Jeffrey Side wrote:
> I see what you mean Bob, but I think Andrews is not against randomness as such, but works that use it based on a system or procedure that is designed to produce similar patterns of randomness. Such works, for Andrews, displays (as Charles Bernstien would say) too much of the mechanisms of its own production to allow readers to fully engage exegetically with the text. This is why Andrews criticises the work as being just as authoritarian as the School of Quietude, to use Silliman’s term.
I suppose I'd have to see examples of this to judge the matter. Of the
top of my head, I can't see why mechanisms would necessarily
authoritarianly narrow a reader's response. Why can't mechanisms be of
interest, and susceptible to all kinds of interpretations. As I jabber,
I find I feel that the subject is too complex for anything less than a
very long, terms-defined, essay.
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> When I write poems chance is used a lot, though I do select from the random data words and phrases that I like, or that I think allow more exegetical possibilities for readers than other chance word or phrase combinations may allow. For me, how this is manufactured is as unimportant as the artist's paints, brush and palette are in the creation of a painting.
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When I compose, I feel my brain randomly tosses elements for use on the
page and I choose among them--on the basis usually of how much they do
for me, because I can only know that--but believing other human beings,
or some other human beings, will have the same kind of brain and
background as I and get similar pleasure from them. In a sense, the
only reader/viewer I care about is me; in another, I want everyone to be
able to experience my work pleasurably.
In other words: urp.
Bob
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>
> Original Message:
>
> I can't see how you can avoid doing both: you can't even roll dice
> without intending to do so (and use the result in an artwork), nor can
> you decide in advance every minute detail of some work you want to
> compose--chance will pop certain unexpecteds into your mind.
> Ultimately, too, that you are you is the result of chance, and your
> choices available by chance--for instance, your by chance happening to
> be alive in 2010 rather than in 1322.
>
> Aside from that, I don't understand what readers have to do with
> anything. If you choose to make something of words, aren't you
> necessarily trying to communicate with someone else? Or, if you're
> "merely" constructing an object of beauty, how can it not be for others,
> as well as yourself? I suppose it's theoretically possible to be
> totally solipsistic, but very difficult and rare. It might also be
> biologically impossible.
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