned I am good at framing others work
I learned my ideas of an artist website are too utilitarian and capitalist
I didn’t write about my work, I wrote new things, things I like, fake but real things, about myself and what I like, indirectly
I thought I’d do something w “cannibalism” about how my writing is based on archives but also making fake archives / Questions of truth and fiction and reality
in certain pieces like in my Skunk Ape story “This May Go Back Centuries,” where I play w the illusions of plausibility set up by “archival material”
But this became weird before this class even started, like, Oh! this doesn’t need to be explained, it’s the ground of fictive practice, fiction plays on reality, duh.
This class was worth it because I am thinking in new ways that I enjoy.
I feel confident in my abilities as a thinker and critic.
I feel like there’s much less room for me as an artist.
I see how saturated the field is.
I feel old and out of date.
I will always write.
I feel how hard it can be to overcome old perceptions I have created of myself.
This is why I am turning toward old neighborhood and family stories
maybe to explain myself? Trying to represent my family and ancestry and mourn the dead
My audience is mostly dead people, even future me who will never find out how this all ends.
“In all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is infinitely more than the inability or disinclination to communicate. That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable.”
— Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and the Language of Man
“Shannon Taggart on Séance, Spiritualism, Spectral Photography and More.” Consensus Unreality, Episode 56, October 2023. youtube.com/watch
Stone-Richards, Michael. “A Commentary On Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.” Glossator, Volume 1, Fall 2009.