© 2014 ellathompson

LIFE, THOUGH… FLIES AT US IN BRIGHT SPLINTERS

Week 8.

A couple o’ lecture points:

  • Context can never be preserved in a work. E.g. Films from ’50s are read differently nowadays compared with how they were read in the ’50s. –> perhaps that’s one of the things that makes lists powerful. Removal from context (to some extent).
  • As makers, you have to realise that your intent counts for nothing. –> again, context and interpretation.
  • Korsakow as a filmmaking system can only be viewed on limited technology.

 

I really enjoyed the reading this week. There was some beautiful writing in it. Plus I loved the filmmaker references. Baz Luhrmann. Good choice. Shields has some really interesting ideas. Plus, I’ve always been attracted to fragmented writing. I often love to flout the rigid laws of grammar and fragment ma writin’. I find that it’s easier to understand, more emotive, and more powerful. Fragments are sort of edited from context. Lists are made up of fragments. This collage book thing is made up of fragments of thoughts. What I noticed when reading it was that I was also making fragments of Shields’ fragments. I was editing – highlighting (electronically! To all those who print readings out: stahp. Technology does this stuff. Gosh.) the words or sentences or paragraphs that I found most striking. So I’m going to make a LIST (ha, go me) of those right here. Although Shields probably wouldn’t approve of my quoting. But deal with it, Shields.

 

LIST OF FUN THINGS THAT SHIELDS WROTE:

“I hate quotations.”

“Take a source, extract what appeals to you, discard the rest. Such an act of editorship is bound to reflect something of the individual doing the editing…”

“… there is no pure originality. All minds quote… By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.”

“scissors-and-paste man”

“The urge to connect bits that don’t seem to belong together has fascinated me all my life.”

“chaotic and opaque”

“parts always seem to be competing for a place in some unfinished scene”

“The law of mosaics: how to deal with parts in the absence of wholes.”

“Life, though… flies at us in bright splinters” <– love this one

“mosaic-like reassemblies of existing bits and pieces”

“Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

“too deeply under the sway of progress”

“Plots are for dead people.”

“The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.”

“All definitions of montage have a common denominator; they all imply that meaning is not inherent in any one shot but is created by the juxtaposition of shots.”

“Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.”

“making irrational sense”

“builds”

“A great painting comes together, just barely.”

“A mosaic, made out of broken dishes, makes no attempt to hide the fact that it’s made out of broken dishes, in fact flaunts it.”

“Momentum”

“literary mosaic”

“subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances”

“I look at melody as rhythm.”

“All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music.” <– yes.

“Collage is pieces of other things. Their edges don’t meet.”

“You don’t make art; you find it.”

“triviality”

“to penetrate the story, to discard the elements of it that are merely shell, or husk, that give apparent form to the story, but actually obscure the essence”

“literature instead as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking”

“work that’s focused… line by line on what the writer really cares about”

“In linear fiction, the whole structure is accelerating toward the epiphanic moment…”

“In collage, every fragment is a capsule: I’m on my way to the moon on every page.” <– awesome.

“The very nature of collage demands fragmented materials, or at least materials yanked out of context. Collage is, in a way, only an accentuated act of editing: picking through options and presenting a new arrangement… The act of editing may be the key postmodern artistic instrument.”

“This project must raise the art of quoting without quotation marks to the very highest level.”

“It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.”

“There are two kinds of filmmaking: Hitchcock’s (the film is complete in the director’s mind) and Coppola’s (which thrives on process). For Hitchcock, any variation from the complete from the complete internal idea is seen as a defect. The perfection already exists. Coppola’s approach is to harvest the random elements that the process throws up, things that were not in his mind when he began.”

“Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. As is already more than self-evident.” <– I loik fragmented writing.

“The problem of scale is interesting. How long will the reader stay engaged?”

“You don’t need a story. The question is How long do you not need a story?

“Nothing is going to happen in this book.”

“Any opportunity that a writer has to engage the reader intimately in the act of creating the text is an opportunity to grab on to. White space does that.” <– I like white space too

“I don’t ever want to be bored, and I certainly don’t ever want any of my readers to be bored.”

“The grandfather clock is the reflection of its historical period, when time was orderly and slow. Tick-tockTick-tock. Tick-tock. It stood there in the front hall in its great, carven case, with a pendulum like the sun or the moon. There was something monumental and solid about time. By the 1930s and ’40s, wristwatches were neurotic and talked very fast – tick-tick-tick-tick – with a second hand going around. Next, we had liquid-crystal watches that didn’t show any time at all until you pressed a button. When you took your finger off, time disappeared. Now, no one wears a watch; your phone has the time.” <– this is great.

“A fiction writer who tells stories is a maker of time.” <– so is this.

“time would be the thing to beat, the thing fiction seemingly cannot do without and, therefore, to grow or change, must.”

“Time must die.”<– yes.

“… pull the thing away from narrative and toward contemplation, which is all I’ve ever wanted.”

“… but if you pluck it at any point, the entire web will vibrate.”<– yes.

“–the shapely swirl of energy holding shattered fragments in place, but only just.”

“The man in the restaurant crushing a wineglass in his hand…” <– yes.

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