It's interesting: on the one hand I think - well I've heard all this stuff
before and I've nothing against people airing it but it gets boring if
they've nothing to add to ideas that have been rolled out years ago but, on
the other hand, I come across people advertising workshops where mugs are
pickpocketted for lessons on how to regurgitate anecdotes in flat verse and
I fantasise about a scenario where the creative writing tutors are locked up
in rooms with Bruce Andrews and MacLow being continously broadcast on
loudspeakers for, say, a weekend retreat in the Cotswolds.
So I think I end up finding I don't like Andrews for he is but definitely
appreciate what he's not.
Which is a rather binary bind, pace Tim.
On 2 April 2010 21:13, Jeffrey Side <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Bruce Andrews interview at The Argotist Online:
>
> http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Andrews%20interview.htm
>
>
> Excerpt:
>
> "Since I’m interested in the experience of the reader, I haven’t been
> interested in chance. Chance might seem to open the possibilities for the
> reader to the widest level, but often it doesn’t get the reader anywhere,
> it’s so open that nothing counts, nothing has any significance, none of the
> connections are designed to have any effect on the reader, and therefore it
> often seems like it ignores the reader, just as much as any type of closed
> textual work. So in a weird way chance and the old notion of intentionality
> end up having the same relationship to the reader, in both cases the reader
> is ignored. Either you don’t care what the reader makes of something because
> there’s not much to make of it, or you ignore the reader because you’ve
> already figured out what everything means, maybe they’ll get it maybe they
> won’t, but you don’t care either way because your job is to create this
> edifice, this autotelic text, as if it means by itself and doesn’t require
> the reader to get on board, and if the reader does have some interest in
> getting on board then they have to pay tuition to take the class to be told
> what things actually meant as if the lecturer is ventriloquizing the author.
> You know, if you read old lit crit, it’s often outrageous, the
> presumptiveness of it. I mean, “this means this, and I know because this is
> what the author meant.” I mean, who the fuck knows what the author meant?
> That’s always irritating to me, because it closes things down. But in a
> weird way, totally randomizing product does too."
>
--
David Bircumshaw
"A window./Big enough to hold screams/
You say are poems" - DMeltzer
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
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