Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little arms are plied,
While little hands make vain pretense
Our wanderings to guide."
Somehow today has ended in nonsense. Or Lewis Carroll. The day has ended in Lewis Carroll and I am developing a philosophy. I am pondering a Raw curriculum. So I write. With you as my witness.
I had a meeting to attend in Chelsea this afternoon and shortly before I headed out I noticed a Pratt professor had an event, a panel, this evening, in Chelsea. It was an interesting topic so I decided I'd hang out in the 'hood of Chelsea and go to the Kitchen. I think I've been there before. Circa 1998. As a youth. A witness to avant-garde theatre. A shaping, or offering, of a preferred reality. It made sense to me. The avant-garde. If it was indeed at the Kitchen.
So there's this event on Narrative. We'll get to it.
First, I was reading Jose Munoz. I didn't get very far into Part II of Disidentifications but I was most moved by this concept of hybridity. "The postcolonial hybrid is a subject whose identity practices are structured around an ambivalent relationship to the signs of empire and the signs of the 'native,' a subject who occupies a space between the West and the rest." He warns, of course, of the convergence of all hybrid experience into one, but the point is well made and taken.
Before the evening's panel, I happened upon an art gallery on W21st. The photos in the storefront window caught my attention. War: with a human perspective. Something stating Syria and Ukraine caught my eye so I locked up my bicycle and entered.
A few of the photos provided images of a lot to think about. This one, however, was incredibly provocative. There is a French football flag hanging in the quarters of this space occupied by a radical Islamist.
In this day and age we're all hybrids. Osama bin Laden was a hybrid. My uncle Jimmy was a hybrid. I am a hybrid. James Baldwin was a hybrid. Of technology or imperialism. To me they are one in the same. But how we manifest this duality or duplicity is the line between artist and terrorist. Raw Fiction is about creating artists.
Tonight, one of the panelists said, and I misquote, "Dead bodies; with worms coming out. Each worm, its own little narrative." Out of context it is the personification of the history of literature. Is it simply that we need new worms, or do we need a whole new dead body on which to feed?
According to this Art and Narrative panel, art is hybrid. So that's a fact and interesting . . . and to be contested. Perhaps, not contested in theory but in newness of theory. Is narrative not ever-present everywhere always? One of tonight's panelists was talking about abstraction and that to interpret narrative in such splotchy works is evidence of lack of imagination . . . impossible. That is the foundation of imagination, I'd say.
And should I be delving into artistic theory with my Raw Fiction youth? What is narrative? What is writing? These are contemporary historical questions.
I'm thinking about the hybridity of art, as in medium, and the hybridity of self, as in imperialism, and I'm wondering where the separation of conversation is. The literary world is still (I'm not going to pretend to make an original thought, as the artists on the panel are not going to pretend to make an "original" work): art is separate from cultural and racial imperialism. Even in its hybridity.
There was a Polish woman on the panel. Genius. She created a film project exploring characters who had been cut from the final version of a movie - what would the narrative have been, what did the narrative become, etc? Fascinating. She did also mention the very real imaginary narrative for Eastern Europeans. In that the end of Communism, for everyone, was the fall of the Berlin Wall.
So education is not just bad in the United States.
Our very own Pratt professor also pushed past a western Euro-centric view. "What if the narrative is dominant, what is our safe word?" A penetrating question. A historical problem. A sexualizing of literature and the dominance of power and the dominance of European aesthetics, and terminology, as Anna Moschovakis articulated at a later point in the discussion.
Word meanings are so ripe.
Narrative.
Whose narrative? Who's the narrator? What defines the narrative/narrator. "What gender? -- choose your own." Moschovakis.
So how do I convey these concepts to youth?
The Bucket Method.
I just invented a new technology for teaching.
(And I want to stage an intervention. On the brilliant flutist (and I know a good flutist when I hear one, this one was special), but what she said about technology. The conversation between good and evil. Technology, irregardless of what it does to communication and humanity as a whole, can be nothing but evil if you think about it in terms of environment (and I, hypocrite, [impossibly/unfortunately] not other, write this on my Mac) but hello, children in Sierra Leone mining the bits of metal to make your iPhone work? Fuck ebola, now the new iPhone is indefinitely delayed.
Fuck the cost of black/brown skinned humans.
I angry.
It ought to be allowed.)
Anyway, the Bucket Method. So basically, I internalize all this theory and pour it over the heads of my youth and let it sink in, without pressure. They have no idea a whole bucket of theory has doused them, and I don't have to deal with the side effects.
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