Alison:
<snip>
This makes me think of plays like Waiting for Godot in which the
whole formality and dynamic are those conversational elements.
<snip>
Both in Beckett and in Pinget (the novels, not the plays) there's a sense of
the props being shaken until they start to fall over, of 'reality' being
left unsupported.
Do you know the work of Richard Maxwell (*House*, *Boxing* et al)?
<snip>
It seems to me that at every point along a creative
process one is making choices ( this, not that) and many people speak
of a feeling of uncovering or revealing some pre-existent thing.
That pre-existent thing however does not exist until it is
manifested, and it only _seems_ inevitable at that point
<snip>
Choices, certainly. But there would be choices made in finding one's way (by
iteration) through a maze. At the end of your journey, you'd have discovered
a solution that was there before you started.
This might be put another way. Much has been made of how we sort out short
term semantic ambiguity in garden path sentences such as 'A cricketer hit a
six pound pigeon with a baseball bat' (which reveals itself sequentially) or
(more puzzlingly counterfactual) 'A gentle man out shooting ducks and an
elephant flies overhead', and so forth. The semantic problems here are
purely illustrative. It's that feeling of dithering between different sorts
of sound, form and sense that interests me very much more. Do we perhaps, in
'expressing ourselves', respond to the exigencies of something beyond and
prior to language in all its definition?
<snip>
maybe the more interesting a work of art is, the less predictable it is
along certain modes
<snip>
I'd be tempted to argue that *art* lurks at either end of that continuum:
both the utterly expected and the converse but _not_ the bit in between. By
contrast, if I ask the way to the Post Office in 'normal' life I expect to
be told that I'm going the right way or the wrong way but not that I live on
the moon.
CW
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