So, I have had a paper due every week since the beginning of the semester. Which means that I haven’t had any time to do anything except write papers and do research. Which means that I haven’t been writing as much as I would like to. Which means I am behind.
But enough about me (sort of.)
I went to the Adam Klein reading on Monday, so I’m going to write about that experience and how I thought about it in relation to my own work. I started writing a post about City Eclogue but I want to spend a little more time with it before I continue with it. There’s a lot I’d like to think about before writing anymore. I guess this could constitute as something to think of when considering my proposal.
I didn’t go to the earlier Klein reading or discussion, but I think I got just as much from a reading as I would from a discussion. I thought a lot of his work was fascinating and not to mention most of it was quite hilarious. I loved the idea of a fake band manager who did everything “wrong.” I loved how he and his collaborators in the band purposefully created things that questioned and downplayed anything to do with the band, such as using Helvetica on their CD covers. It brought a lot of attention to the expectations that most media sources have with regards to how things look, and our obsession with giving everything a glossy, polished overcoat that denies process or evolution (thinking of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons here, especially “Glazed Glitter”).
Most of his work and collaboration seemed to be very playful, which interested me because sometimes my writing is too serious (because sometimes I am too serious) and I would like to learn how to be a bit more flexible while simultaneously taking on serious topics (the broken crystal case is an example of something really simple that is both serious and hilarious.)The concept of “pranking” also brought to mind one of the artists we learned about in the collaboration portion of Mixed Media that I took a couple semesters ago, though I can’t really recall the guy’s name. His concept of “highjacking” public places and making them private differed in the sense that it focused more on the construction of social spaces and how we interact with them, but it had this same kind of playful overtone (in one of the videos he made chairs out of boxes from the post office and put them near a giant art installation.)
I’m always creating soundtracks for books/things I write, so it’s interesting to see the same thing occurring from a professional standpoint. I never quite realized that having a soundtrack to a book was out of the norm, but looking back, I can’t really recall ever hearing about a book soundtrack unless it was the soundtrack to the movie-version first. I think one of the things I would like to do is create a sound poem (or music) in conjunction with a written text and maybe overlap them in some way.
I don’t know. I thought a lot of his concepts fit well with the courses here at EMU, especially his focus on collaboration and interdisciplinarity. I would be interested in seeing the types of theories he incorporates into his syllabus.
T. Kobb's CRTW Blog 